Briefly Noted: “Redeeming Criticism”

Some thoughts on the strangeness of film criticism, courtesy of The New Yorker, “Redeeming Criticism”  —

“The essence of criticism is disproportion: a director or a novelist may spend years on a film or a book, and the critic dispatches it in a few hours or a few days. The result is an essential indecency; criticism is a practice in need of redemption by its practitioners …Critics raise the practice from the parasitical by entering the field with artists, albeit metaphorically—by seeking the point of view of the artist.”

None of this is of course covering new territory that Oscar Wilde hasn’t already navigated for us, but it never hurts to stop and reflect on the purpose of an(y) act of criticism — the usual sorts of questions of objectivity vs. subjectivity apply here:

“These writers’ presumption to expertise in matters of technique and form actually reveals the opposite of the magisterial objectivity to which they lay claim: they’re thinking about their reactions to a movie rather than thinking about the movie. There’s no such thing as “bad acting” or “sloppy blocking” or “bad lines”; none of these aspects of a film exist apart from the ideas and emotions, the world view, of the filmmaker.”

Perhaps what sometimes irks us in a particular work of criticism is the presumption of objectivity —

“Most critics, myself included, lapse into the shoddy shorthand of our own pleasures when we feel constrained in space or time … The goal isn’t a more collegial sort of criticism—getting to an artist’s world view or inspiration doesn’t mean approving of it—or, for that matter, a less passionate one, but, rather, one that reflects the critic’s position and the responsibility that it entails, toward the film and toward oneself as a critic.”