The cinema : 1952 (1952)

I40 THE CINEMA GAVIN LAMBERT The creative value of criticism is established in its own history by the stimulus and interchange it has aroused, in the artist on one side, in the public on the other. Ibsen may have been injured by imperceptive columnists, but against that must be set the response he drew from Bernard Shaw. If the critic seems, as Roger Manvell puts it, a 'parasite', then it is only because his responses are dead or insensitive, not because he is a critic. Nor can wrong or unjust verdicts invalidate the practice of criticism, any more than the existence of bad art invalidates art itself. Much contemporary criticism is mediocre and parasitical because the rise of journalism has diluted its standards, but its essential continuity is still unbroken ; even the tradition of critics also being practising artists, or vice versa, is not yet dead, and in the cinema some of the most important criticism has been done by filmmakers, by Pudovkin and Eisenstein, Grierson and Rotha. The real problem is that this kind of criticism is limited in application by the fact that anything which fails to express a majority point of view films or criticism of films is likely to be overwhelmed nowadays by the immense diffusion of popular standards that the cinema, the press, and the radio command. ' The critic has been edged out by the journalist, as the serious film-maker is so often eclipsed by the efficient hack. It is only in the last seventy years or so that public taste has become articulate through the press ; before that, though its demands were the same, they were less explicit and, perhaps, less liable to stagnation. Once this articulation became widespread, it had to be satisfied on an equivalent scale, and it was exploited by business-men. What was greeted at the start as a democratic institution and a valuable medium of