Given the anything-goes reality of the Internet, where thousands of blogs bloom, it can be hard to overestimate The Voice’s critical place in the journo-ecosystem back in the day. Started by a triumvirate that included Norman Mailer, The Voice was a much welcomed if also sometimes wildly reviled counterbalance to New York’s establishment media, the dean of what became known as alternative weeklies. Its film coverage was crucial to that countercultural identity, with Mr. Mekas initially leading the charge and Mr. Sarris, who introduced the auteur theory to American audiences, soon joining him. Writing about the avant-garde and the mainstream with equal intelligence, wit and high style, Mr. Hoberman bridged the critical traditions his predecessors had carved out.  At The Voice it was possible to believe that intellectual work was a form of real and effective political activism and that resistance to the machine (Hollywood included) was not only possible, but also necessary. For Voice writers, a movie was never only a movie: it was a way of seeing, living in, understanding and, yes, even changing the world. A prolific author and influential teacher, Mr. Hoberman had a reach that went beyond The Voice, which, already weakened (by the Internet, Sept. 11, its owners) continued to lose its mojo, identity and relevance after it was bought by the New Times newspaper chain in 2005. Since then the chain, renamed Village Voice Media, has suffered the same economic woes endured throughout the industry, with the film department taking repeated hits.  Now without portfolio Mr. Hoberman plans to keep writing and teaching. We caught up with him by e-mail.  MANOHLA DARGIS In one of Jonas Mekas’s first columns for The Voice he wrote that “every breaking away from the conventional, dead, official cinema is a healthy sign.” There was an activist element to his rhetoric, and soon after he started writing for The Voice he decided that it wasn’t enough to be a critic, he had to become, as he put it, a near-midwife, so he could hold and protect “all the beautiful things that I saw happening in cinema and that were either butchered or ignored by my colleague writers and by the public.” He was fighting, to borrow the title of a book on him, to free the cinema. Taking a similar long view of your own work, what did you come to see as your role or even mission at The Voice?  J. HOBERMAN Jonas was no longer at The Voice when I started reviewing in late 1977, but he’d been important to me both as a reader and a filmgoer. I saw myself following his example, and also creating a beat. In addition to the avant-garde there were many things that the paper’s two established critics, Andrew Sarris and Tom Allen, were just not that interested in covering — documentaries, independent cinema, museum shows and most foreign films.  To the degree I thought about my role, I saw myself as a journalist (reporting on movies people might not otherwise know about) and as someone contributing to something I’d call, after Jonas’s magazine, “film culture.” On succeeding Sarris as lead critic in 1988 I continued what I saw as a Voice tradition — emphasizing work I felt significant, regardless of its commercial clout or mass appeal.  A. O. SCOTT In the ’60s and ’70s that “film culture” was in many ways understood to be a counterculture, a set of attitudes and commitments distinct from both the Hollywood mainstream and conventional ways of writing about movies. The Voice always saw itself as an oppositional paper, offering an irreverent, muckraking, avant-garde alternative to the establishment press. The language of opposition persists when people use phrases like “independent film” or “traditional media,” but obviously a lot has changed over the years. What is your sense of how the landscape — of film culture and the larger media world within which it is embedded — has shifted since you started?  HOBERMAN A subject for a book! I was around in the ’60s but hit my stride as a critic in the ’80s — Reagan time — when the study of film culture, a science of movie-ology, seemed as though it should be the central pursuit of the age. (That’s now conventional wisdom, as when political pundits routinely read motion pictures as big social metaphors.) Even then, people were bemoaning the end of cinephilia. Movies had already been displaced.  Over the past 15 years the photographic basis of the medium has been eroded by digital image making, the traditional delivery system is changing, not just for cinema but for criticism, the audience is dwarfed by the audience for video games, and yet great things continue to be made. My last review for The Voice was about two terrific, totally different movies: Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” and Ken Jacobs’s “Seeking the Monkey King.” I couldn’t have planned a more optimistic exit.  