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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This book is a lively and provoking introduction to film theory. It is suitable for students from any discipline but is particularly aimed at students studying film and literature as it examines issues common to both subjects such as realism, illusionism, narration, point of view, style, semiotics, psychoanalysis and multiculturalism. It also includes coverage of theorists common to both, Barthes, Lacan and Bakhtin among others.
Robert Stam, renowned for his clarity of writing, will also include studies of cinema specialists providing readers with a depth of reference not generally available outside the field of film studies itself. Other material covered includes film adaptations of works of literature and analogies between literary and film criticism.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Preface
Introduction
The Antecedents of Film Theory
Film and Film Theory: The Beginnings
Early Silent Film Theory
The Essence of Cinema
The Soviet Montage-Theorists
Russian Formalism and the Bakhtin School
The Historical Avant-Gardes
The Debate after Sound
The Frankfurt School
The Phenomenology of Realism
The Cult of the Auteur
The Americanization of Auteur Theory
Third World Film and Theory
The Advent of Structuralism
The Question of Film Language
Cinematic Specificity Revisited
Interrogating Authorship and Genre
1968 and the Leftist Turn
The Classic Realist Text
The Presence of Brecht
The Politics of Reflexivity
The Search for Alternative Aesthetics
From Linguistics to Psychoanalysis
The Feminist Intervention
The Poststructuralist Mutation
Textual Analysis
Interpretation and its Discontents
From Text to Intertext
The Amplification of Sound
The Rise of Cultural Studies
The Birth of the Spectator
Cognitive and Analytic Theory
Semiotics Revisited
Just in Time: The Impact of Deleuze
The Coming Out of Queer Theory
Multiculturalism, Race, and Representation
Third Cinema Revisited
Film and the Postcolonial
The Poetics and Politics of Postmodernism
The Social Valence of Mass-Culture
Post-Cinema: Digital Theory and the New Media
The Pluralization of Film Theory
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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e1
Film Theory
An Introduction
Robert Stam
Department of Cinema Studies, New York University
© 2000 by Robert Stam
BLACKWELL PUBLISHING350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia
The right of Robert Stam to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.
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First published 2000
21 2014
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Preface
Film Theory: An Introduction was conceived as part of a trilogy of Blackwell books dedicated to Contemporary Film Theory, a trilogy which also includes two collections (both co-edited with Toby Miller): Film and Theory, an anthology of theoretical essays from the 1970s up to the present, and A Companion to Film Theory, in which leading figures in the field chart out their own areas of expertise while prognosticating about future developments.
While the literature of film theory is vast, and while there are numerous anthologies of film theory and criticism (Nichols, 1985; Rosen, 1986), there are relatively few historical overviews of film theory as an international enterprise. Guido Aristarco’s Storia della Teoriche del Filme (History of Film Theory) was published in 1951, almost a half-century ago. Dudley Andrew’s The Major Film Theories and Andrew Tudor’s Theories of Film, despite their many good qualities, were both written in the mid-1970s and therefore do not cover recent developments as I have attempted to do here. (It was only when Film Theory: An Introduction was already in press that I became aware of the French translation of Francesco Casetti’s excellent Teorie del Cinema 1945–1990 (Film Theories since 1945), published in Italian in 1993 and in French in 1999.
I do not consider myself a theorist as such; rather, I am a user and a critical reader of theory, an interlocutor with theory. I have generally deployed theory not for its own sake, but in order to analyse specific texts (e.g. Rear Window, Zelig) or specific issues (e.g. the role of language in film, the role of cultural narcissism in spectatorship).
