How things have changed. Earlier, much earlier, if you were a film reviewer you would get to meet the manager of the theatre, who would give you free seats. The best ones in the house. If you were lucky (and had a consistent record of writing positive reviews) you would even have got a crumpled samosa and some tepid tea brought to your seat. You felt powerful, imagining that it was your insightful comments that made or broke a movie. We were delusional then and continue to be so now.
But now, no theatre manager meets you, there are no free tickets and definitely no tubs of popcorn or any of the brown, syrupy, artery-clogging liquid they call a soft drink. And if you are a freelance reviewer, even the little money that you make is constantly lost in the mail. But what remains is still a little bit of the feeling of power: of writing and judging.
So many poets, so few critics
Film reviewers have never had it all good. Directors, actors and other artistes generally look down on them because they seem to continue to believe that those who cannot make films write reviews. A director once told me me how the crew would either ignore or routinely make fun of reviews, or worse, academic articles, about their film. But as Pauline Kael, the celebrated film reviewer, once said, “My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.”
However, the class of self-professed reviewers — friends, neighbours and grandparents — has always been large. After every movie, they will hold forth about the placement of the camera, how the director should have directed the heroine, or how the dialogues could have been better. What they were basically saying was that they could have made a better film. Any review which claims this is making a cardinal mistake.
Not much has changed. Films are like politics. Everybody has an opinion on them, which they freely express in public, thanks now to the Internet. Nowadays, very few publications want to publish serious reviews, and words have been reduced to a number of stars, apt for a society with woeful attention spans. At least in our Gandhi class seats, we used sharp whistles to declare how good or bad a movie was.
A little bit of themselves
But there was something these self-professed critics were right about. For many of them, reviews were not only about the movie but also a little bit about themselves. And that is really what makes reviews special: it brings together the film, the reviewer’s vantage point, and the audience. The reviewer has to enter the minds of the audience, imagine what it means to watch that movie. It is the reviewer who reminds us that the audience is an integral part of the film.
While there are examples of a movie failing or succeeding based on a review, the aim of a review cannot be to help people decide whether to watch a movie or not. The task is greater — it creates a film’s afterlife in the written word. It creates a space where a film can be more than a visual product. This makes it possible to discuss films more meaningfully.
One function of a reviewer is perhaps nothing more than showing aspects of a movie that the viewer may not have noticed, a task that art criticism attempts too. The task of a reviewer is no less urgent than when Pauline Kael wrote “People have expected less of movies and have been willing to settle for less.” It is serious critics (and not necessarily the serious filmmakers) who can keep the real potential of films alive, who can keep reminding people that they are settling for less when they could have more, much more.
Sundar Sarukkai is professor of philosophy at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru