Example of Journalism: Journalistic Criticism

It is common for people with little culture to think that criticizing is only pointing out negative qualities of something. Criticisms of customs, politics, sports, religion, etc. are frequent. Could not be farther from the truth.
Criticizing is not censuring or praising. To criticize is to judge, giving reasons why something is considered good or bad. It is not enough to differ from what is criticized, convincing arguments must be made. Anyone says that he likes or dislikes the latest news that he has read.
Very few, the real critics, reasonably support his views.
The critic, to be worthy of the name, must:
a) Report objectively, do not alter the creations of others and interpret them faithfully.
b) Show your opinions, do not risk unthinking judgments that cannot be sustained. Support any claim.
c) Judge with weight and justice, not accepting partial and subjective criteria. Emphasize the positive and reprove the negative, wherever it comes from.
d) Write with agility, precision and clarity, do not pretend to impress with pedantic phrases that make understanding difficult. Try, as far as possible, to communicate effectively with the largest number of readers.

Criticism is literary when it deals with bibliographical novelties; artistic, if it talks about exhibitions of painting, sculpture or musical concerts; and theatrical or cinematographic, when it refers to public performances.
For Oscar Wilde, "The critic is in relation to the work of art that he criticizes, in the same state as the artist with respect to the visible world of form and color or the invisible world of passion and feeling. It is a creation within another creation. It is the record of one's own soul. For the critic the books were written and the pictures painted. It deals with art, not as an expression, but as an impression. "
I will illustrate, to flesh out the concepts I have just cited, the various criticisms:
Francisco Zendejas, on December 8, 1974, in Excelsior, literary criticism of the work The Mexican Social Constitutionalism, by Jorge Sayeg Helú.
"Mexican social constitutionalism, vols. I, II and III, by Jorge Sayeg Helú, deals with studying the development of our country from its very origins until the end of the armed revolution, which was projected in the Constitution of 1917.
A study of this nature is important, since few are those who, giving the history of Mexico the necessary legal-social approach that is required, have been published until today, and, to our knowledge, none of them deals with doing it in a global. It also has the virtue of being, at the same time as an extensive study of the constitutional history of Mexico until the expedition of our still in force Fundamental Charter, a colorful picture of the partial aspects of each of the most relevant stages of our story. Therefore, it seems to us that reading it will interest not only the specialist in legal history, but also the common reader, who will be moved by many of his passages.
What or what were the reasons that led Hidalgo and Morelos to launch the Mexicans into the War of Independence? Why did this, in its initiation, rather than a political movement tending to materially separate us from Spain, assume the character of a true social revolution? Why can the centralist epoch well be considered a stage of anarchy? How did Juárez, based on the Constitution of 1857, achieve the consolidation of Mexican nationality? What was the pro and con of the stage that Porfirio Díaz presided over? Why did our Revolution, in its first phase, have a predominantly political content, and it was not until later that it manifested itself in its authentic political and social dimension ...
To these questions, it seems to us, the work of Sayeg Helú answers... "
I find an example of theatrical artistic criticism in what Antonio López Chavira writes about the play "Two castaways after the fish", which appeared on December 4, 1974 in Excelsior:
Originally, this piece by André Roussin - entitled "The Little Hut" - was a rather funny comedy whose intentions, participants in an incipient feminism, they became popular thanks to the film version starring Ava Gardner in Hollywood.
Now, presented in Mexico with the name of "Two castaways after the fish", it has become an attempt at something who pretends to pass himself off as "family vaudeville", and who doesn't even reach the qualitative level of a joke car-but. Although the idea of ​​setting her up in Mexico may have yielded at least one interesting experiment (due to her treatment of adultery), the direction of Alberto Rojas, which is hinted at in this staging, has completely nullified its effects and even its character as a piece theatrical.
On such a small stage, like that of the Teatio de la República, set by the well-achieved, but spectacular, scenography by Hugo Maclas, the scenic movement is reduced to a monotonous and minimal expression. The lack of naturalness in the attitudes and dialogues, as well as stiff and schematic performances, provoke in the audience a boredom almost comparable to that of the protagonists demonstrate, briefly interrupted by the timely comments of Evita Muñoz "Chachita", who does the impossible to get the company afloat, vainly.
Alfonso Zayas and Alberto Rojas, in the roles of husband and lover, are completely lacking in grace and miss a humorous streak that could have saved the bad in their performances. Jorge Ortiz de Pinedo, in his character as a castaway cannibal-cook-Veracruz, laboriously maintains the illogicality of his character of him, prefabricated in such a way that it fits perfectly in the series of adaptations to the original text, elaborated by means of worn out jokes and an almost bureaucratic mentality due to its lack of wit, which have turned "The Little Shack" into this unsustainable crap. "
García Riera offers us an excellent example of film criticism.
I transcribe below the one he wrote of the film Ludwig by Luchino Visconti, which appeared in Excelsior on December 4, 1974.
"As if the misfortunes that befell the 19th century Bavarian monarch, whose story Luchino Visconti tells, were not enough in a sumptuous, beautiful and curiously contained film, behold, it has been exhibited at the Show under the title of The Passion of a King. Frankly, it seems fair to me to forget that new fantasy of the distributors and retain the good original title of the film which is simply Ludwig's.
Visconti's restraint, which some may have taken for coldness, can be a paradoxical result, as in so many cases, of the feeling of affinity. That moving King Louis of Bavaria. that he wanted to rule in favor of the spirit, of art, and turning his back to the political and social demands of his time, that he hated Munich, the capital of his state, and preferred to live in the crazy castles built by himself, he was of a line too recognizable for the director of Senso and II Gattopardo. Visconti has been one of the best chroniclers of the nineteenth century in cinema, for his clear understanding of the clash between the romantic spirit and the development of European history. The vision of that dramatic collision that gave dialectical substance to so many Viscontian characters is attenuated in Ludwig by mere fact: if the camera pursues insistently to an unbalanced king (neurotic, we would say now), dying and esthete (sublimator, it would be said now), little or almost no sign of the time, of the social environment with which he collided.
One wonders if Visconti has not had the modesty to prevent himself from seeing more of the context in which Ludwig acted than the king himself. That is why he spoke of affinity: it is in such a way that he manifested the filmmaker's love for his character, that He explains his refusal to ridicule him by the mere contrast to the real world to which he was so alien. monarch. What the film tells us - and it tells us in a very just and inspired way - is that Ludwig only lived in one world, the world of his obsessions, almost totally cut off from the other. That a man capable of maintaining himself in this kind of intrauterine environment was at the same time a king, by simple dynastic chance, gives enough measure of his tragedy. (For the rest, it is clearly significant, in that order, that Ludwig deeply admired Wagner and at the same time could not bear to see in the composer to a person of flesh and blood and that the same happened to him with Princess Sofia, with Elizabeth of Austria or with an actor, as can be seen in the headband.)
The Passion of a King (Ludwig), Italian film, in colors by Luchino Visconti, about his plot, by Enrico Medioli and Suso Cecchi d'Amico, with Helmut Berger, Romy Schneider, Trevor Howard, Silvana Mangano, Gert Frobe. (Ugo Santalucía. 1972. V