Film Criticism in the Digital Age

By Mattias Frey, Cecilia Sayad, Greg Taylor and 11 more

Over the past decade, as digital media has expanded and print outlets have declined, pundits have bemoaned a “crisis of criticism” and mourned the “death of the critic.” Now that well-paying jobs in film criticism have largely evaporated, while blogs, message boards, and social media have given new meaning to the saying that “everyone’s a critic,” urgent questions have emerged about the status and purpose of film criticism in the twenty-first century. 
  In Film Criticism in the Digital Age, ten scholars from across the globe come together to consider whether we are witnessing the extinction of serious film criticism or seeing the start of its rebirth in a new form. Drawing from a wide variety of case studies and methodological perspectives, the book’s contributors find many signs of the film critic’s declining clout, but they also locate surprising examples of how critics—whether moonlighting bloggers or salaried writers—have been able to intervene in current popular discourse about arts and culture.
  In addition to collecting a plethora of scholarly perspectives, Film Criticism in the Digital Age includes statements from key bloggers and print critics, like Armond White and Nick James. Neither an uncritical celebration of digital culture nor a jeremiad against it, this anthology offers a comprehensive look at the challenges and possibilities that the Internet brings to the evaluation, promotion, and explanation of artistic works. 
     

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Apr 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9780813573649

Greg Taylor

Greg Taylor is the author of the young adult novels The Girl Who Became a Beatle, Killer Pizza, and Killer Pizza: The Slice. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he graduated from Penn State University and started out his career as a professional drummer, before moving to Los Angeles to become a screenwriter. His screenwriting credits include Jumanji, Harriet the Spy, Prancer, and The Christmas Box.

Book preview

Film Criticism in the Digital Age

Film Criticism in the Digital Age

Edited by

Mattias Frey and Cecilia Sayad

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Film criticism in the digital age / edited by Mattias Frey and Cecilia Sayad.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–8135–7073–0 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7072–3 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7074–7 (e-book (web pdf)) — ISBN 978–0–8135–7364–9 (e-book (epub))

1. Film criticism. 2. Motion pictures—Philosophy. 3. Mass media—Technological innovations. I. Frey, Mattias, editor. II. Sayad, Cecilia, editor.

PN1995.F4573 2015

791.4301—dc23 2014030640

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

This collection copyright © 2015 by Rutgers, The State University

Individual chapters copyright © 2015 in the names of their authors

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Critical Questions

Mattias Frey

Part I. The Critic and the Audience

Chapter 1. Thumbs in the Crowd: Artists and Audiences in the Postvanguard World

Greg Taylor

Chapter 2. Critics Through Authors: Dialogues, Similarities, and the Sense of a Crisis

Cecilia Sayad

Chapter 3. The Last Honest Film Critic in America: Armond White and the Children of James Baldwin

Daniel McNeil

Part II. New Forms and Activities

Chapter 4. The New Democracy? Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, Twitter, and IMDb

Mattias Frey

Chapter 5. The Price of Conservation: Online Video Criticism of Film in Italy

Giacomo Manzoli and Paolo Noto

Chapter 6. Before and After AfterEllen: Online Queer Cinephile Communities as Critical Counterpublics

Maria San Filippo

Chapter 7. Elevating the Amateur: Nollywood Critics and the Politics of Diasporic Film Criticism

Noah Tsika

Part III. Institutions and the Profession

Chapter 8. American Nationwide Associations of Film Critics in the Internet Era

Anne Hurault-Paupe

Chapter 9. Finnish Film Critics and the Uncertainties of the Profession in the Digital Age

Outi Hakola

Chapter 10. The Social Function of Criticism; or, Why Does the Cinema Have (to Have) a Soul?

Thomas Elsaesser

Part IV. Critics Speak

Chapter 11. The Critic Is Dead . . .

Jasmina Kallay

Chapter 12. What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Movies

Armond White

Chapter 13. Who Needs Critics?

Nick James

Chapter 14. Excerpts from Cineaste’s Film Criticism in the Age of the Internet: A Critical Symposium

Theodoros Panayides, Kevin B. Lee, Karina Longworth, The Self-Styled Siren (Farran Smith Nehme), and Stephanie Zacharek

Afterword

Cecilia Sayad

Selected Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank the contributors, Leslie Mitchner and the Rutgers University Press staff, the anonymous reviewer, Peter Stanfield, and the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Film and the Moving Image at the University of Kent.

