2 - The Path and the Passeur
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 December 2020
Summary
Abstract
This short “opinion piece”, commissioned by an Australian newspaper in 1993, discusses the role of the film reviewer as someone ideally involved with diverse sectors of culture, endeavouring to “build bridges” between these sectors. This ideal is compared to the sad reality of many professional reviewers, who decry or dismiss anything that is unfamiliar or challenging to their already fixed, rigid, largely conservative cultural sensibilities. The idea that all film critics share a single “common culture” of global cinema is interrogated. The chapter discusses the paradoxes of a “career path” in the unpredictable life of a freelance critic, while extolling the open-minded possibilities of being a “passeur”, one who wanders between multiple films, theoretical ideas and widely varying socio-cultural situations.
Keywords: Film criticism, film reviewing, subcultures, Serge Daney
In his parting reflection as Arts Editor of The Age newspaper in Melbourne, Michael Shmith issued a piquant lament: “There is still no established career path for critics. Where is the next generation?”
Part of me can sympathise with Shmith's cri de coeur. In all my years of freelance writing and talking about cinema in public, I have never stumbled across anything that looks remotely like a career path. But that does not mean there are no new critics lurking on the scene. The real problem is in knowing where and how to find them.
Film critics do not always arrive with the legitimacy of university degrees. Those who have managed to become professionals in the field often get dismayed over the prevailing attitude that anyone can be a movie reviewer. Yet there is some justice in this; many of the critics I most admire are passionate amateurs, proud autodidacts.
Another complicating factor is that film critics are not necessarily people who write a large number of reviews – or even write at all. Some critics do their best and most influential work by inspiring their friends and students in conversation; others by running a repertory cinema or programming a film society. Jean-Luc Godard has often said that he never stopped being a critic – he simply moved his critical speculations off the page and onto the screen.
Perhaps the major reason why critics can be hard to locate these days is that they do not necessarily all attend the same movies.
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- Information
- Mysteries of CinemaReflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982–2016, pp. 29 - 32Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018