ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the crisis conversation itself—through discourse analysis of the editorials, articles, and symposia where it has played out, predominantly in British and US forums—to see what this can tell people about film criticism as an institution. It provides a version of the institutional explication of film criticism. The book explores the institutionality of film criticism through case studies of US and Australian critics, publications, and organisations, comparing these against other national schools of criticism where data is available in English. The individual film critics, sites of film criticism, and critics circles sampled were chosen in the hopes they would represent film criticism beyond the crisis conversation, towards a more comprehensive and useful understanding of film criticism's institutional formations. Some critics' personae are shown to be limited to particular comportments and particular institutional locations, while others' can accommodate plural or composite comportments.
