So Long, Duncan Shepherd

San Diego Reader So Long

After three decades of wielding an uncompromising aesthetic scalpel against the tide of cinematic mediocrity, Duncan Shepherd has surrendered his post at The San Diego Reader. For thirty years, he imposed upon current film the most fastidious of standards—an endeavor as necessary as it was, inevitably, solitary.I have followed his lineations since the mid-1970s, a period when my own occasional record and concert reviews for the Reader were modest exercises in critical prose. It was not merely Shepherd’s erudition that arrested my attention, but the cadences of his syntax, the razor-sharp precision of his diction, and the formal rigor of his arguments. Along with the late Steve Esmedina, he provided an indispensable exemplar of stylistic discipline.

Shepherd’s departure marks a genuinely deplorable loss for film criticism. There was something delightfully paradoxical—and altogether sublime—in the fact that one of the nation’s largest alternative weeklies harbored the single most resolutely "un-blurbable" critic in the republic. His reviews were so intricately constructed, so fiercely resistant to vulgar compression, that no movie publicist could possibly extract a single hyperbolic snippet to embellish a newspaper advertisement. That suited Shepherd, as it suited those readers who still demand literacy in their reviewers. Upon his final column, I left the following tribute:

I view your departure from The Reader—whether in print or on the screen—with unfeigned regret. You were among the minuscule handful of critics who stubbornly refused to capitulate to the vulgar chorus of shifting fashion. Though my own aesthetic judgments departed from yours more often than not, I never failed to respect your formidable knowledge, your caustic wit, and the pristine elegance of your prose. To defend a film you had dismantled required nothing less than a complete marshaling of one's intellectual faculties. You have my profound gratitude for maintaining the high fortress of criticism for as long as you did, and I remain hopeful that we shall again encounter your writing—on terms entirely of your own choosing—wherever true engagement with the art survives. Good luck, Duncan.