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Writing the Cinema Experience: |
How might we
best understand the film review, its standing and its character? Movie reviewing
explores the relation critics and audiences have to their experience of the cinema
as a cultural, aesthetic and social object. This involves a particular
kind of cine-aesthetics. Cine-aesthetics refers, in a dual sense, to both reviewing’s
negotiation of cinema’s aesthetic dimensions, and its progressing of
criticism’s own aesthetic priorities. Movie
reviewing is a commodious instrument; it has to be in order to recognise
cinema’s multifarious nature. Depending on the movie, these can range from film
art, to film’s art-like character, to film as an everyday object with aesthetic
dimensions, to other dimensions that also exist independently of the film
world.
Movie reviewing not only serves a range of
cultural, social, economic and aesthetic ends, it also comes to us in a range
of guises. The review in a trade publication such as Variety is interested in the commercial value of movies, connecting
the consideration of a film’s aesthetic dimensions to these priorities. In a
specialist magazine like Sight and Sound,
the review is written for the cineaste or cinephile interested in film’s
several aesthetic dimensions (film form and genre, intertextuality, adaptation,
creative personnel’s oeuvre) and the
relation of these to the public matters raised by the movie. Reviews in a
magazine like The New Yorker are
‘generalist’ – in that they are not
directed at a specialist audience like Variety’s or Sight
and Sound’s – but make great demands on
the cultural/educational capital of readers, and appeal to far fewer people
than day-and-date reviews in other generalist contexts: on radio, television and
in capsule reviews on entertainment pages. This variety of forms and contexts
mirrors how cinema presents itself to us. Film reviewing’s priorities and modes
of address are as wide-ranging as cinema’s own.
What unites these otherwise disparate
forms of film review is their publicness and contemporariness. They attend to
movie titles entering into public circulation, most often for the first time as
new theatrical releases or on film festival programs, but sometimes upon their
re-circulation on TV, streaming services, home theatre releases, or revivals.
They each have a common orientation and attention to cinema as event and
prospective experience. Each is accountable to a ‘readership’ (understood here
to include a viewership and listenership) conceived of as a (larger or smaller)
segment of a general public. The reviewer
here is a particular kind of authority guiding the relations that readers and
audiences have with a particular instance of the cinema. They provide tips,
advice, contexts, evaluations and interpretations that readers can take up or
cast aside. This publicness carries with it accountability: critics have a
social responsibility not only to their readers, to the parent publication or
program, but also to the ‘film beat’ of which they are a part. Inasmuch as movie
reviewing is a form of public ordering, it is also a form of journalism or
public intellectualism.
We will have
already put some readers offside with our suggestion that the sort of response
to a new movie produced by a critic like Roger Ebert on television in At the Movies, (1) and the sort of
response to a new movie produced by Pauline Kael in the pages of The New Yorker, might both be usefully
thought of as ‘film reviews’. For these readers ‘film reviewing’ is a highly
circumscribed object. As the oft-cited distinction between ‘criticism’ and ‘reviewing’
makes clear, the former is usually either characterised as an abject part of
criticism, or a different species of discourse altogether. (2) For these
readers, film reviewing’s formal constraints see it as lacking the developed
exposition and sustained deliberation of film criticism while being against the
use of words such as ‘genre’ and ‘mise en
scène’; it is too compromised by
needing to negotiate extra-filmic matters of celebrity, and social and
political comment.
This is the perspective advocated by Alex
Clayton and Andrew Klevan in their edited collection The Language and Style of Film Criticism. (3) In a welcome move to
reconceptualise film criticism beyond public and scholarly distinctions, they
achieve this by limiting it to only some qualifying forms. (4) The reviewing of ‘the opinionated journalist’ is
particularly singled out for exclusion. (5) Their work does, however, usefully
insist upon the important continuities between some public and much scholarly
film criticism: a shared set of emphases upon coherence and extended argument,
creative response to movies, levels of abstraction, critical independence and
self-reflexivity, explicit focus on film as art and cultural form, and
attention to films worthy of such evaluation and interpretation. (6) However,
such comparisons of the humble review with ‘proper’ criticism casts the bulk of
reviewing as limited or under-achieved.
This creates a yawning gap within film
reviewing between those reviews and reviewers we might see as practicing ‘film
criticism’ and the bulk of ordinary reviews and reviewers. This leaves us with
the difficulty of accounting for the range of activities and attractions of
that which the general public understands as film criticism: a film reviewing
enabled by journalism. But what if
film reviewing’s several ‘failings’ could be recast as attributes of the practice
itself? What if we see movie reviewing as routinely managing – in both its more fully achieved and
slighter forms – two connected,
but jostling, experiences of the cinema: the experience of cinema as an
art-like work in a relatively self-contained film world; and cinema as an
everyday object in our social world? What if the connection with journalism was
productive and enabling rather than troubling and diminishing?
Cinema as Art and Everyday Practice
Audiences
certainly do experience films as both art-like and as a form of art. We talk of
a well-made movie and of excellence in performance, staging and cinematography;
we debate the relative merits of prizes and award winners. We talk of movies as
being challenging and provocative in form and content; we memorialise movies and
directors in film seasons. As Thomas Elsaesser has pointed out, we increasingly
experience the cinema integrated into exhibitions and art museum installations.
