This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, June 16, 2009 - We've been busy at Cinema St. Louis, preparing the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase (which unspools from July 18-23) and putting together our inaugural French Film Festival (which plays from Aug. 28-30). Because of that activity, we've been neglectful of the Lens.
Rather than leave the blog sitting idle, collecting virtual dust, I thought those still faithfully checking in might find some of my ancient scribblings at least modestly entertaining. Cinephilic geezers out there might remember that I served as a film critic with the Riverfront Times for 17 years or so, beginning way back in 1983. The vast majority of my writing now exists only on yellowing newsprint or microfilm, so I've recently been collecting my old reviews and articles for electronic safekeeping. Instead of packing them immediately away, I'm going to air them out a bit by posting select pieces on the Lens.
I'm starting with an article I wrote sometime in the late 1980s or early '90s - I no longer can locate the exact date - in which I bemoan the state of film criticism. I recall that the piece was written in response to a letters-to-the-editor exchange in which a few aggrieved readers were complaining about the furrowed-brow seriousness of the RFT's reviews. Sadly, the points I make here are even more relevant today.
A few addenda: I've resisted doing any significant rewriting, so there's some clearly dated references, but I did some small tinkering to acknowledge events (such as the death of Gene Siskel) that have transpired since the article's original publication. More pertinently, the piece was originally accompanied by a Matt Groening "Life in Hell" cartoon, the scathingly hilarious "How to Be a Clever Film Critic," and I hoped to locate it on the Web and provide a link. Alas, Groening has successfully defended his copyright, and it seems unavailable for free viewing. I reference the cartoon a few times, but the points I make will be clear even without helpful illustration. For the curious, the cartoon can be found in Groening's "Love Is Hell" volume. Buy it.
I'll continue posting these long-lost "classics" until I exhaust either the supply of sufficiently relevant reviews or the patience of the Lens' readers. We'll see which comes first.
Critical Review: A Thumbs Up to "serious" Film Criticism
Film talk is the currency of conversation. Offhand chatter of what's new at the movies, or just out on video, is part of the daily give-and-take, the everyday exchange of ideas -- in the office, on a date, across the bar, at any friendly gathering.
But the talk these days is increasingly cheap: the currency inflated, the ideas devalued.
Reviewers, who set the critical gold standard and help determine the rate of exchange, have allowed the stock placed in their opinions to plummet. Free-spending sorts, they've liberally increased the supply of praise to meet the public's demand: The word "masterpiece," once as rare as a $1,000 bill, is now as common a penny on the street -- and equally valueless.
The critic's thoughts are rapidly losing their worth.
***
Typical moviegoers, unlike the critic, don't so much discuss their thoughts on film as reveal their feelings, their gut, visceral reactions. We loved or hated the movie. We averted our eyes in delighted terror or dropped chin to chest and dozed from boredom. We laughed or cried -- or both.
These cocktail-party generalizations are conversational lubricants, a means of easing friction between newly met strangers, of keeping the dialogue rolling, of greasing discussion's gears. Film, a safely impersonal topic of easy familiarity and wide interest, provides a common ground on which to meet, a shared interest between diverse and even opposed personalities. The movies themselves -- and what we say about them -- are thus secondary to the interaction they enable: Films allow us to answer affirmatively when asked, "You talkin' to me?"
In a social context, this surface-skimming, man-was-it-great-you-gotta-see-it approach to movie "criticism" is perfectly understandable. Once graduated from school, most of us gladly abandon close analysis of art (in whatever form) and regard the books, music and films we read, hear and see as entertainment -- a way of passing the time more pleasantly, of entering a world at a far remove from life's dull routine. The box-office failure of "serious" films, at least those that eschew melodramatic conventions or fail to provide an uplifting ending, is a function of people's resistance to difficult, non-escapist subject matter: "I've got problems enough. I don't need a movie to remind me of them." That attitude, which is as likely to be held by a law-school graduate as a high-school dropout, eliminates much depth in our movie-oriented conversation. Giving that much thought to a film is too much like work, and going to the movies -- let's be honest -- is supposed to be fun.
