An essay concerning the values and meanings of criticism

I have written about films since 1997, more or less regularly, yet I have never actually considered myself a critic. In the beginning I felt I was not qualified enough to call myself a critic (which was just silly) and the last ten years or so I have, when asked, preferred to called myself a film historian (which I am), but still, for reasons unclear, hesitated to use the word critic. Partly I think because it felt belittling (which is even more silly), and that scholar sounded more serious. But I love criticism and read it more or less every day, and have done so since 1997 as well. (Yes, that was an important year for many reasons. It was also the year I moved out of my parents' house, and, incidentally, the year I first sent an email. I remember it was that year because I had sent my first piece of film criticism to the editor by fax and he suggested I send it again as an email, if I had the means to do so. I had to ask a friend of a friend who had an email account.) So since I am qualified and it is not belittling I will henceforth refer to myself as a critic. Not exactly the Edmund Wilson of our time but a critic just the same.

There are three things by which a critic can be judged: the level of command of the facts, the validity of the opinions and the style of writing. I sometimes feel that the third part, style, is what I personally value the most. But somebody who gets all their facts wrong is of course intolerably, although many seems not to be all that bothered with it for some reason. So I read criticism for the artistry of it, i.e. the style. But also because I want to learn new things and to expand my horizons, and to find new ways of looking at things I am already familiar with. Among critics that I read and re-read are Pankaj Mishra, Edmund Wilson, James Wood, Ruth Halldén, Virginia Woolf, Lionel Trilling, and they have all enriched my life, influenced me, guided me. In the introduction to his excellent book The Critic in the Modern World, James Ley writes that "[o]ne of the most evident of the various cultural anxieties that have shadowed the practice of literary criticism throughout its modern history is a nagging sense of doubt about its necessity" but I do not have that nagging sense. On the one hand it is not more unnecessary that most other things we humans do. On the other hand, if it really served no purpose it would not exist. Since people write and read criticism it has a purpose and is a necessity.

None of those mentioned above were film critics but one of the contemporary film critics I particularly like is A.O. Scott at the New York Times and his book Better Living Through Criticism, just released, is the reason for this post. I read the book last week and it was a great pleasure, not least because it was written for people such as myself, by which I mean, among other things, that it is a book about people who love Henry James, the Louvre and Howard Hawks and who have had discussions about what art is and what criticism is, and often have had to speak up in defence of both art and criticism. Scott has done it before in a filmed discussion with David Carr in 2012, which can be considered something of a dress rehearsal for this book. After having seen their debate I commented on it in an earlier post (here) which I recommend that you read if you want to know my views on film criticism. Some of the comments about, or rather against, critics that came up in their discussion are also addressed in Scott's book.

Better Living Through Criticism is not just about film criticism; it is about criticism in general. One chapter is about museums, centred on the Louvre in Paris, and another chapter is about taste. Scott analyses poems by Rilke and Keats and does a fine reading of Henry James's novel The American. He discusses the arguments for being kind or for being harsh, and about the difference of being a bad critic and being wrong. Bad is not something to be, but to be wrong is both natural and healthy Scott believes, and I agree with that. It is not an exact science, and when we change, or the context changes, we might feel differently about something we once loved or hated. But some of Scott's examples are perhaps less than obvious. In the chapter about being wrong he writes about Frank S. Nugent's review of Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938). Nugent did not like it whereas today it is considered a classic and one of Hawks's finest, and Scott's point is that this is an example of how tastes change over time. I would like to point out though that there are many today who feel the same way about Baby as Nugent did in 1938, whereas Otis Ferguson, also writing in 1938, thought it was an excellent film. "This film holds together by virtue of constant invention and surprise in the situations; and Howard Hawks' direction, though it could have been less heavy and more supple, is essentially that of film comedy." Ferguson wrote in his review in The New Republic. So where does this leave us in terms of the changing of tastes?

