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Totally, Tenderly, Tragically: Essays and Criticism from a Lifelong Love Affair with the Movies
Phillip Lopate has been obsessed with movies from the start. As an undergraduate at Columbia, he organized the school's first film society. Later, he even tried his own hand at filmmaking. But it was not until his ascent as a major essayist that Lopate found his truest and most lasting contribution to the medium. And, over the past twenty-five years, tackling subjects ranging from Visconti to Jerry Lewis, from the first New York Film Festival to the thirty-second, Phillip Lopate has made film his most cherished subject. Here, in one place, are the very best of these essays, a joy for anyone who loves movies.
- GenresFilmNonfictionEssays
400 pages, Paperback
First published October 20, 1998
4 people are currently reading
194 people want to read
About the author
Phillip Lopate
106 books104 followersPhillip Lopate is the author of three personal essay collections, two novels, two poetry collections, a memoir of his teaching experiences, and a collection of his movie criticism. He has edited the following anthologies, and his essays, fiction, poetry, film and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, The Paris Review, Harper's, Vogue, Esquire, New York Times, Harvard Educational Review, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. After working with children for twelve years as a writer in the schools, he taught creative writing and literature at Fordham, Cooper Union, University of Houston, and New York University. He currently holds the John Cranford Adams Chair at Hofstra University, and also teaches in the MFA graduate programs at Columbia, the New School and Bennington.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 20, 2009
The collection of essays are hit-and-miss, but the good ones are particularly good, and they're all done in an exceedingly elegant and considerate style of a particular type that has become rather rare in contemporary letters. Often using his own experiences--even for ones not explicitly autobiographical in nature--as a starting off point for his analyses, Lopate often meanders to deeply generous, humanistic observations and conclusions. I was pleased to find the first essay, "Anticipation of La Notte: The 'Heroic' Age of Moviegoing" wasn't nearly as narcissistic and condescending as I expected, but rather a nuanced remembrance that illuminates both the good and the bad (and also, quite often, the lonely) of that celebrated 1960's cinephilia. Other standouts for me where the essays on Contempt, Diary of a Country Priest, Cronaca di un amore (also a particular favorite of mine), Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris.
Also, my copy had long responses written in pencil by some unknown previous reader. After a while it began to seem like I was reading a dialogue. I love library books!
"So I have sought out precisely those films that would take me to a place where the uncanny, the sublime, the tragic, the ecstatic, the beautifully resigned, all converge."
Also, my copy had long responses written in pencil by some unknown previous reader. After a while it began to seem like I was reading a dialogue. I love library books!
"So I have sought out precisely those films that would take me to a place where the uncanny, the sublime, the tragic, the ecstatic, the beautifully resigned, all converge."
May 28, 2025
adored this. added like twenty films to my watch list after reading.
May 15, 2009
FINAL THOUGHTS: Debating between 4 or 5 stars on this. The best essays in here are great ones. Lopate's hybrid critical essays/bios of filmmakers are invaluable to me, since I would otherwise not have read bios on Kenji Mizoguchi or Mikio Naruse. There's a long consideration here of the career of critic Pauline Kael, and it is excellent and even-handed. It is much better than his piece on his critical hero, Andrew Sarris, which is the weakest piece here. Lopate worries aloud that his blindspots about Sarris could have affected his essay, and that indeed is the case. Also he's unconvincing in the essay on Jerry Lewis; undercutting his credibility a bit by droning on about the auteurist mastery that is "Three on a Couch." Riiiiight. In any case, this is a splendid collection. Anyone interested in movies or the essay form in general should enjoy this.
OK, it's no doubt now. His essay on how children are portrayed in the movies gets this the five stars....
Knowing as much as I do about film, it takes a great book to significantly deepen my understanding of the medium, and this book did it in spades with scintillating prose on a wide variety of well selected topics. This is a classic of film writing.
------
(previous thoughts:)
I'd previously read "Anticipation of La Notte: The Heroic Age of Moviegoing", the first and central essay in this collection of film writings, and it's poignantly and wrenchingly poetic and personal -- one of the finest things ever written about the experience and moods attendant to viewing and living with the art of film, and "totally, tenderly, tragically" giving one's life over to that love of cinema. (The title phrase comes from one of the author's favorite films, Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt").
Lopate lucked out (or not, depending on your view) in that his formative youth coincided with the pinnacle of the golden age of the international art cinema: the late '50s and the '60s. He formed his own critical sensibilities in bohemian league with equally passionate young friends of differing viewpoints.