(7) Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) and Madrid’s Arte Reina Sofia
(Spain’s national museum of 20th century art) are two galleries
where art and film work closely together, as in GOMA’s ‘David Lynch
Retrospective’ and Arte Reina Sofia’s incorporation of film into many of its
exhibition spaces. (8) We consider film aesthetically, familiarly recognising
its status as an art form with its own procedures, sense-making strategies,
priorities and canons.
At the same
time, we also experience movies and the cinema as an ordinary social fact. This
aspect of the cinema has been well registered in recent film-historical
scholarship, which has given us accounts of movie-going, historical audiences,
and the circumstances in which these audiences experienced the cinema as an
event, connecting it with their lives. (9) Here the cinema is acknowledged as a
sociological, urban fact enmeshed in the organisation of the street and the
home. It is about the exercise of various kinds of film watching habits in
public and domestic spaces. Over time, these details range from the theatrical
attendance in the 1930s-1950s – which was so
routine that there would be regular reserved seating for entire families at the
neighbourhood cinema – to today’s
array of multiplexes, online streaming, home theatres, mobile devices,
broadcast and pay television, and home video experiences personalising and
negotiating both current cinema and the back catalogue. (10) Cinema viewing gets tied up not just with
particular films but with distribution,
exhibition, and broader reception contexts: the cinema in which it is watched, the
experience of watching, the kinds of audiences with which it is watched and the
critical discourse that is read alongside it. (11)
Cinema is also
social in another related sense: movies negotiate content that exists outside the
film world. They are involved in visualising the social, representing order and
disorder, monitoring, commenting upon, and taking up cultural matters and the
public record. We see this in the contemporary adaptation of the Chris Kyle
story in American Sniper (Clint
Eastwood, 2014); (12) in the appearance of a celebrated set of
quintuplets in Henry King’s A Country
Doctor in 1936, (13) and in the replay of important national political
events such as the 1975 execution of five Australian journalists in East Timor
in Balibo (Robert Connolly, 2009).
This makes filmmaking often akin to a form of extended journalism, with the
same common emphases upon personalisation, the event, the part standing for the
whole, focus on ‘bad news’, on procedure and straying from it, and a
campaigning orientation addressing social problems, marginal behaviours, disasters,
crime, drug addiction and child custody. (14)
Just as film seems journalistic in its visualising, noticing and reflecting, so
too the critic, in a parallel move, is herself involved in visualising,
noticing and reflecting upon ‘bad news’ and its filmic representation. (15)
It would be
tempting to cast these two ways of experiencing the cinema — the film as
art-like and the cinema as social and political fact – as different
experiences requiring two different kinds of writing: criticism and review.
This would mimic the division of labour in the academy, where attention to film
form and the relation of movies to each other is the métier of film studies’
more aesthetic ends, while cinema’s social, political and cultural uses for its
audiences, viewers and makers is film studies as cultural history, as cultural
studies, or media anthropology. According to these critical apparatuses, it
seems we are either having something we could call an aesthetic experience or
something we might call a socio-cultural experience. But as viewers, our
experience of the cinema is more one of continuity than disjunction. As viewers
we seem to have no problem with the duality of Citizen Kane (1941): it is
at once a thinly veiled exposé of the life and times of William Randolph
Hearst, press baron, and a filmmaker’s artistic vision, cinematically
expressing the quest for power and influence, betrayal, regret and loneliness.
Film reviewing inhabits this continuity, reconciling film’s dual attentions.
Memorialising Film Criticism
Examining how we memorialise film
criticism can tell us more about how film reviews work upon this duality.
Anthologies of film criticism usually consist of reviews that were initially
composed in the midst of a movie’s first season. Such anthologies are typically
published well after the movies to which they refer have disappeared or become
difficult to source. Editors make
concessions to contemporary readers by focusing on pieces that travel better
through time, are more accessible, and less tied to day-and-date considerations
and references to now forgotten contemporaneous events and debates. For example, Philip Lopate’s edited collection American Movie Critics (16) positions its film critics as contributing to American
letters, arguing that each included critic and work constitutes an important
but neglected contribution to prose writing. Indeed, the vast bulk of his
contributors would be best described as literary journalists. It is therefore
more on the ‘film as film’ and ‘film as art-like’ spectrum – just as the
writing is, in being ‘notable writing’, art-like itself. In this way such
memorialising only selectively remembers, or potentially misremembers, the
nature of everyday film reviewing.
A critic who
would fit well within Lopate’s collection – if only he were American – is Graham
Greene. (17) At one level, Greene’s film criticism is important because he is
an important writer; this criticism makes up a significant part of his literary
prose output. His novels also lend themselves to film treatment, and continue
to be much adapted, suggesting Greene’s own debt to the cinema in his novels.
Greene therefore not only takes us to a place of great writing on the cinema – as a form of
letters – but also
invites us to a consideration of an acute critical intelligence on cinema.
However, he also does something else: he points to that other kind of
engagement with the cinema – the cinema as a socially, morally and politically
ambiguous fact, to be addressed as such.
