For love or money - The role of the film critic in the digital age
”Scabs”. That was how film critic Kim Newman playfully described everybody who wrote online for free a few years ago, in an interview with science fiction website The Zone (www.zone-sf.com/knewman.html). He later acknowledged that his job was safe due to the general low quality of online reviews and that the nature of online film criticism was chaotic given that anybody can post their thoughts.
Fittingly then, that when The Guardian and British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) recently hosted a forum entitled "The role of the film critic in the digital age" any debate dissolved into anarchy. The outcome was a disappointment cawed over by the well organised factions of print critics and film marketeers.
The paradox that dares call itself the online community was present in patches of incoherence, disarray and self promotion, wedged betwixt all of this. A far better example of this kind of debate, with thinking not shouting, can be found online at Arts Journal (www.artsjournal.com) who back in May 2006 held the same discussion via a series of blog postings.
If this kind of discourse was doomed to bedlam the organisers didn’t help matters by rigging the panel leading the discussion with critics of print or pre-internet media backgrounds. None of them had much experience in online film criticism. The title of the forum should have been more accurately called “How the old guard are reacting to all this new fangled technology stuff”.
The most experienced of the panel in this sense was Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw, who through the forward thinking internet policy of The Guardian, has been merrily embracing new technology as it has been forced upon him. He duly evangelised about the merits of the internet in a “Gee whiz” sort of way. Of the rest of the panel Sam Nichols, Head of distribution at Momentum Pictures, by her profession had to be more web-aware because of the commercial power of the internet and its many browsers in the right demographics. The others comprised Sight & Sound editor Nick James, critic and Edinburgh Film Festival director Hannah McGill and broadcaster and journalist Rosie Millard, none of whom appeared to have much of a clue.
Having such a web ignorant panel immediately created problems when chair Rosie Millard used Rotten Tomatoes as an example, erroneously describing it as a blog. This was mirrored throughout the entire room as almost everyone had problems telling the difference between websites and blogs. For the record, blogs are a popular method of website content management. Rotten Tomatoes is a website that compiles other sources’ reviews, although it does have its own blog. This clarification is a minor one but it is important to distinguish. Should this seem petty, and it is, print also made clarifications. So there – ha!
In broader terms blogging can have a deceptive amateurish image owing to its personal tone although many are taken seriously. By promoting anybody who writes online as a blogger the implication at the forum was that print and established media are professional whilst everyone else online is not. For every mention of a quality website, like online film journal Senses of Cinema, there was a sense of a massive bulk of lurking banality.
Naturally panel members made no bones about clearing up misconceptions that affected them. Such as when Nick James stampeded towards the critical hillock by making a clarification of his own: the difference between reviewing and criticism. With the implication that quality print outlets criticise using skill, verve and wit, leaving the rabble to review everything else.
As for the debate itself, the print critics were generally approving of the opportunities the internet is providing them, making the most of their well honed professional skills which will probably eclipse the popularity of most amateur run websites as advertising revenue heads online. The film marketeers meanwhile have found themselves a bonanza of opportunity in subverting formally fixed channels of communication. Print critics are notorious for occasionally having herd opinions, so finding popular websites and online communities that absolutely love genre films for example, is a boon for the people trying to promote such films.
Apart from the underlying print snobbery concerning online critics the only properly articulated direct attack came from The Daily Telegraph’s dogged reviewer David Gritten who decided that now was the time to take Ain't It Cool founder Harry Knowles to task a little late. Years too late. Describing Knowles as being in the “pocket of the studios” he magnanimously gave himself and other established print critics the custodianship of the integrity of popular film writing: “the only part of the process they can't control”.
Gritten naturally forgot to take a long hard look at the standards of supposedly unimpeachable print concerns, like Empire magazine for example that seems to spend an inordinate amount of print promoting films which it then appears to give lacklustre reviews of a little later on. Or even the furore last year marking the difference between the critical and public response to blockbusters like The Da Vinci Code. Then there’s the minor issue of News Corporation newspapers and media reviewing News Corporation films made by Twentieth Century Fox, a studio owned by News Corporation. The list of print media corruption appears to be a long one matched only by the arrogance of the defenders of print film criticism’s integrity.
So what of the internet critics present? Bugger all frankly. As intimated above the idea of the internet community is a hard one to define, especially when one tries to invite representatives of it to a debate. There was essentially no one on hand to champion online film criticism because it is all so disparate and in such a state of flux. And at an event like this a champion was exactly what everybody online needed. Courted by the film marketeers and dismissed by the print establishment, the online film criticism community will probably always be kicked around if it remains unorganised but this lack of organisation is precisely one of the reasons for its vibrancy and scope.
Of the token web critics invited, the editor of Solace in Cinema Tom Hartshorn quickly struck a blow for amateur film blogs high on the vapours of being invited to press screenings and various people from the Londonist weighed in disgruntled with the level of the debate amongst others before dropping the “Web 2.0” bomb to a room that mostly didn’t understand it or didn’t care. If you don’t know what Web 2.0 is check out the Wikipedia entry. A well marketed and relatively new blog along the lines of Twitch, Solace in Cinema was exactly the kind of youthful exuberance that the audience wanted to embrace. By contrast the Londonist brigade had a more complicated message to convey but had difficulty getting past the ensuing chaos. And the editor of minor film website Sneersnipe Film Review (that would be me) sat quietly in sombre detachment at the unfurling free for all.
