Everyone's a Critic, Reflections

The role of the critic

The critic’s job is to articulate their unique personal reaction to something in a way that an audience finds useful. The “something” in this case can be virtually anything created or designed by humans: media texts such films, albums, and books; or cultural experiences like restaurants, theatrical performances and exhibitions.

Though it’s true that anyone can be a critic, that doesn’t mean that everyone is a critic by default. Engaging in criticism is a deliberate act, an attempt by the critic to understand and analyse culture from their own unique perspective. What defines a “unique perspective” is open to interpretation too: some critics use their knowledge and familiarity with their chosen subject to stake a claim to expertise; others use their identity and life experience to provide a unique voice to their audience. Ultimately, if a person is able to inform and entertain an audience while analysing and reacting to cultural artefacts, they can rightfully claim to be a critic.

An audience is crucial to the practice of criticism, because if a critic is not writing for an audience (real or imagined), they are not writing criticism but a personal journal. A critic is only a critic if they present their unique perspective to an audience, large or small.

Just as there are many different types of critics, and many different ways to engage in criticism, there are many different ways audiences value criticism, too. Some people use criticism as a kind of consumer guide, telling them which movies or books are worth their time, while others see criticism as an art form of its own. This has shifted over time, as the avenues for traditional criticism have dwindled and the internet has opened up new possibilities. Today there are far fewer opportunities for critics to engage in the traditional profession of criticism (being published in print, and paid for their work), but there are virtually infinite opportunities to engage in the practice of criticism. What’s important is that the critic finds their audience, whomever that may be.

When deciding who their audience is, and what their voice is, the critic needs to consider a number of factors – these were outlined to us by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, and I think they beautifully summarise the most important things for critics to understand in their own work:

Taste: by itself, taste – saying “this is good” or “this is bad” – is not criticism. It says nothing about the art but plenty about the critic. Taste can be used to inform criticism, but must only be used as a jumping-off point for the analysis, contextualisation and evaluation of the art.

Privilege and bias: especially today, it is important for the critic to consider who they are and why they should be the person to criticise something. This is central to the idea that each person’s perspective is “unique” – what makes the critic’s point-of-view their own also gives them privileges and biases that must be kept in check.

Context and opinion: critics are responsible for providing an opinion – their opinion – on art, but their audience also expects them to place art in a wider context, to compare it to what has come before.

In this context, I found it incredibly interesting to read A.O. Scott’s Better Living Through Criticism throughout the semester. Scott is a prominent, traditional, white, male film critic, one of the few afforded the privilege of engaging in the profession of criticism – and at one of the world’s most prestigious print newspapers, the New York Times. His form of criticism is something I aspire to, but one which is virtually impossible for anyone but a very select few to achieve, and which is slowly becoming less and less culturally relevant. Scott contends that criticism is art and art is criticism – that just as criticism needs art in order to have a subject matter to criticise, art is valued and given cultural meaning by criticism. Art, by its very nature of responding to and reflecting the culture in which it was created, is a form of criticism. This is something that hasn’t changed with criticism’s shift from traditional to new-media forms – art and criticism are still engaged in a conversation with one another, thousands of years old and showing no sign of ceasing, even if the A.O. Scotts of the world are diminishing in influence and importance.

Criticism has been moving into new frontiers for decades, and this has been accelerating with the internet changing the face of the media and communication. Not only are there an ever-expanding number of new forms of media to be criticised, there are new platforms and formats for critics to practice their craft: curation, recaps and video essays are just three such formats.

One area that has become particularly fertile ground for criticism is the personal essay. Since art and culture is often so closely tied to personal identity, critics are increasingly mining their own life experiences to inform their unique perspective. Though traditional critics might argue that personal essays are too subjective, and do not attempt to objectively assess or evaluate a particular work of art, audiences clearly find value in them. It’s important to note, though, that even in this flurry of new platforms and outlets, the rules still apply: the critic should have wide cultural or personal experience, good taste, they should consider their privilege and bias, and always write with an audience in mind.

