regarding subjectivity/objectivity, your friend was right and you were wrong.
but of course, it wont get you too far debating the merits of film criticism with someone who claims one film is better than another film that he hasnt even seen yet.
No, I do not think it’s true, what you say. I have also said, many times, that a film is either good or bad, and that there’s no opinion going into whether it is such; there is only opinion when stating whether you LIKED a movie or not. This statement of my own is completely false. I mean, basically, it does all come down to the viewer. There are so many different kinds of movies with so many different intentions that it is truely difficult to compare films based on their techinical merits; sure, this one is well made, but this one is not supposed to have nearly as much as that other one. Is one bad while the other’s good? Not at all.
Now, though, your friend is wron about Terminator 2, simply because it is not as good ad Godfather (although it is a very good movie). I mean, it’s fine if it’s your friend’s FAVORITE film, but he can’t honestly say that it’s the BEST film ever made. That statement, while I believe it, completely contradicts what I just said, so whatever.
I guess, in this sense, there really can be no “best film ever made,” although there can be a favorite.
Oh well…
Savvy
All film criticism is opinion. It may be informed opinion, or it may not be, buit it is still opinion. And opinion is always subjective.
This has been discussed before here:
http://www.theauteurs.com/topics/728/comments
Ignorant as your friend may sound, I think on a fundamental level he’s right. Most criticism, even the best criticism, boils down to personal preference. However, there is room to argue about films. It’s simply not enough to say, “Well, I like this movie better than that movie” and leave it at that. The process of criticism is about finding out how movies work, or how they don’t work. Having a discussion about the merits of “The Godfather” with someone who’s never seen the film is sort of pointless. But I have friends that might say “Terminator 2” is better, and they’ve seen both, and have the ability to articulate why they have the opinion that they do. I guess the heart of what I’m saying is that criticism is not very well suited to making pronouncements like “This film is better than that film”. How do you compare “The Godfather” and “Terminator 2” anyway? The best thing that criticism can do is judge the merits of each individual film. This does not mean that we can’t relate one film to another, but we should be sure that the connections we are making are solid and meaningful.
I have always felt that film criticism is much easier to articulate than music criticism. I’ve never read a single piece of music criticism that helped me see a song or album in a new light, because all music criticism seems to be able to do is trace influences and similarities. You can tell me a thousand times over that Bob Dylan is the greatest living songwriter, but my ears will always disagree.
I agree with your friend that reactions will be dependent on our own emotional and psychological make-up, and therefore subjective, that’s pretty obvious, but a writer on film like David Bordwell by concentrating on practical issues such as staging can draw attention to skills that may pass unnoticed by most viewers and even relatively experienced cinephiles. Being alert to as many aspects and areas of expertise of a film as possible can increase appreciation accordingly. Critics can point up a wealth of possible meanings but these may be subjective, arguable or imagined rather than objective. If your friend has not seen The Godfather he is not qualified to say The Terminator is better, only that The Terminator is his favourite film among those he’s seen and that he would think The Godfather would have to be brilliant to surpass it in his estimation..
I am astonished by how many filmgoers consider themselves experts and make bold statements that may be based on ignorance. I’ve done (many years ago too!) and still do the same myself, but with each passing year the more ignorant i feel. There is just so much i don’t know, so many avenues and whole worlds to explore.
Your friend is right about the huge importance of subjectivity but might also ask himself if he’s best placed to judge true comparative greatness of films.
Who wants objective criticism? I want opinions. I want people who have a point of view. I will seek out the knowledgeable. I only want to learn.
Things that absolutely cannot be completely objective – film critics and supreme court nominees.
Though I agree with pretty much everything that’s been said, here’s my one counter: Haven’t you ever watched a film that you haven’t enjoyed, but you know is “good”? For me that film is D.W.‘s Intolerance. I’ve watched it a few times and never actually liked it, but I know that it’s a good film. Can anyone else think of that kind of instance? And does that speak to an inherent knowledge of what is an objectively “good” film?
Yes, many, many times. When I communicate to other people about films that I have seen I try to make a clear distinction between what I felt emotionally about a film and what I felt objectively about a film within my simple view of what goes into making a “good” film. However, frustratingly most of the time they just want my opinion about what I “felt.”
As everybody knows, it is completely possible to acknowledge the quality of a film without liking it (for example hardcore arthouse like Dreyer or Antonioni), and also to like a film while knowing that it is of a rather low quality (the cult following for certain trash movies would account for that). The difference between the subjectivity of a serious critic and the subjectivity of your friend, Adriana, is that one does argue while the other simply expresses something, like his taste.
Were critizism objective it would be the most boring thing in the world.
The interesting part lies in your expression of your friend being “too” subjective. The fact that every citic judges subjectively does not mean that any subjective expression qualifies as a critique.
