Movie critic Mohammed Binaziz has recently released a new book entitled “Film Criticism between Theory and Practice.”
The 196-page book is composed of two chapters; the first explores the film criticism theory and its philosophic and artistic backgrounds; the other chapter applies this theory to international movies including ‘Joker’, and ‘Parasite.”
The book is the fifth for the writer. “Since I started writing about cinema to better understand how movies are made, I read myriads of film criticism articles and most of them can be described as follows: 1. articles that are more like general lectures about the philosophy of art and picture; 2. Articles similar to improvised lectures filled with digressions about the cinema passion in which the author and lecturer changes the subject every two lines or minutes. These articles exaggerate with abstract and uses a transcendent, emotional, uncinematic theorization; 3. Articles that mislead the reader by using big terms irrelevant to cinema and cite philosophers who lived before the emergence of cinema; 4. Articles that are supposed to talk about cinema, but don’t mention any movie, or mention ten movies in the same text; 5. Articles about women in cinema, children in history and cinema, and even potatoes in cinema…but these writings are often vague, with a sociological not artistic aspect, and could turn into ideological writings that allow or forbid; 6. Articles about very old movies in which the introduction takes more than half of the material; 7. Articles with very long phrases composed of over 20 words…they also feature a lot of negation and rectification using thematic methods in every line. Such writings are not informative and lack the artistic knowledge; 8. Biography-like articles by a writer who visit festivals, overuses the pronoun ‘I’, and praises his friends…these articles drown in subjectivity and don’t provide the reader with any kind of information about movies. I wrote this book as an attempt to change this situation, and in order to level up the quality of cinema-related questions, and investigate the answers related to the practice of film criticism,” Binaziz wrote in the foreword.