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Assessments, Exploding Genre

EG Week 7: Genre trajectory

This week we presented our Genre Trajectories to the class and a small group of leaders from other studios. Here’s mine:

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  • In my first sketch I was mostly interested in the functional aspects of genre — specifically, I looked into how a particular technique (in this case, silence) is used to achieve a particular effect (in this case, tension)
  • The result was OK, but not particularly successful — you all heard it in class, it was a pretty perfunctory interaction with genre and tension was marginal at best.
  • In terms of execution, I was happy with some things, but ultimately it was just too simple and surface-level. But I have learned a lot about sound design from it that I will be able to put into practice in future projects.

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  • Moving on from here I’m hoping to start looking deeper. I am now interested in figuring out the meaning signified by genre elements, and whether the meaning can be kept in tact when modifying those elements, or whether it’s possible to keep the elements the same but change the meaning.
  • For example, what makes a film noir a film noir, specifically? Can you transport those elements and the iconography of the film noir into other situations and have the film still be recognisable as a film noir?
  • As a result of this, I’ve started reading into syntactic and semantic inscriptions of genre, which distinguishes between the actual style or narrative elements that are the building blocks of a genre (semantic), versus the larger concepts around how those elements are arranged to create meaning (syntactic).

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  • For my next sketch I’ll be investigating the Spaghetti Western, and I’ll be modifying it in two ways — to essentially see if I can keep the essence of a Western film even through basically all of the hallmarks of the Western will be changed to something new in my film
  • The first thing I’ll be doing is gender flipping it, which has been happening lately with films like Ghostbusters and the upcoming remakes of Splash and Ocean’s Eleven. I’m very interested in readings of Western films as artefacts of the male gaze, and reflective of problematic ideas of the place of women in society that would never be acceptable in modern films
  • The second thing I’ll be doing is transporting the action of my Western to modern-day urban Melbourne. This is for practical reasons — I don’t have access to any horses — but also helps me investigate whether the iconography of the Western stands up to being changed so radically.
  • Sukiyaki Western Django is a good example of a film that in some instances uses the tropes of the Western without modification, and in other instances uses an equivalent trope from Japanese cinema, and sometimes it uses something completely new — but in each instance the element successfully contributes to the genre tapestry of the film.
  • So that’s what my next genre sketch will explore, and from there I’m hoping to explore either the bottle drama or the romantic comedy from a similar semantic or syntactic perspective. Across my first two sketches I still haven’t written a word of dialogue, so I’m really looking forward to writing a script, and I now know that I’m not a great director, but I think writing lies closer to my strengths.

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  • My goal for the final sketch is to find a way to write either a romantic comedy or bottle drama that doesn’t adhere to any of the specific cliches of those genres, but is still recognisably a romantic comedy or bottle drama. If I can achieve that, I think it’ll be a great way to deeply explore genre without confining myself to just replicating tropes.
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Assessments, Media 1, Workshops

PB4 video essay rough cut and feedback

In today’s Workshop we received some feedback from Louise on our video essay rough cut. As Katrina is doing the first pass edit for our video it was the first chance I got to see what she’d done as well, and I was so happy to see it all coming together. There was still plenty to be done (and our feedback reflected that), but as a draft it was very good and I feel like we are well on the way to a finished essay that comes close to our initial vision.

We wisely decided to cut a whole chunk of content out of the middle of our essay before we even presented the rough cut, because while it was interesting it wasn’t particularly relevant to our thesis. This saved us a lot of editing time and pushed our video down to around six minutes, which is still over the final maximum length but will be easier to cut down than if we’d included that chunk.

Louise’s feedback was that the bones of our essay were good — the structure and argument that we chose was effective and managed to get our point across succinctly. I was happy to hear this because I feel the same way — I think we locked into a good structure early in our discussions as a group and have followed it through to the finished product. She also pointed out that there were several parts that could be trimmed to save time, which we’ve happily done. One of her suggested edits ended up not being possible because later in the essay we refer back to something mentioned in the cut section, so if we wanted to keep one we had to keep both — and we needed to keep the second one. I think this will be a valuable lesson in making sure I have multiple potential “cut points” in my scripts that can be removed depending on how close I am to the desired length. Cutting down a long, stream-of-consciousness script is nearly impossible without losing some coherence.

