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June 17, 2011 read: 66 / emailed: / share: email DK Holm

Dave Kehr is one of the best writers on movies and currently mans a Pulitzer Prize worthy column for the New York Times on weekly DVD releases. but heretofore his writings have been contained only in back issues of the Chicago Reader and other publications, or in books celebrating movie posters. Now, though, some of his best reviews from the Chicago Reader years have been gathered in the book When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade (The University of Chicago Press, 290 pages, $22.50, ISBN 978-0226429410). the volume gathers 54 reviews (all positive) and columns spanning 1974 to 1986, with a cogent introduction and a list of Kehr’s 10-best lists from the same era in the back. Among the movies covered are five by Godard, Family Plot, Days of Heaven, once Upon a Time in the West, the Leopard, the Driver, Reds, Lost in America, the big Red one, Risky Business, and Peeping Tom. there are healthy slices of Hollywood films by both aging and emerging directors and coverage of international films by the great masters. the book begins It’s a book that demands to be in the collection of all serious film students, along side their shelves of Sarris, Durgnat, Robin Wood, Hoberman, Rosenbaum, and Naremore. this being said, the book raises interesting questions about the role and style of movie reviewing as it has evolved since the advent of film studies, and the shifts in seriousness in international cinema. in short, it confronts two issues: What does a writer put in a movie review, and are movies as good now as they used to be. the issues begin with the title. to restate it, the title seems to be saying that movies no longer matter. but if I read the introduction correctly, what mr. Kehr means is “when movies mattered journalistically.” the introduction evokes fond memories not only of early cinema writing but of the heyday of alternative newspapers, which at least in the case of the Chicago Reader allowed its scribes lavish room to follow their thoughts. he also notes that alternative newspapers were free, which tilted the burden of financing onto the advertisers who were thus assured that many more people would pick up a free newspaper. the local analogs for this are the Willamette Week, the Portland Mercury, and the Vancouver Voice itself, but the economic terrain demands that the papers be on the slim side and the writers tend to be restrained in their wordage. which is one of the points that mr. Kehr makes – that reviewing has shifted in the last few decades to short, punchier, meditation free journalism which tends to be more or less a branch of the publicity arms of the studios, buying into their world view in which weekend grosses are the measure of success. to read mr. Kehr’s reviews now is to be confronted with a style that blends the seriousness of the academy with the exposition of taste of a consumer report, an approach that is almost unimaginable today. What does a reader want to read in a review, anyway? Based on the kinds of letters that newspapers receive from those cranky enough to write them, they don’t want opinions and they don’t want plot summaries. That leaves little else. mr. Kehr’s reviews are lengthy analyses that often “spoil” the plot, and which are rife with his aesthetic position, which simply put is that cinema is a director’s medium (a notion still debated in academia),  particularly favoring the older directors celebrated by the auteurist writers of the ’50s and ’60s.  the book both begins and ends, for example, with articles about films by Jean Renoir. Thus, When Movies Mattered is nostalgic on many counts: as a recelebration of certain core films at the heart of film studies, as a paean to a time when newspapers mattered, and to a style of movie reviewing that is giving ground to reviewing as brisk remarks geared to a narrow market.