What Are The Qualifications For A Critic?
Last night I watched a lecture by Pamela Hutchinson titled C. A. Lejeune And Britain’s Lady Film Critics, hosted by San Francisco Film Preserve and streamed live online, and I believe it will be added online later .
“In 1922, with a weekly column in the Manchester Guardian, C. A. Lejeune became one of Britain’s first lay film critics, and began to define what that could mean. Soon, she was the best of the bunch, and the funniest, too – but her opinions often became controversial. This talk will look at Lejeune’s passion for cinema and her remarkable career, which included three decades at The Observer, and becoming a fixture on BBC radio and TV. It will also introduce some of the many women who joined her in giving British film criticism a “womanly” voice from the 1920s to the 1950s. Chief among these is her fellow “Sunday Lady” Dilys Powell, her brilliant counterpart at the Sunday Times, who outlasted them all.”
Pamela Hutchinson shared great insights about C.A. Lejuene’s (1897-1973) career as a film critic, her style of writing, her love/hate relationship with cinema, her opinion that cinema is for the masses and not an art form for the elite. She also preferred to hear from working class women about what they thought of the films they watched in the cinemas.
These are a couple of excerpts from Lejuene’s writings that were included in the presentation:
”My official tip for the week is “Man of Aran”. My unofficial tip is “It Happened One Night. I know that this statement will bring down upon me the bitter contempt of film societies, film groups and film theorists generally, but we all have our weaknesses, and mine happens to be a preference for story over seaweed, however patiently gathered and significantly display.”
Source: 'C.A. Lejeune, ‘Man of Aran. A sealed document’, The Observer, 29 April 1932, p24
She wrote this about John Cassavetes’ Shadows,
“I like this film. It makes me feel young again, partly because its strain is human, partly because the new ideas it advances are so refreshingly old. We were looking and hoping this way as far back as 1923. We thought we could find a new world for the cinema by speaking simply and speaking true. We failed. Now perhaps Cassavetes and his kind can find it.”
Source: C.A. Lejeune, ‘Improvisation’, The Observer, 16 October 1960, p26
The lecture also included a few other female critics:
Iris Barry (1895-1969), a poet, novelist, film critic and curator. She moved to New York in 1930 and soon after founded the film department and the world’s first film archive at MoMA, and became the curator of MoMA Film Library, a newly formed film library and the first position of its kind in the US.
Dilys Powell CBE (1901-1995), a film critic and travel writer who outlasted Lejeune, and contributed to The Sunday Times for more than 50 years.
In 1946, at the Foyle's Literary Luncheon she made the following short speech about what makes a good critic. It is from a clip available online that Pamela Hutchinson shared in her presentation which I’ve added below.
“What are the qualifications for a critic?I think that members of my profession are often attacked for being too severe. I do think that the very first qualification of a critic is to like the art he is writing about.
And if a critic’s urge on the side of severity, it is not that he’s a severe and good critic because he doesn’t like what he is writing about. He is severe because he likes it, and because he respects it, and because he expects good things of it.”
In our current times, where film and other cultural institutions are giving preference to “influencers” and “content creators” to provide content that is basically PR fluff specifically made for social media, we need to remember and demand for meaningful critique by people who actually like, engage and understand the art form they are writing or making videos about.
