I. Introduction

To begin this paper, I would like to make some observations about the journalistic film review that I have come to see as working hypotheses. I believe they are suppported by my perusal of a range of reviews, but I will not prove this in this paper. Rather, I will consider some consequences that follow if they are true. In this way, I hope to show that these working hypotheses are worth testing in more detail. By "journalistic film review", I mean the reviews you find in general audience newspapers and magazines, and in some places on television and on the internet as well. For short, I will refer in the rest of this paper to these items as "film reviews".

The film review has become a common and familiar staple of popular journalism, and of criticism. Also, it has been in existence long enough so that, if there are more or less standard expectations about their function and content (and it is my working hypothesis that there are such expectatations), they would be reasonably evident from looking at examples. Yet I suspect that there is a spectrum of form and style along which these fall. So while different reviewers or venues may fulfill the standard expectations in different ways (for example, a Caryn James review may do it in one way, an Anthony Lane review in another, an Ebert and Roeper review in another –and as long as we are including broadcast reviews, an Elvis Mitchell review in still another), there is a common, possibly professionalized, activity in which they are engaged. Film reviews assume that the reader is generally familiar with films (or at any rate with "movies" - the term some analytic aestheticians apply to commercial popular films), they contain colorful and often value-laden language, and many critics seem to enjoy writing with this in mind, especially when the result is an apt or evocative statement. In this respect, Seamon’s singling out of appreciative description is very relevant. Yet film reviews include an assessment and it is an important part of a film review. When Siskel and Ebert offered their summarizing thumbs-up or thumbs-down on their television show, they weren’t making a mockery of film reviewing. They were giving a distillation of it, and recognizing a purpose that journalistic film critics and their readers have come to see as fundamental to this kind of text.

A capsule plot summary therefore isn’t the same as a film review; a film review isn’t just a barebones description of the movie, or even a detailed description only. What the descriptions are descriptions of (e.g., what elements of the film, what other things if any are described in addition to the film) bears more careful study. Neither is an interpretation of a film by itself a film review, although a review often contains interpretative material. Further, there is a paradox that film reviews present, which when understood, may tell us more about the purposes they serve. The paradox is that while film reviews are written primarily as ephemeral, that is, for the purposes of the moment, well-known reviewers sometimes collect their past reviews (or allow them to be collected by an enterprising book editor) and publish them as self-standing books. This suggests that reviews under some conditions pass beyond the category of ephemera. The circumstances bear examination.

Why is the assessment so important to a film review? Mainly because it is important to the film review’s readers. Whatever else it may be, a film review is in important respects a consumer guide. A journalistic film critic’s intended audience is the intended audience for the films the critic reviews. These readers are interested in knowing what the currently available films are like. But they are also interested in how good (or not) the reviewer thinks they are and on what grounds, because both kinds of considerations enable the reader to estimate whether or not he or she will want to spend the time and money to see those films. It’s possible to read film reviews "just to see what’s out there these days", rather like the ways readers of Artnews who live in Los Angeles or Seattle may read the reviews of art shows in New York. You don’t have to be planning a New York trip to give that reading a point; in fact, the more films are treated as serious art (or, the more what’s going on in films becomes a social asset for some other reason), the more common this motivation may become, and the more reviews may be written with such readers in mind. But films are still, and still primarily, a form of entertainment and diversion (at any rate, this is what movies are) and this makes possible the paradigmatic purpose for reading a film review. Film reviews primarily evaluate films that were recently released and for which no critical judgement has yet been enshrined. This is another reason that an evaluation, along with reasons supporting that evaluation, is expected by the reviewer’s readers.

II. Because I was beginning a study of journalistic film reviews, I thought to begin by investigating what some other writers on the subject of art criticism had said about reviews. As we often do, I began with writers who were likely to share my general methodological persuasions about the philosophy of art and judgements of taste (basically, persuasions of the American Society for Aesthetics, which has significant leanings to present day "analytic" philosophy of art). Roger Seamon’s chapter on art criticism in the Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (2001) was a discussion that fit this bill. I was excited to find his contribution because I thought that a taxonomy of criticism would be a useful starting point for my own thoughts. It turned out to be just that, but not exactly in the ways I had expected.

