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 UKs 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?
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.
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