'Every Film a Critic' from Highbrowers to Rotten Tomatoers and Youtube Video Essayists

‘Every Film a Critic’ From Highbrowers to Rotten Tomatoers and YouTube Video Essayists.

Laurie Le Bomin

Thesis 2019 MA New Media and Digital Culture University of Amsterdam

Table of Contents

Preface & Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………………………..3

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..…...4

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….5

1. Critics and the ‘Art of Film’……………………………………………………………………………………………...…7 1,1. T he Cinema of ‘the Spectacle’…………………………………………………………………………….…7 1,2. ‘ Nouvelle Vague’ Critics…………………………………………………………………………….………...9

2. H ighbrow Critics, L owbrow Reviewers…………………………………………………………….………………….10 2,1. Critics and Elitism… ……………………………………………………….…………………………………..11 2,2. A ‘Sensationalist’ Approach to Criticism………………………….………………………………....12

3. Subjective Taste-Makers……………………….…………………………………………………………………………...14 3,1. The Departure from Objectivity………………………………………………………………………….15 3,2. The ‘Universality’ of Taste… ………………………………………………………………………….…….16

4. Is Everyone a Critic in the Digital Era?……………………………………………………………………….……..18 4,1. T he Rise of Amateurism……………………………………………………………………….…………...19 4,2. Tomatometer-Approved Critics… ………………………………………………………………………..21 4,3. A Decline in ‘Good’ Criticism?… ………………………………………………………………….……..23

5. ‘To Edit and to Voice-Over:’ The Audio-Visual Essay Genre… …………………………………….……….25 5,1. Filmmaking and Essays: Early Experiments… …………………………………….………………….26 5,2. Video Essays and Academic Potential… …………………………………….………………………....28 5,3. Social and Cultural Implications……………………….…………………………..…………………….29

6. YouTube Video Essayists and the ‘ Sociality’ of Expertise……………….………………...... 31 6,1. C ritics as YouTube Users and Participatory Expertise……….………………...... 32 6,2. Case Study: Every Frame a Painting, NerdWriter1 and Lessons from the Screenplay, Pseudo-Intellectual Film Criticism?… ……………..…………………………….…………………………...35 6,3. The Challenges of YouTube Film Criticism………………………………………………………....40

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...... 43

Bibliography………………………………………………………...... 44

Appendix………………………………………………………...... 52

Preface & Acknowledgements

To an avid film enthusiast such as me, there is nothing more pleasurable—except watching films—than to look at film criticism and reviews. In many ways, new media has significantly shaped how I came to view films critically. Although I can draw many parallels between the transition from highbrow film criticism to digital new formats and my appreciation of criticism, this thesis constitutes a broader inquiry regarding new media. After applying to the Master in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam, I was curious to learn more about online practices and communities. Learning about theoretical concepts and discourses was highly beneficial to advance my understanding of new media. Initially fascinated by the intellectual nature of film analysis and the literary excellence of film critics in Les Cahiers du Cinéma and The New Yorker, I then began to watch audio-visual formats such as YouTube videos and reviews. As a result, YouTube is a source of knowledge and creativity worth researching. Many researchers have already engaged with this medium—examining its affordances, its cultural and economic impact, and so on. My approach, however, is not limited to this one platform. Instead, I consider the digitization of the cultural practice of film criticism to enquire into online notions of expertise. Despite being familiar with digital methods such as the YouTube Data Tool (Rieder, 2015), I ultimately decided to write this thesis using a theoretical approach. I chose YouTube audio-visual essays as a case study as they constitute a relevant trend in contemporary film criticism. I hope my research, which combines concepts from various fields, will provide thought-provoking insights into this vernacular practice and contribute positively to the development of more innovative, intelligent, and appealing ways to engage critically with and learn about cultural objects. I would like to thank, first and foremost, my supervisor dr. B.M. (Bogna) Konior. Not only did she provide valuable insights into film theory and media studies, her guidance contributed greatly to the production of this thesis. Secondly, I want to show appreciation for each of my professors who significantly and positively impacted my learning experience: Prof. dr. R.A. Rogers, dr. T.J. (Tim) Highfield, Dr A. (Alex) Gekker, dhr. dr. B. (Bernhard) Rieder, dhr. dr. M.D. (Marc) Tuters, dhr. E.K. (Erik) Borra MSc, mw. N. (Natalia) Sánchez Querubín MA, and mrs. Prof. G. (Giovanna) Fossati. And finally, I dedicate this thesis to my family and friends. I also want to thank B. David who offered helpful advice. Without their support, I would not have been able to conduct this research.

Abstract

Film criticism was initially associated with a notion of expertise. Whether written by professional critics and film theory scholars in traditional prints and scholarly articles, or published in magazines by culture journalists, the aesthetics, symbols and historical contexts of a film were analysed to establish its value as an art form. As digital technology transformed the production and distribution process of cinema, the stature of the film critic changed. Streaming services facilitate access to films and TV shows, and anyone can publicly establish themselves as critics and write about their opinions, recommendations, and reviews on social media and websites. With the democratization of film criticism, online communities, amateur critics, and cinephiles proliferated. Rotten Tomatoes has made a significant impact on online film criticism. The website relies on statistical rankings, the audience’s opinions, and professional critics and journalists. A community of critics also emerged on the YouTube platform. Analysing and deconstructing film narratives in a video format has been popularized as a more entertaining approach to film criticism. Consequently, the practice has deteriorated, as many people lament a ‘crisis of criticism’ and even its death. However, there has been a growing trend towards the production of more intellectual content, using visual rhetoric to break down abstract ideas and complex concepts within films. For instance, YouTube channels such as Every Frame a Painting and NerdWriter1, produce high-quality video essays that attract a large audience. The popularity of such content poses the question—are digitization and democratization eroding the relevance of the critic and ‘cultural intermediaries’? And if so, do video essays constitute a revival of the expertise and intellectual aspects of film criticism online?

Introduction

In an interview during which he reminisced about his days as a film critic, author and culture critic Chuck Klosterman revealed that, “the only thing people really wanted was a plot description and how many stars I'd give it. It didn't matter how much effort you put into writing a piece, they looked at it solely as a consumer's guide toward going or not going to films” (Murray, 2006). Given that the practice of film criticism has considerably changed in the digital era, this claim appears to ring particularly pertinent to the current state of modern society. Established and professional film critics are growingly disappearing, replaced by self-proclaimed online experts or film enthusiasts. For audiences, notions of expertise are not authoritative criteria in assessing the quality of a film. Instead, personal opinions and ratings are favoured. Web 2.0, social media, and cultural industries are thus significantly influential in shaping consumers’ behaviours. Many researchers in new media focus on analyzing the challenges of contemporary entertainment and its effect on culture in relation to technology. One of the main topic discussed is the changing relationship between producers and consumers. Audiences can communicate their opinions online, build social networks and communities, produce content, and dictate market trends. They can develop online communities based on common interests or ideas. This active, social, and participatory approach to consumerism impact the economic model, placing the consumer in between two roles. As ‘prosumers’ (Fisher, 125), film audiences create new modes of public engagement with films as cultural objects. In addition to these new forms of sociality enabled by new media, questioning the relevance of film critics, or what sociologists refer to as ‘cultural intermediaries,’ can help shed light on broader economic and social aspects of society. As film criticism first emanated from notions of expertise, it then appears coherent to examine the transformation of film criticism in the digital era. With new media, the practice of film criticism proliferated in diverse formats. This development carried out a promising democratization of culture and taste. With the Internet propelling culture criticism and reviewing outside the realms of academia and print journalism, delineating the practice constitutes a challenge. Technology and new media have accelerated processes of culture production and the rate of consumption, so much so that economic and social models predominantly hinge on the production and commodification of cultural products. Scholars observed that: “entertainment is a commodity that requires profitability: it is an ‘experience that can be sold to and enjoyed by large and heterogeneous groups of people’ and ‘a particular category of marketed product’ (Bates and Ferri, 6). The commodification of films exemplifies the extent to which entertainment is produced to be marketed and consumed on a large scale. Film critics, by engaging with cultural commodities, therefore contribute to the development and profitability of film culture online. The interaction

with culture and cultural objects, made possible by new media, is an important aspect of contemporary discussions. Many researchers have addressed the different possibilities and challenges that arise on social platforms such as YouTube. Focusing on critics’ role in the digital era, one can thus refer to the notion of ‘prosumer’ and the ‘participatory culture.’ Since films are largely discussed and criticized online by various communities, it appears necessary to try and understand how the role of film critics and notions of expertise have changed to adjust to new norms and standards. The purpose of this thesis is not to propose an historiography of film criticism, nor to conceptualise its digitization as one singular practice. Rather, by first giving an historical overview, I want to contextualize the role of the critic in the digital era and ultimately consider its importance. By doing so, one may gain a new perspective on the relevance of ‘cultural intermediaries’ while questioning the ways expertise is conveyed online. Ultimately, I want to argue that digital forms of film criticism, particularly video essays, can permit the development of new modes of expertise. Throughout this thesis, I will use a theoretical approach. In the first part entitled “Critics and the ‘Art of Film’,” and the second ‘H ighbrow Critics, Lowbrow Reviewers,’ I will examine the role of critics and look at the changes throughout history, using concepts in the field of film studies and sociology. Then, I will engage with concepts of subjectivity and taste in the third part ‘Subjective Taste-Makers’. With support from literature in philosophy and culture studies, I want to determine in what ways critics participate in the formation of cultural tastes. In the fourth part ‘Is Everyone a Critic in the Digital Era?,’ I will discuss different definitions of what constitutes a critic. I will also propose a brief analysis of the website Rotten Tomatoes to examine the context of the transition from traditional media to the Web 2.0 and the extent to which the supposed ‘crisis of criticism,’ is led by new online standards and changes in cultural practices. After that, in the fifth part ‘To Edit and To Voice-Over: The Audio-Visual Essay Genre,’ I will engage with the implications of using digital technology to present film criticism. Considering the potential of video essays, I will then focus on new media topics to consider new forms of sociality and expertise in the final part “YouTube Video Essayists and the ‘Sociality’ of Expertise’.” I will zoom in on contemporary film criticism—mainly, the practice of creating YouTube video essays—to further explore notions of expertise. As a case study, I will examine how three YouTube channels; Every Frame a Painting, NerdWriter1 and Lessons from the Screenplay, use video essays as new modes of expression. By positing that these video essayists on YouTube are contributing to the revival of film criticism as an intellectual practice, I will gain further understanding as to whether this new form of film criticism is pseudo-intellectual and a mere symptom of the platform’s purpose in sustaining the participatory culture, or if it indeed constitutes a new form of revival of the expertise and intellectual aspects of film criticism.

1. Critics and the ‘Art of Film’

The technology of film was invented in the late 19th century, relying first on visual projections and later incorporating sound. The production of films demands a considerable amount of machinery and human labor. Additionally, each frame is determined by its aesthetics, its technical prowesses, and its storytelling intent. That is why the artistic value of films is studied by scholars and communicated by critics. Film critics evaluate through their own structured and researched interpretation. This practice elevates the genre of film as a whole by establishing it as an art form. Its legitimacy comes from authoritative figures for whom culture is produced following a hierarchy of taste. Film criticism also contributes to the curation of films for the constitution of a visual heritage. However, the stature of the film critic has long been discussed. In the beginning, film criticism struggled to become a relevant practice. As a matter of fact, “challenges to the critic’s authority and legitimacy are not new; these can actually be traced back to the first attempts to define film as an art form” (Sayad, 41).

1,1. The Cinema of ‘the Spectacle’ It is indeed important to note that the potential of film itself slowly came into view in the early 20th century. When discussing the process of making films such as Le Voyage Dans La Lune (1902), French filmmaker Georges Méliès explained:

As for the scenario, the "fable," or "tale," I only consider it at the end. I can state that the scenario constructed in this manner has no importance, since I use it merely as a pretext for the "stage effects," the "tricks," or for a nicely arranged tableau (Gunning, 382).