Some chapters presented here have appeared previously. A different version of chapter 4 appeared in Mattias Frey, The Permanent Crisis of Film Criticism: The Anxiety of Authority (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015). Chapter 11 was originally published in Film Ireland, September/October 2007, 26–27, © 2007 Jasmina Kallay/Film Ireland. Chapter 12 was originally published in New York Press, 30 April 2008, © 2008 Armond White. Chapter 13 was originally published in Sight and Sound, October 2008, 16–18, © 2008 Nick James/Sight and Sound. Chapter 14 contains excerpts from the eponymous article originally published in Cineaste 33.4 (2008): 30–45, © 2008 Cineaste Magazine. All are reprinted by permission.

Introduction

Critical Questions

Mattias Frey

Today film criticism is a profession under siege. So begins—as a white text over a black screen—Gerald Peary’s documentary For the Love of Movies: The History of American Film Criticism (2009). As the introduction to a chronicle of a profession, its tone is more or less apocalyptic. Nevertheless, Peary’s take on the state of film criticism as activity and institution is hardly aberrant.

In fact, judging by the many journalistic articles,¹ regular symposia and conferences,² and the increasing scholarly output on the subject—which bemoan a crisis of criticism or mourn the death of the critic³—it might seem safe to claim that the aims, status, and institution of arts and culture criticism in general, and film criticism in particular, are, indeed, facing possible extinction. This is hardly a case of academic navel-gazing or journalistic self-indulgence; if we are to believe chroniclers such as Sean P. Means, who listed fifty-five American movie critics who lost their jobs between 2006 and 2009,⁴ the threat is real.

In an era in which criticism is offered free to the reader without sustainable levels of online advertising, and print circulation and advertising have permanently eroded, ontological questions about the purpose and worth of criticism have become urgent. This anthology seeks to understand the current state of film criticism and how it has developed. It aims to examine the challenges and possibilities that the Internet offers to the evaluation, promotion, and explanation of artistic works, as well as digital technology’s impact on film criticism as an institution and profession. How has the status of the critic changed with the development of new digital media and the transformation, consolidation, and demise of traditional media outlets? To what extent can critics—whether moonlighting bloggers or salaried writers—intervene in current popular discourse about arts and culture?

Although these questions have been the source of much journalistic discussion, academics have addressed these issues only in a piecemeal or oblique fashion. In general, film criticism—rather than film history or theory—is just beginning to receive serious scholarly attention. The reason for this lacuna is surely complex; nevertheless, the long-term goal of film studies to establish itself as a serious subject of inquiry and maintain an institutional presence at universities and other highbrow cultural institutions has meant that, for generations, scholars have attempted to distance themselves from mere reviewers and to differentiate their profession from journalism.

In recent years this regard has come into question, and there has been a flurry of activity surrounding film criticism. Nevertheless, these studies have mainly revolved around the biographies of prominent critics, such as Pauline Kael, or indeed collected the writings of important critics—Kael, Manny Farber, Richard Roud, and others—as primary sources.⁵ Where histories of film criticism have existed, they seek primarily to telegraph broadly rather than analyze precisely; see, for example, Jerry Roberts’s The Complete History of American Film Criticism, which speeds through more than a hundred years of writing and an even larger number of critics.⁶ Raymond J. Haberski’s It’s Only a Movie! Films and Critics in American Culture presents a similarly sprawling survey of American film culture and a synopsis of the country’s film critics. It dashes through a century of major events (debates about the aesthetic value of cinema; Cahiers du cinéma and the American auteur theory; the establishment of the New York Film Festival and the American Film Institute; New Hollywood and the rise of film-school directors) in a matter of paragraphs. Haberski’s American story is told as a familiar, consensual, and national tale; his synoptic, monocultural approach represents the straight story of film criticism that urgently needs to be challenged.

The Current State of Debate on Criticism

Five interlocking debates, discourses that overlap and inform each other, have dominated writing about arts and culture criticism in general, and film criticism in particular, in the digital age. To survey the current debates—but also to preview the thematic emphases of this book—we need to outline the major focuses and fronts of these discourses. Each of the contributions to this volume contemplates at least one, if not all five, of these questions and their relationship to film criticism.

Should Evaluation Be a Function of Criticism or Even Its Principal Aim?

