An excerpt from George Hickenlooper's interview with film critic Richard Shickel published in Hickelooper's book, Reel Conversations (1991):
H: In your essay on Chaplin you talked about the decline of film criticism over the past ten years. Would you talk about that?
S: Is it a decline or were we all deluded back then? I don't know. Sure, there's a decline in the sense that film criticism has basically just become a branch of marketing. That's a function of this alleged criticism on television which is some kind of performance--they are performers no less than the performers they are reviewing. Does that, to some degree, lessen the quality of the dialogue about movies? Sure, I think it does, but there are still those of us who are writing in print, seriously attempting to come to grips with movies--both present and past.
Does writing something in print guarantee that it is less of a performance?
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