Roger & We.

Roger Ebert may have bid farewell to broadcasting, but it is his "print corpus that will sustain Mr Ebert's reputation as one of the few authentic giants in a field in which self-importance frequently overshadows accomplishment," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "His writing may lack the polemical dazzle and theoretical muscle of Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, whose names must dutifully be invoked in any consideration of American film criticism. In their heyday those two were warriors, system-builders and intellectual adventurers on a grand scale. But the plain-spoken Midwestern clarity of Mr Ebert's prose and his genial, conversational presence on the page may, in the end, make him a more useful and reliable companion for the dedicated moviegoer."

As it happens, Scott opened the Moving Image Institute in Film Criticism and Feature Writing yesterday and Karina Longworth has an initial take at the SpoutBlog well worth reading top to bottom: "The Scott session, for me, reinforced the notion that there's a divide between those of us who struggle to cobble together a living out of our engagement with the online film community, and those who, because of age or professional stature or other factors that I'm too young and naive to grasp, see the increasing empowerment of the audience as a nuisance."

So let's think back a few years and doubly appreciate what Scott calls Ebert's "genial, conversational presence." Ebert, who's been writing for the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967 and is now returning after a bout with health problems you've surely heard all about, has been online since 1983. No, that's not a typo. "I've been a subscriber to CompuServe since I got my Tandy model 100 in about 1983," he told Paul Kedrosky in the January 1996 issue of Wired. Granted, the focus of the interview is on Ebert's hassles with being overwhelmed by thousands of readers scrambling for a piece of him, but the point is, for decades, from the pre-Web online forum days on, Ebert's been actively seeking out ways to genially converse with fellow film enthusiasts: "I am a better critic now, because I am engaged in an ongoing criticism of my work by people who are not in the least impressed by my reputation."

Read that Kedrosky interview. Sure, a few details are 1996-specific ("E-Mail Addresses of the Rich & Famous," a deluge of AOL discs), but much of what Ebert has to say about learning from readers who disagree with him, even as he sticks to his guns (the "critic who tries to reflect the views of his audience is not a critic, he's a ventriloquist") as well as what Josh Bell has to say in his comment on Karina's entry are encouraging signs that film criticism will thrive long after this or that tower crumbles.

Posted by dwhudson at April 12, 2008 6:03 AM