Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert were three of
America's most revered and widely read film critics, more famous
than many of the movies they wrote about. But their remarkable
contributions to the burgeoning American film criticism of the
1960s and beyond were deeply influenced by four earlier critics:
Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler.
Throughout the 1930s and '40s, Ferguson, Agee, Farber, and Tyler
scrutinized what was on the screen with an intensity not previously
seen in popular reviewing. Although largely ignored by the arts
media of the day, they honed the sort of serious discussion of
films that would be made popular decades later by Kael, Sarris,
Ebert and their contemporaries. With The Rhapsodes, renowned film
scholar and critic David Bordwell--an heir to both those
legacies--restores to a wider audience the work of Ferguson, Agee,
Farber, and Tyler, critics he calls the "Rhapsodes" for the
passionate and deliberately offbeat nature of their vernacular
prose. Each broke with prevailing currents in criticism in order to
find new ways to talk about the popular films that contemporaries
often saw at best as trivial, at worst as a betrayal of art.
Ferguson saw in Hollywood an engaging, adroit mode of popular
storytelling. Agee sought in cinema the lyrical epiphanies found in
romantic poetry. Farber, trained as a painter, brought a pictorial
intelligence to bear on film. A surrealist, Tyler treated classic
Hollywood as a collective hallucination that invited both audience
and critic to find moments of subversive pleasure. With his
customary clarity and brio, Bordwell takes readers through the
relevant cultural and critical landscape and considers the critics'
writing styles, their conceptions of films, and their quarrels. He
concludes by examining the profound impact of Ferguson, Agee,
Farber, and Tyler on later generations of film writers. The
Rhapsodes allows readers to rediscover these remarkable critics who
broke with convention to capture what they found moving, artful, or
disappointing in classic Hollywood cinema and explores their
robust--and continuing--influence.
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