La lectora provisoria

Ayer hubo un panel en Valdivia sobre el estado de la crítica cinematográfica. Adrian Martin leyó este articulo inspirador. El talibán Q sugirió la abolición de las revistas de cine, como Rouge, la que edita on line Adrian Martin. F

THE STATE OF FILM CRITICISM – Valdivia 8 October

por Adrian Martin

I would like to kick off this discussion on the state of film criticism today by proposing a few brief definitions, ideas and contexts.

Lorena Cancela, Gonzalo Maza, Iván Pinto, Quintín, Adrian Martin y Juan Pablo Miranda

Firstly, I think it is useful to think about film criticism happening across three levels. The first level is mass media journalism: the kind of film reviewing and feature writing that takes in place in newspapers and general non-film magazines, as well on radio and on television.

To most of the people who are not here today in this room, the people who read some film criticism in a casual, everyday, sometimes interested way, this really is the their “whole world” of film criticism as they experience it. Most film reviewing in the mass media, as we know, is overwhelmingly fixated on the commercial cinema as it is released in theatres from week to week: the latest films, movie stars, and box-office money reports.

The second level is what I think of as the “middle range” of film criticism, usually in regular film magazines that can offer quite intellectual commentary, but in an accessible, fairly easily readable way.

The readers for this second level of film criticism are generally specifically interested in cinema, or they have a more general interest in reading about culture and the arts.

In this category would go many of the well-established magazines around the world such as Sight and Sound in Britain, Film Comment in the USA, and El Amante in Argentina. These magazines may look at cinema`s past, but they are primarily focused on the present: the latest films, events, Festivals, and so on.

The third level of film criticism is the academic, generally university-based level. This is where film criticism becomes film history and film theory. Its home is the academic journal, and its readership is usually very small and specialised.

Now, having proposed these three categories, I want to make clear straight away that they have no hierarchy, and the lines between them are often blurred. I am not saying that the university is superior to journalism, or vice versa. I believe we can, and we must, do the best work we can in all these spaces for criticism, and history gives us many great examples of critics who have “crossed the borders” or mixed up their modes of address in a very productive way. All of us here today on the panel have worked across these three “sites” at different times, in publications such as the FIPRESCI (International Film Critics Association) website and its on-line journal Undercurrent.

But, I would propose to you that, at certain moments in time, we need to maybe concentrate our energies one or two of these sites, and this need is facing us today.

At the present time, we are hearing a lot in many countries about the “crisis of film criticism”. The word crisis always implies to me death, paralysis or nervous breakdown, so I prefer the word “emergency” – because, in an emergency, I hope that something new is in the process of emerging.

What is the so-called “crisis in film criticism”? Basically, it is about, on the one hand, the major evacuation of true film criticism from the increasingly corrupt, over-controlled world of mass media journalism. And, on the other hand, it is about an anxiety concerning the rise of film criticism on the Internet – and the Internet is an enormous “delivery system” that of course can carry every kind of film criticism, journalistic, middle-range or academic.

In the world of mass media journalism, most real film critics are either being retired (like Jonathan Rosenbaum) or being fired. At last, the inevitable has occurred: the big movie companies have decided that they no longer need critics to publicise and discuss their products, to make them known, or give them an added “special cultural value”. The movie companies almost completely control, by now, what newspapers, radio and TV can say about films. I know this development very well, because I quit my job as a newspaper film critic at the start of 2006, when my articles were being slashed to make room for more advertisements, so I decided to leave, with no desire, at this moment, to return.

On the other hand we have the Internet, and a vast explosion of millions of words and images of every kind concerning film. Of course, the big movie companies, the Hollywood studios and so on, are doing their best to control the Internet as well. But such total control is still not possible.

Many older, established critics are nervous about the Internet. Some University film teachers, also are worried. They suspect that what appears on the Internet lacks cultural authority, and it is unprofessional. It is a kind of democratic nightmare, everybody shouting their stupid opinions all at the same time. It seems, to some people, like an unholy chaos. And it is harder, today, to imagine a professional “career path” for a film critic. Instead, people are just doing film criticism for themselves, expressing themselves and “putting it out there”.

