The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: Ben Sachs

Ben Sachs

...the ending of a life drags the entire movie to a halt, forcing the viewer to reflect on what an extraordinary object his or her body is...Of all the arts, cinema may provide the best vehicle for inspiring this sort of reflection, as the manipulation of time is such an important aspect of the medium.

Contributed to: The Chicago Reader, The Bleader, CINE-FILE, MUBI.

Noted champion of: Takashi Miike, Robert Mulligan, Alain Resnais, Johnny To, Ulrich Seidl's "Paradise" trilogy, Leos Carax, Pedro Almodóvar.

Influences: "Lindsay Anderson, "What is Cinema? by Andre Bazin, Films and Feelings by Raymond Durgnat, The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan by Robin Wood, and every film critic who’s written for the Reader."

Ben Sachs (1983-) was born in Waukegan, IL and over the last four years has become one of the most consistent writers in the fertile Chicago critical scene. Sachs moved to Chicago in 2005 after graduating from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. From his bio on the Chicago Reader website, where he's been a full-time critic and blogger since 2011: I started writing film criticism for the Reader in September 2010 with a capsule review of the wrestling movie Legendary; since December 2011 I've written daily posts for the Bleader. Before that, I had been a regular contributor to the local website CINE-FILE, for which I'd been writing since its conception in 2007....In other movie-related business, I've introduced screenings at Doc Films, taught classes at Facets Multimedia, and continue to volunteer regularly at Bucktown’s Odd Obsession Movies. Before he started contributing to CINE-FILE, Sachs wrote plays, drummed for a band, and worked odd jobs, all without a huge measure of success. CINE-FILE isn't only where he honed his critical chops, it's also where his wife Kathleen Sachs (née Keish) writes.  

That last is not included arbitrarily. Perhaps more than any other critic or blogger, Sachs' family defines and broadens his writing. Whether ecstatic or melancholy (one of the most endearing and engrossing modes he writes in), his writing is deepened by his understanding of what his family means to him and has given to him. Recently he wrote a brief, touching piece about his cousin Naomi entitled "The family member who most influenced me as a critic." His nakedness in front of memory and the impact of this very special person is overwhelming. As in his writing on films, he reaches for small, tactile details hiding in his recollection, trying to better understand his cousin, his relationship to her and who he is. How he fits into the world, starting with his home in Chicago. From a piece about watching the films of Alain Resnais: At the time, I was either unemployed or working part-time—I don't remember which, but I was in a position to go to the movies on weekday afternoons, and I did this often to save money. The small audiences often consisted of retirees, specifically old women who went in pairs and chatted through the films. I liked sharing the theater with them; they made the auditorium feel fuller than it was, and they made me think of my paternal grandmother, a lifelong moviegoer who, in her last days of spectatorship, would convince reclusive old women in her apartment building to accompany her to the show. This leads into a discussion of his grandparents, alive with little tidbits about their habits, the things they'd say, etc. Being at the movies with my grandparents the day before I went back to school, it felt somehow heavier than going at other times or with other people. In autumn and winter, the sky would be bright when we went in and dark when we came out—it only added to the feeling that I was hiding from my responsibilities when they indulged me this way. The memory give way to an unbearably sad final sentiment, after meeting an elderly woman who in no way reminds him of his grandparents after a screening of Private Fears in Public Places: the movie made us equals in loneliness. Whatever that feeling was on all those Sunday afternoons, this was its opposite, a quiet terror that I had nothing to return to after watching the film. Exquisitely upsetting. Sachs' blogposts at the Bleader often read like passages from a novel, one that I hope he some day finishes. 

