The “maddening” movie Roger Ebert called an insult to cinema: “This film is an affront”
There is a lot of hyperbole attached to the world of cinema, much of which is entirely unwarranted. But claiming Roger Ebert as perhaps the most important critic of all time is certainly not one of them.
Ebert feels so far removed from modern online film criticism that his position as the ultimate film writer feels untouchable. While video-based content creators today rely on hot takes and punchy editing for their views, Evert just needed a pen with a torch attached and his sardonic wit.
Starting out as the critic for the Chicago Sun, Ebert made a name for himself with his uniquely toned pieces on some of the best movies ever made. Ebert would use warm language and a combination of solid humour and sincere appreciation for the art to make his work feel both valid and approachable.
Perhaps the finest thing one might say about Ebert’s writing was that it was rarely swayed. It wasn’t concerned with appearing to be of high intelligence, often slamming arthouse pieces while championing the perceivably populist work. Likewise, a big blockbuster needed to do more than just blow stuff up for Ebert to be impressed. Never taken in by the hype, Ebert was a devotee of cinema. It made his thoughts on any movie worth knowing.
As his career took off, Ebert was invited to more and more movie screenings, and his writing only excelled. But it also meant he was subjected to more and more films, and while there must have been some winners, it also meant he had to watch a lot more terrible pictures, one of which he described as an insult to the audience, and it came from perhaps one of the most beloved directors of all time.
Jean-Luc Godard is a fearsomely respected filmmaker. A pioneer in the French New Wave, Godard’s movies have been endlessly studied in universities and championed by the students who viewed them. They are effortlessly chic, deeply thoughtful and gilded with the sincerity of Godard’s vision. However, as he moved away from his vibrant beginnings, Godard started to venture away from story and move toward art.
For a film lover like Ebert, such a decision was always likely to be disdainful, and when he released Film Socialisme in 2010, Ebert was left angry. True to Godard’s later style, it resists any conventional narrative structure, instead assembling fragments of sound, image, and text into a dense, poetic meditation on European history, politics, and culture. It is the exact kind of release that would enthral someone desperate to explain why you simply don’t understand its brilliance.
For Ebert, it was a particularly insulting piece of filmmaking. “This film is an affront,” he said in his review. “It is incoherent, maddening, deliberately opaque and heedless of the ways in which people watch movies. All of that is part of the Godardian method, I am aware, but I feel a bargain of some sort must be struck. We enter the cinema with open minds and goodwill, expecting Godard to engage us in at least a vaguely penetrable way. But in Film Socialisme, he expects us to do all the heavy lifting.”
Ebert’s position was always about how a movie was received rather than intended. “It all seems terrifically political, but there is nothing in the film to offend the most devout Tea Party communicant, and I can’t say what, if anything, the film has to say about socialism.”
At 79 years old at the time, and without ever having much care for critics in his previous years, there is little doubt that Godard had gone beyond caring for what the audience felt. The “No Comment” title card at the end of the movie might confirm that, but while he still had time and space to do so, Ebert was always likely to comment for both of them, even if he did have a one-sided view of this movie.
