When writing about film, we’re used to describing the basic building blocks of said film. Plot, actors, director, editing, cinematography. The reviewer or critic will usually run through a film’s plot summary before taking it to task, analysing whatever themes it brings up and how it tackles them. That’s been, give or take, the broad structure of film criticism for a long time.
But one crucial ingredient is almost always missing from this conversation: money. There is no other artform as dominated by finance and the cold hard business of money as film. A novelist needs just a pen and paper (or Microsoft Word). A painter just needs canvas and paint. Even solid recording equipment for the musician, which will set you back a few hundred dollars, is affordable for those determined enough to do it. But filmmakers need actors, set designers, editors, DPs. Even microbudget films will cost a few thousand dollars.
And whilst a microbudget film may earn plaudits for pushing itself past its financial limitations, made primarily by the passion of their creators, we rarely ask questions of films with larger budgets about how and why they were made. As critics, ignoring that and its implications is a dereliction of duty. The structure of financing affects not just the big blockbusters for whom the ultimate goal is always the bottom line. It affects indies, it affects arthouse titles funded by government initiatives, it still affects the microbudget film hoping to get a foot in the door at a festival.
Why Criticism: So, You’re Covering a Film Festival?
Film has long been an uneasy mix of commercial concerns and artistic endeavours, with the former often winning out over the latter. So much of what we consume as viewers and critics is defined by the market forces around us, and we play as willing participants in it. Analysing that, and our role in it, seems to be largely absent from modern day film criticism. On the release of the original Star Wars, Pauline Kael rightly called it out as a film “totally uninterested in anything that doesn’t connect with the mass audience.” The sense of a film critic willing to take on the business of film as well as the film itself has largely disappeared — the latest Marvel entry is taken for granted, rather than viewed as part of a longer-term strategy to colonise our minds and pop culture consumption.
This mental conditioning is visibly throughout the cinema industry. Let’s take the international arthouse circuit. For most viewers in the UK, USA and the wider West, the majority of titles distributed in the arthouses and independents cinemas are noticeably targeted at a very specific audience (predominantly middle-class, leaning older with a few film students thrown in, white), with a specific range of films (dramas, often tackling social issues or with a psychological element — if it’s not in English, then it will be French, German or Scandinavian), and they’re often marketed on auteur names — the words “A Film by Pedro Almodóvar” or “A Film by Michael Haneke” (or even less well-known names like Francois Ozon or Xavier Dolan) makes the job of turning a profit that little bit easier.
And the distributors that pick these films up are looking to do exactly that. I’m speaking largely in regards to the UK distribution network, but the more successful arthouse distributors know who their audience are and are effective at targeting them. That I happen to be in that audience, more often than not, is part of the game. The programmers of arthouse cinemas in the UK — most of which live off a mixture of funding grants and ticket sales — are constantly making decisions that balance their love for cinema with their need to keep things in the black, so the desire to screen that unique title from a debut director has to pair off with the need to screen those films that sit at the middle ground between populism and art — the 1917s and Jokers. The smaller distribution companies run with maybe one or two full-time staff members, a mammoth task, but in recompense they can survive from smaller films that pick up minimal box office profits.
The arthouse market has the capacity to be just as closed-off as the blockbuster market. The assumptions we make as viewers of a supposedly “enlightened” cinema are not hugely different from the masses, driven as much by our whims and preferences. The arthouse distribution market has longstanding issues with promoting cinema from beyond the Western hemisphere, and to a lesser extent, South Korea and Japan.
Why Criticism: The One-Inch Tall Barrier of Foreign Cinema
Why? It’s a failure of imagination on the part of audiences, but also a failure of faith in the distribution network too. It leads to various national cinemas being reductively represented by only a handful of films each. So, the last handful of Chilean films to have earned cinematic distribution in the UK (and there aren’t many) have predominantly dealt with the Pinochet dictatorship and its aftermath (Pablo Larrain’s No, a hit on the arthouse circuit; Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia for the Light). Russian cinema in recent years as presented to the West in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan and Loveless and Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole is one of unremitting, unending misery. The pinnacle here is Sergei Loznitza’s A Gentle Creature, nearly two-and-a-half hours of unending misery about how shit Russia is. Now, I don’t deny that, between the oppression of LGBT+ folks, institutional corruption and authoritarian government tactics, Russia is shit for many people. But this is a country of 140 million people — there are many stories to tell.
Take a closer look at the funding companies for some of these films. Going by the credits, the majority of funding for A Gentle Creature came from France and Germany. Loveless picked up financing from France and Belgium. Granted, Russian film companies, wary of pissing off government censors, may be trepidatious about funding critical films, given that the fallout after Zvyagintsev’s state-funded Leviathan led to stringent controls on what types of films the Russian culture ministry would fund. But it is instead Western companies now funding these films — and whilst some of the films I’ve listed are certainly powerful, it suggests that the imagination of financiers is limited, reducing Russian cinema to one single note. It is after all, these films that make it to Cannes and then onto arthouse distribution, where they’re feted by the dailies as “honest,” “painful” accounts of the modern Russian condition, perhaps unwilling to question why it is only this vision of Russia we are seeing. Is it because the arthouse audience, for all middle-class enlightenment, is only capable of envisioning one version of Russia — a version that begins in the news media of the country as ruled by a Machievellian dictator, filtering into a cinematic narrative where all we see is self-flagellation?
Why Criticism: Against Nostalgia
We can apply this elsewhere. The paucity of highbrow Indian cinema in arthouses and international film festivals (we’re talking about a country which produces some 2000 films a year), criticised by Soham Gadre elsewhere on this site is a case-in-point. But Bollywood films receive cinematic release in UK cinemas almost every week, and the Indian diaspora is big enough to ensure that these films often do better than arthouse titles. Yet, the standard film publications ignore these films, because the readership for these publications is assumed to be white and middle class, and the assumption is that they probably aren’t interested in finding out about these films, whilst British-Indian audiences are simultaneously sectioned off with separate cultural produce. Granted, Bollywood films aren’t produced “for me” — the filmmakers don’t have me in mind when they’re shooting them, nor do the film’s marketers worry about me when I’m checking the cinema listings (in a pre-COVID world). But the inability of modern film writing to grapple with these structures weakens our ability to grapple with cinema as a whole.
Cinema history’s accessibility is also subject to a business-first mentality. Your ability to see an older film is directly influenced by the whims of accountants and CEOs, whose interests do not align with yours. We saw this quite blatantly last year, as Disney opted to lock away the entire Fox archive from viewership, stealing a significant chunk of film history away. In Matt Zoller Seitz’s brilliant article on the subject, one of the key takeaways is that this is not necessarily an attempt to make more immediate profits, but a longer-term strategy in which the end goal is the shutting out and obliteration of as much cinema that isn’t Disney-branded as possible, deliberately building an artificial scarcity by blocking out rival content. And content is the key word here, rather than movies, or films or cinema. Without challenging this as viewers, we’re going to see a long-term shift to aimlessly compliant consumers, less willing to question the financial and monetary implications of why they watch what they’re watching.
Again though, there are elements in which audiences are splitting. Whilst streaming and megaplexes may encourage listless consumerism, in contrast, the only part of today’s DVD and Blu-ray market which is still in good nick is probably the boutique label section — the Criterions, Eurekas and Arrows, presenting scrubbed-up versions of cult and arthouse films often hard to find. But these labels work hard to present these films as worthy of watching by loading them with extras that give historical context and criticism. The business decisions behind that come from a mix of passion but also pragmatism — there is a market of consumers, often with a bit more money to spend on expensive DVDs and Blus, ready to pay a bit more for a bunch of extras they probably never watch (yup, that’s me). We may be engaged audiences, but we are still reliant on the whims of what these companies are able to secure in terms of rights — and then we enter a whole other world of legal wrangling and bickering over who owns what, ultimately limiting our ability to access many gems of world cinema.
Why Criticism: You Can’t Take the “Film” Out of Film Criticism
Sometimes, there’s a deep cynicism to the way financial forces implicate us in our viewership. After the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the (re)implosion of justified anger with the necessity of the Black Lives Matter movement, Netflix released a Black Lives Matter collection, also making a number of the films on that list free to watch for a time. On the one hand, the collection has some superb films that expertly dissect the problems faced by Black communities daily in the USA. On the other hand, all but a small number of these films are doggedly imprinted with the red “N” logo, branding Netflix’s supposed commitment to racial equality. It’s a meeting of two aligned interests — the interests of Netflix’s audience, wide-ranging but leaning on the millennial side, with a tendency to be drawn in by social issues, and Netflix’s absolute (and primary) commitment to the bottom line, a world in which it is more financially beneficial to promote diverse voices. Whilst I would certainly rather live in such a world, our collective unwillingness to confront this temporary alliance of revolutionary ideals and corporate content curation will probably not end well.
Film criticism unable to confront film’s relationship to business is destined to fail and will continue to reproduce the same tired critiques of cinema. Social-issue dramas become “timely” and “important” — if they’re historically-based, then they’re “an exorcism of the ghosts of slavery / the Pinochet regime / Stalinist terror,” based in vocabulary derived from press releases. The chundering machine of the latest Marvel or Star Wars franchise is viewed in terms of how it relates to other films in the franchise, and not how the creative decisions in those films are filtered through the prism of how they affect marketability or the feverish audience reaction that often greets these films. And when we praise the first-time director’s “sparing use of location,” by setting the action in a handful of rooms, are we ignoring the fact that it’s simply cheaper to shoot in one location and putting the budget together required truncating the script to achieve that?
In looking at the wider film landscape and the decisions between what types of films get made and what types don’t, it’s evident that the influence of the bottom line is everywhere. Being able to stake our place in the world of film — both as passionate cinephiles who love the medium for all its worth, whilst being aware of the market forces around us that influence our decision-making and what we get to see — is paramount to producing a healthier film culture in the long-term.
Fedor Tot (@redrightman) is a Yugoslav-born, Wales-raised freelance film critic and editor, specialising in the cinema of the ex-Yugoslav region. Beyond that he also has an interest in film history, particularly in the way film as a business affects and decides the function of film as an art.