Is Virginia Tracy the First Great American Film Critic?

Indeed, many of Tracy's pieces of film criticism aren't reviews--they're movie-centered essays, in which she develops in detail her probingly comprehensive view of the art form over all. She may even be the cinema's first major theoretician. Her body of work cries out for a complete reissue in book form. Tracy, born in 1874, was the daughter of actors, and she began her career on the stage, in the eighteen-nineties. In 1909, she published a book of short stories about the lives of theatre people, "Merely Players." In her love of movies, she was fighting an uphill battle against the intellectual orthodoxies of the time, which revered theatre as a serious art form and disparaged movies as merely popular entertainment.