ABSTRACT
For the young Sight and Sound editors, the postwar perceptions of crisis in film criticism, precipitated by the nouvelle vague and French critical writing, came to a head in Houston’s article on “The Critical Question.” Citing “English” traditions, it attempted to diffuse the cinephile challenge to critical authority with a broad-church liberalism that could contain and lead a diversified national film culture. A few hundred kilometres to the east, in the Federal Republic of Germany, the reception of French film culture was also producing a crisis. This episode, however, would lead to a very different course and conclusion, one which was mortgaged to past traditions and methods of subjective criticism as detailed in Chapter 2 and one which – despite the role of Lindsay Anderson in the British debates outlined in Chapter 3 and his subsequent success as a director – was even more related to new domestic filmmaking.