Like our audio essay feedback this was an incredibly valuable exercise and will result in a much improved final product.

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Assessments, Media 1, Workshops

PB4 audio essay rough cut and feedback

In our Workshop today we presented a rough cut of our PB4 audio essay to our tutor. It was a valuable opportunity to have someone outside our group listen to it and provide unbiased feedback — and I’m glad to say that we seem to be on the right track. However, there are definitely a couple of areas we could improve.

Firstly, the essay is too long. Even without all of the elements we planned to include it was nearly 50% over the maximum length, so we’ll have to do some work to cut that down before submission. I think we can do this without compromising quality or clarity, even though we might have to say goodbye to some “good tape”.

Secondly, we were also advised to include more sound effects and musical cues, to break up the monotony of hearing a single voice talk at length without a break. I completely agree with this note and I’m glad it was brought up at this stage, because we still have plenty of time to search for the right sound effects.

Overall our audio essay is progressing well and we will have the whole thing completed next week. I’m really proud of how it’s turned out and Emily and Kat have been really great to collaborate with — surprisingly, my first group assessment experience has actually been pretty positive!

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Assessments, Media 1

PB4 inspiration

I happened to download this Planet Money episode on class action lawsuits the week we were choosing topics for PB4, so I listened to it with interest hoping to find formal elements we could borrow for use in our own essay. It turned out that Kat and Emily really liked the format too, so we decided that a Hack/Planet Money style podcast would be the perfect format for our PB4 audio essay.

Specifically, the elements we will be using in our audio essay include vox pops, a host providing context and driving the narrative, interviews with expert speakers, and sound effects/musical cues. With such a short production schedule and limited length our essay will necessarily be less in-depth than this Planet Money episode, but I think it’s still a handy model to try to emulate in limited form.

For the video component, Kat brought to the table a fantastic series of essays by PBS called Idea Channel, which “examines the connections between pop culture, technology and art”. There are dozens and dozens of such videos in the Idea Channel stable, and although they have a very particular style and personality (which we won’t be recreating exactly), some of the broader conceptual ideas on which Idea Channel is based will provide excellent reference for our own work.

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Assessments, Media 1

PB4 research

Our initial research into topics we could tackle for PB4 mostly consisted of representations in media:

  • Gender and sexuality
  • Race
    • Comparing the depiction of Aboriginal Australians in media to Maori and First Nation peoples
  • Subcultures
    • Music subcultures, particularly punk and hip hop
    • Skinheads / racists
    • Drug culture
  • Media (i.e. how creators and media technologies have been depicted in media over the history of cinema/television)
  • Technology (i.e. the development of techniques like long takes, jump scares, etc.)
  • Genre / subject matter
    • Musicals and the appearance of musical numbers in non-musical films (e.g. Magnolia, (500) Days of Summer, etc.)
    • Romantic comedy and its reflection of wider societal values
    • Time travel

After this first round of brainstorming we settled on the depiction of drug use and drug users in media, because the subject matter appealed to us and we thought it would be easy to find resources and references in an area that has seen significant research.

The day after we settled on that topic, we discovered an article that discussed the rise of sequels in mainstream American cinema, which appealed to us all as an idea. We decided that we would change the topic of our PB4 essays to non-original narratives, i.e. sequels, prequels and remakes, and trace their rise from basically non-existent in the early days of cinema to practically dominating the box office today.

There is a vast body of research into this area in academia, and there are some incredibly interesting examples and case studies that we could explore. We’ve also already managed to secure interviews with a film journalist, a film producer and a media academic to drive our essays, which will hopefully provide an interesting baseline of opinion to build upon.

