Phillip Lopate’s Second Affair with Art House Cinema

Phillip Lopate is an American author of essays, fiction, and film criticism. He is a former Professor in the Writing Program at Columbia University School of the Arts. Readers outside of film studies will be more familiar with his contributions to American literature, particularly the personal essay form.¹ For Senses of Cinema readers, Lopate’s name should be well-known: we find him penning film criticism for the New York Times, Criterion Collection, Film Comment, Indiewire, and Cineaste, among other publications.

 It was with great pleasure that I recently read, in those very pages of Cineaste, David Sterritt’s positive review of Lopate’s latest collection of film criticism.² Lopate’s two collections of criticism, published in 1998 and 2024, respectively, capture his 20th and 21st century practice. These books feature Lopate’s impassioned thoughts about narrative cinema, documentary, and film criticism, and they are archives of his many decades of work (beginning around 1963, writing for the Columbia Daily Spectator). Moreover, the chapters are excellent lessons in writing about films in an era of hasty evaluations. The titles of each collection even mirror one another. Totally, Tenderly, Tragically: Essays and Criticism from a Lifelong Love Affair with the Movies and My Affair with Art House Cinema aptly describe the critic’s feelings and approach.³ The 2024 book features forty-seven chapters about narrative cinema, so I begin there before detailing Lopate’s writings about documentary film and film critics.

After making his first and only film in the early 1960s, Lopate decided, “No thanks: I had had my fun; I would become a writer. It was easier and cheaper to control pens and paper than actors.” He continued his reminiscence, “Making that one twenty-minute film […] taught me the enormous difference between having an aesthetic understanding of film and being confronted with the demands of transferring three dimensions into two on an actual set.”⁴ Indeed, one reason for the publication of his 2024 collection is to provide a record of that critical aesthetic. Like the great critics before him – from Bazin to Kael and beyond – Lopate gravitates toward certain films, directors, and styles. Lopate summarizes his preferred aesthetic:

Experiencing the integrity of each shot; relishing a flow of images that unfolds flexibly into its environmental space; endorsing a nuanced, humanistic psychology of character; and demonstrating some sort of wisdom. (… (A) stoical realism about human frailty and suffering and a compassionate sense of fairness over cheap, grindhouse thrills.) (pp. 2-3)

Lopate’s piece on Maurice Pialat’s L’enfance nue (Naked Childhood, 1968) exemplifies his aesthetic. Pialat requires that “the viewer… has to attend to the immediate experience in the moment.” The film is concerned with François’ (Michel Terrazon) “psychological behaviour” and its mysteries are “deepened by Pialat’s quirky filmic technique(s),” including a lack of nondiegetic music, unstable beginning and endings to the scenes, and no temporal indicators (accurate for most Pialat’s films), and offers a “moral vision” of childhood and economically dire circumstances (pp. 235, and 237-38). 

He is one of Bazin’s heirs (p. 17). Sarris’ progeny, too (p. 8). “I am loyal to approaching films from the standpoint of a director’s individual expression,” he confesses (p. 3). It is rare for a critic to offer their “critical principles” in such a straightforward manner (p. 2). 

The tendency for the auteurist approach led Lopate to write about art house cinema. Because he has an art house cinema focus, defined as it is by a male canon, Lopate refers to a usual set of 20th century auteurs (e.g., Antonioni, Bergman, Bresson, Dreyer, Fassbinder, Godard, Rohmer, Tarkovsky, Truffaut) but also topples the West’s hegemony over art house film to champion directors from around the globe (e.g., Kiarostami, Jia Zhangke, Hou Hsiao-hsien, mid-century Japanese filmmakers). 

A second reason for the publication of the 2024 collection is to shine a light on art films since 1998 (p. 3). In this sense, Lopate continues the tradition of the critic as a cultural gatekeeper and observer of film culture.⁵ Given that half the chapters are about directors and works before 1998, this is a strange claim. (The cover features a still from 1953’s Ugetsu Monogatari (Ugetsu, Kenji Mizoguchi).) However, when tasked with examining 21st century films, Lopate writes with as much aplomb as he does about the French New Wave auteurs or post-war Japanese masters. 

If offered the opportunity, I do not doubt Lopate would focus more on contemporary cinema. However, he has never held a film critic position and thus usually writes by assignment (p. 3). Of course, one wonders about the critics who write for free and those who write for pay – two different sorts of love affairs with cinema.⁶ Some of the standout contributions in this collection are those chapters that seem a little less on assignment, and particularly his longer-form criticism, such as a personal reflection on his interactions and friendship with Dušan Makavejev, or in the most essayistic chapter of the book, a treatment of the contemporary essay film. From his one-page reviews for Film Comment or these longer book chapters, Lopate demonstrates that exceptional critics must be adept in various forms and extend their reach across many platforms and publications. 

Because Lopate’s work is scattered across many publications, collecting his thoughts on narrative cinema makes good sense. Much of Lopate’s criticism may be behind paywalls, requiring library access, subscription, or the book or physical media. We may find a few online, such as Indiewire, but having his criticism in one accessible volume reminds me of the joys of reading superb long-form criticism in print. In Lopate’s approach to art house films, one finds no tension or anxiety in the face of the permanent or contemporary crisis of criticism, such as it is today that reviewers vie for clicks rather than offer subjective yet meaningful interpretative remarks.⁷ Lopate refuses evaluative statements in rapid succession that would suit Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic blurbs,  nor does he succumb to the demand of young cinephiles for digestible critical consensus.⁸ Nor will he pit a film against the ideal Film. He compares individual works with the director’s oeuvre (e.g., Akerman, Antonioni, Makavejev, Kore-eda, Wiseman), considered alongside the socio-cultural present, including political and industry concerns (e.g., Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck (2005)), or, in developing an evaluative lens, Lopate offers parallels to past films to reveal something insightful or novel (e.g., reconsidering Hong Sang-soo as the “Korean Woody Allen,” and instead claiming Hong’s sensibility is closer to Rohmer’s (p. 124)).

One of Lopate’s strengths is glorifying the formal elements of a film, as if universally accepted, then offering his subjective take, indicated by the use of personal pronouns. He also seems to get to know characters well, for example, touring through Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline’s (Julie Delpy) decades-long romance in Linklater’s Before trilogy (1995, 2004, and 2013). One of his weaknesses may be the rehashing of some trivia, such as his frequent mention that Godard often wrote his scripts the morning of the shooting. This minor point aside, reading Lopate’s writing across a few decades allowed me to get to know the person behind the pen and keyboard and, despite this familiarity, still have him surprise me on occasion, such as a less than flattering opinion of Rashōmon (Akira Kurosawa, 1951) and Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972), and an honest appraisal of Chantal Akerman’s oeuvre in a heartfelt tribute after her death.

Before Midnight

Once finished with art house cinema, Lopate’s eleven-chapter “Intermission” focusing on documentary cinema is less thrilling. He provides surface-level descriptions and analyses, sometimes on films that do not need more introduction (e.g., Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1956), Rouch and Morin’s Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961)). The survey of Wiseman’s work also needs an update, covering only the twentieth century. A longer piece addressing a range of essay films, combined with the introduction to Rappaport’s essay films, does make me feel the loss of the essay film book Lopate wanted to write but likely never will.

Lopate does not end the affair with narrative cinema and documentary. He reflects on his critical practice (four chapters) and his peers (eight chapters). Regarding the latter, he addresses his peers in roundabout ways. His admiration of Stanely Kauffmann comes in an obituary, his thoughts on Pauline Kael in a review of a Kael biography, and musings about Roger Ebert in a review of the documentary Life Itself (Steve James, 2014). Whether tackling Kael, Ebert, or championing Stanley Cavell and Jonathan Rosenbaum (despite Lopate’s admittance that he may not quite understand everything in Cavell’s connections between philosophy and films), Lopate is always at his most balanced in the assessments of his peers. In one of two concluding essays, Lopate fondly remembers New York reparatory theatres, reminiscing about first film encounters and developing his lifelong love affair. In the concluding essay, recognizing the era of the reparatory theatre is at its end, Lopate doubles down on his cinephilia but from its more certain setting of the home theatre: “I will continue to be in thrall to the moving image until they pry the remote from my cold, dead hand” (p. 399). 

After heaping my praise on this critic, I can identify a few flaws. The biggest flaw is its organizational structure. The forty-seven art house cinema chapters are presented alphabetically by the director’s last name. While Lopate may suggest the reader “hop around” the book, this structure poses a challenge for scholars with a critical interest in Lopate’s output (p. 4). With the arbitrary organization, one does not go on a journey with Lopate and his career in criticism, nor does one get a historical tour through art cinema. I would be interested in a loosely chronological order of the chapters that bundle the reviews published in the same place. This organization allows for questions central to studies of the critic: Does Lopate’s style evolve across the decades? Does his voice shift from his short-form to long-form criticism? How does he evaluate directors for news outlets vs. praise a film for a Criterion Collection essay? This problem could be resolved, to some degree, had the location of the original publication been included in the table of contents rather than at the end of each chapter (save for one book review of Richard Schickel’s Elia Kazan, missing a citation, Film Comment, Volume 42, Issue 1, (January/February 2006): p. 76). As a scholar, I would have also liked full citations for the books reviewed before reading Lopate’s thoughts. 

Had Lopate organized his chapters chronologically, it would have harkened back to the fascinating opening chapter, “On Changing One’s Mind About a Movie.” Lopate contrasts his film experience with Kael. Kael would not see a movie twice “because she wanted to trust her first, gut impression” (p. 8). On the contrary, Lopate is prone to change his mind based on “my particular stage of life, my overarching aesthetic, auteurist reconsiderations, public response, and peer pressure” (p. 10). We are privy to examples of each factor. With unabashed honesty on that final element, Lopate observes how he “willed himself to admire” Malick’s The New World (2005) because younger friends adored it (p. 11). This short chapter is a must-read for budding and seasoned critics. 

A few other minor issues are worth stating. Lopate updates some essays and reviews to bring them into the present. Lopate adds postscripts or makes other changes and adjustments in-text. But one possible alteration seems odd. In a 2000 New York Times piece about Wiseman’s oeuvre, Lopate writes that the documentary filmmaker is “now in his mideighties” (p. 294).⁹ Wiseman was 70 years old in 2000, or he was in his mid-nineties in 2024. Further, while there are no typos, a few punctuation marks are missing, or a comma is used instead of a period. Finally, we may have benefitted from consistent endnotes – some chapters have endnotes for Lopate’s references, others do not – and an index. 

These small bumps aside, Lopate’s collection is required material for the cinephile and scholar. It is also an excellent resource for professors. Lopate provides a new angle on the filmmakers I routinely teach, such as Cronenberg, Godard, Kiarostami, Kurosawa, Ozu, and Truffaut, and these chapters could be helpful summaries and insights for the burgeoning film studies student too. Most important of all, perhaps Lopate can change your mind.

Phillip Lopate, My Affair with Art House Cinema: Essays and Reviews (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024).

Endnotes