Seamon’s discussion present five different categories or kinds of art criticism. In the order of his presentation, they are

These categories are presented here in the order they appear in Seamon’s discussion. The order appears to be chronological or historical, in that the place of an item in the list reflects its emergence as a kind (in some cases, as a predominant kind of criticism. For example, The Poetics of Aristotle are said to be a paradigm of legislative criticism, appreciative criticism is said to have became important in the 18^th century, and the other forms are said to become important in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. In addition the kinds of criticism given appear to represent different functions or purposes for criticism, in contrast to naming tools or techniques that could serve a variety of purposes. (Seamon does say that an individual piece of criticism, which I think he is distinguishing from a kind or form or criticism, may serve a variety of purposes [p. 317]. He says too that there are "logical stages" in the process of appreciation and that what appreciative critics do reflects these. And although he does not say so as explicitly, his accounts suggest that there are logical stages in the other kinds of criticism as well.)

I want to focus in this article on the second kind of criticism given in the list, appreciative description. Seamon observes that appreciative description sometimes requires the critic to identify what the performance is, because it might not be obvious to its intended audience. For example, when the theater critic for the local alternative paper writes that the people lying on the ground in the park last Saturday were a guerrilla theater troupe and not a medical emergency, and tells us what kind of event the actors were acting out, she is engaging not simply in the explanation of behavior but in appreciative art criticism. Yet, Seamon also observes, other cases of appreciative description assume that "the critics are on intimate terms with performances and can presume that the audience has the relevant contexts" (Seamon, p. 320) and he says that the most familiar locus of this form of criticism is the review.

I think this is correct about reviews so far, but I am puzzled by some of his subsequent comments about them and disagree with others. Seamon seems to think, as I do, that reviews are or contain evaluations of the work reviewed. He also thinks that appreciative description plays an important role in a review. Yet he asserts that reviews do not "consist of arguments in support of verdicts, but of efforts of the critic to express through appreciative description the basis upon which a work is judged" (Seamon, p. 320). But what does it mean to give a "basis" for judging the work if not to give arguments in support of the judgement? Perhaps it means that there are not deductive arguments in a review, contrary to say the picture of criticism offered by Monroe Beardsley. But even if that is so, it doesn’t follow either that there is no reasoning at all about the quality of the work reviewed. Perhaps the point is that that the evaluations in appreciative description aren’t always made explicit and may instead be implicit in its descriptive language. But even if this were the case, it would not mean that those evaluations have no importance to the reader or to the critic.

Further, Seamon believes that the reader does not place a lot of importance on whether the appreciative critic persuades him or her to agree with the critic’s comments. He writes that "What we want from a critic is description that permits us to understand how it could be seen that way, even if we disagree with the appraisal" (Seamon, p. 322). But then how are reviews to be understood in terms of appreciative description? The appraisal seems to be an important part of them. Further still, this aspect of Seamon’s analysis appears to be especially flawed or incomplete when applied to journalistic reviews, that is, the reviews that appear in newspapers and general audience magazines. For here, I believe, readers cares a great deal about whether or not they are likely to share the critic’s appraisal.

In support of his characterization of appreciative description, Seamon offers several excerpts of criticism discussing a range of art forms and representing a range of critical tastes. In what follows I will discuss his examples and offer my own views about what these examples show.

Consider first Nicolas Penny’s comments on a painting by Coreggio:

"In the center of the most beautiful painting by Coreggio in the Louvre is a knot of flesh as intricate and lively as a swimming octopus. It consists of the left hand of the Virgin Mary delicately supporting the slightly smaller right hand of Saint Catherine, while the much smaller hand of the infant Christ tenderly picks out the Saint’s ring finger. This is a miniature example of an effect at which Coreggio excelled: actions inspired by a sentiment of breathless intensity are somehow endowed with angelic grace and with a formal complexity which is delightfully difficult to entangle." (Penny, p. 18; quoted in Seamon p. 321)

The complication is that Penny is not offering this description of the painting for its own sake. It’s offered as context in a book review that Penny wrote for the London Review of Books. In it, he reviews a book about Coreggio and a book about Guido Reni. He reviews the former more favorably than the latter, suggesting that the Reni book, unlike the Coreggio book, makes use of extraneous and/or anachronistic angles and so does not (in Penny’s opinion) do justice to the art. An appraisal of these books – though perhaps not of the paintings they cover –is the objective of the review.

