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"I believe," he wrote, "that every film critic should know, say, the difference between a pan and a dolly shot, a fill and key light, direct and reflected sound, the signified and the signifier, diegetic and non-diegetic music, and how both a tracking shot and depth of field can be ideological. They should know their jidai-geki from their gendai-geki, be familiar with the Kuleshov Effect and Truffaut's `Une certaine tendance du cinema francais,' know what the 180-degree rule is and the meaning of `suture."' (A link to the full essay is at boston.com/films).
So, yes, a working critic needs to have the tools and the invested hours of movie watching - needs to, in [Ronald Bergan]'s words, "have seen Jean-Luc Godard's `Histoire du Cinema,' and every film by Carl Dreyer, Robert Bresson, Jean Renoir, Luis Bunuel, and Ingmar Bergman, as well as those of Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet, and at least one by Germaine Dulac, Marcel L'Herbier, Mrinal Sen, Marguerite Duras, Mikio Naruse, Jean Eustache, and Stan Brakhage. They should be well versed in Russian constructivism, German expressionism, Italian neo-realism, Cinema Novo, La Nouvelle Vague, and the Dziga Vertov group."
Point taken, and if a critic has inhaled all those things and exhales them with every review, he or she will speak to no one but a self-contained coterie of academics. To hold the body of cinema, including every suspect frame of popular commercial movies, to the standards and terminology of the most rigorous aesthetic is to close the door on an immense audience of readers. Worse, it cheats the critic out of reading the same tea leaves the masses do, just in a different way. Junk speaks, often louder than art, and not everyone has ears trained to hear what it's saying.
Critic's Notebook
What does a movie reviewer need to know?
The scholar and critic Ronald Bergan posed this question on the Guardian UK's film blog in late March, and in doing so intentionally set the bar as high as possible.
"I believe," he wrote, "that every film critic should know, say, the difference between a pan and a dolly shot, a fill and key light, direct and reflected sound, the signified and the signifier, diegetic and non-diegetic music, and how both a tracking shot and depth of field can be ideological. They should know their jidai-geki from their gendai-geki, be familiar with the Kuleshov Effect and Truffaut's `Une certaine tendance du cinema francais,' know what the 180-degree rule is and the meaning of `suture."' (A link to the full essay is at boston.com/films).
But should they know their Sandra Bullock in-flight entertainment? Or, less glibly, why Pixar movies seem better than other kiddie cartoons, or how an arthouse hit like "The Lives of Others" hews to time-honored principles of melodrama, or why "Snakes on a Plane" matters and doesn't matter at the same time? As a working reviewer who does know from jidai-geki (it's much less fun to call them Japanese period films, isn't it?), Bergan's essay strikes me as a maddening defense of ivory-tower double-talk.
The irony is that he's also dead on. Unlike other areas of criticism and commentary, movie reviewing is perceived as a layman's game. As with TV and pop music - similar "people's mediums" - everyone's a critic. But are they?
Yes and no. If you come out of a film, and I don't care if it's "Talladega Nights" or "The Queen" or "The Lives of Others," and you have thoughts about it and can articulate them, you are indulging in criticism. Period. Bergan worries that professional film criticism has become "subjectively evaluative rather than analytical," but he forgets that A) this is how most people process art and/or entertainment, B) that's not a bad thing, and C) objectivity is a mirage. Dig deep enough into any critical opinion and you'll hit the mother lode of value judgment. To admit to that is honesty, not a failing.
So what does a critic bring to the table? What the reader needs: Context. I spent my high school and college years and post-college years watching movies, reading about film history, learning about the movie industry (Hollywood and elsewhere), studying film theory, parsing the mysteries of shot language and the grammar of editing. Far from over, the education continues with every new book on the subject, every new release in theaters, and, really, everything under the sun. A critic who's an expert in his or her field yet knows nothing about life is a particularly useless sort of monk.
So when I (or Wesley or Manohla Dargis at the New York Times or Peter Keough at the Boston Phoenix or Stephanie Zacharek at Slate.com) write about a movie, we're presenting our gut reaction. We're also setting that reaction within a context: how the movie's told, who the people are who made it, where it sits in its genre, how it plays fair (or not) by the rules of that genre. And then we go further, and position the movie in the culture it's part of, whether pop or artistic.