Yes! I’m one of those old fashioned modernists that believes in the possibility of positing objective criteria for evaluating art, including the art of cinema.
In criticism, objectivity will always be a relative term.
Galselmi- thats an interesting stance. But what that invokes for me is a check box-style way of judging films. Which would be limiting, to say the least. Care to elaborate?
Thorsten- Perhaps you’re on to something with your identification of “too” subjective as the interesting bit. Maybe film criticism requires equal parts subjectivity and objectivity, and descends into gray territory as it progresses toward either pole.
sorry, my computer keeps double posting.
no.
I’ll agree with what others have said: your friend is right about criticism being inherently subjective. But he’s not very bright if that’s his excuse for a statement like “Terminator 2 was not only a better movie than The Godfather, but was also possibly the best film ever made,” which hardly takes subjectivity into account.
Adriana,
I may have overstated my position. Basically, I believe that ‘beauty,’ ‘rigor,’ ‘discipline’ ‘austerity,’ etc are objective qualities an artist may advance by paying particularly close attention to form and structure.
So I’m not opposed to subjectivity per se. Subjectivity is not mutually exclusive with any of these categories.
What I find abhorrent is the reigning historicist/relativist orthodoxy that forces us to appreciate any and all cultural artifacts not for their intrinsic beauty, but for their ability to ‘encode’ — not ‘reflect’ or ‘express,’ for those are hopeless passe terms — social power dynamics, etc.
No.
NEXT!!!!!
For me “2001: A Space Odyssey” is a film that I can look at and say, “Technically, it’s brilliant. It’s ambitious, groundbreaking, and complex. However, it just won’t cut it for me”. The only way to objectify criticism is to look at things like production value, etc. To be objective means that we must be dealing with concrete objects – like mathematical sums. Movies are not sums. They are a creative venture. I’m willing to recognize that “2001” is brilliant in many ways, but I can also detail why I don’t think it works, and why it’s even sort of pretentious at points. Which is why I don’t like it. But my opinion is ultimately subjective, because you, or anyone else could disagree and have very good reasons for doing so. Who’s right? Who’s wrong? If someone came to me and said, “Kubrick’s film doesn’t break any new ground”, I’d say they’re an idiot, because any cursory examination of film history, especially science fiction history reveals that “2001” is indeed groundbreaking. It’s a fact. But we have opinions about facts. We have to decide what the facts mean to us and to the world. This is why I contest that the primary function of criticism is to articulate what it is that we see in a film. In doing so, we can make value judgements, and then open it up for discussion.
A truly objective criticism is limited. If you want fairly objective criticism look at the AFI 100. There are good movies on that list, no doubt. But as a whole it’s sort of stale.
Nathan,
I disagree. Objective criticism, or criticism which insists on a claim to objective aesthetic criteria, need not limit itself to stale technicalities. At least when it comes to literature, there is a long-running tradition of criticism which has sought to both interpret and evaluate art on the basis of objective categories, particularly form and structure: how the two intersect, how does form advance (or limit) content, etc.
It’s a great disservice to hundreds of years of developments in Western thinking regarding aesthetics: criticism today has been limited to personal choice (as you would have it) or, worse, the degree to which pieces of art ‘interrogate’ class-/gender-/etc.-based domination, etc. etc. Yuck.
Look, a good place to start with all these questions is Hazard Adams’ anthology entitled “Critical Theory Since Plato.” You’re welcome. And yes, I am a raging douche.
Look, a good place to start with all these questions is Hazard Adams’ anthology entitled “Critical Theory Since Plato.” You’re welcome. And yes, I am a raging douche.
EDIT: Double Douche
Ganselmi – I’m not denying that objective criticism is possible. I just think that if our criticisms are strictly objective, then it will be limited. If I limit myself to saying that “2001” has great production values, is ambitious, and groundbreaking (all fairly objective statements), what have I really said? And what’s the point of saying it?
And what objective aesthetic criteria are we talking about? Form and structure are flexible things. Obviously there is good form and bad form, good structure and bad structure, but as individuals we have to make decisions on what works and what does not. And not everyone will agree. To me, the inherent subjectivity of art criticism lies in the simple fact that people disagree all the time. For instance, I didn’t think that the structure of “21 Grams” worked for the story it was telling. However, others thought that it did. If objective criticism is useful, how do we decide who is right? We don’t. We can’t – at least not in the way that we decided that 2 + 2 = 4 is right. Objectivity assumes that there is a definite right and wrong – definitive correct and incorrect judgements.
I’m not calling for total anarchy here. I just think that the main function of art criticism is to incite discussion.
Or maybe I should put it this way: I believe that criticism exists on two levels.
On the micro level, which involves individuals, conversations, and even writing, we are sort of forced into subjectivity. Again, the very fact that critics and historians disagree on the value of given works of art (or cinema in this case) should be enough to show that there is subjectivity involved.
