J. Hoberman

James Lewis Hoberman (born March 14, 1948), also known as J. Hoberman, is an American film critic. He began at The Village Voice during the 1970s, became a full-time staff writer in 1983, and was the senior film critic from 1988 to 2012. He is also the author of several books.

Education

Hoberman completed his B.A. at Binghamton University and his M.F.A. at Columbia University. At Binghamton, prominent experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs both instructed and influenced him.

Career

After completing his MFA Hoberman worked for The Village Voice as third-stringer under Andrew Sarris. There, he specialized in examining experimental film. Indeed, his first published film review appeared in 1977 for David Lynch's seminal debut film Eraserhead. From 2009 until January 4, 2012, Hoberman was the senior film editor at the Village Voice. He contributes regularly to Film Comment, The New York Times, and The Virginia Quarterly Review.

Hoberman appears in the 2009 documentary film For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, recalling his first movie memory, going with his mother to see Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show On Earth (1952), and how he was mesmerized by a scene in that film depicting a train crash.

Cold War

The Cold War was a state of political and military tension after World War II between powers in the Western Bloc (the United States, its NATO allies and others) and powers in the Eastern Bloc (the Soviet Union and its allies in the Warsaw Pact).

Historians do not fully agree on the dates, but 1947–91 is common. The term "cold" is used because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two sides, although there were major regional wars, known as proxy wars, supported by the two sides. The Cold War split the temporary wartime alliance against Nazi Germany, leaving the USSR and the US as two superpowers with profound economic and political differences: the former being a single-party Marxist–Leninist state operating a planned economy and controlled press and owning exclusively the right to establish and govern communities, and the latter being a capitalist state with generally free elections and press, which also granted freedom of expression and freedom of association to its citizens. A self-proclaimed neutral bloc arose with the Non-Aligned Movement founded by Egypt, India, Indonesia and Yugoslavia; this faction rejected association with either the US-led West or the Soviet-led East. The two superpowers never engaged directly in full-scale armed combat, but they were heavily armed in preparation for a possible all-out nuclear world war. Each side had a nuclear deterrent that deterred an attack by the other side, on the basis that such an attack would lead to total destruction of the attacker: the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Aside from the development of the two sides' nuclear arsenals, and deployment of conventional military forces, the struggle for dominance was expressed via proxy wars around the globe, psychological warfare, massive propaganda campaigns and espionage, rivalry at sports events, and technological competitions such as the Space Race.

Andrew Sarris

Andrew Sarris (October 31, 1928 – June 20, 2012) was an American film critic, a leading proponent of the auteur theory of criticism.

Life and career

Sarris was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Greek immigrant parents, Themis (née Katavolos) and George Andrew Sarris, and grew up in Ozone Park, Queens. After attending John Adams High School in South Ozone Park (where he overlapped with Jimmy Breslin), he graduated from Columbia University in 1951 and subsequently served for three years in the Army Signal Corps before moving to Paris for a year, where he befriended Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Upon returning to New York's Lower East Side, Sarris briefly pursued graduate studies at his alma mater and Teachers College before turning to film criticism as a vocation. After initially writing for Film Culture, his first review for The Village Voice—a laudatory review of Psycho—was published in 1960. He is generally credited with popularizing the auteur theory in the United States of America and coining the term in his 1962 essay, "Notes on the Auteur Theory," which critics writing in Cahiers du Cinéma had inspired.