If you ask me what my practice of criticism is, it’s about undoing my 30-year career trajectory. The more I engage with film criticism the more I want to unlearn it. Most of what I see, as the practice of film criticism today, are at odds with my philosophical stance. While the highest point for a film critic in his lifetime is to be acknowledged and recognised as an authority or expert in his subject field, to me, that’s a fearsome loss of innocence, an invitation to dead knowledge and the illusion of power.
After the advent of digital film in the late 90s, the explosion of new cinema felt like a tsunami. It became a virtual torrent of new imagery, a defiance to be known and pinned down, a challenge to the critics who like to map and territorialise a cinema. It reminded one of the mid-80s when critics labelled the Chinese Fifth and Sixth Generation cinema before they realised how the flow of history could not be contained. There could not be a Seventh or Tenth Generation cinema as the doors were flung wide open. This is even more apparent in other national cinemas. For example, a critic once quipped of the current Philippines digital cinema: „It’s a big problem. There’s too much to see.“ To put it another way, since there’s just too much to see and know, it’s not possible anymore to pin it down. Had the Chinese Fifth and Sixth Generation cinema been digital and a massive torrent from the beginning, would it have been defined as easily?
Time is really now of essence. There is an insane pressure to crunch through heaps of cinema delivered on multiple virtual platforms from Vimeo to YouTube. Films keep being posted online and popping into your email boxes before you can hit the delete key. You are asked to have a quick opinion and make an instant judgement EVEN with ‘slow’ cinema. If Buddhism ever made more sense than ever, it’s now. The mantra of being ‘in the moment’ is your only critical tool to make your judgements by.
But isn’t that too much an impossible yardstick to live by? Who can possibly know so much, to have a well-considered opinion on multiple national cinemas and across genres? Yet how many critics do you actually meet who say: „I don’t know“, when asked about a film. Very few I bet.
So I propose that in the spirit of filmmakers who are championing ‘slow’ cinema, we should have a parallel movement here – the slow, indeterminate film critic! We should have a new film criticism of uncertainty where we want to listen and consider other points of view before we venture a judgement. After all, did Nelson Algren (The Man with the Golden Arm) not opine: “The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.”
The Indeterminate Critic stands at the other pole to the Empire Critic, the worldly-wise opinion maker, who has chartered territories and insisted that might is right – he who talks loudest should be heard. The Indeterminate Critic realises the abyss that the depth of knowledge plunges into. His reflective position is a simple one: Is criticism supposed to open up or to close down discussion?
For over a decade, I have avoided the path of the major film festivals and chose the road less travelled, going off track to visit small, emerging film festivals from Colombo (Sri Lanka), Beirut (Lebanon), Almaty (Kazakhstan), Hanoi (Vietnam), Jogjakarta and Makassar (Indonesia) to Mindanao (Philippines). Even after attending Cannes for 15 straight years, I was curiously surprised that I didn’t even miss it the year after I stopped. Invariably, I started to work with many of these young film festivals in organisation, film selection, sidebar events and also tried to inculcate the importance of having a philosophical position. My main approach lay in assisting them to find and hear their own voice. Unlike other festival consultants, it was important to me that they had an understanding and belief in what they wanted their programme to be. It was not my job to tell them what to do or what to show. It was concerned with going through the process of reflection to understand motivations and the essence of meanings. It was more about inspiring them to trust their own instincts, and not to take wholesale, unsolicited opinions. Not even from one slow, indeterminate film critic.