This subject is a holdover from earlier eras; it is a debate that has reemerged, especially in academic treatises on criticism, because of the general return to ontological and existential questions about criticism. Just as the advent of digital formats precipitated a return to ontological debates about what is cinema? in the postcelluloid world, the rise of digital media and the demise of print have led commentators to reexamine the most basic questions about the purpose of criticism.

For centuries the purpose of criticism has been a subject of debate, and this is not the place to rehearse the various viewpoints in depth. For now it must suffice to say that these purposes have included education or refining the taste of the audience; personal or artistic expression on the side of the critic; creating a dialogue with an audience or enlivening a public sphere; describing, deciphering, demystifying, contextualizing, or categorizing the work or its relationship to society; or simply judging the aesthetic or entertainment value of the examined cultural product.⁷

Rather than telegraphing the history of the idea of criticism, the more pressing task here is to examine where the current debate stands and how, in fact, the ascent of digital media has inflected and energized contemporary discourses on the purpose of criticism. On this subject, although some journalists and a smattering of treatises by academics argue for an anarchy of opinion and agitate for alternative purposes for criticism (more on this in the discussion of John Carey’s What Good Are the Arts? below), without a doubt the main theme and thrust of contemporary scholarly writing on criticism has argued that evaluation is or should be its main purpose.

In the recently published On Criticism Noël Carroll deploys examples from film, music, performance, and visual arts to advance the thesis that criticism’s primary function is not—as is sometimes claimed—description, interpretation, the demystification of hidden meanings, or the uncovering of latent ideologies. Instead, criticism should always aim to evaluate; criticism, according to Carroll, is essentially evaluation grounded in reasons.⁸

For Carroll evaluation’s role as the engine of the critical project should be self-understood; indeed, the original etymology of the word critic, kritikos, one who serves on a jury and delivers a verdict, implies evaluation. Traditionally, criticism has been generally aligned with evaluation.⁹ Only recently have critics renounced their task to judge objects according to their aesthetic value. To substantiate how widely criticism has become decoupled from evaluation, Carroll refers to a recent poll of art critics: 75 percent maintained that evaluation was the least significant aspect of their professional duties.¹⁰ Opposing skeptics’ thesis that evaluation is doomed to be subjective and that the artist’s intentions are unknowable, Carroll demonstrates that although we do not have so-called direct access to the artist’s intention, we have lots of indirect evidence for it, because most artists produce works that belong to recognized categories such as genres, movements, styles, periods, or oeuvres. According to Carroll, the function of the critic is to judge the extent to which the work achieves the artist’s intention; this is the work’s success value.¹¹

Carroll’s treatise is informed by the vocabularies and concerns of analytic philosophy, and his disdain for the lack of rigor in ideological-symptomatic traditions and interpretation in general is well documented.¹² Nevertheless, other prominent commentators whose research and perspectives are far different have also advocated (a return to) evaluation as the most important purpose of arts and culture criticism.

Rónán McDonald, a literary scholar and major recent interlocutor in this debate, narrates the history of criticism to argue that this practice has become devalued as a social good; the reason for this, in his view, is a historical itinerary that has progressively departed from evaluation as the purpose behind criticism. This path was put into motion by the agenda of university scholars working under the auspices of cultural studies, which resolved debates about how to assess aesthetic value by driving a steamroller over hierarchies, flattening all into indifferent practices.¹³ Because of cultural studies’ implication that all cultural products are equally worthy of serious inquiry, McDonald argues, they also suggest that culture is equally worthy of being ignored. Besides the object and purpose of inquiry, the very language—obscure vocabularies and jargon—that scholars have been prone to use since the heyday of cultural studies has precipitated, according to McDonald, a fundamental divergence between scholarly and journalistic criticism by which the public imagination became immune to issues and debates in academia.¹⁴

What Should Be the Nature of the Relationship between the Critic and His or Her Audience?

This question, too, has been a perennial one that has reemerged with the transformations engendered by the new media; most often, as we see in the preceding argument by McDonald, the fronts in the debate about the nature of the relationship between critics and audiences have followed from the previous question about the very function of criticism.

