Film Criticism Is More Than Just Our Stupid Opinions
A country is only as strong as the art it produces. Art is difficult to discuss beyond the feelings it evokes inside us. It takes emotional intelligence, patience, kindness, empathy, sympathy, and a passionate intellect to effectively witness and discuss the art that moves the tides of the human heart. A country is only as great as the art it produces.
When you hear the term film criticism, what comes to mind? When I was growing up, film criticism meant a fat and skinny guy often yelling at each other about why the other’s opinion about a movie was wrong. I’m referencing Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel because they were my first experiences with people discussing movies that weren’t on screen at the time of the discussion. They talked about movies as if they were something separate and vital. Movies are essential, but the value of Cinema is never separate from the act of people watching the movies. The value of Cinema is locked inside each audience member. When individuals discuss their experience of watching movies, the value of film is activated beyond selfishness and solipsism. The stories we tell one another are the genesis of culture and the only vessel of history. Movies are the most effective way to convey information and teach empathy. Movies are more effective than religion because they cost less money and time and do not require short-circuiting common sense.
The peril for the modern critic arises when criticism is sourced from a mental position of separation from the human beings emotionally experiencing the art; it’s the great lie contemporary critics tell themselves to survive in a world that no longer appreciates the power of art beyond the hot take written under a deadline. Critics paid by journalistic institutions have disqualified themselves from publishing an opinion worth reading. New Critics publish analyses and appreciations in personal newsletters, websites, blogs, and eventually in books, without concern for billionaire-owned, gated institutions of art filtration.
We’ve each watched movies our whole lives. There has never been a time on Earth when anyone alive was not a part of Cinema as a core channel of human expression. Making movies and selling them to eyeballs has been one of the most successful commercial institutions in human history. We created a complex, highly functional machine designed to cultivate and deliver art as entertainment for mass consumption. Over time, the balance between entertainment and art has shifted in intricate patterns that only Ph.D. eggheads can fully analyze and convey through scientific methods. But many of us inherently feel that the sugar-coated, empty-calorie entertainment has caused obesity within the human spirit, threatening to drag us into the darkest caves where movies have little value beyond manipulating emotions for commercial and political ends. That’s propaganda.
We, humans, are fascinating creatures. The more we stare at something, the more ideas about the experience of staring at the same thing gather weight in the mind. A language has emerged and evolved for Cinema over the past 150 years. A minor miracle of nature tricks the human mind into seeing the past recast on screen when light captured at a specific pace is projected in two dimensions. Nature's magic lets us see past moments on a screen as captured light dances before our eyes. This illusion redirects our sight and sound, letting other senses fade. Thus, stories told through Cinema find a way into our hearts.
Technical choices carry artistic impact when considering how to convey the value of movies effectively. Some of these choices are the framing of the film, how scenes are staged and lit, what camera angles are selected during filming, and, of course, editing and the soundtrack are all vital components to composing what viewers will psychologically experience when watching this trick of the eye convey a story to them on multiple levels of perception.
It is helpful to consider the rectangular image projected on a screen as an energy field that reveals emotional impact through kinetic motion. A primary obsession of the New Critic is answering the question from scene to scene in a film, “Where is energy right now, and where is the energy moving from where it has been?” Everything about experiencing Cinema at its deepest level unfolds from this obsession. From this point of delightful concern, we can build the most profound connections while experiencing art in fundamentally unique ways.
As a child, I watched American movies that my local Midwestern theater screened in my blue-collar city. HBO, on the other hand, offered much more choice, but viewers still had to submit to its broadcast schedule. Video rentals eventually gave us power over time and choice. And now, we have so many choices that it has paralyzed our ability to appreciate and analyze film art. We currently endure a joyless parade of Superhero pornography that moves too fast to identify and discuss the human impacts of the modern stories we tell ourselves. Enter the New Critic into our scene of sugar-coated carnage of Cinema, here to save the day, yelling out to the world while waving a hat, “Slow the fuck down! We don’t have that much time together, and we’re wasting it!”
I loved movies and never thought about camera angles because I was never taught about them. I was raised in a time when movies were commodities, money paid for distraction from adult working lives, and brief respites from the perfunctory secular mechanism of public education for children.
I didn’t know what point of view meant. I thought the dialogue and music were recorded at the same time as the images were captured. I didn’t think of movies as art, but they were one of my favorite things to do with my free time. I thought about movies all day. I tried to replay them in my head when I was bored in class. I’d act out naughty scenes on the playground the same way I’d eventually rap to my young friend’s beatbox under the jungle gym of our school of poor children.
Movies affected me deeply. However, I was severely restrained from responding to the stories I loved on screen, beyond conveying my limited emotional reactions to my friends and family. This lack of a language to discuss film retarded my ability to think and write about movies until I entered my Undergraduate Creative Writing program in 1996, back during the birth of the modern Internet, before the critical analysis and appreciation of Cinema was destroyed when every idiot with a negative opinion was encouraged to fight about them from the parapets of social media platforms, which all ended up being the spawn of Hell.
Camera angles were rarely discussed in modern criticism after that. But it is important to remember, at the dawn of this age of New Criticism, that sensitive, intelligent human beings must discuss the impact of art on our hearts and souls. Film criticism is an honorable undertaking. The exertion of words in the service of art is a noble discipline, deeply intertwined with the universe and history of Cinema. Powerful, deep criticism and discussions of the art of Cinema have steered entire cultures and redirected industries. Here and now, at the moment of death for the old and awful Internet, it is time for the New Critic to assume control of the cultural conversation again, steering us back towards a humanistic appreciation of art.
