Film Criticism

[hearthesilence]

For good reason. So many good critics struggling as freelancers but a sloppy blowhard like Schickel still has his job?

[Perkins Cobb]

Richard Shickel's new book gets a D- from the AV Club

And domino won't even give him a "c."

[Ribs]

The Dissolve is closing

[mfunk9786]

Considering the major quality dip and its devolution into a kitschy "only 90s kidz" site after these critics left (IV aside, though he doesn't get the first tier assignments), I was sort of hoping that this announcement would be about The AV Club.

Can I offer a very unpopular opinion? I think we might be, in 2015, moving to the point where it's far enough past the internet film publication boom that it's a little unrealistic that even established critics can expect a salary from internet film criticism, paltry though it might be. This is a situation where you've got a site going from inception to shuttering in around 2 years, and the final post indicates that all of the critics there (who all work the same beat - reviewing movies) would prefer to all work together somewhere else. Who's stepping up to that plate, considering what happened with this venture? Someone needs to make money in order to pay people to do this, and considering the cautionary tale that The Dissolve has become, I wonder who that's ultimately going to be. There's going to be a tipping point (and maybe this is it) where online film criticism becomes a paid hobby (and for so many who fancy themselves film critics through some kind of blog [aka 'tomatometer fillers'] or social media presence like Letterboxd [as cringe-y as those places can be] an unpaid one) rather than a profession. I'm not suggesting that critics break bricks from 9 to 5, there just might need to be some element of additional hustle involved, and I don't know that it's some kind of horrific thing that internet publications can't house hundreds of film critics just because.

[domino harvey]

This is why, in the long run, the democracy of the internet is a bad thing for longform intelligent film scholarship and criticism in the non-reviewer mode. Because, as I mentioned in the John Ford thread, people not as smart or capable will do similar work for less or nothing and still bring in close to enough readers on clickbait sites anyways, so it doesn't matter to higher ups. I know people love to mock the old guard for being out of touch, but they're not wrong: everyone having an equal voice only sounds like a great idea if you pretend/hope everyone else is as intelligent as the top tier. What it gives way to in reality are fifty podcasts about the same four classic movies with prattering ignorance and "hip" superiority to film in general. Like any kind of incessant noise, it becomes harder to separate what you want to hear from what is all around you, and so sites with a higher pedigree like the Dissolve are fighting an uphill battle, one they just lost.

[mfunk9786]

But those voices have established themselves via sites like The Dissolve over the years, and they're still young and have decades of contributions to make to film criticism, I just wonder if that'll be at the volume or for the pay that they might have expected when they got into it. I'm being dramatic as these folks are all going to find jobs elsewhere, but even as freelancers or just internet presences they can continue to elevate the discussion so long as we continue to know where to find them. It isn't necessarily as glamorous as being a full time staff film critic, but it's better than a scenario in which people just disappear - the internet and social media will ensure that they don't unless they decide they entirely want to move onto something else. We're still a long way out from everything just becoming a mushy hive mind.

[domino harvey]

Virtually every person who writes professionally in print about film (in books, articles, etc) pays the bills with teaching-- which, by the way, also indicates they have a proper education, background, and position to merit their voices being heard. It's extremely short-sighted in an internet age to expect to earn a living from writing alone.

[mfunk9786]

As much as I want to leap all over the implication that a formal education is required in order to warrant someone's critical voice being heard, I think I'll just go and get myself a cup of coffee instead.

[domino harvey]

The "implication" is that to be professionally printed, you generally need it. Not that having an education necessarily makes you a better voice on film (though it increases the odds that what you have to say is worthwhile) or that lacking one takes away to think critically with regards to film, merely that it opens doors otherwise jammed shut. Like, you know, most of the real world re: job opportunities

[knives]

Yeah, I don't get what is offensive about Dom saying, "a formal education better prepares you to write on a professional level." If anything it seems to run right back to the theory you ran that the Internet has spread voices too thin for discussion to be more than a hobby. It's a sad thing that happened to the Dissolve, but it also is highly indicative of where the humanities are moving to right now where the only people that can support themselves exclusively through them are either insanely productive or whorishly pandering. The issue isn't even just with critics and academics either. Actual artists who at one time could produce films regularly enough and be seen as mainstream enough, I'm thinking within film of people like Kelly Reichardt, are pushed into teaching jobs as their primary job because of how the Internet allows for excessive free content. It's almost like we're going back three hundred years where you need a personal sponsor to get your art heard.

[dustybooks]

I spent a couple of years getting supplemental income via paid freelancing as a music critic and found it occasionally rewarding but also very frustrating. With print media especially there is so much "input" on the editorial side from the PR world and a lot of pressure in certain directions. I assume it's much the same with film (and it seemed to me that a bit of what the Dissolve was posting in the last few months was becoming increasingly superficial and echo-chambery). At the same time, having an actual editor working with you on your writing one-on-one is an irreplaceable experience and makes everyone's work so much indescribably better. That's the kind of thing we're losing. But I willingly gave it up because it was becoming harder and harder to write about or champion anything that deeply interested me. That lack of freedom seems to have become the tradeoff for getting paid.

