The question of whether a person needs a literal degree in film to be a "real film critic" is one I wrestle with often.
On the one hand, the film discourse has been mired by players who lack any base of knowledge in the thing they are critiquing. The YouTube algorithm rewards voices who know how to get clicks, not people who possess any special eye for the semantics or historical context for film. On the other hand, it's not fair to keep all the keys to the conversation to those who have the means to pursue a literal graduate and post-graduate education, nor should film lovers shirk from insights that come from alternative sources.
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| Sherlock Jr (1924) |
While I am invested in a future that includes graduates of film school--institutes dedicated specially to cultivating knowledge about the artform--I also don't necessarily think a person needs to get the grade in order to be qualified to talk about film, but they do need to do their homework. A part of this entails looking beyond the "Honest Trailers" corner of the internet and plugging into sources dedicated to the pursuit and cultivation of knowledge.
I don't mean to suggest that there are not valid and useful outlets for film education on spaces like YouTube. (You may have noticed, I myself use a more ground-level method of delivering educational film content.) Truly, I don't think the dividing line is as straightforward as having a degree or not, but I do want to focus on some of the academic sources that have done the most to shape me and my viewpoints on film study.
Which leads me to this new entry, a sort of referral for various film books that did a lot to influence my own views on film. (A lot of these books will be familiar to those who have been following my writing as they tend to be the kinds of books I pull quotes from.) I'm doing this for two main reasons.
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| Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) |
1. I want to give more context for my own theoretical and historical approaches to how I discuss movies. I obviously owe a lot of this to other sources, including those with whom I interacted directly in classroom settings, but it's beyond me to recognize them here in this particular space. 2. I want to offer some suggestions for anyone wanting to nurture their critical thinking within the film world, whether or not they are or will ever pursue a formal education in media arts. These sources all have my endorsement as solid launching points for academic film pursuit.
The other promise I will give is that these books meet a certain threshold of accessibility. TMA 391 had me read way too many books and essays from the driest of rhetoricians, people who actually made film study boring. These are all academic books meant for college-level study, but they're not hard reads.
At least, not as hard as Dziga Vertov.
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| An American in Paris (1951) |
1. The Hollywood Musical by Jane Feuer
Something I feel like my readers can't possibly appreciate just from reading my essays is that my formal film education actually did very little to build up my literacy with the movie musical specifically. My first semester our professor showed us The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, yes, and I think MEDIA HISTORY 1 had us watch Shall We Dance, but I never took any kind of class specifically on the musical genre. Basically all of my studies on the musical genre were extracurricular, resulting from doing that thing that all professors wish their students would do, going out to the library and checking out books written by scholars and studying when they're supposed to be engaged in acts of youthful debauchery. I can't say this about most aspects of my film education, but my musical literacy is almost 100% self-made.
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| Funny Face (1957) |
I have read something like six or seven books on this specific subject in their entirety (the complete catalogue my university's library had offered on the subject). I point to Feuer's book as the most influential among them because it gave me the most intricate framework through which to understand the genre. This excerpt, for example, has probably been the launching pad of every musical essay I have made on this blog and was even featured in
my study of the Disney musical subgenre,
“The experience of the film may provide an emotional catharsis or an escape for the viewer, as the dream does for the dreamer within the film. But when the musical also implies that dream ballets resolve the very real problem of the narrative, and by analogy, that movies fulfill our wishes in ‘real life,’ the parallels between movies and life breaks down. MGM musicals of the 1940s and 1950s don’t dare to question their own logic. To do so would be to deny the promise of entertainment itself. For genre films serve the culture by working through (in symbolic form) conflicts that can never really be resolved outside the cinema. Outside this bottleneck emerge more and more dream sequences, more and more Hollywood musicals.”
Here's the thing: I actually disagree with this point.
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| Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) |
Yes, the world onscreen is certainly different than the one offscreen. Musicals in particular tend to represent the world as we wish it was, but that reveals its own kind of truth, its own kind of wisdom, like the shared hopes and desires of all those who gather in the cinema to imagine, to admit we wish things were different. It's often only in the thrall of the dream ballet that we can access these most vulnerable parts of ourselves, and that entry point is the genesis of a lot of what we'd call self-discovery. In that way, the musical goes a long way to resolve "real life" conflicts of the heart. I share this excerpt not because I share its viewpoint, but because it gave me the tools to question what my investment in the genre really was.