As the introduction suggests, these essays give us a sense of what it means to operate at a higher critical level when perceiving art. The fact is, Lopate SEES MORE than you or I do, when watching a film, and subsequently feels more. Given the sheer volume and breadth and depth of my own life's film viewing, I'd venture to say I'm closer to him than I am to most of you in this realm.
------
From the essay, "When Writers Direct" (about David Mamet, Paul Schrader and John Sayles):
"It's also curious that all three of these thoughtful films come a cropper when they reach for violent plot solutions. It is as though Sayles, Schrader and Mamet have all bought the standard line that movies must be about 'action.' This is true, up to a point, particularly with American movies; but excessive faith seems to have been placed in the 'magic' of movies to leap over gaps in narrative plausibility, simply by inserting an explosion. The pressure to 'make something happen' has catapulted these three films into some very questionable third acts."
OK, it's no doubt now. His essay on how children are portrayed in the movies gets this the five stars....
Knowing as much as I do about film, it takes a great book to significantly deepen my understanding of the medium, and this book did it in spades with scintillating prose on a wide variety of well selected topics. This is a classic of film writing.
------
(previous thoughts:)
I'd previously read "Anticipation of La Notte: The Heroic Age of Moviegoing", the first and central essay in this collection of film writings, and it's poignantly and wrenchingly poetic and personal -- one of the finest things ever written about the experience and moods attendant to viewing and living with the art of film, and "totally, tenderly, tragically" giving one's life over to that love of cinema. (The title phrase comes from one of the author's favorite films, Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt").
Lopate lucked out (or not, depending on your view) in that his formative youth coincided with the pinnacle of the golden age of the international art cinema: the late '50s and the '60s. He formed his own critical sensibilities in bohemian league with equally passionate young friends of differing viewpoints.
As the introduction suggests, these essays give us a sense of what it means to operate at a higher critical level when perceiving art. The fact is, Lopate SEES MORE than you or I do, when watching a film, and subsequently feels more. Given the sheer volume and breadth and depth of my own life's film viewing, I'd venture to say I'm closer to him than I am to most of you in this realm.
------
From the essay, "When Writers Direct" (about David Mamet, Paul Schrader and John Sayles):
"It's also curious that all three of these thoughtful films come a cropper when they reach for violent plot solutions. It is as though Sayles, Schrader and Mamet have all bought the standard line that movies must be about 'action.' This is true, up to a point, particularly with American movies; but excessive faith seems to have been placed in the 'magic' of movies to leap over gaps in narrative plausibility, simply by inserting an explosion. The pressure to 'make something happen' has catapulted these three films into some very questionable third acts."
June 19, 2014
I sought out Phillip Lopate's book of film criticism and essays, Totally Tenderly Tragically (1998), due to the fact that he wrote some engaging notes for the Criterion editions of Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu and Mikio Naruse's When A Woman Ascend the Stairs-two directors who rise in my esteem after every film I see by them. Furthermore, the title of his collection comes from one of Jean-Luc Goddard best films, Contempt. There are thoughtful pieces on Mizoguchi ("Kenji Mizoguchi") and Naruse ("A Taste for Naruse") here as well. Again, I found affinity with Lopate on other directors and critics as well: with Antonioni ("Anticipation of LaNotte: The "Heroic" Age of Moviegoing" and ""Anotonioni's Conaca"-which inspired me to see it), Goddard ("Contempt: The Story of a Marriage"), Truffant ("truffaut's The Woman Next Door"), Yasujiro Ozu ("Three Ozu Films from the Fifties"), Sidney Lumet ("Sidney Lumet, or The Necessity for Compromise"), Pauline Kael ("The Passion of Pauline Kael") and Andrew Sarris ("The Gallant Andrew Sarris"). I was also inspired to seek out other films and explore the oveure of several other directors as well: ("Diary of a Country Priest:Films as Spiritual Life"-Robert Bresson), his passion for Fassbinder (but not Despair-"Fassbinder's Despair"), Luchino Visconti ("The Operatic Realism of Luchino Visconti"-I ordered five of his films on Lopate's recommendation), John Cassavetes ("The Legacy of John Cassavetes"). In general, I share an afinity in my taste for art films, but Lopate is strikingly intolerant of modern and mainstream Hollywood productions. For example, in "The 32nd New York Film Festival" he reveals that he does not appreciate Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express, and has special contmept for Krzsztof Kieslowski's Red. That being said I found the overall collection of essays inspiring, thought-provoking, and entertaining. Two of the standout pieces were the appreciation of Naruse and the profile on Pauline Kael. So I will seek out more of Lopate's essay collections in the future.
September 13, 2007
read his (fucking amazing) essay 'The Heroic Age of Moviegoing' and learn why contemporary movie culture sucks.
