Summary—“Criticism” (Chapter 17 of Hollywood Cinema)

· While film theory is properly concerned with the properties of cinema as a whole, criticism's primary object of investigation is the individual movie, a group of movies, or the study of particular techniques.

· Criticism plays an important role in defining the ways in which we understand the functions and meanings of Hollywood movies. Some critical approaches, such as the idea of the director as auteur, have informed the industry's own assumptions about the nature of its business.

· The review is an evaluative form of consumer criticism in which an opinion is offered about whether a movie is worth paying to see. Review discourse accepts Hollywood on its own terms, implicitly endorsing its production system, and is often hostile to other kinds of criticism. It may be seen as supporting the motion picture industry, and as part of its publicity machine, making judgments according to criteria established by the industry, such as "entertainment value."

· Different kinds of theoretical approaches ask different kinds of questions about movies. Early film theorists consciously sought to elevate movies to the level of Art, so that they could be evaluated according to conventional critical principles. By contrast, between the 1930s and the 1960s aesthetic approaches were characterized by a preoccupation with realism. Sociological and psychological studies examined the sociology of movie going and Hollywood itself, and asked what the cinema could reveal about the habits and obsessions of the societies in which it existed. Much of this work was highly critical of what it saw as the damaging effect of Hollywood on American society.

· Auteurism privileges the "authorship" of a movie as an individual artistic achievement, and largely dismisses the material circumstances of a movie's production and consumption. Despite its limitations, auteurism was crucial to the elevation of cinema- to academic respectability, and it persists as an organizing principle in such arenas as museum and festival programming, university courses, and book publishing. Within the industry, the auteur became a marketing strategy during the. 1970s.

· The wide range of theoretical discourses brought to bear on the Hollywood cinema in the 1960s and 1970s may be grouped as broadly structuralist in orientation, because they sought to identify the wider structures within which particular movies were produced and against which they were "read." Structuralism directed intellectual attention to the organizing principles underlying human behavior, institutions, and texts, and was influential in revising notions of authorship.

· Part of the pleasure of movies lies in their apparent lack of an authorial voice, which makes it possible for their consumers to value them for whatever they care to take from them. Viewed in this way, movies are infinitely open texts, showcases of endless incidental pleasures which encourage rather than repress consumer choice. Poststructuralist criticism enacts this consumer choice in its selection of aspects of the movies for analysis and its proposal that everything within a movie is potentially meaningful.

· As cinema criticism has moved away from its initial need to justify its own existence by discovering unrecognized "artists," it has become possible to recognize the existence of Hollywood as a mode of production. Film studies departments can now operate within the academy by studying Hollywood and its production as a culture industry and as a system of representation, without having to defend its reputation as Art.

· A criticism that takes Hollywood seriously should aim not so much to discover profound meanings or concealed purposes in its movies as to explore the ambiguities, contradictions, silences, and equivocations on their surfaces, and consider how these features express aspects of the culture to which the movies belong.