Bringing Up Baby

Among the film critics of earlier days whom Scott does not mention but that I like to read are C.A. Lejeune and Dilys Powell, but then I would like them considering their unwavering championship of John Ford. Lejeune called him "probably the finest film director now living" ("now" being 1940) and they did not just like the social dramas such as The Informer (1935) or The Grapes of Wrath (1940) but his other films too, including the Westerns. Lejeune wrote a lovely review of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) for example. When Ford's The Sun Shines Bright (1953) came out Powell used it as a test-case in her review the same year, and pointing out how different art forms require different approaches:

To explain to a sophisticated taste why The Sun Shines Bright is so good a film strikes me as nearly impossible. A sophisticated literary taste, that is. In the cinema sophistication wears strange colours, and the most austere judge will admire a piece which to a reading man may appear tearful tosh. Nothing sadder than to watch some devoted film critic trying to explain to a dramatic or a literary critic - or even an art critic, for artists outside their own field are ruled more than they think by literary ideas - that to appreciate a film you have to look at it, not just listen to it. Human desperation can go no further. (From Powell's review in The Sunday Times.)

In the end of her review she points out that the film is not realistic in the sense that it is about the real world, but it does not pretend to be. It is Ford's world, "an artist's abstract of life".

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

It is worth emphasising this because conventional wisdom (and Scott's book is part of that convention) has it that before the critics at Cahiers du cinéma in the mid-1950s nobody took American popular cinema seriously and film directors were not considered artists. I do not know how many times I have read critics and scholars claiming that people such as Ford and Hitchcock were "discovered" by the French. But this is just not true. At best you could argue that the French critics enlarged the group of directors whom was taken seriously; they spoke favourably about, for example, Sam Fuller and Robert Aldrich in a way few had done before. But the directors of the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s who today are generally considered the elite are pretty much the same as was considered the elite before Cahiers, such as Eisenstein, Murnau, Ford, Wilder, Lang, Welles and Hitchcock. (Ferguson frequently referred to Hitchcock as "a genius", and in his review in The New Republic of The Lady Vanishes (1938) he called him "a one-man show /.../ almost an academy".) Perhaps the only definitive addition the critics at Cahiers made to the pantheon has been Hawks, with the qualification that in the US he had already been celebrated repeatedly by Manny Farber, and several French critics, already in the 1920s, loved his films. "It is a work of Howard Hawks, auteur of A Girl in Every Port, which in itself is a recommendation." Michel Vaucaire wrote about Scarface in Le Crapouillot in 1932, although Hawks's biggest French fan back then might have been Jean George Auriol.

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In High Fidelity (Stephen Frears 2000) Rob's girlfriend Laura is pushing him to start a record label and be a producer. Her argument is something like "It's that you're making something. You the critic, the professional appreciatory, are now putting something new into the world. The second one of those records are sold you're officially a part of it." The implication here is that if you are a critic you are not actually doing anything, and not contributing anything. It is not an unusual view and one of the reasons why Scott wrote his book is to argue against that point, and make the opposite claim. Criticism is creative and an art form in its own right. "That the critic is a craftsman of sorts is obvious enough; I want to insist that the critic is also a creator." (p. 17) In the second chapter he points out that many great artists, such as Jean-Luc Godard, T.S. Eliot and Édouard Manet, are critics not only because they write criticism but because in their art they are commenting on others films, books, poems and paintings. But a work of more traditional criticism, a review, an essay, can also in and of itself be a work of art. Art and criticism go hand in hand.

Scott quotes a lot of critics along the way but there is a quote by Alfred Kazin that he does not use, even though Kazin argues something else that Scott wants to put across, that criticism is "so basic a communication between men", So not only is criticism an art form, or can be, but it is also something we all do almost on a daily basis. It is part of being human. It is also an intellectual endeavour, and this is important for Scott. To think, to question, to criticise, these are things that we should do, and must do, if we are to prosper. And yet... "Anti-intellectualism is virtually our civic religion. 'Critical thinking' may be a ubiquitous educational slogan - a vaguely defined skill we hope our children pick up on the way to adulthood - but the rewards for not using your intelligence are immediate and abundant." (p. 10) So an important impetus behind the book is clearly that, to emphasise the importance of the free-thinking intellect when such a thing is not necessarily valued. But Scott does not fall into the trap of saying that there was once a golden age and now everything has gone to the dogs; he is more enlightened than that. He does also make fun of all those who have proclaimed the death of the movies and sighed about how they do not make good films any more. "Some of the most respected and shrewdly perceptive critics in the field have shared this view, at moments that would in due course be held up as pinnacles of glory: Agee in 1941, Manny Farber in 1962, Pauline Kael in 1979, David Denby in 2012." (p. 186)

But Better Living Through Criticism is not a history of criticism. It is a defence, and celebration, of criticism, and it does a very fine job of that. Now there are more new books on the subject, with a more strict focus on film criticism, such as Girish Shambu's The New Cinephilia and David Bordwell's forthcoming The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture. Hopefully I will return with posts about them too.