My dialogue with theory began in the mid 1960s when I was living and teaching in Tunisia, North Africa. There I began to read in French the film theory associated with the beginnings of film semiology, and I also participated in Tunis’s vibrant film culture of ciné-clubs and cinématèques. I went to Paris in 1968 to study at the Sorbonne, where I combined the study of French literature and theory with daily (often thrice daily) trips to the cinématèque, and visits to classes on film, including those taught by Eric Rohmer, Henri Langlois, and Jean Mitry. When I returned to the USA in 1969 as a graduate student in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of California, Berkeley, I kept in touch with theory through Berkeley’s many courses on film, dispersed through various departments, and especially through the inspirational work of Professor Bertrand Augst, who always kept us abreast of the latest Parisian developments. In Berkeley I was also part of a film discussion group, which included Margaret Morse, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Janet Bergstron, Leger Grindon, Rick Prelinger, and Constance Penley, where we read theoretical texts with avid attention. In 1973 I followed Bertrand Augst, then my dissertation advisor, to the Centre Americain d’Études Cinématographiques in Paris, where I attended seminars with Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour, Michel Marie, Jacques Aumont, and Marie-Claire Ropars Weulleumier. A seminar on Glauber Rocha with Marie-Claire Ropars resulted in a jointly written essay, published in Portuguese, on Rocha’s Land in Anguish. My studies in Paris also led to a long correspondence with Christian Metz, an extraordinarily generous figure who commented regularly on my work as well as on his own.
Since then I have maintained a dialogue with theory by teaching such courses as “Theories of Spectatorship,” “Film and Language,” “Semiology of Film and Television,” and “Bakhtin and the Media,” and by writing books thoroughly laced with film theory: Reflexivity in Film and Literature, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics (with Sandy Flitterman-Lewis and Bob Burgoyne), Subversive Pleasures:Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film, and Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (with Ella Shohat). On occasion, some of the material here recasts and reconfigures some of the work that appeared in those books. The section on “reflexivity” reworks material from Reflexivity in Film and Literature; the section on “alternative aesthetics” reworks material from Subversive Pleasures; the section on “intertextuality” and the question of film language recasts material from New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics; and the section on “Multiculturalism, Race, and Representation” recapitulates some materials from Unthinking Eurocentrism.
I should like to thank a number of people for their help. Andrew McNeillie of Blackwell Publishers showed unwavering support and enthusiasm. He is one of those rare editors who actually develops a human and intellectual dialogue with writers. Alison Dunnett and Jack Messenger of Blackwell Publishers have been delightful editors and e-mail correspondents. I should also like to thank the NYU research assistants – Elizabeth Botha, Michelle Brown, and Jeff de Oca – who did the indispensable backup work not only for this book but also for the other two in the series (Film and Theory and A Companion to Film Theory). I also want to thank the four people who blessed me with a close and meticulous reading of the manuscript: Richard Allen, James Naremore, Ella Shohat, and Ismail Xavier. One could not ask for better interlocutors. Finally, my thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation for offering me a residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy, where I corrected the proofs of this book. It is hard to imagine a more serene setting in which to do such work.
Introduction
My hope in this book is to provide a reasonably comprehensive overview of film theory during “the century of the cinema,” for both those already familiar with the subject and those with little previous knowledge. What follows, then, is a kind of “user’s guide” to film theory. It is a very personal guide, since it is inevitably colored by my own interests and concerns. At the same time, however, I am not personally committed to theories of my own construction, so I hope I have maintained some “ecumenical distance” from all the theories I discuss. I do not pretend to be neutral, of course (clearly, I find some theories more congenial than others), but neither am I concerned to defend my own position or to malign my ideological opponents. Throughout this book I am shamelessly eclectic, synthetic, anthropophagic even. To paraphrase Godard, one should put whatever one likes in a book of film theory. If I am a partisan of anything it is of “theoretical cubism”: the deployment of multiple perspectives and grids. Each grid has its blind spots and insights; each needs the “excess seeing” of the other grids. As a synaesthetic, multi-track medium which has generated an enormously variegated body of texts, the cinema virtually requires multiple frameworks of understanding.
Although I make frequent reference to Bakhtin, I am not a Bakhtinian (if such a thing exists). Rather, I use Bakhtin’s theoretical categories to illuminate the limitations and potentialities of other grids. I have learned from many theoretical schools, but none of them has a monopoly on the truth. I refuse to believe that I am the only person in the field who can read both Gilles Deleuze and Noël Carroll with pleasure, or more accurately, who reads both with mingled pleasure and displeasure. I refuse the Hobson’s Choice between approaches which often strike me as complementary rather than contradictory.
