Film Criticism vs Music Criticism

Loathe as I am to zoom off on a tangent, as I did on the Kuhn thread on ILM, and despite my timidity to step into a thread of this intellectual quality (because I lack the artistic education and reading and intellect of the major participants here - I've loved reading it, I must emphasise)(and I wish Josh would come back here), but this touches on a major old area of interest of mine. I started a mag about comics back in 1981, and throughout the '80s I frequently talked about what I saw as the lamentable state of comic book criticism, especially in the UK.

Partly I was talking about low standards, but much of it was that comics criticism hadn't developed at all as a distinct form - the best writing was by people adapting slightly from reviewing books or films or something. Cinematic terminology was particularly levered in all over the place, to the point of cliche. The only place that seemed to be getting anywhere, in the English language, was the Comics Journal, and while I always admired that mag and aspired to its high standards (and I do think I did something to improve the craft of comic criticism in Britain, probably as an editor more than as a critic myself) I was uneasy with its old-fashioned high cultural assumptions. I would argue against that stance in lit or art crit, but it seemed especially inapt in a popular art form like comics. I explicitly referred to music writing a number of times back in those days. A blend of people writing serious academic critiques with a real understanding of critical methods and people ranting about political ideologies and others excited about the vigour and silliness of superheroes seemed far more desirable to me, and it's what I strived towards, I think with some success - but here I'm talking much more about attitude than about the critical toolkit.

There were a lot of things that were unique to the way comics worked that weren't covered by approaches transplanted from books and movies, much as those sources were valuable. The passage Frank quotes way upthread about Rossellini is a rewarding way to look at some comics, but of course there are other things to look at simultaneously that are unique to that form - where is the panel placed, how big, how does it realte to others, and on and on. I guess I'm saying that it worries me when people try to force parallels between the way of examining and talking about two differing artforms (except maybe in the earliest stages of developing a way of talking), because I think they are most often sources of error and misunderstanding, and they clutter the path to comprehending a form for what it is. Movies and music, despite certain similarities (I think demographics is a more important one than most that have been raised here), are such different forms that hardly any parallels sytike me as remotely useful. Cinema and comics and novels are storytelling forms, and therefore have substantial similarities, but music, like painting say, is not inherently (or is far less inherently) a storytelling form - and I say that as a big country (lowercase first letter on both words!) fan. Story is far more of an optional bolt-on in music (or painting) than it is in cinema, so I think the way we think about structure and pacing and meaning needs to be very different.

I think the purpose of music and the way it is consumed covers a very wide range of things. Much music has no narrative or meaning. I love some records for their stories and messages and ideas and the emotional content of their lyrics, but the absence or lack of appeal of these factors by no means makes a record uninteresting. A record can have appeal for a pretty tune and nice sound, or a driving, exciting beat or whatever. Nearly everyone values music to some degree, and they all have different relationships to it, and they use it in different ways and it does different things to their mood and feelings and it is involved in the way they relate to others in a variety of ways. I think all this is far less true of movies, which are consumed in two main ways (and both mainly involve sitting quietly facing the screen) and involve little or no interaction with others and don't accompany us on journeys or have the ambient role music does.

In conclusion my point seems to be that this is one of the best threads I've read in a while, and I think it's a pointless comparison because everything about the fields is too different to be worth the thought that everyone has put in, so apart from making a great thread we've all wasted our time...