Next, Seamon offers Randell Jarrell’s description of the scene in Robert Frost’s poem "Design".

"This is the Argument from Design with a vengeance; is the terrible negative from which the eighteenth century’s Kodak picture (with it’s "Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here" on the margin) had to be printed…And this little albino catastrophe is too whitely catastrophic to be accidental, too unlikely to be a coincidence." (Jarrell, p. 42 : quoted in Seamon, p. 321 )

Jarrell’s discussion offers extended interpretations of several poems by Frost. Nevertheless, Jarrell’s objective is evaluative in that he thinks that Frost’s poetry (or some of it ) has merits that are have been overlooked. He writes

"Back in the days when ‘serious readers of modern poetry’ were most patronizing to Frost’s poems, one was often moved to argument, or to article writing, or to saying umder one’s breath: What is man that Thou art mindful of him? In these days it’s better-a little, not much: the lips are pursed that ought to be parted, and they still pay lip service or a little more. But Frost’s best poetry - and there is a great deal of it, at once wonderfully different and wonderfully alike - deserves the attention, submission, and astonished awe that real art always requires of us; to give it a couple of readings and a ribbon lettered First in the Old-Fashioned (or Before 1900) Class of Modern Poetry is worse, almost than not to read it at all." (Jarrell, p. 34)

He writes that "Provide Provide" is "to put it as crudely as possible—an immortal masterpiece" (Jarrell, p. 41) and that "…it is full of the deepest, and most touching, moral wisdom, and it is full, too, of the life we have to try to be wise about and moral in." (Jarrell, p. 41) His point about "Design" is not only that Frost has used words wonderfully, but that he has used them wonderfully in the service of skepticism about the Argument from Design, specifically, in service of the notion that if there is design in nature, it doesn’t necessarily reflect a kindly designer. Jarrell thinks this skepticism is insightful, and so his interpretation of the poem is not offered for its own sake; it’s offered to bolster an evaluation of Frost as a poet. It’s not that one couldn’t write an article on Frost whose objective was the interpretations of the poems in their own right. It just isn’t the objective (or the only objective) that Jarrell’s review seems to have.

Seamon quotes a review written by George Bernard Shaw, of a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.

"No doubt it was something to have brought the chorus to the point of singing such difficult music accurately and steadily. But a note-perfect performance is only the raw material of an artistic performance; and what the Birmingham Festival achieved was very little more than such raw material. In the opening chorus, the plaintive, poignant melody in triple time got trampled to pieces by the stolid trudging choir from beat to beat. The violins in the orchestra shewed the singers how it ought to be done; but the lesson was thrown away; the trudging continued. (Shaw, p. 89; quoted in Seamon, p. 320 )

Shaw’s review was printed in the World newspaper in 1891. It foregrounds making a negative assessment of the choir’s performance and supporting that assessment. Shaw is quite aware of his assessment : he opens the review with a semi-humorous warning that travel and seating complications put him in a mood to be unkind to what he was about to hear, but the assessment turned out to be deserved. As Seamon observes, the line about "‘trudging’ is an attempt "to say just how something was bad." Yet the "something" is the singing of the music, and to say the singing trudges is to describe what made the singing bad. Isn’t the passage thereby giving a reason to judge the performance wanting? The editor of the Shaw collection subtitled it "reviews and bombardments", perhaps in light of content like this.

I would like to discuss one more example from Seamon’s discussion, since it is from a film review: Anthony Lane’s review of Germinal, adopted from the novel by Zola. Seamon believes this example supports his picture of the role of appreciative description in reviews. I think it better supports my view that the assessment in a review matters.

