Influenced is an interview series featuring authors talking about the works that influenced them.

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Episode XII: "Every film becomes good or at least interesting in a sense over time, just by existing."

Published 2/5/17
In this installment, AS Hamrah talks GODARD ON GODARD, Fahrenheit 451, humor in criticism, critical consensus & more.

Note: This interview—and virtually all on this site—are conducted via Google Chat.

Today I’m with AS Hamrah, the film critic for n+1, with writing in Harper’s, Bookforum and more.

All movie critics have seen many thousands of movies, but AS writes like it—like he’s got thousands of more to watch too—never mincing words or decorating an opinion for the sake of anything, never giving a movie more words than it deserves, often giving it less. I’ve mostly read two types of articles from AS: one diving into the history and influence of a given filmmaker, the other taking a sweeping tour of everything that’s out or will be (in the case of a film festival, for example). I enjoy the first but adore the second, because it’s freeing, allowing for such declarative one-offs as “Like Moonlight, [Manchester by the Sea]’s a New American Classic, a film bringing movie drama to a high level that quality TV will never reach,” reminiscent of that friend who’s always provoking you to disagree with him. What he loves he loves, and what he doesn’t he’s able to distill in seconds. The 2015 film Steve Jobs is a “series of epic walk-and-talks about the future retconned to be 100 percent correct because they’re about our present.”

Just like his writing, I found AS’ online presence, or the enigma of, refreshing; I had to go through a friend to get his contact information, even before I knew he was a he. Today we’re in discussion of a seminal work that influenced AS, GODARD ON GODARD, a collection of Jean-Luc Godard’s film criticism, from 1950-1967. Let’s start here and before: when did your first film writing begin, and when did you come upon Godard on Godard?

I got Godard on Godard before I really had any inkling of being a film critic. I bought it at a store in Middletown, Connecticut, when I was in high school, just about to start college. I began reading it on a bus trip to either New York or Boston, I don’t remember which, and I was immediately seized by it. 

The edition I have, which is sitting on my desk beside me now—I got it out last night to reread some of it—is the 1972 UK paperback from Secker & Warburg, which was part of the Cinema Two series of books that went along with the Cinema One series, which were fairly slim volumes about individual filmmakers, often an interview, like the Jon Halliday book on Douglas Sirk. The Cinema Two series were longer and more expansive. 

Godard on Godard was edited and translated by a British film critic named Tom Milne, who died about 10 years ago and seems to be something of a forgotten figure today, although Jonathan Rosenbaum, who knew him, has suggested there should be a collection of his writing published. Milne edited the book with Jean Narboni, a Cahiers du Cinema editor and film critic. The book was first published in France in 1968, but I have never seen that edition and don't know to what extent it is different from this one (besides being in French!) or how Milne changed it, if he just went with Narboni’s selection. Milne’s notes for each of Godard’s pieces are equally as fascinating and illuminating. The book is organized in a novel way, with each section covering a few years in Godard’s career as a critic and filmmaker and each piece in each section annotated quite extensively by Milne. I liked this arrangement, which reminded me at the time of the unique format of Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968. These books have a form of their own that in a way isn’t recuperable by literary criticism.

Richard Roud wrote the introduction, which is itself somewhat Godardian, it ends in a very Godardian way with a quote from Borges and its last line seems to refer to some narration in a Godard’s film Vivre sa vie, which is itself a quote from Edgar Allan Poe, if I remember it right. Roud ran the New York Film Festival for many years, founded it with Amos Vogel in the early 1960s and introduced many of the films of the French New Wave to American audiences. 

I guess I actually did have an inkling of being a film critic when I got the book because my cousins used to ask me to write film reviews for them, which I’d send them in the mail, and I was already seeing as many films as I could in theaters and on TV. I used to go to see screenings at Wesleyan University. I grew up in a town next to Wesleyan and the nighttime screenings there were open to the public. (I alluded to this in a recent n+1 piece.) I started going to all of them as soon as I got a driver's license. I owe a lot to Jeanine Basinger, I think she was the head of Wesleyan's film program then, an excellent film critic and writer, although I never took a class with her and I've never actually met her. She’s still there. I got her book on the film director Anthony Mann around the same time. Godard writes about Mann, too.

