Film criticism by the people, for the people
Posted by Mediascaper on May 16, 2009
I love movies — individually as works of art and entertainment, and collectively as an art form. I don’t, however, like movie snobs, who I would argue love movies less than they love themselves being so darn knowledgeable about movies. So if John Podhoretz had written a coherent, well-thought-out argument against movie snobbery, I would have been on board. Instead, his screed against professional film criticism comes off as shallow and anti-intellectual:
Film criticism requires nothing but an interesting sensibility. The more self-consciously educated one is in the field — by which I mean the more obscure the storehouse of cinematic knowledge a critic has — the less likely it is that one will have anything interesting to say to an ordinary person who isn’t all that interested in the condition of Finnish cinema.
Overlooking the ridiculousness of equating “self-consciously educated” with useless knowledge, I don’t know of any mainstream critics who needlessly shoehorn references to Finnish cinema — or anything that remotely obscure to American readers – into their reviews for a daily or weekly newspaper.
And I wonder how Podhoretz reconciles his argument with his own work as a critic. His ponderous review of the latest Star Trek opens with seven numbing grafs about an episode of the original TV show before bothering to briefly evaluate the film.
Podhoretz, who writes for the Weekly Standard, sets up his weak argument by claiming that readers don’t give a whit about what critics write. The best he can do to back up his claim is to cite a “story” about a “survey” in the 1980s that “proves” readers don’t read the paper for columnists or opinions:
And nobody, but nobody, knew the names of the critics. This was at a time when the paper in question had two movie critics, two theater critics, two television critics, two book critics, a dance critic, a rock critic, a classical music critic, and an architecture critic. It took the paper nearly three decades to get around to it, but the lead critics in all but one of these fields have taken buyouts and are not being replaced.
In raising the flag of populism — “Amateurism in the best sense will lead to some very interesting work by people whose primary motivation is simply to express themselves in relation to the work they’re seeing” — Podhoretz privileges the “purer critical impulse” of the amateur reviewer above the preening, show-off erudition of the cineaste who is paid to share his thoughts.
Podhoretz doesn’t seem to consider — or perhaps doesn’t care — that lifting the lid on one’s “storehouse of cinematic knowledge” can encourage readers to seek out films that might otherwise have never heard about. Or to view films from a previously unknown perspective and thus broaden their own appreciation for them.
It isn’t essential to know the influence Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress had on Star Wars. Or that the train station sequence in DePalma’s The Untouchables was an homage to the Odessa Steps scene in Battleship Potemkin. Or that any number of Hollywood products are glossy, hollowed-out renderings of far better foreign films.
But by no means should the inclusion of such knowledge in reviews be seen as indulgent. To limit a critic’s commentary to the work being reviewed does little to advance the appreciation of film as an art form, and deprives the audience of discovering films that influenced its structure and/or content.
