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Essay Papers The Sociological Perspective

In hellip i guess before reviewing a dangerous method, i should say at least a couple of words about its subject: psychoanalysis and people impersonating it. A long time has passed since psychoanalysis was considered to be an extraordinary, revolutionary, and scandalous hellip that the internet has transformed film and television criticism 1 is readily apparent, though the ways in which it has done so are exceedingly hard to pin down. The most obvious change is simply quantitative: digital technology has made the maxim everyone’s a critic more nearly true than ever before. It is far harder to gauge the internet’s impact on the quality of film and television criticism, mainly because developments are so diverse and contradictory. Online criticism ranges from brilliant to banal, and it is as easy to argue that film criticism has never been better as it is to argue that it has never been worse. It merely depends on where we cast our nets and on what evaluative criteria we bring into play. What we can say for sure is that digital technology has a great potential to reinvigorate film and television criticism.

The aim of this article is to tentatively explore what this potential consists of and how it can be realized. Film criticism is a sweeping concept, ranging from amateur blogs to newspaper reviews to dense scholarly studies that shade into film theory and film history. I will concentrate on the latter pole of the continuum, partly to make the discussion somewhat manageable, and partly because it is in the area of more academically oriented criticism that i think fulfillment of this potential is both most realistic and enticing.

How to Write a Better Narrative Essay

For example, unlike their print counterparts, most online critics need not worry about word counts or deadlines. They are also free to write about any film they want, not just theatrical releases, or to put to the test generic conventions and explore alternative writing styles, unconstrained by editorial policy. Hypertext links can point readers in the direction of relevant background information, while comment sections make online criticism more like the first move in an ongoing conversation rather than a verdict from on high.

Most importantly – and promisingly – online critics may incorporate in their work moving images and sound. The burgeoning genre of the video essay commonly employs edited footage from the films under analysis in order to enrich and expand the function of criticism: to shed light on individual films, groups of films, or the cinema as an art form. The inability to quote their object of study has been a long standing drawback for film critics. The predicament has been most famously, and perhaps enigmatically, expressed in raymond bellour’s classical essay, the unattainable text. For bellour, the literary text occupies a privileged position due to the undivided conformity of the object of study and the means of study, in the absolute material coincidence between language and language 1975: 20. Unlike literary critics, film critics have not been able to replicate portions of works, but have had to cope as best they can, mimicking, evoking, describing, playing on an absent object , as bellour puts it ibid. For the first time, there is material equivalence between film and film criticism, as both exist – or can be made to exist – simply as media files.

First, film critics have naturally not been incapable of reproducing any cinematic attribute. Film is a multimodal medium, and its repertoire includes print critics’ symbolic means of expression: the written word. Certainly, when filmmakers started using intertitles in the silent era, critics could accurately quote movie dialogue – but not, crucially, its preceding and/or subsequent visual enactment presumably the very reason such works assumed cinematic rather than solely literary form in the first place. With the introduction of sound, dialogue and performance were synchronized, throwing into relief the inadequacy of partial quotation or more accurately, in this case, transcription.

Print critics may still duplicate the literal meaning of the words spoken onscreen, but not the act of speaking itself, i.e. The what but not the how except, of course, as always, through ekphrasis. 3 second, since the 1970s film scholars have occasionally made use of frame enlargements when performing close readings. While useful for some purposes – scrutinizing image composition or lighting schemes, for example – still frames can merely hint at some of the key characteristics of film as a temporal art form: camera movement, blocking, editing, and so on.

As kristin thompson – who, with david bordwell, pioneered the use of still images in scholarly studies – points out, frame enlargements were quite rarely used because it took special equipment to photograph such frames: expensive camera attachments, color balanced light sources, and the expertise to use both 2006: n.p. Thus, until dvds made frame grabbing easy, most scholars persisted with studio generated publicity photos as illustrations, which of course were useless for close analysis, seeing as they did not reflect what really appeared in the film, since they were still photos taken on the set, often with different poses, lighting, and camera position ibid. Numerous cinematic works cannot be quoted even in video essays, if only for the simple reason that they are unavailable either online or on dvd. Fourth, if we think of a film’s theatrical distribution as an original , some aural and visual information may be lost or altered as celluloid prints are converted to digital files on a computer. There is no surround sound, for example film grain is often removed and the image will typically be cropped along the perimeter. 4 still, for most purposes these are minor problems and it is worth bearing in mind that literary critics are not able to quote all aspects of a book either: to appraise the quality of its paper, its layout, or font style, they too must resort to description. The obvious advancement that digital film criticism offers is the ability to quote in order to illustrate and exemplify, to hold up for the reader fragments of the work as a shared frame of reference for the critic’s observations and evaluations.

The video essay is still in its infancy, and has not coalesced into established patterns or forms yet. Matt zoller seitz’s wonderful five part analysis of the film authorship of wes anderson, the substance of style , is a fairly conventional auteur study, tracing key influences on the director’s style and themes. 5 however, rather than putting forward his argument as text, it is presented in the form of a voiceover accompanied by carefully edited footage from anderson’ work, sometimes juxtaposed by the work of the major artists that have inspired it. This allows zoller seitz to make his case with far greater economy, precision, and persuasion than a written piece with some frame grabs could hope to accomplish. By contrast, jim emerson’s video essay, close up , presents a very different approach to the format. 6 a collage of excerpts from classical films with no expository narration, it offers not so much a straightforward line of reasoning as an evocative meditation on the medium of film.

With some modifications if, no doubt, somewhat to its detriment zoller seitz’s essay could probably be adapted into a scholarly article emerson’s, meanwhile, would not look out of place in an art gallery. These examples, though far from exhaustive, point up the scope of the video essay. As we will see, the format overlaps in myriad ways with a number of more established generic structures. It attempts, in broad strokes, to provide an overview of the main genres with which the video essay intersects – and partly normative, i.e. It seeks to tentatively indicate some fruitful avenues for how the video essay may enhance film criticism.