What were your impressions of films back then? Or to make that (barely) less abstract: what excited you about the films you saw, compelled you to write about them to the small audience of your cousins?

There was no real start point for me, I had just always loved movies, and the more I watched through my adolescence the more I became gripped by them and wanted to seek out less mainstream forms of cinema. There was no movie theater in my town so getting to movies was always difficult and going to them was something of an adventure. I began to read about movies as much as I could and when I read Sarris's The American Cinema all of a sudden I had a course of films and filmmakers to explore in a less haphazard way than just catching things as they came on television. Godard on Godard was the next step in that, it introduced me to many filmmakers and films I had never heard of and had no access to—not at all!—as well as the whole world of literature and painting Godard constantly refers to in his reviews and articles. I wanted to see all these things, or read them, and became very interested in Cahiers du Cinema and finding old issues of it and trying to read it even though it was in French, and finding the new ones. Godard was like a great encyclopedia that led me to new things.

Some of the films Godard writes about I still haven't seen. The book includes Godard's year-end top-ten lists for about a 10- or 12-year period and I've made an effort to see all those films. Some are very elusive. I have still never seen a Norbert Carbonnaux film, for instance, called (in English) Hardboiled Egg Time, a French comedy from the 1950s, nor Une Vie by Alexandre Astruc, Les Rendezvous du Diable by Haroun Tazieff, a couple of Claude de Givray films, or Journal d'une femme un blanc by Claude Autant-Lara, and some Dovzhenko/Soltnseva films on those lists. These films are quite obscure (to most people). If anyone reading this knows how I can see them, let me know! A couple I had a chance to see but had to work when they were showing. One of the Dovzhenko/Soltnseva films showed at Light Industry in Brooklyn not too long ago but I couldn't make it to the screening.

Anyway, to get out of those weeds: A couple of things that started me on cinema were that in 7th grade my English teacher showed us Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 in class and in Spanish class our teacher, who was a real right-winger and had been in the Army, showed Los Olvidados by Buñuel. I can't imagine that happening in a public school in the US now. I really owe those two teachers a great debt, especially the English teacher. We read Bradbury’s novel along with the film. 

There was also a program on the Connecticut PBS station that showed avant-garde films, and this show was rebroadcast in the morning and I would watch it before school. I distinctly remember seeing both Mothlight by Stan Brakhage and Kustom Kar Kommandos by Kenneth Anger on that television show while eating my cereal, and then leaving to catch the bus for school.  

So from a very early age, your passion was . . . apparent—and well nourished. Were you ever given a formal education in film?

I studied English and Film in college in Boston but it was boring and I spent most of my time going to punk rock shows and seeing movies in theaters and renting videos.

I don't want to turn Godard on Godard into too much of a fetish object, but I wanted to add that the copy I have has a photo from Godard's film Weekend on the cover. I hadn't seen Weekend when I got the book, but reading it prepared me for that film, prepared me to understand it. I saw it when I was a freshman in college. Among Godard's '60s films, Weekend is often dismissed by people who prefer his films with Anna Karina. She's not in it, it was made after she and Godard split. The photo shows Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne at the scene of one of the car crashes in the film. When the book was published in the US in the mid-1980s, the cover featured Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo from Breathless, Godard's first feature film. I always thought that was a cop-out, an appeal to the wrong readers. I mean, it isn't really, but the book traces Godard's trajectory from film critic though making Breathless to his temporary abandonment of commercial cinema after Weekend. And the book came out in France the same year Weekend was in theaters. The book ends with Godard's writing from right before Weekend, a call to revolution, with a manifesto and a poem. Now, today, these two final items in the book make a lot of sense, they seemed awkward when I first read them. They call to us today.

