Specialist in verbalisation: Colin McArthur’s film criticism

Films do not exist in isolation from institutional discourses about film. As cultural intermediaries, film critics, journalists and reviewers perform specialised functions for ascribing symbolic value to cinema. They verbalise for readers, viewers and listeners, descriptions and judgements about the relative value of one or more film and, potentially, cinema as a subfield of cultural production. Critics are authorised to speak as experts by a range of media – newspapers, journals and magazines, television, book publishers, seminars, advertising and promotional agencies, social media, festivals, award ceremonies – in various forms – short reviews and commentaries, rankings in the manner of top one hundred films of all time/ decade/year, through to longform essays in specialist magazines and scholarly monographs.
Colin McArthur’s film criticism ranges across more than five decades (1960s-present), a period of seismic shifts in cultural politics and cinema. Not the least of these trajectories is that of cultural nationalism in Scotland, its gaucheness long a source of embarrassment to intellectuals before its rehabilitation by the postmodern sensibilities of the culture industry. McArthur's theoretical and methodological advances took varying forms of involved polemics and detached analyses. These make available for critical inspection the repressed visual signifiers of class and nation, transforming the critical reception of film representations of Scotland, in contrast to the unexamined ideological codes of conventional film criticism in their function as specialists in verbalisation.