There are many possible ways to describe the history of film theory. It can be a triumphant parade of “great men and women”: Munsterberg, Eisenstein, Arnheim, Dulac, Bazin, Mulvey. It can be a history of orienting metaphors: “cine-eye,” “cine-drug,” “film-magic,” “window on the world,” “camera-pen,” “film language,” “film mirror,” “film dream.” It can be a story of the impact of philosophy on theory: Kant and Munsterberg, Mounier and Bazin, Bergson and Deleuze. It can be a history of cinema’s rapprochement with (or rejection of) other arts: film as painting, film as music, film as theater (or anti-theater). It can be a sequence of paradigmatic shifts in theoretical/interpretative grids and discursive styles – formalism, semiology, psychoanalysis, feminism, cognitivism, queer theory, postcolonial theory – each with its talismanic keywords, tacit assumptions, and characteristic jargon.
Film Theory: An Introduction combines elements of all these approaches. It assumes, first of all, that the evolution of film theory cannot be narrated as a linear progression of movements and phases. The contours of theory vary from country to country and from moment to moment, and movements and ideas can be concurrent rather than successive or mutually exclusive. A book of this type must deal with a dizzying array of chronologies and concerns. It has to confront the same logistical problem that confronted early film-makers like Porter and Edison: the problem of the “meanwhile,” i.e. the problem of relaying simultaneous events taking place in widely separated locales. This book has to convey a sense of “meanwhile, back in France,” or “meanwhile, over in genre theory,” or “mean-while, in the Third World.” While more-or-less chronological, the book’s approach is not strictly so, otherwise we might lose the drift and potential of a given movement, preventing us, for example, from tracing the lines that lead out from Munsterberg to Metz.
A strict chronology can also be deceptive. The mere fact of sequencing risks implying a false causality: post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this). The ideas of theorists working in one historical period might bear fruit only much later. Who would have guessed that the philosophical ideas of Henri Bergson would reemerge a century later in the work of Gilles Deleuze? The work of the Bakhtin Circle, similarly, was published in the 1920s, yet Bakhtinian ideas “entered” theory only in the 1960s and 1970s, at which point a retrospective reassessment defined him as a “proto-poststructuralist.” Often the sequencing of influence depends on the hazards of translation: the bulk of the writings of Dziga Vertov in the 1920s, for example, was translated into French only in the 1960s and 1970s. In any case, I do not generally subscribe to the “great person” approach to film theory. The section rubrics in this book designate theoretical schools and research projects rather than individuals, although individuals obviously play a role in schools.
This book also has to cope with the difficulties inherent in all such surveys. Chronology deceives and patterns falsify. Generalizations about theoretical “schools” elide the manifest exceptions and anomalies. Synthetic accounts of given theorists (for example, Eisenstein) fail to register changes in their theories over time. The slicing up of a theoretical continuum into neatly separated movements and schools, moreover, is always somewhat arbitrary. “Feminism,” “psychoanalysis,” “deconstruction,” “postcoloniality,” and “textual analysis” are here discussed separately and in succession, for example, yet nothing prevents a psychoanalytic postcolonial feminist from using deconstruction as part of textual analysis. Many of the theoretical “moments,” furthermore – feminism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, postcolonial theory – are maddeningly intertwined and concurrent; ordering them in a linear fashion implies a temporal succession that doesn’t exist. (Hypertext and hypermedia might have handled this challenge more effectively.)
While this book tries to survey the field impartially, it is – as I have already indicated – a very personal account of film theory. I am therefore confronted by the question of voice, of how to interweave my own voice with the voices of others. On one level, the book is a form of “reported speech,” an enunciatory modality where the social evaluations and intonations of the “reporter” inevitably color and shade the report. To put it differently, the book is written in what literary theorists call “free, indirect discourse,” a style which slides between the direct reporting of speech – quoting Eisenstein, for example – and a more ventriloqual speech – my version of Eisenstein’s thinking – all interlaced with more personal ruminations. To make a literary analogy, it is as if I were mingling the authorial interventionism of a Balzac with the filtrations of a Flaubert or a Henry James. At times I will present the ideas of others; at times I will extrapolate or expand on the ideas of others; and at times I will present my own ideas as they have evolved over the years. When a passage is not marked as summarizing the work of others, the reader can assume that I am speaking in my own voice, especially in relation to issues that have always concerned me: the historicity of theory, intertextuality theory, Eurocentrism and multiculturalism, alternative aesthetics.
