Film Criticism as a Cultural Institution

Huw Walmsley-Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317286981
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

At the beginning of the 21st century film criticism was described as in crisis. The decline of print journalism, a series of lay-offs of prominent critics, and the rise of "amateur" reviewing online spurred a conversation about the decline, even death, of film criticism. This discourse flourished in part because film criticism has been little examined in scholarship to date. This book takes a deeper look at film criticism by focusing on its institutional contours. This is achieved through a combination of archival research and interviews with prominent film critics and stakeholders, including Adrian Martin (LOLA), Stephanie Zacharek (Time), Peter Bart (Variety), and Andrew Sarris (The Village Voice).

Film Criticism as a Cultural Institution first examines the contemporary crisis conversation surrounding film criticism, comparing this to historical precedents. It then provides what today's crisis conversation does not: an account of film criticism's institutional formations. Using primarily U.S. and Australian case studies based on interviews, observation and archival research—as well as accounts from other national schools—the book maps contemporary film criticism. Across various sites, such as publications or online spaces, and organisations, such as film critics circles, it elucidates film criticism's institutional practices, tasks, comportments, and personae.

Looking at the history of conversations about film criticism shows us that "crisis" has always been a leitmotif. While acknowledging the considerable changes and challenges that film criticism faces today, this book situates these within an historical context and proposes an institutional framework that allows us to move beyond crisis discourse. Looking at film criticism in this way allows us to see that the very question of what counts as film criticism is continually contested within an institutional ecology made up of distinctive critical comportments addressed to distinctive audiences.

Part I

Understanding the conversation

Chapter 1

Crisis and continuity in film criticism

This chapter examines what I will call the “crisis conversation” in film criticism at the turn of the 21st century. At the millennium there was fervent media discussion of the “crisis” in film criticism. This conversation played out across magazine feature articles and editorials, blog posts, symposia, panel discussions, and books.¹ In this chapter I identify the three key discourses that permeated this “crisis conversation”. I locate a discourse of the “Golden Age”, which saw contemporary critics look back nostalgically to the critics, and cinema, of earlier times; a discourse of “decline”, which saw contemporary critics detail the ways in which, and means by which, film criticism had deteriorated in recent times; and a discourse of “conflict” between film criticism and the film industry, which detailed the ways in which the film industry had disrespected and undermined film criticism in recent times.

But rather than simply cataloguing and taking at face value the claims made in this recent crisis conversation, I also compare these claims to historical conversations about film criticism. Conversations about film criticism have a history stretching back as far as film criticism’s emergence as an institution in the early 20th century. Comparing the recent and historical conversations about film criticism I find that each of the discourses of the most recent crisis conversation have their analogue in past conversations. I also compare the recent crisis conversation in film criticism against recent crisis conversations in arts criticism, once again finding equivalent discourses. If the symptoms of “crisis” in film criticism can be glimpsed in both historical conversations about film criticism, and recent conversations about other arts disciplines, this suggests that the crisis-making forces seemingly pervading film criticism at the turn-of-the-century were far from unprecedented; in fact they may be better understood as institutional features or norms. For this reason Mattias Frey (2015) has described film criticism as being in a state of “permanent crisis”.

If this is the case, we are forced to re-evaluate the purpose and function of this crisis conversation to its contributors, and to those of us with a scholarly interest in the institution of film criticism. For its contributors, the crisis conversation is a response to perceived threats to the institution as it is understood by certain members. It is a way of legislating and codifying the boundaries of film criticism in a time of uncertainty. This is done by stating “for the record” what does and does not constitute film criticism, with activities and comportments that do not accord with these values seen as uncritical, and symptomatic of a “crisis” within the institution. Recent and historical crisis conversations allow us to see the institution “from within” (Chouliaraki, 2008: 32). They explicate the expectations, roles, and perceived rights of critics and other institutional stakeholders. By analysing film criticism’s response to perceived crises, it is possible to gain an understanding of the internal logics and dynamics that shape the institution.