There is a danger, however, in expecting those of us whose work is film criticism to assume the same let's-just-enjoy posture. What is the critic's job? Is a reviewer simply a consumer guide, a quick reference source for determining which movie to see on a Friday night? Or are there broader responsibilities attached to the role than summarizing plots and giving a thumbs up or down? As a reader and filmgoer, you've likely formulated your own answers, but allow me to offer a subjective view from the inside looking out: a reviewer's assessment of what constitutes the worth of one man's opinion.
***
We all hold opinions, of course: We exercise judgment, praise or disparage and zealously defend our positions. There's no "I'm right and you're wrong" to evaluating movies -- our likes and dislikes are too personal to be universalized -- so disagreement over a film's relative worth is a commonplace. A critic's assertion that a film is good or bad is of value as a guide for attendance only if the reviewer's preferences strongly coincide with the reader's (or diverge with predictable consistency: "If that guy hates it, I'm sure to love it"). Read a critic long enough, and certain patterns do emerge that enable you to make an educated guess about whether the recommendation of a particular film should be followed. A writer's prejudices against this or that genre or biases toward an actor or director become apparent over time, so some limited use can be made of reviews for deciding between film choices. The emphasis here is on the word "limited."
Unfortunately, this loved-it/hated-it approach is increasingly expected by the public and willingly offered by the reviewers. It's even been codified in ratings systems, the "cute 'n' easy consumer guides" that Matt Groening acidly satirizes in his "How to Be a Clever Film Critic" cartoon. Assigning four stars to a movie, rating it 9 on a scale of 10 or giving it a thumbs up isn't a shorthand method of criticism, it's a way of escaping the real work of reviewing -- the job of explaining, not asserting.
There's an inherent laziness, on the part of both reader and writer, involved in the rating process, a desire to simplify that which is annoyingly complex: Don't make me read (or write) the article, just give me that thumb. This alleged quantification of value is also dismissive of the film itself, even when the movie's rated highly, because of its reductive nature. The film is viewed as an addition problem, a toting of the positives and negatives to yield the final number.
The retrogressive movement of contemporary reviewing toward ratings and simple thoughts briefly expressed is usually most evident in the film criticism -- and the words are used advisedly -- offered on radio and television. Given only a few minutes in which to deliver an opinion, reviewers who work in these media must necessarily strive for concision and simplicity: A brief plot summary, a few film clips or sound bites and a hastily delivered opinion are essentially all that time allows.
Despite the inescapable restrictions, it remains possible to review a film on TV or radio with seriousness and dignity -- as Leonard Maltin once did for the otherwise insubstantial "Entertainment Tonight." Radio, because of its less rigid formatting, even allows for more extended, and intelligently astute, reviews. For reasons not altogether fathomable, however, movie reviewers on TV often regard themselves as entertainers, and the film under discussion becomes a pretext for jokes and generalized clowning.
The venerable Gene Shalit of NBC's "Today Show," for example, is an accomplished comedian, but his wordplay and mugging delivery focus more attention on himself than on the movie reviewed. Locally, Gentry Trotter was the inarguable nadir of this phenomenon: His breathless presentation was an eye-popping show, but his calculated outrageousness rendered his opinions ludicrous.
Television's slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am approach to film criticism has been increasingly adopted by newspaper and magazine reviewers (just as TV news' headline format, story brevity, personalities-over-issues orientation and flashy graphics have been translated into print by USA Today and People). Catering to the television generation's supposed preference for form over substance, editors demand short reviews, punchy, simple prose and that ubiquitous quick-reference ratings system.
Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert's TV show and the lame successors left behind as the pair moved from public television to cable to syndication have also further eroded critical standards. Ebert is (and the late Siskel was) capable of intelligent work in their writing, and their show was often stimulating fun, but the format of film clips, point-counterpoint and thumbs severely limits any substantive discussion.