My goal is not to discuss any single theory or theorist in exhaustive detail, but rather to show overall shifts and movements in terms of the questions asked, the concerns expressed, the problematics explored. In a sense, my hope is to “deprovincialize” theory in both space and time. In temporal terms, theoretical issues trace their antecedents far back into pre-cinematic history. Issues of genre, for example, have been present at least since Aristotle’s Poetics. In spatial terms, I see theory as implicated in a global, international space. Nor do film-theoretical concerns follow the same sequence in every locale. While feminism has been a strong presence in Anglo-American film theory since the 1970s, feminism (including French feminism) has had relatively little impact in French film critical discourse. While film theorists in countries like Brazil or Argentina have long been concerned with issues of “national cinema,” such issues have been more marginal and recent in Europe and America.
Film theory is an international and multicultural enterprise, yet too often it remains monolingual, provincial, and chauvinistic. French theorists have only recently begun to reference work in English, while Anglo-American theory tends to cite only that work in French which has been translated into English. Work in Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, and German, not to mention Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Arabic, often goes untranslated and is therefore slighted, as is work in English from countries like India and Nigeria. A good deal of important work, for example Glauber Rocha’s voluminous writings on film – analogous in some ways to Pasolini’s written oeuvre, combining theory and criticism with poems, novels, and screenplays – has never been translated into English. While Bordwell and Carroll are right to mock the servile Francophilia of that post-1960s strain of film theory that genuflects to Parisian gurus long after their aura has faded in France itself, its corrective is not Anglophilia or “United Statesian” jingoism, but rather a true internationalism. I therefore hope to multiply the perspectives and locations from which film theory is spoken, although I have hardly succeeded to the degree I might have hoped, since the focus here still remains more or less constricted to theoretical work undertaken in the United States, France, Great Britain, Russia, Germany, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, and Italy, with all-too occasional “visits” to “Third World” and “postcolonial” theory.
The fiction feature film à la Hollywood is often regarded as the “real” cinema, much in the same way as an American tourist abroad might ask: “How much is this in real money?” I assume that “real” cinema comes in many forms: fiction and non-fiction, realist and non-realist, mainstream and avant-garde. All are worthy of our interest.
Film theory is rarely “pure”; it is usually laced with an admixture of literary criticism, social commentary, and philosophical speculation. The status of those who practice film theory, moreover, varies widely, from film theorists strictu sensu (Balazs, Metz), through filmmakers reflecting on their own practice (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Deren, Solanas, Kluge, Tarkovsky), to freelance intellectuals who also write about the cinema (James Agee, Parker Tyler), through practicing film critics whose collective oeuvre “hides,” as it were, an embryonic theory to be teased out by the reader (the case of Manny Farber or Serge Daney). Recent decades have witnessed the “academicization” of film theory, in a situation where most theorists have a university base.
The semiotic film theory of the 1970s and 1980s presumed a kind of quasi-religious initiation into the sacred texts of the then-reigning maîtres à penser. Much of film theory came to consist of ritualistic invocations (and crude summaries) of Lacan and other poststructuralist thinkers. In the 1970s “theory” became “Theory”; the Religion of Art transmuted into the Religion of Theory. For Lindsay Waters, theory was the crack cocaine which got people high and then let them down. Current theory, thankfully, is more epistemologically modest and less authoritarian. Grand Theory has abandoned its totalizing ambitions, while many theorists have called for more modest approaches to theory, in tandem with philosophers like Richard Rorty who redefine philosophy not as system-building à la Hegel but rather as a civil “conversation” without any claims to ultimate truth. Theorists such as Noël Carroll and David Bordwell, similarly, have called for “middle-level theorizing” which would “countenance as film theory any line of inquiry dedicated to producing generalizations pertaining to, or general explanations of, filmic phenomena, or devoted to isolating, tracking, and/or accounting for any mechanisms, devices, patterns, and regularities in the field of cinema.” Film theory, then, refers to any generalized reflexion on the patterns and regularities (or significant irregularities) to be found in relation to film as a medium, to film language, to the cinematic apparatus or to the nature of the cinematic text, or to cinematic reception. Instead of Grand Theory, then, only theories and the “activity of theorizing,” and the workmanlike production of general concepts, taxonomies, and explanations.
