A 7.5 N.Y. Times opinion piece called “The Dominance of the White Male Critic” has been making the rounds — And, for better or for worse, what Elizabeth Mendez Berry and Chi-hui Yang have written is undoubtedly a conversation starter.
Wouldn’t this lead to separatist art? and separatist film criticism as well? All I care for are critics that are competent, know their film history and can express themselves in ways undaunted by any societal pressures around them. This kind of nonsense argument is calling for people to step aside. Of note, there’s also been a movement for throwing out the white male canon of film history, which I’ve always implied as coming from millennials that just don’t watch old movies and have not seen any movies pre-80s. They’re just too lazy to watch all those classics and so they just decide, to hell with it, white men created them anyways so let’s just destroy the whole damn thing. I would like to bet that the two authors of this piece haven't even seen “Citizen Kane.”
Excerpt from Berry-Yang piece: “For decades, those given the biggest platforms to interpret culture [have been] white men. This means that the spaces in media where national mythologies are articulated, debated and affirmed are still largely segregated. The conversation about our collective imagination has the same blind spots as our political discourse.
“Consider how this played out around the movie Green Book,” Berry and Yang observe, adding that “when it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September, most of the reviewers heralded it as a heartwarming triumph over racism.”
Berry and Yang: “But two months later, when [Green Book] started screening in movie theaters across America, black writers saw it as another trite example of the country’s insatiable appetite for white-savior narratives.”
Did the white-savior thing get thrown at Green Book regardless? Yeah, of course, but those who took potshots in this vein were hardly confined to critics on the urban fringes. It was mostly attacked during award season (and in some cases savagely) by under-40 white wokesters along with know-it-all palefaces who’d been around for decades. Trevor Noah‘s much-discussed Daily Show billboard slogan (“Don’t Green Book This One, Guys!”) wasn’t aimed at critics of color, trust me.
Berry and Yang” “The initial positive buzz [for Green Book] set such a strong tone that its best-picture win at the Academy Awards seemed a foregone conclusion. But that didn’t stop the white filmmakers from going after black reviewers like K. Austin Collins of Vanity Fair who found it problematic.
“’What the makers of this movie are missing is just that many black critics didn’t get to see this movie until it came out‘ during Oscar season, well after early screenings for critics, Mr. Collins said during a panel at the Sundance Film Festival. ‘When black critics do finally get to see this movie, it is seen as disrupting the Oscar campaign. I don’t think any of us really care about that. We care about representation.'