The “Golden Age” of film criticism

In the conversation about film criticism at the turn of the 21st century, there was a sense that film criticism’s “Golden Age” had passed. The idea that film criticism had a Golden Age, and that the tide had ebbed since that high water mark, was key to the sense of film criticism being in crisis. After all, in order for the notion of a crisis in film criticism to make sense there must be an earlier point of robust good health and a set of ideal operating procedures and conditions from which we have declined. So I will begin by examining how the Golden Age of film criticism was constructed in recent conversation.

The time and duration of film criticism’s Golden Age differs slightly depending on the critic, but whenever then “then” was, it differs starkly from now. For Josh Young of Esquire, criticism’s Golden Age is simply “the 1950s”, a time before “TV […] home video, and the public’s shrinking attention span […] diminished the impact of serious criticism”.² James Wolcott spoke, colourfully, of a time when film critics “had the oral swagger of gunslingers. […] they had the power to kill individual films and kneecap entire careers” (Wolcott, 1997). Glenn Kenny suggested that contemporary film critics who “wax rhapsodical” over Pauline Kael were in mourning for an era when the film critic was “something of a big shot, could successfully dress down David Lean, all that sort of thing (“Film Crit. Internet”, 2008: 35).³

For many critics this Golden Age of serious, powerful, great film criticism was inextricable from a Golden Age of serious, powerful, great films. For Godfrey Cheshire, this was roughly the mid-1950s to the mid 1970s: “the great crest of the wave known as ‘cinema’ (movies seen and practiced as a rigorous, refined art)” or the era of “cinematic modernism” (“Film Crit. America”, 2000: 28). Richard Schickel agreed, describing this as a time when film critics were more important, even indispensible:

People were really trying to get a handle on the then-flourishing modern masters of the form—Bergman, Godard, Kurosawa, et al. Also the American movie was in an inspiringly unsettled state and was trying to expand and redefine its generic boundaries. The services of reviewers as mediators and explicators were more centrally interesting to readers then than they are now.

(“Film Crit. America”, 2000: 40)

The notion of a Golden Age of Art Cinema—post-war continental European cinema and the later New American Cinema—joining forces symbiotically with new critical forums and voices to constitute a Golden Age of Film Criticism is a compelling, seemingly uncontroversial, concept. Frey notes this same connection between great films and great criticism being made throughout the history of conversation on film criticism (Frey, 2015: 31–32, 106). But when we look back we realise that there was only one time in the history of film criticism when it was not prone to looking back nostalgically on its own history, and that is when it had no history to reflect upon. For instance, trade paper film critic and editorialist Louis Reeves Harrison looked forward, in 1911, to the day when a truly independent film criticism would arrive, noting that the best critics so far had been those whom “have not hesitated to sear morbid spots in the interest of the entire body” (Harrison, 1911a: 9). But while the sentiment is optimistic, the implication of the “morbidity” of the cinema and the ineffectualness of most criticism makes even this early commentary from inside film criticism of a piece with later conversations.

Take, for instance, an example from the midst of the “Golden Age” of cinematic modernism. Writing at the publication’s inception, Film Quarterly’s editor Ernest Callenbach described the situation in cinema globally in 1958 as “fairly bleak”: the Japanese cinema’s high water mark of Rashomon was a long distant memory; the British cinema “did not exist”; there were “stirrings” in Poland, France, and Spain “but the films were not imported”; Hollywood had “sunk back into ever costlier commercialism”; the impetus of Italian neo-realism was spent; and only the “isolated genius of […] Bergman and […] Bresson—both somehow outside of the main cultural stream—gave comfort” (Callenbach, 1951: 2). Comparing this account of the state of affairs in film in 1958 with reflections on the mid-century cinema offered at the turn of the 21st century, two thing becomes clear: in reflecting on the history of the cinema critics often mistake the canonical works of a given period for the “state of the cinema” at the time; and critics are likely to underestimate the cinema of their own time. A future critic’s “Golden Age” may be a past critic’s “bleak” period.