Early cinema was thus the cinema of ‘the spectacle, ’ or ‘the cinema of attractions’ (Gunning, 382). By favoring illusions of reality and magic tricks instead of cohesive narratives, films were made for entertaining audiences visually. The role of the director was not recognized as central in the production process. It was not until later that the status of the director was elevated to the one of an artist, bestowing critics an important role in cultural ‘gatekeeping’. Vachel Lindsay was a prime contributor to the establishment of film as an art form. In 1914, he published the first work of American film criticism The Art of the Moving Picture. This groundbreaking book included various analysis of silent films. In Chapter 3, he began with the following statement; “the motion picture art is a great high art, not a process of commercial manufacture” (Lindsay, 79). He then addressed the people working in the fields of art, humanities, and the critical to explicitly declare his intentions to “establish the theory and practice of the photoplay as a fine art” (80). Although he

was among the first to adopt a scholarly approach to film, him positioning it as art through critical standards also implied that film criticism as a practice would be reserved to an elite of intellectuals. To him, for films to last historically and be considered as high-value cultural objects, the ‘shabby readers’ (80)—the lowbrow people with little education and poor taste—had to be pushed to the sidelines and arbitrarily dismissed in the establishment of film as an art. This elitism gave critics a ‘highbrow’ stature, which will be further examined in the second part of this thesis entitled ‘H ighbrow Critics, L owbrow Reviewers’. Acclaimed films such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), Gone with the Wind (1939), Meet Me In St. Louis (1944), which required expensive production budgets to make, defined the aesthetics of Hollywood films. In spite of the cinema of ‘spectacle’ being the focus of Hollywood since the 1920s, many contemporary films have been criticized for their exorbitant budgets and over-the-top resort to technical display. Th e first denunciations can be traced back to the 1950s when the rear-projection technique was used to produce a practical imitation of reality. In Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) for instance, scenes were filmed by combining actors’ performances with pre-filmed backgrounds, instead of on location. Laura Mulvey appraised this technique as “an aesthetic emblem of a bygone studio era” (Danks, 67). Rear-projection was thus an innovative way of filming. However, it now constitutes an outdated industrial form “that define[s] the heightened artificiality of classical Hollywood as an outmoded form” (Danks, 66). This cheaper production method could be compared to the contemporary ‘green-screen’ video effects technique used in blockbusters and franchise films such as Spy Kids 3D: Game Over (2001) and Spider-Man (2002). Critics’ dissatisfaction with these techniques is mainly due to its unfitting nature with specific “cultural and historical conceptions of what constitutes cinematic realism” (Danks, 68). In other words, these types of techniques are being used systematically in films for practical reasons to suggest realism, but fail to bring a significant cultural value. Instead of framing a scene in reality, which would anchor the film in a specific historical and cultural context, rear-projection or green-screen effects become mere backgrounds creating a sort of mise en abyme, that brings about confusion in their artificial aspect. The artificiality mentioned here is not associated with set designs or fabricated décors—as these contribute to the artistic value of a film—but with its superficial and irreal nature; “its self-consciousness, spatial and temporal discontinuity, artificiality, pictorial inability to adequately suggest appropriate lines of perspective, hermetic qualities, and imperialist and colonialist implications” (Danks, 66). As a consequence, many films that exhibit a generic and recognizable aesthetic can be dismissed by critics because they suggest the imperialist nature of the Hollywood industry.

1,2. ‘Nouvelle Vague’ Critics From the 1950s onward, in an effort to diverge from Hollywood’s extravagant productions and challenge popular culture, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut prompted a movement called the ‘nouvelle vague.’ I n a 1954 article published in Les Cahiers du Cinéma, a French ‘revue’ which had a significant role in establishing film criticism as a legitimate and professional practice, Truffaut emphasized the potential of film as a medium for directors to express their ideas. To him, considering the decline of the French film industry, it was essential to reinstate the directors’ role and authority in the creative process, in lieu of screenwriters’ and producers’ focus on textual representations (Glenn, 27). This idea of 'auteur cinema’ or ‘auteur theory,’ which considers films through the lens of the director’s artistic intent, allowed for both intellectuals and journalists to make an impact on the film industry. P ublishing their film reviews enabled them to discuss and debate film culture. Les Cahiers du Cinéma featured works written by an elite of writers, elevating the intellectual and cultural value of film criticism. It had a tremendous impact on the history of film theory, introducing non-academic criteria used to evaluate films such as technical competence and the personality and intent of the director. It also participated in the birth of cinephilia, which gave readers a new appreciation of films. Film critics were teaching audiences “how to appreciate and analyze the unique nature of cinematic language” (Glenn, 19). It prompted the creation of ciné-clubs where communities of cinephiles could gather, socialize, and discuss their common interests. For instance, the Cinémathèque Française was highly influential in educating audiences about auteur cinema, showing various experimental and alternative films (Glenn, 19). The emergence of film culture is an important aspect of the popularization of film criticism. Knowledge about films began being identified with evidence of expertise. It became a way to socialize and gain desirable cultural capital. The heydays of cinephilia and film in France had an impact on American culture. As Asher Weiss pointed out, “the 1960s and 70s, whether because of the remarkable bounty of good films, or the rising interest in film culture, or both, spawned a golden age in American movie criticism” (10). Roger Ebert, for instance, was an influential film critic who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1975. Throughout his career, he popularized film criticism on television. His reviews and knowledge about films were broadcasted and accessible to a mainstream audience. He remains a trailblazer in successfully adapting film criticism to the specificities of the medium. Simultaneously, film criticism became a relevant way for scholars and academics to engage with culture and politics. This approach was influenced by the historical events taking place; the feminist movement, the Civil Rights movement, the counterculture movement, and the Vietnam War. These conflicting contexts were marked by unstable and contradictory ideas and prompted scholars to focus on how ideologies were communicated through media. Particularly, one influential figure named Laura Mulvey established the psychoanalysis approach in film studies. She

aimed to analyse how films shaped and transmitted ideological ideas. More specifically, she sought to demonstrate the relevance of psychoanalysis theory as a “political weapon” (Mulvey, 833). According to her, films were structured in a way that reflected the inequalities of the socio-cultural-political context, mainly the misrepresentation and sexualization of women on screen through specific framing and camera movements. Exposing how visual rhetorics contributed to the transmission of political ideas led many feminist scholars to use her approach. Mulvey was the first to consider questions of identity and gender disparities, broadening the scope of research within the field of film studies. Consequently, films came to be appreciated and criticized, not only for their artistic merit but also for their cultural and political value. Following scholars’ political engagement, critics introduced “new models of film appreciation, providing a vision of critic as a creative artist, as opposed to distanced judge” (Taylor, 7), popularizing the practice outside the realm of elite intellectuals.

2. Highbrow Critics, Lowbrow Reviewers

The verb “to criticize” comes from the Greek krinein, which means “to decide”. Criticism implies judgment and deliberation. Culture criticism aims to produce opinions and evaluations of cultural objects. To assess the quality of these objects, two approaches can be taken; the first is an expert’s critic evaluation or “evaluation grounded in reasons,” and the second is a journalistic review or “a report with opinion” (Jaakkola, 12). The expert’s critic is considered more authoritative as it presumes the critic to have received validation from an institution after acquiring specific knowledge. Furthermore, the term ‘evaluation’ alludes to a more objective, intellectual and logical approach, as opposed to ‘report’ which would entail a subjective description. Criticism contextualises, classifies, elucidates, interprets, analyses, and evaluates a cultural object (Jaakkola, 13) to communicate its artistic and cultural value. To some extent, reviewing uses similar elements to make cultural objects appealing but only provides audiences with guiding lines on how to consume and understand them. According to Christian Metz’s psychoanalytical semiotics, the cinema is an institution operated by feedback loops between “the outer machine (the cinema industry), the inner machine (the spectator’s psychology), and the third machine (the cinematic writer)” (Beller, 11). To him, the three machines operate to gratify the cinema itself. Therefore, critics and reviewers, by evaluating ‘the outer machine,’ inform cinematic standards and values, and participate in the creation of meaning for the audience or ‘inner machine’. In other words, the relation between the cinema industry and the audience are based on a system of “financial feedback” (Beller, 11), thus placing critics and reviewers as a connector between the production

and consumption process. To Peter B. Orlik, director and professor in the School of Broadcast & Cinematic Arts at Central Michigan University, the critical process constitutes a “knowledgeable comprehension, positive/negative ascertainment, and resulting carefully considered judgement as a means of reasonably estimating the value of the particular work under scrutiny” (Jaakkola, 13). Critics and reviewers, through structured, detailed analysis and evaluation, connect filmmakers and audience, and bring about a form of public ‘gatekeeping’ by producing meaning and safeguarding the value of cultural objects.

2,1. Critics and Elitism As gatekeepers of film culture, ‘highbrow critics’ (Taylor, 5) embodied the elitism of traditional critics. Originally, as stated by Matthew Arnold, a 1880s cultural critic and poet, criticism was “a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in this world” (Taylor, 6). In his view, the critic had to remain objective, unbiased, dispassionate, and thorough. By applying a sophisticated approach to the practice, it puts film criticism in the domain of elite deliberative processes which are not democratic in a Tocquevillian perspective (Crosbie, Roberge, 284). In his reflection on 19th-century civilization, French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville described elites as using intelligence to assert power over the public. He stated that, “the high-minded and the noble advocate subjection, [...] honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, whilst men without patriotism and without principles are the apostles of civilization and of intelligence” (Tocqueville, 22). Simply put, society’s control is operated by a privileged few through the establishment of intellectual authorities that encourage obedience and contain individuals’ divergent behaviours and opinions. In the book entitled In Defence of Elitism however, William A. Henry III argued that society had reconciled democracy with elitism (46). He distinguished democracy and egalitarianism, claiming that the latter encouraged mediocrity and ignorance. To him, democracy is based “on the theory that anyone’s participation, even if ignorant and fleetingly motivated, enriches the collective judgment” (Henry, 46). He illustrated the practical application of democracy with the example of the popular vote in America. Voters are fulfilling their duty in response to shared common standards and values. Elections are held because a representative democracy requires electees to have merit since favoritism is not accepted. An intellectual distinction is thus perceived as a prerequisite for governance. Intellectual legitimacy is “valued above ideology and certainly far above compatibility with the common man” (Henry, 47). This intellectual elitism also applies to the field of culture. As a culture critic for Time magazine, he advocated for an established elite of intellectuals that set superior societal standards. The prevalence of uninformed opinions in a society justified the presence of elites who use their cognitive abilities to elevate culture; “high culture is hard brain-work” (Henry, 313). William A.

Henry III’s argument reinforced Tocqueville’s description of 19th-century America where a dominant minority exercised control. Elites exist because they are perceived as primordial to individuals’ education and self-improvement. One may argue that claiming to push individuals towards excellence is de facto using knowledge as an instrument of subjection. By conveying the idea that as long as individuals respect and comply with principles decided by higher figures, they can be part of society and elevate themselves. Ultimately, I would argue that it implements a flawed outlook on the purpose of intellectual expertise. Instead of encouraging critical thinking, it creates intellectual insecurities and a desire for social validation. Both can be illustrated by the trend of auteurism which paradoxically introduced a different form of elitism. Auteurism is a critical approach to film based on auteur theory. Critics often adopted a laudatory approach to independent or avant-gardist film directors. In the 1957 edition of Les Cahiers du Cinéma, André Bazin warned that auteurism risked promoting an “aesthetic personality cult” (Sexton, 135). The term cult initially referred to a herd-like mentality and perceived superiority in a group. In the 1950s, it was used to refer negatively to individual thinkers assigning abstract and intellectual ideas to popular culture. Auteurism was now not compatible with a trustworthy critical approach due to the elitism that came with it. As Pratley explained,

There is . . . a tendency on the part of some individuals to support such works simply because of the learned superiority which comes with proclaiming their enthusiasm for these bewildering puzzle pieces. This, in turn, is prompted by a fear that in disavowing these distortionist fallacies they will reveal their lack of profundity, be looked down upon with scorn, and ultimately be rejected from intellectual circles (Sexton, 135).

