The critical question: Sight and Sound's postwar consolidation of liberal taste

Return to the lost continent

“…In fact the digitization of the newspapers that are assumed to be Ellis's major source - Richards (2000, 24) has endorsed his essay as 'a careful, thorough analysis of a broad range of newspaper and journal reviews' -might lead to rather different conclusions across the board. Melanie Selfe and Mattias Frey have in different ways qualified and sought to explain Ellis's cut-off point of 1948, Selfe (2012) by examining the institutional politics of film reviewing, Frey (2013), who calls Ellis's essay 'a convincing prehistory and an excellent case analysis' (213), by demonstrating through basic selective quotation the endurance of 'quality film' ideas down to the present. However, Ellis's start date of 1942 is equally dubious.…”

‘Criticism’: Notes on the Circulation of Cultural Judgement

“…Recently, for instance, Kersten and Bielby (2012) closely examined the criteria at work in film criticism in the context of broader cultural changes and raised the issue of to 'what extent cultural arbiters like film critics have begun to expand the scope of their interpretative focus in light of these changes ' (2012: 197). 5 Clayton and Klevan (2011) brought together a range of close analyses of the variants of language employed in writing about film and within a longer historical frame, Frey (2013) looked at transitions in the core critical criteria used by film critics in 1950s and 1960s Britain.…”

“…The converse situation also arises too, where immediate and negative 'amateur' responses to material can have an impact on sales or ratings, a situation which has recently caused some rethinking of the best 'launch strategy' for certain cultural products (Lawson 2013 discusses an example from television). Although it can be exaggerated and is subject to strong national variations, there is evidence of a displacement, 'from beneath' at it were, occurring with respect to the role of professional newspaper and magazine critic, a displacement which, in some areas, threatens a reduction in the number of critical columnists employed (comments and sources of data can be found in Rayner 2008, Rixon 2013and Frey 2013. Not surprisingly, this has led to attempts at defending the value of professional criticism and its importance for the 'health' of the arts it covers and the general cultural good.…”