The macro level takes all of these various opinions, conversations, writings, historical analysis etc etc and assimilates it, so that we can create cannons that point toward specific works of art and artists. We can then in turn use those canons as a yardstick for future works of art.
As a critic (non-professional, micro level) I don’t know how to be objective about what I see. At least not in how I respond to it, and the articulation of my responses.
I don’t know if aren’t talking in circles here anyway.
“The demonstrable value-judgment is the donkey’s carrot of literary criticism." – Northrop Frye
There are different kinds or stages of subjectivity. The likes of “Oooohhhh, Robert Pattinson is so cute!!!!” and “Boy, did you see that? The Joker blew the whole hospital up!!!” are definitely not very valualbe outside the close circle of friends of the speakers. To paraphrase myself: a good critique is subjective and has to be but will take that only as a starting point for making an argument. And that involves some thought and some consideration of things outside the film, too.
There has been some discussion about old and new media and how the internet destroys journalism – for film critizism this would mean that people do it for free instead of being paid for it which would result in a loss of quality, having only fans expressing their not very elaborate views. Of course, this is nonsense because there is a lot of very deep thinking about film on the net. But the internet definitely has added to the gap between audience and critics. The attitude of “everyone’s a critic” has sharpened the aggressiveness towards the experts. The argument of “all critics are subjective so my opinion is worth as much as that of, say, Glenn Kenny”, which in nuce is what Adriana’s friend was trying to say I assume, leads to rather dull discussions about films as can be seen in lots of commentary threads on blogs and newspapers (though, strangely, in the USA these discussions seem to be better than here in Germany).
The subjectivity of art and its contemplation must not make this subjectivity the only criteria.
A film review should be well written, too. For me, that’s the most important part.
The idea of a sort-of “check list” for how objectively good a movie is has always been interesting to me. Generally, when I watch I movie I think of a few things when deciding if I enjoyed it:
-Did it keep me interested? (i.e were there parts of the film when I found myself staring off into space?)
-Was it well produced? (this doesn’t seem to matter too much most of the time)
-Was it beautiful?
The things I think about when deciding if it is a great movie are usually along the lines of:
-Did the story mean anything? Did it tell me something profound or did it simply “examine” some part of our lives?
-Was I involved with the movie? Did I actually care if something terrible or wonderful happened?
-Were the cinematics interesting, but not catchy?
-Will this movie affect my life in a significant way? (other than just shocking me)
I realize this is kind of silly, but I’m just thinking out loud. I think the first few things would be my subjective view while the second set of thigs would determine my objective view. I may love the movie and know it’s crap or I may hate the movie and know it’s gold.
I’d like to introduce the book notion,for example..I love Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings magnum opus but is Tolkien’s challenging trilogy a manifesto of puzzles and deviant emotions such Paradise Lost by John Milton is (considering epics belong in multiple categories..)
I to be honest prefer both for a respective possibility of reasons..one might try to analyze Helm’s Deep battle in the most Art of War criticism he can achieve and a good female friend of mine might express her opinion that Paradise Lost “kicked ass man” and that’s all,no further evidence of why this particular piece moved her or why it’s so much better Kalevala or other epics of the genre..
Art is objective in a subjective point of view,being a person who seeks objectivity,I try to face it in any case whatsoever..the fact Terminator by Cameron is a finer motion picture than Andrei Rublev is ambivalent since both the first Terminator and Andrei Rublev are classic examples of possessive magnetism,for the on-screen film-buffs like we all are around here..the best way to accomplish this objectivity is to admire the work of art in the era where it was first created upon,regardless of the negativity of the excessive acceptance..that way,one will easily decide whether Zombie 2 by Fulci beats the horror nightmare of I Walked with a Zombie by Jacques Tourneur,2 different lavishing films but of similar concept.
Most people could agree that a long complex tracking shot, for instance, is technically well executed, but there may be some difference of opinion as to why it’s there in the first place. So, no, I don’t think there is any possible objective quantification of a film’s merits.
Adriana
I had an interesting argument with a friend the other day, and I wanted to pose it to this forum and see some opinions on it.
My friend, who is by no means a cinephile, was arguing that Terminator 2 was not only a better movie than The Godfather, but was also possibly the best film ever made. (He’s never seen The Godfather, but I’ll leave that be for now). When I asked him why, he said simply because he liked Terminator more than any other movie he had seen. I told him he was being too subjective in his perception of what a good film is, and he countered that all film criticism is subjective and is based on the experiences, aesthetics preferences, and personality of the viewer.I said that there is a objective way to judge a film, based solely on the creative merit and technical aspects of it without being emotionally involved. Thinking about it further though, I’m not entirely sure. Do you think this is true? Can someone ever watch a film objectively and critique it this way? Or are all critics subject to their own individual likes and dislikes no matter what?