The tendency of contemporary critics to extrapolate a Golden Age based on rare, extraordinary, or non-indicative examples applies as well to film critics of previous eras as it does to cinema. Golden Age critics are credited with a larger audience and greater cultural relevance that they actually enjoyed. A 1970 magazine profile of American film critics distinguished between the bulk of film “reviewers”—whom the majority of the film audience would vernacularly nominate as film critics—and those few writers who work in the context of film reviewing, yet attempt “with varying degrees of success to speak less as reviewers than true critics” (Koch, 1970: 12). These “critical reviewers”, such as Stanley Kaufman, Andrew Sarris, and Pauline Kael, address their carefully reasoned judgements to much smaller audiences, and “are not the ones who can fill theatres” (Koch, 1970: 12). While they were recognised in their own time as addressing a coterie, their longevity and continued relevance to contemporary readers sees the critical reviewer stand as the sole representative of all the varied levels of critical activity of their time.

Contemporary film critics’ nostalgia for their predecessors often centres on their perceived power and influence. But like his contemporary equivalents Lou Greenspan claimed in 1967 that film criticism “has fallen to the lowest level in 40 years, with professional writers on our newspapers and national magazines becoming less and less effective” (Greenspan, 1967: n.p.). A year earlier a survey of film critics in trade paper the Motion Picture Herald asked Pittsburgh Press critic Kasper Monahan what influence critics have on their readers. His answer: None. Meanwhile London Daily Mirror critic Dick Richards foreshadowed turn-of-the-century concerns about the internet, offering that “ultimately, the public becomes its own critic”, how else to explain lines around the block for films critics abhorred? (Richards qtd. in Weaver, 1966: 6). A neat summation of the limited powers of the film critic comes from a 1945 vox populi survey of the line outside an Edinburgh cinema:

Fourteen of the twenty persons interviewed admitted reading film criticism, but said they ignored it as too often it turned out they liked the film critics did not. As about half liked the star, the answer would seem to be that star appeal is a major factor in inducing patrons to attend, while habit is almost as important.

(“Film Critics Read”, 1945: 11)

These historical perspectives are echoed by contemporary scholarly studies in the social sciences, which find only a weak correlation between critical opinion and audience attendance. Even then this is only in the case of certain “legitimate” (prestigious, artistic) films and genres, and only amongst the relatively small audience that puts a premium on artistic distinction (Frey, 2015: 114–115).

If ever there was a golden age (and location) of film criticism it was perhaps the cine-club and small-magazine boom of post Second World War Parisian film culture that birthed the Nouvelle Vague. But during this peak critical moment the movement’s patriarch, André Bazin, reflected that “few people read film criticism; reviews have little bearing on a film’s success at the box office, especially in the face of mass marketing, and the exchange between critics and filmmakers is nearly nonexistent” (Watts, 2010: 2015). By measure of the most literal kind of “influence”, Bazin wrote of film criticism’s “near-futility”: “to write film criticism is more or less the equivalent of spitting from a bridge” (Bazin qtd. in Watts, 2010: 2015).

Film criticism in decline

If there was indeed a Golden Age of film criticism, and that age is behind us, then what has occurred to bring about the institution’s downfall, and what prevents its resurrection? The contemporary conversation recognised a cocktail of disparate causes that could be grouped together under the heading of “a shift in the culture”. Variety’s Todd McCarthy offers a concise summary of some of the forces that are seen to have contributed to a critical malaise:

My general view, shared by many I’m sure, is that so-called serious film criticism, like serious films, seems to matter much less than it did two or three decades ago, that a collective sense of film history is on the decline, despite the paradoxical increase in the easy availability of thousands of older films, that the opportunities to see anything but the latest pictures on the big screen are exceedingly difficult anywhere outside of a handful of major metropolitan areas; that magazine/newspaper editors subscribe to industry-generated hype to the extent of effectively marginalizing or eliminating coverage of more interesting foreign/independent/specialized fare and that too many critics are oriented toward box-office views of film achievement.