Sachs is never less than honest about his own bias; just this week he wrote a piece about his slight re-evaluation of a documentary he reviewed earlier in the year. He allows himself hindsight and admits when he's made mistakes. He opens himself up to visions he doesn't connect with or understand, meets everyone halfway when he can. Sachs' first major coup as a critic was a series on the films of Takashi Miike for Mubi's Notebook. His writing here takes on the same darkly profound current that colours so much of the Japanese Auteur's work. His phrasing is bold and sticks in the brain with the power of Miike's best images. They make for a great entrée into both Miike and Sachs, and they introduce a concept that serves as something like an unspoken mantra to his criticism. The idea, appropriated from Miike, that he never left a room or walked out of a film because it was ugly or bad. "Even the most routine action film, he argued, will contain some moment of beauty; you just have to keep your eyes open and find it." And finding the beauty in the most unusual places is one of Sachs' strengths, whether in an obscure 70s film like Sometimes a Great Notion or a modern comedy like The To Do List. His optimism as a critic ultimately outweighs his melancholy, no matter how beautiful and engrossing the latter is. To quote a poem Sachs brought to my attention: ...we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live...To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth...

On Sometimes a Great Notion

"The human body wants to live," I remember a high school teacher saying, after explaining to our class how difficult it was to asphyxiate yourself. Once you lose consciousness, he told us, you can't apply pressure to whatever it is you're pushing to your mouth and nose, and air reenters your body. (He taught world history; I'm not sure how the subject came up.) In most cases it takes a long time before a body expires—even typically demure people discover unknown strength when violently attacked or pinned beneath a heavy object. This is why the climax of Sometimes a Great Notion is so devastating. As the scene goes on, the voice of instinct tells you that this victim must survive, no matter how terrible the situation gets. It's an instinct supported by countless narrative films, which train us to think that death happens quickly and that long, suspenseful sequences will resolve well.

On Robert Mulligan

Still, Mulligan's filmmaking was more powerful when he was working with less-straightforward material. As a case in point, check out his other feature of 1965, the movie-land drama Inside Daisy Clover. The script, by former film critic Gavin Lambert, is rife with allusions to Hollywood history (the movie takes place in the 1930s, though it invokes scandals that go back to the silent era) and contains several shocking plot twists. Mulligan's direction grounds the material, which might have become hysterical or overly cerebral in other hands, in a firm sense of character. Better yet, the straight-ahead presentation of the early scenes gives you no idea how dark the story will get in the second half—in this case, Mulligan's borderline squarishness proves an excellent poker face.

On Izo

Surprisingly, the film is most wearying when it’s at its most violent. Miike’s directed some of the most audacious scenes of violence in modern cinema, not to mention dozens of generic crime movies: It’s no secret he can shoot a decent action scene pretty much reflexively. In Izo, the swordfights generally occur in an unremarkable pattern of several-clashes-then-victorious-blow familiar to anyone who’s ever seen ten minutes of a samurai film.  There are also a lot of them. The fights’ maddening regularity is the main reason why the film is so difficult to watch, but not for the obvious explanation that they’re too graphic. (In fact, the violence here is relatively restrained for Miike.) The awful truth is that they’re boring. It’s by now a cliché to say the atrocities of the 20th century were the most inhumane that have yet been conceived. Less often said is what our responsibilities are, as inheritors of those atrocities, in the 21st century. For most people, the default response is a kind of paralysis. The information has been shoved down our throats, and we see enough violence on TV to know it isn’t pretty. (Izo reflects this numbing familiarity with sequences of stock footage that show up throughout the film. They show more familiar stuff: the Nuremberg rallies, the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, et cetera. One of the movie’s great jokes is to insert benign images into these montages—people on amusement park rides, old advertisements—that further deny them any power.) Perhaps that cliché is ultimately comforting: If things were definitively bad in the last century, we don’t have to worry about them getting worse. And yet the impulse to cause others harm is never far from us.  Look at any news report about a terrorist attack or, more tellingly, the way ordinary people respond to them with calls for vengeance.  Again, this is nothing new; but how often do we think about the weight of past atrocities when impelled to violence ourselves? The great accomplishment of Izo is that it forces the viewer to do just that, over two hours of unrelenting focus analogous to prayer

The Encyclopedia of Film Criticism: Lindsay Anderson

Lindsay Anderson

There is no such thing as uncommitted criticism anymore than there is such thing as insignificant art.

Anderson, left, with muse Malcolm McDowell

Contributed to: Sequence, Sight & Sound

Known for: About John Ford, "Stand Up! Stand Up!"