Today there is
considerable reporting of child abuse, and debate about the robbing of
childhood and the sexualisation of children in dress and deportment in film and
TV programming. Greene was concerned about such matters in his film writing and,
in particular, that they were blatantly happening in cinema. The phrase ‘child
abuse’ was not used then (18), but that is what we would call what he saw as
the dubious pleasures afforded by Shirley Temple in John Ford’s Wee Willie Winkie (1937). In his review
in Day and Night on 23 October, 1937,
Greene assessed Temple’s appeal as follows:
Her admirers – middle-aged
men and clergymen – respond to
her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little
body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of the
story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desires. (19)
The review
was notorious. Greene fled to Mexico under threat of prosecution for criminal
libel. These charges were upheld. Greene had to pay damages to Shirley Temple
and Fox because of his contention that the studio was acting as a kind of pimp
procuring the child star for ‘immoral purposes’. This is decidedly film
criticism as social and political comment, cultural criticism and journalistic campaigning. In the 1972
edition of Greene’s collected film criticism, where the review of Wee Willie Winkie should be, the reader
is directed to the appendix where there are pages on the Shirley Temple libel
action. These include an extract from the libel settlement in which the British
Lord Chief Justice describes Greene’s statements as ‘a gross outrage’. (20)
We have seen that film reviews focusing on
social, cultural and political commentary can be edited out of the
memorialisation of film criticism. But this is not always the case. Australia’s
longest serving film critic, Sylvia Lawson, had a small selection of her
criticism anthologised in An Australian
Film Reader, and in an edited collection of notable writing from the
fortnightly publication, Nation, for
which Lawson wrote in the 1960s and early ‘70s. (21) In An Australian Film
Reader, her general essays on Australian movies are presented as important
documents of the campaign to secure governmental support for the
reestablishment of a local film industry. In the Nation collection, her cinema reviews are presented by the book’s
editor as exemplars of the publication’s most important cultural, social and
political commentary. Her reviewing is decidedly an integral part of a broader
tapestry of social, political and cultural engagement, reporting and comment.
For Lawson, reviewing is an extension of her journalism and cultural activism
(the title of her most recent book is Demanding
the Impossible). (22)
But Lawson, like Greene, represents more
than one side of this duality. In Nation, The Australian and other national
publications including the cultural quarterly Quadrant, Lawson wrote on the cinema with a precision and elegance,
and at length, in her own distinctive critical voice – sufficient to see her
described as ‘Australia’s Pauline Kael’ and the country’s ‘first film critic’. (23) In the 1960s she was also
briefly co-director of the Sydney Film Festival, as well as a contributor to
the ‘serious’ cinephile publication Sydney
Cinema Journal; in the 1970s and ‘80s she played an important role in the
development of screen studies in Australia. (24) Lawson’s criticism is both a
way of doing journalism and a way of recognising and giving due regard to
film’s aesthetic dimensions. (25) Take the opening of her review of Robert
Connolly’s Balibo:
What follows here isn’t so much review as comment on a film as public
event. As directed by Robert Connolly, Balibo is a vivid, undismissable revival of collective memory, a convergence of
argument around unhealed wounds and political conflict still unresolved after
nearly 35 years. It is directed and edited with great energy, with several
excellent performances and one great one, Anthony LaPaglia’s as Roger East. It
is framed in recollection and testimony, and haunted throughout by the music of
the place we’re in, Timor; it is at once beautiful, purposeful, and relentless.
(26)
Lawson’s prose here connects historical
events, politics and aesthetics. She sees Balibo as a form of journalism, documenting and intervening in national and
international affairs; and as an artwork of a certain kind notable for its
direction, its performances, and its use of music to create an overall effect.
Here, reviewing is a response to and a frame for film viewing, making
assessments of its significance based on multiple criteria. (27)
Our ways of more generally memorialising
the film review and public film criticism usefully point to reviewing’s important
joining together of the movies as art and as social fact. But such memorialisation
also affirms Clayton and Klevan’s push to distinguish among film critics and
kinds of film criticism, in that it selects and points to outstanding examples.
In this way, ordinary reviewing is still at risk of being rendered not only as inferior,
but also simply not on a continuum with these outstanding exemplars. We do not
memorialise more humble and limited movie reviews. (28) We do not celebrate the
reviewing which is more obviously tied to commercial considerations such as
those of the trade, or the publisher more interested in providing consumer
guides and ratings. In these forms of reviewing, the audiences can seem
‘pandered to’ rather than challenged and educated. The review is, at best,
providing a signalling service to ensure that the right target audience is
reached for the film in question. Such movie reviewing is less concerned with
schooling our satisfactions in the way in which Lawson and Greene seek.
But movie reviewing is a broad church. We
need a way of thinking about this continuity between film as art and film as
ordinary object that might accommodate the range of reviewing. Rather than
finding ways in which some of it might float free from other, less well
achieved kinds of reviewing, we want to be able to put together the
extraordinary and the ordinary to illuminate their commonality, to find continuity
among works of varying achievement – and to find ways of accommodating our
experience of the cinema as the dual dispositions we have observed in our most
notable criticism.
