Comparing Criticisms

I'm fulfilling the last of my core credits this semester- the "A" credit, the "arts" credit- in an Media and Theatre Arts program 100 level class called "Movies in America", in which we've been dealing largely with movie criticism since the debut of cinema in the US until the present day. Many of the theories behind critiquing movies allign with those I've encountered before in literature classes. Movies to me, aren't a big deal. I'm not obsessed or passionate about them like, say, my brother, who is an MTA major and can relate every little daily scenario to some cinematic moment. He's got a lot to say about all the details of a film: the lighting, the sound, the cinematography, directing, editing, etc... but I've been paying a lot of attention to his rants and raves lately as well as those of my professor in MTA101 and kind of inwardly comparing and contrasting Movie criticism and Literary criticism. Well, I know it could be argued that film criticism IS literary criticism, since movies can be considered literature. Many are based on books and all rely on a script, a written play-by-play of the film. Tuesday, we were discussing the "Auteur" theory in regards to the movie Citizen Kane, which we then watched in class. I know from American Lit that this movie is regarded as an American masterpiece and a milestone in cinematic history. http://www.filmreference.com/encyclopedia/Academy-Awards-Crime-Films/Auteur-Theory-and-Authorship.html

Essentially, this "Auteur" or "author" theory proposes that the director of a film is like the author of a novel; permeating his artistic vision through the scenes of a movie like a novelist does through the words in a book. That we appreciate art because of the artist, that the voice of the artist comes through in the finished product. But this is a tricky theory to apply to the film genre,because how can you call the director the artist when a whole team of people go into the movie-making process? I tried to consider these ideas in light of some of Frye's ideas about literary criticism. So much more goes into an artistic body of work- be it film, novel, poem, painting- than just the words on the page, which are essentially just symbols. Although I do think that the author of a novel has a lot more responsibility for the finished product than the director of a film, who collaborates with a whole team of other artists to produce the final film. In some movies, it is the cinematography that really stands out, in others the score, and still others the acting. These elements don't come into play in a novel or poetry, or do they? One way I considered it was that the words on the pages of a novel are like a script, and the reader's interpretation is like a performance, in which sense, we're more responsible for our understanding or interpretation of the book than the author. Compare, contrast. Compare, contrast. These are other ways I'm finding to consider this complicated concept of criticism.