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Bernard Hemingway's Two Cents
What is a Film Review?
If film reviewers are qualified to pass judgement on a film, shouldn't they be able to tell a good film from a bad one the way a wine-taster can tell good wine from bad. That they cannot is partly a function of the nature of film, partly due to the way the reviewer experiences it and partly because of the sheer number and variety of films that are released. Typically a film reviewer might see a Hollywood romantic comedy within hours of watching a European Holocaust drama. Expecting anything like verifiable rationality under such conditions is unrealistic.
A film is a rich text made up of many elements. Concept, script, direction, cinematography, casting, acting, production values, editing and so on are all contributants to the quality of a film but none in itself is a guarantor of quality or is normatively related to any other. Thus, no reviewer has access to an accepted evaluative methodology or is even able to develop one (or at least one that is going to encompass Kurosawa and the Farrelly brothers). Even more importantly, each reviewer values those elements differently and in turn experiences their multiplicitous combination differently.
How one evaluates something depends on a myriad of particularities from clearly-formulated aesthetic and political priorities to unarticulated emotional needs, let alone transient circumstantial factors. The combination of the complex subjectivity of the reviewer and the rich text of the film means that there's no guarantee of evaluative consistency.
For example tale the critical divergence over Yi Yi - A One and A Two (Edward Yang, 2000)in a single daily newspaper. The Age's Jim Schembri called it a "bum-numbing opus", his then colleague on that paper, Adrian Martin, a "luminous masterpiece". The difference in tone of expression is revealing. Schembri has a spade-is-a-spade, I-know-what-I-like directness as opposed to Martin's cineastic lyricism. Each reveals his experience with the film in the light of his explicit and implicit values.
Thus, it was interesting to see an advertisement for The Man from Elysian Fields (George Hickenlooper, 2003) which quoted (an unidentified reviewer in) The Los Angeles Times as claiming it to be " a truly, truly great movie".
To say that a film is "great" not only places it high above all other competitors for your attention but also suggests that it affords more than personal satisfaction, that it has some intrinsic merit in the scale of human values. I saw Hickenlooper's film. It was an entertaining but truistic homily on the perils of marital infidelity. It certainly wasn't a "great" film in the canonical sense. What the LA Times reviewer is claiming is subjectively true presumably because its simplistic moral message had resonance for him or her. Here "great" is being used as loosely as when we say, for example, "That was a great cup of tea". Greatness in this sense is a function of the satisfaction afforded the particular viewer by the film. One of the complexifying factors here is that film straddles the worlds of both entertainment and art and may rate very differently looked at from either point of view.
Whilst disagreeing over individual instances of films, reviewers, however, share values and intersubjective agreement (and peer pressure) over time tend to raise particular films to "greatness" in the transcendent sense. The epicentre of film critical values in this respect is very much European.
Thus, if you compare the 2003 Senses of Cinema (Australian) synopsis of their contributors' Top Ten lists with the 2003 Sight and Sound (British) critics poll the results are very similar:
| Senses of Cinema - January - February 2003 | Sight and Sound Poll - 2002 | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock) | 1. | Citizen Kane |
| 2. | Citizen Kane (Orson Welles | 2. | Vertigo |
| 3. | 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick | 3. | La Ręgle du Jeu (Jean Renoir) |
| 4. | La Regle du Jeu (Jean Renoir) | 4. | The Godfather / The Godfather II (Francis Ford Coppola) |
| 5. | Sunrise (F. W. Murnau) | 5. | Tokyo Story |
| 6. | The Searchers (John Ford) | 6. | 2001: A Space Odyssey |
| 7. | The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick) | 7. | Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein) |
| 8. | Seven Samurai(Akira Kurosawa | 8. | Sunrise (F.W. Murnau) |
| 9. | Au Hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson) | 9. | 8˝ (Frederico Fellini) |
| 10. | Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu) | 10. | Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly) |
Both lists reflect the influence of Cahiers Du Cinema and the rise of Left-critical film studies departments since the 1970s with their strongly humanist agendas. Choose another intersubjective set, however, say, Hollywood film critics, and you'll get a different result. Trying to work out who's correct and what are the "best" films is a fruitless task.
In summary, a film review is a form of persuasion or dissuasion and the reviewer is recommending you to see, or not see a film based on their values, experience and abilities. The reasons they offer are part of the discourse that surrounds that film and should be enjoyed at such but not looked to for lapidary finality. At best a reviewer can offer you a way to view or re-view a film other than you might have, left to your own devices.The rest is up to you.
You can read more about my views on film by clicking here.
If you'd like to make any comment, then please contact me: bernardATcinephilia.net.au (replace AT with @)
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