The intellectual who turns film critic is letting himself in for a rough time. Despite the hundreds upon hundreds of books written about movies, he is still left with no solidly established precedents or precursors to defy or demolish, no unassailable terms, standards, and values that can serve as springboard for his own work; indeed, even at this late date he must set about proving, as though for the first time, that movies belong to the area of “legitimate” art and deserve serious attention.

Even worse, he is confronted by the maddening task of devising a prose style born from and suited only to his subject, a way of writing about, say, the Western, that would not serve equally well for The Wasteland. No wonder, then, that he generally lapses into the easy jargon of psychoanalysis and sociology or the ponderous mishmash of the cinéastes who talk of “visual-spatial continuums,” “the paradigmatic character of the avant-garde film,” “psycho-physical correspondences.” In the course of his development—if there is a development—he tends to scorn the present, withdrawing to the lost childhood of the movies, to a sentimental memory of golden, pre-sound days when the camera moved, when Keaton and Langdon and Arbuckle gave birth to laughter, and Griffith and Stroheim walked large upon the earth. Since then, he tells us, something has gone wrong, horribly wrong. Never mind where or what; it is enough, simply, to assert his disgust.

And this he does, growing increasingly savage and vindictive with each Ben Hur, blaming Hollywood, then the mass audience, then the middlebrow, then the pressure groups, then back full circle to Hollywood again. He comes to find at least a little good in the worst of the imports, while the best American movies serve him as negative commentaries on the state of our country and our culture. Those few intransigents—i.e., James Agee, Manny Farber, William Poster—who sought a way out of the prevailing critical gloom, frantically casting about for something to praise in the Hollywood-style movie and movie-maker, were no better off; all the love they lavished on the face of Frances Dee, the miming of Mickey Rooney, and the odd-ball antics of John Huston seem now only a kind of whistling in the dark, revealing, as Pauline Kael has said, “a great deal about themselves but very little about films.”

Withal, books on the movies manage somehow to get written. (How they get published is another matter; most are remaindered before the ink is decently dry.) And to me, at any rate, the worst of them, like the worst of movies, has a certain morbid fascination. I offer this most recent pair—Theory of Film¹ by Siegfried Kracauer, and The Three Faces of the Film, ² by Parker Tyler—as cases in point.

In the Theory of Film, Siegfried Kracauer sets about proving, once and for all, that (1) movies are an art, and (2) that they differ radically from other arts. To his task, Dr. Kracauer brings an impressive set of credentials (author of From Caligari to Hitler, a host of articles in the literary and film quarterlies, several years at the Museum of Modern Art Film Library, etc.), a passion for pure scholarship (thirty-seven solid pages of notes, with authorities ranging from Arnheim, R. to Zinnemann, F.), a tendency to set down a far-off image as though it were one of the eternal verities (Groucho Marx is “an eruptive monad in the middle of self-created anarchy”), and a marvelous aliveness (sometimes) to just about everything that crosses the light of the screen.

For Dr. Kracauer, “the hunting ground of the motion picture camera is the external world expanding in all directions.” Its natural prey are those sights and spectacles and moments so fugitive and impermanent as to elude observation—i.e., streets, roads, masses of people, the turning of wheels, the shadow on a wall, the ripple of a single leaf. Mercilessly, the camera fastens on the phenomena of everyday life till they are made to yield up a new reality, a “camera reality” so astonishing and momentous that it forces us to relearn our notions of the world and our relation to things. Thus, the human face seen under close-up is no longer simply a face. We get, instead, “new and unsuspected formations of matter; skin textures are reminiscent of aerial photographs, eyes turn into lakes or volcanic craters.” Somehow and at any cost the camera must fill the screen, if only with the dirt underfoot or the waste we leave behind. It will exalt a sewer grating into a symbol of the metropolis and the litter in an empty subway car into an eloquent statement on the human condition.

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Dr. Kracauer also has many wonderful perceptions about dialogue and sound and music—although he permits too many stretches like: “There are, then, two pairs of alternatives: synchronism-asynchronism; parallelism-counterpoint. Yet these two pairs do not assert themselves independently of each other. Rather, they are invariably interlinked in such a way that one alternative of either pair fuses with one of the other. . . .”

Such passages, though, contain ideas, and the ideas usually turn out to merit the required six or eight readings. (He believes, for example, that film music goes by special rules of its own, that the farther it draws us from the images on the screen the more it reveals of the greater life from which it issues; specifically, the child-murderer’s reedy, compulsive little whistle in M has a thousand times the evocative power of the tom-tom-like High Noon ballad.) But Dr. Kracauer, alas, is a man with a thesis, doggedly intent on showing, says the dust jacket, how movies reflect “the condition of modern man, the moral temper of our society.” Nothing will stand in the way of his high purpose: if data don’t conform to thesis, so much the worse for data; if unity is demanded, unity will be imposed, no matter how artificial; if ideas run a little dry, there is always the obvious to be labored.