One burning issue that didn't receive a mention was the abject failure of some print media outlets to represent themselves online. This didn’t even come up in the debate until the author informally asked Nick James afterwards about the disgraceful state of Sight & Sound's website. The magazine has one but for whatever reason it's little more than a token presence with barely any content or identity. Nick James put it down to the bureaucracy of the British Film Institute (BFI) with vague plans to rectify this at some point.
Given the rush by UK government departments and agencies to present themselves in a clear way online this is nothing less than a national shame regardless of whether the magazine wants to remain print only. The BFI and Sight & Sound are funded by the UK tax payer but the years of authoritative film criticism, synopses and cast and crew details are currently denied to anybody unwilling to pay a visit to the BFI library or any other specialist library.
Even with a gap of five years to protect the magazine's subscription base, if the Sight & Sound back catalogue were properly databased and presented online even following the model of the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) it would be a resource of world importance to cinema, incidentally generating massive amounts of advertising revenue in the process if the editor so chose. As well as the amateur online critics raising their game, so too must the print dinosaurs.
The tragedy of this debate was that, by defining the current Mexican stand-off of the situation and then descending into miss-mash, the forum didn't explore where film criticism is going online. It was pretty much taken as given at the forum that a discussion that might have taken weeks or months with a newspaper or magazine could now happen with more immediacy as writer and reader bandy their positions back and forth but this was about as far as the thinking was allowed to go.
Now more than ever with the battle between rival next generation DVD formats, the mainstream appearance of HD cinema projections and the march forwards of download on demand the question for film critics should be “how do I fit into all this” as opposed to warring about the current state of affairs. Fundamentally the internet is all about sharing information - hence in part the current vogue for mash-ups: applications that mix and mash different content sources to create something novel and hopefully useful.
Looking beyond the need for some print media to use the internet better, another major issue which was barely mentioned at the forum was the ease with which the internet allows aggregation of opinion. Portal websites, including Rotten Tomatoes or the far superior MRQE - Movie Review Query Engine, consolidate reviews of films. These present readers one way of establishing a kind of consensus amongst film critics and reviewers, from simple comparison of stars given to actually reading opposing opinions side by side. Newspapers too have been doing this kind of critical comparison for some years now and some acknowledge that there can be conflicting opinions on the particular merits of a film - the UK film magazine Little White Lies notably sometimes carries alternate reviews of a film side by side and The Guardian’s approach to blogging is tagged as “comment is free”.
Already, online articles use clips of video via YouTube and the like to illustrate their points. Admittedly it's a nightmare for pre-internet models of copyright but this is a significant difference from print. Definitely many websites do little more than publish endless numbers of refitted press releases for films. The fast publishing times and endless amount of promotional material for films suits blogs particularly well. Strong editorial control of this approach to a film website resisting the urge to publish anything can be shown on flagship sites like Twitch but many others do little more than do the work of the film marketeers for them - without payment! Film publicity agencies target film websites with all sorts of bland multi-media material hoping to get some of it posted.
For that one unique website that does something special we have to endure tens or hundreds that are generic. If everybody mostly loves Ghost Rider, then so be it, provided one or two websites in the fray are out there doing something different. This is part of what the internet allows - it empowers individuals and with skill and luck they can get their message heard without, as previously, entering the world of journalism.
Predicting the future, or playing Cassandra as the print critics might misconstrue this, may be an intellectual parlour game but whoever translates the writing on the wall stands to reap the rewards – be they critical or financial. Internet word of mouth can open a film but it can also kill one, as Harry Knowles showed a decade ago with Batman and Robin.
One consequence should scare print critics and the film marketeers though. As a by-product of all the crap online, the critical judgement of readers is improving. Formerly where one could rely that a newspaper or magazine had standards simply because it was being sold, now amateur websites can be better than the websites of print publications. In this environment everybody has their critical skills and judgement continually challenged with the hopeful result that all these badly written and conceived film websites will improve the overall quality of both amateur and professional film criticism, and possibly one might dare to suggest, even the films that are being sold to us.
For more on this forum check out the following websites
Guardian Blog response
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/03/whither_the_film_critic_in_the.html
Londonist response
www.londonist.com/archives/2007/03/the_role_of_the.php
Twitch forum posts on this topic
http://twitchfilm.net/forum/index.php?topic=1680.0
Arts Journal Discussion – a better
discourse on the nature of the general arts critic in the digital age
www.artsjournal.com/ajblog/front.html
Solace in Cinema
www.solaceincinema.com/
Sight & Sound
www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/
Wikipedia entry on Web 2.0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2
The Guardian will also be posting a podcast
of the forum any time now...
http://film.guardian.co.uk/
End note
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