I love writing as a hobby and still post my work online at my own blogs for free; I feel somewhat guilty about it when this sort of thing happens, though I'm far too obscure for it to make any difference. It's not really something I'm willing to scale back or stop -- but that's easy for me to say, as it's not my livelihood.

[MichaelB]

Virtually every person who writes professionally in print about film (in books, articles, etc) pays the bills with teaching-- which, by the way, also indicates they have a proper education, background, and position to merit their voices being heard. It's extremely short-sighted in an internet age to expect to earn a living from writing alone.

Certainly, some of of my friends who write professionally in print about film also have teaching jobs, but it's nowhere close to "virtually every person". In fact, I'm not even convinced that it's a majority.

I suspect the fact that you work in academia and I don't might explain our somewhat different impressions - but my friends who write professionally about film are just as likely to have day jobs in editorial positions, festival programming, physical-media production, etc.

[domino harvey]

I suspect the fact that you work in academia and I don't might explain our somewhat different impressions

Entirely possible, or perhaps even our geographic differences

[htom]

Aren't all the Time Out reviews online?

As of now, this no longer seems to be the case.

[Altair]

Despite some rather predictable articles on female and ethnic representation in cinema which seemed to be there to check boxes rather than operate as incisive analysis of films/the industry, it was my favourite film review site, the reviews usually being consistently better than my other mainstay, rogerebert.com, and it certainly had a nice, elegant design. I'm saddened and shocked that it's seemed to have fallen so early while other, less deserving sites appear to carry on strong. This can't be a good day for serious internet criticism; increasingly, I'm falling back on print critics such Brody and Lane at The New Yorker and A.O. Scott at The New York Times rather than internet-exclusive content.

[Mr Sausage]

I think if Film Criticism is to survive as a long-form essayistic or belletristic mode outside of academics, it's going to have to do what Literary Criticism did (which itself lost most of its non-academic relevance and viability), and that's lose any pretense to being a paid career. The internet has been great to Literary Criticism, with not only a large blogging community with a double-handful of people writing intelligent criticism, but a number of great online journals (The Quarterly Conversation, Open Letters Monthly, ect.) and now print journals with major online ties and presences (Music and Literature) allowing serious, non-academic criticism to renew itself. All of this mostly done by people who don't make it their primary job or expect to make a living at it (a lot of the contributors to the mags and journals are bloggers who, in another age, would've been primarily critics or academics).

My guess as to why film hasn't found the same online-publishing niche is partly down to the fact that it's still expected to be commercially viable. If it's going to survive, my guess is that it'll have to become the domain of very smart enthusiasts rather than professionals.

[FrauBlucher]

My guess as to why film hasn't found the same online-publishing niche is partly down to the fact that it's still expected to be commercially viable. If it's going to survive, my guess is that it'll have to become the domain of very smart enthusiasts rather than professionals.

This is it in a nutshell...This guy I work with wants to write film criticism. Unfortunately, the only genre that interests him is the cops and gangster movies and nothing before the second half of the twentieth century, but mostly from the 70s on. He has no use for, what he refers to as "slow movies." Anything like Bergman, Tarr, Antonioni amongst others are not even on his radar. Good or bad this is a product of the internet.

[Altair]

Matt Zoller Seitz's tribute to The Dissolve.

[colinr0380]

I hate to compound the recent bad news in online film criticism (I'm really going to miss The Dissolve's podcast in particular), but a little over a week ago the great Midnight Eye site also announced it was finishing. Though hopefully we will not be seeing the last of Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp in commentary and book form.

[oh yeah]

I really liked the Dissolve. At first I was skeptical, but til yesterday I'd been visiting it daily for the past 6-9 months and was consistently impressed by how good the quality of writing was. Also, how knowledgeable and articulate most of the commentators were -- with a taste in film that was very welcoming to foreign and more obscure titles, similar to the general ambiance here perhaps. You don't find a lot of big sites like that, so it's just a sad thing to see it go. I do enjoy the AV Club a lot, despite its faults, but it's certainly less highbrow and often (especially in the comments) guilty of a kind of ironic snark that does no good.

[Jeff]

Scott Foundas is leaving Variety for a gig as an acquisitions and development executive at Amazon Studios.

[Altair]

BBC Culture's 100 Greatest American Films

A really strange list: the top 10 reads like the AFI list, but then deeper into it are some great, offbeat classics: Heaven's Gate (#98), The Shanghai Gesture (#72), Letter from an Unknown Woman (#43) etc.

But... Forrest Gump?

[Ribs]

Letter from an Unknown Woman isn't that odd a choice; it came in at 154th on Sight and Sound in 2012, for instance. It's usually not that high up but it's definitely up there.

[copen]

[quote="Altair"]BBC Culture's 100 Greatest American Films


53. Grey Gardens (Albert and David Maysles, Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer, 1975)
This seems to be the only documentary on the list. Probably an error. They've heard so much about it, that they decided to put it on the list.

[Newsnayr]

It should be noted that to make the list, the BBC polled 62 international film critics, asking them for their top 10s Sight and Sound style (though they were ranked with corresponding point values), including Jonathan Rosenbaum.