Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: THE age of seventy-one, he was lauded by his colleagues for bringing "the appreciation of film, and film criticism, to the widest possible audience and into the twenty-first century" (Van Horn and Nelson) and for his distinctive ability "to connect the creators of movies with their consumers" (Corliss).At the time of his death, Ebert was, indeed, widely known to movie goers.His reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times, where he had worked for forty-six years, were syndicated to over two hundred newspapers, and he had cohosted the weekly, nationally syndicated television program of film reviews, At the Movies, for decades.As well-known as he was by the public, Ebert also achieved over the course of his career a remarkably high level of recognition from his peers.He was the first film critic to receive journalism's Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in Film, was inducted into the selective New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics, named an honorary member of the Directors' Guild of America, presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Screenwriters' Guild, and became the first film critic to be granted a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.Upon his death, he was praised as "the best known film critic in America" by fellow film critic Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, while others, each in a different way, attempted to characterize Ebert's ability to reach such a wide-ranging audience.Some described his writing style as humble and accessible (McMahon); others regarded it as discursive and immediate (Clark); while still others celebrated Ebert's passion for the movies as populist, intimate, and Midwestern (Zak).
Source: The Journal of Popular Culture
DOI: 10.1111/jpcu.13152
Author: Denise Bielby
Institution: University of California, Santa Cruz
Language: English
Topic: Cinema History and Criticism
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4294252830