Weekend is also—I’ve never read anyone noting this but someone probably has—a rebuke to Truffaut and to Fahrenheit 451. The Book People of the Truffaut film (and of Bradbury's novel), who memorize books, are in Weekend literalized as people who really are books: characters and authors walking around in the woods. They are set on fire by the bourgeois couple in Weekend, living beings burned alive instead of just books burned as in Fahrenheit 451. This radical rebuke to Truffaut was really something to think about when I first saw Weekend with Fahrenheit 451 still so fresh in my mind. Godard states in this violent, sick way that even memorizing books will not help us in certain circumstances, which are the kind of circumstances that seem to be appearing in the US now. Godard created a rivalry with Truffaut that was often cruel and unfair (as is well known). I think both are right, and I value both of those films. But I get confused by cinephiles who reject them. Weekend is an exhilarating, eye-opening film, even in the parts people complain about - the garbagemen eating the sandwiches with the anti-capitalist voiceover, for instance. 

I love anyone who loves both those films, both controversial works in their directors' oeuvres that are often dismissed as marginal to everything else they did in the 1960s. 

When you first said 'They call to us today', my thoughts weren't in the way of the political stage but the theatre, that you were going to comment on how that manifesto would apply to the current film landscape, so with that still lingering in my head—please answer at will.

The current film landscape is changing rapidly due to streaming and digital technology but is still dominated in general by big Hollywood films that don't often grapple with current reality in interesting ways. Both filmmaking and film criticism must counter that and at the same time confront the current political reality we face, which is more dangerous than the world of the May 1968 Godard's films predicted and contributed to. In that sense the book is a model of how to approach both contemporary cinema and political reality. The kind of criticism it embodies and the kind of filmmaking it celebrates and calls into being are necessary now as we confront a new era of repression, demagoguery, and possibly war, imperialist war.

Well then let's talk about the exact opposite to which you're alluding. Humor. I'm curious if you have access to the reviews you wrote at such an early age, and what you think when you read them—but really I want to know if even those were laced with the humor your current writing has today. There's a stereotype of the film (or any) critic, as a sardonic imp, craving errors, rendering them into jokes. It's not untrue—for critics just short of talent, it's a good crutch to have. But humor can not only sweeten a film's folly, it can grab the reader and put them in the writer’s perspective. Did you pick up on that from your own informal education? What writers showed you how to rightly employ humor?

I don't have access to those reviews I wrote in high school—thank God!—but I recall trying to be witty in them. I was very influenced by Fran Lebowitz at the time. She started out as a film critic at Interview magazine, which I didn't know back then. I saw her on David Letterman and bought her books. Godard's writing is equally witty and full of unexpected turns of phrase (in Milne's translation of course), very aphoristic and piercing. Roud, in his intro, calls him "unkind, unfair, and unreasonable." While Godard's writing is polemical and sometimes abstruse, it is also fun and lighthearted in its way. It is hopeful writing, and Godard often speaks of freedom in his reviews—he is obsessed with which directors evince some kind of freedom or autonomy. So I wouldn't go as far as Roud and say that Godard’s writing is the three U's he ascribes to it. The critics from the 1950s at Cahiers du cinema who became filmmakers have this double reputation as being on the one had cruel to directors they did not like and on the other too kind to the directors they discovered for themselves, directors who they did not think were understood in the proper light. So Godard (and Truffaut) were seen as too mean to some, and too forgiving of Hawks, Hitchcock, Lang, etc., the auteurs they loved. Above all, Godard’s style as a writer provides a guide to understanding mise-en-scene; he uses his wit to break down the films so we can understand them as visual experiences and as a process, something that happens between directors and actors and audiences.