By attributing deeper meanings to certain films and using auteurism to assert knowledge, it is argued here that most critics were in part influenced by their desire for intellectual and social recognition.

2,2. A ‘Sensationalist’ Approach to Criticism Later, during the counterculture movement and its interest in challenging mainstream opinions, film criticism emerged as a popular journalistic practice. The debated role of the journalistic critic can be illustrated by taking two contrasting examples: Andrew Sarris, who brought the auteur theory to the American public, and Pauline Kael who pioneered a more modern approach. Sarris, who wrote for the New York Observer, approached film criticism as a vehicle towards journalistic and literary excellence. He also contributed to the development of film scholarship as a teacher. He took part in counter-culturistic cinema practices in the 1960s with his contributions to Film Culture and The Village Voice. These magazines embodied the ‘New American Cinema’ which

engaged with avant-garde films, departing from classical Hollywood productions (Fossen, 30). Sarris and Kael shared common political opinions but had divergent visions on film criticism. Sarris often adopted a more detached, auteurist approach and historical perspective on films, while Kael focused on sensationalism and the audience's viewpoint (Bordwell, 254). Writing for The New Yorker, Kael participated in a cultural shift as she “shaped how critics looked at movies and how people read them. [...] she made it exciting to go into film criticism as a profession, and her influence on the next generation of film critics has been enormous” (Beller, 11). Kael was known to have a singular writing style and a personal approach to film. She became an authoritative figure by disregarding theory and established standards, making film criticism more appealing and accessible to the public. There appears to have been a shift in critics’ focus as as producers of meaning, or what is referred to in sociology as ‘cultural intermediaries’. Bourdieu’s definition frames cultural intermediaries as “anyone involved in the transmission of a work of art” (Crosbie, Roberge, 276). Drawing upon this broad definition, the transmission of a cultural object is dependant on the expertise—ability, experience, authority—of a critic or reviewer in translating and communicating the artistic intent within films. Enough extended knowledge or ‘cultural capital’ is required for critics and reviewers to be considered cultural intermediaries. Since the 1960s however, instead of bridging the gap between the production and consumption of culture with expertise, critics and reviewers appear to be leaning towards a less elitist approach. Henceforth, the stature of film critics, increasingly challenged by socio-economic contexts has changed. Critics are no longer the politically engaged intellectuals of the auteur film landscape, but part of the neoliberalist capitalistic system. Hence, there is a need to be aware of the different modes of practice of critics and reviewers. Accordingly, “we should develop an ability to untangle or disaggregate the practices of cultural intermediaries: to work out when, how and under what conditions such aesthetic activity might be creative, innovative and providing any more than an impetus inclining towards the conservative and mundane” (Negus, 13). This claim coincides with a different definition of cultural intermediaries, departing from Bourdieu’s initial one. Keith Negus defines “cultural intermediaries as those involved in the economic impact of the cultural product” (Crosbie, Roberge, 276). As he explains, “cultural intermediaries shape both use values and exchange values, and seek to manage how these values are connected with people’s lives through the various techniques of persuasion and marketing and through the construction of markets.” (Negus, 4). To some extent, it reduces critics to mere facilitators of the producer-consumer interactions within a capitalistic system. However, the mediation here is not solely financial. Following Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of the end of political economy and the rise of the ‘attention economy’ (Beller, 5), it can be suggested that the ‘economic impact’ mentioned in Negus’ definition can encompass the different aspects of the attention economy. While the attention economy is worth

acknowledging as a significant element in contemporary society, it will not be a central concept in this thesis. Digital technology and new media are transforming both the production and distribution process of cinema. As Tom Gunning suggested, “in some sense recent spectacle cinema has reaffirmed its loots in stimulus and carnival rides, in what might be called the Spielberg-Lucas-Coppola cinema of effects” (387). Here, he is referring to films such as Jaws (1975), Jurassic Park (1993) and Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) which were, and still are today, highly popular. Not only did these blockbusters captivated the mainstream audience, but it also gave rise to the popularity of the ‘franchise’ marketing concept. The plethora of remakes, sequels and prequels, are frequently ranked online and slashed by film critics who give low ratings on popular websites. Critics’ reviews target consumers and are directed at fans seeking recommendations. This trend in negatively reviewed films is due in part to the fact that “most movies are constructed functionally, to be legible and entertaining. They are not built to last but exist very much of their brief, hyped moment in the marketplace” (Taylor, 5). The same goes for television, although its programming was always intended for a mainstream audience. The medium is regarded as maintaining publicly shared social and cultural values, with its aesthetics embodying what David Thorbum calls "consensus narratives" (Crosbie, Roberge, 283). Television, thus, produces public content through standardized visuals, moderated dialogues, plots reinforcing the status quo, familiar characters, and so on. From the popular TV comedy I Love Lucy (1951-1957) portraying the values of family life in the United States in the 1950s, to the sitcom Friends (1994-2004) which captured the zeitgeist of the early 2000s, television is a mass communication media. Programs are made to accommodate product placements and advertise a specific lifestyle. Consequently, TV criticism is often regarded as an irrelevant practice. Nonetheless, the emergence of cable television and streaming websites has allowed for the production of more artistic series, which resulted in the acceptance of TV criticism despite considerable skepticism. Since the history of television differs greatly from the history of film and although it would be interesting to address TV and series criticism, especially since streaming services such as Netflix have had a tremendous impact on the practice, the focus of this thesis will solely be on film criticism.

3. S ubjective Taste-Makers

The shift towards a more journalistic approach to film criticism popularized the practice, prompting the emergence of amateur critics. As film culture increasingly opened itself to the public, having a profound and sincere appreciation for films was thought to offer meaningful

insights to criticism. Critics also contributed to the development of new social relations between film fans. The enthusiasm for films communicated by critics influenced audiences to appreciate film criticism as an accessible practice for supporting their interests. Most of the popular culture goods were not judged based on the hierarchy of taste established by elites, but on the critic’s own diverse experiences of them. This subjective approach redefined the nature of criticism itself, departing from its scientific and academic objectivity, towards empiricism. Thus, I specifically chose to engage with philosophical concepts. Through this approach, I will be able to draw upon theoretical principles that characterize our understanding of criticism and gain insights into broader discourses surrounding subjectivity, beauty, and taste.

3,1. The Departure from Objectivity First, I will turn to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical claims about language to emphasize why some began to perceive criticism as non-theoretical. Wittgenstein argued that highbrow critics tended to appropriate critical expressions for the establishment of rules or ‘calculi’ (Abrams, 544), modeled after the scientific languages. This bias towards an expert, academic, and sometimes ornamental language limited its critical purposes to the intellectual sphere. Also, setting up standards and norms of thinking meant that critics were restricted in their judgment by existing rules. To Wittgenstein, there cannot be authoritative principles for language is viewed as ever-changing, adapting to different contexts. By approaching criticism as an impartial way to convey expertise, film critics risk using concepts which are inherently biased and have limited critical purposes. That is why exclusively relying on the critical lexicon established by aesthetical theorists to criticize a film, may only lead to its ‘valency’ or its value in terms of grammatical and logical assessment. It has no practical value. To remodel the function of criticism, M. H. Abrams proposed that:

we must remain ready to put the simplified model of critical activity back into its complex and variable surroundings. When we do so, we find that the most important thing the model leaves out is the role played in the transaction by language-both by the general system of language and by the characteristic language of the individual critic. In terms of the model, language comes into play only insofar as the critic, having made his aesthetic discoveries, proceeds to render his visual perceptions in words (546).

Following this claim, it can be inferred that individual empiricism is suggested to be the underlying criteria in film criticism. As previously mentioned, Pauline Kael’s work as a critic was based on the description of her emotions when experiencing a film. She thus followed Wittgenstein’s argument in rejecting the traditional critic’s scholarly structured language. To her, “there are not—and there

never were—any formal principles that can be used to judge movies but there are concepts that are serviceable for a while and so pass for, or are mistaken for ‘objective’” (Fossen, 43). Because authoritative principles are built on immutable theoretical ideas, they cannot offer a more concrete understanding of films. Concepts, on the other hand, are temporary and characterized as intrinsically subjective. In his book What Good Are the Arts?, anti-elitist John Carey rejects the same external standards, especially aesthetic ones, claiming that they only validate an institution or an authority assessing artistic values. To him, objective criticism is not possible since “artistic value exists only in people's minds. Art is inescapably personal and cannot be called to account in any objective court” (McDonald, 19). To appreciate the subjectivity of film as an art form, aesthetic values have to be informed by subjective perception. He warns, however, that overtly subjective ill-advised remarks made by critics can be limiting and have detrimental effects on their legitimacy. Subjectivity for a critic is, therefore, used to encompass the complexity and diversity of sentiment or experience at play when watching a film, so that variations of taste can be transcribed and communicated.

3,2. The ‘Universality’ of Taste Taste is defined in the Cambridge dictionary as “a person's ability to judge and recognize what is good or suitable, especially relating to such matters as art, style, beauty, and behaviour” (Cambridge English Dictionary). Following this definition, it can be inferred that the journalistic practice of film criticism adopts a sentimentalist approach. Insofar as the subjective experience of films are appreciated and shared, the value of films produces a common taste, which in turn informs the artistic cultural standards. Henceforth, taste can be examined through philosophical sentimentalism. In David Hume’s Of the Standard of Taste, because empirical experience or sentiment has universal physical basis in producing bodily pleasures, it positions taste as a distinctive common sense. Taste is, ergo, the product of aesthetic and moral values. These values are informed by external influences and societal standards, making both sentiment and judgement determinant in the production of an object’s beauty. As Hume stated:

The difference, it is said, is very wide between judgment and sentiment. All sentiment is right; because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it. But all determinations of the understanding are not right; because they have a reference to something beyond themselves, to wit, real matter of fact; and are not always conformable to that standard. Among a thousand different opinions which different men may entertain of the same subject, there is one, and but one, that is just and true; and the only difficulty is to fix and ascertain it. On the contrary, a thousand different sentiments, excited by the same object, are all right: Because no sentiment represents what is really in the object. It only marks a certain conformity or relation between the object and the organs or faculties of the mind; and if

that conformity did not really exist, the sentiment could never possibly have being. Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty (Hume, 1757).