And that is one of the fascinating contradictions of academia, you can really admire a person's thought process without sharing their conclusions. Feuer makes a valid argument about the function of musicals and how it intersects with human thought and the reality of social living. I disagree with her assessment, at least parts of it, but tracking her thought process still helps me better understand the field I am working in.
Again, I actually read a ton of books on movie musicals, but I told myself here that I would only allot the genre one entry in this piece, but as a bonus, I'll also give a shoutout to Richard Barrios' "Dangerous Rhythms: Why Musicals Matter" as another jewel within the conversation.
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| Stranger Things (2016) |
2. Flickers of Film: Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema by Jason Sperb
I checked out this book specifically to research for my analysis of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Pokemon: Detective Pikachu, but it is a text I have referred back to many times across many different essays because I think a lot about how the film industry has basically commandeered the psychology of nostalgia for profit.
Most of the book's interest in nostalgia is as a tool of consumerism, a method for getting the proletariat to partake of the media tree in service of the bourgeoise. I'd imagine that Sperb is probably one of those guys who spies adults going to Disneyland without kids (or heck, probably with kids just the same) and sees consumerist drones fulfilling their programming. This is one of the reasons why it's interesting that I would respond so much to a lot of what he said.
A lot of my participation in the film discourse is shaped by my adoration of texts I consumed as a child (e.g. Disney or Harry Potter), but I don't think that has left me any less capable of reflecting on how these currents carry tremendous consumerist loads. I chose not to view the last two Fantastic Beasts movies in theaters after my first outing made it pretty clear this franchise did not meaningfully build off the mythology it was capitalizing on. Despite my investment in the property (or just as likely, because of it), that necessary measure of discernment remained.
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| The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) |
That all said, I think there's a lot of value to Sperb's insights. In order to be proactive in how they internalize media, especially when it's insulated in something as emotion-based as nostalgia, consumers need to know where the limitations are and what the motivations are of producers supplying it, and sometimes that perspective comes from an outside source.
He explains,“Nostalgia is always most intense during periods of dramatic cultural and technological upheaval, whereby the perceived reassurances of a simpler past anchor our perception of an uncertain present (and future) ... Nostalgia, then, is less about reclaiming a vanishing past than about paradoxically resisting a potentially threatening future: how to pull back against the endless rush to change or against the inevitable end of mortality itself? In this sense, nostalgia is often really about the lingering specter of death; the awareness that everything must one day end nurtures the idea that moments and memories lost will never come again. Paradoxically, personal and collective (cinematic) fantasies of a past that often never existed in the first place become the only way to relive it.”
As with Feuer, I value the insights, even as I take certain exceptions with them.
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| Breaking Bad (2008) |
3. Manhood in America: A Cultural History by Michael Kimmel
Kimmel's book falls more in line or larger sociology, his discussions on art and pop culture only supplementary to his larger discussions on the social factors that shaped how American masculinity have evolved over time, from the American Revolution to the modern time. In his words,
"In the middle of the 19th century … If social order, permanence, could no longer be taken for granted and a man could rise as high as he aspired, then his sense of himself as a man was in constant need of demonstration. Everything became a test—his relationships to work, to women, to nature, and to other men.”
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| Citizen Kane (1941) |
He describes how American men for centuries have been at once liberated and inhibited by this thing called "The American Dream." It teases men with the promise of being self-made, the truest alpha male, but there are a lot of internal contradictions at work here. Once you win this game, you must also subsume oneself to the least manly of stations--to be "comfortable" and "stagnant," that which our hunter-gatherer ancestors would never consent to--and that's if you can even make the uphill climb to begin with. The pursuit alone can unearth impulses in some men that could only be described as base or animal--which is of course how they'd probably prefer it anyway. This disconnect is the basis from which a lot of what we'd call "toxic masculinity" is formed and perpetuated.
