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The Critic Is Dead...
In our information-overloaded age of e-critics and online networking, have traditional reviewers lost their power to make or break a film? Jasmina Kallay flings some rotten tomatoes.
The recent Guardian list of the top 1,000 films, serialised in daily supplements, roughly coincided with Sight & Sound’s special 75th anniversary edition featuring 75 obscure, albeit unknown films, or ‘hidden gems’, as they were called. The usual response to these lists is to see how many inclusions you agree with, but also to nitpick and find the one film that didn’t make it onto the list (my gripe with the Guardian’s list was the omission of Palme d’Or winner Theo Angelopoulos), thus giving you a reason to argue about the arbitrariness of selecting films that have shared cultural meaning. What was especially interesting, however, was the disparity between the two mentioned lists, both of which were compiled by film critics and not the public. For starters, only four film titles [1] were shared by both lists. This brought into relief some pertinent questions in regards to film criticism, namely what its current role and relevance is within the changing landscape of new digital media. While it’s beyond a doubt that the era of influential film critics of Pauline Kael’s ilk is well over, her assessment of film criticism in 1963 still holds: ‘Film criticism is exciting just because there is no formula to apply, just because you must use everything you are and everything you know’ [2] So the question is, how does what we are and what we know in this digital media age affect film criticism, and in turn, what is to be expected of the film critic?
If we go by Nietzsche’s remark that ‘Our writing materials contribute their part to our thinking’ [3], then we must turn to the internet and digital media theory for answers. The greatest and most obvious consequence of the internet is that printed opinion has lost its hold, and the plethora of individuals proffering their two-pence worth in blogs means we are no longer governed by a hierarchy within which a select few opinion-makers shape views and attitudes. This is what Mark Dery calls a ‘world unmediated by authorities and experts’ [4]; he goes on to deem that ‘The roles of reader, writer, and critic are so quickly interchangeable that they become increasingly irrelevant in a community of co-creation’. In this climate of co-creation, the average internet user is more likely to post his/her opinion before seeking out a more qualified criticism. Likewise, this same user will probably seek the opinions of like-minded souls among subjective and personable bloggers, and have greater trust in their judgement than in that of an impersonal, arch film critic. With the blurring of the lines between critic, reader, and writer, we are relinquishing the one-way form of criticism and entering a multi-lane highway of dialogue and debate, which alone could transform the concept of film criticism. Further erosion of the authority of printed media voices comes from the decamping of advertising revenue to online ventures, which means newspapers are frequently under pressure to placate their advertisers, a practice that at times involves editorial intervention in the critics’ assessments. Sight & Sound has sporadically commented on this market-fuelled and deplorable collusion of the editors who inflate a film’s rating with complete disregard for the critic’s article, thus creating a strange dichotomy of a fairly damning review finding itself in receipt of an unusually high number of stars (which also reveals the editor’s lack of faith in the average reader’s willingness to read beyond the star rating)!
1. Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948), Ladislaw Starewicz’s Le Roman de Renard (1931), Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1971) & Steve Roberts’s Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (1980)
2. I Lost It at the Movies, Pauline Kael, Little, Brown, 1965
3. Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, Friedrich Kittler, Stanford University Press, 1990
4. Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery, Duke University Press, 1993
The full article is printed in Film Ireland 118.
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