MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

But the point of having categories like these isn’t to pin labels. In part knowing them allows us simply to notice things in films that might otherwise remain a part of an undifferentiated flow of images. They enable us to see underlying principles that make films into dynamic systems rather than collections of techniques. They [...]

And while I read a lot about negative criticism, I read less about the need for analytical criticism — an approach to reading in which the critic focuses on explanation over judgment. I think that if more of any type of criticism is needed it’s this. What matters to me is: does the critic help [...]

In a recent post on his blog (1), Craig Fischer, shared this quote: An essay is a search to find out what one thinks about something. –Phillip Lopate, “In Search of the Centaur: the Essay-Film.” In a way that sums up my feeling about the criticism I write. To write about something I’ve read is [...]

In further explorations of criticism (with an eye towards specifically comics criticism), I’ve been reading (and now rereading) David Bordwell’s Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Harvard, 1989). Bordwell’s primary focus is the process of interpretation in academic film criticism with an eye towards conventional and institutional norms. It is a [...]

David Bordwell wrote a post about film criticism, “In critical condition”, which is worth a read. He lays out four activities of the critic–describe, analyze, interpret, and evaluate–and relates these to three types of format: review, academic article or book of criticism, and critical essay. The evaluative activity becomes a key part. Such as analyzing [...]

At the new Thought Balloons blog, Charles Hatfield and Craig Fischer discuss Groensteen’s System of Comics (my old review). Fischer provides an excellent example of Groensteen’s “braiding” (tressage) in Jason’s “Hey Wait…”: Across the multiframe of the book, the motif of six-panel repetition appears and reappears at central moments, creating a series that transcends the [...]

However, I also think it’s a little unfair to say that the “average intelligent reader” is interested merely in a “recommendation.” This only reinforces the divide between “criticism,” which is perforce practiced primarily in the academy, and reviewing, the goal of which is presumably to provide a recommendation. [...] As I have suggested several times [...]

I will begin with the field in which I do most of my professional work—literary studies. Since not everyone is an expert in literary studies, allow me to start with some elementary principles familiar to those already involved with literature but that may not be so obvious to those who are not. Chronologically, first, we [...]

Explaining anything involves analyzing it, at least to some degree. Analysis is a matter of breaking up whole phenomena into relevant parts and showing how they work together. [...] An academic film critic will divide a film into parts (scenes, sequences, “acts”) to see how the overall architecture works. Explaining something also involves describing it. [...]

The next two lines [of Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish] are similarly structured: “For love / The leaning grasses and two light above the sea.” That is, “For love,” an abstraction, impossible to grasp, the poet should present something concrete: “The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea.” Although I can’t say precisely how [...]

At the same time that he [the poet] is trying to envisage the poem as a whole, he is trying to relate the individual items to the whole. He cannot assemble them in a merely arbitrary fashion; they must bear some relation to each other. So he develops his sense of the whole, the anticipation [...]