To get back to your question, I value wit in film criticism as long as it has some kind of bite. The novelist Dawn Powell says somewhere that wit isn't wit unless it bites. So film critics who use gentle humor don't interest me. I'd much rather read critics who dispense with it altogether than ones who are trying to be funny for no good reason. I just think wit is part of good writing, it makes up style. But I also think that thinking that is generational. It’s more Gen X and less Baby Boomer and Millennial. Because the critics I valued the most were like that. Maybe it skips a generation. I'm in an in-between generation between much larger generations, as were the Cahiers '50s critics, and Sarris, Manny Farber, Kael, Sontag, Renata Adler.

Something caught me above, about being cruel to some directors and too kind to those they discover. It makes me think of current reviews, in aggregate, when a movie is slightly ambitious but isn't something worth seeing, and yet gets a 90+ on Rotten Tomatoes, just for what? Showing up? Having an unusual arc or not involving a super hero? When a movie is hyped before you see it, does that play into your own calculations? Do you let budget or distribution change how you judge it?

No, as Godard said, all movies are equal before God! 

There is far too much critical consensus and many critics simply agree with each other on what's good and bad and what's worth seeing and then putting on a list at the end of the year. It takes a long time to get over list-making. It's very herd-like and driven by publicity. The whole structure of it is wrong—reviewing everything as soon as it comes out, holding to embargoes, straining to be fair to everything, not pissing off advertisers. It's a system that lacks freedom, and it seems dated to me given the new ways people watch movies today. Twitter makes up for that in some ways, like film criticism's subtext or unconscious. I try to write more like that, they way people actually talk with each other about films they see. But I'm bad at Twitter!

It's probably a good thing to be bad at Twitter. Why do you think any given critic would catch the tide instead of going against it? Insecurity in their own opinion?

I don't know. They're trying to be professional and advance their careers in a dwindling market. They are a number of working critics I like, I don't want to give the impression there aren't.

Maybe some others have a misguided sense of responsibility in writing for the historical record as films come out, which is important to do, in any case. 

In nearly every retrospective work of film criticism I read, invariably praising a filmmaker, there's a mention of a prominent critic who dismissed said filmmaker at release—as if any successful piece of cinema should be met with unalloyed acclaim. But you'd hope a film that lasts should polarize. Do you yourself ever write while keeping in mind that another critic (you respect) might disagree, or that you'd disagree with yourself in the future?

That I will disagree with myself in the future, yes. Not so much that I might disagree with someone else. Every film becomes good or at least interesting in a sense over time, just by existing. None are irredeemable. Time heals the wounds inflicted by critics good and bad. And some films are very difficult to understand when they come out because they seem made for the future, not the present. Godard’s Film Socialisme, from 2010, is like that.

What about yourself have you begun to disagree with in the past few years, if there's any salient thread at all? Is there a single review you gave that sticks out to you as one you've taken the opposite side on? Impossible to answer, but what trajectory do you think you're on that will have you, in the future, disagreeing with what you write today?

Films by certain filmmakers I don't like that much will look better in the future just by being unique or personal. There are filmmakers now who are original and singular that maybe I don't love but their films will look better (to me) in the future. I think that's what happened with critics with, for instance, Powell and Pressburger's films. They were misunderstood when they came out in the 1940s and ‘50s but twenty or thirty years later they were understood. So there are filmmakers like that today, too, even ones who have got a lot of acclaim and have strong fan bases but who I'm just not into. 

We're nearly out of time, so to take us out I'll revert to the boilerplate. What are you most looking forward to in film in 2017?

Well, I want to see this Polish film The Lure that's about to come out. There are a number of undistributed films I saw that I think should be released, a Romanian film called Sieranevada is one. An Argentine film called The Human Surge is about to play at Metrograph, that film should really be seen by a lot of people. Godard is working on a new film he's been shooting in the Middle East. I guess he's editing it now. He's still going strong, his most recent film, the 3D film Goodbye to Language, was a revelation. Totally new and unexpected and so far in advance of everything else. It closed the book on standard 3D and opened new doors. Who knows who will walk through them? As he wrote in the last item in Godard on Godard, I look forward to a cinema that is free and bonded in friendship. But as he also said, I await the destruction of cinema with optimism!