Filmkritiek: professionele vs. Amateurcritici

Nowadays, art criticism, and film criticism with it, is changing. Digitization and the advent of web 2.0 are among others fostering the emergence of amateur film critics who can now publish their own reviews, similar to their professional counterparts. These amateur film critics differ from professional film critics regarding their experience and expertise. Because of the lack of experience and expertise, it is often assumed that amateur film critics are producing reviews that are less critical and are of less quality. Owing to this assumption, this thesis will study and compare the film discourse about popular film by both professional and amateur film critics. There has been looked at how popular and art critical film discourses become tangible in film reviews of both kinds of critics. To prevent this study to be too determined by a national context, film reviews from the Netherlands, France and the United States have been studied. With the help of existing theories and studies a quantitative discourse analysis of film reviews has been implemented. From the analysis, several results about the film discourse employed by both professional and amateur film critics and about the appreciation of popular film have derived.