The Cinema According to James Agee

From An Invention Without A Future

The art of film criticism has lately suffered for a variety of reasons, among them the devaluation of the academic humanities, the crisis of print journalism, and the various social and cultural transformations wrought by digital technology and neoliberal capitalism. In this environment, we need to encourage a robust critical discourse dealing with questions of artistic value, and a cinephilia aimed at an unspecialized, broadly literate audience. If we want a good model, I suggest we give closer attention to James Agee.

In the small pantheon of American film critics who have written for newspapers and magazines, Agee occupies an unusual place. He is the only American movie reviewer with a significant literary reputation (some might say that Vachel Lindsay qualifies, but Lindsay wasn’t a reviewer), and he had a short but significant career as a screenwriter and aspiring director. As a literary figure, Agee is sometimes compared with Thomas Wolfe: both were Southerners (in Agee’s case a border-state Southerner) who wrote semiautobiographical novels about provincial childhood; both were influenced by Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; both produced huge, unruly manuscripts; and both died at an early age. Of the two, however, Agee was by far the superior stylist, and his major literary achievement apart from the posthumous, unfinished A Death in the Family (1955) wasn’t fiction but Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), an account of the effects of the Great Depression on Alabama tenant farmers, which grew out of his job at Fortune magazine and could be described as a merger of radical journalism, lyrical prose, and avant-garde art.

It’s been said that Agee wasted his talent on magazine work. Certainly he had moments of frustration at the Luce organization, but a more convincing argument can be made that Time, Life, Fortune, the Nation, and other journals helped him discover and develop his particular gifts. An above-average novelist and poet (except in poetic prose, in which he excelled—see his “Knoxville: Summer of 1915”), Agee was a superb writer of essays that make nonsense of the distinction between journalism and literature. He was constrained by the Luce magazines, especially in unsigned movie reviews conforming to Time-speak, and was sometimes contemptuous of his job; but at the Nation, where he was paid fifty dollars a month, he had the freedom to champion an art and space to establish an identity. W. H. Auden wasn’t entirely wrong in his fan letter to the journal saying that Agee’s column “is of such profound interest, expressed with such extraordinary wit and felicity, and so transcends its ostensible—to me, rather unimportant—subject, that his articles belong in that very select class … of newspaper work which has permanent literary value.” (Despite Auden’s snobbery about movies, he contributed to Britain’s GPO documentary film unit in the 1930s at roughly the same moment when he was arguing that the artist “must be more than a bit like a working journalist” [Auden, 138].)

Far from transcending his subject, Agee reveals its importance. Auden is correct, however, when he says that the Nation reviews have “literary value.” They’re exactly what Victorian theologian John Henry Newman had in mind in “Literature and Style” (1899), which distinguishes between the objective, uniform language of science and the subjective, infinitely variable language of literature. Literary language, Newman argues, is addressed more to the ear than the eye, and the writer “subjects it withal to his own purposes, and moulds it according to his peculiarities … his views of external things, his judgments upon life, manners, and history, the exercises of his wit, of his humor, of his depth, of his sagacity, the very pulsation and throbbing of his intellect.” As a result, it becomes “the faithful expression of [an] intense personality” (220–21).

Whether or not we agree with the romantic idea that “style is the man,” Agee’s work for the Nation, which makes considerable use of the first person, has “intense personality” (perhaps better described as a “persona,” as long as...