Aesthetic Approach
Philosophical aesthetics provides a way of
understanding this dilemma. When we talk about aesthetics, we tend to
reflexively associate it with art and art-like experiences. Most of the writing
on aesthetics is concerned with art of various kinds. (29) Yet there is a
stream of aesthetic thinking that sees the aesthetic as a particular kind of
experience or set of experiences. It is a way of apprehending and encountering
things, and is not limited to art objects. Whether it is John Dewey’s
democratisation of art in Art as
Experience, (30) Richard Shusterman’s deliberations on live performance and
transient art in Pragmatist Aesthetics,
(31) or Yuriko Saito’s deliberation on everyday practices and objects in Everyday Aesthetics, (32) there is a longstanding body of work that
sees an aesthetic dimension in our encounter with everyday cultural objects and
experiences.
For Dewey, aesthetics is properly part of
our desire to have our ‘designs of living … widened and enriched’ through
experience. (33) His task was ‘to restore continuity between the refined and
intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events,
doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute
experience’. (34) Extending Dewey, Saito emphasises the ways our experiences of everyday
objects and practices, for all of their functional uses, have an intrinsic
aesthetic dimension to them. She writes that ‘an aesthetic reaction can also be a seemingly
insignificant, and sometimes almost automatic, response we form in our everyday
life. It can be our response to everyday phenomena’. (35) Aesthetics and aesthetic
considerations are intrinsic not only to those things we single out as art or
those parts of our social world that are most like art. Rather, they include
objects we experience and practices we undertake as a matter of course, which
are not necessarily a lesser kind of aesthetic experience. For Saito, these
everyday aesthetic experiences are worthy of judgment and evaluation in their
own right.
Saito’s theorisation licenses a different
kind of attention to cinema and film reviewing. The movie review provides
evidence of a continuum of aesthetic
attention, just as our movie experience is on such a continuum. Viewers do
not stop having an aesthetic experience, and critics do not suddenly stop
undertaking an aesthetic exposition, when film is approached as an everyday,
quotidian artifact useful for comparison, instructions in living, facilitation
of social interaction, or political comment. (36)
The film review, tied as it is to
day-and-date screenings, is not designed to take its readers and viewers away
from the cinema, but to supplement and amplify their viewing. It is like other
everyday aesthetic objects in that it propels its readers ‘towards everyday
decisions and actions’. (37) Sometimes
this takes place without contemplative appreciation, as in capsule review
guides and ratings (which encourage a response similar to movie advertisements).
But sometimes it comes with considered appreciation. Film reviewing is a way of
sharing experiences of cinema just as our viewing provides one of the ways we
have of exploring and discovering one another. (38)
For reviewers
and viewers alike, cinema is a mix of art-like, notable, and run-of-the-mill
movies; a commonplace reality undergirded by extensive cinema consumption. Its
reach as a cultural phenomenon permeates other cultural, social and economic
worlds in news, fashion, society and politics. We can positively value both
aspects – cinema as art
and cinema as quotidian cultural object, where even ‘bad films’ deserve (dis)respect
(39) – recognising in
their combination our routine, cinema-going experiences.
These embody
different but connected kinds of aesthetic experiences of the cinema event – perhaps a
distinct cine-aesthetics of reviewing.
Film Reviewing’s Cine-aesthetics
While the
sustained development of this cine-aesthetics of reviewing would require a
larger study involving many different critics covering several decades, we can
illuminate aspects of it by examining how one particular critic negotiated
these different orientations and experiences of the cinema. As the film review,
in its contemporary form, arguably began with the coming of sound, early sound critics
writing for commercial general interest publications make for instructive
reading. They were not only writing at a time when their readership was closely
attending to the cinema, but critics and audiences alike were also going to
movie theatres as a central public event in their lives. Consequently, these
critics often reflected on the continuum of aesthetic experience we have
identified. Because they were self-consciously writing about film in a new way,
they made explicit the reviewing standpoints that are now implicit and taken
for granted. Reviewers also felt able to move among perspectives and
orientations to film that would later become the subject of a more elaborated
division of labour, as reviewing came to be featured in a broader range of
publications, including specialist ones.
Rather than
continue to use an already ‘memorialised’ film critic, we want to shift attention
to an exceptional reviewer whose criticism has not only been largely forgotten,
but who was also reviewing for a populist and, at times, disreputable weekly
publication noted as much for its publicity stunts and sensationalist
journalism as any serious contribution to public affairs. Unlike Greene’s reviews,
Kenneth Slessor’s movie reviews were neither for a ‘quality’ newspaper nor a
cultural magazine, but were conducted in the unassuming everyday aesthetic
context of Smith’s Weekly, an Australian weekly national newspaper. His reviews
also went no further than their immediate readership in Australia and New
Zealand. By contrast, C.A. (Caroline Alice) Lejeune, the long-term critic for The Observer (1928-1960), like Greene
later for the Spectator (1935-1940),
at the time attracted notice beyond Britain. Their readership included other
journalist reviewers; one of them was Slessor, who made reference to Lejeune’s
reviews in Smith’s Weekly. (40)
Slessor ‘conducted’ the film pages of Smith’s Weekly from 1931 until the
advent of World War II. (41) He self-consciously situated the cinema in the
swim of everyday life, connecting it with Smith’s agenda and the public concerns of its readers. (42) Film, here, was a
decidedly everyday aesthetic object to be attended to as such. (43) But
Slessor, an important poet and literary journalist in his own right, combined
this with an attention to film as art and as art-like in character. (44) As in
other general interest publications in Australia in the 1930s, movie reviewing
systematised, regularised and extended a newspaper’s attention to film, and
Slessor’s pages were pioneering in this regard. He made the cinema an object of
regular and sustained attention, treating it in a dedicated section. His criticism
encompassed the whole movie, examining staging, camera work, performance, direction,
scripting and genre. He insisted that each kind or genre of movie offered
different pleasures, and required its own critical standards. He examined film
in terms of how and to what extent it was similar to other art forms. Slessor
was evaluating, rating and noting movies.
