The Rhapsodes: How 1940 Critics Changed American Film Culture by David Bordwell

 The first barrier was recognizing film as a valid popular art.  Already some of Hollywood's admirers put story first and recognized that the liveliest film was often the unpretentious comedy or melodrama.  Prestige pictures, especially literary adaptations, were no guarantee of vitality.  What makes this vitality possible, Feguson maintained, is a discrete technique.                                                                                        -- David Bordwell, The Rhapsodes (The University of Chicago Press, 2016)

Bordwell's book is about four America film critics who wrote in the 1940's:  James Agee, Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber and Parker Tyler.  There were not many full-time film critics in those days and these writers had other overlapping and helpful interests: Agee wrote books and scripts, Ferguson was an expert on jazz, Tyler was interested in Freud and Jung and also wrote poetry, Farber was a painter.  Bordwell's short book does a good job of describing the lives, the writing and the critical approaches of these critics who were influential beyond the actual numbers of their readers, though Agee did write film reviews for Time magazine for several years.

I do think Bordwell, who has written excellent books on Hollywood technique and Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu, overestimates the influence of these critics on those who followed -- Andrew Sarris, for instance, was more influenced by Eugene Archer and a number of French critics -- though there is no doubt that the four critics cited by Bordwell paved the way for later serious and analytical film writers.  Bordwell does quote significantly from the writings of Ferguson, Agee, Farber and Tyler but there are now books that have collections of these writers' articles, including collections of Farber and Agee in The Library of America.