Image: Most Valuable Film Criticism from 1979 to 2005

Author: Di Rongjun (Editor)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: For film criticism, a significant historical event occurred in the 1960s when the French young film critic and later world-renowned director Truffaut advocated the "auteur theory" in the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma while declaring the independence of film criticism relative to film production. He emphasized the naming and identification rights of critics, highlighting the significance of film criticism as a self-asserting form of writing. As for theoretical film criticism, one or a more important aspect lies in the encounter and overlap of film theory, criticism, and cultural studies. In fact, the major debate between the so-called Birmingham School of British cultural studies and Sight and Sound, one of the leading film journals, may be one of the significant events in the history of 20th-century intellectual and cultural thought. In the history of Chinese cinema over a century, film criticism has played at least two important roles in shaping and political life. One was in the 1930s when the left-wing filmmakers under Communist leadership successfully seized the mass media, using a powerful wave of films to reshape the direction of Chinese film production. The other was in the 1980s, in the early years of the New Period, when mass film criticism became one of the most active amateur cultural activities within the "work unit system," giving rise to a nationwide wave of enthusiasm for the "Million Worker Amateur Film Critics Army"—much like many cultural phenomena of the 1980s. In the process of its transformation and disintegration, the original system burst into its later glory.