The exact nature of the relationship between critic and reader and the potential for the critic to mediate between the audience and the work has been a subject of long deliberation as, indeed, mediation speaks to the very purpose of criticism.¹⁵ Traditionally, scholars have noted how the critic, unlike the reader/viewer, "includes the concept of ‘arbiter,’ of arbitrage."¹⁶ But surely, the opinions on the quality of this mediation range from educator (à la Matthew Arnold) to a more personal negotiation with the work, in the vein of Oscar Wilde.¹⁷

Much of the scholarship was either purely theoretical or based on more or less anecdotal evidence. More recently, researchers working with rigorous empirical methods have tested the claims that critics can function as tastemakers or gatekeepers and significantly exert influence on the success or failure of a film. The gatekeeper thesis has traditionally maintained that the critic shapes the reader’s reception of the film—or at least provides the preconditions or point of departure for his or her later viewing. Tested empirically, however, sociologists have doubted the extent to which critics can perform this function.¹⁸ Wesley Shrum’s study of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, for example, concludes that, despite anecdotal claims to the contrary,¹⁹ critics do not have the power to ‘make or break’ shows; indeed, the visibility provided by reviews is more important than their evaluative function.²⁰ According to Shrum’s research, which is also useful for film, the critic only has an effect on certain type of productions (legitimate genres such as art-house) or certain types of readers/viewers (those who seek to refine a discriminating sensibility for art).²¹

Some strict proponents of cultural studies have questioned that there is any real distinction between critics and readers; for commentators such as John Carey, what critics think about this or that artwork . . . is necessarily of limited and personal interest.²² Indeed, for these believers in the absolute constructedness of the subject, all criticism is only personal opinion. Unlike psychology and sociology of art or pure audience research (to his mind rigorous methods to account for taste), criticism is a vaguely subjective measure of the immeasurable: artistic value. It follows that works of art cannot be rigorously evaluated as better or worse than any other. In turn, Carey disputes what has been the traditional justification for a critic and his or her relationship with an audience, namely, that the critic’s judgment to understand and evaluate art and his or her ability to communicate this judgment are superior to a layperson’s capacity. For Carey, to claim that our feelings are, in an absolute sense, more valuable than someone else’s (as opposed to simply more valuable to us) does not make sense. If all opinions are equally valid or invalid, we cannot rationally call other people’s aesthetic choices ‘mistaken’ or ‘incorrect,’ no matter how much we happen to not like them.²³

Pace Carey (but also the large number of bloggers who practice film criticism outside of traditional institutions and rarely theorize its practice), in today’s academic deliberations over the role of the critic, the strongest current advocates a powerful critical authority figure who will guide the reader from a position of superior knowledge. Before we examine the major commentators who write in this vein, it is worth mentioning how widespread this position is in film culture. Indeed, among professional journalistic critics there is extreme anxiety about this function and about its possible loss: this mentality is the one on offer, for example, in Gerald Peary’s documentary, in Sight and Sound and Cineaste dossiers on criticism (excerpts thereof are reprinted in this volume), and in the regular screeds in publications like Variety, such as the one that asks Are Film Critics Really Needed Anymore . . . or Is It a Washed-Up Profession?²⁴

Contemporary academic studies of criticism mourn the death of the critic and call for the critic as strong authority figure, a type—they assert—that once existed. Terry Eagleton invoked a crisis of criticism already in 1984, contending that in a period in which, with the decline of the public sphere, the traditional authority of criticism has been called into serious question, a reaffirmation of that authority is urgently needed.²⁵ Maurice Berger’s 1998 collection of prominent critics’ thoughts on The Crisis of Criticism strikes a similarly elegiac chord: now the critic is often expendable in the process of determining what is good art and what is bad art; according to Berger, at the threshold of the twenty-first century the critic has lost his or her aura of respect.²⁶

But perhaps the most prominent and articulate proponent of this thesis today is McDonald, whose Death of the Critic argues that the role of the critic has transformed from a mediator, a figure to whom a wide audience might look as a judge of quality or a guide to meaning, to a puppet who confirms and assuages their prejudices and inclinations rather than challenging them.²⁷ Above all, McDonald advocates new public critics along the lines of Kael or Susan Sontag, who, he opines, do not currently exist in contemporary media and society. Charting a historical trajectory that includes the age of criticism and prominent professionals such as F. R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling, McDonald asserts that the early 1970s marked the beginning of the end of a period in which critical writing flourished nearly indistinguishably between broadsheets and academic journals, and critics made authoritative, evaluative pronouncements to a broad public.²⁸ The death of the critic entailed an end to a communicative mediation between a learned authority and a willing, engaged reader; since then scholarly and journalistic criticism have increasingly diverged, and the vacuum of authority has been replaced by a host of nonexpert bloggers and a dispersive field of reviewing that fails to capture the public imagination.²⁹

How Have the New Media Changed Film Criticism as an Activity and Form?