Such extended and focused writing
heightened the film experience for the reader, leading reviews to become an
aesthetic event in their own right. Slessor seized on meaningful movies to
provide these writing opportunities. It had now become possible, much to the
chagrin of filmmakers and the trade, for the review to be more interesting than
the work being reviewed. Slessor actively colluded with his readers, extending
their engagement with particular movies to create an organic, conversational readership. (45) The vehicle for this
sense of community was their shared appreciation of and pleasure in the cinema,
its films, its ways and byways of exhibition and social uptake. This social
uptake was abetted by other kinds of journalistic film discourse on the Smith’s pages: short capsule reviews,
industry journalism, gossip, ludic commentary, film-themed light verse, cartoon
panels humorously and satirically summarising the movies of the week, and
sometimes flattering and often unflattering caricatures of actors and industry
figures. The reviews were thus in conversation with these other kinds of movie
attentions. Editorial staff and writers alike sought their interconnection.
Just as Slessor’s treatment of movies
oscillated between these different kinds of noticing, so did his aesthetic lens
shift between ‘art’ and ‘everyday’. Yes, Slessor did approach some films – especially those he saw as good or just
interesting – through an explicit ‘aesthetic of art’
lens. Here, readers were shown that they were in the presence of art of a
particular kind: that of the sound film. At other times – and even in reviews when he was attending
to movie art – Slessor would take pains to also situate
the cinema in everyday life, drawing attention to the audience’s experience of
and intersection with the cinema. Slessor’s review of China Seas (Tay Garnett, 1935) notably combined these attentions in
the one review. Slessor begins by situating the film experience in the life of
the viewer/reader, pointing to the ways in which viewing is tied to, and used
to reflect on, its relations to the everyday world of the viewer.
After a steady examination of this picture, I have decided against
taking a rest-cure in Chinese waters. Woy Woy will do me. What with the typhoons,
hurricanes, pirates, torture, and sudden death which seem to be chucked in with
a pleasure-cruise in China Seas, it must all be very galling and exasperating.
The remarkable thing about the travellers in this film is that, having survived
the typhoons and pirates, they don’t seem to care two hoots – no more than
travellers on the Bellevue Hill tram-line care about such minor annoyances as a
hold-up at the power-house. (46)
Here we see a double movement in play. In his meditation on
entertainment, Richard Dyer has pointed to cinema’s propensity to provide both a time away from our daily affairs and chores, while at the
same time engaging with those affairs and chores. (47) There is a pointed comparison made between the two
through reference to their shared experience of journey-making within the film
and by audiences, holidaying domestically (Woy Woy) or taking public transport
(Bellevue Hill tram-line), the latter often being a necessary part of cinema
attendance. With these references and comparisons, Slessor is refusing some of
the distance implied by the idea of art as ‘something different from our daily
affairs, even if it is meant to illuminate or emulate some aspect of our
everyday life’. (48)
By keeping close to the everyday
experience of film and the viewer’s relation to film as diversion,
entertainment and instruction, Slessor can be seen to be delivering a faithful
account of this experience and attending closely to the profound consequences
of our everyday attitudes and responses. (49) In this way, cinema has an indeterminate
status: sometimes it has a significance not found in everyday life; at other
times, it is just an aspect of that life; sometimes, as in China Seas, it works as both. Slessor continues:
… a popular player appears in each new role trailing clouds of ancient
glory behind him, so that it is hard to dissociate him from the last two parts,
or last half-dozen parts, in which he has acted. It comes as a bit of a shock,
certainly, to find, when all the passengers have marched up in the gangway
here, that the boat holds in close proximity none less than our old friends,
Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Wallace Beery, Lewis Stone, and C. Aubrey Smith. You
feel like saying, as each remembered face comes down the deck, ‘Fancy meeting
you’. (50)
This is not only a comment upon the nature
of the star system and its effect upon film viewing; it also shows how a review
permits audiences, readers and critics to forge a close connection with each
other. By comparing what is normal in the cinema with our common, face-to-face
encounters, the viewing itself becomes, in in turn, a shared ‘fancy meeting
you’ moment akin to that of the face-to-face encounter.
Elsewhere in the same review, Slessor
considers China Seas as a ‘film in a
film world’. He identifies it as a movie of certain type, evaluating it in
terms of this type and how it builds on previous movies. He talks of the
dramatic range of the performers and evaluates their performance. He discusses
the work’s pacing. In such moments, Slessor was ‘making’ the 1930s cinema
audience in the form of Smith’s readers,
who were conscious of their participation in an artwork; the artistic import of
this work was to be understood through the movie’s situation within its
respective cinema genre, its performances, its direction, its antecedents and
precedents, and its relation to the novel being adapted. In these moments, he
was constructing for cinema the sense of a film’s membership in a film world,
as well as an artistic practice in its own right, with its own affordances.