Lane writes that

"The point [of the movie] is plain, and inarguable: that in nineteenth century France, as anywhere else, miners toiled under infernal conditions for woeful wages, and deserved better…As social history, all this looks impeccable; as a campaign for justice, it is flushed with fine feelings; as drama, however, it’s got problems. Call me a thrill junkie, but I find there’s only so much excitement to be had from watching angry debates about the redistribution of timbering costs." (Lane, 90; quoted in Seamon, 322)

As the excerpt suggests, Lane gives the film a negative review overall, maintaining that the film just isn’t engaging enough. "The lasting impression", he writes " is of something long and boring and good for you, like celery" (Lane, p. 91) Although he lays some of blame for this at the feet of Zola ("It isn’t difficult",he writes "to make a bad film from Zola; he can seldom resist telling us what to think, which makes him far lesser artist than Flaubert but saves lazy minds a lot of bother"; Lane, p. 91), he chides the director as well, in part for wasting his star. Of course it is Lane’s opinion that it isn’t column and readers who follow a particular reviewer’s columns often do so with the assumption that the reviewer’s tastes are likely to be reflection of their own. These readers reasonably infer that, all things equal, they would not be likely to find the film engaging either.

What is to be learned from all this? Mainly, I think Seamon’s examples don’t support his downplaying of the role of arguments and assessments in reviews. In fact, these elements may be more important than he thinks, even in his own examples, which are drawn from a range of publications and of reviewed art objects. Second, I think that appreciative description would not provide a correct (or, at least, not a complete) account of reviews that serve this purpose. Notice in this connection that form in the reviews discussed seems to follow function. I’m not surprised that Shaw’s concert review makes an assessment, since it was written for a newspaper. I’m not surprised, either, that assessment is important to Penny’s book review, since it appeared in the London Review of Books. By the same token, it’s not surprising that there are detailed interpretations in the Jarrell review that could be of interest for their own sake: it appeared in the Kenyon Review, whose audience is not solely a general one, but includes literary academicians whose methodological commitments make the interpretations of literary works of greater interest than assessments of their strengths and weaknesses.

Can the concept of "appreciative description" be modified so that it applies to reviews to which assessment is important? If we simply remove from Seamon’s existing account of appreciative description the claim that what we want from a critic we want "even if we disagree with appraisal", then it could apply to these reviews. However, we still wouldn’t know why reviews are an important locus of appreciative description, which Seamon says they are. So the modification leaves us with a mystery. Perhaps, then, reviews are best placed in their own category of criticism, where appraisal is acknowledged to be important. In that case, perhaps the central role of appraisal could be used to explain the applicability of appreciative description, understood now as a tool or technique that could be put to the service of a range of critical objectives. Even if this is the best strategy though, it isn’t the end of the story. There are further questions on which understanding the review as a kind of criticism depends and for which answers could be pursued. For example, is assessment in fact important to most or all reviews or just to reviews written in particular contexts (e.g., reviews in the popular press—what I have been calling "journalistic reviews"), reviews by particular reviewers for whom making an appraisal is just a matter of personal style?) All I have offered on this score thus far is preliminary suspicions, the question bears further examination. One form this examination could take is the analysis of kinds of reviews as kinds, e.g., reviews of particular art media, reviews in particular venues (e.g., journalistic reviews), reviews by particular reviewers, especially those with regular columns or broadcast venues. Further, why do some readers who are not in a position to attend the performance or see the art object read the reviews anyway? If they are just curious, what are they curious about? Also, what about the other elements present in art reviews in addition to assessments ? What are they and what are they for (e.g., do they support the assessment, or do they serve an independent purpose) ?

Sources:

Jarrell: Randall Jarrell, "To the Laodicians", in Poetry and the Age (Vintage, 1959), pp. 34-62; originally in Kenyon Review 14 (1952): 535-561.

Lane: Anthony Lane, "The Shaft", New Yorker 70 (March 14 1994): 90-91.

Penny: Nicholas Penny, "Why Christ is playing with the Magdalene’s Hair?", London Review of Books (2 July 1998): 18-19

Seamon: Roger Seamon, "Criticism", in Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, eds., (Routledge, 2001), pp. 315-328

Shaw: George Bernard Shaw, The Great Composers: Reviews and Bombardments, Louis Crompton, ed. (U Cal Press, 1978), pp. 88-90.