Editor’s Note: In February, the University of Illinois honored Roger Ebert posthumously with the Illinois Prize. At the event, Roger was remembered by, among others, Milos Stehlik, the director of Chicago’s Facets Multi-media, a cinematheque and video rental service that led the way in renting international and art cinema by mail.
I know Roger Ebert for more than 40
years. I use the present tense consciously, because for me, his words still
breathe, and through them, so does he. Despite the fact that television is what
gave Roger a national platform and an influence far beyond what was possible through
newspapers, I think his heart always belonged to print. Walking to deliver him
press kits or screeners, past the presses on the ground floor of the old Sun-Times building was a powerful symbol that words needed paper and ink to spread,
to take flight, to penetrate lives. For me, Roger belongs to a generation of
journalists for whom journalism was not just a profession, but a culture and a
way of life. This goes beyond hanging out at O’Rourke’s. The most
sacrosanct—and non-negotiable—sentence I heard him speak was “I have
to write.” Writing was life itself. When Roger moved to television and
then online—it was
still words which had the magic to engage minds and make those minds see.
What would Roger Ebert have been if
he had not been given the job of film critic at the Chicago Sun-Times and
remained a sports writer or written something else? Fortunately for us in the
film world, we will never know.
While words ran in Roger’s blood,
film was in his heart. He contradicted the conventional stereotype of a journalist
or critic as a dispassionate and distanced investigator and communicator of
facts. Roger knew that film was something messy and intangible, which could not
be easily objectified or quantified. Film is about love and fear, about dreams
and failure, about an individual’s potential to alter his or her destiny.
Film is about individuals trying to find the strength to reassert their
goodness, to save other lives and to be saved in turn. Roger knew that film could only be approached
with passion.
Roger engaged that passion to
communicate this uncertainty of our human existence. He fashioned a different
kind of film criticism. His writing would communicate constructs of a filmmaker’s
imagination. Roger’s writing
would be the glue between the souls of the characters on the screen and our
souls. Roger would be the writer, but he would also be the shaman, channeling
the mysteries of film, aligning our spirits to those of the characters on the
screen. He would show us how film can help us understand, and become whole. His
was an engaged journalism: a journalism in which words have the power to change
things.
Through Roger’s writing,
we could feel the urgency of what the filmmaker was trying to say. The great
lesson which Roger Ebert taught: film was not about drama or character, it was
about us, the audience. It is about helping us be, and be better.
It is what made him unique and
irreplaceable. You can’t learn this in journalism school. You have to BE it.
For Roger, this pact which I think he made with himself gave him the permission
to be something more than a journalist: to be a champion. The films and
filmmakers who owe the success of their films and their careers to Roger is
long: Greg Nava and Anna Thomas and “El Norte,” Werner Herzog and
“Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” Errol Morris and “Gates of
Heaven” – just three examples from my personal experience.
Roger’s message for these films and
for scores of others was at once uniform and clear, “This film HAS TO
EXIST.”
Inherent in this evangelism was a
shared belief: film is the most
important art and it has the power to change the universe. I never saw Roger
happier than when he discovered a film he thought was great.
In this sense, Roger was a part of
all of us He belonged to our community of filmmakers and film lovers. That community
is a global community, stretching from Hollywood to Mumbai, Munich to Tehran. I
remember Roger’s enthusiastic embrace of the film, MOOLADE, by the great
Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene – a film intended to empower African women
to band together and resist genital mutilation, or Iranian filmmaker Tahmineh
Milani’s feature TWO WOMEN – the story of two school friends forced to choose a
life of oppression because they are women living in a rigid society. It’s
paradoxical that Roger was ALL Illinois – a proud Chicagoan but even more
proud of being a native son of Champaign-Urbana.
These were not films backed by
large studio campaigns or coming with a lot of buzz. The films needed help to
be recognized and appreciated. And Roger Ebert, film critic, led the charge.
For me, the great gift that he left
us was not only his personal portrait of courage, but his faith that the
spreading of the love of film through journalism would continue through an
investment in the next generation of talented young critics –
rogerbert.com
These young journalists, too, can shout
out that it is film which has the power to unite us, to make us understand people
other than ourselves, to open our hearts
Thank you, Roger Ebert: film has
never had a better friend.