In the space of the one review, we see
Slessor traverse a gamut of critical attentions, consider aspects of the film – and the audience’s appreciation of
and negotiation with the cinema in their daily lives. The film here is
decidedly both an everyday aesthetic object and an art object in a film world. The
cine-aesthetics of the movie review notably adopts both approaches.
Proposing that film reviewing adopt a
solely art-centred approach would set unacceptable limits on the scope of
criticism, and the kinds of aspects of a movie that could be taken up. It would
lose sight of the rich array of aesthetic values (51) that Saito insists are
integrated with the utilitarian contexts of our cinematic experience. Saito’s
wager is of the ‘what if’ kind: what if we thought of ‘aesthetics’ more
broadly? She (with Arnold Berleant) asks us to recognise that ‘how we engage
with the prosaic landscapes of home, work, local travel, and recreation is an
important measure of the quality of our lives’. (52) Movie reviewing’s
cine-aesthetics is a balancing act between film as everyday aesthetic object
and film as art and art-like aesthetic object.
The connection with journalism in reviewing is
notable. Like most movie critics until comparatively recently, Slessor worked
for a newspaper or magazine. Dismissing film reviewing as ‘mere journalism’ misses what is important
and useful about the review as a platform for aesthetic negotiation. Journalism
is the métier for dealing with,
noting and organising everyday contexts and practices. Its strictures enabled reviewing to take cinema up in several respects.
It was open to seeking and noting cinema’s diverse artistic sources and
qualities, even where these were not paradigmatic art. Journalism focuses on
the dramatic, singular and sensational because it is interested in news value.
In this way reviewing, like the cinema on which it reported, was identifying
something that was unusual and special, and therefore reportable as such. But
journalism also focuses on the ordinary and mundane. The reviewer likewise has
to parse everything that is released, and not everything works intellectually
or aesthetically – but it may work or be interesting in other alternative
registers that may be more mundane and ordinary. This is precisely what can
give reviewing its perceived lesser status. But it constitutes the very
interest, capability and reach of film reviewing.
The reviewing of movies is
thus best seen as an extension of journalism and its practices of audience- and
world-making. Its form and content, its interaction with sources and the film
beat, all mean that, in order to create its independent space of interpretation,
review and commentary, reviewers need to be in a perennial dance with their sources (cinema distributors, filmmakers,
publicists, other film reviewers and now blogs) and the publics to whom they
are accountable. The sometimes vexed relation of reviewers with the trade and the
general public is a version of the typical hostilities that attend any relation
between journalists, their sources, and their readers and viewers.
Thus, film
reviewing has a particular aesthetic interest in that it routinely engages
different kinds of aesthetic satisfactions. It approaches film for its
achievement as an artwork; and as an everyday functional aesthetic object. Central to movie reviewing is its ability
to assay the porous boundaries and vocabularies of these orientations.
Consequently,
in those moments when viewing and criticism are attending to the cinema in its
social uses and its ordinary variety, when we are paying attention to
run-of-the-mill films, when we are addressing and thinking through the serious
issues Balibo raises, we are
participating in an aesthetic experience. Such hybrid aesthetics allows the reviewer
to find interest in the unexceptional, routine and ordinary film as well as the
more achieved film.
Without this
common thread of aesthetics, we
would be left relating some movies and movie reviewing to art, while seeing
others as mere entertainment – closely associated with journalism, publicity
and promotion. Reviewing is a vehicle for facilitating just this kind of
engagement with our prosaic landscapes of the cinema. The reviewer illuminates,
more or less well, the cinema’s art world and its evanescent world as a
comportment of the everyday. In so doing, the film reviewer remains truthful to
cinema’s diverse dimensions. (53)
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1. Of course
Roger Ebert in his written film
reviews might be regarded as Kael’s equal. We use his example here to point to
the constraints of television reviewing generally, with Ebert providing a
prominent, internationally recognisable case of what is often still a
nationally-based form of television programming – one for
which there are many national exemplars. An Australian exemplar was the team of
David Stratton and Margaret Pomerantz, who for 28 years had their own movie
shows, ending in December 2014. For a sample of Ebert’s contribution to
extended forms of film criticism, see Roger Ebert, Awake in the Dark: Forty Years of Reviews, Essays and Interviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
2. Bruce
Hodsdon, in his homage to the Australian film critic John Flaus, cites his
oft-repeated distinction as residing in two related propositions: (a) ‘If all
film production ceased tomorrow, criticism would continue but reviewing would
not’; and (b) ‘Reviewing assumes that the reader hasn’t seen the film;
criticism assumes that the reader has, will or should have seen the film’. See
Hodsdon, ‘Bubbles
in a Coffee Cup: The Film Criticism of John Flaus’, Senses of Cinema, no. 72, October 2014. For his part, David
Bordwell distinguishes between three kinds of film criticism: film review,
academic article or book of criticism, and critical essay. See Bordwell, ‘In
Critical Condition’ in Minding Movies:
Observation on the Art, Craft, and Business of Filmmaking (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 55.
