How I Became a Film Critic

When I was a kid I fell in love with watching Siskel & Ebert, the absolute gold standard of televised film criticism. As I am sure it inspired hundreds of others to want share their love of movies with the world, I wanted to be Roger or Gene. I wanted the job of going to the movies. I had no idea that someone could get paid to go to the movies. That was insane to me and I wondered why everyone didn't seek that same job. In later years, I would learn that relatively few people actually pursued film criticism as a career. 

The job of film critic developed in the early 20th century, not long after the invention of movies themselves. After several years of newspapers dismissing movies as a flash in the pan phenomenon, the movies became an established part of American culture and newspapers were forced to acknowledge that phenomenon. The earliest known film critics were beat writers, often theater writers or feature writers. They may have been fascinated with the moving pictures, but they were essentially reporters who were given the movies as a beat. 

This notion of movies being a beat rather than a calling persisted for years. Rarely, if ever, did someone start out there career as a film critic. Perhaps the best, and most rare, example of film critics setting out to be critics, took place in Paris, France, where the famed Cahiers Du Cinema became one of the biggest and most influential film guides in the world. Cahier was founded by a group of people who wanted to one day be film directors. But, they began their careers as professional appreciators, people who fell in love with movies and developed an all-consuming desire to share their enthusiasm for movies. 

Jean Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, started out at Cahiers Du Cinema before leaving to lead the French New Wave as some of the most talented and beloved filmmakers of all time. At Cahier in the 50s they worked alongside film critics André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, pioneers in writing seriously and critically about film. They turned their passion for film into their own magazine, though Bazin had been famous in France prior to Cahier, having chosen film as his career years earlier after launching his career as a literary critic. 

Find my full length article at Geeks.Media