Thomas Doherty: The Death of Film Criticism
The transfer of film criticism from its print-based platforms (newspapers, magazines, and academic journals) to ectoplasmic Web-page billboards has rocked the lit-crit screen trade. Whether from the world of journalism (where the pink slips are landing with hurricane force) or academe (which itself is experiencing the worst job market since the Middle Ages), serious writers on film feel under siege, underappreciated, and underemployed....
The history lessons are revelatory, both for uncovering the long tradition of discerning film criticism in America (it didn't start in the 1960s) and for the surprising number of brand-name writers who have slummed as movie reviewers: Carl Sandburg, on the silent screen in The Chicago Daily News in the 1920s (on Garbo: "slim, pale, like willows turning yellow in autumn"); John Updike, who took to the pages of The Boston Globe to defend the Goldie Hawn-Kurt Russell rom-com Overboard (1987) (on Goldie: "a semicomic valentine surrounded by tumble-dried blond hair").
Turn-of-the-(last)-century critics fixed on film early on as a canvas to mull over and carp about. Watching the Life and Passion of Christ (1903), Joseph Medill Patterson wondered, "Is it irreverent to portray the Passion, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension in a vaudeville theatre over a darkened stage where half an hour before a couple of painted, short-skirted girls were doing a 'sister act'?" More than one of the pioneers used his perch as a steppingstone to the other side of the screen. D.W. Griffith's racist hallucination, The Birth of a Nation (1915), was co-written by the film critic Frank E. Woods, though the guild might want to keep quiet about that one. The future playwright and screenwriter Robert E. Sherwood—The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)—first caught Hollywood's eye for his prescient film commentary. Writing under the heading "The Silent Drama," he knew the curtain was coming down on pantomime after one listen to The Jazz Singer (1927). "I, for one, suddenly realized that I shall have to find a new name for this department," he proclaimed....
Even when Hollywood turned to high-budget but lowbrow blockbusters in the 1980s, film criticism maintained its sharp edge and upward arc. Reviewing the decade, Peary, Lopate, and Roberts all give due regard to the salutary impact of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, the Chicago-based tag team whose television point-counterpoint, which made its debut nationally on PBS in 1978, brought a new level of film smarts to a video forum long dominated by dolts in turtleneck sweaters. "At their best, Siskel and Ebert's lively talks were marked by the immediacy, drama, comedy, intelligence, and surprise of live theatre," argues Roberts.
Then a different kind of termite art burrowed into the house that film criticism built. In the mid-1990s, the wide-open frontier of the blogosphere allowed young punks who still got carded at the multiplex to leapfrog over their print and video elders on user-friendly sites with hip domain names. If the traditional film critic was a professorial lecturer who lorded his superior knowledge and literary chops over the common rung of moviegoer, the Web slinger was a man-boy of the people, visceral and emotional, a stream-of-consciousness spurter with no internal censor or mute button. Listen to the war cry of the Internet Movie Critic ensconced at http://home.earthlink.net/~usondermann: "What sets me apart from the Siskel & Eberts of this world is a simple truth: I don't read books!"...
Defenders of the bloggers, texters, and tweeters laud the democratization of opinion and the instant access to inside dope. (Many Web-based critics have few qualms about pirated scripts and studio screeners.) Untethered to the industry and not co-opted by plush press junkets, the argument goes, the unpaid fan-bloggers are more independent, more honest, and more in sync with the mass audience than the jaded sexagenarians. Moreover, purely as a media forum for cinematic analysis, the widescreen Net blows away the printed page, offering unlimited space for analysis, links to like-minded sites, and photo "captures" and streaming clips for illustration. The bloggers get the info out first and fast, the readership bookmarks its own comfort zones, and critic and reader begin a two-way conversation that collapses the distinction between interlocutors. The print-bound critics are lumbering dinosaurs grousing about their own extinction. Survival of the fittest, gramps....
The problem, however, especially for graduate students and younger scholars, is that the powers that be in academe still have not sussed out how to calibrate the value of online work in decisions about hiring, tenure, and promotion, how to weigh the contributions on Web sites like Sense of Cinema (http://sensesofcinema.com) and FlowTV (http://flowtv.org) against peer-reviewed brands like Cinema Journal and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. Is heavy Web-site traffic the modern version of frequent citation from respected colleagues? Is a year in harness as a conscientious Webmaster equal to the publication of a scholarly article? Not yet, but the hoary admonition to "publish or perish" may soon morph into "post or perish."...