The Permanent Crisis of Film Criticism: The Anxiety of Authority

by Mattias Frey

Film criticism is in crisis. Dwelling on the many film journalists made redundant at newspapers, magazines, and other 'old media' in past years, commentators have voiced existential questions about the purpose and worth of the profession in the age of WordPress blogospheres and proclaimed the 'death of the critic'. Bemoaning the current anarchy of internet amateurs and the lack of authoritative critics, many journalists and academics claim that in the digital age, cultural commentary has become dumbed down and fragmented into niche markets. Mattias Freu, arguing against these claims, examines the history of film critical discourse in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States . He demonstrates that since its origins, film criticism has always found itself in the need to show critical authority and the anxieties over challenges to that authority have been longstanding concerns.

194 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2015

Reviews

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

An antidote to all of the handwringing over the supposed dumbing down and death of film criticism brought on by the internets. Runs through the entire history of film criticism and finds it marked by almost constant crisis rhetoric triggered by changes in filmmaking, relationships to readers, or channels of distribution for film and its criticism. The rhetoric is used to establish or re-establish critical authority - who gets to talk about film and why. Super informative read.

[Nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Copiously researched and often fascinating. Frey offers some excellent scholarship on early film criticism, and the chapter on Sight and Sound and the BFI in the 1950s and 60s is absolutely outstanding. The historical analysis of Pauline Kael's impact on Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is also very helpful, although it wanders into a particular blind spot which, upon reflection, seems characteristic of the book as a whole (more in a second). My biggest overall takeaway from this book is a deeper understanding of the Victorian antecedents of film criticism, the concrete impact of the Nouvelle Vague on adjacent film cultures in Britain and Germany, as well as the instability of film criticism as a discipline/profession/vocation from its earliest manifestations.

In hindsight, I can't help but register disappointment at the flatness of Frey's approach here. He sets out to prove that "death of the critic" discourses (much popular in the late 00's / early '10s era when digital cinephilia began to really take off as an object of reflection and study, and when this book was presumably written) are rehashing a rhetoric of crisis which has never not been part and parcel with film criticism as a profession. He does this by way of historical documentation and analysis, which ably proves his point that film criticism by-and-large has never been a stable, monolithic institution which is now undergoing a demolition at the hands of late capitalism, the Internet, or Hollywood imbecility (pick your villain). At most, it achieved periods of brief and fecund stability in certain golden ages - Cahiers du Cinema and Sight and Sound in the 50s and 60s, Kael and Sarris in the 70s - which succeeded in educating and forming the taste of an elite intellectual middle class who went on to fill the shoes of their heroes in the 80s, 90s, and 00's, and whose nostalgic recollections of these titans as "public critics" fuels new decline-and-fall narratives. Frey's survey of the actual documents of each major epoch of film criticism effectively punctures the rosy memories.

What Frey's analysis doesn't do is offer much in the way of insights into the "why" behind those rosy memories. I believe his argument is incomplete without at least a nod to the importance of this question. History itself as a discipline is inextricably tied up with the notion of collective memory, and so much of the history of film criticism has been written in subjective, often autobiographical modes. A simple empirical rebuttal is effective at clearing the haze around certain actions and outcomes relating to a complex figure like Pauline Kael, but it has nothing to say about why so many Kaelian devotees succeeded in canonizing one particular history about her (the ideal type of the public American film critic, with the power to make or break careers). It seems to me that Frey runs up against the limits of a purely empirical approach here: his argument amounts to "there's really nothing to fuss about because everything has always been in a fuss" but he doesn't enter into an interrogation of why those who fuss the most have accepted the (empirically) faulty narrative to begin with. This, even though his concluding chapter notes that the cohort most responsible for a certain tendency in historicizing film criticism can be clearly traced out by class and educational markers, and whose writing constitutes a legitimate tradition which is collecting and passing on the wisdom of "the greats" from earlier ages (Anyone reading Nick Pinkerton in 2021 is at once being immersed in a stylistic and critical tradition which flows from Manny Farber, James Agee, and yes, Kael, with appeals to the authority of arguments like Farber's "white elephant and termite" discourse).

One could say he is wisely keeping his intentions narrow so as to deliver a tight historically-focused case, but in my view it only points up the limitations of a purely empirical approach in explaining a phenomenon that crosses psychological and ultimately metaphysical lines: what, truly, is so unstable about film criticism? To be fair: A turn into psychology would've indeed capsized the book. But an overture towards ontology? I think it would've been entirely appropriate to finish there without necessitating another 100 pages. The crux of the matter is that Frey effectively (and pleasurably) lays out 146 pages of proof that film criticism isn't uniquely in crisis right now, but it has always been so. This is insightful and rebuts the short-sighted hand wringing of newspaper critics, but, it must be asked what is ultimately driving the permanent crisis at its deepest level. That Frey either demurs to go down that path (or doesn't see the need for it) only highlights certain foundational limitations of the larger tradition of academic film studies as a conglomeration of empirical, positivist, and materialist disciplines