Film criticism in the digital age

Screen, 2000

The core concern of media studies today is the material form of mediation. In whichever direction we take our analyses, the specificity of the discipline lies in its attention to the detailed functioning of textuality. The sociology of communication, the political economy of the media, the philosophy of media aesthetics are distinctive subdisciplines of other, older, fields of research. What distinguishes ours is the irreducible materiality of mediation. We can perhaps feel that we are less prone to overgeneralisation, mythmaking and simple errors of fact because of that attention; and that we are in a better position to make statements about audiences, institutions, economies, societies, cultures and aesthetics because we have spent long years, both individually and as a research community, looking at the minutiae of historical and contemporary media. And yet we seem to have betrayed the digital media not only in the failure to archive electronic media but intellectually too: in the half-acceptance of a view that the digital media in some way effective dematerialisethe older media. Once dematerialised, media can no longer fall into our field or, alternatively, we are confronted with the proposal that we abandon the central object of our studies, the materiality of the text, and remake ourselves in the theoreticis mould with which the US academy in particular greeted the embarrassingly political discourses of 1970s 'Screen Theory'. As literary theory has pursued the dematerialisation of the book, print, paper and inks in the abstraction of the text, so media studies faces a choice between dematerialising and rematerialising its object.

International Journal of Communication, 2012

Scholars claim that the mass-media story is being replaced by the interactive-media story. Much discussion has focused on the changing roles of artists, gatekeepers, producers, and consumers, but what role does the critic play in this story? After providing an historical analysis of the concept of the critic in critical-cultural studies, I argue for a way out of the subjugation-emancipation paradox of normative judgment using an end-relational theory of critique. Without such an approach, criticism is easily conflated with consumerism, forcing two consequences: the relegation of judgment to mere personal preference, and the potential loss of an avant-garde. Thus, I argue that we need critics more, not less, in the interactive technology, Web 2.0 world.

2017

Film criticism has its historical roots in cultural criticism and shares its core discourse about objectivity, aesthetics, and polemics. Regularly seen as ‘in crisis’, film criticism has evolved to be a diverse genre of writing that uses different frames of reference and explanatory paradigms to meet a variety of readership needs. The so-called crises reside in the ambivalent relationships between industry, the critic profession, and technological change that has resulted in the erosion of the critic’s authority in modern times. Far from facing existential crisis, film criticism continues to evolve as a vibrant contributor to film literacy and engagement.

Unitas, 2020

In the light of Barthes’s failed assassination of the author, this essay will tread on the plane of film criticism’s practices of resuscitation of the author. Looking at the current phenomenon of the explosion of quantification in social media space, this essay considers the way communicative capitalism and neoliberal psychopolitics regulate points of view, analyses, and criticism in the internet, and funnel them into a single unit, which is in the form of opinion. This essay will look into three reviews of Citizen Jake (2018) which, as will be argued, often function in double: not only as reviews, but also as consumer guides, which come from the individual opinion of a privileged member of the audience, the reviewer. As a recommendation to resist these reductions, it is suggested that the film critic must practice a self-conscious theorization by looking at the social practices governing the production of the film, the subject of criticism. Dialectically, this will also resolve the failed modernist projects of defacing the author, defacing capitalist subjectivities, toward a materialist conception of film.

Transcultural Studies: A Series in Interdisciplinary Research

This article is evaluating problems that literary reviews published in newspapers are dealing with: development tendencies of modern media are giving priority to non-verbal forms of communication, to photography and graphic shape of titles, which may control or overshadow a meaning of a text. In order to survive in such a context, book reviews usually accept the language of journalism and tend to ideologise or commercialize themselves in accordance with it, abandoning their original discourse based on literary criticism. Is there any place left for literary criticism in modern media or is it completely expelled to specialized magazines?

Fotocinema, nº14, 2017

Crítico, ensayista y teórico de cine, la pluma de Jonathan Rosenbaum es de aquellas que practican el ejercicio de la resistencia; que se oponen a la clasificación, las etiquetas, al mundo del mainstream y a la cultura del espectáculo. Podríamos decir que es uno de esos críticos tal vez incómodos para algunos pero necesarios y reveladores para quienes aprecian el séptimo arte. Tras trabajar como principal crítico del Chicago Reader entre 1987 y 2008, actualmente sigue ejerciendo el ejercicio de la escritura cinematográfica a través de su página web, en la que no solo postea periódicamente reseñas de libros o películas sino que cuenta además con un archivo de publicaciones anteriores. Como autor y editor, ha contribuido a través de diferentes proyectos a la difusión y dignificación del cine más allá de los circuitos comerciales, siendo responsable de títulos como Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia (2003), Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (2004) o Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition (2010). Su participación en Curtocircuíto. Festival Internacional de Cine de Santiago de Compostela, me dio la oportunidad de aproximarme a sus modos de analizar el cine, de re-pensarlo casi como extensión de la vida. Conversamos sobre las filias y las fobias de la crítica, sobre el binomio cine/arte y los retos a los que se enfrenta el cine en la actualidad.

In medias res, 2020

Taking the philosophy of media as a starting point, this text examines the possibilities, forms and status of critique in our times which are dominated, at least in the West, by what is known as media culture. On the one hand, the text avoids reducing systemic and strategic critique of capitalism to merely a critical point of view, while on the other it problematizes and examines the critique of modern media practices. The authors implicitly conclude that merely asking these questions paves the road to comprehensive critical action, within the existing systems of this media universe, as well as beyond it, i.e. in the particular socio-economic system of thought and action. This text also examines the possibility of achieving critical practices through art, and in the context of emerging new technologies. Possibilities for critique within the framework of new media art are explored in particular, as this might revolutionize not only media practices, but also the social, historical and...

There is a loose historical continuity in themes and concerns running from the origins of “close” reading in the early 20th century through machine translation and computational linguistics in the third quarter and “distant” reading in the present. Distant reading is the only current form of literary criticism that is presenting us with something new in the way that telescopes once presented astronomers with something new. Moreover it is the only form of criticism that is directly commensurate with the material substance of language. In the long-term it will advance in part by recouping and reconstructing earlier work in symbolic computation of natural language.

Bisman (Bisnis dan Manajemen): The Journal of Business and Management, 2020

Based on the phenomena that happen in society, there are many e-wallet services in Indonesia but still have not adopted their effectiveness. This study aims to measure people's acceptance of GoPay e-wallet as a tool of payment in the cashless generation. To find out whether consumers are interested in using GoPay as a payment tool frequently, we using multiple linear regression analyses. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and experience on the intention to reuse GoPay with millennial generation samples in Yogyakarta. The results show that perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and experience partially and simultaneously affect the intention reusing GoPay e-wallet.