Why I love Ebert

Last night I watched Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, a beautiful and simple and rare film that says almost nothing, yet speaks volumes about both human nature and what it means to just be. This film has been on my “to-see” list for about two years, and I'm glad I finally got around to it, because it will stick with me.

I came to this movie by way of Roger Ebert's Great Movies series, which he started five or six years ago, and which I make a point of following closely — any time he highlights a film I haven't seen, I add it to my list. I'm consistently a half-dozen or so films behind, which leaves me with a nice reserve should I ever feel like bingeing on a batch of really good (and to me, new) movies.

I point people to Ebert's list whenever they ask me if there's a “canon” of great movies they should see. His catalog is subjective and incomplete, of course (two of my all-time top five, Rio Bravo and The Philadelphia Story, are missing), but it's a well-balanced, thoughtful, and inventive syllabus, with (pardon the phrase) something for everyone, and it's always growing.

Ebert the writer is nothing like the “thumbs up/thumbs down” critic he plays on TV; he's a scholar and an essayist with a genuine passion for movies. He's more game, optimistic, and forgiving than many of his crankier intellectual collegaues (Kael, Sarris, Thomson) — he employs neither sledgehammer nor scalpel in his criticism. He clearly loves movies, and doesn't hesitate to lavish praise on a stupid movie that delighted him. It's obvious that he also loves to write, and he's very skilled when it comes to conveying how a movie feels, what it accomplishes, and how it fits into the universe of film.

For instance, take these excerpts from his review of Au Hasard Balthazar — a film which follows the lives of a handful of people, as observed by a passive (and “saintly”) donkey:

“What we see through Balthazar's eyes is a village filled with small, flawed, weak people, in a world where sweetness is uncommon and cruelty comes easily.”

“The genius of Bresson's approach is that he never gives us a single moment that could be described as one of Balthazar's ‘reaction shots’ ... Balthazar simply walks or waits, regarding everything with the clarity of a donkey who knows it is a beast of burden, and that its life consists of either bearing or not bearing, of feeling pain or not feeling pain, or even feeling pleasure. All of these things are equally beyond its control.”

“Although the donkey has no way of revealing its thoughts, that doesn't prevent us from supplying them — quite the contrary; we regard that white-spotted furry face and those big eyes, and we feel sympathy with every experience the donkey undergoes. That is Bresson's civilizing and even spiritual purpose in most of his films; we must go to the characters, instead of passively letting them come to us. In the vast majority of movies, everything is done for the audience. We are cued to laugh or cry, be frightened or relieved; Hitchcock called the movies a machine for causing emotions in the audience.”

“Bresson (and Ozu) take a different approach. They regard, and ask us to regard along with them, and to arrive at conclusions about their characters that are our own. This is the cinema of empathy.”

“[Bresson] was known to shoot the same shot 10, 20, even 50 times, until all ‘acting’ was drained from it, and the actors were simply performing the physical actions and speaking the words. There was no room in his cinema for De Niro or Penn. It might seem that the result would be a movie filled with zombies, but quite the contrary: By simplifying performance to the action and the word without permitting inflection or style, Bresson achieves a kind of purity that makes his movies remarkably emotional. The actors portray lives without informing us how to feel about them; forced to decide for ourselves how to feel, forced to empathize, we often have stronger feelings than if the actors were feeling them for us.”

Note the emotional, historical, and technical perspective Eberts puts on this film — reading the above, you already understand quite a lot about the movie, and you've also gained some insight on Bresson, Ozu, and Hitchcock (all of whom have multiple entries on the Great Movies roster). If you watched Au Hasard Balthazar and found it moving, you might very well want to see Ozu's Tokyo Story next.

Ebert's series has led me to many films that I now consider all-time favorites: Laura, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Out of the Past, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Thin Man, and the films of Jacques Tati. Then there are all the amazing and bizarre movies I never even knew existed until Ebert pointed them out, like Herzog's Stroszek, Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock, Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes, Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre, Ray's The Music Room, Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel, Powell's Peeping Tom, and Cocteau's stunning Beauty and the Beast.

Just listing those films, I'm reminded of this passage from Ebert's introduction to his Great Movies series, which (once again) hits the nail right on the head:

“One of the gifts one movie lover can give another is the title of a wonderful film they have not yet discovered. In university, I had a Shakespeare professor who was the world's leading expert in Romeo and Juliet, and who used to say he would give anything for the ability to read the play again for the first time. When I meet someone who has never seen The Third Man or Singin' in the Rain, I envy them the experience they are about to have.”