thank you. forty-six years ago on april 3, 1967, i became the film critic for the Chicago sun-times. some of you have read my reviews and columns and even written to me since that time. others were introduced to my film criticism through the television show, my books, the website, the film festival, or the ebert club and newsletter. however you came to know me, i'm glad you did and thank you for being the best readers any film critic could ask for.
typically, i write over 200 reviews a year for the sun-times that are carried by universal press syndicate in some 200 newspapers. last year, i wrote the most of my career, including 306 movie reviews, a blog post or two a week, and assorted other articles. i must slow down now, which is why i'm taking what i like to call "a leave of presence."
what in the world is a leave of presence? it means i am not going away. my intent is to continue to write selected reviews but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers handpicked and greatly admired by me. what's more, I'll be able at last to do what I've always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies i want to review.
at the same time, i am re-launching the new and improved rogerebert.com and taking ownership of the site under a separate entity, ebert digital, run by me, my beloved wife, chaz, and our brilliant friend, josh golden of table xi. stepping away from the day-to-day grind will enable me to continue as a film critic for the Chicago sun-times, and roll out other projects under the ebert brand in the coming year.
ebertfest, my annual film festival, celebrating its 15th year, will continue at the university of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, my alma mater and home town, april 17-21. in response to your repeated requests to bring back the tv show "at the movies," i am launching a fundraising campaign via kickstarter in the next couple of weeks. and gamers beware, i am even thinking about a movie version of a video game or mobile app. once completed, you can engage me in debate on whether you think it is art.
and i continue to cooperate with the talented filmmaker steve james on the bio-documentary he, steve zaillian and martin scorsese are making about my life. i am humbled that anyone would even think to do it, but i am also grateful.
of course, there will be some changes. the immediate reason for my "leave of presence" is my health. the "painful fracture" that made it difficult for me to walk has recently been revealed to be a cancer. it is being treated with radiation, which has made it impossible for me to attend as many movies as i used to. i have been watching more of them on screener copies that the studios have been kind enough to send to me. my friend and colleague richard roeper and other critics have stepped up and kept the newspaper and website current with reviews of all the major releases. so we have and will continue to go on. at this point in my life, in addition to writing about movies, i may write about what it's like to cope with health challenges and the limitations they can force upon you. it really stinks that the cancer has returned and that i have spent too many days in the hospital. so on bad days i may write about the vulnerability that accompanies illness. on good days, i may wax ecstatic about a movie so good it transports me beyond illness.
i'll also be able to review classics for my "great movies" collection, which has produced three books and could justify a fourth.
for now, i am throwing myself into ebert digital and the redesigned, highly interactive and searchable rogerebert.com. you'll learn more about its exciting new features on april 9 when the site is launched. in addition to housing an archive of more than 10,000 of my reviews dating back to 1967 we will also feature reviews written by other critics. you may disagree with them like you have with me, but will nonetheless appreciate what they bring to the party. some i recruited from the ranks of my far flung correspondents, an inspiration i had four years ago when i noticed how many of the comments on my blog came from foreign lands and how knowledgeable they were about cinema.
we'll be recruiting more critics and it is my hope that some of the writers i have admired over the years will be among them. we'll offer many more reviews of indie, foreign, documentary and restored classic revivals. as the space between broadcast television, cable and the internet morph into a hybrid of content, we will continue to spotlight the musings of pulitzer prize-winning tv critic tom shales, as well as the blog "scanners" by jim emerson, who i first met at microsoft when he edited cinemania. the ebert club newsletter, under editor marie haws of Vancouver, will be expanded to give its thousands of subscribers even bigger and better benefits.
for years i devoutly took every one of my tear sheets, folded them and added them to a pile on my desk. the photo above shows the height of that pile in 1985 as it appeared on the cover of my first book about the movies published by my old friends john mcmeel and donna martin of andrews & mcmeel. today, because of technology, the opportunities to become bigger, better and reach more people are piling up too. the fact that we're re-launching the site now, in the midst of other challenges, should give you an idea how important rogerebert.com and ebert digital are to chaz and me. i hope you'll stop by, and look for me. i'll be there.
so on this day of reflection i say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. i'll see you at the movies.
two or three weeks ago leonid f. illyiehev, the Soviet propaganda boss, made a rather plaintive speech to the young writers of Moscow. please, he said, in effect, there are other subjects besides "the camps" to write about.
