Philip Lopate's Affair With Arthouse Cinema

Phillip Lopate’s excellent new book

You’re a New York cinephile. Depending on your age, you have spent countless hours at the Thalia, the Carnegie Hall Cinema, MoMA, MoMI, Film at Lincoln Center, or Film Forum. Back in the day you eagerly consulted the The Village Voice film listings, and now use Screen Slate, to plan your days. You have a lot in common with Philip Lopate. Except that he has surely seen more movies than you, read more books than you, and is most likely a better writer than you are.

Lopate is one of the best film critics we have, as well as being a prolific author and personal essayist (his forte) who writes widely about topics other than film. Despite his encyclopedic film knowledge, he brings the freshness and curiosity of an amateur and the passion of a lover to his writing about movies. It has been more than a quarter century since Lopate’s first film book, Totally Tenderly Tragically: Essays and Criticism from a Lifelong Love Affair with the Movies. Gladly, the affair goes on, evidenced by his wonderful new collection, My Affair with Art House Cinema: Essays and Reviews. The cover is adorned with a still from Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu–a film made 71 years ago–and the book can’t avoid a feeling of nostalgia, some wistfulness for the heyday of the commercial repertory film theater. While Lopate writes incisively about current directors, including Maren Ade, Hong Sang-soo, Richard Linklater, and that up-and-coming phenom Frederick Wiseman, the collection focuses on the greats of the past, the filmmakers that shaped his–and our–understanding of the art form.

The book was launched this Tuesday at the Corner Bookstore on the Upper East Side, with a thoroughly delightful conversation between Lopate and another legendary cinephile, Molly Haskell. (The audience packed into the small bookshop was filled with venerable New York film-world fixtures, including Carrie Rickey, Liz Helfgott, Alan Berliner, Mark Street, Stuart Klawans, and Leonard Lopate). In her enthusiastic introduction, Haskell pointed to the unique quality of Lopate’s writing, its rare blend that combines the authority of deep scholarship with an endearingly personal voice. In one of the book’s opening chapters, “How I Look at Movies,” Lopate, with deceptive ease, and in just five pages, explains his aesthetic preferences. He is particularly drawn to directors like Antonioni and Renoir who show people in a group and use space expressively. “A big part of what still pleases me is the way a film stitches its characters to their environments–how it allows us to see a larger sociological and geographical perspective, how it carves up the space and keeps a flow going. The master of this fluidity was Jean Renoir.” Of course, this preference isn’t rigid. “Then again, I am happy with some directors, like Robert Bresson or Yasujiro Ozu, who resist fluidity and call our attention to the isolation of each composed shot.”

Molly Haskell and Phillip Lopate at the Corner Bookstore on July 16, 2024

The book’s other curtain-raising chapter, before its 60+ brief chapters on a wide range of movies, and a section on individual film critics, is “On Changing One’s Mind About Movies,” which starts: “For those who have ever tried to palm themselves off as film critics or even to assert confident judgements about movies in social gatherings, the nagging awareness of just how unstable and fluid these judgments can be is a secret embarrassment, a threat, possibly a stimulus.” Lopate then charts his evolving opinions on films including Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort (upgrade), Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light (upgrade), and Jean-luc Godard’s Two or Three Things… (downgrade). In their conversation, Haskell and Lopate derided Pauline Kael’s pride in the fact (if she is to be believed) that she never watched a film more than once. For Lopate, revisiting and reevaluating films, and understanding how their meaning changes as you evolve and, well, grow older, is vital and essential. To see a film is to go on a journey, and there are few writers who can share the steps of that journey with such lucidity and insight, and with such willingness to embrace and ponder contradictions. As a writer, Lopate is at once supremely (and deservedly) confident in his aesthetics, and also disarmingly vulnerable and thoughtful enough to always doubt and question himself. (I don’t know anyone else who can admit to being arrogant in a way that sounds self-deprecating). And though he is drawn to dark and disturbing films, Lopate said at the event, when asked pointedly by his daughter Lily what exactly it is that he ultimately looks for in a film, he quoted Stendhal, “art is a promise of happiness.” Which is why as much as he loves Bergman’s Winter Light, he is more inclined to revisit one of his favorite movies, Meet Me in St. Louis, a movie which certainly delivers joy, but with the right amount of sadness and darkness to keep Lopate truly happy.