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Is Criticism Art?
By Hassouna Mansouri

Let's start with the general opinion: criticism is at the service of art. For promotional criticism, yes. For journalism, perhaps. But intellectual criticism is something else.

Reflecting on this question, I have to ponder the French case of the Nouvelle Vague. Rivette, Chabrol, Rohmer, Truffaut and Godard: all of them started out as film critics, and all of them became filmmakers in the end. Did they think that filmmaking was more noble than film criticism? I'm not at all certain. There are two ways to make cinema: using a camera or a pen, celluloid or words.

And let's refer to another French case. As a lover of French literature I remember a 19th century saying by Flaubert on literary criticism: "Le critique est un écrivain raté". But is the critic really a failed writer? Or is the critic a person who chooses to write reviews because he or she is not able to write a novel or make a film? The guys of the Nouvelle Vague, as writers and filmmakers, are there to show us the opposite.

According to my viewpoint, film criticism and filmmaking come from the same world. It's all about interpretation. And there isn't only one interpretation for Citizen Kane, La Régle du jeu or 8 1/2 — fortunately so, in my opinion. These films have been analysed, are still being analysed, and will go on being analysed in the future. The fact is that these films are great works of art precisely because they are open for analysis, inviting analysis. Those who analyse them do so using their fantasy and their knowledge to give sense to these films — and thereby give sense to the world. See Noël Burch on the concept of l'oeuvre ouverte (the open work) in Theory of Film Practice, where he posits a difference between a closed work of art and an open one.

The mental situation of the critic is a dialogue with a film, with a work of art, with the world of cinema and, of course, with every kind of art, as well as life itself. The critic and the artist have the same ambition: to make sense of the world. And they use the same materials to do so.

I think that if there is a difference between criticism and art, at least in cinema, it's a difference of degree and not of nature. A film critic and a filmmaker are swimming in the same water made of images, fantasies and concepts. The difference is that the filmmaker is completely naked, while the film critic wears a swimsuit. Some film critics are even frogmen - they put on wet suits.

Hassouna Mansouri
© FIPRESCI 2004

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