How do you know the power and impact of someone like Roger Ebert? You know him by his fruits-Ava DuVernay is just one of them. The eight-year-old little girl would grow up to make a film titled I Will Follow, about which Ebert would write a glowing review, not knowing at the time that he’d actually met the auteur decades before, and inspired her greatly. We see a picture of Roger Ebert with a fan, who’d asked him to take a photo with her, and her young niece. It’s one of those scenes that, were it to have occurred in a narrative film, we film critics would have rolled our eyes a bit, knowing that the filmmaker and screenwriter had taken the whole “suspension of disbelief” thing a bit too far.
These words come to mind during one of the most amazing scenes in Life Itself, Steven James’s 2014 documentary on the life and times of the late Roger Ebert.
And when someone else asked how you know that a theory-or that anything, for that matter-is powerful, the professor sort of smirked and said, “You shall know them by their fruits.” Towards the end of a course on the works of Nietzsche and Freud, one student finally, bravely asked the question we all knew our philosophy professor did not want us to ask: “Which one got it right?” Our professor decided to bite, explaining that the person with the best theory-the more powerful theory-was the better of the two.
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