Gallery
Artists in the Audience: Student Film Reviews
Friday 18 June - Friday 2 July 2010
Oscar Wilde believed that criticism could be ‘creative in the highest sense of the word’; the examined work might be merely a ‘starting-point for a new creation’. Over cinema’s first century and beyond, ambitious movie reviewers have practised criticism as an art, whether in the stylised tones of Parker Tyler and Manny Farber or the measured prose of Vincent Canby and Jonathan Rosenbaum.
The writers in this exhibition, 3rd-year Film Studies students, seek to continue in this tradition: they strive to be artists in the audience. The reviews on display were produced as assignments for FI585: Film Criticism. Each week the module participants screened a film and were required to deliver publishable copy a few hours later.
The deadlines and word limits by which these notices were composed—not uncommon for journalists writing for daily and weekly publications—were ‘liberating constraints’ for the fresh voices of these UK-based critics. The pieces experiment with form and stylistics or pursue challenging questions about representation and entertainment industry economics. They take failures to task, revise conventional wisdom or simply indulge the pleasure of movie-going.
Above all, these reviews evince a willingness to contribute to and have strong opinions about film culture—in short, they dare to shape how we are to view images and understand films in this country.
Dr. Mattias Frey
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