Cinema is a collaborative work and as a critic, it is sometimes difficult to think about the intention of the filmmaker, because there is also the work of the screenwriter, the producers and even the protagonist, said Ernesto Diezmartínez Guzmán.
“Tom Cruise’s cinema is not made without his consent,” he exemplified, there are many analyzes to speak of the intention.
During the talk Film Criticism in Mexico, A general panorama, given within the Dialogues program at El Colegio de Sinaloa, Diezmartínez pointed out that it is always a swampy terrain when talking about the author’s intentions.
“For two reasons: because it is always difficult to do psychoanalysis to the author, how do you know what the intentions were, unless you talk to him and tell you what his intentions were; the other is that I believe that the film has to speak ”.
During the talk he shared with Carlos Zazueta, director of the Historical Collections and Library, of El Colegio and Gerardo Osorno, host of the program, Diezmartínez pointed out that in his activity as a critic he always tries to write about the film itself.
“Yes there is a context around it, but what matters in the end is the film, what were the intentions can count as an element if we have the information, there are also other elements, one thing is what the artist, in this case the filmmaker, wants , and other what the public understands, the relationship is not unidirectional, “he said.
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“The artist gives a work, but the interpretation of it varies over time, Don Quixote is not the same when it came out, in romanticism, and now at this moment. Cervantes wrote with an intention and later it was reinterpreted.
The author of the book Vertigo, which compiles reviews that he published in Northwest, assured that the critic is a sort of guide, a bond of union and a bridge between the viewer and the work, his function is to make the work known.
“In a second instance, criticize, deconstruct the elements of a film, there are elements of historical issues, from the perspective of gender, author, industrial or a specific ideological position.”
He recognized that in film criticism, you have basic objective elements, such as the length of the film, who the director is, and so on. But the construction of the arguments has a range of subjectivity, which can vary but is present.
“One does not write film criticism as if one were an android, taking the purely formal elements, although a purely formal cinematographic analysis can be done, but when you start to analyze the fusion of genres, which with the passage of time has become clearer and dense this combination, like the apocalyptic tapes that are western, but instead of horses they are chariots, you start to take other elements, “he said.
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“You get into the themes, the intentions, the objectives, the ideological analysis of the films, like the Marvel films, you see Aeroman, who has an entertaining part, but if you scratch him, there is the imperialist discourse and the ultra-mega capitalist, that he is the savior of humanity there is an undeniable ideological charge. Aeroman is not the same as Spider-Man, who is a poor devil looking for what to do to earn money ”.
He recalled that cinema was born at the end of the 19th century, but commercial and industrial expansion occurred at the beginning of the 20th century and in the United States, when the explosion of attendance at movie theaters comes, there is an urban audience, workers, people who he was leaving work or that on the weekend he was going to see a movie to entertain himself.
“There was an intention of fun, escapism, at the same time to create a valuable product. And there is still that, cinema for entertainment and there is nothing wrong. Escapist cinema has that function and there is quality ”.
Diezmartínez shared that as a critic, he has always tried to be didactic in some way without being too snobbish, trying to argue in such a way that whoever reads it, whether a more seasoned cinephile or not, can understand the information.
“That is why the very specialized jargon bothers me, although it has its function, but for a film critic that has this connotation of dissemination, dissemination of analysis, you have to write in a language that is understood and try to give the reader weapons.”
Carlos Zazueta thanked Diezmartínez for agreeing to participate in Dialogues, the El Colegio program that serves to inform.
They are talks that are recorded as a document, on the Facebook page, for those who wish to consult and that can also serve for research purposes.
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