I found this wonderful site awhile ago through a youtube search and mentioned the revealing Arthur Penn interview to Wael Khairy in a comment for his "Bonnie and Clyde"
entry. Recently watched the excellent Sidney Lumet piece. Glad it's on your radar now.

Roger,

I just wanted to personally thank you for your blog post "Why film criticism
is important."

I found your wishing that we would have done an interview with Gene so
moving and one of the greatest compliments and validations of the work of
the Archive of American Television.

Please feel free to let me know if there's any clip we can post for you from
your interview (or others in our collection). We'd be happy to do so.

Happy Holidays and continued wishes for your good health,

Karen
L. Herman
Director, Archive of American Television

You look so jolly in the older pics! I like that you've retained your jolly-ness. It's very becoming. Great interview, too!

Mr. Ebert.

This year was the first time for me to know about your famous show, Ebert Presents. I think it's more of a loss to me I was never introduced to it earlier, but then I say I'm lucky because I could never have found out about it. Unfortunately, this is because the show is not very popular here in Egypt. It is only when I chose to be a film critic did I know that there's a whole community of film critics that I never knew about.

I do write for C Magazine, the only English magazine devoted for film in Egypt. However, the editors there have a very limited knowledge of film. I don't blame them, though, because being a film critic for foreign films (meaning, non-Arabic) is not much of a thing here.

Although I have a degree in English literature, I decided I would focus on film because, like you say in the video, film is "the most serious of the mass arts". At first, I thought about obtaining a degree in film, but then I found that literary criticism and film criticism have a lot in common. So, I decided to get all my knowledge on film from books.

Do you think that would be enough, Mr. Ebert, especially when we don't have any film communities (in English) here that would help me, besides books? Do you think it would be better if I get a degree in film from a university in the US or the UK so as to be involved in a film community and interact with people with the same interests? I asked Wael Khairy, your Far-Flung Correspondent in Egypt, if he knows any books which I can start with, and he recommended your book, Awake in the Dark, and Movie Made America as well as David Bordwell's essays for starters like me. I also got Film Theory and Criticism by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. Do you have better suggestions, Mr. Ebert?

One more thing, I've always wanted to say how a great blessing it is to accept circumstances laid upon us. I know some people who would have a longtime depression as a result of something which, if compared to what you're facing now, is nothing. And thinking of all the people you inspired, Mr. Ebert, I guess this is what they call "a blessing in disguise".

Thank you,
Sarah Dorra

Ebert: Wael gave you good advice. Be sure to follow Bordwell's blog.

I just stumbled across this after reading your more recent piece on e.e. cummings. I love your answer here, though sadly I think it's telling you call movies "the art form of the 20th century" - I worry that they are going the way of the theater, which you correctly point out is not a mass art - it seems that increasingly both Hollywood and Broadway cater to the public with recycled spectacles while the more interesting stuff gets limited to a small niche.

There are several reasons for this - the natural progression of art forms (in which once-popular mediums give way to newer forms), the related reliance of the American film industry on slavish adaptations of comic books and other sources (as if the movies are only there to play second fiddle to other forms of entertainment), and the increase in the use of CGI which completely distorts the delicate balance between illusion and documentary that existed since the birth of the medium.

Whatever the reason, I fear that you're right to say "If films are not important, the criticism wouldn't matter so much." As films are mattering less and less, I find it unsurprising that film criticism is on its way out as a professional gig (and I think a lot of the blame for this is misplaced; why should publishers be expected to employ writers whose subject matter has limited interest?).

The answer will not be in lamenting the demise of professional criticism, but embracing the rise (and encouraging the growth, another important matter that sometimes gets neglected) of the amateur writers who most likely earn their bread elsewhere. Most importantly, if criticism is to be important again, we must focus on making movies matter once more.

And the answer to that, too, may lie amongst amateurs and on the internet - as someone interested in filmmaking, it's certainly a direction I personally hope to go in eventually. At any rate, it's soon to tell but the untapped potential of viral video (primarily utilized at this point for the limited purposes of gags and home movies) gives room for some silver lining in the 21st-century cloud.