One of his consistently irritating habits is to set down a few modest truths and then, as though fearful of saying something new and dangerous, to smother them with the first handy banality. (He has a superb eye, incidentally, for picking the worst passages from the best writers; even James Agee, allotted two meager quotes, comes out tired, thin, and trite.) To illustrate, Dr. Kracauer spends a longish chapter dealing with the question of how stage actor and screen actor differ from each other. His answer is that the stage actor is the hub of the play, the carrier of all its meaning, while the screen actor is only “raw material” employed to represent the species rather than the individual : “. . . the film actor must act as if he did not act at all but were a real-life person caught in the act by the camera. He must seem to be his character. He is in a sense a photographer’s model.”

Again, nothing sensational here; a mild uh huh and you plod ahead, looking for the liberating insight or aperçu toward which Dr. Kracauer seems to be laboring and laboring. Instead, six-and-a-half pages of elaborate system-building and meticulous annotation peter off into “The typical Hollywood star . . . acts out a standing character identical with his own or at least developed from it, frequently with the aid of make-up and publicity experts.” A little later, Dr. Kracauer ends his accolades to Rossellini and De Sica’s canny handling of non-professional actors on this note of caution: “But one should keep in mind that the Italians are blessed with mimetic gifts and have a knack of expressive gesture.” (I always did like that Henry Armetta!) And the very next line brings the comment that “. . . while producing The Men director Fred Zinneman found that people who have undergone a powerful emotional experience are particularly fit to reenact themselves.”

Such hedgings and restraints are seldom in evidence when Dr. Kracauer goes to work on specific movies. John Ford’s The Informer is curtly dismissed because it doesn’t “really record city nature,” but his Grapes of Wrath—in every way a lesser work—is hailed as “a classic of the screen”; the schmaltz-drenched One Hundred Men and a Girl gets a loving paragraph for its “aesthetic gratifications,” but the tight, sinewy, and inventive Forty-second Street is brushed off with a chilly little mention; Fred Niblo’s chariot race sequence in Ben Hur is “superb” cinema, but Eisenstein’s ice battle in Alexander Nevsky is “rather lifeless.”

Once out to make a point, Dr. Kracauer has no qualms about treating the lowest-grade celluloid with solemn respect and downright mawkishness. Apropos of Jungle Patrol, a combat pilot quickie which any Times Square bug house audience would laugh off the screen, we read:

This film culminates in a sequence of terrific air fights which, however, are not seen at all. What we do see instead is a loudspeaker in the operations hut hooked in to the planes’ inter-coms. As the ill-fated fights take their course, different voices which seem to come from nowhere flow out of the radio set, forming an endless sound strip. To be sure, we grasp the tragic implications of their blurred messages. But this is not the whole story they are telling us. Rather, the gist of it is the constant mutter itself, the fabric woven by voice after voice. In the process of unfolding, it sensitizes us to the influences of space and matter and their share in the individual destinies.

Apart from the fact that this is about as original a bit of business as the use of exfoliating calendar leaves to denote the passing of time, and that those “blurred messages” are on a par with “You-can’t-send-a-kid-up-in-a-crate-like-that!” I think Dr. Kracauer’s real trouble arises out of a general mistrust of simple explanations. Thus, it apparently never occurs to him that Jungle Patrol is a low-budget item and that the showing of an air battle, even with the aid of trick photography and scale models, costs a good deal more than the taping of a few voices. Similarly, if Bicycle Thief, La Strada, and Cabiria are “soaked in the street world,” doesn’t economics divulge as much as aesthetics? And the Western hero—is he an “incarnation of Little David,” “a potential victim,” “a pitiable figure,” or just a man whose gun and horse are endlessly fascinating camera staples?

Dr. Kracauer winds up with a mournful portrait of lost modern man drifting in an ideologically shelterless void, alienated from other men, from himself, and from physical reality. What he needs, insists Dr. Kracauer, summoning Dewey, Freud, Marx, Toynbee, Mumford, etc. as witnesses, is to “seize the concrete world and shake hands with it.” And of all the arts, only the film will lead him out of the forest of abstraction and set him “on paths that wind through the thicket of things.”

And once through this thicket, where ends the path? What has Dr. Kracauer been driving at all along with his metaphysics and depth psychology? The answer: a “rapprochement between the peoples of the world,” “a common life of mankind on earth.” Lest we have any doubts about the extent of his vision or the depth of his purpose, he resolves these at the end by a heartfelt endorsement of what one New York Times reader had to say about Arapajito: “What seems to me remarkable is that you see this story happening in [India] and see these faces with their exotic beauty and still feel that the same thing is happening every day somewhere in Manhattan, Brooklyn or the Bronx.”

