“I suspect that I am, far more than not, in your own situation: deeply interested in moving pictures, considerably experienced from childhood on in watching them and thinking and talking about them, and totally, or almost totally, without experience or even much second-hand knowledge of how they are made. If I am broadly right in this assumption, we start on the same ground, and under the same handicaps, and I qualify to be here, if at all, only by two means. It is my business to conduct one end of a conversation, as an amateur critic among amateur critics. And I will be of use and of interest only in so far as my amateur judgment is sound, stimulating, or illuminating.”
–James Agee, The Nation, December 26, 1942 (quoted from James Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism, p. 34)
“I’m proud I was ’serious’ — proud I laid out ideas, tweaked language, extruded persona, and gave equal time to my natural enthusiasm and my natural skepticism. If I hadn’t been serious, I wouldn’t be looking back on these pieces today, and God knows neither would you. But as I go through them again, it’s their journalistic factuality that stands out. Since we’ve now reached the point where the ’60s are history — not just dead and gone, but an academic industry whose bibliography no one leaves alive — I’m gratified to find myself the author of a you-are-there sourcebook with some good ideas in it. Although rock was the cultural glue of the ’60s by acclamation, few historians have the chops to write about it in any but the most received and general terms. In contrast, Any Old Way You Choose It is proactive and specific — an on-the-spot account of an art form, culture industry, and social formation in progress. The author is a sympathetic participant-observer who was never a fire-breathing ideologue or hapless cynic. The book is far more reportorial than he perceived at the time, and even when the writing seems naive, which is less than he feared, what it leaves out and what it chooses to mention say a great deal about just how exactly America was surprising its citizenry at the time.”
–Robert Christgau, Introduction to Any Old Way You Choose It: Rock and Other Pop Music, 1967-1973, p. xiv
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I do not aspire to be an “expert” on movies. My goal, when writing about film, is to describe what I have seen, to reflect on what it might mean, and to capture for posterity something of the essence of what it felt like to have been there in a certain theater, in a certain city, at a certain moment in time. It is not necessary to have expert knowledge of how movies are made to execute this task well; as James Agee points out later in the article that the first of the above passages comes from, a writer, provided she recognizes her own ignorance, need feel no apology for what her eyes tell her as she watches any given screen, “where the proof is caught irrelevant to excuse, and available in proportion to the eye which sees it, and the mind which uses it.”
It is important to me to have a thorough understanding of filmmaking technique and to be as familiar as possible with film history, but only insofar as these things help me to be “serious” and “reportorial.” I’m not necessarily interested in telling you which are the “best” films or which ones you should or should not see: my goal, instead, is to document as best I can the moment in cinema history that I inhabit. Because I think that movies still matter, and the best way I know to convince you of this fact is to explain why they matter to me, and how. And because I think that someday in the future I’ll want to have a record of what I thought about this here present before it became part of the past.
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