From Opinion to Method: Film Criticism beyond Communicative Capitalism

Abstract

In the light of Barthes’s failed assassination of the author, this essay will tread on the plane of film criticism’s practices of resuscitation of the author. Looking at the current phenomenon of the explosion of quantification in social media space, this essay considers the way communicative capitalism and neoliberal psychopolitics regulate points of view, analyses, and criticism in the internet, and funnel them into a single unit, which is in the form of opinion. This essay will look into three reviews of Citizen Jake (2018) which, as will be argued, often function in double: not only as reviews, but also as consumer guides, which come from the individual opinion of a privileged member of the audience, the reviewer. As a recommendation to resist these reductions, it is suggested that the film critic must practice a self-conscious theorization by looking at the social practices governing the production of the film, the subject of criticism. Dialectically, this will also resolve the failed modernist projects of defacing the author, defacing capitalist subjectivities, toward a materialist conception of film.