This is not my bailiwick, and I assume you have all seen this, but I’d be interested in your reactions:Â The Death of Film Criticism. I’m particularly interested in how colleges and universities — the discipline — evaluates and weighs scholarship published outside of the usual refereed print formats.
Hmmm…not too insightful. Hampered, not doubt, by the fact that the author is himself not a blogger, nor seems to be familiar with what film blogs are out there (the variety, the varying degrees of quality, the different types of contributors/audiences).
And “DSL hotline.” Really? DSL? Oh my.
Another quotation: “Predictably, the old guard sees the newbies as semiliterate troglodytes who prowl the viral veld grunting out expletives.” Okay, then tell us the not-predictable. Who besides Reed and Schickel has weighed in on the issue (which, I’m still convinced, is a non-issue)?
The piece seems to both reflect and resist the tone of the documentary it cites: elegaic. “The Death of Film Criticism”–perhaps this should be changed to “The Recent Deaths of a Few Great Film Critics” (Kael, Siskel, Sontag, and, hopefully not for some time, Ebert). “Hellooo?” chirp in unison Anthony Lane, David Denby, Scott, Dargis, Holden, Canby, Turan, and the much loved (by me at least) Elvis Mitchell.
Lastly: Traditional film critics adorn their reviews with prose that is expansive and deeply personal. Bloggers say “It sucks.” But then the author cites Variety‘s review of Battleship Potemkin: “utterly devoid of entertainment and box office value.” Read: “it sucks.”
I remember asking Reynolds years ago why it is that book reviews which slam the book reviewed always seem to be written by people who are predisposed to hate the book. Why are articles such as this (“crisis X was created by bloggers”) always written by people who seem to lack even the remotest interest in blogging?
Still, my interest in the documentary has been piqued.
Just saw that the author, Thomas Doherty, got his Ph.D. from Iowa. Just so happens that its Department of Cinema & Comparative Literature may be dissolved. Those who are interested can visit the SCMS website to learn more (SCMS has posted a letter from the department’s director). If you do a google search, you can actually read the Provost’s initial recommendation.
I read that letter with mixed feelings. I don’t really know what “good” placement means. I do know that there are very few film studies jobs available per year (maybe 20 that I see?) and they regularly report receiving 200-300 applicants. So I am really wondering if shutting down departments, one of whose main areas of prestige is turning out graduates who cannot find jobs, is not such a bad idea. No doubt the administration is made up of corporate-minded scumbags, like at many places; however,the bleating of the professoriate, who are mostly only too happy to churn out students without doing much to improve their working conditions or prospects of employment, does not move me a great deal either. I’m sure it’s a big deal for Corey, but perhaps it’s just the chickens coming home to roost for insular minded departments who put a great deal of faith in academic procedures of legitimation and reproduction. How much really should we moved by the plea that many graduates can be found at the “finest universities?” Thank god they weren’t found at less “fine” universities!
Regarding the actual topic of the post: it’s odd that Siskel and Ebert, as well as Rex Reed, would be upheld as exemplars of an earlier literate age of film criticism, when their approach to film reviewing was/is highly criticized for superficiality (thumbs up!). It’s also odd that such praise would be heaped on Sarris and Kael, when reviewers like this, despite their reputations, have no currency within most academic programs, at least in my experience, because they lack genuine “theory.” Does the university have a critical role in the promotion of a literate public discourse about film? But I suppose they can all be uncritically lumped together to bash the “blogosphere.” I’m not particularly interested in advocating for the blogosphere (except for this one, which seems to usually go beyond “it sucks,” no?) but I’m not much interested either in the ongoing tradition of hand-wringing commentary about the “disappearance” of this or that, when its appearance was not really ever what it’s claimed to be. One only has to read the endless commentaries on academia by the likes of Stanley Fish to discern the genre of critique often favored by the Chronicle and other publications–where the importance of a non-issue is foregrounded according to some pretty suspect notions of “culture” which either mispercieve or distort the role of the university, even for those at its “higher” ends.
I agree with Michael. Thumbs up!
A similar argument erupted around the death of the print book review, and the complementary (and suspicious) growth of ‘net reviews. (There, a lot of criticism zeroed in on Amazon’s approach, and the way books are “pushed”–copies sent ahead to “favored” reviewers, etc. That’s a subject for another post.)
But what intrigues me is a problem at the heart of the Ol’ Kentucky Home handwringing about film or book blogospherics: what is the nature of criticism? Not just who owns it, and who is authorized to produce it, but what is its nature? I am often startled by how “sophisticated” academic treatises on the problematics of representation in text A are sneaky variations on “It sucks.” So, whither value, cultural critique, aesthetic judgment, the literacy of critical writing, etc…..?
But more anon. Thanks for the first shot and the subsequent posts–an intriguing subject.