Should film critics care about cinematic technique?

Posted on April 23, 2014

The debate about critics and film-making missing a point: Hollywood needs policing on its weaknesses, not its strengths

The first debate in 2014 about the future of film criticism is under way, this time touching down on both sides of the Atlantic, so that must make it official.

First out of the gate were the Brits. “In the digital age what is left for a critic to supply?” asked Malcolm Thorndike Nicholson in an article in UK’s Prospect magazine, which mourned that “storied time when people really did take movies – and movie reviews – seriously” and castigated critics for clinging to a moth-eaten blueprint for their reviews, in which they trudge through their plot synopses and acting appraisals. “Take out a few details and one may as well be reading a theatre or book review.” Where, he asked, were those willing to celebrate film as film – “lighting, camera movement, framing, editing, sound, all those elements that a casual movie-goer is not likely to consciously register” but which are “as crucial to the effect of a movie as brushstrokes and pigment are to a painting”?

Two weeks later, following Ted Gioia’s complaint for the Daily Beast that “music criticism has degenerated into lifestyle reporting”, Critic-wire convened a round-table to hash out the question: “Do movie critics need filmmaking experience or an understanding of film theory to do their jobs?” It brought about an impressive knocking of heads, the most impassioned from New York magazine’s Matt Zoller Seitz, who issued a rousing mini-manifesto at Ebert.com entitled Please, Critics, Write About the Filmmaking.

“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,” he complained, demanding more analysis of the “nuts and bolts” of filmmaking “where the camera goes, and why it goes there … Otherwise it’s all just book reports or political op-eds that happen to be about film and TV. It’s literary criticism about visual media.”

Two demands for cinematic formalism in the space of one fortnight! Somewhere in Switzerland, Jean-Luc Godard is smiling. What’s striking about the Era When Criticism Mattered, which uncoincidentally ran with the heyday of the great studios (1940-1970) is how much it was staffed by non-professionals. Pauline Kael only saw a new film once, because that was the way her readers would consume it: “I go into the movie, I watch it, and I ask myself what happened to me.” Dwight Macdonald confessed in On Movies that for 40 years he thought a lap dissolve meant “holding the camera in the lap”. James Agee famously declared that he didn’t want to know how movies were made, fearing that it would make him too forgiving. “My realization of the complexity of making any film would be so much clarified that I would be much warier than most critics can be in assigning credit or blame.”

Call them the last members of the Addison DeWitt school of criticism: gifted prose stylists with nothing to declare except their talent, a combustible mixtures of connoisseurship and populism (when it suited them), who saw in their own presumption of a common reader an echo of the studio’s own connection with the popular audience. That age is now almost gone, dissolved in the non-stratified but specialist-friendly zoning of the internet. The common reader – that phantasm dreamt up by writers, a sort of idealized perfect lover and quiet listener – is longer so perfect or so quiet. “What the internet is creating is a class of literate, gifted amateur writers, in an old tradition,” wrote Roger Ebert in a 2010 blogpost. “A blog on the internet gives them a place to publish. Maybe they don’t get a lot of visits, but it’s out there. As a young woman in San Francisco, Pauline Kael wrote the notes for screenings of great films, and did a little freelancing. If she’d had a blog, no telling what she might have written during those years.”

The only thing lacking from internet film appreciation – and it’s a telling blind spot, encouraged by the mole-tunnel solipsism of the internet itself – is a sense of the movies as a communal experience. The audience has been vaporised. These young film critics are burrowers, not broadcasters. To read Richard Brody, a film critic for the New Yorker, is to imagine a cinema filled to the brim with critics, balding, bearded and bespectacled, all feverishly taking notes on deep-focus mise-en-scène. “The editor wanted me to concentrate on the plot and characterizations and performances because, well, you know, we’re mainstream,” is Seitz’s characterization of the typical film critic’s resistance to his manifesto. “It pisses me off.” Brody’s animus to Pauline Kael drips with similar condescension:

Kael properly deduced that a huge part of going to the movies consisted of how the audience responded to the people on the screen, rather than simply basing her critique on the competence of the writing or the technical aspects of the cinematography. Her sentences in her radio and print reviews about the onscreen talent of the 20th century rise to the level of expert observation of humanity in all its manifold variety.

In other words: she forgot what she was watching was art. She thought the little people were real. She got lost in the illusion.

It may not be the prettiest definition of cinema – boring old characters and plot – or the only one, but it is one that holds for 99% of the people who go to see movies, and also the one that is hardest to get right. It’s not as if Hollywood is excelling in these areas right now. To hear these guys sound off, you’d think that we were living in the golden age of film narrative and Rembrandt-rich character studies. At the risk of pointing out the obvious: we’re not. To sit through the average Hollywood movie, it’s not technique that’s lacking. Most young film directors, reared in music videos and advertising, can cut like Adderall addicts and swing their cameras from the rafters like Howard Keel, but their grasp on narrative and insight into character limps way out back.

Hollywood needs policing on its weaknesses, not its strengths. And what is neglected in today’s film culture and could most do with lionization is the not the director’s art but the producer’s – that all-too-rare ability to corral together a loose, combustible, creative team required to draw the lightning strike of a great movie. “Marlon this part is much closer to you and to myself, too,” wrote Elia Kazan to Marlon Brando in a remarkable letter, during rehearsals for On the Waterfront, in which he drew out the similarities between himself, the actor and character of the orphan Terry Molloy in Budd Schulberg’s script – an act of three-way autobiography, each man seeing himself in the character, all corralled together by the exertions of legendary producer Sam Spiegel.

A similar three-way communion went into the making of The Graduate, between writer Buck Henry, director Mike Nichols and star Dustin Hoffman, all of whom saw themselves in Benjamin Braddock. Of course it is also a storehouse of film technique, a virtual textbook in how to express internal states onscreen. “I needed everything I had learned in the last 30 years to shoot The Graduate,” said the film’s cinematographer Robert Surtees in an article he wrote for American Cinematographer entitled Using the Camera Emotionally. “We used the gamut of lenses, hidden camera, pre-fogged film hand held cameras … whatever we could think of to express the mood, the emotion of the scene.”

Scorsese’s grasp of technique, too, was never more fluid or expressive than it was in Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, where it was entirely subservient to expressing the internal state of a single character, born of a three-way tug of love between screenwriter Paul Schrader, director Martin Scorsese and star Robert De Niro, all of whom thought they were Travis Bickle. “The three of us just came together,” said Scorsese. “It was exactly what we wanted; it was one of the strangest things.”

One of the strangest things. Call it Auteurism 3.0: the belief that great films arise not from one man’s mastery but a three-way collision of souls, director, writer and star, all intent on an act of simultaneous autobiography. It’s true of On the Waterfront, and The Graduate and The 400 Blows. It’s true of The Godfather, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and There Will Be Blood and The Social Network. It’s also – and this should make even diehard formalists happy – what makes those films films, uniquely so. Creative collaboration breathes its own air, brings its own special suppleness, one which allows the audience to get under the skin of a character, into their heads, behind their eyes. So yes to discussions of technique, but can we remember what the technique is there for?

Sourced from theguardian.com