Put differently, since beauty is subjective, it is guided by a convergence of sentiments and appreciated based on empirical judgments. Sentiments, therefore, inform all aesthetic, moral and value judgments. Consequently, refining one’s taste is not linked to earning the merit of appreciating high culture through academic research or theoretical studies, but implies refining the ability to reflect on the sentiment that results from the experience of the cultural object. Therefore, taste is defined not only by the pleasure given by a film, but also by the analysis of our own standards and the extent to which they constitute a feeling of approval and admiration in us, or conversely the opposite. Hume’s argument joins Immanuel Kant’s in concluding that there is no objective beauty. Despite their divergent ideas on empiricism and sentimentalism, they can both advance our understanding of criticism. For Kant, the impossibility of an objective critic means that, when assessing the quality of art, an arbitrary assumption about what its purpose is is made, and criteria are invented by the perceiver (59). This subjective creation of standards and rules is said to be necessary to unite the relation with the object, the pleasure it provides, and the beauty it predicates. Beauty is what satisfies universally without concepts, so what may differentiate a purely subjective judgment of taste from the one of a critic is the ‘Understanding’ of “the faculty of concept” (Kant, 77) regarding the conscious intention assigned to the representation of an object without purpose. In Kant’s words, “we could even define Taste as the faculty of judging of that which makes universally communicable, without the mediation of a concept, our feeling in a given representation” (Kant, 173). Kant thus goes further than simply recognizing the relativity of beauty. In addition to instinctive natural sentiments, individuals and especially critics can engage with beauty by making subjective judgments of taste through the common understanding that the capacity to do so is universal. In contrast, taste, inherently subjective and prejudiced by individuals’ desires, is also said to present a limit to sentimentalism by its detractors who claim that it embodies emotional indulgence and a misrepresentation of reality (Jefferson, 523). When individual emotions dictate judgments expected to be grounded in reason, it most likely impacts a critic’s authority. A critic’s personal desire to be recognized and admired for their capacity to express tasteful convictions may cloud their judgments. For instance, their emotions can be misdirected at a specific film aspect with which they are not or otherwise too familiar. Moreover, critics can easily mask what would be considered a lack of or ‘bad’ taste with syntax. This extract from Alexander Pope’s An Essay On Criticism, written in 1711, can help shed light on the mistakes made by critics:

In search of wit these lose their common sense, And then turn critics in their own defence: Each burns alike, who can, or cannot write, Or with a rival's, or an eunuch's spite (Pope, Part 1).

According to Pope, critics can be flawed by vanity and selfish interests. By referring to “a rival's, or an eunuch's spite,” he compares critic’s conceitedness to impotent intellectual insecurities. Although Pope’s poetic essay was a reactionary piece against the critics of his time, it constitutes a reflection on the critic’s ideal role. To him, since critics were biased, the establishment of artistic limits were to be made by the artists themselves. Hence, he suggested criticism should be based on sensible wisdom rather than defiant intelligence. As a result, it is now widely argued that anyone can be or become a critic.

4. Is Everyone a Critic in the Digital Era?

In light of the philosophical sentimentalism and its understanding of subjectivity, beauty, and taste, I would wish to suggest that there is a need to reconsider the role of film critics in the contemporary era. Films “exist on the border of art and consumer culture” (Taylor, 5) and tastes are heavily influenced by the cultural and economic context. It is, therefore, necessary to take into account entertainment culture and market structures. Since films are cultural commodities which are marketed and, with the advent of the internet, discussed by using various public forms of criticism and reviewing, it raises questions about the current role and legitimacy of critics. To illustrate critics’ relevance in the digital era, one can turn to contemporary debates in The New York Times, or even among intellectuals surrounding the phrase claiming that ‘everyone is a critic.’ In the article entitled “Is Everyone Qualified to Be a Critic?,” Adam Kirsch and Charles McGrath briefly state their views on the critic’s function. Kirsch describes receptivity and response, meaning the reaction people experience when looking at a work of art, or in this case a film, as being the fundamental aspect of criticism. Whether they disregard the piece or are moved by it, their immediate judgement constitutes a form of criticism that is inherently present in their consciousness. This instant perception echoes the above-mentioned philosophical sentimentalist approach in which sentiment is at the core of moral judgments. The ability to then self-reflect, question one’s responses or emotions, and transcribe them as coherent ideas onto another medium, is what makes for a legitimate critic. In his own words,

What makes someone a critic in the vocational sense is, first, the habit of questioning her own reactions — asking herself why she feels as she does. Second, she must have the ability to formalize and articulate those questions — in other words, she must be a writer. To be able to say what you feel and why: that is the basic equipment of a critic (Kirsch, McGrath, 2015).

The critic is thus considered a professional individual who communicates his or her own taste as a form of moral value criterion through written language. For McGrath, “a valuable critic is someone whose judgment you can rely on and learn from, which is not to say someone you always agree with” (2015). Critics are respectable, valid figures who provide knowledgeable judgments to challenge other people’s opinions. As Gitlin argues, it is important to pinpoint the role of critics in shaping taste. As their judgments do not derive from the mainstream, collective preferences, “they are best thought of as ‘precipitates:’ the material outcome of debates among producers, around which the dispositions of certain audiences then crystallize” (Ross, 924). They have a significant impact on audiences’ judgments and are, therefore, influential in the formation of taste through their critical works. It can be concluded that they produce meaning, as Daniel Mendelsohn suggests in its definition of criticism in the 2012 article entitled “A Critic’s Manifesto.” In simple terms, Mendelsohn describes criticism with the equation “KNOWLEDGE + TASTE = MEANINGFUL JUDGEMENT.” Being a critic is therefore not compatible with a lack of knowledge or taste. According to him, the work of a critic is to produce meaning, “to mediate intelligently and stylishly between a work and its audience; to educate and edify in an engaging and, preferably, entertaining way” (Kristensen, 1). This definition restates the traditional understanding of the critic’s ideal qualifications, adding the performance aspect of the critic.

4,1. The Rise of Amateurism With the majority of contemporary ‘amateur’ critics, cinephiles and freelance writers, writing and publishing on the Internet, communicating opinions about films became a way for film culture to be deployed online. The decline in print journalism, and subsequently the deterioration of the critic-journalist profession resulted in a move of criticism to online spaces. Along with adapting to the transition from print to new media, criticism gained a new meaning. According to its new conception, criticism is not a means to convey expertise and taste in the traditional sense, but it rather serves to communicate and differentiate oneself online. In the issue entitled “Film Criticism: The Next Generation” published in the magazine Cinéaste, contributing film critics described what writing online film criticism meant to them. Vadim Rizov, a freelance writer, stated that “the goal of film criticism is to articulate my thoughts and record them before my memory fades” (Cinéaste Magazine, 2013). In his view, criticism is a sort of personal approach to films made

public. It is aimed at maintaining a collection of film interpretations, each one being associated with a specific memory. His conceptualization of criticism reflects the perceived permanence of digital content. Calum Marsh, who is also a freelance critic for various publications, addressed the difficulties of online criticism. He explained that “it has been my experience that writing film criticism on the Internet is sort of like distributing music with it: you accept that free dissemination is valuable for the audience it might earn you over time” (2013). He is alluding to the absence of copyrighting regulations online and the fact that the authorship of a critic’s work is often misapprehended or overlooked. These complex and limiting aspects of online film criticism lead to much uncertainty for any critic who aspires to gain public recognition or achieve a successful career in the traditional sense. Furthermore, distinguishing critics from amateurs has become difficult with the proliferation of online reviewers. According to Marc Verboord, the binary structure designating criticism as a “professional” practice and reviewing as one for “amateurs” does not include gradual distinctions between different types of reviewers (Jaakkola, 13). An attempt to label these distinctions has been made by Kristensen and From. In their theoretical typology, they proposed a model that distinguishes four ideal types of cultural critics:

1) the intellectual cultural critic, who is closely connected to an aesthetic tradition, bohemia and/or academia, or institutionalized cultural capital; 2) the professional cultural journalist, who is first and foremost embedded in a media professional logic; 3) the media-made arbiter of taste, whose authority is closely linked to practical experience with cultural production and repeated charismatic media performances; and 4) the everyday amateur expert, who offers subjective opinions and represents experience-based cultural taste. The aim is to provide an analytical minimum model for future empirical studies by outlining the contours of the multiple, objective and subjective, professional and non-professional cultural ‘authorities’ of contemporary media culture (Kristensen & From, 1).

Their topology is thus particularly relevant in addressing the growing disappearance of the distinction between the private and public sphere and its consequences for cultural intermediaries. By drawing distinctions between cultural critics in accordance with sociological concepts and historical transitions, their topology relies mainly on notions of power and capital. They claim that a critic’s authority is linked to “their cultural, social, and, in the terms of Couldry (2003, 2012), media meta-capital” (Kristensen & From, 12), extending Bourdieu’s initial definition of cultural intermediaries to include the impacts of new media. Moreover, although criticism is considered to be more legitimate than reviewing, the terms have been used interchangeably in recent years. Th is amalgam can be explained by the impact of the internet on the film industry. Film distribution and consumption is transitioning from traditional theater releases to digital platforms such as Netflix.

Web 2.0 enabled more than access to films through streaming services, it also offered spaces—forums, websites, social media—for audiences to voice their opinions. These digital environments gave rise to the democratization of the practice of film criticism and prompted a shift in audiences’ approach to film culture.

4,2. Tomatometer-Approved Critics Nowadays, anyone can publicly establish themselves as critics. Individuals with different levels of expertise can express their interpretations and opinions online with little to no restrictions. New conventions across digital media blur the line separating expert critics from online practitioners. The proliferation of digital forms of film evaluation such as amateur blogs, video essays, viewer/consumer reviews, the democratization of the culture production process and the mediation of user-generated content pose challenges for the relevance of critics’ traditional roles. Launched in 1998, the website Rotten Tomatoes is a prime example that illustrates this changing new media landscape for critics. It makes use of statistics and ratings from online communities of consumers, amateur critics, and cinephiles to determine the quality of a film. Critics’ approval of a film largely determines its reputation and its commercial success. It was found that “more than one-third of Americans actively seek the advice of film critics (The Wall Street Journal 2001), and approximately one of every three filmgoers say they choose films because of favorable reviews” (Basuroy et al., 103). Critics’ positive reviews thus act as signals of quality and determine the value of cultural products. The higher the rating a film gets, the more likely it is to influence a film’s performance. Film ratings are, thus, determinant factors and explain why Rotten Tomatoes has become a referential source for film reviews. Its rating system is based on aggregated opinions. Films obtain two scores that are measured according to the ‘Tomatometer’ (Rotten Tomatoes). Both are calculated based on a 60% or higher approval rate; one of critics’ reviews and the other on the audiences’. Scores constitute a critical consensus which further establishes the website’s authority. A recognizable ‘certified fresh’ badge, which has become a mainstream staple in film quality evaluation, also accompanies well-reviewed films.

A movie or TV show that reaches the requirements for Certified Fresh doesn't immediately receive the designation. Instead, it is automatically flagged for our staff's consideration. Once the team can determine that it's unlikely the score will drop below the minimum requirements, they will mark it Certified Fresh. If the Tomatometer score drops below 70%, then the movie or TV show will lose its Certified Fresh status (Rotten Tomatoes).

These conditions and prerequisites, which serve to establish the website’s commitment to quality and transparency, are signals that evoke trust in the rating system. Instead of the star rating system

used by IMDb (the Internet Movie Database) for instance, Rotten Tomatoes creates its own sets of principles and rules that take form through easily recognizable symbols (red tomato, green splat, badge, popcorn bucket). These emblems serve to signify reliable film criticism. Moreover, critics are selected after a process that is similar to a professional selection of candidates. Individual critics and publications can apply on the website and are approved if they meet the criteria required according to ‘key values’ and ‘eligibility guidelines’ (Rotten Tomatoes). Key values are divided into four criteria: 1) insight, which requires critics to have a relevant perspective and interesting opinions, 2) audience, which implies that critics must have online influence and be able to represent specific communities, 3) quality, meaning that critics must follow standards regarding the written and oral language, and 4) dedication. Values are, therefore, presented as being based on critics’ ethical and journalistic principles. The ‘eligibility guidelines’ list requirements such as “consistent output for a minimum of two years,” “a minimum of 200K subscribers on a video publishing platform qualifies for broad audience reach,” and “demonstrated social media presence and engagement (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and/or Instagram)” (Rotten Tomatoes). Although it is mentioned that exceptions can be made, productivity and online influence are predominantly considered. As Denis McQuail claims, the main new media competence now lies in the “ability to attract attention and arouse interest” and “assess public taste” (Ross, 913). To do so, Rotten Tomatoes offers content specifically targeted at fans. This emphasis on film enthusiasts communities aims to encourage active participation.