If the first two debates have taken place mostly in university humanities departments, and only occasionally or indirectly been addressed by film critics working for daily newspapers or magazines, professionals have had no choice but to confront the ways in which criticism is—in a very tangible and material way—a very different activity than it was only ten years ago. If personal computers and floppy disks transformed the way that copy was written, edited, and submitted, and the early years of widespread Internet access meant that reporting from film festivals became a much more immediate affair, the arrival of Twitter, blogging, and other forms of virtually instantaneous communication have revolutionized the possibilities—and in many ways forced the hand—of those who write about film.

In the not-so-distant past, information about films—which, even skeptics such as Shrum agree is a function of criticism—was largely limited to marketing and advertising on the one hand (trailers, posters, perhaps an advance interview—all circumscribed by physical locations and times), and on the other to the critic’s notice, which would generally appear on or near the day of the film’s general release. Today the viewer has a whole wealth of information to consume when and where he or she wants: the film’s website, online trailers, advance reviews from other countries, even entire pirated copies of the film itself. Against this seemingly endless stream of available information, the critic must compete. This takes the form of blogs but also Twitter feeds; these days, one has the chance to read several dozen tweets of film critics as they walk out of press screenings at festivals halfway across the globe. Even if we were to accept the thesis, proposed by McDonald and others, that in the twenty-first century there are fewer or no public critics, no one could argue with the fact that critics have become more public. Mark Kermode, Nick James, A. O. Scott, Peter Bradshaw, Leonard Maltin, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and Carrie Rickey are just a handful of the hundreds of professional film critics who actively tweet, let alone the thousands of amateurs who perform more or less the same service, if perhaps more anonymously and without salaries. We are a long way from the days of reading about films on a monthly basis (Monthly Film Bulletin); even traditional daily trade papers such as Variety and the Hollywood Reporter have lost ground to more innovative, even faster providers of entertainment news (e.g., Deadline Hollywood). Programmers (the British Film Institute’s Geoff Andrew) and film festival directors (Edinburgh’s Chris Fujiwara) tweet in their own names, and institutional accounts (the Film Society at Lincoln Center, Melbourne Cinémathèque, Viennale) communicate with stakeholders via short messages.

Today—at least as far as the straight story goes—film criticism as a form and activity (both composing and receiving) has become more amateurish, shorter, more immediate, and less considered. If we are to believe alarmists such as Andrew Keen, today’s internet is killing our culture and assaulting our economy.³⁰ The new media, according to this argument, are the logical extension of the unstoppable momentum of the last years of print media—less column space, more lurid illustrations, more advertisements, less pay for writers. This critique usually corresponds to one of two related discourses: a complaint about the atomization or fragmentation of the public sphere and, perhaps more often, bemoanings about the dumbing down of film criticism and its audiences.³¹ This type of thinking is widespread both among journalistic critics and among academics writing on the subject. For McDonald, the public critic has been dismembered by two opposing forces: the tendency of academic criticism to become increasingly inward-looking and non-evaluative, and the momentum for journalistic and popular criticism to become a much more democratic, dispersive affair, no longer left in the hands of experts.³² Rather than more bloggers and a false democratization of critical writing, McDonald argues, erudite, authoritative critics who are able to challenge prevailing tastes and communicate to a wide audience are needed to reunite the fragmented public sphere.³³ Indeed, even a cursory glance at the forums that accompany today’s online reviews would seem to confirm the worst suspicions of Sight and Sound editor Nick James, who writes that these days the culture prefers, it seems, the sponsored slogan to judicious assessment,³⁴ or legendary critic Armond White’s polemics about Internetters who express their ‘expertise,’ which essentially is either their contempt or idiocy about films, filmmakers, or professional critics.³⁵ Take, for example, the response to Philip French’s review of Flight (2012), published in the Observer and on the common website for the Observer and sister newspaper the Guardian on 3 February 2013.³⁶ One of the first posts made after the review, by elmond02012, asks of the reviewer—perhaps Britain’s most famous, who has been the chief critic for the Observer since 1978, published several books, and was awarded an OBE for his services to the field—Who is this French guy? In the many instances such as these it would be very tempting to believe that there has been a permanent breakdown of any dialogue between the learned critic and the curious, respectful reader; a cacophony of voices and opinions and a malicious discourse have drowned out the gentlemanly tones of yesteryears.

