When I was in the film program at Northwestern University in Chicago, my peers and I were required to read the works of Walter Benjamin, John Berger, Michel Foucault and even Freud, Jung and Marx. The idea was to apply their theories to the cinema to better understand how film worked, or how it related to audience identification. We also read the major film theorists such as Andrew Tudor, Laura Mulvey and Siegfried Kracauer, among others. While I don’t regret reading those theorists, scholars and great thinkers, I can’t honestly assess how much that type of scholarly writing with its academic jargon enhanced our understanding and appreciation of popular movies.
However, every Friday after our morning class, we raced to the student center to snatch a copy of the Chicago Reader to read what Dave Kehr had to say about the movies opening that weekend. More than the dusty tomes of those academic thinkers, Kehr’s lengthy reviews in the Reader had an immediate influence on our tastes and ideas. Kehr applied the theories and ideas we were learning in our classes to his popular reviews but without the pretentious jargon associated with academia. We learned more about the auteur theory and genre analysis from Kehr, who was using it in practice, than from any text book.
Dave Kehr was more than a film reviewer; he was a true critic, capable of analyzing and offering insight beyond his personal opinion. The best lesson I learned from reading his reviews was the importance of separating personal taste from insight. He might dislike a film that I really loved, or vice versa, but I still learned something from reading his review. I have read movie reviews my entire life, but Dave Kehr is the only movie critic I ever really followed.
All of this came flooding back to me when I read Movies That Mattered: More Reviews from a Transformative Decade, a collection of his reviews and essays from 1974-1986. Scheduled for publication next month and available on Amazon on November 1, this collection is the follow-up to When Movies Mattered, a similar anthology of reviews and essays. The articles in Movies That Mattered were originally written for the Reader and for Chicago Magazine and are not available anywhere online.
Kehr’s two collections are perfect companions to a FilmStruck subscription. Cinephiles will appreciate his approach to criticism, which combined academic-level insights with a fluid, straightforward writing style. Though he wrote about film from many angles, analyzing them based on style, form, genre or subtext, he gained a reputation as an auteurist. He offered original insights and perspectives on well-known directors from Jacques Rivette to Steven Spielberg—sometimes in the same essay! In recounting Rivette’s experiments with narrative, in which the director felt the story should take shape as it was being filmed, Kehr determined that his films were “animated by a sense of play—of fantasy, freedom, and wonder,” like Spielberg’s. The difference is that the French director wanted the audience to play along, while “Spielberg only lets us watch and admire the end result.” (FilmStruck offers two films by Rivette, Paris Belongs to Us [1961] and The Nun [1966].)
Kehr covered the work of the major European directors of the 1970s and 1980s, an era when the work of international filmmakers regularly appeared in local theaters. The Woman Next Door (1981) by Truffaut, Tess (1981) by Polanski, Fanny and Alexander (1982) by Bergman and Lola (1981) by Fassbinder, which are all available on FilmStruck, were reviewed by Kehr at the time of release. As an auteurist, he placed each film within the context of the director’s career, which allowed him to find something solid to say. The Woman Next Door was not well received by many reviewers, but Kehr felt it represented Truffaut’s interest in formal techniques, a new direction for him. Though Tess was based on the classic novel by Thomas Hardy, Polanski turned it into a personal statement relevant to his own personal misfortunes. Fanny and Alexander represented a summation of Bergman’s themes and motifs, a kind of cap to his entire career. And, Kehr compared Lola and Fassbinder to The Blue Angel (1930) and Josef von Sternberg.
The most interesting section of the book is “Part 4: Autopsies/Minority Reports,” which includes ten reviews of critically acclaimed films that Kehr found lacking or troubling. I am not surprised that one of them, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), is by Woody Allen, a director that Kehr tended to dismiss, especially after Stardust Memories (1980). While he doesn’t dislike Hannah, he brings up its weaknesses as a counter to all of the critics who “coo over him as if he were a child learning to walk, and every tiny step is hailed with a chorus of indulgent hosannas.” Kehr notes that “Allen has never mastered (or even shown much interest in) the plastic side of his medium,” meaning he lacked a talent for fully understanding visual techniques and their relationship to the narrative. Personally, I have loved everything that Allen has done since I first saw him on The Tonight Show (1962-2017) when I was a pre-schooler, but Kehr has a point. Perhaps that is why Allen uses the world’s best cinematographers—Gordon Willis, Sven Nykvist, Darius Khondji—to compensate for his weaknesses in visual techniques.
Kehr also lobs stingers at Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), dubbing it “a remarkably callow, peach-fuzzy piece of work” and “a piece of juvenilia,” and Apocalypse Now (1979), which he describes as a “visionary film without a point of view and, hence, without a true vision.” Read his reviews of these films; even if you love them, you will see his points.
After leaving the Chicago Reader, Kehr became the critic for the Chicago Tribune. A few years later, he moved to New York to write for one of the city’s dailies, which is where I lost track of him. He penned a DVD column for the The New York Times for a while and then founded his own blog, which is no longer active.
In the afterword, Kehr reveals that he left film journalism in 2013 to become a curator in the Department of Film at the Museum of Modern Art. In this capacity, he offers several insightful observations about the past, present and future of film that by themselves are worth the price of the book. The comment that stuck with me was his confession that he doesn’t really miss writing about the movies, partly because he is “free of the need to feign an interest in superheroes and mumblecore. . . .” I was reminded of the many reviews of comic-book films in which the star ratings were inflated by critics who are trying to remain relevant to young viewers, or by web reviewers who know little about film beyond their limited personal tastes. I can also relate because I work hard in my film classes to find something positive to say about the franchises, sequels and series that are so superficial and badly crafted that it is a “win” when they actually follow the rules of classic continuity editing.
After pondering his statement, the title of Kehr’s book, Moves That Mattered, suddenly made sense to me.
Susan Doll
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