Worse, print imitations are now duplicating the show's most egregious tendencies (particularly its emphasis on personality: the critic as star). The trend is a diminution of the craft (and, in some hands, the art) of criticism: If all a review offers is plot description, a few unsupported "critical" observations (along the order of "I thought it a bit overlong") and a conclusory yea or nay, the writer provides nothing more than a quick, time-killing read. It's the reviewer as everyman.
And everyone, after all, is a critic.
***
The long-held belief of many intelligent folks is that any damn fool can do the critic's job (and that plenty damn fools do). Because moviegoing is such a common, shared experience -- because we all attend, talk about and argue over films -- the general assumption is that no special knowledge is necessary to qualify as an "expert." Certain minimal language skills are required, perhaps, but otherwise a fannish enthusiasm and an in with the publisher are all the resume a critic purportedly needs.
People who would never question a specialist in other areas -- whether plumber or doctor -- think nothing of belittling the credentials of the critic. "Hey," they say, "I saw the same film. What's to know?"
Write about movies? Gimme a break. I mean, what could be easier?
That contemptuous attitude has certainly prevailed in the columns of most daily newspapers. Although some papers have made an effort to fill the film critic's post with a person educated in the field, the job has traditionally been awarded to writers trained as reporters first, reviewers second. (Groening's observation that the "Daily Type" of clever film critic writes nice plot summaries is absolutely dead on: As journalists, they recount the facts of the film concisely and with enviable clarity. Sometimes that's all they do.)
That obviously doesn't mean that all daily reviewers are therefore inadequate: The good ones (and we have a few right here in town) educate themselves in the job's requirements; the bad ones crib press materials and coast. Given either result, however, the underlying anybody-can-do-it presumption still nettles.
Most movies, it's admitted, are accessible even to a child -- all you need do is sit back and watch -- so enjoying and understanding them on a basic level is indisputably easy. But film's apparent simplicity is part of its complexity, an element of its art. The seamless, closed, unified quality of movies, particularly Hollywood movies, is an illusion: Look closely and the stitching shows, the multifarious parts become evident. A film is a complicated tangle, and the critic's job is its unraveling.
To accomplish that task, the critic needs tools -- an array of facts, a body of knowledge. What, then, is required? Let's inventory the workbench, briefly noting the information with which the reviewer should be at least superficially familiar:
- Film technology and technique: zoom, track, pan, fade, wipe, dissolve, dolly, crane, aspect ratio, blue screen, traveling matte, glass shot, rear projection.
- Film history: silent movies, national cinemas, the avant-garde, the documentary, the animated film, Hollywood studios, the star system, important movements (Russian formalism, German expressionism, Italian neorealism, the French new wave, American direct cinema, British social realism).
- Film genres: musicals, Westerns, gangster and crime films, film noir, horror movies, screwball comedy, melodramas.
- Filmmakers: Griffith, Porter, Chaplin, Keaton, von Stroheim, von Sternberg, Lubitsch, Hawks, Ford, Eisenstein, Gance, Ophuls, Murnau, Renoir, Bunuel, Sturges, Hitchcock, Disney, Rossellini, Welles, Flaherty, Dreyer, Bresson, Capra, Wilder, Lang, Kurosawa, Ozu, Bergman, Fellini, Godard, Truffaut, Kubrick, Huston, Lean, Antonioni, Polanski, Visconti, Bertolucci, Herzog, Fassbinder, Altman, Coppola, Scorsese.
- Film theory: formalism, realism, autuerism, modernism, structuralism and semiotics, feminism.
- Film criticism: important practitioners (Agee, Warshow, Ferguson, Farber, Sarris, Kael, Wood, Thomson), major journals of past and present (Sight and Sound, Movie, Screen, Sequence, Cahiers du Cinema, Film Culture, Film Comment, American Film, Take One, Film Quarterly, Cineaste, Jump Cut), key texts ("The American Cinema," "The Immediate Experience," "Agee on Film," "Talking Pictures," "How To Read a Film," "Movies and Methods").