Pop media becomes a key interface by which men are able to perpetuate this fantasy of true independence within a larger system--one that at once buoys and subjugates them. Wouldn't you know? Men are just as in need of pleasant illusions as "the weaker sex." The conventions of film and television make it easy for a disgruntled 40-something IT worker to look at Arnold Schwarzenegger and think, "hey, he's just like me!" There is media that comments on this disconnect, of course, but try telling your cousin who listens to Joe Rogan that Tony Soprano is not a role model.
Again, Kimmel's book is more rooted in sociology than media arts study, his overview even covers a much wider frame of time than when feature films were a part of pop culture. But scholars are allowed to (and ought to) drink from more than just one fountain.
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| Nothing But a Man (1964) |
4.
Expanding the Black Film Canon by Doris Alexander The thrust of her book is generating dialogue surrounding underdiscussed films with contributions by the black community, "expanding the black film canon," as it were. Her introductory chapter, for example, sees a deep reading of 1964's Nothing But a Man, starring Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln. (The movie surfaces up on YouTube occasionally, if you're curious, and is very much worth the watch.) She explains,
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Gina Prince-Bythewood directing Charlize Theron and Kiki Layne
in The Old Guard (2020) |
"By expanding the number of and types of films analyzed, we can chart the increasing number of voices that tell black stories, and we can examine ways in which the representation of black characters and black communities have progressed and regressed over time." I see my own obligations as a film critic as very similar. With many respective canons, I want to discover and rescue lost items and bring up to the surface where other prospective film lovers can gift them the attention and consideration their filmmakers no doubt wished for them.
But of course, her aims specific to advancing black representation are not lost on me either. I included an excerpt from her book in my piece on racebending Ariel for last year's remake. My intent there was to show how a narrow view of black narratives disservices the complexities of entire nationalities, ethnicities, and cultures. Hence, the necessity for shake-ups like casting a black actress in the role of a traditionally white character.
In that spirit, I might also add Stella Meghie's 2020 film, The Photograph, to the list of black-centric movies worth bringing into the discourse. It was the very first film I reviewed for this blog and is also available to watch on Freevee as of this publishing.
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| In a Lonely Place (1950) |
5.
Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame by Ty Burr
The most recent entry on this list, I came across this one after I had already been writing in this space for some time. This was years after me walking up to the pulpit to tell the world that if they really felt bad about what happened to Judy Garland, they need to stop clicking on paparazzi sites and leave movie stars alone. Burr's book tracks the history of the Hollywood movie star and how these creatures have survived the movie industry's turbulent history.
The way Burr writes perfectly captures that dichotomy that traps a lot of viewers--even those who might think ourselves above such pettiness--resenting the arbitrary hierarchy that privileged these lucky few while also desperately needing to understand them. As he says,
“What journalists knew—what even the smarter studio heads must have understood—was that audiences out there in the dark loved all this dirt. Loved it. It was proof of so many things. That stars weren’t perfect beings, but flawed like the rest of us. That stars had worse flaws than the rest of us, and maybe we could do better if we had the chance. That money and fame either can’t buy happiness or can lead directly to unhappiness (or at least the sin of having a really good time.) That you could, or should, be punished for daring to rise so high. It was schadenfreude and it was a new kind of entertainment, yoked to the movies but delivering higher highs and more thrillingly vicious lows.”
The book doesn't shy away at all from the Olympian metaphor at work. Burr describes movie stars as gods made by the masses, and this is where you see the futility of this model. We feed the movie stars with our worship until they stop telling us what we want to hear, or until they grow old, which can't be fair to them, now can it?
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| Cinema Paradiso (1988) |
Cliche though it may sound ... it has perhaps never been so imperative for the larger public to educate themselves on media. Cinema has shaped our collective identity over the decades, and whatever shape it takes in the decades to come, audiences need the tools to decipher what they are seeing play out on the big screen.
Again, there are a lot of valid ways to acquire this, but there are also a lot of ways that genuine curiosity can be squandered on the usual drivel that fills the internet, and so participants need to be proactive in this effort. That may sound like a lot of homework, but in my experience, a little mindfulness can turn a chore into an exploration. There are certainly more boring fields of study than the movies.
--The Professor
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| Arrival (2016) |
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