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No matter what you might say about Dr. Kracauer, it’s only fair to concede that his discussion of this or that movie generally imparts some sense at least of what actually took place on the screen. For Parker Tyler, a movie is only the goad that sends him into a frenzy of free association; the real drama is taking place in his unconscious. Or, as Paul Goodman puts it in his blurb for The Three Faces of the Film: “Parker Tyler reacting to a Hollywood movie is a better movie than they ever dreamed of there.”

From what I’m able to make out, Mr. Tyler employs three basic approaches in criticism. These are (1) the juxtaposition of things that don’t belong together, (2) the laying down of laws and propositions as difficult to affirm as they are to deny, and (3) the celebration of the chi-chi and the brushing-off of the conventional. A few random samplings.

Juxtaposition: Writing on documentary and semi-documentary films, Mr. Tyler, within the confines of a single page, trots out Zola, Flaubert, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Arnold Bennett’s The Grand Babylon Hotel, Jules Romains’ Men of Good Will (“a great part of which is an urban portrait corresponding to Eisenstein’s rural portrait of Mexico”), Flaherty’s Nanook, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, The March of Time, The House on 92nd St., and 13 rue Madeleine. Then, in apparent desperation, he overflows into a footnote: “. . . two postwar films naming streets in their titles . . . were It Happened on Fifth Avenue and Miracle on 34th St.”

Laws and Propositions: “The frantic drive of Hollywood cameras to ‘eat up’ space on their recurrent trips to the moon directly reflects the general Hollywood conception of space as a jungle, a chaos, whether void or occupied.” “To get more people into the theaters . . . the movies have been overreaching stage and novel to call upon the dynamic sensations of kinesthesia through the third-dimension effect and the illusion of being surrounded by the area of vision . . . .” (Roughly translated, screens are getting bigger all the time.) “The sum of [the] narratives in Rashomon rests on the elements of the tragedy in which all agree: one raped, one was raped, one killed, one was killed.” (With that I’ll go along.)

Chi-chi and Conventional: You can hunt high and low before you’ll find a kind word for anything that’s come out of Hollywood since Greed and Broken Blossoms. In fact, the only American movie with which Mr. Tyler deals at any length is Sunset Boulevard, where he never quite forgives Billy Wilder for not being Jean Cocteau; the others get neat little flash cards—Sex, Sadism, or Sadistic Sex. But turn him loose on the experimental squibbles of a Maya Deren and he begins to drip dithyrambs: “lyrically simple,” “structurally strong,” “transmuted into glory,” “a triumphant sense of dance flow,” “a parable of the individual’s integrity in an unchanging environment.”

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All three critical approaches converge on the gimmicky British shocker Dead of Night, which had to do with murder and mayhem in a British manor house, said murder and mayhem turning out to be really the hero’s dream, said dream turning out to be really a detail by detail forecast of coming events. Such a movie is, of course, Mr. Tyler’s meat; for this exegesis he doesn’t even pretend to bother with such philistine considerations as photography, direction, and acting. He concentrates, instead, on the “archetypal” moviegoer, on “Mr. Average Citizen” who, like Dead of Night’s hero, gets into his car and drives, if not to a manor house at least to a movie house, where events on the screen, as observed by Mr. Tyler, parallel and parody his private daydreams.

If this method is to fall within the realm of good movie criticism—or movie criticism at all—it must be used delicately and sparingly and tied hard and fast to the movie’s formal, surface content. Unfortunately, in Mr. Tyler’s hands the method is converted into a vehicle for the wildest and weirdest observations you’re ever likely to encounter this side of a mescaline trance. Take Dead of Night’s ventriloquist episode. Since it involves dubbing-in, since dubbing-in is “the constant factor of projection, common to the mechanism of mind and film,” Mr. Tyler takes the next logical step. “Is it not possible,” he speculates, “for neurotic homosexuals to project their unconscious desires arbitrarily onto others, especially an actor or actress seen in the movies?” (Yes, but I’ve noticed the same tendency among quite a few heterosexuals.) The screen murder of a psychiatrist gives him even less trouble. “It is easy to imagine that Mr. Average Citizen, faithful movie-goer, can . . . overcome a psychiatrist, if necessary, by strangling him.” And so forth, till the windup when Mr. Tyler does a few tricky turns with Frankenstein’s monster, Danny Kaye, and Rita Hayworth.

Some years back S. J. Perelman claimed that “when it comes to rococo, it’s Manny Farber two to one.” Personally, my money’s on Parker Tyler.

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¹ Oxford University Press, 364 pp., $10.00.

² Thomas Yoseloff, 150 pp., $6.50.