To slightly modify the formulation, film theory is an evolving body of concepts designed to account for the cinema in all its dimensions (aesthetic, social, psychological) for an interpretive community of scholars, critics, and interested spectators.
While I endorse the “modesty” of the Bordwell–Carroll perspective, this modesty should not become an alibi for censuring larger philosophical or political questions about the cinema. There is a danger that “middle-range” theory, like “consensus history” or “end-of-ideology” discourse, will assume that all the big questions are unanswerable as posed, leaving us only with small-scale inquiries susceptible to direct empirical verification. That some questions, such as the role of the cinematic apparatus in engendering ideological alienation, were answered ineptly or dogmatically does not mean that such questions were not worth asking. Indeed, even unanswerable questions might be worth asking, if only to see where they take us and what we discover along the way. Film theory, to put it paradoxically, can generate productive failures and calamitous successes. Modesty, furthermore, can lead in many directions not necessarily anticipated by the cognitivists. The patterns and regularities noted in the field of cinema, for example, might have to do not only with predictable stylistic or narratological procedures but also with patterns of gendered, racialized, sexualized, and culturally inflected representation and reception. Why are materials on “race,” for example, or on “third cinema,” not seen as “theoretical?” While on one level this exclusion might have to do with the artificial boundaries constructed around areas of theoretical inquiry, one wonders if it might not also have to do with the colonialist hierarchy which associates Europe with reflecting “mind” and non-Europe with unreflecting body? In a sense, this book broadens film theory to include the larger field of theorized film-related writing: cultural studies, film analysis, and so forth. I have therefore tried to include such diverse schools as multicultural media theory, postcolonial theory, and queer theory, in short the entire gamut of all the complex, subtle, and theoretically sophisticated film-related work performed under a wide variety of banners.
Although film theory has often involved debates, argument is only one, rather narrow, dimension of film theorizing. Theorists are often at their worst, moreover, precisely when they are hell-bent on annihilating an opponent; the stupidity the polemicist projects onto the straw-man antagonist ends up, through a kind of boomerang, by implicating the polemicist. Indeed, there is something disturbingly masculinist and testosterone-driven in the view of theory as cockfight or shouting match à la Crossfire. A real dialogue depends on the ability of each side to articulate the adversary’s project fairly before critiquing it.
The analytical method of distilling a theoretical text into its separate premises, as deployed by a Richard Allen or a Gregory Currie or a Noël Carroll, has clearly demonstrated its usefulness in clearing up logical ambiguities, conceptual confusions, and misfired deductions. But not everything is reducible to the dessicated skeleton of an abstract “argument.” The complex, historically situated, densely intertextual theories of a Bertolt Brecht, for example, cannot be reduced to a “truth claim” to be rebutted. The analytic method sometimes commits what literary critics used to call the “heresy of paraphrase”; it fails to recognize that the playful, oxymoronic, paradoxical writing of a Walter Benjamin or a Roland Barthes cannot always be broken down without loss into an arid sequence of “propositions,” a syllogistic armature from which all the vital juices have been drained. Sometimes tension and ambiguity are the point. Nor is film theory a kind of conceptual chess leading to an indisputable checkmate. Theories of art are not right or wrong in the same way as scientific theories. (Indeed, some would argue that even scientific theories are merely a sequence of metaphorical approximations.) One cannot discredit Bazin’s theorized defence of Italian neo-realist films in the same way as one can discredit the defence of outmoded “sciences” like phrenology and craniology.
Rather than being simply right or wrong – although on occasion they are one or the other – these diverse grids are relatively rich or impoverished, culturally dense or shallow, methodologically open or closed, fastidiously anal or cannibalistically oral, historically informed or ahistorical, one-dimensional or multidimensional, monocultural or multicultural. In theory, we find brilliant exponents of impoverished paradigms, and mediocre exponents of rich paradigms. Some film theories try to amplify meaning, while others try to discipline it, close it down. Robert Ray contrasts the impersonal, positivist approach to theory with what he calls the baroque, surrealist, essayistic approach. Indeed the history of film theory exhibits a kind of dialogue between two necessary moments, that of imaginative creation and that of analytical critique, a productive oscillation between ecstatic enthusiasms (those of an Eisenstein, for example) and the dry analytical rigor of those who tidy up the enchanting mess the creative enthusiasts have made. (Which is not to say that critique cannot display its own enthusiasm and creativity.)