DARGIS I love both those movies. Yet when I write about that kind of work, I can feel as if I’m whispering into the wind, drowned out by the whirring of the mainstream cinema hype machine, which of course is kept nicely oiled by the entertainment media. I try to resist whining about the good old days — though here I do need to point out that film as film is on the verge of extinction even if cinema is not — but the mainstream media pay even less mind to serious cinema than it did. It’s hard to imagine the kind of passionate debate about films like “Last Year at Marienbad” and even “Blue Velvet” going on for movies like “Anatolia” except in the more rarefied reaches of the blogosphere, which is good (sometimes) if also an index of the marginalization of serious cinema and the discussion about it.  HOBERMAN What you call “whispering in the wind,” I’d say is speaking through a powerful megaphone. Anyway, there’s still room for novelty and potential for debate. Look at the fracas over “The Tree of Life” and “Melancholia.” It just goes to show that, although a great filmmaker like the Soviet master Andrei Tarkovsky was a minority taste at best among the critics of the ’80s (check out his reviews), his epigones have succeeded in creating significant cine-scandals.  SCOTT I’m glad to hear you say that. I’ve been frustrated by the emergence of a conventional wisdom — not limited to critics — according to which movies have diminished in importance and the arguments about them have diminished in intensity since whenever the good old days are supposed to have been. This kind of nostalgia figured heavily in the flurry of writing about Pauline Kael occasioned by the 10th anniversary of her death and Brian Kellow’s biography. But I wonder if you’d be willing to walk down memory lane for a moment and recall a particularly fierce debate of the past, and say something about what it meant at the time.  HOBERMAN Probably the biggest debate I was ever involved in was precipitated by my critique of Kael’s “Shoah” pan. We had a heated exchange in the back row of the Broadway Screening Room. People seemed surprised to see us so worked up over a movie. She told me that I had made things hard for her at The New Yorker, and I said: “What the hell are you talking about Pauline? You wrote the review!”  DARGIS I wish I had been there to witness that. The thing is, there is truth behind such yearning — for film as film and for technical proficiency, you know, like sharply focused images. Some of my favorite movies each year are made or at least distributed by the studios. But they don’t make as many great or even competent movies as they did. Just look at the films James Agee was championing and dismissing in a given column, as when he plowed through “Life With Father,” “Thunderbolt,” “The Macomber Affair,” “Miracle on 34th Street” and a couple other titles in a single 1947 week.  These days, by contrast, there seem to be five times the number of movies opening and quickly leaving, and also five times the dreck. Along these lines, Jim, you mentioned that cinema itself has changed in the past 15 years, and I wonder how your relationship with the object has also changed, perhaps as a consequence?  HOBERMAN For 30-odd years, looking at movies and writing (or talking) about them, was my job. It was fun but it was work. You have to keep up. It’s too early to say how things will change for me now that I’m a civilian. I always loved old movies, and I still do. There are certain films that as a teacher, I watch almost every year — early Chaplin, “The Man With a Movie Camera,” “The Rules of the Game,” “In the Street,” “Pather Panchali,” “Vertigo,” “Flaming Creatures,” “Breathless” — and sitting there with a class, I get to see them again for the first time.  SCOTT To stay with that theme for a moment, what were some of your formative experiences of movies, the ones that started you on the path to becoming a critic?  HOBERMAN I didn’t set out to be a critic. If anything I backed into it. I liked to write and I was deeply interested in movies. The first that really spoke to me was “Dr. Strangelove,” which I saw twice when I was 14; a year later “Shoot the Piano Player” was the first movie I really wanted to live. They were like sacred texts. “Alphaville,” a kind of synthesis, just blew my mind.  That was the first movie I wrote about (a single-spaced sheet for the Harpur Film Society, along with Mike Kuchar’s “Sins of the Fleshapoids”), trying to get a fix on what made it so great. After that I kept a notebook. Later I knew a bunch of underground filmmakers and cartoonists, I wanted to be part of something — and it happened. My ideal reader was me at 16.
A discussion with the former Village Voice senior movie critic J. Hoberman about The Voice, film culture and the precarious habit of cinephilia.