ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a means of conceptualising, or a language for talking about, film criticism as an institution, and suggests why we might find it enlightening to do so. It explores definitions of film criticism that speak respectively to its aesthetic, economic, social, and historical dimensions, but these sources are united in illuminating some aspect(s) of film criticism's institutional nature. The continuing roll-out of specialised magazines and journals of film criticism and the post-war institutionalisation of academic film studies consolidated the sense of separate "macro-institutional" locations for journalistic, essayistic, and academic film criticism. F. E. Sparshott's market-centred approach and David Bordwell's convention of production approach are two sides of the same coin when viewing film criticism as an institution. In contrast to Bordwell's hierarchy of critical abstraction, R. Seamon structures his critical conventions around epochs dominated by a particular critical impulse or vogue.
