My favourite thing about Vanity Fair’s annual “Hollywood” issue—aside from the knowledge that there’ll be at least one photo of Scarlett Johansson or Angelina Jolie with her bare butt sticking up in the air—is the regular feature they call the “Film Snob’s Dictionary.” Although it was packaged as a layman’s guide to actors, directors and terms beloved by hardcore cinephiles, writers David Kamp and Lawrence Levi wound up using the “Dictionary” more as a vehicle for subtly satirizing the incomprehensible, often perverse tastes of modern movie buffs.
And who are these people? Kamp and Levi give a good explanation in the introduction to The Film Snob’s Dictionary (Broadway Books, $16.95), which gathers all the Vanity Fair features, plus some new material, into a single snarky volume. The true Film Snob, they say, generally scoffs at traditional arthouse icons like Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman. “Watching a Bergman film is so PBS-tote-bag,” they write, “so Mom-and-Dad-on-a-date-in-college, so baguettes-and-Chardonnay. The Snob prides himself on his populist, un-arty taste, favoring, for example, the soapy, overemotive schlock of India’s Bombay-based ‘Bollywood’ film industry over the artful, nuanced films of the Calcutta-born Satyajit Ray and the spaghetti Westerns of the Sergios Leone and Corbucci over anything Fellini ever made. It’s a Reverse Snobbery more powerful than the Snobbery it’s rebelling against.”
Kamp and Levi do a lot of “emperor has no clothes” bullshit-calling in their book, which would become tiresome over the long haul if it weren’t for the fact that so many of their entries are so witheringly, quotably accurate. Asia Argento, for instance, is a “tattooed sexpot Italian actress, incapable of keeping her clothes on, who, perhaps by dint of being the daughter of Dario Argento, has managed to position herself as an art-damaged alterna-auteuress rather than a mere softcore goth girl.” Pauline Kael’s work “stood out for its bracing, provocative prose and its author’s loony, nonsensical taste; no one was smarter and more cogent about Cary Grant’s career and Steven Spielberg’s early films, yet no one was more reckless in overpraising grim 1970s murk and unbearably blowsy female performances.” Andrei Tarkovsky is a “Russian director of stunning intellect and visual acuity, but afflicted with a glacial sense of pacing that makes watching his films not so much an entertainment choice as a lifestyle.”
The genius of Kamp and Levi’s book is their ability not just to spot the flaws and the shortcomings of the movies and the directors they write about, but to recognize that it’s precisely those flaws and shortcomings—which the ordinary moviegoer, with his misplaced reasonableness, usually finds unbearable—that the Film Snob often regards as their most endearing and appealing qualities. (I love their description of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue, for instance, as “ambitious but not wholly endurable,” or of film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum as “industrious but mirthless.”)
The book only stumbles when Kamp and Levi attempt to out-Snob the Snobs by drawing up a list of “10 Worthwhile Snob Causes Célèbres” and a complementary rundown of “10 Fraudulent Snob Causes Célèbres.” It’s not so much that these lists are bullshit (although calling movies like L’Atalante and Office Space “flagrant hackwork whose creators didn’t give a damn” really is ridiculous); it’s that they fall into the classic Snob trap of treating your own idiosyncratic personal preferences as if they were immutable standards which all art should be measured against.
Still, while The Film Snob’s Dictionary isn’t about to take the place of Manny Farber or James Agee on any Snobs’ bookshelves, if it can make even one Snob think twice before praising a film’s “movieness” or saying “apparatus” instead of “camera,” Kamp and Levi will have accomplished something. (May 11, 2006)
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