Reverse Shot: Twenty Years of Film Criticism in Four Movements: The Way of the Dinosaur

Reverse Shot is a magazine that has for the last twenty years hazardously found for itself a place between the journalistic review and the academic essay. It is the sort of place and space allowing room for the critic to think through their stance on a film. They are neither obliged to respond hastily, as in a typically short review, nor feel they have to bolster their claims with some theoretical heavy lifting – the dumbbell curl of Derrida, a Deleuzian bench press, or a Žižekian powerlift. None of these names get a mention in the book (though you will find them all occasionally name-checked in pieces on the website). And this resistance has nothing to do with a pull towards cognitivism, in viewing films with greater apparent objectivity and a yen often for the statistical. (There is one mention of David Bordwell and none at all for Noël Carroll). No, editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert want the writers to find their own voice over feeling obliged to channel it through a methodology or the potential false Gods of high theory. As they say in the introduction: “We’ve tried to maintain standards [of] robust, considered, contextual and well-edited film criticism that gives voice to smart, engaged writers regardless of metrics or ‘likes’” (p. 18). Genevieve Yue says when introducing the first of the book’s four parts that here was “a newish journal that was more idea-driven than most. Their reviews never felt routine, but essayistic and deeply considered” (p. 23).

However, what can seem in-depth journalistically can appear ephemeral when put into book form, and while it has numerous insightful remarks from dozens of writers, reading the tome from cover to cover might not be ideal: you feel whiplashed from one piece to the next, drawn in and then tossed out. Those two thousand or so words that made you go there before just about anywhere else immediately after seeing, for example, L’intrus (Claire Denis, 2004), Zama (Lucrecia Martel, 2012), The Hidden Life (Terrence Malick, 2020) or Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu, 2012), can seem foreshortened here not because of any failing on the reviewer’s part but because the book format meets the critical essay format. The expectation within which the essays originally found themselves was relative profundity – amongst the most thought-through accounts of the given films. But by that reckoning the editors might say this is a reviewer’s problem: that anybody writing on the book might feel obliged to work through it cover to cover, but someone buying it will be more inclined to dip in and out, happy that they have in their hands a weighty volume to flick through rather than a website to be clicked over.

L’intrus

This suggests that what matters is not so much its content but the book’s intent. While people are generally now accepting that books are wonderful objects which needn’t be powered by electricity, can be read with thumbs and fingers that needn’t overwork the tendons in our hands or wrists, and that offer more options to how and where we sit when reading them, this means that more and more material will be made available in book form than we might have expected a decade ago. “eBook sales [instead of steadily increasing] seem to have stabilized at around 20 percent of total book sales, with print sales making up the remaining 80 percent. ‘Five or 10 years ago…you would have thought those numbers would have been reversed.’”¹ As Paula Cocozza says, “here are some things that you can’t do with a Kindle. You can’t turn down a corner, tuck a flap in a chapter, crack a spine (brutal, but sometimes pleasurable) or flick the pages to see how far you have come and how far you have to go.”² It is also perhaps why publishers have to stop sending out PDFs of books they expect people to review given that it is usually the hard copy they expect people to buy. How can you review a book as an object when you never have the chance to hold it in your hand? That said, Reverse Shot: Twenty Years of Criticism in Four Movements is also available as an eBook, but understandably the reader might wonder why purchase it in electrical form when most of the material is readily available online.

By offering Reverse Shot: Twenty Years of Criticism in Four Movements in hard copy, the editors are asking us to feel the pleasure of the text in a way that Roland Barthes would have taken for granted when he wrote a book with that title in 1973. Koresky and Reichert aren’t just saying here is a collection of essays – they are asking the reader to buy what they can read free online and at a price. The book becomes an object of contemplation, with the operative word object as readily as contemplation. But it also becomes an object of fixity in a world of digital malleability. “With the recent news that Kindle and other e-readers are automatically updating Roald Dahl’s books to sanitised versions, an entire era has come to an end… Who in future will feel safe buying an electronic copy of anything?”³

What the book also does, of course, is put between hard covers many (mainly but not exclusively American) critics who have become prominent in the 21st century. Here you can read Nick Pinkerton, Adam Nayman, Yue, Ela Bittencourt, Devika Girish, Damon Smith and Andrew Tracy, some of whom will be familiar to those who read Sight and Sound, Cinemascope, Criterion, Mubi and indeed Senses of Cinema: the ecosystem of English language cinephilia. This is a generation that gets by rather than gets rich, and if nobody became broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people, as H. L. Mencken famously claimed, then a good way to remain poor is by trying to push that assumption and writing semi-long reads in a magazine that for a long time was reliant on the largesse of its contributors. As Caden Mark Gardner says, “some places I got to write for did not pay me at all, and from other venues I received Venmo payments that would not even cover one smoothie at Erewhon Market. The things you do for the love of movies” (p. 614). Part of that love was working without financial recompense in the initial stages of Reverse Shot. Eric Hynes in his foreword talks about writing regularly for free during the first decade of the journal’s life. If people often go into film production with the idea of making lots of money, only a fool would go into film criticism with the same expectation, and only a complete idiot would regularly write for magazines like Reverse Shot, Senses of Cinema and others, let alone, like Koresky and Reichert, edit one for two decades. Luckily, for the state of film criticism, there are a lot of idiots around.

