On reviewing...

Before having to write reviews, I consulted them for the same reason most people do: I wanted to know if the thing in review was worth my time. Though I’m a very young man at twenty-six, I lived in a time when entertainment was not available on demand. Like every other kid I went home from school eagerly awaiting 6PM, when The Simpsons would come on. Other than inspiring nostalgia, this highlights that before the internet gave us access to everything whenever we desire, our entertainment choices were infinitely more limited. Now that we have access to an unprecedented amount of film, television, music, radio and innumerable website can tell us what to eat based on our budget, location and dietary requirements, I believe criticism is more important than ever.

Recently, I watched Kristof Kieslowski’s Dekalog. Dekalog was shot for Polish TV in 1988-89. I was two years old then and definitely not living in Poland. My chances of watching Dekalog were rather slim.  Today, were I inclined to break various copyright laws, I could log on to sites like ‘gorillavid’, ‘putlocker’ or ‘project free TV’ and depending on my internet connection, I could watch an episode of Dekalog  within minutes. But how did I come across an esoteric twenty three year old Polish TV series? When I was in my late teens, I was obsessed with Michael Mann’s Heat but I couldn’t find anyone to discuss it with. So I logged on to Google and discovered a review by a man I’d never heard of: Roger Ebert. Ebert talked about Pacino and De Niro living within their performances and Mann’s writing elevating relatively archetypal characters above cliché (Ebert 1995). I began to rely on Ebert’s reviews to direct my choices for entertainment. Ebert wrote a review advocating Dekalog that I came across while browsing his website. Ebert’s review ends with a commentary that I feel captures the role criticism should play in our lives:

These are not characters involved in the simple minded struggles of Hollywood plots. They are adults, for the most part outside organized religion, faced with situations in their own lives that require them to make moral choices. You shouldn’t watch the films all at once, but one at a time. Then if you are lucky and have someone to talk with, you discuss them, and learn about yourself. Or if you are alone, you discuss them with yourself, so many of Kieslowski's characters do (Ebert 2000).

As Dekalog prompted Ebert to reflect on his moral, ethical and spiritual values, Ebert’s review – or any review that provides insightful judgement – can prompt us to reflect on our own opinions of what we have seen, heard or experienced. In her essay, ‘On Beauty and Being Just’, Elaine Scarry offers the following view of education:

This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky. The arts and sciences like Plato's dialogues, have at their center the drive to confer greater clarity on what already has clear discernibility, as well as to confer initial clarity on what originally has none. (Scarry 1999, p. 7-8)

Reading books and watching films or live performances, even eating at certain restaurants is a kind of education. As Scarry puts it, by engaging in these activities, we are submitting ourselves to ‘other minds’. I eagerly submitted myself to Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Wallander, having submitted myself to the minds of Swedish directors Ingmar Bergman and Tomas Alfredson. I discovered these film makers after Ebert had submitted his far more cinema-literate mind to them and published his reviews of their work on his website. Writing a review of Wallander, forced me into a discussion with myself about why I had enjoyed it so much. I realised it was because this wasn’t a series about a detective; it was a series about a human being placed in morally, ethically and psychologically compromising positions because of his occupation. I read several reviews of Wallander as research before (and after) its completion to get a sense of where my own opinion of it sat in comparison. Stuart Jeffries’s review in The Guardian newspaper was the most distinctive. At first I was angry at what I thought were sarcastic comments:

Cheer up, Kurt Wallander. Yes, you've seen three women's corpses in the past week. One of them dismembered and washed up on the Baltic coast. Another in a shallow grave in your garden. A third found strangled at the roadside. And yes, your female colleague has been hammered into a coma by a man who pimps out his own daughters and is punchably unrepentant in the interview room. But still. Look into Vanja's eyes. Can't you see how much she loves you and how much she wants to be happy with you? Have a word with yourself (Jeffries 2012, p. 1).

 How dare he impune my beloved Wallander, I thought and in a fit of hubris, I dismissed his review and set to writing my own. I ended my review with what I thought was a clever little joke about Wallander’s mobile phone. I remembered that Jeffries had made a similar joke and having calmed down a bit since reading his review, I decided read it again. I discovered two important points I had missed:

In ‘An Event in Autumn’ it was Wallander creator Henning Mankell's thought, as ever, that beneath Sweden's bourgeois skin beat hearts of darkness. The implausibly high crime rate in Ystad is not just necessary for a crime franchise to get off the ground; it also expresses Mankell's politics: the evil in those hearts must be exposed. In this he follows his mentor Sven Lindqvist, the Swedish writer who saw western Europe commit atrocities in its colonies before bringing that evil home (Jeffries n 2012, p. 1).

