American cinema was not always regarded as the predominant cinema in the world, one that has found the ideal balance between commercialism and art. Indeed, approximately 40 years after the birth of the new medium, with the exception of a small number of American directors such as D.W. Griffith, Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin, Hollywood was dismissed as an industry more interested in gaining money than advancing the craft of filmmaking, unlike the innovative work of the much admired European directors. As H. L. Mencken noted in his book Prejudices, Hollywood was ‘too rich to have any room for genuine artists.’
Otis Ferguson: ‘An Anti-Intellectual Intellectual’
This snobbish attitude towards Hollywood films was challenged in the forties by two film critics: Otis Ferguson and Manny Farber. Ferguson was the film critic for the cultural magazine The New Republic from 1934 until his death in 1943 when his ship was struck by a radio-guided bomb in the Gulf of Salerno during the World War II. He was the first American film critic to champion popular films, such as the 1935 romantic comedy Hands across the Table, for their lack of pretentiousness and the sheer entertainment they offered to the audience. He disliked the intellectuals’ favourite Citizen Kane (1941), which was technically excellent but could not get the audience emotionally involved with the drama of the characters, while hailed Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) as one of ‘the genuine artistic achievements of this country’
Ferguson believed that under the Hollywood films’ cloak of entertainment lay the almost invisible craft and creativity of the artists who worked for the studios and he strongly criticised the dominant opinion in the intellectual circles that artistic qualities could only be found in European films and not in those produced in their own country. Greg Taylor, in his book Artists in the Audience described Ferguson as an ‘anti-intellectual intellectual who cultivated a popular taste in opposition to the highbrow, politically fashionable, stifling New York intellectual milieu that surrounded him on all sides.’ For Andrew Sarris he was simply ‘the writer of the best and most subtly influential film criticism ever turned out in America’
Manny Farber: The Critic as a Writer
The influence of Ferguson’s criticism can be traced in the work of the other great film critic of the forties Manny Farber. Farber replaced Ferguson as a film critic for The New Republic after the latter’s death and he shared with him the passion for American B-movies for the unambitious entertainment they offered to the audience and their realistic depiction of the American society and way of life.
In his acclaimed essay White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art he attacked Hollywood’s pompous high-concept dramatic films that would swoop the Academy awards as well as the pretentiously artistic European films that were easily labelled as masterpieces by the majority of film critics (white elephant art) while praising genre films by directors such as Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh for their termite-like nature. For Farber this lack of ambition to be sophisticated and deal with serious subject matters that characterised B-movies produced in Hollywood made them the most characteristic example of the popular art of cinema.
Farber was peculiar not only in his taste of films but also in his writing style. His film reviews deviated from the plot-summary norm putting instead the film under the microscope and thoroughly examining its strengths and weaknesses. His complex prose style though that joined contradictory adjectives and did not follow a sustained argument, refused to provide a final judgement for the quality of the film. As Jonathan Rosenbaum pointed out in regards to Farber’s film criticism ‘You can’t even tell whether he’s ridiculing or celebrating something.’ Farber though was not interested in writing his film criticism as a consumer’s guide. When asked about the role of evaluation in his critical work he answered: ‘It’s practically worthless for a critic. The last thing I want to know is whether you like it or not.’
The written works of Ferguson and Farber demonstrate the evolution of film criticism with lengthy analytical pieces replacing the simplistic early reviews. Furthermore, by championing films produced in Hollywood these two influential film critics argued that, contrary to the prevalent belief, entertainment and art are concepts that can coincide. Finally, their work would influence some young French film critics who would go on to establish Hollywood directors as genuine artists, the following decade, marking the golden age of film criticism.
Apostolos Kostoulas - Apostolos Kostoulas is an aspiring film critic. He has been awarded an MA in Film Studies from UCL and an MA in Journalism, from Brunel ...
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