Although some of this criticism may be justified, however, we must be careful not to simply default, once again, to the cultural pessimism of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno or Jean Baudrillard.³⁷ These perspectives lazily assert either a conspiracy theory that an inevitable dumbing down is taking place, orchestrated by elites or the system, or some sort of descent into a brave, new simulacrum and the end of history. To contend that the new forms of criticism simply mirror today’s slick and evanescent popular entertainment spoon-fed to apathetic masses of an ADD society is reductive, condescending, and wrong. It would be a mistake not to take account of the new possibilities that film criticism in the digital age offers.

The new film criticism has often taken advantage of innovative ways to configure time and space. I have already written about the way that online reviews and tweets allow for an immediate reaction to films, a compression of the temporal cycles that used to govern films and their reception and a circumscription of even the shorter forms of capsule reviewing. But often ignored behind the dumbing-down rhetoric about 140-character tweets and ill-considered remarks in Internet forums is the fact that online reviews and blogs often allow for an expansion of space for writing. There can be a utopian design to these new forms. Whereas print columns have continued to shrink over the decades in the switch to smaller tabloid formats and to give more space to dwindling advertisement, online reviews and blogging allow at least the possibility of five-thousand-word treatises, unscathed by the machinations of rogue copyeditors or subeditors’ mangled titles. Critics have the opportunity to write more and consider further aspects of the film and can also be afforded more liberties about how they write: unconstrained by house style (or politics), they might invoke informal, personal, or other idioms that they believe best befit the object. Furthermore, unlike in the days of print, opinions can be revised. Although certain film critics made claims to the permanence of evaluation (notably Pauline Kael), many others have noted how the meaning of a film can change with time and in the course of cinema history (e.g., Andrew Sarris).³⁸ Online reviewing, in its various forms, allows for these revisions to be undertaken with little effort and cost. In this the new film criticism returns to the precinémathèque days: an evanescent and changeable form and activity meant to be consumed spontaneously and at best darkly remembered, rather than necessarily archived and stored permanently.

Unlike literary criticism, the new film criticism allows for a fundamental formal innovation: the new digital media finally enable film to be easily subjected to review or critique via the very same medium. Not only can online journalists include the film’s trailer or a clip to illustrate an important point; these days critics can make a video review themselves. Later in this book, Giacomo Manzoli and Paolo Noto will deliberate on the possibilities and present tendencies of the online and video review form.³⁹

Finally, let us not forget—looking forward to debates on the sustainability of business models for journalism and criticism and the institutional organization of professional film critics—that at the moment there is more or less free access to a huge range of film criticism, a smorgasbord of writing about motion pictures, which means that, with a simple click of the button and most often without any payment whatsoever, the thoughts of critics from Nigeria, Germany, Japan, or Brazil on any given film can be accessed. For now at least, consumers have the utopian possibilities of Film Studies for Free, to quote Catherine Grant’s popular blog.

To return briefly to what I first presented as a largely negative example—the reactions to Philip French’s review of Flight—there is at least a measure of hope that one can take from what at first seems to be a miserable sign for the dumbing down of film criticism in particular and society in general. After elmond02012 posted a reaction, a polyvocal discussion ensued, in which the initial polemic (Who is this French guy?) was answered (He’s one of the greatest film critics of the last half century) and debated.⁴⁰ It extended well beyond the merits of Philip French and his short review of Robert Zemeckis’s film to spawn a heated discussion on the purpose and value of film critics in general. Despite the sometimes rancorous or childish tone (this is not a university lecture hall after all), some sort of spontaneous education took place in an ad hoc community; it enabled a dialogue that would not have been possible in the top-down letters to the editor era of public participation in film criticism.⁴¹ There is at least the potential of an international public sphere, an international cinephilia in which both professional and amateur critics can communicate, debate, and discuss films, whether they live in the West or East, in the city or in the countryside.⁴²

How Have New Media Changed Film Criticism as a Profession and Institution?

