I understand you to be asking two questions. One is where is all the
wonderful pre-www2 movie criticism in English, French and Italian. A
fair answer would cover four or five decades and demonstrate that the
director was generally considered the primary creative authority for a
film, even during the industrial period when directors had least
authority among serious critics, and even to a degree in fan magazines,
and certainly if you look through the voluminous industry journals of
the 1907-193? period. John Ford's first pictures at Universal were
unabashedly promoted as Jack Ford films, he was the power behind them,
almost Zarathustrian.
Take a look at Welford Beaton in The Film Spectator, always a rousing
auteurist from the early 20s (if not before).
What about D.W.Griffith's defenses of his authorship of the Biographs in
1913 (or was it 14?).

Follow the coverage of King Vidor's career, from his first self-paid
advertisements for himself, through his coverage in the serious American
journals -- there are several large anthologies of American 30s film
criticism -- not forgetting the remarkable issue that Revue du Cinéma
(formatted exactly like the postwar yellow Cahiers and with direct
continuity into Cahiers) devoted to the Paris premiere of Hallelujah
(1930) where they assembled a couple dozen of the nation's leading
intellectuals, artists, etc., to each contribute an article on the film
-- and even VARIETY published three reviews of its NYC premiere -- all
centered on Vidor, all very much concerned with questions of style and
cinematic art.

Films like these were studied in the Italian film school in Rome in the
1930s, and histories of film written around them. Vidor was the direct,
acknowledged inspiration for most of so-called "neo-realism"; De Sica
didn't hide his debt to The Crowd for Bicycle Thief. There are whole
"lineages" in Hollywood and between Hollywood and European cinemas where
leading filmmakers are stylistically and auteurishly influencing their
colleagues. DeMille and Chaplin and Lubitsch and von Sternberg were not
obscure names, their styles were not invisible, there was no need for an
Astruc to speak of a caméra-stylo because people were already DOING it,
and had been egotistically proclaiming themselves for decades.

Anyhow, one could go on. There's tons of good stuff. Not much in The
New York Times, except for Frank Nugent.

Your second question is when have fundamentally new idea gotten born in
human history. I do not know. As far as I can tell, they don't begin,
they just always were, and now and then someone fixates on something and
out comes The Critique of Pure Reason, which certainly marked a sea
change, but far be it from me to trace where all Kant's notions came from.

Cinema was born at a time when we humans already had a rich tradition in
aesthetic criticism. Right from the first painters looked at movies
differently than theater critics, etc. But also right from the start
many people proclaimed that cinema was NOT (as someone herabouts
proclaimed recently) a "bastard" art, but a legitimate seventh art.

Ideas are very strange. Bazin, for example, made derogatory remarks
about cutting in "classic" (I hate that word) Hollywood cinema, and this
got picked up as a dogma by American academics in the 1960s and the
result was that two generations of film scholars did not pay attention
to cutting. Then there's Brown University which cannot decide if it has
a department of cinema studies, of semiotics, or of culture theory. The
problem is that idea which blow around in Parisian cafes like so much
cigarette smoke get transported to the US and become marble monuments of
Unchanging Verities. And so people in this group are forever asking
"what is auteurism?" (etc.) with the apparent conviction that there is
some kind of true answer to the question. And somehow it is necessary
to say that auterism began on such and such a date by such and such an
author, or all cinema can be divided into pre- and post-Citizen Kane.
Maybe we should just adopt the dates of Brown U's name changes as the
chapter headings for The History of Ideas?



Paul Gallagher wrote:

> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Tag Gallagher <tag@s...> wrote:
> >
> > > The debate awhile back over
> > > whether Cahiers and Sarris et al had fundamentally offered a new
> > > critical approach to cinema, especially Hollywood cinema. I
> think on
> > > these grounds, the answer has to be yes,
> >
> >
> > I don't think it's possible to make this statement without a deep,
> > profound, widespread and all pervasive unfamiliarity with American
> movie
> > criticism prior to ww2. Not to mention French or Italian.
> >
>
> Which works of criticism do you have in mind? In the history of film
> criticism, when have fundamentally new critical approaches appeared?
>
> Paul
>