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A prolonged debate about film criticism has been taking place in the film magazines. It centres in an attempt to define, or re-define, what film criticism is. Film critics on non-specialist papers, along with critics of the other arts, tend to avoid theories and the use of ‘an aesthetic’ in their approach to films. They rely rather on native wit, and on the three critical questions: ‘What is this film trying to do? How well does it do it? Was it worth doing in the first place? But the younger critics, writing chiefly in magazines of their own devising, put forward a variety of reasons for contesting this approach. Most of them base their objections on a common idea, and that is an insistence that film as a medium is completely different from the other arts. Therefore, they say, some way must be found to deal with its separate qualities in criticism. What they want is some kind of theory to work to.

     Different magazines put forward different theories. The writers of Oxford Opinion, for instance, follow the Cahiers du Cinema (the platform of the nouvelle vague critics) in believing that all good film criticism is arrived at through considerations of form. They attack the established magazines, like Sight and Sound, for writing about films as if they were scenarios, that is discussing their ‘literary’ qualities at the expense of their ‘cinematic’ ones. This leads the established critics, they say, into mistakenly preferring films that try to say something important, but say it badly, over those where there is a complete harmony of (possibly trivial) subject and style. Unfortunately, in maintaining this abstract form of argument, Oxford Opinion are often led into making certain dubious statements. They admit that content is, in a sense, indivisible from form, and some of them admit that moral qualities in a film can be important. But where they find stylistic qualities to admire in a director, they tend to deduce a rather meretricious moral importance from the actual style itself. Thus they believe that if you examine closely the work of a director like Hitchcock in a film like Psycho you become aware of ‘the profound sense of social responsibility inculcated by Hitchcock’. Thus, they claim, he is a first-rate director, and not a second-rate one as many other people think. They also lump together Wajda and Kramer as inferior to directors like Welles, believing presumably that both the former directors can be classified as artists whose technique has betrayed their material.

     Other magazines, chiefly the committed ones of the Left like Definition, do not go along with Oxford Opinion’s absolute obsession with form. But they too refute the traditional ‘three questions’ approach to film criticism. Their grounds for doing so are somewhat obscure, since their own two questions (What does this film say to me? How important do I find it?) seem remarkably similar. But they are dissatisfied with the established critical methods for a variety of other reasons. In a recent attack on Sight and Sound they brought charges of lack of enthusiasm, excessive enthusiasm, superficiality, obviousness, fashionableness, lack of discrimination, and disinterest in such fundamental problems of film-making as its economics.

     The victims, of course, are not taking this lying down. The editor of Sight and Sound, Penelope Houston, and Peter John Dyer (who edits its subsidiary, The Monthly Film Bulletin) have strongly defended their own critical attitudes in the face of all these charges. In articles in her own magazine, and in contributions to the smaller ones, Miss Houston has answered these detailed attacks point by point, and has attacked in turn the criticism-by-form enthusiasts for the practical fact that their writings tend quickly to become ‘programme notes for the initiated’. In a highly-charged article in Film, Mr Dyer also lashed back at, among other things, the writers who babble about style without having the least idea of what it is — as the style of their own articles shows.

     Among the number of refinements on the original discussion (the relative importance of form and content to film criticism) it is becoming increasingly harder to see who stands clearly for what, and in which local areas the various magazines agree with each other. What does seem to emerge is a virulent and general dissatisfaction with anything that might be called a liberal attitude to film criticism. Some of the dissatisfaction, of course, can be dismissed as ill-considered, unintelligent and anarchic for its own sake. But not all of it. For in some of the smaller magazines there is a genuine concern for standards of film criticism, and a spirit of honest enquiry.

     Unfortunately, there tend to be more heated questions than satisfactory answers, more theorizing than capable practice. For two principal defects show clearly in most of this rebellious writing. First, the inability of the younger critics to say exactly what they believe in positive terms (‘It is when we stop to ask ourselves exactly what we mean by “standards” that the uncertainties present themselves’). And second, a disparity between such critical theories as they are able to formulate and the quality of the actual criticism that gets written as a result of them. Thus Definition, after its pungent pleas for more intelligent critical standards published, for instance, a review of The Girl Rosemarie which was little more than a synopsis of the plot — concerning itself no more with the value of the film’s content than with the effectiveness of its style. This, perhaps, was not typical.

