Backpage: Against Insight

By David Bordwell

Film criticism lies at the centre of nearly all intellectual discourse about the cinema, and if we take criticism to be an effort to know particular movies more intimately, it probably deserves its prime place. But contemporary film criticism is failing. In academic venues, it mostly grinds Movie X through Theory Y, in the hope that somehow the exercise will yield political emancipation. Meanwhile, film magazines and free city weeklies promote that self-assured nonconformity which prizes jaunty wordplay and throwaway judgments.

We read nonfiction for information, ideas, opinions, and good writing. Most orthodox criticism overdoes opinions, which create the critic’s professional persona. Soon opinions crystallize into tastes, and the persona overshadows the films. I realize the pressures here. Readers at all levels don’t take film as seriously as they take music or architecture, so film journalists are obliged to be superficially entertaining in a way that reviewers in other arts needn’t be. Still, most film criticism is fact-free (apart from festival buzz and chatty personal memories), and remarkably barren of fertile ideas. Go back and read, say, Rivette on widescreen cinema, or Sontag on Bresson, or Bazin on anything, and I think you’ll agree that most of today’s film critics have abandoned probing for posturing. They seem to have only one idea, and that surprisingly banal—that there is a zeitgeist and films reflect it.

Academic writing, you might think, runs in the other direction, overdoing ideas and information. Actually, prestigious academic film talk is drenched in opinions. Theory is a matter of taste: you say Virilio, I say Deleuze. Most film academics don’t critically examine the doctrines they applaud. Many dismiss requests for evidence as signs of “empiricism,” and when they cite evidence it’s likely to be tenuous or tendentious. They too have a touching faith in zeitgeist explanations. And too many academics seem to illustrate Nietzsche’s aphorism that to most readers muddy water looks deep.

        Interestingly, academic film writing also shares with journalistic criticism a belief in generating insights. It’s one of the reasons that Theory is driven by fashion. Once one big doctrine has run out of insights, we’re on to the next. But what’s an insight? Is it just a twitch or tingle? Or is it closer to a hunch—something that should be speculated on, investigated, analyzed, and tested? Intellectuals should turn insights into clear-cut ideas, reliable information, or nuanced opinions, but neither journalistic critics nor academic ones do this very often.

As I get older, I’m less interested in opinions, whoever holds them, and more interested in ideas and information. Excellent writing can still grab me (Dwight MacDonald, for instance, who crafted some of the zestiest pieces about cinema ever written), but I also want to learnapproximately true things about film, and this requires going beyond most current models of what a piece of film writing should be.

We could, for instance, aspire to the power of fine science writing. Why couldn’t a book on cinema achieve the rigor and lucidity irradiating Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, andSteel, Matt Ridley’s Nature via Nurture, or Helena Cronin’s Ant and the Peacock? Nearer to home, the other arts have given us essayists who write with full sensitivity to history and technique. Charles Rosen on music, Jacques Barzun and W. H. Auden on literature, Robert Hughes on painting—all provide not only vigorous opinions but little-known information and provocative ideas. We learn from them.

My critique has been broad, and it sounds harsher than I’d like. There are some fine journalistic critics and film scholars. Still, no one, as far as I know, is producing what I’d like to see. The film writing I have in mind would be essayistic, but it would have a solid understructure of evidence. It would be conceptually bold and bristling with subtly defended opinions. Its judgments would be nuanced in optimal awareness of the history of cinema, its economics and technology as well as its auteurs. Add a graceful writing style leavened with humour and purged of vainglorious anecdotes. We might then have criticism in a broader sense than we now usually find it, and something worthy of the art we love.

—David Bordwell

David Bordwell

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Back Page: Against Insight
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Editor’s Note
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