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This chapter discusses how the coming of sound was an important phase in the bid for naturalism in the cinema. By the end of the 1920s many filmmakers across different national cinemas were in pursuit of forms of cinematic realism that would convey ‘modernity’. The 1920s would also see the beginnings of an intellectual tradition that read cinema as a self-reflexive medium and a distinctively public phenomenon that might translate, or at the very least comment on, modernity for a mass audience. A burgeoning film culture began to involve critics and reviewers as taste-makers, categorising and theorising about films as art, and film journals and magazines as the forum in which the patrons of film clubs and societies could begin to find the films they enjoyed contextualised. The chapter also includes the study, ‘Writing the Cinema into Daily Life: Iris Barry and the Emergence of British Film Criticism in the 1920s’ by Haidee Wasson, which assesses Barry's role in opening up film criticism to a massive readership.

This chapter examines the historical films produced in the U.S. during the period from 1932 to 1939 about World War 1. During this period, Hollywood's depictions of the war, the impoverishment of the war hero and national decline revealed the frustrating barriers between the American cinema's struggle for historical prestige and the antagonism of censors and critics. Examples of these films include I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang, Gold Diggers and The Roaring Twenties.

This chapter analyzes the films of Christian Petzold. Over the past twenty years and across eleven feature-length works, Petzold has established himself as the most critically acclaimed director in Germany. Five of his last eight films have won Best Film from the Association of German Film Critics (2001, 2005, 2007, 2008, and 2012). It is not only the critics, however, who admire Petzold's work: his breakthrough The State I Am In (Die innere Sicherheit; 2000) won the Federal Film Prize in Gold, the equivalent of a best-film prize for its year, an unusual recognition for an art-house film. His films consistently explore new and transformational modes of individualities, especially the compromised, even tainted, character of desire in the wake of economic adaptability, accommodation, and mobility. This kind of adaptability, productive desire, and subsequent movement are emphatically historicized in Petzold's cinema, in which history regularly intrudes upon individuals' dreams, fantasies, and desires as well as the spaces they inhabit.

This chapter shows how film critics come to mind whenever one thinks of evaluating films. These are people who are in the business of pronouncing on the value of films. There are so many films to see and so little time. Thus, almost all of us have to fall back on the recommendations of film critics in order to inform our choice of viewing fare. There are several different ways in which the role of a film critic may be pursued. Some critics attempt to function as consumer reporters—trying to predict which films most of their readership will enjoy. Other critics aim at being taste-makers—identifying which films are special, and in the best of cases, suggesting how the rest of us might go on to appreciate them.

This chapter gives a detailed summary of the events in the film, and discusses the techniques and devices it employs to tell the story. It describes how Terence Fisher, the director of The Curse of Frankenstein, was received by some film critics. He was as an auteur, a director with a unique creative vision, which imbues his oeuvre with particular and consistent artistic qualities for some, and for others, he was a hack and a plodder who made derivative and uninteresting films. The chapters also talks about the remarkably vigorous quality of the team's work ethics. It describes how the team remained harmonious and excited throughout the making of the film even though the working conditions were not always ideal. The chapter also discusses how the film was able to work around its relatively small budget. Though it manifests in the small number of shooting locations and the size of the cast, the budget limits were otherwise extremely well hidden by the deceptively spacious scenes captured by Fisher's camera, and in the immaculate costume and scenographic design. The chapter also discusses how audiences received the film when it was first shown in theaters.

American film critics commonly deride Hollywood’s practice of remaking foreign films as an indication of the industry’s creative bankruptcy and imperialist tendencies. Such sentiments occur as early as the 1930s, just as Hollywood gained institutional cohesion and as various countries fostered their local “national” cinemas. This suggests that American critics have consistently held an ambivalent stance toward Hollywood, particularly when situated in relation to the world’s cinemas. Critics have participated in an enduring conflation of the “foreign” with artistic quality and Hollywood with crass commercialism and, concomitantly, reinforced simplistic notions about transnational cinematic flows. Yet within and alongside such reviews, American critics created a rhetorical space for a more nuanced approach to transnational cinema through their use of different critical keywords, points of analysis, and methods of evaluation. This chapter explores the historically changing criteria by which American film critics have evaluated Hollywood’s transnational film remakes as a means of uncovering how the “transnational” operated in popular American film discourse, even if it was not named as such.

This chapter offers a concise characterisation of the network of intermediaries: film distribution, the issue of copyright, and the phenomenon of film criticism. Film distribution traditionally forms the connection between film production and film exhibition. It determines which films are to be seen where, by whom, and under what circumstances. Film distribution companies are also the main suppliers for a curator. With regards to issues of copyright, a film curator has to acquire the formal permission to show a film in a public screening. Film curating, as well as professional film criticism, is part of a process of creating reputations. The possible similarity between the tasks of a professional film critic and a film curator is that both experts are attempting to provide relevant information to situate a film in its context and to propose structures of reflection, to reveal diverse relations of similarities and connections, to formulate value concepts, and to construct criteria of judgement.

