creativity said:
I'm having a little trouble discerning what it is that you're criticizing, especially in the case of Sarris, who is famous for his concision (The American Cinema is composed entirely of nuggets). As far as I can tell, the only thing these critics have in common, in contradistinction to Bordwell, is that they were rigidly systematic thinkers. This is a strength as much as it is a weakness, since every such system you acquaint yourself with gives you a readymade framework which you can apply to perceive films in a new way. Even if you find Deleuze largely silly and overburdened by ideology, I'd be very surprised if the concepts didn't frequently return to you when you're thinking critically about films, or even increase your sensitivity toward certain kinds of films.
To clarify my earlier point about batting averages---I only meant to suggest that you should take care not to prematurely dismiss critics simply because they don't share your feelings on particular films. While I defended Kael, I wouldn't necessarily agree with her about a great many films. Perhaps very few would agree with her excoriating review of La Dolce Vita (and others), but she writes with such conviction that it's hard not to sympathize with her reactionary derision of what she terms the "come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-Europe parties"---she's calling out what she sees as the fashionable, the meretricious, the artistically opportunistic. Was she really so wrong to pass a negative verdict on these films? For me, yes, as she fails to capture what it is I find so ecstatic about them, but as you can see where she's coming from, not only are her thoughts worth entertaining, they positively contribute to a broader-minded understanding of these films.
This and the whole business of "transcending personal biases" seems like a huge mistake to me. Film criticism has to be grounded in the immediate perception of films. The work of criticism is only to serve our understanding of these personal experiences, which we may only by good fortune share intersubjectively. Because I'm too tired to argue this point for myself, I'm going to quote from Santayana:
Since it should be the task of film criticism to unite us in an understanding and appreciation of the medium rather than to divide us along sectarian lines, it seems thoroughly misguided to suppose it's possible, or (much worse) desirable, to "transcend" personal biases with criticism and strive for a false objectivity that is really just a narrow self-centeredness. To really care about objectivity means to attend more closely to the gifted critics with whom you disagree, not the ones who most often only flatter your personal biases.
My problem with such arguments is that they presume that because SOME people cannot think past their own personal biases, then nobody can. I simply disagree with this, for I don't think the human being so limited, at least not by any inherent forces. Again, I don't discount the idea of a personal experience with a film, but at the same time, I think that any critic worth their salt ought to be able to separate whether they liked/disliked a film from whether it was good or bad. I don't like Winter Light, all that much, but I also saw, almost immediately, that it was a great and greatly-written film that simply didn't cater to many of my aesthetic preferences. Same with Last Year at Marienbad, which I outright HATE but still think that it's a good movie. I fucking love Step Brothers, but I would be wrong to defend that on any sort of artistic grounds because it doesn't really sustain itself at any level beyond my liking of it. Indeed, the very fact that I DO discern my own personal biases and the place from whence they came and choose to try and think beyond them for the sake of criticism seems to me rather a refutation of that Santayana quote, and I don't think that there's anything provincial and superficial about such a judgment.
If one person says a film is good and one that it is bad, then logic dictates that one must necessarily be right and one wrong (or, more likely, given human weakness, one is MORE right than the other, for they may very well have some faulty reasoning), for one object cannot, in the same logical universe, possess two exclusive qualities (i.e. an object cannot be a cube and a tetrahedron at the same time). That's not to say that a film cannot have constituent parts that are good and bad, but those have to add up to something, have to lend themselves to an overall level of quality. The fact that different people will do the math differently and come up with different conclusions does not render every single conclusion a valid one; that seems to me something of a solipsistic way of looking at it. Rather, the breakdown will be something more complex. A small percentage will come up with a right (or more right) conclusion as well as showing a process in reaching that conclusion that is consistent and replicable (that is, to keep up with the math test metaphor, they will have the right answer and show the work that they did to get there). Another percentage will have the right answer but show that they may not be able to consistently hit the mark because there is a flaw in the way that they do their work or consider their problem. The rest, the ones that hit the wrong conclusion, may receive partial credit for the way in which they did their work. It's not the best metaphor, for art is neither math nor science, but criticism is, I think, somewhere in a middle ground between the two.
That's what I mean. And I don't think that criticism IS "to unite us in an appreciation and understanding of the medium." It would be nice if this is what it did, but if criticism is just people sharing how a film made them feel, then I feel like it becomes a much less useful medium than one that attempts to think past such things and more toward the overall construction of a work of art, for this latter is likely to be much more agreeable between people of differing stripes and, what's more, to make the great art more reproducible. What produces an emotional experience will not and cannot be the same from person-to-person, but what produces an intellectual response in people of comparable intelligence levels is more measurable and will, 99/100 times, produce an emotional response of some sort, as well. The thing is, I have no PROBLEM with the fact that I may be wrong on something. I try to see a film for what it is as best I can and make sure people understand why I came to the conclusion that I did. History will either bear me out or beat me, but I'll be damned if the critics who almost always gave Stanley Kubrick's work mixed or lukewarm reviews when it premiered have not been proven downright wrong by the march of time. No opinion can be invalid, but one opinion CAN prove itself more valid than others if the source can both show and tell the process by which they came to their beliefs.
Edit: WorriedCitizen, it is the intellectual in art that survives the dirt of history. The shit gets buried, particularly that shit that had no real value outside of the its ability to manipulate the emotions(for every society will have a different idea of what should or does produce emotion, as that often IS dictated by temporal experience and aesthetic preference); what survives is, usually, that which lived on some intellectual level primarily (or at least in some part). Nobody really reads something like Uncle Tom's Cabin these days except as a sort of historical curiosity, but everybody reads Huck Finn and The Great Gatsby. I believe that what separates these works is that in the latter works, there is an intelligence to their construction that transcends the fashions of the day and is appreciable regardless of your station in life. "Art for art's sake" is the right idea; "art for the artist's sake," which would be the way that art would come out of an impulse that is non-communicative (a generalization, I admit) leads to stuff like AbEx, or a Yoko Ono piece where she puts an apple on a pedestal and nothing else.
Next up is Sunshine...