Of all the major areas of debate, this one is perhaps the most speculative: we currently find ourselves in a transitional stage—in terms of the shift from print media to digital media but also vis-à-vis the reorganization of media companies and their business models—which has a profound and material effect on the very status of the writer-journalist-critic within this landscape.

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, media reorganization or consolidation have become two sober euphemisms for the shrinking number of newspapers and journalists and the increasing frequency by which existing media organizations have been merged under common ownership.⁴³ For some commentators we are witnessing not only the end of print media but perhaps even the end of a pluralistic media landscape that addressed local, regional, national, international, and niche audiences.⁴⁴ This sense of institutional crisis, which no doubt is a major factor in the present crisis of criticism, has spawned websites such as Newspaperdeathwatch, which furnishes industry reports and statistics of the most apocalyptic kind. It is difficult to put a positive spin on the fact that newspapers in the United States hemorrhaged nearly 50 percent of their market value and 30 percent of their staff in the first nine years of the century;⁴⁵ the many large print-media groups to have become insolvent in the last few years include Canwest Global, Frankfurter Rundschau, Freedom Communications, the Journal Register Company, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Philadelphia Newspapers LLC, the Sun-Times Media Group, and the Tribune Company.⁴⁶ Local newspapers are merging or ceasing to exist; once thriving organs, from the Seattle P-I to Newsweek, are forced to make do with a skeleton staff and an online-only presence.⁴⁷

The publishers who remain face a fundamental dilemma: how does one incentivize readers to pay for something that they have been receiving—since the heady, early days of the Internet, when almost all newspapers rushed to put most or their entire content online—for free? The New York Times, The Times (of London), the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and even the Onion have forms of paywalls: some require payment for all content, others for some content, and still others charge only after a certain number of articles have been called up within a certain time period.⁴⁸ Others have changed their coverage (e.g., hyperlocalism) or the type of content that appears on the websites according to time of day (i.e., dayparting), offered specialized content not available elsewhere, bundled their content (e.g., subscription plus iPad), sought out sponsors, or created membership systems or groups (e.g., wine clubs, dating sites) that engender a feeling of community and exploit the relationships of trust that they enjoy with loyal readers.⁴⁹

These business models have met with varying success, and it seems that no one sustainable model can truly fit every organization.⁵⁰ The irony—and this reveals the situation as a business failure, rather than necessarily a fragmentation or dumbing down of the audience—is that although media companies are failing, their audiences are actually growing; the thirst for news and criticism is bigger than ever before.⁵¹ Indeed, if we look beyond Europe and North America, worldwide and especially in Asia and Africa we actually find huge increases in print circulations and new titles.⁵²

What the controversy over free-content online publications (e.g., the Guardian) versus paywalls ignores, however, is that even when print media consumption still dwarfed the incipient digital media, changes were taking place. Looking at the US alternative weekly sector, which has included the Village Voice, LA Weekly, Chicago Reader, and Boston Phoenix and has traditionally figured as one of the most important gateways of film criticism, we see that consolidation was already well under way. Already a few years into the new century, the sector was reduced by vertical or horizontal integration. As an example of the former, Boston Phoenix parent company Phoenix Media/Communications Group owned also the Portland Phoenix and Providence Phoenix papers, nightlife magazine Stuff, and a number of area radio stations, local printing facilities, and social network and dating websites. (This consolidation failed to prevent the demise of the Boston Phoenix in 2013.) For an instance of the latter, witness the 2005 merger of the New Times and Village Voice newspaper chains, so that the following alternative weeklies/listing magazines became part of a common ownership: Phoenix New Times, Denver Westword, Miami New Times, Dallas Observer, Houston Press, SF Weekly (San Francisco), Cleveland Scene, St. Louis Riverfront Times, Kansas City Pitch, New Times Broward–Palm Beach, Village Voice, LA Weekly, OC Weekly, Minneapolis City Pages, and the Nashville Scene.⁵³

Not only were alternative weeklies increasingly consolidated under common ownership, switching to the tabloid format, eliminating staff positions in favor of freelancers and interns, forgoing film festival and other costly coverage—they were also (becoming) free.⁵⁴ These usually progressive, left-leaning newspapers were subsidized by their traditionally strong classified advertising but also by reserving hefty portions of ads, often in separate pull-out sections, for strippers, escorts, and other