What is Australian film criticism for if the audience is not reading it

I want to say that the question does not bother me, but it does. Not constantly. Not the way it bothered me in 2021, when I was writing reviews during lockdown for a readership I could literally count because the analytics were open on my second monitor and the numbers were, to use a precise critical term, terrible. It bothers me now in a quieter way, the way a draught bothers you in a house you have otherwise made comfortable. You stop noticing it for weeks. Then someone asks you why you are wearing a jumper indoors and you have to explain the gap in the wall you have been living around.

The question is simple. Who reads Australian film criticism? And the follow-up, which is the one that actually matters: if the answer is “almost nobody,” does that change what the writing is for?

I have been asking this for six years and I have not arrived at a clean answer. What I have arrived at is a set of observations that circle the question without resolving it, and I am starting to think the circling might be the point.

The mastheads are thinning

The publications that formed the backbone of serious Australian film writing are in various states of retreat. Metro magazine, which ran for decades as one of the few places you could find sustained critical engagement with Australian screen culture, ceased regular publication. RealTime, which covered performance and media arts with a rigour that nobody else in the country matched, went quiet. Senses of Cinema, which remains one of the most respected online film journals in the world, continues to publish, but its output has slowed and its funding is precarious in the way that all arts funding in this country is precarious: not quite gone, but never secure enough to plan around.

What replaced them is a mixture of things. There are personal Substacks. There are podcast episodes where critics talk to each other for ninety minutes about a film that seven hundred people saw. There are Instagram carousels with star ratings and two-sentence verdicts. There is this publication, which occupies a space I am still trying to define, somewhere between the formality of the old mastheads and the informality of social media, trying to be serious without being stiff, trying to be accessible without being shallow.

The ecosystem is not dead. But it is thinner than it was, and the thinning has consequences that go beyond the obvious loss of platforms. When there are fewer places to publish, there are fewer writers who can sustain a practice. When there are fewer writers sustaining a practice, the range of critical perspectives narrows. When the range narrows, the conversation gets smaller. And when the conversation gets smaller, the films that do not fit the dominant critical frame simply go unreviewed, which in Australian cinema means they effectively go unrecorded.

Who is reading

I know, roughly, who reads what I write. Other critics. Filmmakers, especially early-career ones who Google their own names and find my review on the second page of results. Funding body staff, who read criticism the way intelligence analysts read open-source reporting: not for the verdicts but for the texture, for the ambient sense of what the sector thinks of itself. Film students, who cite us in essays and occasionally email to argue. And a small committed public, people who care about Australian cinema the way some people care about independent bookshops, with a loyalty that is partly aesthetic and partly civic, a belief that the thing ought to exist whether or not it is commercially justified.

That is not a mass audience. It is not even a niche audience in the way that, say, specialty coffee has a niche audience. It is closer to what you would call a constituency. A group of people who share not just an interest but a stake. They read Australian film criticism because they believe it matters that someone is paying attention, and they want to be the kind of person who pays attention, and reading the criticism is how they prove it to themselves.

I do not say this dismissively. I am one of those people. I read Australian film criticism before I wrote it, and I read it for the same reasons: to feel less alone in caring about something that most of the country does not care about, or cares about only intermittently, when a film crosses over into mainstream visibility and briefly becomes a conversation.

Whether criticism shapes anything

Here is where the question gets uncomfortable. Does Australian film criticism shape the culture, or does it just document it? I have heard both arguments, and I find neither fully convincing.

The shaping argument says that criticism creates a language for talking about films, that it sets the terms of the discussion, that it identifies what matters and why, and that this identification, over time, influences what gets made. A critic who writes persuasively about the absence of working-class stories in Australian cinema is, in this reading, doing something that eventually shows up in funding applications and pitch meetings and the kinds of films that get greenlit. The language travels. The argument gets absorbed.

I want to believe this, and sometimes I do. I have seen my own phrases appear in festival programme notes. I have had a producer tell me that a review I wrote helped them articulate what their next film should be about. These moments are real, and they matter to me more than I want to admit, because they suggest that the writing is not just landing in empty space.

But the documenting argument has its own weight. Most of the time, criticism arrives after the fact. The film is already made. The decisions have been taken. The funding has been spent. The review is a response to a finished object, and the finished object does not change because someone wrote fifteen hundred words about it. In this reading, criticism is a record, valuable in the way that records are valuable, as evidence, as memory, as a trace of what mattered to whom and when, but not as an agent of change. The critic watches. The critic writes. The culture does what it was going to do anyway.

What I have settled on

I have not settled on anything, which is the honest answer. What I have is something closer to a working position, provisional and subject to revision, which is that the value of Australian film criticism is not located in its influence or its audience size or its commercial viability. The value is located in the act of taking the films seriously. Seriously enough to write about them at length. Seriously enough to argue about them. Seriously enough to be wrong about them and then come back and say so.

This country makes films that most of the country does not see. That is not new and it is not going to change. The films exist anyway. They exist because filmmakers keep making them, and the critics exist because someone needs to say what the films are doing and whether they are doing it well and why it matters that they are doing it at all.

I write for a small audience. The audience is enough if the writing is good enough. That conditional is the only standard I have found that does not collapse into either grandiosity or despair. The masthead runs on conviction. The readership is small. The question of who we are writing for has not gone away, and I do not think it should. The question keeps the writing honest, because the moment you stop asking it, you start writing for yourself, and writing for yourself is a luxury that criticism cannot afford.

I want to say I have made peace with this. The truth is closer to a truce.