Revisiting the distinction between criticism and reviewing: practices, functions, rhetorics, and containers

ABSTRACT

In this article I revisit the distinction between criticism and reviewing in cultural and film studies. I focus on three attempts to tackle this distinction. The first comes from Colin McArthur, who published ‘British Film Reviewing: A Complaint’ in Screen in 1985. The second is from Meaghan Morris, and her seminal 1988 article, ‘Indigestion: A Rhetoric of Reviewing’. The third is from more recent work by Tom O’Regan and Huw Walmsley-Evans, which is redefining the terms upon which we encounter the review around the concept of ‘media containers’ and aesthetics.  Through discussion of these three attempts I examine the extent to which reviewing is constructed as a form of media practice in its own right.

KEYWORDS:

• Reviewing
• criticism
• taste
• rhetoric
• film
• practice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Sargent was a recognized Vaudeville critic and later become a key figure in the founding of Variety (Azlant, 1997, p. 248). He also worked as a scenario editor at the Lubin company. Frank Woods was a journalist writing under the by-line of the ‘Spectator’ in the ‘Moving Picture Department’ of the New York Dramatic Mirror. He was chosen as first president of the Photoplay Author’s League in 1914 (see Azlant, 1997, 242).

2. This is despite McArthur’s careful analysis of the reception of the film Local Hero in Scotland, including a powerful critique of ‘the absence of a concern with mise-en-scène’ as a symptom of a general malaise in the British screen culture of the day (McArthur 1985, 81).

3. The paper was first published as ‘Indigestion: A Rhetoric of Reviewing’ in Filmnews 12 (6) (1982), and then in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media in 1983.

4. The phrases ‘expectations of critique and analysis’ and ‘vectors of interpretation’ draw inspiration from articles by Stephen Muecke (1991) and McKenzie Wark (1991).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven Maras

Steven Maras, PhD (Murdoch University). Associate Professor in Media and Communication, The University of Western Australia.  He is the author of Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practice (2009) and Objectivity in Journalism (2013).