The Film Scholar versus The Film Critic

Critics and scholars represent an ample amount of the people who publicly analyze films. What I am trying to ponder (and believe me, I want your help on this), is the difference between film scholarship and film criticism. The latter, I feel, can be very easy and enjoyable for writers. For us cinephiles, we know that sometimes, ripping apart a bad film can produce the same amount of enjoyment as watching The Godfather (or whatever films may be among your favorites).

I engage in film criticism a fair amount for someone my age, as I write for the college newspaper, but what I find to be more astonishing and sophisticated as a study is scholarship. When I say scholarship, I mean learning about the cultural contexts of film, the sociological representations, gender/racial portraitures, and then considering how that is represented with formal elements of cinema like narrative structure, cinematography, lighitng, mise-en-scene - just to name a few.

I was one of the however-many millions who watched The Golden Globes this past Sunday. As I sat there and consumed this guilty pleasure, the one moment of that entire four hour ceremony that meant ANYTHING significant to the future of film was not Cameron's boast about how 3-D effects are changing everything, or Drew Barrymore's train wreck of a speech, it was Martin Scorsese's speech about the preservation of film.

When I watched him, I did not see a critic, a hater, or someone who rips films apart for a living, I saw a man who loves FILM, not digital tapes, or the FUSION camera, or 3-D technology, but film, film prints, film stocks, film projectors, the idea of watching little frames click around a wheel and shine through a beam of light.

There is nothing wrong with film criticism, in fact, I love it because I do it. But film scholarship, in my opinion at least, is much more admirable.