suddenly, in Moscow, it would appear, everyone wants to write about life in the stalin concentration camps. the reason for this is a rather short, sparsely told, eloquent, explosive, work by alexander solzhenitsyn which today reaches the American public in English translation.
solzhenitsyn is a 44-year-old mathematics teacher in the old Russian town of Ryazan who spent eight years in stalin's concentration camps. "one day in the life of ivan denisovich" is his first literary work, the simple story of one day in a Soviet concentration camp.
there is hardly a detail in solzhenitsyn's story which, in itself is new. the cruelty, the falseness of the charges, the animal fight for survival, the debasement, the cynical grafting, the brutalizing, the sentences stretching into infinity (or death), the hunger, the suffering, the cold--all this is familiar.
changes perception
but the same might have been said of conditions in Russian prisons before dostoyevsky wrote his "notes, from the house of the dead." the story of political prisoners in Siberia was well known before george kennan wrote his famous "Siberia and the exile system" in 1891.
yet, each of these works changed our perception of the known facts. so it is with solzhenitsyn's remarkable tale. in the Soviet Union, of course, it has been a sensation. until the november issue of the literary journal, novy mir, appeared with solzhenitsyn's story, no Soviet writer had tackled this most terrible and characteristic feature of the stalin era. (it took premier khrushchev's personal okay to get the story published.) small wonder that all 95,000 copies of novy mir vanished almost before they hit the newsstands and that they now sell for $10 a copy.
solzhenitsyn has written no mere propagandistic expose. he has created a small, almost flawless classic employing the eloquence of reticence and understatement in a manner which even the fumbling of hurried translation cannot obscure.
ivan denisovich shukov, his central figure, is a simple peasant. his "crime" was to escape from the Germans who took him prisoner in 1943 and return to his own lines. had he not said he had been in German hands he would have gotten a medal. by telling the truth he was sentenced to a concentration camp as a "spy." had he not confessed being a "spy" he would have been shot. neither he nor his nkvd interrogator had ingenuity enough to figure out what kind of "spying" he was supposed to do.
ancient skulls recovered from a deep cave in northern Spain are the oldest known remains to show clear signs of neanderthal facial features, researchers claim.
scientists reconstructed 17 skulls from pieces of bone found in the mud at Sima de los Huesos, or the "pit of bones", in the Atapuerca mountains. the skulls had some neanderthal-like features, but their appearance was otherwise far more primitive.
juan luis arsuaga, professor of palaeontology at the complutense university of Madrid, said the remains belonged to a "missing link" population that fell somewhere between the neanderthals and a more archaic group of human forerunners.
the term "missing link" has fallen out of favour with many researchers, in part because it implies a simple, step-wise progression from one species to another. but the phrase is still used at times to describe species that bridge a divide between distinct ancestors and descendants.
the skulls come from a haul of bones that belong to at least 28 individuals who came to rest in a chamber at the bottom of a 14-metre-deep cave shaft. the bodies are thought to have been washed into the pit after they died elsewhere in the cave system.
sometimes when you switch off, you turn on. after making my 15-hour the story of film: an odyssey, i wanted to switch off. it had taken six years to make and i'd travelled the world. i wanted to go nowhere and to think about anything but film-making, so i walked a lot, drew a bit and filmed stuff. filming to escape filming is weird, i know, but, like people watching or climbing hills, it's absorbing and relaxing for me. so i filmed cities, clouds, the sea and my niece and nephew, laura and ben, playing. i had fun watching them have fun.
orson welles once said that to write a poem you need a pen, to paint a picture you need a brush and to make a film you need an army. i was army-less, and as far away from film-making as you could get – or so i thought.
magical… henry thomas as elliott in spielberg's et. (photograph: ap)
a month after i switched off, on an idle evening in a hotel room, i looked at the footage of laura and ben playing – a single shot that lasted just 11 minutes. as they know me well and my camera was unobtrusively tiny, they were unselfconscious. as i wasn't making a film, i was unselfconscious, too. this double distraction made the footage fresh. i watched the two kids trying to bite each other, then fart, then smash up the marble run they played with, and i felt a film coming on, the way hunger comes on.
inspiration is a ball kicked in from nowhere, said seamus heaney. in came that ball. the kids in my shot reminded me of kids in other movies – elliot in et, billy in ken loach's kes, children in silent Japanese films, the stroppy adventurers in great Iranian movies like jafar panahi's the white balloon. looking at my footage felt like looking into a rock pool.
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