     But it is also a mark of their weakness that nothing they have written could be so called. Similarly, an Oxford Opinion writer, Robin Wood, after devoting an article to the importance of form, gave a demonstration of the limitations of his theory in a review of Bergman’s The Virgin Spring:

     There follows the charming little love scene (it is very charming) between father and daughter, which is one of the cruxes of the film. Their behaviour is very, very affectionate. Karin clings to her father, strokes his neck, shows all the spirited gaiety of a young girl in love; and Tore returns it all after a moment’s initial doubt, with a lover’s tenderness. Bergman presents it all as charming, and in a sense natural (what is nature, after all?): few seem to have noticed that we are being shown unequivocally a mutual incestuous desire. . .’

If this is an example of the efficacy of drawing moral conclusions from close examination of the technique (although no actual camera movements are mentioned here), one cannot help feeling that Mr Wood, keen Freudian though he is, may be on shaky ground. Elsewhere, he describes the scene where Tore murders the two herdsmen and the boy who have raped his daughter. The victims fall, as Mr Wood observes, in positions suggesting crucifixion, and he likens Tore’s ‘God pardon me for what I have done’ to Christ’s ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do’. In this he fails apparently to see the same element of comic bathos in his comparison as Bergman accidentally suggested in the scene itself. This seems, in fact, to be the chief disadvantage of this method of criticism, that by keeping his nose firmly to the ground, the critic sees no further than the end of it. He is unable to stand back from what he is criticizing and view it in any wider context of art and life.

     These examples illustrate, perhaps, the dangers into which cloudy theorizing can lead when it is unsupported by that genuine discernment which La Bruyère considered rarer than diamonds and pearls. On the other hand, among the writings of these new schools of critics there occurs every now and then a lucid and meaningful thought. One, I think, comes in a paragraph in the lengthy diatribe prefacing Definition’s third number:

     But we should like to make one observation in fairness both to ourselves and Sight and Sound. A writer who does not elaborate upon details of camera movement or of composition is not necessarily producing judgements which could have been arrived at equally well by a glance at the script. He is writing about the experience which came across to him in the cinema; and if he appears to neglect significant points of technique, it is often because he has assumed them in his account of the film’s statement. (And of course many films are no more than charades illustrating a plot-synopsis.)

Leaving aside the too-often neglected truth of the last remark, this seems to me to get to the crux of the matter. For in considering a film, it may often be more important for the critic to comment not so much on how a director creates an effect, but on the fact that he does create it. He may quite properly capture the cinematic essence of a film by describing the reaction it aroused in him rather than by annotating its technique. All of which raises the question of just how different the art of film is from the other arts. There is something a little suspect, in fact, in the aggressiveness with which would-be serious critics insist upon isolating film, as if it stood or fell only by those qualities that are unique to it. It is surely a fact that all works of art (certainly plays, films and novels) have much in common with each other. Each has a theme, and must create characters, develop a plot, use appropriate settings, build up a mood, and so on, Consequently criticisms of the aims, results, and value of these things in a given film will have much in common with similar assessments pertaining to other kinds of art forms. Criticisms of techniques in each case, looked at in this light, then become subsidiary.

     The isolation of film also implies a further limitation, which is that critics who scorn comparisons with the other arts narrow the potential of film. For the relating of a work of art to its context in the history of achievements of a similar kind is an important aspect of criticism. Not to mention the importance of relating a work of art to life, which can only be the sum of the critic’s experiences.

     What may be lacking in film criticism generally (and one would not accuse Sight and Sound of these deficiencies) are the two qualities of discernment and the ability to convey enthusiasm. One thinks of Wilde, in The Critic as Artist, dismissing the importance of Ruskin’s views on Turner, since they are nothing to that ‘mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence’. Wilde, as ever, is more concerned with paradox than with strict truth, since a critic’s case for showing enthusiasm must be reasonably sound. But the essence of what he says is true. There is a good contemporary example of this enthusiasm in the person of Kenneth Tynan, who at the age of twenty-three took the leading drama critics to task in He That Plays The King. He had the linguistic ability to convey the sensations of attending a particular performance — the prime quality for which James Agate (another enthusiast) first noticed him in an early, overwritten, but highly stimulating review of Othello, later printed in Ego 9. It might be a good thing if some of the turgid attackers of established film criticism, so academic and confused with theory as they often are, could inherit some of this capacity for sheer communication. For none of them so far has shown the ability to combine intelligent theory with consistent practice. Objecting to the older critics for an alleged staidness and superficiality, they lack themselves any vital combination of liveliness and depth.