We might wonder while reading the book if many of the best films have been helped along by the best of criticism, sometimes remunerated; sometimes not. It might be the filmmakers who are more likely to make the money, but it is often thanks to the cajoling, demanding presence of critics that they have made good films; whether it was the New Wave directors going on to direct movies of their own after working for Cahiers du cinéma in the ‘50s, and putting into practise some of their critical claims, or the New York writers of the seventies (Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, John Simon, Vincent Canby, Stanley Kauffmann) who were given enough space to make the argument for the importance of film culture. It may be an exaggeration to say that film criticism made Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970), Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973), Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975), Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) and The Conversation (Francis Coppola, 1974), but without the rigour of the critical response, would the wave have been so strong? One may disagree with the quality of the American critics, may regard Simon as needlessly cruel, Kauffmann as a pompous windbag, Sarris never as good as the auteurist theory he helped more than anyone else establish Stateside, and the brilliant Kael too beholden to her whims and moods. Yet these were voices filmmakers, actors and producers would take seriously, collectively, even if as individuals they might not have cared for their ideas. When interviewed by Brian Linehan in 1977, The Godfather (Francis Coppola 1972) producer Robert Evans said: “I’d rather have a picture that was respected artistically and didn’t do as big a business as a pulp picture…as an example, Chinatown [Roman Polański, 1974] got marvelous reviews…extraordinary reviews. I’d rather have a Chinatown than an Airport [George Seaton, 1970].” But that relationship between critical recognition and filmic production seems to have weakened. “In the best-case scenario, both the artist and the capitalist investor can strike a balance to appease each other’s competing interests – the former to do something unique and interesting, the latter to reduce the chance that it won’t land,” Jake Ures says in Jacobin. “But this partnership has become unbalanced in recent years. What was once a fraught but necessary relationship of mutual trade-offs has transformed into a dynamic where only one side makes concessions: artists.”⁴ Not only does the critic have little say here; even the filmmaker struggles to get a hearing. The festival circuit might be doing its best to keep the critical and the aesthetic paramount but these are usually supporting films much smaller than The Godfather and Chinatown. Cinema needs critics, and if Bruce Willis could say in 1997 that “Nobody…pays attention to reviews… most of the written word has gone the way of the dinosaur”,⁵ better Chinatown that Evans knows benefits from critical praise than The Fifth Element (Luc Besson, 1997) which could live without it. But Willis did have a point – people were no longer listening to critics.

If Reverse Shot isn’t quite creating a new generation of important voices this isn’t for want of trying, and says more about the sort of filmic world Jacobin’s Ures describes over any failure of intent on the magazine’s part. The Reverse Shot writers have flung themselves far and wide, writing for the New York Times and Rolling Stone, The Nation and the Village Voice. They are moving beyond the thoughtful, often roomy but undeniably limiting world of the cinephilic magazines we mentioned above. This no doubt pleases Koresky and Reichert, who work hard to make sure the pieces published are edited into clear and concise prose – the sort of writing that can appeal to a broader audience even if Reverse Shot remains niche. Some may have wished for more theory and terminology in this collection, which might have deepened our understanding of some of the films under discussion, fitting them into broader philosophical and social contexts, but partly what makes Reverse Shot so engaging is that it relies on the intuitive and pithy formulation over analytic elaboration. Koresky for example wittily and astutely notes when discussing Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004), that “perhaps its only true American counterpart is Casablanca [Michael Curtiz, 1942], that other movie about the mortality of romance, the disappointment of idealism, the frustration of missed opportunity. ‘Baby, you’re gonna miss that plane…’” (p. 534). Then we have Kelli Weston saying “[Nia] DaCosta’s Candyman [2021] seems obsessively aware of the moment in which it arrives. This is not in and of itself detrimental” (p. 702). Other examples of getting to the point over elaborating upon it include AG Sims saying of Kelly Reichardt, “she sets her contemporary stories in places where time has already worn down both her settings and her characters” (p. 680) while Nayman says of Reichardt’s Certain Women (2016) “The only one of Kelly Reichardt’s six features to not significantly feature a car is 2011’s Meek’s Cutoff, which has a preindustrial setting” (p. 475). Then we have Edo Choi on Armageddon Time (James Gray, 2021), “at its best, the film maintains this double vision, achieving an effect not far afield of Terence Davies’ Distant Voices (1988), Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), where the fulcrum of the drama exists in the reflective gap between the past self’s experience of a present time and the present self’s memory of a past one” (p. 634). We also have Reichert saying that we shouldn’t forget that P.T. Anderson can work thespian wonders with unpromising material: he “…molded art from lumps of clay like Mark Wahlberg and Adam Sandler” (p. 229). Finally, we can note Chloe Lizette saying “as a director, [Eliza] Hittman never tries to get ahead of her teenage characters; instead, her films emanate outwards from their youthful confusion” (p. 617).

