When Roger Ebert became a film critic in 1967, he came across an obscure film from an unknown director at the Chicago International Film Festival. The film, then titled I Call First, was the debut feature of Martin Scorsese.
The 25-year-old neophyte movie critic for The Chicago Sun-Times lauded the work as "absolutely genuine, artistically satisfying and technically comparable to the best films being made anywhere." He declared it a great moment in American movies, as he predicted the young, thin, shaggy-haired, fast-talking, Italian-American filmmaker fresh out of NYU would go on to become a seminal director.
His conjecture would later prove accurate, but what also developed in that moment of prescience was the emergence of one of the most important and perceptive film critics of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Ebert grew up Roman Catholic in the American Midwest. He related to Scorsese's depiction of religious guilt and inner struggle. He was able to find personal resonances in the film despite differences in geography and culture from its New York street toughs.
This would happen to him recurrently throughout his life; he was able to find a sense of himself through engaging with characters on the screen. He must have understood when J.R., the film's hero, embellishes John Wayne in John Ford's 1956 film The Searchers that the filmmaker, too, was a man who educated himself through his personal study of cinema.
Ebert's power of perception, ability to empathize and quality of imagination found itself at home in a movie theater. He loved movies intensely and understood their importance completely.
In 1975, he became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. That same year, he began hosting a weekly television show reviewing films for a Chicago public broadcasting station. PBS later picked up the show and Gene Siskel of The Chicago Tribune joined him as co-host.
The collaboration resulted in one of the most famous and financially successful television duos in history. They became household names and trademarked the phrase "Two Thumbs Up."
What began as a contentious relationship developed into more of a sibling rivalry. They would argue vehemently and more than occasionally dished personal insults the other's way. Ebert would denigrate Siskel for being bald; Siskel would do the same to Ebert for being fat. Aside from the intermittent puerile disparaging and nasty bickering, their focus would be on the films, and when they disagreed, they were emphatic to make their points. Both were erudite and spirited, and their passion for the movies was demonstrated in the way they talked about them.
In 1982, they left PBS and became a syndicated commercial television show, At The Movies With Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert. As the program grew larger and gained a wider audience, people began to appreciate the joy of talking about movies. They showed the world what it meant to have a detailed dialogue about film, and by doing so, affirmed its legitimacy.
While they were both most known for their television presence, they each continued to churn out film reviews at their respective newspapers. Ebert was always the superior writer - more precise in his prose and astute in his observations. It was the content of his written criticism that best illustrated his sharp insight.
As someone who once began pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Chicago, Ebert brought a literary sensibility to his craft.
He made inferences that could be supported, presented arguments cogently and connected new films to old films. He believed in the concept of the cinematic canon. He would elucidate that films are, in fact, texts - that they can and should be read and interpreted as seriously as literature or anything else.
He would connect Akira Kurosawa to William Shakespeare, David Lynch to Norman Rockwell, Orson Welles to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.
In his entry on Citizen Kane in the book Great Movies, which contains the catalog of what he considered superlative, he explained his take on the meaning of 'Rosebud,' the eponymous character's dying word later revealed as the childhood sled that was taken from him when he was torn from his parents and sent to boarding school as:
"The emblem of security, hope and innocence of childhood, which a man can spend his life seeking to regain. It is the green light at the end of Gatsby's pier; it is the leopard atop Kilimanjaro, seeking nobody knows what... It is that yearning after transience that adults learn to suppress."
In 2002, Ebert was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. He went through treatment and a series of surgeries and continued as a film critic.
Four years later, he underwent another operation and, a month afterward, his carotid artery burst near the surgery site. It was a side effect of his radiation treatment and nearly killed him. He subsequently continued rigorous treatment and endured more surgeries.
He could no longer eat and drink and would have to use a feeding tube to do so, and he lost his ability to speak.
While he could no longer perform a television show, he continued to write movie reviews - still able to transmit his own personal voice through written work.
Following his recovery, he returned to The Chicago Sun-Times and his website. When he first started making public appearances, he relied on his wife to help him communicate through scribbling notes to her. He later used a computer voice that would speak when he typed.
He made adjustments and learned to live. The one thing he was able to do the same was write movie reviews and would remain as prolific a critic as ever and of the highest quality.
Embedded in his work is the sense of criticism's purpose - to develop better thinkers. He would often say that movies were the greatest art form of the 20th century. The ubiquity and availability of cinema began to mean something profound: That everyone could improve their thinking by thinking about movies and thinking more about how others think about them.
He knew not to separately categorize movies and often made it a point to show how different art forms could speak to each other through film - that film itself is a confluence of many art forms.
Cinema is connected to everything and can connect to anything. For Ebert, it was connected to his heart as an instrument for living.
He was not the first film critic to do all this. He was not even necessarily the greatest at it, but he was great and his significance is that he was the most famous and the most accessible of them all. He helped earn film criticism the recognition of being serious and substantial in the general public's eye. He made it available to everyone and not just a recreation reserved for the intellectual elite.
In the tradition of the great film critics who came before him - James Agee, Manny Farber and Pauline Kael - he exemplified what it meant to be the searching critic. To have a childlike affection for movies that translates into an insatiable hunger to learn from them.
He always made it a point to try and learn from movies and we learned from his sharing with us. Our biggest loss now as moviegoers is that after a trip to the theater for a new release, we can no longer emerge with the hopes of comparing our thoughts to his.
Email: eric.cortellessa@ubspectrum.com
