American Film Evaluation System And Effect Study

The America film has a long history of more than one hundred years, and shortly after its birth, a lot of critics and academics started to pay attention to film criticism. Since Vachel Lindsay published a series of comment articles about The Birth of a Country, film criticism has developed rapidly with the bloom the film industry. Till now, American film criticism has formed a clear system, in which every kind of film comment serves a particular purpose. According to Christian Matz’s "Cinematic institution" theory, cinema is a kind of "Imaginary technique", which was applied to social operation system. This social operation system, as an objective relation, is called "Cinema Institution", which contains production machine, consumption machine and promotion machine. This paper tried to analyze this film evaluation system accordingly, especially from the aspect of "Cinema Institution theory". To reach this goal, various kinds of film evaluation methods were classified to academic criticism, popular criticism, internet criticism and film awards, according to the media platform they mainly rely on. Special attentions were paid to the development background, history, merits and demerits, as well as the future trends, to explore the possible interaction relations between film evaluation system and the film industry. Among this, academic criticism impacts on the exploration of film arts and the production trends, since they are comparatively more professional and influential. However, media criticism usually appears in all kinds of mass media. With higher exposure rate, media criticism has dramatic influence on film consumption. With the fast development of Internet, new media tends to integrate mass media and offers a new platform for film criticism, where interaction between author and reader can be possible. Studies on American film evaluation system can illuminate the film industrial development of China. On the one hand, we should complete the film evaluation system in China; on the other hand, cultivating independent film critics is necessary.