I think I’ve found the moment when the self-consciously personal voice of New Journalism finally entered film criticism. It happened in the pages of the Village Voice, which during the 1960s had been one of the best places to learn about film. The paper’s coverage was remarkably broad, running Jonas Mekas’s inspired coverage of the avant-garde scene alongside Andrew Sarris’s reevaluation of narrative cinema from an auteurist perspective.
Two new books provide excellent examples of the kind of relationship between the confessional and the professional, the personal and the political, that Sarris and Corliss were so ineptly grasping at. In Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions, Michelle Citron, a filmmaker and Northwestern University professor, combines autobiography with the story of her interest in film, while in Chick Flicks, B. Ruby Rich interlaces a collection of her previous writing on film (some of which first appeared in the Reader) with chapters that mix autobiography and reflections on the emergence of feminism and feminist filmmaking and theory.
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Both Rich and Citron are about 50; both come from lower-middle-class Jewish backgrounds. They both begin their stories by hoping that their parents will like–or would have liked–their books. Both abandoned established academic disciplines for cinema in 1972; both had early enthusiasms for experimental filmmaking. Both also “experimented” sexually, as Citron writes of herself, “sleeping with men, women, men and women.” Both are not only feminists but lesbians, and, though writing from an oppositional stance, they lack the self-assured smugness of Sarris and Corliss. Never presenting themselves as possessors of the final answer, they search tentatively through their own and others’ lives.
Rich repeatedly defends pluralism, holding that multiple or opposing positions on an issue can all have value. She does this beautifully in a brief account of the arguments for and against the realist documentary as an agent for political change, finding four “pro” arguments (“ordinary people,” for example, “are able to see them/ourselves on the screen”) and five “con” ones (“information comes to…replace analysis”). Here, as elsewhere, she advocates no single approach to filmmaking, reaching the more nuanced position that each choice also involves a limitation. She also implies that no one viewer possesses the sole answer to interpreting a film, and that each viewer, critics included, should listen to others.
But these are quibbles. Ultimately Rich’s book is a moving argument for a newly emerging cinema, a feminist one made largely with women spectators in mind, one that attempts to present the full personal and social contexts that affect their lives. If she seems a little obtuse on why some men are uncomfortable with plots in which women get to murder men, well, no critic is perfect.
There is, in short, an idea implicit in both books that one looks to cinema for affirmations of the self, whether defined individually or as a member of a larger community. Great films have helped to teach me who I am by presenting a vision that’s not my own. Indeed, I would necessarily have to include my appreciation of the work of feminist filmmakers such as Yvonne Rainer here: By showing me how differently someone else sees and thinks, her films broaden my view of what it means to be human. While I hold no brief for the mass suicide that ends Mizoguchi’s The Loyal 47 Ronin, I can still be moved to tears by the conviction of the samurai’s balletic submission to ritual, each seemingly assuming his proper place in this most sublimely ordered of films, without forgetting the alien social vision this implies. Perhaps Rich learns similarly from the Kluge film, but her tone resembles that of the party bureaucrat she decries elsewhere in the book.
Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions by Michelle Citron, University of Minnesota Press, $19.95 paper, $49.95 cloth.