By the time Lindsay Anderson (April 17th, 1923 – August 30th, 1994) directed the Palme d'Or winning If...., he had lived many lives. Of his childhood, he had this to say: My father, a Scot and a soldier, was born in Nassik, North India. My mother (born in Queenstown, South Africa) was a Bell. I was born in Bangalore, a child of Empire. Did these antecedents make for an alienation, long unrecognised?" Anderson recognized that he was fated to be a thorn in the side of British tradition. His adolescence brought him within striking distance of British attitudes. He studied at prestigious Cheltenham College then joined the army at the tail end of World War II. This was all the proof he needed that 'civilization' was not for him and that the mainstream could be both a dull and dangerous thing. 

After leaving the service he discovered a love for film and founded a critical quarterly called Sequence Magazine along with fellow future director Karel Reisz. This allowed him to leverage a position writing for the british film journal Sight & Sound, where he developed his voice. Anderson's criticism broke from the confines of British film writing, alternately standing up for everything the older generation of British critics had decried and vice versa. He was a lone voice in the wilderness in England, fiercely protective of both the art of filmmaking and film writing. He wrote with a hard political edge, talking about the importance of style and content as they formed the backbone of a revolution. He felt that bad or negligible criticism would make it impossible for film culture to flourish: To a remarkable extent, denigration of the cinema, denial of its importance and its significance has become common among those who write about it professionally. By celebrating the merits of the trivial we lower the prestige of the cinema and indirectly make it difficult for anyone to make a good film. 

He would write many impassioned defenses of both artforms during his time at Sight & Sound, most notably a piece entitled "Stand Up! Stand Up!" calling for higher standards of critical writing, keenly aware that the two nourished each other: It is a matter of fact, not opinion, that the cinema is an art. This does not call for theoretical discussion - unless, of course, you enjoy that kind of intellectual exercise. If it is simply the truth we are after, the question has already been answered, empirically. If L'Atalante, Strike, Rashomon and Louisiana Story are not works of art, then there is no way of describing them. And if Griffith, Renoir, Jennings and de Sica are not artists, we will have to invent a new word for for them.

Noted champion of: Humphrey Jennings and John Ford. On Ford, on whom he published a book of critical analysis: "Ford has always found his true image of reality in this world, not in the deliberately fashioned symbolism of a literary invention; his symbols arise naturally out of the ordinary, the everyday; it is by familiar places, traditions and themes that his imagination is most happily stimulated." On Jennings: "He may be the only poet the British cinema has yet produced." I personally would call him the first poet of British criticism.

All there is

This may well be the final entry in David Cairns epic Late Show Blogathon. It's been an immense pleasure taking part and reading all the many-splendored accounts of the final works in many an oeuvre. Take some time and read the other entries. They're fantastic!

Anger may never fade, but it does seem to dull slightly with age. We lose the energy with which we used to run around and tear everything down. Bricks get heavier to carry and we pour reasonable amounts of liquor for ourselves to sip from the bottles we used to light on fire and throw in windows. Or something like that. When I first became a committed cinephile, I fell hard for political cinema. Still love it. Still need it. It took me so long to appreciate classical cinema (I'm fairly certain that if it weren't for David's totally brilliant POV-by-POV exploration of Citizen Kane last month, I'd still wrongly think of that movie as a little too 'good' for its own good. Thanks for that by the way, Dave!) because for so many years I had incredibly harsh criteria for a movie's success. It wasn't enough to be art, it had to have something worth saying, and it needed to say it through a megaphone. Society was falling apart before our very eyes, damnit! We needed to speak up! Stand up or shut up. But that changes. You can't fully appreciate everything cinema has to offer if you never get off your soapbox. Don't you know you're blocking the projector? When I started making films myself I quickly forgot Ken Loach's statement about close-ups turning people into objects, which can be exploited and traded and killed and forgotten. I liked close-ups and I liked The Wind That Shakes The Barley. We can all just get along! Sometimes.