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Cinema Studies

A close formal reading of Zodiac

In his 2007 film Zodiac, David Fincher precisely controls the visual aspects of film language to drive story action, develop characterisation and convey meaning. A formal analysis of a single shot, which occurs at timecode 02:19:04 on the Director’s Cut Blu-ray version of the film, reveals the contribution of lighting, colour, focus and staging to the overall experience of the shot and the meaning it conveys. In the scene, Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) visits Bob Vaughn (Charles Fleischer) after receiving an anonymous tip that a former workmate of Vaughn’s may be the Zodiac killer, with handwriting evidence linking the workmate to the Zodiac’s letters. During a conversation in Vaughn’s kitchen, which immediately precedes the shot being analysed in this essay, Graysmith learns that the handwriting sample actually came from Vaughn and not the workmate, implying that Vaughn himself may be the killer.

In the shot that follows, by meticulously controlling the visual properties of the frame in the context of the scene and the film as a whole, Fincher suddenly and immediately evokes the mood and atmosphere of a thriller. After over one hour without seeing a murder on screen, the audience is manipulated by a combination of cinematography and mise-en-scène to believe that the Zodiac killer may spring back into activity by striking against the film’s main character.

Taken in isolation, the most immediately identifiable characteristic of the shot is its extremely dark, low contrast lighting and slightly yellow hue. The colour yellow has a centrally important meaning in the visual style of Zodiac, and this meaning changes in the context of various scenes and time periods throughout the film. In early scenes in the San Francisco Chronicle newsroom, yellow (along with similar colours orange and brown) are warm visual signifiers of the 1960s and 1970s, the retro colour palette helping the film establish its setting and year. By the time the film arrives at the scene set in Vaughn’s house, which occurs in 1979, yellow has been stripped of its nostalgic properties and is now more strongly connotative of bruising and decay, as the toll of investigating the Zodiac killer begins to destroy the lives of those investigating him. By grading this scene with a dark yellow tint, Fincher further illustrates the damaging frustration and obsession that has gripped Graysmith while also drawing visual parallels to the murder scene that opens the film, which is similarly depicted in shadowy yellow tones.

In terms of staging, the shot is deliberately composed to convey a change in the power relationship between the two characters. Before Graysmith realises that Vaughn might be dangerous, they are shot in a relatively standard manner and roughly on equal terms — medium shots follow the dialogue from one character to the other as they discuss the handwriting evidence in Vaughn’s kitchen. But in contrast to the earlier shot, after his realisation Graysmith is placed in the foreground to the far right of screen and shot in close-up, taking up roughly fifty per cent of the frame. Behind him, to the left of the frame, Vaughn stands deep in the background over Graysmith’s shoulder. The shot is photographed with a shallow depth of field to keep Graysmith perfectly sharp while Vaughn is almost completely out of focus, his dark brown and grey costume blending in with the dark background. Graysmith is clearly the most visible subject of the shot, but Vaughn looms over it in such a way that he controls the action and demands the audience’s attention. This shot would likely have been photographed with a long focal length through a telephoto lens, which in addition to a shallow focal plane also has the effect of visually compressing the depth of the composition and making it appear to the audience as if Vaughn is mere centimetres behind Graysmith, when he’s actually metres away.

The combined result of all these visual choices is that Vaughn looks as though he is towering over Graysmith’s shoulder, watching over him like a hunter stalking its prey. This heightens the sense of imminent danger and also plays into the genre associations the audience is being manipulated to make. The shot lingers on Graysmith’s face and eyes in close-up as they dart from side to side, emphasising his fear and paranoia as he starts to put together what he’s just learned, realising that he’s stumbled into danger and trying to figure a way out. His hair and make-up is styled in such a way that a mixture of sweat and rain glistens on his forehead and facial features, visually separating him from the darker surrounding of the frame and emphasising that he is foreign to this environment, an interlocutor who is no longer in control of what happens to him.

Approximately three seconds into the shot, Vaughn indicates that he wants them both to go downstairs and turns on the basement light, which throws a flood of diegetic yellow light into the background of the scene. Previously the shot had been lit primarily from above, which gave each character’s face sunken features and a death-like quality. The basement light hits Vaughn entirely on the left-hand side of his face as it streams out of the basement from the extreme left of screen, without producing any significant change in the lighting on Graysmith’s face. The right-hand side of Vaughn’s face plunges even further into shadow, distorting his features and making him appear even more obscured and menacing in the background. This reinforces the character’s mystery, as neither Graysmith nor the audience can yet tell what his true intentions are. The light from the basement also creates a vertical line of shadow that bisects the frame between the two characters, enclosing each in a small, tight square of space. This foreshadows Graysmith’s confinement in the remainder of the scene, as he finds himself locked into a potentially dangerous situation without any obvious way out.