At the same time, theoretical research programs, or metaphors like “film language” and “film dream,” can obey a law of diminishing returns, exhausting their capacity to generate new knowledge. Theoretical movements can begin as exciting and then become boring and predictable, or they can begin as boring and then suddenly become interesting as they “mate” with other theories. Theories can be safely correct in positivist terms or ambitiously interesting but wrong-headed. Profoundly mistaken theorists can make brilliant points “along the way.” Theory can be methodical and rigorous or it can consist of the anarchic play of a sensibility over a text or an issue. Theory can liberate the energies of its users or inhibit them. Theories are also task-specific. “Ideology critique” is well-suited for exposing pro-capitalist manipulations in Hollywood films, but it is rather ill-equipped for delineating the kinesthetic pleasures of a camera movement in Murnau’s Sunrise. Analytic or post-analytic film theory, like analytic philosophy, is good at taking things apart; it is less adept at discerning correspondences and relationalities.
Theories do not supersede one another in a linear progression. Indeed, there are Darwinian survivalist overtones in the view that theories can be “retired,” that they can be “eliminated” in competition. It would be silly to adopt a scorched earth policy that suggests that one movement or other got everything wrong. Theories do not usually fall into disuse like old automobiles relegated to a conceptual junkyard. They do not die; they transform themselves, leaving traces and reminiscences. There are shifts in emphasis, of course, but many of the major themes – mimesis, authorship, spectatorship – have been reiterated and reenvisioned from the beginning. At times, theorists broach the same questions, but answer them in light of different goals and in a different theoretical language.
Finally, I offer this book as a kind of antechamber to film theory, an invitation into its mansion. Needless to say, I hope readers will visit the various rooms in the mansion by reading, if they have not done so already, the theorists themselves.
The Antecedents of Film Theory
Film theory, like all writing, is palimpsestic; it bears the traces of earlier theories and the impact of neighboring discourses. Saturated with the memory of longer histories of reflection, theory embeds many antecedent debates. Film theory must be seen as part of a long-standing tradition of theoretical reflection on the arts in general. Film theorists from the turn of the twentieth century through André Bazin and Jean-Louis Baudry and Luce Iragaray have been struck, for example, by the uncanny resemblance between Plato’s allegorical cave and the cinematic apparatus. Both Plato’s cave and the cinema feature an artificial light, cast from behind the prisoners/spectators. In Plato’s cave the light plays over effigies of people and animals, leading the deluded captives to confuse flimsy simulations with ontological reality. Contemporary theorists hostile to the cinema often replay, consciously or not, Plato’s rejection of the fictive arts as nurturing illusion and fomenting the lower passions.
Some of the antecedent debates inherited by film theory concern aesthetics, medium specificity, genre, and realism, themes which will become leitmotifs throughout this book. The discussion of film aesthetics, for example, draws on the long history of aesthetics in general. Aesthetics (from the Greek word aisthesis meaning perception, sensation) emerged as a separate discipline in the eighteenth century as the study of artistic beauty and related issues of the sublime, the grotesque, the humorous, and the pleasurable. In philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, and logic made up the triad of “normative” sciences devoted to devising rules concerning the Beautiful, the Good, and the True, respectively. Aesthetics (and Anti-Aesthetics) tries to answer such questions as: What is beauty in a work of art? Is beauty “real” and objectively verifiable, or subjective, a matter of taste? Are aesthetics medium-specific? Should a film exploit the distinctive traits of the medium? Is “art” an honorific to be attributed only to a few films, or are all films works of art simply because of their institutionally defined social status? Do films have a natural “vocation” for realism, or for artifice and stylization? Should technique call attention to itself or be self-effacing? Is there an ideal style? Is there a correct way of telling a story? Are notions of the beautiful eternally true or are they shaped by ambient social values? To what extent are aesthetics linked to larger ethical and social issues? Can beauty be separated from social use and function, as a certain Kantian tradition suggests? What is the relation between film technique and social responsibility? Is a tracking shot, as Godard put it, a question of morality? Are there aesthetic correlatives to specific ideologies such as fascism discernible in the films of Leni Riefenstahl and Busby Berkeley, as Susan Sontag has suggested? Can fascist or racist films like Triumph of the Will or Birth of a Nation be “masterpieces” in artistic terms and still be repugnant in ethical/political terms? Are aesthetics and ethics so easily separable? Has all art been irrevocably changed by Auschwitz, as Adorno suggested? Do we even need aesthetics, or is it hopelessly compromised, as Clyde Taylor (1998) argues, by its origins in eighteenth-century racist discourses? Or can one distinguish between capital-A “Aesthetics,” rooted in Germanic racist thought, and small-a “aesthetics” as a concern, common to all cultures, with the formal shaping of representations of the sensate world?
