The catty bitch known as Christopher Nolan recently took a swipe at amateur film critics.
And that’s a real problem in criticism today… I’m thinking more of amateur criticism.
The “problem” he’s talking about isn’t important. I’m more interested in his invocation of ‘amateurs’ (translation: bad), which presumes the existence of ‘professionals’ (translation: less bad).
You might be thinking “obviously there is a difference.” There was. When film critics were pretty much only employed by newspapers and TV stations, the distinction made sense. Pauline Kael was a professional critic. The bloke down the pub who liked movies was not.
Today, the line is blurred. Influencers ‘review’ films before anyone else. Richard Brody’s on TikTok. YouTube creators earn more than staff writers. Pauline and the bloke down the pub would both have a Substack.
So what does it mean to be a professional critic now? Getting paid for writing or talking about film doesn’t seem sufficient. Nor does having an audience. What’s left?
Once, critics operated as tastemakers. In the halcyon days of the monoculture, audiences’ only real connection with films was intermediated by critics, who would shape and contextualise what filtered down. There were few critics working, meaning each had outsized influence. This was particularly pronounced pre the mid-1970s, when films were rolled-out gradually (making those first reactions crucial), but it lasted all the way into the 1990s. “The first trade review always carries more industry weight than it probably should” wrote indie producer John Pierson in 1995. “However the first major consumer newspaper reviews are far more telling.”
Now, any one critic is just a leaf in the wind. “The more visible movie reviewing becomes,” wrote David Bordwell, “the less important any one reviewer seems.” There are some outstanding critics working today - Adam Nayman and Amy Nicholson and Justin Chang and Manohla Dargis to name a few - but how many people are going to see films because they recommend them? In place of individual taste we have the Almighty Aggregator. Did this movie get 2.8 on Letterboxd? Probably a skip. 80% on Rotten Tomatoes? Take my money.
Up to a certain point, film appreciation is a numbers game. But cranking your figures up doesn’t cut it either. Having an unholy number of notches on your cinematic bedpost is no longer scarce. An ecosystem of podcasts, physical media labels and enthusiasts has already strip-mined cinema history. ‘I can give you a great recommendation’ just isn’t that impressive a skill any more. In five minutes of research anyone can compile - and recommend to others - a list of Ten Great J-Horror Movies Worth Their Time, without ever having to sit down and actually watch one.
So if the distinction between amateur and professional isn’t based on audience, money, influence or recommendation…. What’s left?
Two hallmarks of modern film writing are ubiquitous here on Substack. They are two versions of the same impulse: to use a film as a springboard for discussing Something More Important, namely either: (1) The World, or (2) Yourself.
On the former, the formula goes something like this: pick a hot-button issue; identify a film or group of films that speak to that issue; take the side that your readers likely agree with; cherry-pick a couple of examples from the film - and hey presto you’ve got a 1,500 word ‘take.’
On the latter, when struggling to identify something interesting to say about a film, you can simply make it about you. Suddenly, the words come gushing out of every orifice. After all, what in the world could possibly be more interesting than yourself? (I often have to expel hundreds of words of indulgent nonsense from my writing, but hey at least it’s warmed up my fingers).
Both are, of course, perfectly valid modes of writing. When done well (which is, admittedly, rare), they can be exceptional. I’m not here to yuck anyone’s yum. But they cannot be used to distinguish amateur from professional criticism for the simple reason that anyone can do them. You don’t need any specialist knowledge about a film to be able to tie it to your own experience or the latest news item. It is a purely extractive process.
Which finally leads me to my point. Specialist knowledge. Professional critics pursue a level of technical, craft, academic, formal, theoretical and historical knowledge that lets them do things amateurs can’t. They know more shit. And the more shit you know, the better job you’re going to be able to do at communicating the parts of films that us rubes do not understand.
This extends beyond films and into other artforms. Cinema is a Frankenstein’s monster, and a professional critic wants to understand its constituent parts. I’m reading David Bordwell’s The Rhapsodes, and one of the things he writes about is how his leading 1940s critics - Agee, Farber, Ferguson and Tyler - “all were polymaths, bringing experiences of other arts to bear on the cinema.” Manny Farber, for example, trained as a painter and “brought a concern with fastidious craft, pictorial design, and emotional expressivity to his thinking about films.”
If this all sounds like gatekeeping: it’s the opposite. One way to think of a ‘professional’ is that they are performing a role based on some skill or credential that a hobbyist does not have. In some industries, like the sunlit uplands of law, this means you have gone through some expensive training program and are regulated and insured and whatnot. Not the case for film criticism. The barriers to entry are insanely low. Information isn’t scarce, but doing the work is. Nolan’s point, I think, is that an awful lot of people writing about film aren’t putting this work in. We can! All it takes to become a professional critic, in the words of Otis Ferguson, is “a constant and humble passion to know everything of what is being done and how everything is being done.”
If you approach cinema with this kind of bloodthirsty curiosity, then all the modes of criticism I’ve spent the last 1,000 words dismissing will become relevant again. People will trust your taste. You can make eclectic recommendations that aggregators wouldn’t dream of. You can use the specifics of the movie, rather than bland generalisations, to write outwards into the personal and the social. And yes, you can build a brand and even have some influence. But all this is rooted in, first and foremost, the pursuit of knowledge.
The irony is that the best way to accumulate this knowledge and hone this curiosity is to write a fuckload of amateurish stuff, and to do so without compunction or shame. I have written this essay to cajole and berate myself as much as anyone. So if you read this and feel disheartened, don’t be. Remember this: everyone’s an amateur, the only difference is that some are putting the work in to become a professional.
"The catty bitch known as Christopher Nolan..." is one hell of a lede, you get my like just for that alone. Informative as hell, and a solid reminder to keep on learning. I think the most powerful point you made is in this line: "All it takes to become a professional critic, in the words of Otis Ferguson, is 'a constant and humble passion to know everything of what is being done and how everything is being done.'"
The "humble" part is often missing from a lot of online reviewers (YouTubers are a big offender). There seems to be an apathy towards learning, especially about cinema, which is how you get a lot of people unironically praising tentpole IP-driven stuff as "absolute cinema" when it most certainly is not.
So I of course have a lot of thoughts on this, most of which would be redundant on account of how well you, Ed, lay things out here.
I'll say this (and I'm cribbing from a review I'm writing up behind the scenes at the moment): I do think we're starting to see the natural conclusion of art having been made to exist in a sociopolitical framework that simply isn't congruent with art's truest utility. Humans inwardly fracture reality from what we experience, and art is simply that exact fracture in the opposite direction (i.e. outwardly) to the point of physical externalization, and can therefore then subsequently be experienced by others. Art is the exchange of the human element at its most utopian and expansive. Criticism -- real criticism -- bolsters the possibilities of that exchange.
The job of the critic as understood by the zeitgeist, however, spins out of that aforementioned framework that was incongruent with art in the first place. That's crumbling now; the bar for entry has revealed itself as low precisely because the utility of art shares a direct relationship to the lowest and most remarkable bar of all: the human privilege of fracturing reality. Perhaps this pursuit of knowledge you mention is a step towards a world that invests in its humans and that ability we have to be, do, know, and fracture; an investment that every real piece of criticism is already making by being written.