These visual signifiers rely on the audience’s familiarity with the thriller genre and some of its associated tropes to be effective — particularly the idea that basements are dangerous places with no escape, that villains are generally lit with dramatic shadows, and that breaking into a sweat is associated with fear. At nine seconds long the shot is the longest in the whole scene, and the spacious shot duration allows the dark mood and negative associations to settle over the frame slowly, giving the audience a sinking feeling to go along with Graysmith’s. Had Fincher cut away at any point during the shot it could have undercut the moment of emotion and empathy that slowly builds as Graysmith realises his predicament. By looking directly at Graysmith’s eyes, shot from a level angle, head-on direction and in close-up, the audience is directed to experience the scene from his perspective, and left there for several seconds of agony.

In a film that is generally concerned with power, control and unfulfilled obsessions, with a main character that systematically pieces together a case from disparate and conflicting sources, it’s the first time Graysmith feels like he’s not completely in control. Due to precise manipulation of cinematography and mise-en-scène, it’s also the first time in over an hour that the audience feels the same way.

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Assessments, Media 1

PB3: Eraserhead

Behold, my finished video for Project Brief 3.

I decided to call it Eraserhead, both as a reference to collector culture and as an ironic nod to one of the most disturbing films of all time — and possibly the film least like mine in all of cinema history.

The film is an interview with my brother, Gavin, who has held on to his small, crappy collection of erasers for 30 years despite their total lack of usefulness. I’m really interested in the idea of nostalgia as one of the biggest mediators of human experience/behaviour, and my brother’s collection is a direct manifestation of his attachment to childhood objects.

Aesthetically, I decided to place Gavin against a plain white background and shoot him with high contrast lighting and exposure. I hoped that this would visually separate him from “real life”, to reinforce the idea that his collection is a bit weird and abnormal, and also to give the interview a slightly clinical feeling. I first saw this visual style in the films of Errol Morris, my favourite documentarian, and I tried to replicate his aesthetic as best I could using a home-made lighting rig against a wall in my living room. I was pleasantly surprised at how close to my vision it ended up being. In a studio environment with a professional lighting set-up it would be quite easy to improve it even further.

Another aspect of my film that I’m happy with is the audio, and specifically how it is constructed. I made heavy use of J-cuts after first learning about them in our week three Workshops, and they really help to tie everything together into a cohesive whole. Each sentence flows into the next and it feels like a single piece of dialogue even though there are dozens of cuts in the audio track.

It was a real struggle to find footage online that I could incorporate into my project. Even when I could think of suitable types of footage that I could use to illustrate what Gavin was saying, I would search online and more often than not I would come back empty handed. I had a very specific idea of the kind of footage I wanted to incorporate (vintage black and white educational films) because it would tie into my theme of nostalgia, but it was actually impossible to find such footage in most circumstances, particularly the shot of a child crying. I ended up having to “grunge-ify” some recent footage so that it would fit the rest of the piece. Next time I’m planning a video project that will incorporate found footage, I think I’ll try to source it before I finalise my vision for the project, because it really was the hardest part of the whole exercise.

But I think the biggest weakness of the film is that it was difficult to shape Gavin’s interview answers into a narrative that adequately gets the film’s point across. I think audiences will likely watch my film and then afterwards think, “so what?”. I am really interested in making documentary portraits, and this was a useful experiment for my first time, but in the future I think it will be valuable to ensure my subject has an interesting story to tell that doesn’t need to be shaped too much (or at all).

On the other hand, I really like films where the “point” is either ambiguous or subjective, and it’s up to the audience to do the work to understand it, so that could be true of Eraserhead too. I guess I’ll find out when it’s presented to my classmates.

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