I believe we need to put this “professional anxiety” aside. We also need to stop celebrating “democracy for its own sake” on the Internet. Now is the time for work, hard work. But we need to situate this work in a very particular mood, a very particular context.

I would like to remind you that many of the greatest magazines or publications of film criticism were proudly and defiantly amateur operations. And I would also like to remind you that the word “amateur” means a lover, a lover of some chosen object or field, who constantly cultivates and refines and polishes his or her love.

In fact, my very favourite definition, of all time, of what a film critic is, comes from Serge Daney: he said that a critic should be someone who “knows something, and loves something, and knows why he or she loves something”. Which is easy and great to say, but harder to really achieve. It takes years of work, and that work is both individual and communal or collective.

Today, to put it bluntly from my perspective, it is that “middle range” of film criticism we must commit to, strongly and passionately and vigorously. We must expand this middle range, and pull more into it from all directions. And we must pursue this dream not only in old-fashioned, single-language “hard cover” publications – but in a multi-lingual, cross-cultural way, on the Internet.

In Chile, for example, Mabuse and La Fuga, provide two great on-line examples of initiatives that are trying to combine and bridge the informative, the intelligent and the intellectual aspects of film criticism. We could all, I am sure, mention other important examples, such as Ekran and Kino in Slovenia, or Criticine in the Phillipines, or Filmkrant in Holland.

You will notice that it is in the comparatively smaller countries that these important initiatives are happening, places like Chile, Argentina, or my own Australia. But not so much yet in England or America or France, the “old world powers” that are expressing all this anxiety about crisis and the “loss of solid values and standards” in criticism. There is a lesson in this, which I have found myself saying a lot here in Valdivia: the smaller countries have to get together and collaborate more, for that is where the next revolution in film criticism is going to come from. Not in the pages of The New York Times or on the Entertainment Cable TV Hollywood Gossip programmes! And maybe not even in Film Comment or Sight and Sound or the French Cahiers du cinéma, which the filmmaker Jonas Mekas recently described as “just routine outlets” which have lost their fire, their original reason for being.

I have two quick ideas to end with. The first idea is about the format of a film magazine in the age of the Internet. Too often, we go into a new technology, with its new possibilities, with the same old ideas of what a publication should be, and what it should do. In terms of a “middle range” film magazine, this means we head straight for the latest interesting films, the latest Festivals, the latest books; we do interviews and write reviews, we talk about directors, and do some “overview” essay pieces. But this standard “spread” is not enough anymore, it is blocking our critical, intellectual imagination. We need to completely redefine what a “film magazine” is or could be, and I am interested to hear how my colleagues respond to that challenge.

The second idea is about blogs, the “blogosphere”. Right at this second, it is some of the film blogs that are doing the most interesting, innovative work in film criticism and cultural commentary – such as Quintín and Flavia`s great blog, La Lectora Provisoria – which has already had, over this past week, five instalments of their “Valdivia Diary”, and that is instant, on-the-spot criticism for you!

About fifteen years ago, before the Internet explosion, the French critic Nicole Brenez spoke of one of the last books by Serge Daney: the diary he kept in the months leading up to his death, gathered into a book which is titled The Exercise Has Been Beneficial, Sir. What Nicole said about this book, prophetically, is that is an incredible mixture of writing modes: intimate confession, scholarly analysis, fugitive notes, poetic reveries, angry complaints – every kind of rapture, and every kind of “settling of accounts”. Nicole added that this mixture of styles, in the end, captures something “proper to cinema”, something that corresponds to the cinema`s own incessant mixture of documentary and fiction, fantasy and testimony, memory and dream. And when I see the latest amazing mixtures of these elements in the best films shown here at Valdivia, I know we have to hurry up to produce a new kind of film criticism, a criticism that is proper to our time.

Thank you.

This entry was posted on Jueves, Octubre 9th, 2008 at 11:37 am and is filed under Cine, Festival de Valdivia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.