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FILM CRITICISM IN THE DIGITAL AGE Mattias Frey and Cecilia Sayad, eds. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2015, 273 pp.
If Roland Barthes's seminal 1968 pronouncement of the "Death of the Author" helped give birth to postmodern literary theory, it is our own digital age that has led to the crashing fade-out of the professional-and even semiprofessional-film critic. Over the last decade, we have read a litany of postmortems, ranging from the snide "good riddance" to elegies invoking the ghosts of Pauline Kael, James Agee, Andrew Sarris, and other pre-digital critical auteurs.
Although there has been a flurry of online articles underscoring this seismic shift, Film Criticism in the Digital Age ambitiously bills itself as "the first book-length study of its kind" (13). To that end, coeditors Frey and Sayad assemble both academic and popular analyses on the dearth-perhaps death-of the working film critic, caught up and rubbed out in the brave new World Wide Web of bottomless blogs and 140-character tweets. Refusing a simplistic "thumbs-up/thumbs down" approach, this useful if fitful anthology merits several stars, at least because it has the audacity to deliver its content in the old-school, contemplative, and tactile platform of print.
Frey's introduction provides a valuable recap of recent reports on the demise of film criticism-which, unfortunately, has not been exaggerated by those men (and a few women) who have remained standing since journalistic ink started running red in the 1990s. Frey cites the Salt Lake Tribune's Sean Means, who lists over fifty film critics purged from 2006 to 2010-including such stalwarts as David Ansen of Newsweek (itself now out of print) and Variety's Todd McCarthy. From these opening shots, Frey focuses in on the book's main debates: for example, the relationship between the critic and his or her audience; the effect the new media forms have on criticism itself and the critic as occupation; and perhaps most Orwellian, whether...