January 25, 2021
Very correct, very nice, very safe, very middlebrow. Thus, I have no use for this. It was in a free books pile outside a store in New Haven, Connecticut. Back in the pile it goes.
March 31, 2025
3.75
I do find my tastes very closely aligned with Lopate but this may have to do with being of a certain age and raised on a specific cultural diet. I suppose taste is generational and I could see how some of this might come off as nearing middlebrow if not aesthetically conservative these days in its lack of understanding or seeing the value of pop culture. Nonetheless, he is a good essayist (reviewer) and usually has enough insights to warrant the reading of them. It’s fair to say that some of the reviews are a little dated in that the films/directors/judgments are all a bit too overly familiar now. He's not trying to be smart or about film history or it's production...this is just conversational takes from a film fan, a cineaste. Very rarely does he have any deep insight into any of these films, it's more like grabbing a coffee with a friend after a film screening and chatting about observations and feelings. It's not revelatory, but it's fun to hear what your friends think. It's kinda like that.
I do find my tastes very closely aligned with Lopate but this may have to do with being of a certain age and raised on a specific cultural diet. I suppose taste is generational and I could see how some of this might come off as nearing middlebrow if not aesthetically conservative these days in its lack of understanding or seeing the value of pop culture. Nonetheless, he is a good essayist (reviewer) and usually has enough insights to warrant the reading of them. It’s fair to say that some of the reviews are a little dated in that the films/directors/judgments are all a bit too overly familiar now. He's not trying to be smart or about film history or it's production...this is just conversational takes from a film fan, a cineaste. Very rarely does he have any deep insight into any of these films, it's more like grabbing a coffee with a friend after a film screening and chatting about observations and feelings. It's not revelatory, but it's fun to hear what your friends think. It's kinda like that.
August 1, 2017
This turned out to be a significant disappointment, as I'd previously quite liked Lopate's essay collection Portrait Inside My Head and his curation of the American Movie Critics anthology for the Library of America, and so had figured that a collection of his writing on film would be close to a sure thing. Instead, this proved to be the first book in memory with which I was so disillusioned partway through that I had to put it on hold for close to a month before I had mustered the energy to finish it (thankfully, the books read in the interim served as quite wonderful palate cleansers).
The writing included in Totally, Tenderly, Tragically spans Lopate's career from university to the time of publication (the lack of dates associated with each piece was a frequent annoyance to me, as it sometimes prevented me from determining whether discussion of a movie was contemporaneous or not, and if not, what length gap existed). This choice highlights why authors often collections often limit their collections to representations a certain chronological window; when such a wide gap of quality is reflected in one volume, the callowness of the early work stands out far more harshly than the increased sophistication of age.
Sometimes, Lopate would append current-day thoughts to the older pieces, and these were in fact probably the most appealing portions of the book. It was an innovative choice, one I hadn't seen before in a book and which allowed Lopate to let time interact with the material in a fresh way, but unfortunately, there wasn't commentary on every piece, and some of them were woefully short, in length and on insight, occasionally just providing information about the circumstances of the intiial writing or publication rather than re-probing or noting changes in his opinion. I would've been fascinated to read his opinion of his own work in every case, but it especially might have mitigated my sharp reactions to certain material that has aged quite poorly (not opinion-wise, but in terms of dated world-views) or was simply under-baked.
There is a tone to most of the essays that seemed appealing in the early going, a certain appealing casualness, Lopate's writing neither rigorously theoretical nor relentlessly focused on the commercial or entertainment prospects of films; the fact that he was never writing from the formal position of full-time theorist or critic gave him a latitude in approach, and in word count, that seemed promising. But his pieces quickly became to feel academic, not in a theoretical way (which I wouldn't have minded), but in a way that brought to mind college term papers, where one is expected to synthesize others' research and thoughts into something that shed slightly new light on a topic; Lopate seemed uninterested (or perhaps felt unqualified) to either strongly assert his opinions or ideas, and frankly sometimes didn't even succeed in creating something new out of other peoples'.
It's true that at times one can see him, almost visibly straining, make an effort toward provocation with a conclusion or assertion, but he mostly just seems unsteady and unsure of his footing. When reading film criticism, my agreement with the writer's opinions factors quite low into my opinion of his work, but I will say that a contrary opinion is made much more palatable when it comes with conviction behind it. Likewise, there were instances of fairly apparent misreadings of certain films, which, had he elaborated, he might have been able to clarify or make more interesting or intriguing; in the absence of such arguments, however, he merely knocked points off his own creditability, without even having bothered to try defending it.