3. See Alex Clayton and Andrew Klevan, ‘Introduction:
the Language and Style of Film Criticism’, in Clayton and Klevan (eds.), The Language and Style of Film Criticism (New
York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 1-26.
4. Clayton and Klevan, ‘Introduction’, p. 24.
5. Clayton and Klevan, ‘Introduction’, p. 1.
6. Noël
Carroll has also sought to demarcate the proper space of criticism, including
film criticism. In his On Criticism (London:
Routledge, 2009, p. 5), he sees criticism’s fundamental business as being
‘evaluation’; in this he sets himself against those, particularly from within a
cultural/critical studies tradition who would see its principal business as
developing ‘interpretations’. Clayton and Klevan (‘Introduction’) do not see what
they do as ‘abstracting’ from the work but as remaining close to the work,
contrasting their approach with the formalist approach of David Bordwell (‘In
Critical Condition’). All, however, see the necessity of movie criticism as
having independence from the film trade or any other institution that might
seek to secure judgement on favourable terms; and each presumes film as art or
an art-like cultural form with film being an object in itself – a film in a
film world.
7. Thomas Elsaesser’s reference to the film museum is
in his lecture ‘Cinema after Film: On the Future of Obsolescence of the Moving
Image’, Centre for the
Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, January 10, 2014. Published on YouTube as ‘Thomas Elsaesser at CSDS:
Golden Jubilee Lecture’, May 25, 2014.
8. See
exhibition catalogue by Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), David Lynch Between Two Worlds, Jose da
Silva Curator and author. Greg Hainge author. Brisbane: Gallery of Modern Art,
2015.
9. See Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby and Philippe
Meers, ‘Cinema Audiences and Modernity: an Introduction’ in Biltereyst, Maltby
and Meers (eds.), Cinema, Audiences and
Modernity (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 1-16, especially pp. 2-3.
10. See Karina Aveyard and Albert Moran (eds.), Watching Films: New Perspectives on
Movie-going, Exhibition and Reception (Bristol: Intellect, 2013).
11. This is the
aspect of our cinema experience that Roland Barthes pointed to when he wrote
‘whenever I hear the word cinema, I can’t help thinking “movie theatre” rather
than film’. See Roland
Barthes, ‘Leaving the Movie Theatre’ in The
Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984), p. 346.
12. Chris Kyle with Jim de Felice and Scott McEwan, American Sniper: the Autobiography of the
Most Lethal Sniper in US Military History (New York: Harper Collins, 2012).
13. For a
contemporary review of this film see Kenneth Slessor, ‘The Country Doctor’, Smith’s Weekly, June 27, 1936, p. 14.
14. Richard
Ericson, Crim Baranek and Janet Chan, Representing
Order (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), pp. 341-344.
15. This is a point made by a number of the reviewers
Peter Malone assembled for his overview of Australian film criticism. See Malone
(ed.), Worth
Watching: 30 Film Reviewers on Review (Melbourne:
Spectrum, 1994).
16. Phillip Lopate (ed.), American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents until Now (New
York: The Library of America, 2006).
17. John
Russell Taylor (ed.), Graham
Greene on Film: The Collected Film Criticism,
1935-1940 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972).
18. For a discussion of the contemporary discourse around child abuse, see
Ian Hacking, ‘Kind-Making: The Case of
Child Abuse’ in Social
Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press), 1999, pp. 125-162.
19. See
David Parkinson, ‘This Day in Cinema: This Day in 1937:
Controversial Graham Greene film review published’, October 28, 2013.
21. See Sylvia Lawson, ‘Not for the Likes of Us’
(1965) and ‘Australian Film’ (1969) in Albert Moran and Tom O’Regan (eds.), An Australian Film Reader (Sydney:
Currently Press, 1985), pp. 150-157 and pp. 175-183. Also see K.S. Inglis
(ed.), Nation: The Life of an Independent Journal of Opinion 1958-1972 (Carlton: Melbourne Unibersity Press,
1989).
22. Sylvia
Lawson, Demanding the Impossible (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2012).
23. Quentin Turnour, personal communication, Canberra,
February 27, 2014. Turnour was, until recently, a key figure in the National
Film and Sound Archive.
24. Lawson’s involvement in screen studies began at University of Sydney in the late 1960s 7 early ‘70s when
she developed a course there with John Flaus and David Malouf. She then moved
to Brisbane soon after the establishment of Griffith University, and was
crucial to its development of film and television studies. See Noel
King, Constantine Verevis and Deane Williams (eds.), Australian Film Theory and Criticism, Vol. 1 (Bristol: Intellect,
2013). Lawson is also associated closely with Australian feminism; see her How Simone de Beauvoir died in Australia (Sydney:
UNSW Press, 2002).
25. Film reviewing was one of the ways in which the
cinema, a pre-eminently international form, was localised. Other kinds of localisation
were provided by newsreels and, in the silent period, performances of various
kinds accompanying exhibition of mostly international pictures.
26. Sylvia Lawson, ‘Half-forgotten
and Given Back’, Inside Story,
August 25, 2009.
27. For a more detailed and explicit treatment of
these multiple criteria see Sylvia Lawson, ‘Out of the Mid-Century:
History, Memory and Cinema’, LOLA,
no. 1, 2011.
