How to approach the complex subject of cultural and social criticism at a time when judgments fuse and each exchange seems to hide the specter of dissent?
These days, we are talking about stories of protest and dissenting speeches. Young people in their twenties would arrive in university programs in the human sciences armed with a priori and a desire to “revolutionize” this institution, at the risk of perpetrating new types of oppression. This way of presenting things tends towards a form of alarmist discourse which turns out to be a missed opportunity to take a step back to reflect on the place that the critical gesture can have in a classroom, and more generally in the public space.
Behind the questions of vocabulary to be banned or preferred, a profound re-examination of society as it has been presented to us looms. What do these debates say about our collective relationship with criticism?
I want to follow the idea of Valérie Lefebvre-Faucher, resulting from her powerful essay Minutes, according to which we must aspire to “extend the acceptable space of speech” in order to find a way of discussing which is based on nuance, doubt, slowness.
Reach out, listen out
This space of speech to extend that Lefebvre-Faucher calls me in a context of teaching.
I had the chance to teach undergraduate students the film criticism course at the University of Montreal. It seemed essential to me to teach film criticism as a creative practice which is anchored as much in the requirement of thought as in the curiosity of the unknown. I wanted to legitimize the voices of these students, understand their interests, what they feel is laudable or abject. I wanted them to understand that everything begins with a deep intuition, which, deployed in the writing, becomes a land of exchanges, a fever of demands, an epiphanic power.
I have often been surprised by their film reviews. Impressed, more than once. Baffled, from time to time. Criticism is an object as malleable as it is dangerous, and I could not pretend to teach it while protecting myself completely from it. I remember my naive haste to present the first ten minutes of the Contempt (1963) and from this single sentence, received for all feedback: “Godard and the fetishistic hypersexualization of the female body in 2019, no thank you. Georges Delerue’s music did not move them, any more than Raoul Coutard’s camera. I could contextualize the extract, explain its aesthetic significance, their reasoning had a different base from mine. What’s wrong with this scene? What is not happening?
Let’s unfold it together just a minute. Critical thinking grows from that which extends in speech and in time, and this nourishes teachers as well as students. Is it thus possible to think of criticism through an empathy with potential claimant or as the actualization of a shared desire to enlighten the world?
Be inspired by André Bazin
This reflection, I place it in the extension of the critical approach of André Bazin (1918-1958), too little known within literary studies.
Bazin inspires me with his ability to read images through a simple love of living things and human singularities, sometimes trivial, sometimes grandiose. Author of 2,681 texts, co-founder of Cinema notebooks, Pioneer and animator of film clubs, considered one of the greatest theorists of the seventh art, André Bazin was also a critic who liked to defend films (sometimes obscure, underestimated) and who gave scholarly forms to his love.
“There are no absolute errors in art. The function of the critic is not to bring on a silver platter a truth that does not exist, but to extend as far as possible in the intelligence, and the sensitivity of those who read it, the shock of the ‘work of art’, he wrote in his last text, in 1958.
This sentence sums up the beauty of critical experience and asks each time the same endless question: can we (re) learn to see?
Ways in love with criticism
Whether critical practice, positive or negative, is built around a committed gesture of love that tries to exceed its prejudices seems to me to open a field of emancipation necessary for collective thought. […] I like to imagine that critical experience, as threatened as it is by economic or anti-intellectualist imperatives, continues to be embodied in the form of a curious amorous quest, in which sharing one’s reasoning and convictions is understood as a sensitive and lucid commitment to the world and the works it houses […].
I hope that this “acceptable space of speech” of which Lefebvre-Faucher spoke is cultivated more and more in our society according to this Bazinian pedagogy, where reflection emerges from an interest in the experience of the other, from his gaze. , in his voice, as astonishing, discordant, marginal as they are.
Empathy, at the heart of this dynamic of openness, becomes an intriguing invitation to resistance.
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