We also serve movie and TV fans with original editorial content on our site and through social channels, produce fun and informative video series, and hold live events for fans across the country, with our ‘Your Opinion Sucks’ live shows. If you’re an entertainment fan looking for a recommendation, or to share an opinion, you’ve come to the right place (Rotten Tomatoes).

On Rotten Tomatoes, one can thus refer to online ratings which serve as an accessible and easy-to-understand format to assess the quality of a film before watching it, and get involved in a community. Critics act both as influencers and predictors. This dual role was examined by Jehoshua Eliashberg and Steven M. Shugan. According to their definition, “an influencer or opinion leader, is a person who is regarded by a group or by other people as having expertise or knowledge on a particular subject” and “a predictor is expected to call the entire run (i.e., predict whether the film will do well) or, in the extreme case, correctly predict every week of the film’s run” (Basuroy et al., 104). Critics’ influence is based on their reputation, while their role as predictor relies on their ability to gauge the notoriety a film will gain. Criticizing commercial films is, therefore, not determined by notions of expertise, but by critics’ social media reach and their understanding of

trends in audiences’ tastes. Besides, their recognized authority is dependent upon their ability to resonate with a wide audience and to build a strong following across platforms. In that sense, both positive and negative reviews contribute to the establishment of a critic’s online persona and reinforce his or her leverage in impacting audiences’ choices. More often than not, negative reviews have a greater impact than positive ones. The study by Basuroy et al. questioning “How Critical Are Critical Reviews?” (103) referred to the ‘negativity bias’ to posit that audiences are more affected by negative reviews. Their hypothesis was validated by their findings:

our second set of results shows that negative reviews hurt revenue more than positive reviews help revenue in the early weeks of a film’s release. This suggests that whereas studios favor positive reviews and dislike negative reviews, the impact is not symmetric” (B asuroy et al., 116).

Although the study relies heavily on statistics and focuses on the revenue and marketing effects of film criticism, it is particularly efficient in showing the impact of critics on both the film industry and film audiences. Consequently, online reviews, whether they are positive or negative, do not have any significant impact when singled-out. What matters most is the final score resulting from the combination of multiple reviews. Rotten Tomatoes scores, thus, paradoxically exemplify the loss of value of criticism. On the one hand, it allows for more people to discern quality in films. On the other hand, the simplified presentation of film reviews can result in inconsistencies, especially between critics and audiences. The website appears to have eroded the professional and authoritative aspect of film criticism. Social bonds between film audiences and a critic are replaced by statistical rankings, making the ‘pleasure’ and meaning found in writing or reading film criticism obsolete. Film reviews are governed by “‘herd-like’ models of connected sociality” (Terranova, 13). An emphasis on the superiority of the majority within social networks means that, while the proliferation of reviews is facilitated, there is paradoxically a loss of diversity in the expression of opinion. The general agreement surrounding a film is taken as a certain and reliable signal of quality since unanimity is favoured over an individual’s ability to convey expertise and subjective taste.

4,3. A Decline in ‘Good’ Criticism? Along with this homogenization of mainstream taste, many others have foreseen “a crisis of criticism”, and even the "death of criticism" (Crosbie, Roberge, 275). Since critics’ artistic judgments are not considered as much as it used to, singular critical opinions can no longer impact audiences. Instead, they solely look at the aggregate percentage of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’. In other words, it is only when the rate of approval outweighs the one of disapproval that a film is deemed worth watching. Or, Stephen Prince argues that:

There are two sources of pleasure in good criticism. The first derives from re-experiencing the film through the critic's descriptions; the second derives from the critic's use of language. Many people read criticism not because they necessarily agree with the critic, but because they like the way the critic writes or talks about movies (379).

In other words, it is through their expertise and a distinctive writing style that critics offer subjective critical opinions which can enable readers to sympathize and relate to empirical experiences. This communicative dynamic results in the creation of social bonds between critics and film audiences. These bonds permit the intellectual challenge and gratification that comes with reading film criticism. Ronan McDonald’s book The Death of the Critic addresses the challenges faced by critics and particularly literary critics. As a highbrow practice, criticism relies on knowledgeable and sophisticated writing within an authoritative institution. Contemporary readers, however, tend to disregard authority. According to McDonald,

The era of the experts, the informed cognoscenti whose judgements and tastes operated as a lodestar for the public, has seemingly been swept aside by a public that has laid claim to its capacity to evaluate its own cultural consumption. The contraction of academic criticism and the expansion of reviewing are both symptoms of the same anti-authoritarianism: a refusal of top-down instruction and a suspicion of hierarchy. The critic-as-instructor, as objective judge and expert, has yielded to the critic who shares personal reactions and subjective enthusiasms. If anyone can be a critic, then there is hardly any need for specialized and devoted professionals (4).

If his argument is applied to film criticism, it seems that the scholar practice is struggling to stay relevant in the contemporary era. Not only did proliferation of amateur critics led to the impoverishment of the academic and professional field, but it also disrupted standards and values. Subjectivity and sensitivity prevail over expertise and authority. McDonald’s final words sum up the way criticism, in his view, should be considered anew; “if criticism is to be valued, if it is to reach a wide public, it needs to be evaluative” (146). According to him, the lack of established, objective evaluation criteria in modern criticism seem to devalue criticism. Here, criticism is to be understood as the expression of valuable and valid judgments that are necessary for criticism to be relevant. When cultural objects are valued for their popularity, norms of perception are influenced by mainstream ideas and emulation prevails. Film criticism as a purely consumeristic guide limits the development of critical thinking. The need for cultural intermediaries fades and cultural tastes are shaped by disregarding the validity of informed judgments. It can be inferred that the deterioration of the traditional critic role, thus, does not solely result from the advent of the Web

2.0 and the decrease in reading material, but also stems from the mainstream dismissal of authoritative institutions and the subsequent public appropriation of the practice of film criticism.

5. ‘To Edit and to Voice-Over:’ The Audio-Visual Essay Genre

New experimental genres can alleviate the deterioration of criticism and place it in the foreground of the digital era. With the democratization of filmmaking and editing technology, film criticism is no longer limited to the written language. Although the use of voice-over and visuals carries various implications for the production of culture, the expression of ideas, and the transmission of knowledge, it constitutes a relevant potential for the practice of film criticism. Previous forms of educational and intellectual audiovisuals content seem to have tried adapting to the new media landscape. Do cumentaries have considerably changed. Akin to intellectual film criticism, they were not appealing to a mainstream audience and would be considered dull, elitist, and highbrow. Most of them relied on interviews with experts and historical evidence to represent information as accurately and objectively as possible. However, many documentaries also rely on investigative and politically engaged journalism. For this reason, documentaries came to be regarded as ambiguous mediums. For instance, in Michael Moore’s 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, the investigation is led by the filmmaker. His biases are, therefore, inherent to the documentary and injected into the narrative. As the audience is conditioned to trust visual evidence, their judgment is largely affected by the filmmaker’s viewpoint. As Laura Rascaroli explains,

The film’s rhetorical structure is that of journalistic exposé, in which the reporter investigates a topic and discovers scandal, corruption, or controversy and aims to convince the audience of their historicity/factuality [...] at all times, the spectator is told clearly where to be, what to feel, how to react, what to find out, what to believe (43).

Consequently, there is a need to develop different ways to present ideas. In recent years, attempts to make better use of technology to represent knowledge and ideas in a more accessible and appealing way have proliferated. A novel form known as ‘visual essay’ or ‘audio-visual essay’ has gained popularity online. In the following section, I will examine the developments of the audio-visual essay genre and shed light on its potential and limits. It is particularly relevant since

audio-visual essays constitute the first attempts to combine the written form with digital technology. First emanating from experimental filmmaking to then becoming a new method of presenting academic research, the audio-visual essay genre has now become an innovative means of communication for online film critics.

5,1. Filmmaking and Essays: Early Experiments Contemporary video essays derive from the documentary genre of ‘film essay’ or ‘essay film.’ Jean-Luc Godard was one of the first to experiment with film essays with its eight episodes instalment entitled Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1997–98, France). As a filmmaker and critic of the French New Wave, his project was not so much an attempt to encapsulate the history of the cinema, but rather to shed light on the possibilities of representation offered by the medium. To him, the potential of film was immense, and one way to elevate its value was to combine it with thoughtful reflections. In his own words, “instead of writing criticism, I make a film, but the critical dimension is subsumed” (Godard, 171). The series of video essays, which investigated various topics in film history, was initially commissioned for cable television and released in VHS (Williams, 10). It was acclaimed for its impact on the cinema and other art forms. In his praise of the series, James S. Williams highlighted that “what counts above all is that an intersubjective critical space is created that actively encourages the processes of memory, and forces us also to consider the importance and value of our own filmic memories” (12). T he film essay is, thus, not primarily an attempt to instruct the audience about the history of cinema. Most importantly, it instigates critical thinking while allowing a new perspective on what is represented on screen. This twofold depiction influenced Alexandre Astruc, who coined the term la caméra-stylo (18), to describe experimental works that combined filmmaking techniques with the literary essay genre. He stressed the importance of the cinema as a means of expression and communication. According to him,

The future of cinema is completely bound up in its developmental possibilities as a language. The documentary age, when the camera was set up on a street corner to record the minor happiness of its image-cargo, is well and truly over. Now we must speak, and speak in order to say something. Little by little, film replaces paper or canvas as the privileged material where the trace of individual obsessions are inscribed, where they unfold (Astruc, 47).

Although he was not fond of film critics—“ only a film critic could fail to notice the striking transformation which is taking place before our eyes” (Astruc, 17)— his claim iterates the importance of considering the new social context in which audio and visuals are growingly becoming the main modes of communication and knowledge transmission.

The ‘Taking Ideas For A Walk: The 2018 Essay Conference,’ organized by the University of Dundee’s Centre for Critical and Creative Cultures, explored the changing media landscape and its impact on the traditional essay genre. Among the different questions the conference set out to address, one was particularly relevant to reflect on the current democratization of both knowledge and technology. The question asked, “how might returning to the essay’s roots help us move towards writing a different kind of academic paper or help yield a more open kind of journalism – a more varied but also intellectually serious kind of popular intervention?” (DURA, 2008). In other words, in what ways can essays constitute an engaging and entertaining form of cultural content, yet still hold intellectual value and critical discernment? Phillip Lopate, essayist and film critic, was a guest speaker at the conference. He contributed significantly to the establishment of the literary essay genre with his works The Art of the Personal Essay and To Show and to Tell. In an interview that took place at the conference, Lopate discussed his career and the state of the essay in the contemporary era. When describing his writing style, he emphasized the importance of irony and humour. As the interviewer observed, “if you read a Lopate personal essay and a film review side-by-side, you’ll recognise his voice in each; he doesn’t switch between one writing style and another, and there’s always that little bit of cheekiness somewhere in the text” (Lyttle, 2008). Lopate upholds literary artistry as the main element of the film essay form. His belief echoes Adam Kirsch and Charles McGrath’s definition of a critic. According to them, the critic has to be a writer first and foremost. Lopate, thus, distinguishes essayists from documentarians:

“The text must present more than information”, writes Lopate, “it must have a strong, personal point of view. The standard documentary voiceover which tells us, say, about the annual herring yield is fundamentally journalistic, not essayistic” (ibid. : 19). The documentary’s typically omniscient mode of address is communal and collective. The essay, by contrast, invites us to adopt a more singular spectatorial position. It speaks to us as embodied individuals rather than as an undifferentiated mass (Lavik, 4).

To him, essays are unique in their subjective and personal mode of address. Film essayists must, therefore, make use of their voice in a distinct and explicit manner, without omitting the main line of reasoning. Lopate opposes the designation of Godard and other avant-gardists filmmakers as essayists. He pointed out that the essay film genre is “a cinematic genre that barely exists” (Lavik, 3). The format of film essays alone seems unable to exploit the possibilities of combining filmmaking with literary essays fully. As a result, the genre is still considered experimental.