28. Capsule reviews, however, are anthologised in the
many Halliwell Guides and in Pauline
Kael’s 5001 Nights at the Movies. But
these are more akin to the reference guide, the encyclopaedia and the companion
than they are to providing the literary journalism of critical virtuosi. See Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (New York:
Picador, 1982, 1984, 1991, 1992); and John Walker (ed.), Halliwell’s Film and Video Guide 2002 (London: Collins Reference,
2001).
29. See ‘Neglect
of Everyday Aesthetics’ in Yuriko Saito, Everyday
Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 9-53;
particularly pp. 14-15.
30. John Dewey, Art
as Experience (New York: Perigee, 2005).
31. Richard
Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living
Beauty, Rethinking Art, 2nd edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2000).
32. Saito, Everyday
Aesthetics.
33. Dewey, Art
as Experience, p. 23.
34. Dewey, Art
as Experience, p. 2.
35. Saito, Everyday
Aesthetics, p. 10.
36. We can find some support for Saito’s view from
Noël Carroll, who points out that philosophical conceptions of art have not
been good at dealing with the communal aspects of our viewing and subsequent
social discussions. See Carroll, ‘Art and Friendship’ in his Minerva’s Night
Out: Philosophy, Pop Culture, and Moving Pictures (Malden, MA: Wiley
Blackwell, 2013), pp. 269-275.
37. Saito, Everyday
Aesthetics, 11.
38. Carroll makes just this point in discussing art
and friendship. While his article uses a theatre play, Art, as his point of departure to discuss the way we use art to
‘forge our small-scale, face-to-face, everyday relations with others’, he also
acknowledges that ‘food, sports, fashion, humour, and politics are serviceable
in similar ways’. Carroll is echoing here Saito’s contention concerning the
importance of paying attention to the aesthetic dimension of a range of our
everyday practices and objects. See ‘Art and Friendship’ in Noël Carroll, Minerva’s
Night Out, p. 272.
39. Joe Queenan talks of the pleasures derived from
‘hating another Showgirls or Gigli’ in Queenan, ‘Why
bad films aren’t getting the disrespect they deserve’, The Guardian, August 21, 2015.
40. See Kenneth Slessor, ‘Great Films of 1932 that
Australia Didn’t See’, Smith’s Weekly,
August 2, 1933, p. 10. Slessor referred to Lejeune as ‘he’, not realising that
this foremost of British film critics of the period was a woman, Caroline
Alice, signing herself as C.A. With Australasia being at the end of the global
cycle of film distribution and exhibition, Slessor, as an Australasian
reviewer, had a need for the UK review; the reverse did not pertain.
41. As a senior journalist, Slessor wrote across the
newspaper, working variously in editorial and management capacities, including editorial
assistant, then editor and managing editor. Slessor left the newspaper to become the Australian military’s official war
correspondent with the outbreak of the WWII. See George Blaikie, Remember ‘Smith’s Weekly’? A Biography of an
Uninhibited National Australian Newspaper, Born 1 March 1919 Died: 28 October
1950 (Adelaide: Rigby 1966), particularly p. 49.
42. A small collection of Slessor’s movie
reviews has recently been made available. See Huw
Walmsley-Evans, Tom O’Regan and Philip Mead (eds.), ‘Kenneth Slessor: Selected Film Reviews,
1933-36’, Screening the Past, no.
39, 2015.
43. For
an extended discussion of Slessor’s film criticism, see Huw Walmsley-Evans, Tom
O’Regan and Philip Mead, ‘Kenneth
Slessor and the Sound Cinema: The “Chief Film Critic whose Reviews are Accepted
as the Most Reliable in Australia”’, Screening the Past, no.
39, 2015.
44. Slessor
is best known in Australia as its leading poet between the wars, and as a war
diarist and literary journalist. See Geoffrey Dutton’s Kenneth Slessor: A
Biography (Ringwood,
Victoria: Viking, 1991). Philip Mead, in his book Networked Language: Culture & History in Australian Poetry (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing,
2008), connects Slessor’s engagement with the cinema to his poetry, arguing that the
latter is best understood as a response to – and a form of engaging with – the
cinema by other means.
45. The centrality of developing a ‘readership’ – a community brought together through the agency of
journalism and its vehicles – is at the core of
John Hartley’s consideration of journalism and its democratic functions. See
John Hartley, Popular Reality (London: Arnold, 1996), p. 31.
46. Kenneth Slessor, ‘China Seas’, Smith’s Weekly,
January 4, 1936: p. 29.
47. Richard Dyer has usefully described this combination
of withdrawal from everyday affairs and engagement in them as ‘entertainment’.
See Richard Dyer, Only Entertainment,
2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2005).
48. Saito, Everyday
Aesthetics, p. 35.
49. Saito, Everyday
Aesthetics, p. 8.
50. Slessor, ‘China
Seas’, p. 29.
51. Saito, Everyday
Aesthetics, p. 27.
52. Arnold Berleant, Living in the Landscape: Toward an Aesthetics of
Environment (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 1997), p. 16, quoted in Saito, Everyday Aesthetics, p.
52.
53. Saito, Everyday
Aesthetics, p. 5.
|
from Issue 6: Distances |
© Tom O'Regan, Huw Walmsley-Evans & LOLA, December 2015. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |