Film Criticism in the Digital Age ed. by Mattias Frey and Cecilia Sayad (review)

If Roland Barthes's seminal 1968 pronouncement of the "Death of the Author" helped give birth to postmodern literary theory, it is our own digital age that has led to the crashing fade-out of the professional—and even semiprofessional—film critic. Over the last decade, we have read a litany of postmortems, ranging from the snide "good riddance" to elegies invoking the ghosts of Pauline Kael, James Agee, Andrew Sarris, and other pre-digital critical auteurs.

Although there has been a flurry of online articles underscoring this seismic shift, Film Criticism in the Digital Age ambitiously bills itself as "the first book-length study of its kind" (13). To that end, coeditors Frey and Sayad assemble both academic and popular analyses on the dearth—perhaps death—of the working film critic, caught up and rubbed out in the brave new World Wide Web of bottomless blogs and 140-character tweets. Refusing a simplistic "thumbs-up/thumbs down" approach, this useful if fitful anthology merits several stars, at least because it has the audacity to deliver its content in the old-school, contemplative, and tactile platform of print.

Frey's introduction provides a valuable recap of recent reports on the demise of film criticism—which, unfortunately, has not been exaggerated by those men (and a few women) who have remained standing since journalistic ink started running red in the 1990s. Frey cites the Salt Lake Tribune's Sean Means, who lists over fifty film critics purged from 2006 to 2010—including such stalwarts as David Ansen of Newsweek (itself now out of print) and Variety's Todd McCarthy. From these opening shots, Frey focuses in on the book's main debates: for example, the relationship between the critic and his or her audience; the effect the new media forms have on criticism itself and the critic as occupation; and perhaps most Orwellian, whether "evaluation" should be the purpose of film criticism any longer in an age of cultural fragmentation and relativism. (To the latter, we might also add the morphing of popular film and TV into cultish mass constructs—Hunger Games or Game of Thrones anyone?)

Contributors to the book, from noted scholar Thomas Elsaesser to controversial critic Armond White, primarily discuss the anarchic state of Anglo-American film criticism; however, also included are several globally oriented studies that will be of less interest to US readers. Threading through many of the essays are thoughts on the deeper debate regarding the culture and practice of the Internet itself. With no editorial "gatekeepers" anymore, nor the necessity of a media infrastructure per se, now anyone truly can be a critic (or, for that matter, an anonymous, toxic "troll"). As a result, this hyper-democratized explosion of popular voices has not only leveled the critical playing field but largely paved it over, engendering an equivalence of sorts between onetime elite (and discretely exclusive) print publications and the amateur "citizen journalist" writer. An upstart reviewing site can appear in a Google search within spitting distance of, say, the New York Times or Variety (especially if it is addressing an offbeat film or topic), and popular aggregate film sites such as Rotten Tomatoes tend to squish all the quoted reviewers together in one visual and evaluative field. Recently, Rotten Tomatoes has even begun grafting in audience comments, mutating into even more of a weedy, Franken-site hybrid.

In the shrinking big picture of professional journalism in the age of Craigslist and Facebook, film criticism is only a small, if more battered, back page. Although Frey and Sayad competently treat the narrow issues, they tread lightly around the elephant in the (chat) room: the "free" and uncontrolled nature of Internet content that makes most for-profit news, arts, and culture sites slavishly dependent on (generically derived) advertising revenue, which is only a trickle compared to the streams that once flowed in print's heyday. This, of course, is the original sin of the content providers, who...