Doing Film Criticism
Film criticism was never really something I decided to do, but it's something that I've always done. Criticism is an act, not a profession. You do it because the artwork requires it; and if the artwork doesn't require it, if there's nothing necessary for criticism to contribute to it, then you don't do it.
I'm always a bit wary when people say that to go into film criticism or film distribution or film programming, you have to ‘love cinema’. I'm happy to have devoted much of my life to watching, thinking about and writing about films, and I expect to continue doing so, but I'm not sure I'd say that there is an object called ‘cinema’ which I ‘love’. To say that you love something is basically another way of saying that you're not interested in it. A loved object is a dead object, as the line of great necrophiliac movies from VERTIGO (1958) to THE STRANGE CASE OF ANGELICA (O Estranho Caso de Angélica, 2010) has shown us.
It seems to me that criticism should be about something more than the love of art, as art should be about something more than the love of the world: criticism and art should both be valued for their usefulness, for how they are useful to us as thinking and living people. The concepts of ‘cinema’ and ‘cinephilia’ were no doubt useful at one time, as ways of staking a claim for a series of new ideas about art and modernity which could only have come into existence through engagement with this new medium; I am not sure that they are useful any longer.
I come to Berlin this year excited to think about the problems and opportunities for film criticism at a time when cinema as a unified object or concept is in such a state of uncertainty. Like many people interested in the study of films in my country, Australia, I experience such vocational precariousness myself in my movement among the different venues open to me as a film critic – the university, online and print media, film institutions like cinematheques and film festivals – all of which want and expect different things from films and film criticism.
The common response to this is to say that, however diverse and fragmented one's critical activity is, it is united by that impossibly open and multiple object it serves, namely cinema. Cinephiles love this kind of things (and they love so many – ‘Love loves to love love’, wrote James Joyce pitilessly in Ulysses, and nobody loves to love love as much as the cinephile), seeing no contradiction between the embrace of diversity and the need to circumscribe this diversity within the concept of 'cinema' – "I'm not some snob who just loves obscure art movies," they say, "I love all cinema!" or, "I'm not some schlub who just loves Hollywood movies – I love all cinema!"
My feeling is that film criticism is better off without such rhetoric, and it may also be better off without 'cinema' as its unifying concept – we call what we do ‘film criticism’ because it was born of a critical engagement with these things we have called films, but film criticism is actually an approach, a way of doing something. It is something we can keep doing, that I hope to keep doing in Berlin and afterwards, without needing cinema and my love of it to let me do it.
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