Filmkritikens retorik : En kvalitativ studie av recensioner till hög- och populärkulturella filmverk

• Main Author: Kojo, Lovis
• Format: Others
• Language: Swedish
• Published: Umeå universitet, Institutionen för kultur- och medievetenskaper 2018
• Subjects: culture journalism; film reviews; film critics; film criticism; popular culture; high culture; Frankfurt School; Pierre Bourdieu; Media and Communications; Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-146647

The divide between popular culture and high culture has been a subject of discussion since the early days of media research. Even though popular culture has a somewhat higher status today than in the early 1900’s, the division between the two cultural forms still exists. For example, the movies that appeal to the great masses are rarely awarded the most prestigious European film prices. The aim of this study was to examine how these two cultural practices is separated in film reviews on the Swedish film site MovieZine with the use of the socio-cultural theories of Adorno, Horkheimer and Bourdieu. The main issues consisted of what types of rhetorical arguments the critics use to value the film, and what types of cultural references they make in the different reviews The selection of the movie reviews for this study was based on the ten most viewed movies in Swedish cinema in 2016, and ten movies that were awarded some of the most prestigious and refined American and European film prices in the same year. The general result showed that the film critics used different types of rhetorical arguments based on what type of films they reviewed. In their reviews of the more high cultural films, the citric based their arguments on matters that are considered to be of a more intellectual and analytical kind, than in the reviews of the films that appeal to the masses. The critics often referred to movies or other cultural phenomenon that could be placed on the same side of the cultural spectrum as the movies they reviewed.