Excellent, but where were the women if not dead or incidental? The leading woman detective was dramatically neutralised by a bad man's hammer and every other woman character was handmaiden to Wallander's hunt. We were left with a man tracking down other men who committed crimes against women (Jeffries 2012, p. 1).

I had taken for granted that my perspective is extremely limited as an Australian undergraduate who knows nothing about Swedish political, social or cultural history. The review I had written was dangerously short –sighted. I wanted to advocate Wallander, but I hadn’t considered the responsibilities inherent in this. There was an almost complete absence of critical authority in my review. I had not researched the author of the novels the series was based on; I had not watched the Swedish language interpretations of them; I had not read the novels each episode was based on; I had not watched many of Kenneth Brannagh’s previous films, I had not checked to see if the directors had made anything I had seen. I was ‘illiterate’ to the subject I wanted to advocate. The critic has no relevance except what he creates himself according to Frye (1976, p. 797) and if my advocacy was to be relevant, I would need to show an understanding of the political, cultural and social circumstances that inspired Henning Mankell to create Kurt Wallander. More than that though, I needed to be able to compare it with other films or television shows that the (imaginary) audience of this review might have seen. Voeltz’s comparative analysis serves as a useful example of how comparing two films based on a similar subject – mining activities in Africa – can trace changes in political and social attitudes.

Blood Diamond is an adventure story set in Sierra Leone during the civil wars of the 1990s and it surpasses the other films in portraying gut-wrenching violence and sadism, yet it also sets out to give a history lesson on child soldiers, conflict diamonds, and the complicity of the diamond monopoly in helping to create these horrors that still plague Africa, or as film reviewer William Arnold wrote, it is a “multicaret message movie”. Gold! (1974) a film made thirty-two years earlier, deals with another commodity that has transfixed humanity since it was first brought out of the earth, and along with diamonds, a crucial part of the mineral revolution that transformed the history of South Africa. Blood Diamond uses a little guilt trip political message, while Gold! ignores the grim realities of mine life and glosses over the white-black relationships in apartheid South Africa (Voeltz 2010, p. 186).

Voeltz’s comparison traces a shift in Hollywood’s representations of Africa. This helps Voeltz establish critical authority because it implies that he has watched both films and thought about them as products of their own eras before forming his final judgement. Ebert does this in almost every review he writes: in his review of Dekalog he cites Annette Insdorf’s book on Kieslowski, ‘Double Lives and Second Chances’ and, according to Ebert, Insdorf cited Wim Wender’s film Wings of Desire, in order to qualify her own assertions about Kieslowski:

I like the theory of Annette Insdorf, in her valuable book about Kieslowski, Double Lives, Second Chances; she compares the watcher to the angels in Wim Wenders' ‘Wings of Desire,’ who are pure gaze--able to ‘record human folly and suffering but unable to alter the course of the lives they witness’(Ebert 2000).

Observing the critical styles of other reviewers has proven invaluable to my own understanding of what I have been analysing. Many of my initial judgements were based on what I now consider a disrespectful lack of understanding to the films, books and music I was trying to review. This lack of respect was not confined to subjects I found unenjoyable, it extended to subjects I wished to advocate: In my initial review of Wallander for example, I was advocating what I thought was a better class of police drama. After reading Jeffries’s review again, I realised that I was unwittingly advocating the agenda of a politically active author who was profoundly upset by what was happening in his native Sweden. Without at least trying to understand and demonstrate every aspect of Wallander’s creation, I could not write with the kind of critical authority needed to responsibly advocate that series and as a result, my review would have been superficial and easy to dismiss.

References:

Ebert, R 2000, The Decalogue, <http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20000402/REVIEWS08/4020301/1023>

Ebert, R 1995, Heat, <http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19951215/REVIEWS/512150302/1023>

Jeffries S 2012, Wallander; Shakespeare Uncovered; Henry IV Part 1 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/jul/08/television-shakespeare>

Scarry, E 1999, On Beauty and Being Just, Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Voeltz, R 2010, ‘Africa, Buddies, Diamonds, Politics, and Gold: A Comparison of the Films Blood Diamond (2006) and Gold! (1974)’, via JSTOR Academic Database.