It is easy to forget, in a time when most universities feature rigorous deconstructions of films in their curricula, that not so long ago the cinema was considered a debased form akin to vaudeville. Perhaps the earliest intellectual credence lent to... [more]

It is easy to forget, in a time when most universities feature rigorous deconstructions of films in their curricula, that not so long ago the cinema was considered a debased form akin to vaudeville. Perhaps the earliest intellectual credence lent to the nascent medium came from the French Surrealists of the 1930s, all of whom appear to have been avid filmgoers. The movement's keystone figure, Andre Breton, maintained that within the worst films were at least five transcendent minutes; conversely, the most lauded efforts usually contained only five good minutes. A convenient axiom, one that enabled the artists to move from one flea-pit cinema to the next with remarkable expediency. The New York-based critic Andrew Sarris is generally credited with concocting the auteur theory in the 1960s. The auteur system of evaluation frames the entirety of a film's literary and visual content as a reflection of the director's personality, his personal agenda and assorted obsessions lurking below the surface of a given entertainment. This outgrowth of post-graduate English literature studies became an industry in itself (certainly with respect to the book trade, which spawned a halcyon period of auteur-oriented film titles in the early '70s) and was undoubtedly a boon to the programmers of the revival houses that flourished through the 1970s. Many directors who had retired and died with "studio hack" as their only epitaph were given a new day in the sun thanks to the relentless re-evaluations of Sarris and his disciples. Emerging in the late 1970s on the heels of this school of criticism was the discipline of semiotics. Based on the writings of European academics such as Jacques Lacan, Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida, and others, semiotics sought to investigate the quantum kernels of any artistic effort, reducing aesthetic information to a language of interrelated signs and signifiers. As to whether this theory has done more than create yet another academic industry, one needs only look to the time-tested Roman "thumbs up, thumbs down" rating system, which has become so ubiquitous and beloved in America film critique. [show less]