5,2. Video Essays and Academic Potential Similarly, academic video essays, which derive from film essays, have struggled to develop. As Thomas Van den Berg and Miklós Kiss observed in their analysis of audiovisual essays and academic research video, “finding writings or practical guidelines for how to produce videos is scarce or at least theoretically thin (see the very useful but quite basic How-to Video Essays guide by Greer Fyfe and Miriam Ross) and measurements for evaluation are rather underdeveloped” (5). The lack of established standards for creating video essays limits its development. It is, however, worth mentioning that a few attempts to introduce new media formats as legitimate critical methods have been made. Scholars such as Eric Faden and Catherine Grant have tapped into the potentials of audio-visual film criticism. For Eric Faden, since media formats have replaced the written ones, academic fields must adapt. In his approach, he refers to Alexandre Astruc’s definition of the film essay genre as ‘la caméra-stylo’ by using the term ‘media stylo’ (Faden, 1). He, thus, offers a new concept that stresses the new media aspect of the video essay genre. Faden declared his departure from the traditional scholar approach with the following statement: “I vow to abstain from that most sacred but restricted of intellectual practices—the literary academic essay—no matter the temptation. From here forward I put my faith in media over text, screen over paper” (1). This bold pledge is a testament to the importance of media in the field of film study. Media is said not to be solely the object of inquiry, but is also suggested as a methodology. As explained here,

scholarship in an electronic culture does not abandon the tools and techniques of oral or alphabetic culture; it simply can use them in new ways. In a key difference, the media stylo moves scholarship beyond just creating knowledge and takes on an aesthetic, poetic function. Critical media, unlike say the traditional journal article, should evoke the same pleasure, mystery, allure, and seduction as the very movies that initiated our scholarly inquiry (Faden, 3).

Academia is urged to realize the benefits of using new mediums to advance research in a pertinent manner. Faden joins Catherine Grant by emphasizing on the creative aspect of audio-video essays. For her, these new formats are “creative, critical, and performative film studies practices” (Grant, 1). They constitute an audiovisual attempt to answer substantial questions by combining textual information and visual representation with film as both object and subject. In their view, a scholarly approach should not be limited to the creation of objective knowledge. For this expertise to be meaningful, it has to be modeled after the objects analysed. In other words, academic film criticism must hold similar creative intent and value as the films studied. Using a less formal and distant approach, as well as incorporating visual rhetoric are essential aspects in the creation of substantial audio-visual essays:

After several decades of scholarly writing that was wary of making assertions about aesthetic value, or that privileged theories over the individual films used for purposes of illustration, this renewed interest in close analysis in the service of evaluation is most refreshing, harkening back to the early days of cinephile criticism and early academic scholarship in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The emergence of DVD technology, the expansion of the internet and the emergence of a number of sophisticated cinephile bloggers has coincided with a revival in academic circles of the kind of ‘expressive’ criticism devoted to close reading and evaluation. This kind of scholarship fits Mulvey’s description, quoted above: ‘textual analysis ceases to be a restricted academic practice and returns, perhaps, to its origins as a work of cinephilia, of love of the cinema’ (Keathley, 178).

According to Keathley, the departure from elitism and the return to a film enthusiast approach are important elements that explain the current changes in film culture. Technology has allowed film criticism to evolve beyond the boundaries of academia. Audio-visual essays are not merely distinguishable by their creative, performative, experimental, and subjective aspects, but also by their social and cultural significance.

5,3. Social and Cultural Implications Representing cultural objects involves many ambiguous aspects. Film essays engage with the political to spur engagement and active participation with what is presented. Academic video essays present knowledge in a distant and objective way to allow students to develop their own critical thoughts. Consequently, an emphasis is placed on the viewer who has to actively process the information so as to avoid experiencing things solely through sentiment. As a matter of fact,

in moving outside, or beyond, the standard determinants of immediately recognisable modes of representation, the onus lies firmly on the viewer to decode and process meaning. The manipulation of form here appears to avoid the perils of self-reflexivity’s pure introspection by firmly orienting the viewer to the ideological imperatives of seeing/knowledge, thus indicating both one’s proactive and determined role in this process (Charlesworth, 118).

Most documentaries, film essays, and academic video essays interact with the viewer by trying to convey objectivity. The presentation of seemingly factual information persuades the viewer of the legitimacy and validity of the format and its expertise. Since the cognitive abilities of the viewer are considered as sole determinants of knowledge receptivity, these formats are labelled intellectual and, ergo, can constitute a form of elitism. However, modern video essays have specific characteristics. The majority of them challenge the viewer’s perspective, encouraging critical

thinking, rather than attempting to validate intellectual capacities. This new form of audiovisual film criticism is particularly relevant to address in the digital era when current trends have deteriorated the value of criticism by relying on negative opinions, hyper skepticism, and imitation. In fact, identities and the formation and transmission of knowledge are increasingly shaped by visuals and sounds. These now play an important role in the formation of societal ideas. According to Walter Benjamin, the contemporary visual culture has instigated the 'age of mechanical reproduction' (Mirzoeff, 6). Through the process of visualizing knowledge, cultural objects are taken apart and manipulated for the construction of new narratives. This reappropriation of form results in the formation of identical and imitative representations. As a result, these representations inform and influence the ways films are appreciated. In video essays, meaning is produced through the quality of the interaction between the viewer and the representation. The use of voice-over encourages trust and legitimacy, while skillful editing conveys mastery of digital technology. To fully tapped into the potential of digital film criticism, Erlend Lavik states that,

though this genre has a serious drawback: the voiceover is at the mercy of – or forever playing catch-up with – the film’s linear, temporal unfolding. [...] In the digital film criticism that I have in mind, however, text and image are carefully coordinated or “co-written”. Thus, the video essayist can arrest the action, for example by freezing the frame, to develop a detailed argument about shot composition, or inserting footage from other movies as points of comparison (9).

For Lavik, a video essayist has to create more than an audiovisual commentary of film through voice-over narration. The argument has to be coherent and proficiently enacted by utilizing media to its full capacities. A balance and a clear intent in the use of visuals and audio allows the viewer to think about what is represented critically. Nonetheless, adapting the written language to audiovisuals can carry historical implications. According to Katherine Groo, “the essential tool of historical expression—writing—loses its privileges, its claims to objectivity and neutrality, as it collapses in a series of endless substitutions and equivalences” (4). Thus, one has to question the nature of video essays as digital objects and the impact of editing, rearranging, reproducing and sharing film clips online. What should be considered is how a representation can efficiently make use of techniques to direct a viewer in a specific direction, while at the same time mediating the impact of rhetorics by encouraging critical thinking. Also, since video essays have prompted a return to fan-based criticism and ciné-club-like communities, a deluge of imitations and similar content can be observed, particularly on YouTube. These modern video essays are particularly relevant in discussing the state of visual culture and introduce new prospects for the production of meaning.

6. YouTube Video Essayists and The ‘Sociality’ of Expertise

As previously mentioned, the Web 2.0 has disrupted many aspects of the film industry and the YouTube platform, in particular, has been influential in this transformation. It encourages users to participate through its various affordances. For instance, its algorithm serves to recommend content, keeping the user engaged on the platform and the ‘YouTube Studio’ (YouTube, 2019) feature facilitates the creation and sharing of content. Participatory media, then, implies taking part in social processes. Marshall McLuhan’s work was influential and groundbreaking for the understanding of the new forms of sociality enabled by new media. In Understanding Media, he conceptualized the historical and cultural change of media, claiming that it produced new social models based on collective values. Reflecting on his reasoning, Douglas M. Kellner and Meenakshi Gigi Durham remarked that,

whereas print culture [...] produced rational, literate, and individualist subjects [...], the proliferating media culture produced more fragmentary, nonrational, and aestheticized subjects, immersed in the sights, sounds, and spectacles of media like film, radio, television, and advertising. The new media culture was, McLuhan argued, “tribal,” sharing collective ideas and behavior. It was generating an expanding global culture and consciousness that he believed would overcome the individualism and nationalism of the previous modern era (x xii).

With McLuhan characterization of new media culture, it can be deduced that technology is driving the uniformisation and convergence of ideas. Film, in particular, constitutes a visual media through which society is portrayed in certain ways. Since most popular films originate from American ideas, it is important to note also that imperialist ideas largely lead this homogenization of culture. However, my interest here does not lie in examining the dominance of American films on contemporary criticism. While McLuhan may argue that new media produces converging ideas, I want to focus on the specificities of mediation and the possibilities for new modes of expression and transmission of expertise. In the digital era, the mediation of culture is blurred by the rise of the ‘prosumer.’ As previously explained, the term refers to the consumers’ ability to shape the content of cultural commodities by engaging in the ‘participatory culture’ (Fuchs, 203). Bernard Stiegler asserts that technology now operates in relation to networks and enables the participatory aspect of new media. According to him, social media platforms such as YouTube are technologies designed and scaled to operate in the same way as they would be for cultural production. In other

words, social media and cultural production are both set up and automated by active user participation.

Collaborative techniques and auto-broadcasting seem to set up the conditions for a sort of technocultural isonomy, where hegemonic subjective relations imposed by the cultural industries seem reversed and which make an auto-production based on i soproduction possible” (Stiegler, 45).

In his view, it is the formation of new sociality enabled by new media technologies that lead to a paradigm shift in the traditional cultural producer/consumer dichotomous model. The individual, as well as its social network, both contribute to the creation of culture. This duality raises questions about the significant role of YouTube film critics and reviewers in shaping culture. Most of them rely on skepticism and humour to engage their audience in an entertaining way. This approach can be contrasted by the growing trend of ‘serious’ video essayists on YouTube. These vernacular practices constitute relevant objects of inquiry due to their popularity and influence on viewers’ tastes and way of looking at films. Since there is no strict distinction between what constitutes a legitimate and informational YouTube video from a satirical content, one has to take the platform’s characteristics into account. I will, thus, focus on examining the diversity and variations of videos related to film criticism through the lense of the participatory culture and its impact in shaping notions of expertise.

6,1. Critics as YouTube Users and Participatory Expertise As an example, one can refer to Patrick Vonderau’s analysis of the strike orchestrated by the labor union preserving TV and film writers’ rights, the Writers Guild of America (WGA), that took place in 2007, to shed light on the new possibilities offered by YouTube. After being dismissed amidst the strike, writer Jim O’Doherty used YouTube as an outlet for productivity. For him, “the internet is a place where you can be creative, very independent, you can get out of bed in the morning, get an idea, go shoot it, come back to your home, edit it on your laptop and get it out onto a variety of different platforms” (Vonderau, 112). YouTube is, therefore, a new environment where individuals, for whom participation in a disrupted industry has been limited due to the changing economic context, can establish themselves as creators and develop their skills and reputation. Similarly, for film criticism and reviewing, YouTube has introduced non-institutional cultural forms and practices, as well as sub-cultures and communities. The evaluation of publicly available forms of entertainment has become a vernacular practice. The transition from traditional criticism to contemporary criticism can be seen in the proliferation of YouTube channels such as CinemaSins, Screen Junkies, Screen Rant, which are particularly appealing to viewers. They attract a large number of subscribers and fans for whom videos that hash over films, using humour and

parodic tones, constitute an entertaining form of critical film review. These channels have become authoritative and recognized figures on YouTube. The channel Screen Junkies, which to this date gathers more than 6.6 million subscribers (Screen Junkies, 2019), has gained popularity thanks to its ‘Honest Trailers’ series in which film trailers are parodied using a satirical voice-over. One can argue that this trend of mocking commercial films exemplifies the ‘clickbait’ mentality of social media and leads to a decline of standards in film criticism. YouTube is an open-platform where any individual can publish content. This democratization in content production and distribution leads to a deluge of poor quality, meaningless, morally ambiguous videos–thus deteriorating qualitative standards. According to Gunnar Iversen, this abundance of content is inherent to the platform.

