Feature: MIFF Diary, Day 13: Star ratings and film criticism
Love it. Hate it. Just make sure you rate it!
Thus are festival-goers implored to give a rating of 1-5 stars to the films they encounter during the Melbourne International Film Festival. It’s a win-win situation for the festival, MUBI.com and Sony for whom this operates as a handy cross promotion. For a film critic, nothing could be more abominable!
It’s abominable because the star-rating system is the antithesis of the work that critics do. The star system represents the commodification of films, the reduction of the cacophony of signs that is a movie to an arbitrary numerical value. Criticism is on the side of meaning, working out how sounds and images produce meaning. Criticism enters into a dialogue with a film and it is only through this conversation that the film lives as art. A star-rating designates the moment we pronounce a film as dead.
It is true that a critic ultimately makes an evaluative statement. This film is good. That film is bad. But evaluation is a very small part of criticism. The first duty of the critic is to be open to the film, to be humble, to be ready to experience something new. One is then captured by something—a single moment perhaps, or the totality of the film, a sense of the film’s strategies—and this sets us off. We talk about the film’s language, what it is saying. But we don’t just talk about the film. Because a film is never just a film. It is an extension on other films, other ideas, places, histories.
When the evaluation is made (and sometimes it is not), it is made not because of some universally applicable standard but because we have our own convictions about other films, other ideas, places, histories. The evaluation is made not to assert one’s personal taste but as part of a process of working out how we feel about the world. Love it. Hate it. Sure, why not? But why? For criticism, this question of why is the most important.
Yesterday I started my day with Natural Selection, one of the worst films of the festival so far. It’s a film by some liberal, middle class director who holds a typical liberal, middle class contempt for religious, working class people. This is the sort of Alan Ball-esque American indie film where everyone is the exact opposite of how they appear: The sexually repressed Christian husband is actually a porn addict, the mild-mannered wife has a raging libido and the friendly church minister is actually a gun-wielding psychopath who chases a woman he covets half-way across the country. The whole thing is of course annoyingly scored by I Can’t Believe It’s Not Jon Brion and the falsely optimistic ending which sees main character Linda smiling alone on a beach after having cut ties with everyone from her past is a perfect match for The Future’s endorsement of narcissistic alienation.
Next was Wasted Youth, a fine film set in an economically devastated Athens that follows two parallel stories. The first involves a policeman who, exploited by his boss, works the night shift for the third night in a row. The second involves a skateboarding teenager as he hangs around doing nothing much at all with his friends. The two stories are not literally connected (not until the very end at least) and the film is never heading somewhere definite, but what does become apparent is that the film’s concern is somewhere else, that these two characters are symptomatic of a society collapsing in on itself.
That film ended up being quite complementary to my last film of the day, Tatsumi. Both films connected the traumas of everyday existence to greater historical events, slices of life that gave witness to greater social concerns. The film is an animated biography of sorts of renowned manga author Yoshihiro Tatsumi who founded a movement of manga artists dealing with darker, more realistic themes in their work. The film intersperses key events from Tatsumi’s life with animated adaptations of some of his stories, all despairing tales of human weakness and impotence. These stories are melodramatic and brutal but the film’s structure asks us to consider these stories in a wider context: How do these films reflect the author’s psyche? on the one hand but also What kind of society could have produced such painful images?
FILMS WATCHED:
- Natural Selection — Robbie Pickering
- Wasted Youth — Argyris Papadimitropoulos
- Tatsumi — Eric Khoo
