Adrian Martin
Adrian Martin, an arts critic and audiovisual artist based in Vilassar de Mar (Spain), is Adjunct Professor of Film and Screen Studies at Monash University (Australia). He is the author of seven books on cinema, and co-editor of LOLA journal online.
All essays by Adrian Martin
Writing in Images and Sounds
‘In hardboiled crime/detective/gangster films of the 1940s, there is often a scene where one character confronts another and hints at something unstated and highly menacing, but awesomely present in the air – usually leading to the utterance of the classic line: ‘Do I have to spell it out in words?’ This excellent phrase often comes to mind when reading the criticism devoted to almost every art form: film, painting, music, theatre, TV, sculpture. Because the dominant assumption, operative for a long time now, is that we do need to spell it all out in words – that our responses to creative works are only genuinely articulated, and furthermore legitimated, when we put them into ordered, written, rational form. ‘