The default experience of YouTube is one surrounded by too many in the midst of too much, clips of every imaginable style and genre, high and low, old and new, professional and amateur, commercial and non-commercial. YouTube is a place where one can drown, or fight to stay afloat, in a superabundance of meanings (356).

His argument is linked to the context of information overload. YouTube videos that analyze films through visuals and satire exemplify the challenges of participatory culture. Through viral contents, clickbait titles, videos about films attract viewers. In spite of that, as I will argue, the proliferation of more serious formats re-establishing standards for film criticism on YouTube can permit the development of new modes of expertise. In particular, many YouTube videos termed ‘video essays,’ have appeared. These new types of content, inspired by three popular channels, NerdWriter1, Every Frame a Painting and Lessons from the Screenplay, have gained popularity as reliable sources of experts’ knowledge. Many scholars from various fields have examined notions of expertise regarding technology. Philippe Ross mentions H. M. Collins and Robert Evans’ characterization of two types of expertise. The first, which is referred to as ‘contributory expertise’ (Ross, 915), concerns the level of competence one has to have to bring about significant contribution. The second is ‘interactional expertise’ (Ross, 915) and revolves around the ability to understand and communicate the specificities of a subject. In the case of film criticism, this distinction would apply to the classical divide between scholars as experts— i n the sense that they can advance the field of film studies— and critics and reviewers as experts— b y their understanding of the language and subject of film. Since “acquiring expertise is, therefore, a social process—a matter of socialization into the practices of an expert group” (Ross, 915), YouTube facilitates the exchange of ideas and the immersion into established and self-proclaimed groups of experts. However, when considering new media and the platformization of knowledge, it can be argued that there cannot be a single delineation between types of expertise. As previously stated, YouTube is an amalgam of

different types of videos. As a result, it becomes tricky to identify certified or legitimate expertise from ill-advised content. Thus, knowledge is now, not only more accessible than ever— m aking differentiation surrounding the levels of expertise one can acquire more complex— but is also transformed through its manipulation. This appropriation and re-interpretation of knowledge can be analysed using the scientific approach of Kurt A. Richardson and Andrew Tait in their article entitled “The Death of the Expert?”. They distinguish ‘neo-experts’ from ‘modernists experts’:

So neo-experts are not only concerned with the process of producing context-specific understanding, but also with the care that must be taken in applying such understanding in the real world. [...] rather than being the source of the relevant domain specific knowledge, they are there to bring together the ‘expertise’ of the many organizational stakeholders in a coherent fashion to facilitate the definition of the problem space, and the development of strategies to guide an organization, or department, or individual in a particular direction—a rather harder proposition than just supplying textbook like knowledge. ‘Modernist Experts’ do our thinking for us, whereas ‘Neo-Experts’ help us think for ourselves ( Richardson and Tait, 95).

Although their dichotomy is primarily devoted to business organization and management consulting, I would suggest that it can be applied to new media film critics. If taken as a model, it can be observed that YouTube film critics are combining the knowledge of traditional experts, along with theirs, by producing videos that have an impact in the online ‘world’. This impact can be seen in the audience reach they have. As an example, the channel MovieFlame engages with film theory using a specialist tone. Its creator, Morgan Ross, is “a college graduate with a degree in film making and communication (focusing on mass media)” (MovieFlame, 2019). He, therefore, combines his media expertise with the medium of YouTube. Whereas the channel I Hate Everything produces subjective film reviews emphasizing on displaying extreme skepticism and aversion for particular films. Yet, MovieFlame only gathers 673,236 subscribers (MovieFlame, 2019), while I Hate Everything counts 1,941,350 subscribers (I Hate Everything, 2019). They, thus, deploy different strategies that resonate to their viewers’ taste and establish their legitimacy. The popularity of these channels is an indicator of the departure from institutional systems. As explained by Iversen, “popularity works as the major attraction and distinction—mainly through rating—and creates an ambiance of competition” (3). Traditional institutions no longer establish authoritative hierarchies through selective criteria. Instead, YouTube creators are competing amongst themselves to build their reputation. In this non-traditional approach to expertise, creators of these channels can be related to neo-experts. By connecting with their audiences, they gain feedback and organize their own network of expertise. Contrary to film scholars, from whom theoretical knowledge originates, these YouTube channels focus on producing content relevant to

the current social context. Alike neo-experts, they focus on accommodating audiences’ desire for novel, visual, creative, and entertaining videos. As knowledge is becoming increasingly available, participatory platforms are important in shaping notions of expertise. According to Damien Smith Pfister, “the model of communication and the dominant medium of communication do not just incidentally coincide; the cultural use of the medium actually shapes the model of expertise” (220). While his article focuses on Wikipedia, YouTube, as one of the main source of audio-visual film criticism, also constitutes a platform of knowledge and a medium for communication. In this ‘participatory expertise’ (Pfister, 220), creators are encouraged to think creatively about new ways to convey expertise. As it is argued here, instead of knowledge, innovation and creativity are what differentiate their performance, and consequently attribute them a higher status as experts.

As established information routines break down, simple possession of information will not itself give rhetorical advantage, since theoretically everyone will have access to that information [...]. Interlocutors who can arrange an argument in a novel form will have more persuasive success. [...]. Novel—that is to say imaginative or speedy—arrangements will garner more attention (Pfister, 224).

This disruption of traditional institutions is important to address. Networked expertise is relevant to gain insight into the different practices of online communities. YouTube, as a social environment, constitute an opportunity for the development of new approaches. The methods and formats of film criticism have expanded to include academic research, journalistic writing, online reviews, scores and ratings, and more recently YouTube videos. Popular channels adopt a satirical approach to film criticism. Subjectively knit-peaking films for comical aims on YouTube generate communities but also imply a disregard for any objective truth. In contrast, a large number of YouTube video essays are seemingly leaning towards a more intellectual approach to film criticism. Consequently, I would like to further examine the latter approach by zooming in on the three channels: NerdWriter1, Every Frame a Painting and Lessons from the Screenplay.

6,2. Case Study: Every Frame a Painting, NerdWriter1 and Lessons from the Screenplay, Pseudo-Intellectual Criticism? Every Frame a Painting, Nerdwriter1 and Lessons from the Screenplay are successful channels that rely on sophisticated editing, intellectual concepts, and film theory to critically analyse films. I chose these channels because they are among the most popular that specialize in video essays. When querying ‘video essays’ on YouTube (using a private browser and without being logged in to any account so as to get an unbiased result) channels ranked as follows: 1) Every Frame a Painting with

28 videos and 1.5 million subscribers, 2) Nerdwriter1 with 244 videos and 2.5 million subscribers, 3) Lindsay Ellis with 102 videos and 612K/606K subscribers, and 4) Lessons from the Screenplay with 44 videos and 1 million subscribers. I used the filter ‘sort by view count’ to get the most relevant result in terms of overall popularity of the contents produced. It is important to note that the channel Lindsay Ellis does gather a greater number of views than Lessons from the Screenplay, but has two identical accounts (see Fig. 1), which I believe is the reason why it obtained a higher ranking despite having fewer subscribers than Lessons from the Screenplay. Hence, given this inaccuracy, I have decided to exclude the channel Lindsay Ellis from my analysis. In any case, the popularity of these three channels raises the following question—do video essayists constitute a revival of the expertise and intellectual aspects of film criticism online?

Fig. 1. Screenshot from Y ouTube search interface.

Since the three channels have produced video essays about Steven Spielberg’s films, I have selected these videos as relevant illustrations for analysing each channels’ characteristics. In this cross-examination, I aim to comment on editing style, tone, and argumentation. Every Frame a Painting video essay “The Spielberg Oner,” takes an in-depth look at the director’s often overlooked use of the single-shot filmmaking technique. The tone of the voice-over is informal ‘that’s for shit like this’, ‘incomprehensible bullshit’ (Every Frame a Painting, 2014), friendly, advisory, and educational. The commentary approach places the visuals as the main focus of the video. The video’s visual look is consistent thanks to skillful editing and color grading. The narrative is constructed through a combination of clips taken from various Spielberg’s films. These clips are assembled to examine the characteristics and changes throughout history of a specific filmmaking technique. Every Frame a Painting was created as a passion project. Creators Taylor

Ramos and Tony Zhou produced “a series of video essays about film form, made from April 2014 to September 2016” (Every Frame a Painting, 2019). They stopped uploading content after losing interest in making videos. As they explained, “when we started this YouTube project, we gave ourselves one simple rule: if we ever stopped enjoying the videos, we’d also stop making them. And one day, we woke up and felt it was time" (Fusco, 2017). They, thus, had no commercial intent or plan to develop the series on a larger scale. The series of video essays emanated from the creators’ interest in film. It focused on directing viewers’ attention on aesthetic elements, cinematic techniques, and film structures. The Nerdwiter1 channel, created by Evan Puschak, examines films through the lens of interconnected ideas. His video essays often focus on revealing audio and visual rhetorics, as well as abstract and philosophical ideas within films. In “See With Your Ears: Spielberg And Sound Design,” he focuses on revealing an aspect of Spielberg’s films that commonly goes unnoticed. He offers a novel perspective that focuses on storytelling techniques within films. By adopting a poetic and melodious tone, his voice-over is the prevalent aspect of the video. This specific approach of combining visuals with a well-spoken, serious narrator creates a feeling of immersion into an intellectual case. In addition, no self-introduction is made. Instead, the viewer is instantly engaged:

There are a few ways that you can build up tension in a movie scene through camera work, through pacing, and probably most commonly through music like the music you’re hearing right now from this incredibly tensed scene from Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich...except there is no music in this scene (0:00-0:27) (Puschak, 2018).

What is interesting here is that the sound effects are used to stress the narrator’s point. He re-created an audio cinematic tension that audiences are familiar with and cut the sounds to reveal that he manipulated the scene. This dexterous use of audiovisual rhetorics is effective in challenging the viewer’s perception and reinforces the video essayist’s argument. He is not so much concerned with the production of a film analysis in itself, but with what techniques are used for the representation of ideas within films and what they consequently entail for the audience. In an interview with Tom Bilyeu, he stated what impact he wanted to have through his work:

For me, we learn by saying not thinking. We learn by articulation and articulation is what makes the world go round, right. So the impact I want to have is I want to articulate things in such a way that people actually view a different world than they viewed before [...]. Because the world and our minds are made up of language and when you find a new way to write that language you changed the world [...] and people’s mind (39:24) (Puschak, 2017).