Film school was both the perfect and worst place to explore my conviction. I could quietly (sometimes) sneer and roll my eyes at the empty experiments of my classmates "This is your idea of art?! Upper class hackwork!" But before it ever got to that point, I had a lot of catching up to do. There was a hundred years of film I didn't know enough about. I spent a single semester at Temple University and though I was mostly terrified of the place they did have something very valuable: a library with every single Criterion DVD available for rent. I took out ten at a time, the limit, every week, and watched them all. Friends? Who needs friends? I had Salò! In my hands! To watch! Never in my life did I think I'd get to see it. It was out of print but these bastards had a copy! It for so long (well, the few years I knew about it) had felt like that jewel in any cinephile's crown. I had to wait until my roommate, an Cape Verdean engineer and athlete, was away for the night to watch it in our tiny dorm room. He had put up with Blood for Dracula. I doubt very much he'd have spoken to me again if he caught any given frame of the film's last two thirds. The film's famously tough and it rather defeated me on first viewing. Horrific, sure, but why? Two years later I'd read Gary Indiana's book and was staggered to hear him recount his history with the film. After the first time he saw it, he'd drive home by way of the same theatre every Saturday night for months and watch it....everytime. The passage stuck with even if I'm probably fucking it up. Still. Seeing it multiple times in the same month felt like torment. Was I wrong about the film? 

Of course I was. My mistake was not seeing its mise-en-scène as purposeful. I was still feeling out theory and didn't know any better. Too blinded by the inferno of grotesquery. Pasolini had fallen out of love with sensuality and the human body and the film reflects that. Sexuality is used like gunfire against a bulletproof vest. It hurts but unfortunately it's not going to kill you. Not yet. "All's good if it's excessive." And so every crime against the body imaginable is committed with false glee. The men don't even seem to really enjoy what they're doing, even though their reactions to their crimes is always a mask of elation. It's false. They can't get joy from this. They're like Pasolini, or the Italian elite whose leg he was pissing down. The joy is gone or it's imagined. No one's really happy. What we witness is Pasolini's energy being channelled into a completely new, productive direction. He was angrier than he'd ever been, his art failed him, and his rage seethes beneath every drab frame, colorless wall, every rambling, punishing monologue, every 'excessive' act of depravity. It took quite a lot to stage this anti-facist Grand Guignol, evidence that Pasolini was as passionate as he'd ever been. And then just as quickly as he'd opened this new chapter of his artistic life, it was closed for him. Murdered by a prostitute. Where else might his ambition have taken him? It's tempting to think that, like Bellocchio and Bertolucci, he would have always had some kind of support. But if we look at two of his peers, he may well have found himself resorting to a more personal form of cinema. 

The Criterion Collection released two films at almost the same time a little before I arrived at college, and to this day they'd both make me Sight & Sound poll if you asked me. If Lindsay Anderson's If.... and Dušan Makavejev's Sweet Movie hadn't been put out when they did, if I hadn't rented them the same day and watched them both the same night, I can't help feeling I'd be chasing a different muse. These films helped me learn the importance of film preservation, let me see how color and light could really be used, how sexuality could be expressed cinematically, how perfect and wonderful the human body, flesh, blood, fluids, could be, and how perfectly seductive leftwing fury was. Less importantly my preferred ellipses has four dots. If I fell hard for these films, it's because I fell in love with the anti-establishment lovers, fusing their beliefs and sex and violence in a whirlwind I've never been released from. I already suffered from crippling completism by the time I saw these films and made a point to find everything else by their creators. It took me many years but I've seen everything by both men (exception: Lindsay Anderson's TV play Look Back In Anger with Malcolm McDowell. If you have a lead, do drop me a line. I lost twenty dollars to raremoviedepot.com, who claimed to have it and then never did me the courtesy of letting me know they didn't. I've emailed several times to no avail). I was a little disheartened. Each made a few other spectacular films - Montenegro, O Lucky Man, Innocence Unprotected, The White Bus, Love Affair, Britannia Hospital, W.R. Mysteries of the Organism, This Sporting Life, Manifesto, The Coca-Cola Kid - but nothing that ever recaptured that magic of watching those films for the first time. But then I guess a relationship sometimes pales in comparison to falling in love. 