(“Film Crit. America”, 2000: 37)

As McCarthy’s overview makes clear, complaints about film criticism’s declining place in print journalism were commonplace even before the global financial crisis of 2008. In the same critical forum David Ansen (then of Newsweek) asked: “is there a magazine outside of The New Yorker or The Atlantic that hasn’t seen the pictures get larger, and the text smaller, in the past twenty years?” (“Film Crit. America”, 2000: 27). And while Ebert reminded us that such constraints are commercial-journalistic imperatives (“Film Crit. America”, 2000: 33), many critics felt like their publications were inherently and increasingly anti-critical in disposition. Editors are villains of the crisis conversation narrative in the same way—as we will see in later sections—as marketers, publicists, and distributors. Editors are often seen as the functionaries of the media arm of a media/industry alliance against film criticism:

editors, perhaps pressured by publishers (with marketing studies in hand), may ask critics to shorten and punch up their reviews, assign star or letter grades to the movies, omit qualifying paragraphs, lines of reasoning, evocation—everything that makes a review criticism and not thumbs up or thumbs down hackwork. […] all too often editors cut critics down to size any way they can.

(David Denby qtd. in “Film Crit. America”, 2000: 31)

Stories exposing an editorial preference for coverage of commercial or popular cinema also abound, though the editor is sometimes given the benefit of the doubt and painted as ignorant rather than malevolent. Jonathan Romney of The Independent describes “having to persuade editors that what’s important as film is not necessarily the same as what’s considered important as ‘news,’ which invariably means the Hollywood releases” (“International Film Crit.”, 2005: 44). Such experiences were not limited to the Anglosphere: a study of the arts pages in Finland’s largest newspaper reported a take-over of “journalistic values” (Romney’s “news values”) beginning in the 1990s (Hellman and Jaakkola cited in Hakola, 2015: 180–181).

With print already waning at the turn of the century, film critics were ready to consider what prospects the internet held out for more satisfactory critical discourse. The online space was seen as a potential counterweight to “commercial imperatives” (Andrew Tracy qtd. in “International Film Crit.”, 2005: 44) and the “blandness of the official film culture, which is more preoccupied with box office grosses than artistic excellence” (“Film Crit. Cyberspace”, 2003). It even held out the hope of a return to a Golden Age of film criticism, according to Zach Campbell: “blog and online discussion communities today, at their best, perpetuate the luxurious bloom of small cinema magazines and cine-club chat that proliferated all over the world’s film cultures in earlier decades” (“Film Crit. Internet”, 2008: 31).

But the internet was more often seen as a wrecker than a saviour when it came to the decline of critical discourse on film. For instance Edelstein took issue with the idea that the internet was free from the “journalistic” imperative to speak to a mainstream audience: “because the medium is so interactive, there is more pressure for critics at big outlets to be mainstream-friendly” he says, “no matter how highbrow your publication you’re still confronted with anti-intellectualism at its most virulent” (“Film Crit. America”, 2000: 34). Then there was the fear that the “literary-essayistic” tradition of film criticism was being eroded by new patterns of online discourse:

the instant-response capability of the Net has allowed those conversations, arguments, or grudge matches to be played out in something approaching real time—and, at its worst, has had the adverse effect of personalizing film discourse to a truly uncomfortable degree, detaching it wholly from the literary models and hurling it into the pettiness, snideness, knee-jerk irrationality, and fatuous posing of everyday speech.

(Tracy qtd. in “Film Crit. Internet”, 2008: 44)

In this way the internet was seen as a contributor to a more generalised intellectual decline in critical discourse on film. Anne Thompson complained that her film students’ “fickle” approach to entertainment and distracted web browsing made them susceptible to film marketing and inaccessible to the entreaties of film critics, who hold no relevance for them (Thompson, 2008). Sight and Sound columnist Nick Roddick regretfully explained that in order for critics to remain relevant to the contemporary “average cinemagoer”, they must “test drive” the film for “a 21-year-old whose idea of star appeal is Paris Hilton in her underwear”. Their former role, in contrast, had been to “give an expert opinion” (Roddick, 2007: 12). Edelstein bemoaned the “increasing inability of the general public to read and understand criticism” (“Film Crit. America”, 2000: 34) while a Cineaste editorial warned against the “twin threats of commercialism and philistinism that threaten to extinguish [film culture]” (“Film Crit. Cyberspace”, 2003).

For some critics this dumbing down of film criticism was a symptom of the absence of agreed standards or credentials for the professional film critic. Jonathan Rosenbaum claimed that those in a position to give jobs in film crit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Film criticism as a cultural institution
• PART I: Understanding the conversation
• PART II: Towards an ecology
• Epilogue: Film criticism in the new century
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index