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I thought I end by mentioning some of my favourite film critics. One of the best, and for me personally most influential, is Tom Milne. Among other things he has written a great book about Rouben Mamoulian, been assistant editor of Sight & Sound, and he wrote reviews for various newspapers and in Time Out Film Guide (which he founded). He also translated French books and articles into English. My favourite of working critics today is Glenn Kenny, especially when he writes at his blog Some Came Running. Kenny, like Scott, also writes for the New York Times, as does another of the great ones, Manohla Dargis.

Awake in the Dark, edited by David Denby, is a fine collection of reviews and articles by a number of film critics, including many of those mentioned in this post.

Here, finally, is a video essay by Matt Zoller Seitz, also among the best critics today. (There is a lot more to Boetticher than the five films that are discussed in this video essay but it still captures the essence of the filmmaker.)



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Scott does on one page write about Dr Mabuse's island when I suspect he means Dr Moreau's, but I will not hold it against him. In any event the astute invocation of Monty Python's The Life of Brian (1979) at another point makes up for any mistake he might have made.

For more reviews by Otis Ferguson: The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson (1971)
For more reviews of Dilys Powell: The Golden Screen (1989) and The Dilys Powell Film Reader (1991)
For more reviews by C.A. Lejeune: The C.A. Lejeune Film Reader (1991)

Here is my homage to Andrew Sarris.
Here is my post about Robert Warshow.
Here is a post I wrote about by thoughts about art, and how I define it.
In 2012 I founded an online film journal, Frames Cinema Journal, and Catherine Grant was my guest-editor for the first issue. It has many articles on criticism in an age of open access.

Some suggested, non-film related, readings:
Irving Howe's 1969 essay about the New York Intellectuals.
Pankaj Mishra's wonderful essay Edmund Wilson in Benares.
Amit Chaudhuri's review of James Wood's latest book.
Alfred Kazin's book On Native Ground (1942).

The title of this post is of course inspired by John Locke.

The superlative act of the critic is to find in a work of art for the delight of modern temperaments some previously unsuspected implication of beauty. (Lewis E. Gates)

The idea of criticism

The first time something written by me got published was in 1997 (an article about Alexander Mackendrick in the Swedish film journal Filmrutan), and ever since then I have written essays, articles, reviews, blog posts and done interviews, alternating a life as a critic with a life as a projectionist, administrator, festival organiser, archivist, actor, scholar and lecturer. I have done pretty much all one can do when it comes to film, including making short films on my own. I feel I have a pretty solid knowledge about all aspects of film, the how, the when, the what and the why.

And yet when I write about a film I am always very much aware of my inadequacies. Even after having seen a film three times there might still be things that I have missed, that have escape my attention. I might read things into a film which were never there, and most certainly were never intended by anyone to be there. I may also struggle to explain why I like a particular film and not another one which is very similar. There are so many small things that affect us when we watch a film and anything we might say about it is merely a construction after the facts, an effort of our part to intellectualise a feeling, which we may or may not be able to fully understand. We may for example say that we did not like film X because it was politically conservative, yet we do like film Y even though it is equally conservative. Or let's say that somebody has been watching a film with a long car chase. Afterwards she says "That was a boring film. I don't like car chases, don't see the point of them." But that very same person also happens to love Bullitt (Peter Yates 1968), even though that has a long car chase in it. So it was not the car chase in itself that was the problem, even though it might have felt like it. It was perhaps rather the way the car chase was edited, or the way the car chase was integrated in the film as a whole. But that is more complicated, and just by watching the film we might not easily comprehend what it was we liked or did not like. Not really, even if we think so. It might be "Like an itch you cannot scratch.", as Morpheus says in The Matrix (Lana (formerly known as Larry) and Andy Wachowski 1999). But the best thing a critic can do is to try and explain how she felt and why, with some humility.

