Indeed, I haven’t made any film. I don’t even consider myself a film critic either, just someone with a film blog as millions of others out there. However, that did not stop me from receiving about four insults a day after writing some criticism about a brazilian film. It took me a while to find out that these comments came from someone directly involved in the production of the film, which relieved me in a way, and worried me in another.

After all, this was just a person blindly protecting his own creation, and who can blame an artist for being emotionally attached to his/her work, right? If the lack of rationality or ability to take criticism was justified by this intense proximity with the object, I have to admit being surprised by the fact that a professional could attack someone who wouldn’t really influence the opinion of others, and that therefore wouldn’t affect the appreciation or the economical career of the film.

Which brings me to the idea that the (conflictual) relationship between film critics and filmmakers is not a matter of money (no one has ever proved that the critics alone made the success or the failure of a film, and probably no one ever will), it’s maybe not just the “mother bird protecting her eggs” thing either. The whole conflict is a communication structure issue. We always suppose that art communicates something, and therefore nothing is more logical than continuing the dialogue, either with arguments of taste (I like it/I don’t like it), of aesthetics, of adequacy to morals, society etc.

The big issue is that this strange king of communication is not built on the same language: artists’s discourses are ambiguous and spoken out loud for anyone, in the same way that critics respond to whomever wants to read them, in a written language. Criticizing is like a dialogue between two deaf people, or better, it’s a political debate on a public park, each candidate screaming his own ideas to different people passing by. The film is lost somewhere in the middle, protected by one and exposed by the other. With all the passion and the screaming, most of the people in the park will normally just hear some undistinguished noise and leave the place.

Bruno Carmelo