For a minute there, as you may know from my bio on the About page, I was a film critic in Hollywood. I wrote for Erik Samdahl's site Filmjabber. Seeing titles before the public got to was a treat; you could rely on an audience of journalists to be quiet, turn off their phones, and approach the act of watching a film with a certain amount of reverence.
At least, that's how it felt.
1. On Perceiving Aesthetics
The assumption that film was an art form and therefore deserving of analysis and careful respect was in the air, and I couldn't get enough. The sensation was different when I'd go see certain titles again with a paying public audience. There was more popcorn, more laughter, and less engagement. But I don't think either audience was smarter than the other; just a difference in how we choose to see. The film medium was invented so recently, comparatively speaking, and is of such ignoble origins that it's had a hard time being taken seriously as art. Too many of us think of cinema as entertainment, a diversion, like television.
I think it's more than that.
Television is the only medium about which viewers don't care about quality: it simply has to exist, so you can sit in front of it. It's a device for fighting boredom. For more on why TV and film are not, and never will be, the same thing, click here for an excellent list and exploration of how they differ (a few drawbacks of TV include: inability to use silence or slow pacing; overreliance on close-ups; favoring plot over character; simplistic structural progression requirements; necessity of false endings and arbitrarily extended narratives; drastically compressed shooting schedules).
The distinctions elucidated in that link are all to do with form, because if TV can now show everything onscreen that cinema can, the differences between the mediums must be formal, rather than substantive. And the reason why you see think-pieces on how great TV is is because most journalists have no training in form. The reason most people don't recognize film as art is because they don't have backgrounds in appreciating film form, and the reason I find film critics a valuable but ultimately dubious source of understanding cinema is also the same:
They almost never talk about form.
2. Sharing the Nuts and Bolts
In what other field would this be tolerated? Entire generations of analysts with no training or experience in the medium they purport to be experts in? Only popular music is in worse shape. Critics are at their best when they contextualize for us, linking a film to inspirations and relationships with other works in art, literature or society. This is what great critics do: not tell us whether they liked the movie or not, but broaden and deepen our understanding. If they were able to write about the how of a movie, rather than just the what, they'd be infinitely better at their jobs.
I'm not the first person to notice this. Reknowned film scholar Matt Zoeller Seitz takes critics to task over their laziness in a now-legendary 2014 essay: Please, Critics, Write About The Filmmaking.
"Form is not just an academic side dish to the main course of content," he writes. "We critics of film and TV have a duty to help viewers understand how form and and content interact, and how content is expressed through form. The film or TV critic who refuses to write about form in any serious way abdicates that duty, and abets visual illiteracy."
Just as we would naturally care about brushstrokes and color choices in painting, recognizing the expressive importance they have, aesthetics in cinema are what Seitz considers the "nuts and bolts: where the camera goes, and why it goes there. Why a scene included a lot of over-the-shoulder shots of a character speaking, even though the angle prevents you from seeing their lips moving. Why a particular scene was played entirely in closeup, or entirely in long shot. Basic stuff."
Seitz can't help but continue, and I can't help but continue quoting him- "We have several successive generations of film watchers—some of whom consume TV and movies voraciously and have surprisingly wide-ranging tastes—who don't know how to interpret a shot, or how to think about what the size or position of characters in a frame might tell us about the story's attitude toward those characters. That's a problem."
I articulate these concerns not for the sake of spite, but out of a desire to share. We could be getting so much more out of films, loving and feeling them to such greater degrees, recognizing their artistry in ways we– critics and audiences alike– don't have the vocabulary for.
3. A Bit About Why We're Here
For me, watching a film is analogous to going to an art museum. Art is the only profession that explores what it means to be alive. All the rest, though necessary, is secondary. I see cinema as exploration of human nature, depictions and ruminations on how we treat each other, how we think and feel and what we can learn by reflecting on that. Nothing could be more essential, and no art medium is as potent, as high-impact, as cinema. No other medium can manipulate time to such a degree, engage us on as many levels, or so completely replicate the experience of dreaming and memory.
Most film critics– and I say all this with kindness– have journalism or English backgrounds at best. I am not as good a writer as they, but I can offer something they're choosing not to; I'm lucky in that I come from both writing and cinema, literature and photography, the world of refined art history education and practice, and the world of hard-scrabble street life. I have not made many films, but I've done enough in film and photography to have some understanding of visual literacy.
The essays linked below are my attempt to fulfill Seitz's directive. They are not brilliant. Awards aside, I am not the best critic out there, nor the best filmmaker, photographer, bus driver, observer or chronicler of life. I can name vastly more inspiring figures in each of those roles whom I bow deeply to.*
But I might be the only person simultaneously doing all of those things in quite the way I do. It is with this hope I offer these writeups, that they might contribute in some small way to how we choose to see.
