The Ethics of Film Criticism
By Chris Fujiwara

My Childhood by Bill Douglas

As delivered (more or less) at the Seoul Cinematheque, February 28, 2010

There are two approaches I could take toward the topic I'm supposed to talk about today. Each has to do with a certain responsibility.

First, the ethical film critic could be one who argues for a certain kind of cinema that the critic would like to see achieved or perpetuated, and who opposes a different kind of cinema. This critic's responsibility is to a definition of what cinema has been in the past and what it should be in the future.

There's a certain illusion in this attitude, because the objective possibility that something the critic writes could have any influence on the production of films is small. At most the critic could realistically hope that his or her writing might express an enthusiasm that would be communicated to others, or might serve to define and clarify what opposes one type of cinema to another, why certain things are valid and interesting and honest and certain other things are not.

For a critic who is also a journalist, who has the job of reviewing many films that are released over the year, this approach may well define the ethics of criticism. Because such a critic is in the position of a judge, having to dispense favorable and unfavorable evaluations, and, in many newspapers and magazines, deciding the number of "stars" to be awarded, which is probably the only thing that many readers will look at. So the ethical question of someone in this position becomes: what justifies my judgment? Am I merely recording what I like and what I don't like? Or am I, across the seeming randomness of my responses to a diverse series of films of different genres and by different authors, or films that are not made by an author at all, really arguing for a certain vision of cinema – necessarily my own personal vision, but one that I can defend, and that I do defend, in social terms (even if the society is an ideal and not a real one), case by case?

And if one sees one's work of criticism in this way, one will try to use the space one has available, the opportunity one has to publish a review of an individual film, as an opportunity to talk about something larger than that film, to talk about the space in which all films exist, where they enter into dialogues with one another, where they offer competing definitions for what the cinema actually is or should be. (To be clear, let me say what I am for and against in cinema, very briefly and broadly: I am against univocal meaning, the self-reading image; and I am for absence, ambiguity, and the space for reading.)

Then there is a second approach to the ethics of criticism, which has to do with one's response to an individual film and the responsibility one has to the film. Not, in this case, to all cinema, but to one film. This is, in fact, the kind of responsibility that I usually see myself as being under. Although I used to write regularly for weekly and daily newspapers and thus faced for several years the first kind of situation I described, where I was writing about all kinds of films, whether I felt close to them or not, these days I usually write only on things I want to write about, and these are usually films that for one reason or another I feel close to.

Let's look at this question of the responsibility to the individual film. The problem is always this: the film is other-than-me, but I can see and respond to the film only through what I am, through my past experiences with films, through the habits of seeing and the frames of thinking I've already formed. I can't deny that I bring these things with me to each new film I see; I can't nullify them and pretend they play no part in my response. Then how do I ensure that my habits and predilections don't overwhelm and nullify the new film, making the new film the mere repetition of what was already seen and known, and printing on the new film the shadows of older ones?

There isn't an infallible procedure for ensuring that this doesn't happen. This is a matter of the conscience of the critic – the professional conscience, as much as the ethical conscience (I guess in a way I am a little afraid of the word ethics) – and also a matter of technique: the critic has to figure out how to guard against too-easy assimilations and comparisons and remain alive to the possibility of the new and unfamiliar.

That possibility always exists. In any important work, there is a strangeness that is irreducible. If it lacks this strangeness, it is not a work that we can seriously discuss in aesthetic terms.

The strangeness is something that sticks, that resists being easily described, much less made into a formula: for example, the rhythms of the cutting in Johnny Guitar; the ability of a shot (in Bill Douglas's Trilogy) to reveal a person as an incomprehensible stubbornness of traits; the way Ozu films the spaces of houses in Late Spring and Early Summer so that the spaces seem to watch and wait for the people.

It's not enough to say of such things that they are strange; merely identifying them as strange is, of course, not criticism. What we have to account for somehow is the power of the work to take us by surprise, the power of the work to look at us.

The almost inevitable way people try to do this, especially if they have a theoretical bent, is through categories. For example, with Bill Douglas's Trilogy, we could say that the impact of a shot has to do with the ability of photography to catch reality. So we may conclude that Douglas's filmmaking is a good example of the photographic property of film. But isn't there something purely outside category that we fail to respond to when we meet the film in such a way? Something that might even be a challenge to our categories?

Yet how else is it possible to "account for" a "power" other than by using the categories we already have? And if we must grant to every work that comes along the potential to transcend or tear down our categories, what are bringing to the work, what does criticism do? Is there even criticism where there are no categories?

The best answer I can see is that we don't bring just our categories, but our ability to pay attention, and, in fact, we are better off pretending we have no categories, throwing them away at the moment we approach a film as critics (but keeping them close by for when we need them as historians and theorists). We have to pay attention to the detail of the film, the film that exists, as image and sound. We have to try to exclude as much as possible of what doesn't belong to the film, what the film itself doesn't claim as part of it – knowing that it may be impossible or impractical to exclude everything, but trying anyway to think with the film, to remain at the level of the film that is happening on the screen. If it's a bad film, the badness will quickly discourage our efforts, but the material for our criticism will readily emerge. If it's a good film, the detail of the film, the body of the film, will indicate how it wants to be written about. The critic should write about the exact experience he or she has of a shot by Bill Douglas, or the editing of Nicholas Ray, or Ozu Yasujiro's architecture, the exact weight and texture and atmosphere of these things.

We also have a responsibility not to surrender to the overwhelming power of the film in a kind of ecstatic fusion, but to remain neutral before it. Not neutral in the manner of a judge who evaluates from a great height, applying invariable standards. But neutral in the sense that our own individuality and thought don't become submerged and our values remain distinct, so that we don't have to say yes to what the film says yes to, no to what the film says no to, but can hold everything in a state of suspension. The danger of love is that it seems to relieve us of the responsibility to speak. Not just the ability, which can also happen, but the responsibility. And the critic can never be without the responsibility to speak.

Finally, we might ask: to whom – not to what, but to whom – is the critic responsible, and what kind of responsibility is it? There are four answers that make the most sense, which I'll list in ascending order of ethical urgency.

1) To the reader – this is more a professional responsibility than an ethical one (except in a very broad sense), and of course we have to know that there are different kinds of readers, and, if we are also journalists, we have to work with some sense of which kind we are mainly writing for, and some sympathy for the interests of the reader. This sense and this sympathy are really matters, as I said, that belong more to a professional attitude than to ethics, though there may be an ethical element, more or less strong, in how we choose to be aware of the reader in our writing.

2) To the filmmaker – yes, but only inasmuch as the filmmaker is the vessel of what Bakhtin calls a "word" that seeks, on its own, a response. The critic must give the response that he or she can give to the word. As for the responsibility we have to the filmmaker as an individual apart from the work – who is, often, an individual we may know, or whom we will likely meet, etc. – for the critic this is not really an ethical responsibility, except maybe in certain special cases. The ethical responsibility is mainly to the work, and also to the filmmaker only as someone who, as the author of the work, has a special relationship to it.

3) To the people of the world of cinema – this sounds absurdly broad, but in order to write at all about film, we have to have the sense that there is, after all, a community of us who care about it.

4) To oneself – I hinted at this responsibility earlier when I said that the critic needs to be faithful to an experience.

I could add more persons to whom the critic has some responsibility – but the more we add more the farther we get away from what is specific to criticism, and into regions that fall under more generalized notions of ethics.

Chris Fujiwara
© FIPRESCI 2010

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