You have a point and there’s a danger of that, but even that won’t make said work qualitatively worse.
Enjoyment is something else entirely. I am not talking about enjoyment, I’m talking about objective craft. Even if a veteran artist’s work is not ‘new’, it is no less proficient for that. And even if veteran artists do still get respect for craft, the idea that ‘humanity’ and ‘inclusion’ has a place in the reviewing process is detrimental to that.
What is the significance of a film being the most technically proficient (assuming we could come to consensus on what such a thing means)?
I guess, more deeply, what is the point of art? Isn't the point of art to engage its (human!) audience? Or perhaps to intentionally repel them? Or do do
something to evoke an emotion?
Eminem being able to rap faster than anyone else according to a stopwatch is something that I can agree marks him as technically dominant in one area of his craft. And good for him, seriously. But I don't think that makes his music more interesting or more of something I want to listen to. If anything, I might listen to that fast verse and go, "Yup, that was really fast."
But what is the impact of that on his music as
art? What is the value of criticism as a technical checklist if nothing in the criticism has any relationship to the experience and enjoyment that the reader might get from it?
Look, this was not intended as an Eminem appreciation debate.
This thread is now an Eminem appreciation debate and there's
nothing anyone can do about it!!!
If Cardi B was as fast at rapping as Eminem, would that somehow make her pussy-centric hollering good music to you or suddenly better or more worthwhile? Does Eminem using his technical prowess to *checks notes* write a cringe-y diss track about Machine Gun Kelly somehow make that any less painful?
I'm not debating whether or not some people are technically superior to others. I'm saying that technical accomplishment is only one piece of what makes art great. And, as Crumbsroom says, there are great artists who intentionally push back against the structure of what is considered technical accomplishment.
Again, if a critical review just amounts to a checklist or a cold attempt at objective ranking of technical elements, I'm just not interested. It matters what a movie is about. It matters how a movie goes about it. It matters what a movie is trying to evoke in the viewer. It matters how different people feel watching it. Art can have different value to different people (such as my example of asexual viewers and the film
Straight Up), and I think it's weird to want to run away from that fact in the pursuit of being "objective".
The reason I brought in the ‘decolonising maths’ story is to illustrate that there is a tendency to devalue objectively technical skill in favour of unmeasurable metrics. This is not helpful and it is ultimately much more ‘unfair’ that young white boys who have spent their every waking moment studying still don’t get into Oxbridge due to not having some fancy ‘cultural’ quirk up their sleeve.
Again, this is a mischaracterization of what the framework is after. The ability to show a solution path for a problem is not an unmeasurable metric. Quite the opposite. There are a lot of ways that bias is built into schooling (and the framework cites some of these, such as using language acquisition as a metric for sorting students into tracks that may not match their mathematical ability). Teachers often (usually unintentionally) reward product over process. I really saw this with my student teacher this year. Going back to my fraction example from the previous post, if you only value the answer you would come away thinking Child 1 gets fractions and Child 2 doesn't, when actually it is quite the opposite.
A worse way that this shows up in writing and, dear God. So many students come to me with writing that is technically proficient (grammar, spelling, claim followed by evidence/reasoning) but deeply soulless because they have been molded to cookie cutter structures in the name of technical ability.
In good education, technical skill is
embedded in the work, but is not the be-all end-all of it. Teachers will always value technical skill, because clarity of communication depends on it to a degree. But the over-emphasis of technical skill also does a disservice to students.
If Eminem is such an unhelpful example, let’s go back to Moonlight winning Best Picture. It’s a fine film, and I don’t like La La Land
If what people love doesn't matter, then what's the point? I thought about
Moonlight for days after watching it. And on both an emotional level and a technical level (because I LOVED the lighting in those night scenes on the beach).
La La Land left me cold emotionally, and I would need a really good reason to watch it again. Awards can be based on whatever they want to be based on. I don't want "Best Picture" to be synonymous with "best use of camera movement".
All I was getting at is, once ‘humanity’ is seen as an objective aspect of filmmaking worth praising, it is extremely likely that respect for technical skill will diminish and disappear. The skill itself will disappear, as will the desire to harvest it.
I disagree. People who have something powerful to say AND a powerful way to say it will always be in demand. I probably have 100 books in my classroom about kids on thrilling adventures. But there is a good reason why
Hatchet and
Bud, Not Buddy are literally falling apart at the spine. We talk in my class about "goosebump" lines in poems and books, and students understand that there is a craft to how those authors achieve those moments. What is thrilling is when students independently attempt to emulate and build on techniques.
I believe it is… not ‘unfair’ but irrational not to reward that level of polished, ripe skill in favour of the ‘humanity’ of something like Moonlight.
I thought that
Moonlight displayed technical skill and heart. Again, it's about the combination of those things, not one being elevated entirely and ignoring the other.
I referenced the Times story (sent it to you) to note that it shows the critical emphasis is shifting away from the sheer quality of things. Unless you are in advanced pure maths territory (the quantum physics of maths with its own Schrödinger’s Cats), answers are either wrong or they’re right. The working out will give you extra points in an exam but you won’t (I hope to Christ!) get full marks with a factually incorrect answer.
So going back to my fractions example, you would give the student who got the right answer (with flawed methodology) points, but not the student who got the wrong answer (but with conceptually correct methodology)?
Technical skill and superiority exist and they matter, and failing to praise or even simply acknowledge the quality of someone’s craft because of any outside factors is not reasonable from any point of view.
Again, I think that most reviews/criticism acknowledge both! I am really struggling to think of any film review I've read recently that spoke only about the "human" elements of a film and completely neglected to discuss the technical elements. Maybe you have an example, but I don't.
““If this framework spreads it could condemn a generation of children to irrelevance in science, technology, engineering and math fields, where the right answer is not a matter of opinion,” wrote James Robbins, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, in USA Today.
Williamson Evers, a former assistant secretary of education under President Obama, wrote in The Wall Street Journal*that “encouraging those gifted in math to shine will be a distant memory”.”
I agree with this point and feel it applies to film and film criticism, is all. Dismissing technical craft as ‘irrelevant’ will simply disadvantage people like Chazelle and Eminem and rob society of a chance to appreciate their work. People whose skill is truly superior will be ‘irrelevant’. Which to me, at least, would be a great shame.
Dismissing and de-emphasizing are not the same thing.
It is really frustrating to see the framework being interpreted at such a ridiculous extreme. It's like people think teachers are out here going "Oh, you think 24 divided by 6 is 9? Well, if that's how you feel, then okay! Gold star!!".
I would also argue that sometimes in science the "right answer" IS a matter of opinion, because sometimes people in a certain field are blind to their own biases. Like, I don't know, coming up with a generalization and then realizing, OOPS, we only studied this phenomenon in one demographic. A great example is answering the question "How do you know if someone is having a heart attack?". For years, the "correct" answer to this question (and the one that is still widely circulated) is a list of symptoms in
men who are having heart attacks.