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| Roger Ebert speaks to an audience in Savannah, GA in 2004, during his 3-part scene-by-scene analysis of Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941). I am in attendance (though not pictured). |
Roger Ebert (1942-2013)
I'm flipping back through The Great Movies after hearing about the passing of Roger Ebert. It was a book that introduced me to a bunch of (now obvious) classics/favorites -- Aguirre the Wrath of God, McCabe & Mrs Miller, A Hard Day's Night, A Woman Under the Influence, Manhattan, Sweet Smell of Success -- while also letting me know it was okay to love Oliver Stone's JFK, to seek out a copy of Hoop Dreams, and to immerse myself in the generally held canon of world film classics while not feeling beholden to it.
In his essay on JFK, Ebert recounts an argument Walter Cronkite had with him after Ebert had praised the film: "I am a film critic and my assignment is different than his. He wants facts. I want moods, tones, fears, imaginings, whims, speculations, nightmares. As a general principle, I believe films are the wrong medium for facts. Facts belong in print. Films are about emotions."
I have gone back and forth on my opinion of JFK over the years, just as I have on Roger Ebert. The Great Movies seems so obvious to me now, so canonical. Yet, I do remember a time when I didn't know there was a film director named Werner Herzog who was making extraordinary films and I didn't know Robert Altman wasn't the obvious answer for best American filmmaker of the 1970's. Ebert was an essential voice. I read his reviews and would be pushed to think more deeply about the films he rated favorably if they left me more cold, challenged to defend (to myself) the movies I liked that left him cold. When I was reading him regularly in the late 90's, his top 10 lists often championed films that were not being championed by other critics (Eve's Bayou, Dark City) and pushed me to branch out and see what unchampioned works I could find on the fringe.
As cynical as I could be, it is obvious to me that he really did love the movies he wrote about in The Great Movies. There are plenty of canonical classics he left out, several "unsuspecting" films he brought in. And ultimately he did what a great film writer or critic should do: he made me want to watch films. He helped me engage with and understand some difficult works, helped me articulate what I responded to and strongly disliked in movies and helped fuel a passion to take in and enjoy the diversity of the medium fro mall over the world. So, I could dismiss him as populist (as I have done in the past). He worked for a major newspaper. So what? I would take one Ebert essay over a thousand Armond Whites and their forced contrarianism. I could dismiss him as sometimes having shallow observations. So what? He was engaging a broader audience and has written about hundreds of movies over the course of his life.
But I come back to that quote. "Films are about emotions." I didn't understand that much when I read it then, I'm sure. But it is where I live now. It is why I loved JFK when I couldn't reconcile all that JFK said or seemed to say. It is why I still love JFK. And Herzog. And Altman. And McElwee.
At the end of the day, Roger Ebert helped me love film more. Beyond me, he was a formidable voice to a generation of film viewers who were given a video store full of cinema history and didn't know what to do with it all. I can only hope there is someone who, in an age of irony and cynicism, can stand in his place and passionately entice future generations to seek out the old paths and to love the medium for what it is, not what it symbolizes.
Goodbye, old friend.
PS: I still need to see Last Year at Marienbad, Lawrence of Arabia, Pandora's Box and The "Up" Series. After that, I will have seen all The Great Movies.