Both directors eventually ran out of people willing to pay them scads of money to make polarizing films. Anderson fell into taking whatever job came his way and greatly embarrassed himself in the process. His last decent film, the tearjerker The Whales of August (David rightly pointed out that Whales is the perfect late movie, between Anderson behind the camera and Vincent Price, Bette Davis, Lillian Gish, Ann Sothern and Harry Carey, Jr in front of it), is at times so cinematically inert it nearly becomes the kind of British Cinema he so detested. It's incredibly respectful, especially of its aged stars. Too respectful I thought when I first watched it. But even in my anger that Anderson had toned himself down, I couldn't help but be moved. It is a very moving film, no matter how you look at it. But it's not the Anderson I fell in love with. The same is true, to a degree of Makavejev's Manifesto. It does have a little of the old magic in there but it's almost too heart-warming to be as cutting as it could have been. From there? 

In the 90s Makavejev and Anderson made their last films: A Hole In The Soul and Is That All There Is? If you think those sound eerily similar, try watching them back to back. Both films are very gently directed, personal documentaries, one a little more artificial than the other, where the men drift around their home lands, take a passing glance at their legacy and spend time with (and quite coincidentally take boat rides with) old friends. Both look ahead but that look in their eye says they know their best days are behind them. They find the world a bigger place than it used to be. Anderson encounters modern television ads, a rude relation, and the generation beneath him; in essence he lets the audience know that he knows that he's gotten old. His work had gotten crass, compromised: he'd directed a TV miniseries not long before this called Glory! Glory! about a sex symbol used by an evangelist to get converts. It's trash. Uninspired, lacking in wit and charisma. Anderson had grown tired and in Is That All There Is? he as good as admits it. Makavejev never fell as hard on hard times, so he has to less to feel guilty about. His trip is just a little less interesting for it. But neither man asks for pity. Neither throws themself on both knees in despair at what we've become. They don't ask anything of us except maybe...just maybe, we consider looking beneath the sheen of the world around us. New isn't always good. In fact it's easier to couch a lie in 'progress', especially if everyone's doing it. What they ask is that we not forget the past. 

I'll remember one thing from Is That All There Is? until I die myself: Anderson films himself in the bath. I've seen footage of him setting up of that shot. Can you imagine? 71 years old and he freely shows off his aged form hidden only by grey bathwater (is all English water that murky?). I love him for that scene. Here it is: age, death, tomorrow, fear. But it's one of the best images Anderson ever created. He's just a man in that tub, and he's gotten old. We all will. Here's something profound and honest and lovely, even after studios had robbed him of his good name. That's what these essay films allowed these old masters to accomplish. Makavejev and Anderson were once forces to be reckoned with. Makavejev once closed the Berlin Film Festival for heaven's sake! Giant director George Stevens refused to acknowledge Michael Verhoeven's anti-american film Ok! and Makavejev called bullshit on his imperialist ass and the whole festival just stopped. That was politics! That was filmmaking! Then. Now? The early 90s? Dusk falls on their heyday and they make one last, unadulterated statement. No producer to answer to. No story to get right. Just their own. Just them and the crew and their families. If Anderson had lived another ten years I don't know that he would ever set foot behind a camera again. He looks so tired. Makavejev, bless him, is still alive and kickin' at 85 and hasn't made another film. They were always linked by progressive ideology and that beautiful anger and they shared a heartfelt, humble bow in front of just some friends, a few camera technicians and of course me. Like they were writing their life stories with my development in mind, the gracious wonders. They were still mad as hell, but they had let go of enough to look at the world with clear eyes and heads and recognize that their place in it, as filmmakers, had been filled. But they didn't want to go out on a commission. As Martin Sheen says of Brando's Kurtz they "just wanted to go out like a soldier....not like some poor, wasted, ragged ass renegade." So they amble through a narrow corridor in the middle of the present called the past, hoping we'll join them and remember better/worse days. Days when their art made a difference. Days when Pasolini was just getting started. They couldn't know anyone would be watching, let alone writing all this down...