- Film business: financing, self-censorship, production, distribution, exhibition.
Appended to the end of each of the above lists is an understood "etc.," for the examples given selectively represent rather than exhaust the categories. Nor does this catalog even take into account the "simple" practicalities of the actual filmmaking process, its complexity and uniqueness.
A film, unlike most works of art, is not the product of a single man or woman but of a group, and to fully appreciate the collaborative result, the critic must have an understanding of the different role each of the creators plays: director, producer, screenwriter, actor, cinematographer, editor, art director, costume designer, composer, sound mixer, casting director, special-effects unit, makeup designer.
Further, because of film's cannibalized nature -- its use of parts and pieces from virtually all other art forms -- the reviewer must have at least a working knowledge of literature, theater, art, photography and music. And if the critic is to intelligently judge a film outside a simply aesthetic context, a familiarity with history, politics, geography, socioeconomics, current events and pop culture proves essential.
It ain't rocket science, but done correctly, film criticism isn't quite the cinch that it sounds.
***
Critics, of course, don't consistently bring this knowledge to bear in a direct way, but it informs their work, lends it validity, gives it perspective. Depending on the medium and the intended audience, making too much use of such information can even be inappropriate.
Although I've used the terms interchangeably until now, the words "reviewer" and "critic" exist on a continuum, a sliding scale demarcated by the four sorts of clever film critics that Groening hilariously types. Down at the scale's far end, the "TV Clown" is arguably not even a reviewer: There's no intent to inform, only amuse, and any real understanding of film the "TV Clown" may have is largely irrelevant to the primary purpose of entertainment. As we move up the scale, however, it becomes increasingly important for the writer to have a well of film knowledge from which to draw: If the bucket comes up empty, the review (or critical essay) usually provides scant intellectual sustenance.
And that should be the purpose of criticism -- the provision of food for thought. Film's pervasive influence in the culture -- the ways in which it determines styles and attitudes, shapes or reflects trends, helps set society's agenda -- merits serious consideration.
The movie under discussion may seem juvenile or repellant or "just-for-fun," but a "Porky's," a "Nightmare on Elm Street," a "Top Gun" can reveal a great deal about the national psyche. The hidden messages a movie delivers, the invisible structures (social, political and psychological) that support and shape it, the meaning of a film and the means by which it's communicated: These are, or should be, the subjects of film criticism.
Whether a critic likes or dislikes a film and what the movie is about on a superficial narrative level are too often the exclusive focus of a review. A plot summary and statement of conclusive opinion are certainly relevant but are only secondarily important. The capable reviewer doesn't seek to gain silent, nodding assent ("Yeah, that's how I saw it, too"), but to elicit a response, to engage in a dialogue, to challenge readers' preconceptions, to identify aspects of the film that might escape an untrained observer's eye ("Say, I didn't notice that"). The good critic is a teacher, a sharer of knowledge and insight; occasionally, the critic is a provocateur, and the work should anger ("That guy's out to lunch").
The idea, ultimately, is not to eliminate the fun of movies -- as analysis is sometimes accused of doing -- but to expand the pleasures of filmgoing, to make it as stimulating intellectually as it is emotionally. The implicit assertion is that thinking about movies can offer as much entertainment as watching them.
***
Viewing a film, the moviegoer sits alone and enraptured, enveloped by and pleasurably lost in the darkness.
The critic, a few rows up and over to the left, shines a small guiding light in the hopes of adding illumination to the screen. Sometimes that light flickers and disappears, and sometimes it annoys. But in the best of times it reveals what would otherwise never be seen.
Cliff Froehlich heads Cinema St. Louis. The Lens is the blog of Cinema St. Louis, hosted by the Beacon.