We do this not only to give readers an idea of whether it's something they might want to see but also to give them several angles from which to think about it. Even the shallowest brain-stem entertainments say things about the assumptions of the people who made them and the society they reflect. For instance: "300" - macho war whoop, big dumb fun, or willfully stoopid insistence on manliness in an anxious culture? Or, hey, the Mark Wahlberg movie "Shooter": liberal reimagining of "Dirty Harry"-style vigilante movies? Or the same old reactionary impulses gussied up with trendy anti-government rhetoric?
Or maybe "Shooter" is just an entertaining night out - if that's all you want out of it, fine. As a reviewer, my job is to let those who want their meat and potatoes know whether it's good meat and potatoes while also giving sustenance to those who want to burrow deeper into what a movie says (versus what it thinks it's saying; often a different thing entirely).
Some readers, of course, prefer Wong Kar-wai's "2046" or the films of David Lynch - conscious art rather than heedless commerce. Also fine. Then it's a critic's job to place the jewel in its setting: What does the film aim for and does it succeed? Where does it fit in the filmmaker's body of work? What's the smaller message and the larger one? How is that conveyed? Is there a message at all? Does one come to this film seeking incident and atmosphere rather than a statement?
For this kind of film, a critic requires the arsenal of education that Bergan talks about - he or she needs to work at least at the same level of sophistication as the filmmaker and the film's most receptive audience. Otherwise you're sending a pizza delivery boy to lecture on Picasso: He might have interestingly fresh things to say but they won't come from an informed consideration (unless he's an art history major). There are strengths in naivete but they tend to be nullified by the disadvantages.
So, yes, a working critic needs to have the tools and the invested hours of movie watching - needs to, in Bergan's words, "have seen Jean-Luc Godard's `Histoire du Cinema,' and every film by Carl Dreyer, Robert Bresson, Jean Renoir, Luis Bunuel, and Ingmar Bergman, as well as those of Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet, and at least one by Germaine Dulac, Marcel L'Herbier, Mrinal Sen, Marguerite Duras, Mikio Naruse, Jean Eustache, and Stan Brakhage. They should be well versed in Russian constructivism, German expressionism, Italian neo-realism, Cinema Novo, La Nouvelle Vague, and the Dziga Vertov group."
Point taken, and if a critic has inhaled all those things and exhales them with every review, he or she will speak to no one but a self-contained coterie of academics. To hold the body of cinema, including every suspect frame of popular commercial movies, to the standards and terminology of the most rigorous aesthetic is to close the door on an immense audience of readers. Worse, it cheats the critic out of reading the same tea leaves the masses do, just in a different way. Junk speaks, often louder than art, and not everyone has ears trained to hear what it's saying.
What does a critic need to know? Actually, before anything else, he or she needs to know how to write. You can't break the rules if you don't have the tools, by which I mean the basics - grammar, spelling, how to construct an argument - and the advance courses of how to establish a voice, how to make it flow, how to carry readers along to understanding a point they might not have considered. (Or how to get readers to see a film they might not have considered - in the final analysis, that's the only reason I do this job.)
For proof, I point you to the collected works of Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Pauline Kael, and Manny Farber. A glittering writing style can only get you so far, of course: The New Yorker's Anthony Lane is a terrific, multi-leveled read but why do I suspect he doesn't care all that much for movies? A critic has to have a love for his or her subject down in the bones. Why even get out of bed otherwise?
So: writing and love. Context. Really, though, we need to bring only as much of our film-geek knowledge and analysis to bear on a particular movie as it calls for - and then add a little more, to broaden the argument. Talking about the mise-en-scene of "300" or its lack of "indexical images" is pointless, at least in those terms. Talking about why the film's computer graphics connects it with video games and comic books while safely divorcing it from conventional realism - and how that lack of realism might reflect interestingly and unconsciously on our current adventures abroad - is perhaps taking the discussion out of the ivory tower and into the head of the average reader, for agreement or disagreement but at least engagement.
That's what every critic should know: How to engage a reader. How to make him or her see the thing afresh, whatever it may be, and even more than that the world that contains it.
Ty Burr can be reached at [email protected]. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
Caption: To properly serve readers, it doesn't hurt to be familiar with films ranging from classics like Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" (left, with Bengt Ekerot and Max von Sydow) to the mainstream such as "The Lake House" (with Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves).
Credit: Ty Burr Globe Staff.
(c) The Boston Globe Apr 15, 2007