Lopate occasionally seems to have theories established independent of the examples he cites, and the imperfect forcing of material into a mold shows at times; relatedly, he can fall into repetitive patterns of thought, without seeming to give much thought to his insistence on them, even when his writing seems to be hinting at a case to be made against them. Even structurally, he sometimes fails to provide a suitable button to an essay, making one wonder how it was accepted for publication elsewhere. It's not always clear how much he actually likes movies, despite his constant professing his love for them; he seems more interested in them, at a considerable remove, which makes his writing feel, almost uniformly throughout the book, much less personal than a) that movie criticism I like best and b) the work of his with which I was previously familiar, and which I liked very much. It is this latter lack which left me disappointed by this book, as well as one other thing I realized over the course of the book—his professional relationship to the movies has an unavoidable tinge of the amateurish, giving his writing in this book a hobbyist feel; his writing about himself is, naturally, that of an expert, allowing for an assured style never found here.
The writing included in Totally, Tenderly, Tragically spans Lopate's career from university to the time of publication (the lack of dates associated with each piece was a frequent annoyance to me, as it sometimes prevented me from determining whether discussion of a movie was contemporaneous or not, and if not, what length gap existed). This choice highlights why authors often collections often limit their collections to representations a certain chronological window; when such a wide gap of quality is reflected in one volume, the callowness of the early work stands out far more harshly than the increased sophistication of age.
Sometimes, Lopate would append current-day thoughts to the older pieces, and these were in fact probably the most appealing portions of the book. It was an innovative choice, one I hadn't seen before in a book and which allowed Lopate to let time interact with the material in a fresh way, but unfortunately, there wasn't commentary on every piece, and some of them were woefully short, in length and on insight, occasionally just providing information about the circumstances of the intiial writing or publication rather than re-probing or noting changes in his opinion. I would've been fascinated to read his opinion of his own work in every case, but it especially might have mitigated my sharp reactions to certain material that has aged quite poorly (not opinion-wise, but in terms of dated world-views) or was simply under-baked.
There is a tone to most of the essays that seemed appealing in the early going, a certain appealing casualness, Lopate's writing neither rigorously theoretical nor relentlessly focused on the commercial or entertainment prospects of films; the fact that he was never writing from the formal position of full-time theorist or critic gave him a latitude in approach, and in word count, that seemed promising. But his pieces quickly became to feel academic, not in a theoretical way (which I wouldn't have minded), but in a way that brought to mind college term papers, where one is expected to synthesize others' research and thoughts into something that shed slightly new light on a topic; Lopate seemed uninterested (or perhaps felt unqualified) to either strongly assert his opinions or ideas, and frankly sometimes didn't even succeed in creating something new out of other peoples'.
It's true that at times one can see him, almost visibly straining, make an effort toward provocation with a conclusion or assertion, but he mostly just seems unsteady and unsure of his footing. When reading film criticism, my agreement with the writer's opinions factors quite low into my opinion of his work, but I will say that a contrary opinion is made much more palatable when it comes with conviction behind it. Likewise, there were instances of fairly apparent misreadings of certain films, which, had he elaborated, he might have been able to clarify or make more interesting or intriguing; in the absence of such arguments, however, he merely knocked points off his own creditability, without even having bothered to try defending it.
Lopate occasionally seems to have theories established independent of the examples he cites, and the imperfect forcing of material into a mold shows at times; relatedly, he can fall into repetitive patterns of thought, without seeming to give much thought to his insistence on them, even when his writing seems to be hinting at a case to be made against them. Even structurally, he sometimes fails to provide a suitable button to an essay, making one wonder how it was accepted for publication elsewhere. It's not always clear how much he actually likes movies, despite his constant professing his love for them; he seems more interested in them, at a considerable remove, which makes his writing feel, almost uniformly throughout the book, much less personal than a) that movie criticism I like best and b) the work of his with which I was previously familiar, and which I liked very much. It is this latter lack which left me disappointed by this book, as well as one other thing I realized over the course of the book—his professional relationship to the movies has an unavoidable tinge of the amateurish, giving his writing in this book a hobbyist feel; his writing about himself is, naturally, that of an expert, allowing for an assured style never found here.
January 19, 2012
Nice collection of essays on film. Got this for Lopate's essay on essay films where he goes into Chris Marker's work (primarily Sans Soleil), but there are also good pieces on Godard's Contempt, Mizoguchi, Ozu, Fassbinder, Pauline Kael, Cassavetes. Also, Lopate covers some of his own 'bachelor strategies' for wooing women (which mostly entail buying an extra ticket to film festival premieres).
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