Jack Benny was not only radio’s biggest star after the mid-1930s, but he was the most visible celebrity in Hollywood. This chapter examines the many ways that Benny’s radio program, and Benny’s performance career, intertwined radio and film, two powerful media industries that were often said to be at war with one another. While media conglomeration today means that performers and story ideas are moved freely across media, there were many impediments to do so in the past. Benny’s radio show was the first to parody popular movies, but he could not mention the radio stars who sold rival products. Benny’s radio-themed films made at Paramount between 1939 and 1941, met with significant box office success and even greater critical disparagement.

This chapter describes the critical reception of The Mummy (1932). When the film was screened, professional film critics were intrigued by the central figure of Boris Karloff, the actor who had been transformed into a living mummy. The Los Angeles Times even offered a prescient take that foresaw Karloff's future place in the film pantheon. As for the film itself, however, the critical reception was more lukewarm. Critics who had grown tired of horror cinema found little in The Mummy to change their opinions. The chapter then looks at re-evaluations and later evaluations of the film. Critics continue to find weaknesses, but they also continue to find rewarding new ways of approaching The Mummy. On the whole, The Mummy has managed to stand firm despite early critical indifference and subsequent changes in audience tastes. The film's position as the start of a subgenre has ensured that The Mummy retains immortality as a popular culture artefact.

This chapter introduces Paweł Pawlikowski's 2013 film titled Ida, which has been hailed by audiences around the world as the Polish-born director's masterpiece. It mentions film critics that laud Ida's mesmerising black-and-white cinematography and excellent acting and cultural critics that praise its courageous storyline. It also explains Ida as a film about meditation that focuses on a teenage novice nun and her world-weary aunt. This chapter reveals Ida's obscure references and ambiguous influences, as well as its essence as a quest for silence in the aftermath of tragedy. It analyses how Ida offers muted reflections on the major forces that have traumatised and shaped the contemporary Western world.

This chapter details Iris Barry's writings for the Spectator. Iris began developing an aesthetic for the emerging art of film at a time when motion pictures were finding a grammar and syntax to differentiate the medium from theater and the other arts. Iris saw many of the seminal films of the period with fresh eyes, not knowing which, if any, eventually would take their place among the canons of a new art form. Her writing and analysis was sophisticated, substantial, and surprising for a self-taught critic who seemed to have derived great benefit from her informal contacts and conversations with the important British modernists she knew. As she began her career as a film critic, Iris faced two formidable challenges: how to define film as an art form and distinguish it from the other arts, and how to acknowledge foreign superiority in filmmaking in the face of rising British nationalism.

This chapter examines the emergence and editorial development of film literature in Greece in the 1920s by drawing two pioneer female film critics, Iris Skaravaiou and Iris Barry, into an “imaginary community” between 1920s Athens and London. It investigates the activities and early professional life of Skaravaiou as well as her links with women critics and cinéphiles of the 1910s and 1920s in France and the United Kingdom in order to relate Greek to West European film literature. It explores how Skaravaiou became involved with film journalism and with developing Greek cinema. It shows that Skaravaiou fought hard to claim a place in Greek journalism and to establish cinema as the newest form of twentieth-century art. The chapter argues that a reconsideration of silent cinema history in Greece, based on neglected but important sources, should welcome Iris Skaravaiou as an important contributor, and that her writings should be placed in the context of a form of modernism that legitimated personal expression and was not aligned with the male canon.

This chapter describes Iris Barry's book Let's Go to the Pictures (1926). The book brings together observations and theoretical concerns present in more fragmentary form in her Spectator articles. Writing the book provided an opportunity to summarize what she had learned about film at the time. Although the book ostensibly attempts to differentiate film from the more established arts and lend respectability to the appreciation of film, it succeeds most thoroughly as a report on the nature and rewards of filmgoing. In its comments on national film movements, directors, actors, and the mechanics of film distribution, the text astutely chronicles the achievements of filmmakers; but most affectingly captures the allure of film-as-experienced, telling us a great deal about why viewers are drawn to pictures in motion.

This chapter details Iris Barry's life following her marriage to American poet Alan Porter on October 8, 1923. Twenty-four-year-old Porter was just out of Oxford and writing for the Spectator. Through Porter and his Oxford friends, Iris was introduced to St. Loe Strachey, proprietor of the Spectator. Strachey's son, John, a film enthusiast, thought that the magazine should take notice of films. In the early 1920s Porter's Oxford friend, Bertram Higgins, was writing short reviews of motion pictures, but decided he could not continue and turned the job over to Iris, who had been writing occasional criticism for the publication. Thus began her long and consequential association with film and film criticism. She became what Ivor Montagu later called the “first film critic on a serious British journal,” meaning the first to criticize rather than merely to promote, motion pictures.

This chapter considers Iris Barry's articles for the Spectator. These include her analysis of Charlie Chaplin's film The Gold Rush, which she highly praised, and the article “Lesser glories,” published in the March 6, 1926 issue, where she observed that “the more intelligent cinemagoers seem to be divided into two: those who go seldom and only when they can be sure of seeing an exceptionally good picture, and those who go frequently to take the bad with the good.” In September 1927, Iris convinced the Mail to send her to Hollywood for the first time. There she quickly satisfied her curiosity about Americans and looked for films for the Film Society.