Before Sunset

Most of these are the sort of generalisations good, shorter journalism rarity risks, and despite Reverse Shot’s lengthier reviews it gives the writer the chance to stretch their legs without feeling obliged to run an intellectual marathon. The reader may wish for the writer to elaborate but part of the pleasure in such remarks rests on the freedom we have to think about our relationship with cinema in the context of the claims. What other performances in Anderson’s work show him working with lumps of clay? Surely not Joaquin Phoenix, Daniel Day-Lewis and Philip Seymour Hoffman, but perhaps Tom Cruise and Gwyneth Paltrow as we muse over which other filmmakers sometimes work with actors as if trying to get blood from a stone and end up with marvellously moving lava instead? When Nayman notices how common it is for Reichardt to show characters in cars we might find ourselves thinking of all the great films of the ‘70s that Reichardt’s work resembles, and what place the car seems to occupy in contemporary film. For all the car chases in ‘70s cinema, many others showed the car as a space of confused freedom, and Reichardt’s work often picks up on this aspect. Slow and meandering over fast and furious.

By this reckoning, it is best to describe Reverse Shot and, by extension the book, as an essayistic exploration, a light-touch invitation to thought. Choi’s comments on Armageddon Time and Terence Davies’ work could intriguingly be explored through Gilles Deleuze’s crystals of time, with the philosopher saying, “what is a mutual image? Bergson constantly posed the question and sought the reply in time’s abyss. What is actual is always a present. But then, precisely, the present changes or passes. We can always say that it becomes past when it no longer is, when a new present replaces it. But”, Deleuze adds, “this is meaningless. It is clearly necessary for it to pass on for the new present to arrive, and it is clearly necessary for it to pass at the same time as it is present, at the moment that it is the present. Thus the image has to be present and past, still present and already past, at once and at the same time.”⁶ This is a densely argued notion but it isn’t so far removed from what Choi sees evident in Gray’s film and Davies’ work. Reverse Shot offers ideas which may be missing the weight of such theoretical, philosophical musings, carrying within their lightness the hint of theory without quite its presence. Equally, when West says Candyman is obsessively aware of its moment of arrival, we might wonder how recent Hollywood has through various byways and pathways absorbed for good and ill the ideological aspect that was deemed necessary to many a ‘60s and ‘70s work, ones that would fall under agit-prop, Third Cinema, Maoism, Leninism and the Brechtian. How did the insistently invisible Hollywood movie become self-aware without losing the transparency that still makes the films so easy to watch? When did the male gaze become a term that filmmakers had to become self-conscious about rather than thoughtlessly reiterating it in film after film?

It isn’t Reverse Shot’s place to answer such questions but no doubt Koresky and Reichert would be pleased to say they are ones the magazine is happy to raise. The journal may be part of the zeitgeist but that doesn’t mean it wants to surf it or dash itself against the waves. How to find the balance? When Koresky and Reichert note that as media has changed from the printed word to the digital sphere they have tried to maintain standards, they are noting how much has changed in film criticism in the last twenty years, aware of how much that passes for content now a couple of decades ago would have been no more than a prejudice thrown around at the water cooler or during a fag break outside. Today it finds itself online and can compete with all the other voices of criticism. Is this the democratic at its most varied or the loudmouth whose voice should have remained restricted to a narrow in-person environment? We would be inclined to say the latter, but if Willis is right that people generally no longer listen to critics, then does it much matter whether it is someone who knows cinema, history and form, or someone who says it as it is without knowing what it is? Koresky and Reichert will hope readers can tell the difference. Part of this lies in the book itself: proving that film criticism, as the written word in book form, hasn’t quite gone the way of the dinosaur.

Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert, eds., Reverse Shot: Twenty Years of Film Criticism in Four Movements (New York: Museum of the Moving Image, 2023).

Endnotes