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Three Remarks on Film Critics |
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Introduction 2022: These are the notes I ‘spoke from’ for a 1991
“Australian Film Critics Forum” in Melbourne, organised by the Australian Film
Institute. Held in a conference room of the plush Regent hotel, it was a
bizarre affair, pitting me as the “maverick young cinephile” (I was 31) against
two older Gentlemen of the Press: the Age newspaper’s then-reigning film
critic, Neil Jillett (this was four years before I got his job), as well as its
TV columnist, a beloved Melbourne University Classics professor named Dennis
Pryor (deceased 2008), who (like Jillett) refused to take his position as
reviewer seriously at all, but always had a memorised quote from Homer or
suchlike readily at hand to get him out of trouble. The guiding topic/question
of the session was, approximately, “What are the prerequisites for being a film
or TV critic?”. Public discussion time afterwards got quite heated, with
audience members including Freda Freiberg denouncing Jillett – and Jillett
sneering at me as he hissed: “A film critic is someone who has … written
for a magazine?!?” During the panel
itself, I was allotted a grand total of three minutes, in which I made the
following statement about some basic principles for film critics and criticism.
1. Where do I come from, what do I do? I teach film
studies; I write for magazines large and small; I hang around the independent
and experimental film scenes. I also read many kinds of film books and
magazines; I watch older movies at film societies and rare movies on video.
Everybody’s history is different, but I believe that
the prerequisites for being a film critic go something like this: a knowledge
of film history and an ability to make meaningful connections between films; a
knowledge of (and investment in) current debates here and overseas; and a
sympathy for marginal and independent forms of cinema – short, avant-garde,
documentary, theoretical, militant, feminist, specialist …
2. I absolutely reject the idea that a film critic is
just a reasonably “all-round cultured” person with an average interest in
cinema – plus, a person who is equipped with a set of noisy personal opinions
(based on what Meaghan Morris has diagnosed as “gut reactions”), and an
infinite, ever-renewed set of “good/bad” judgments to be dispensed on a weekly
basis.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t mind opinions per se; and I can enjoy the public
display of them, as a spectator or a dispenser, just like anybody. But I do
take objection to the high levels of whimsy, of arbitrary and fickle judgement,
based on nothing more than a vague feeling such as “that film just didn’t
work”.
For instance, a current local case. Why do we read
official praise for Ray Argall’s Return
Home (1990) or Jocelyn Moorhouse’s Proof (1991) – and I personally like both of them myself – as “well made”; but, from
those same, mainstream reviewers, harsh verdicts upon the “aptitude” of Brian
McKenzie’s Stan and George’s New Life (made 1991, released theatrically
in 1992)? What is a well-directed,
well-made film? It’s most often a reflex, unexamined, assumed category.
It’s often said of critics that they “know nothing
about filmmaking”; and some critics/reviewers respond in turn that they presume
to speak as an “average filmgoer” – nothing more and nothing less. The
“everyone’s a critic” line, and all that. But I believe that both these positions are wrong. The
critic needs technical/industrial knowledge, and a distance or overview, a critical position. The critic should
be someone in between, proposing
something interesting and useful both to filmmaker and filmgoer alike.
3. Critics should know – and care – about where films
“come from” in cultural terms. In recent mainstream coverage of the Melbourne
Film Festival, for instance, two films not nominated for Australian Film Institute awards were either disparaged or simply
ignored.
The first of these is Ross Gibson’s Dead to the World (made 1991, released
theatrically in 1992, and later drastically recut for TV). Whatever one thinks
of it (I have some problems with it myself), it’s not a “puzzle” (as it has
been lazily described), so much as a film evidently emerging from a quite
specific slice of Australian film culture: I mean, in this case, Filmnews magazine, the books and essays
of Susan Dermody & Liz Jacka on Australian cinema debates, Sylvia Lawson’s
column in Australian Society magazine,
not to mention Gibson’s own writings …
The second case is Leo Berkeley’s Holidays on the
River Yarra (1991). In interviews, the director has referenced Roberto
Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero (1948),
Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien (1974)
and Jon Jost’s Last Chants for a Slow Dance (1977) as
primary influences. Guess which one of those three citations would very likely
be lost on most of our salaried newspaper film reviewers in Australia at
present?
So, I find myself musing on the place that Jost’s masterpiece – and many other films like it – has in the
intellectual and sentimental journeys of “my generation” of cinephiles
(Berkeley included) … compared to the generally ignorant, dismissive press treatment
that a local movie like Holidays on the
River Yarra, growing from those same cultural roots, tends to (very
predictably) receive.
In short, we need critics who know something, and care
a lot more, about cinema in general – and
about cinema’s cultural place(s).
© Adrian Martin 31 July 1991 |