He aims to challenge the way other people critically think about things through language. As previously determined, language is ever-changing in nature. The concept of ‘family resemblance’ (Majdik and Keith, 278) demonstrates this claim by positing that the meaning of things assigned by language emanates from the variations and overlaying of different characterizations. To put it simply, language obtains meaning through its diverse social enactments. Zoltan P. Majdik and William M. Keith relied on Wittgenstein’s reflections on language to conceptualize expertise as a plural activity. According to them, “expertise, as practice, therefore, is the process of being able to articulate reasons for—thus operating under a requirement to socially validate and legitimize—an individual’s enactment of expertise (Majdik and Keith, 279). Through video essays, natively digital forms of expertise and expression are enacted and become entangled with vernacular standards and practices. This argument can be related to Michel Foucault’s approach to language. In his view, language is intrinsically inscribed in a specific context—“language is not a value-neutral mode of transmission, but always-and-already entangled in a regulating system that it cannot escape, describe, critique, or unravel” (Groo 5). In the case of Puschak’s YouTube video essays, they engage viewers in a novel way because they connect multiple ideas in a coherent and eloquent manner. This ability to have direct bearing on others’ perspective is what relates Puschak to an expert. His expertise is not merely the result of knowledge possession combined with its skillful production and interpretation of ideas within the YouTube social space, but it is also shaped by his particular mode of expression. Drawing this parallel between Wittgenstein’s and Foucault's philosophical conceptions about language and notions of expertise brings about relevant insight into a video essayist’s performance and its impact on the production of meaning in social spaces. Lessons from the Screenplay was created in 2016 by Michael Tucker who has a background in video editing; “af ter years of doing various editing gigs, I really wanted to return to my creative, writer/director roots and continue my pursuit of filmmaking” (LFTS, 2019). The channel is a collective operation with Tricia Aurand, Alex Calleros, Brian Bitner, and Vince Major as members of the team. They also use other mediums such as podcasts and blog posts on their website. Their goal is to engage viewers in new ways and make knowledge more intelligible and accessible. To describe their channel, they wrote the following description; “Part educational series and part love letter to awesome films, Lessons from the Screenplay aims to be a fun way to learn more about your favorite films and help us all become better storytellers” (Lessons from the Screenplay, 2019). In the video essay “Jurassic Park — Using Theme to Craft Character,” they rely on written text and visual quotations to support their argumentation. For instance, Figure 2 shows how external sources are presented to the viewer, and Figure 3 demonstrates how parts of the script are displayed so as to not separate the visuals from the text. Since the main focus of the channel is the screenplay, there is an emphasis on visualizing the script.

Fig. 2. Screenshot from Jurassic Park — Using Theme to Craft Character (2:00).

Fig. 3. Screenshot from Jurassic Park — Using Theme to Craft Character (6:36).

In addition, they adopt an academic approach to film criticism by investigating a specific research question through literature sources, contextualization, and film theory. To introduce the video essay, the line of reasoning is justified as follows:

...and in revisiting the film as an adult, it’s clear that one of the most impressive aspects of Jurassic Park is its screenplay. [..] So today, I want to examine how the theme’s origins inspired the creation of two very specific central characters. To look at how both the plot and supporting characters challenge their beliefs. And dissect how every single choice made by the writers fed the theme until

it became a full-grown monster, unstoppable monster (0:27-1:02) (Lesson from the Screenplay, 2018).

To conclude this analysis, it becomes clear that the genre of video essays on YouTube is not represented by one singular style. Despite employing similar techniques— voice-over narration, visuals to help support argumentation— t he creators of these videos have their own modes of expression and follow different methods to convey expertise. Nonetheless, their image and reputation are built on their attempt to educate viewers and challenge perspectives. The fact that these types of content are among the most popular provides a significant insight into which qualitative standards are valued. The three videos essays analyzed are, thus, not mere pseudo-intellectual attempts to deconstruct films. They constitute legitimate and reliable sources of knowledge. Hence, YouTube video essays that originate from experimental filmmaking and academia can retain intellectual qualities while injecting a creative vitality to film criticism.

6,3. The Challenges of YouTube Film Criticism So far, it has been established that film critics influence the way media is viewed critically. It appears that video essays appeal to a mainstream audience. Along with overly subjective, skeptical, or humorous videos made for pure entertainment, video essays have broadened the scope of film criticism. The most popular video essays channels display various ideas by conveying objectivity, mastery, and knowledge of films. Many other creators, on the other hand, embrace the subjective potential of YouTube video essays. Renegade Cut describes itself as “a leftist video essay series about the politics, philosophies and culture that inform popular media” (Renegade Cut, 2019). Similar to a journalistic publication, the channel is politically engaged. When it comes to film criticism, this bias raises questions about whether adopting a political stance can jeopardize the legitimacy of a critic who relies on ideologies or skepticism rather than producing an unbiased and meaningful interpretation. Furthermore, while video essays can attract a large audience, they are intertwined with the platform’s specific ways of operating. Other elements have to be taken into account. The YouTube personalized algorithm, for instance, is biased and influences viewers’ choices. Moreover, monetization and copyrights are financial factors that should be further analyzed. In participatory platforms, popularity is a dominating determinant so offering sophisticated and high-quality videos is not sufficient to compete with other channels. As a result, many creators may purposefully adopt a divergent viewpoint to gain attention and create controversial content. For instance, CinemaSins produces the popular YouTube series “Everything Wrong With.” A voice-over criticizes a film and counts out film errors as ‘sins.’ At the end of every video, the sins’ total determines its ‘sentence,’ or conclusive judgment. Although the videos are made for

entertainment, they devalue films, as well as the practice of film criticism. What is analyzed is not the complexities of the films themselves, but their faults in satisfying the expectations and arbitrary standards of the critic. This type of film criticism is growingly impacting how audiences watch films. They tend to reproduce nitpicking minor flaws instead of enjoying the films. Since CinemaSins is a popular channel, gathering to this date 8,431,806 subscribers and a total view count of 2,692,131,027 views (CinemaSins, 2019), their legitimacy is questioned by other creators. Patrick (H) Willems, a YouTube video essayist and film critic has been adamant about the negative influence CinemaSins has had on the practice of film criticism. In his controversial video entitled “SHUT UP ABOUT PLOT HOLES,” he denounced the popular trend of ignorantly complaining about plot holes. He filmed himself in different locations and included film clips and humorous skits to lay out his argument creatively. What I find interesting in his video is that, instead of simply vocalizing his claim, he performed it as a way to achieve a greater persuasive impact.

2012 was when the change really happened. This was when plot holes started taking over YouTube. Pop[ular] culture from a nerdy fan perspective began exploding in popularity. And immediately, the types of video that proved most popular were humorous analysis of popular movies focusing on surface level knit-picks. [...] For many people, especially millennials [...] most film criticism they consume is on YouTube. [...] Plot holes do not mean anything but they are good clickbait. [...] No one is really to blame for this … okay CinemaSins definitely deserves some of the blame, but it is not just them. This is way bigger, this is about cultural shifts coinciding with evolving technology. (9:57-11:00) (Patrick (H) Willems , 2018).

Patrick (H) Willems shed light on a broader cultural issue. In allowing popular trends that degrade the value of film and criticism, there is an increased risk of losing the ability to discern and have valid judgements. To subside CinemaSins’ influence, the channel CinemaWins was created. The purpose of the videos is meant to alleviate the negative trend of nitpicking films. As the creator explains it; ‘I use a similar format as CinemaSins specifically to be their opposite. This is just my spin on films that I think don't get the respect they deserve or are so good they need to be celebrated” (CinemaWins, 2019). This approach, however, is limited as it is mere imitation and still contributes to the production of film analysis in a superficial, humorous way. This aspect is important to take into account. On YouTube and other social media platforms, ideas and behaviours can rapidly spread and be reproduced mindlessly. Online platforms that encourage participation in effect trigger imitation. As Marcel Danesi suggests, it leads to the formation of an “ever-expanding pastiche culture” (Jaakkola, 16). Pastiche refers to the collective creation of visual works that imitate one another. There is a need to examine these trends and define approaches that

defy popular ideas and ensure the existence of knowledgeable and diverse sources. This cultural diversity is fundamental to regulate society because, as it is suggested here:

social reality expresses itself through form, and form itself is the ‘totality of social relations around a certain production as well as the material and aesthetic choices’. The difficulties arise, however, when we fail to take note of how such ‘expressions’ are formed, the manner in which they connect to and are produced from the social world, and we posit that ‘expression’ as enough (Charlesworth, 144).

Therefore, because new media operates through increased sociality and facilitates the expression of social states, intermediaries are needed to think about cultural objects and ideas critically. Moreover, while the point of most YouTube videos is that they constitute a subjective perspective, viewers can fail to recognize the subtleties of what is presented. In video essays, critics frame themselves as authoritative by using sophisticated editing and voice-over. These techniques present information and convey objectivity through visual rhetoric or ‘vococentrism’ (Harvey, 7). Consequently, video essays can, also, deceitfully convey expertise to the viewer. Furthermore, “to attach one’s conception of media production expertise primarily to a set of technical features is to obscure the overarching need for producers to appeal to, or engage, an audience” (Ross, 914). Following this argument, I would suggest that, while specific video essays—such as the ones examined in the case study—can be considered as attempts to elevate the practice of film criticism and bring it back to its intellectual roots, their potential predominantly hinge on the audience receptivity and depend on the knowledge, creativity, persuasiveness, and diversity of creators’ performances, i.e. their verbalization and visual rhetoric abilities. Due to these aspects, I would not consider YouTube video essays as a new and established film criticism practice. In many ways, they do hold significant potential for the presentation and transmission of expertise. But the few examples to point to for confirming a complete revival of the intellectual aspects of film criticism seem insufficient. To consider film criticism anew would imply a departure from film reviews or rankings and a complete shift to audio-visual formats.

Conclusion

The digital era has transformed film criticism. In this thesis, I considered different aspects of that transformation. In the beginning, since film itself was not predominantly considered as an art form by the mainstream audience, film critics were considered elitist and held a marginalized and authoritative stature in the mediation of culture. The democratization of the practice of film criticism, however, introduced the importance of subjectivity. Journalistic film criticism was marked by a subjective expressionism, shaping popular tastes. This approach was further reinforced by the digital transition, which allowed new public modes of expression and reshaped notions of expertise. Since then, films have growingly been judged as cultural commodities, placing the critic as a mere consumer guide. The Web 2.0. has not only democratized the practice of film criticism, but it also deteriorated the relevance of critics as cultural intermediaries. The success of Rotten Tomatoes accelerated the disappearance of the traditional critic in mainstream culture by popularizing rankings and statistics. Furthermore, the democratization and availability of resources to make videos, as well as online social environments, allow for a plurality of film criticism practices and formats to emerge. In particular, YouTube has radically transformed film criticism. The use of satire and humour to criticize films is a testament to the platform’s influence in shaping cultural behaviours and tastes. That is why there is a need to analyze practices on YouTube. Nitpicking videos and skeptic film reviews are significantly influencing viewers’ ways of watching films. The popularity and impact of these types of content on cultural norms and values need to be examined and questioned. I set out to answer whether the digitization and democratization of film criticism had eroded the relevance of the critic and ‘cultural intermediaries.’ While critics had been considered highbrow and dull before, I believe that the sociality of YouTube has allowed positive contributions to the democratization and development of film criticism. New media, as a cultural industry, is based on participation, sociality, and popularity so examining vernacular practices is fundamental to understand how tastes and ideas are formed. In my case study, I gained insights into YouTube video essays, which I posited to constitute a revival of the expertise and intellectual aspects of film criticism online. As it was observed, verbalization and visual rhetoric are fundamental elements that effectively convey expertise. They constitute relevant technical methods to communicate ideas in the digital era. However, these technicalities are not enough to establish YouTube video essays as a new film criticism practice. The diversity of video essays that are posted regularly on YouTube implies that subtleties and variations exist. This constant change renders an exhaustive and definitive categorization of video essays as revived intellectual forms of

criticism impossible. Nonetheless, it does not make case studies irrelevant as it can help determine which attempts at communicating expertise can be most effective. All things considered, I wish to suggest that video essays constitute a new possibility for the mitigation of the challenges originating from the participatory culture. For film criticism to be relevant and valued in the digital era, there is a need to develop new standards and qualitative criteria. YouTube video essays, ergo, are not only important for the transmission of knowledge and expertise, but are also paramount to safeguard the value of film criticism as they hold significant potential for shaping ideas and producing meaning. Knowledge is now more accessible than ever and as a result, the potential of technology in the transmission of expertise should be considered. Creative and effective attempts can constitute more meaningful, accessible, and relatable forms of expression and communication.

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Appendix

Laurie Le Bomin. “Film Criticism in the Digital Era.” YouTube. 1 3 June 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLvS7uYenFM.