I am writing this because of the recently broadcast discussion between A.O. Scott and David Carr at the New York Times (here), which has since been doing the rounds on the internet among the usual, and un-usual, suspects. In the episode Carr attacks the art and the concept of film criticism, with arguments such as "Who are you to criticise somebody's work?", "A critic is just one guy.", "Critics never like films that are popular at the box office.", "Critics are elitist." The only argument he does not use is "All critics are failed filmmakers." Now, it is not clear whether Carr is actually believing what he says, or if he is just teasing Scott. One would hope so because if not he is very clichéd. I have heard all of those things before, many times, and I just do not understand any of them.

We all criticise everything all the time. That is part of human nature, and it takes many forms. From saying "That's an awful hat that guy's wearing!" to voting in a general election (because by voting for this particular party I am criticising all the other parties). There is no reason why we should not write criticism in newspapers or any other outlet.

As A.O. Scott pointed out, most of the things people say about critics are just myths, based on straw men critics. I think it is safe to assume that few of those that attack critics have read all that much criticism, and could not be bothered with it, which is just fine. There are elitist critics (whatever that is) and there are "popular" critics who are mostly interested in the recent blockbusters, and then there are those that are equally excited about the latest superhero movie and the latest film by Béla Tarr.

The argument that critics are all failed filmmakers makes even less sense, because the implication is that the critics hate all films because they themselves failed at making any. But has there ever been a critic who hates all films? Is such a person even conceivable?  It would be interesting if practising filmmmakers were also writing film criticism, but there is no reason to think that they would be more relevant or insightful than film critics who never made a film. You hear the same argument made about music critics, and it is as dumb there, but I wonder how common an argument it is in other forms if criticism. Are food critics called failed chefs? Are car critics called failed car makers?

There is also the view from filmmakers that it is very hard to make a film and therefore not fair to critique it afterwards, since all involved did their best. But that is neither there nor here. If that was a relevant argument we would hardly ever be able to critique anything. "I'm sorry, this soufflé is not any good, it's too much salt in it. I'm sending it back." "Do you know how hard it is to make a soufflé? How dare you criticise it?" We can only judge the result, not how hard it was to make. But then you hardly see any critics say "This film was awful and I don't understand why. For crying out loud, how hard can it be to make a multimillion dollar action film in which aliens attack New York?"

Another argument is "Why do we need critics? Why not just let the man on the street do the criticism." It is not clear what the difference would be though. It would still be just one guy, and who is he to say what is good or what is bad, and who gave him the right to criticise somebody else's work? Anybody can be a critic, just as long as they are able to articulate how and what they feel. There is little point in criticism which only says "This film is good." unless perhaps it is from somebody that you know well, and have the exact same taste as.

But do we even need critics? Well, no, not in the sense that we need doctors and firemen. But we do not not need them either. Reading good criticism is just as rewarding as watching a good film or reading a good book, it is just another form of expression, and just as valid and legitimate as any other form of expression. Tom in Metropolitan (Whit Stillman 1989) says "I don't read novels. I prefer good literary criticism." which is pushing it a bit too far... But good criticism can help as make sense of the world, of our thoughts and our likes and dislikes. It can help us grow. Good criticism might make us appreciate a work of art (be it a painting, a novel or a film) that we had not understood or previously liked, or it might help us navigate among the overwhelming amount of books and plays and films and albums out there that we do not have the time to read or watch or listen to. If I am interested in punk music I might want to read punk criticism to find out what to look for, where I should begin, and then after getting my bearings I can further explore on my own.

Of course there is a lot of bad criticism out there, bad because being inconsistent, hypocritical, offensive, arrogant or a-historical. But we should not judge criticism by its worst practitioners.

A.O. Scott on film criticism

Some day I might write down my own thoughts on the state of film criticism today, but until I do that, here's what A. O. Scott of the New York Times has to say. I rather liked the article.