Agee on Film

"I read Agee in high school. He was deeply humanistic. He was an inspiring force for me as well as for many other critics. He was a message critic, very much concerned with what film said, and very sociologically oriented. “Before the auteurists, Hitchcock was considered trivial. Now the notion that Hitchcock’s body of work was important is not so controversial.” As someone who experienced so much success writing about topics other than film, he brought a great deal of style and a great deal of prestige to film criticism. I’ll give you an anecdote: When I was at Columbia, I applied for a creative writing course. During a personal interview with Professor F W Dupee, a legendary literary critic, I was asked what I wanted to write, and I said film criticism. He said: ‘Oh no, you don’t want to do that. We’ve already lost Jim Agee to movies. He was a good writer until Hollywood got to him.’ That was the attitude that people had. But Agee blazed a path that other great writers would follow."