Enjoy!
*For some of the best writing on film technique, refer to the lucid, passionate work of David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson.
At least, that's how it felt.
1. On Perceiving Aesthetics
The assumption that film was an art form and therefore deserving of analysis and careful respect was in the air, and I couldn't get enough. The sensation was different when I'd go see certain titles again with a paying public audience. There was more popcorn, more laughter, and less engagement. But I don't think either audience was smarter than the other; just a difference in how we choose to see. The film medium was invented so recently, comparatively speaking, and is of such ignoble origins that it's had a hard time being taken seriously as art. Too many of us think of cinema as entertainment, a diversion, like television.
I think it's more than that.
Television is the only medium about which viewers don't care about quality: it simply has to exist, so you can sit in front of it. It's a device for fighting boredom. For more on why TV and film are not, and never will be, the same thing, click here for an excellent list and exploration of how they differ (a few drawbacks of TV include: inability to use silence or slow pacing; overreliance on close-ups; favoring plot over character; simplistic structural progression requirements; necessity of false endings and arbitrarily extended narratives; drastically compressed shooting schedules).
The distinctions elucidated in that link are all to do with form, because if TV can now show everything onscreen that cinema can, the differences between the mediums must be formal, rather than substantive. And the reason why you see think-pieces on how great TV is is because most journalists have no training in form. The reason most people don't recognize film as art is because they don't have backgrounds in appreciating film form, and the reason I find film critics a valuable but ultimately dubious source of understanding cinema is also the same:
They almost never talk about form.
2. Sharing the Nuts and Bolts
In what other field would this be tolerated? Entire generations of analysts with no training or experience in the medium they purport to be experts in? Only popular music is in worse shape. Critics are at their best when they contextualize for us, linking a film to inspirations and relationships with other works in art, literature or society. This is what great critics do: not tell us whether they liked the movie or not, but broaden and deepen our understanding. If they were able to write about the how of a movie, rather than just the what, they'd be infinitely better at their jobs.
I'm not the first person to notice this. Reknowned film scholar Matt Zoeller Seitz takes critics to task over their laziness in a now-legendary 2014 essay: Please, Critics, Write About The Filmmaking.
"Form is not just an academic side dish to the main course of content," he writes. "We critics of film and TV have a duty to help viewers understand how form and and content interact, and how content is expressed through form. The film or TV critic who refuses to write about form in any serious way abdicates that duty, and abets visual illiteracy."
Just as we would naturally care about brushstrokes and color choices in painting, recognizing the expressive importance they have, aesthetics in cinema are what Seitz considers the "nuts and bolts: where the camera goes, and why it goes there. Why a scene included a lot of over-the-shoulder shots of a character speaking, even though the angle prevents you from seeing their lips moving. Why a particular scene was played entirely in closeup, or entirely in long shot. Basic stuff."
Seitz can't help but continue, and I can't help but continue quoting him- "We have several successive generations of film watchers—some of whom consume TV and movies voraciously and have surprisingly wide-ranging tastes—who don't know how to interpret a shot, or how to think about what the size or position of characters in a frame might tell us about the story's attitude toward those characters. That's a problem."
I articulate these concerns not for the sake of spite, but out of a desire to share. We could be getting so much more out of films, loving and feeling them to such greater degrees, recognizing their artistry in ways we– critics and audiences alike– don't have the vocabulary for.
3. A Bit About Why We're Here
For me, watching a film is analogous to going to an art museum. Art is the only profession that explores what it means to be alive. All the rest, though necessary, is secondary. I see cinema as exploration of human nature, depictions and ruminations on how we treat each other, how we think and feel and what we can learn by reflecting on that. Nothing could be more essential, and no art medium is as potent, as high-impact, as cinema. No other medium can manipulate time to such a degree, engage us on as many levels, or so completely replicate the experience of dreaming and memory.
Most film critics– and I say all this with kindness– have journalism or English backgrounds at best. I am not as good a writer as they, but I can offer something they're choosing not to; I'm lucky in that I come from both writing and cinema, literature and photography, the world of refined art history education and practice, and the world of hard-scrabble street life. I have not made many films, but I've done enough in film and photography to have some understanding of visual literacy.
The essays linked below are my attempt to fulfill Seitz's directive. They are not brilliant. Awards aside, I am not the best critic out there, nor the best filmmaker, photographer, bus driver, observer or chronicler of life. I can name vastly more inspiring figures in each of those roles whom I bow deeply to.*
But I might be the only person simultaneously doing all of those things in quite the way I do. It is with this hope I offer these writeups, that they might contribute in some small way to how we choose to see.
Enjoy!
*For some of the best writing on film technique, refer to the lucid, passionate work of David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson.