“Medium specificity” arguments, similarly, also trace their lineage to a long tradition of reflection. The medium specificity approach goes at least as far back as Aristotle’s Poetics, and then to the distinction made by the German philosopher Lessing (in Laocoön, 1766) between spatial and temporal arts, and his insistence on establishing what is essential to each medium, that to which it should be “true” (film theorists from Eisenstein to Carroll explicitly reference the Laocoön essay). Questions of media specificity also lurk in the background when critics (or ordinary spectators) call films “too theatrical” or “too static” or “too literary.” When spectators confidently announce, as if they were themselves inventing the idea rather than receiving it spoon-fed from the industry, that they “believe that film is entertainment,” they too are proffering a medium specificity argument, albeit a peculiarly unreflective one.
A medium specificity approach to the cinema assumes that each art form has uniquely particular norms and capabilities of expression. As Noël Carroll points out in Theorizing the Moving Image, the approach has two components, one internal (the posited relation between the medium and the art form that emerges from it) and one external (its differential relation to other art forms and media). An essentialist approach assumes (1) that film is good at doing certain things (e.g. depicting animated movement) ànd not others (staring at a static object), and (2) that film should follow its own logic and not be derivative of other arts, i.e. that it should do what it does best and not what other media do best.
The issue of medium specificity brings with it issues of comparative prestige. Literature especially has often been seen as a more venerable, more distinguished, essentially more “noble” medium than film. The results of millennia of literary production are compared with the average productions of a century of film, and literature is pronounced superior. The written word, which brings with it the aura of scripture, is said to be intrinsically a more subtle and precise medium for the delineation of thoughts and feelings. Yet it could just as easily be argued that cinema, precisely because of its heterogenous matter of expression, is capable of greater complexity and subtlety than literature. Cinema’s audiovisual nature and its five tracks authorize an infinitely richer combinatoire of syntactic and semantic possibilities. The cinema has extremely varied resources, even if some of those resources are rarely used (just as some of the resources of literature are rarely used). Film forms an ideal site for the orchestration of multiple genres, narrational systems, and forms of writing. Most striking is the high density of information available to the cinema. If the cliché phrase suggests that an “image is worth a thousand words” how much more worthy are the typical film’s hundreds of shots (each formed by hundreds if not thousands of images) as they interact simultaneously with phonetic sound, noises, written materials, and music? Interestingly, literature itself sometimes expresses a kind of “envy” of cinema, as when novelist Robbe-Grillet aspires to cinema’s perpetual present tense, or when Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert laments in Lolita that he, unlike a film director, has to “put the impact of an instantaneous vision into a sequence of words” in such a way that “their physical accumulation on the page impairs the actual flash, the sharp unity of impression.”
The question of cinematic specificity can be approached (a) technologically, in terms of the apparatus necessary to its production; (b) linguistically, in terms of film’s “materials of expression”; (c) historically, in terms of its origins (e.g. in daguerreotypes, dioramas, kinetoscopes); (d) institutionally, in terms of its processes of production (collaborative rather than individual, industrial rather than artisanal); and (e) in terms of its processes of reception (individual reader versus gregarious reception in movie theater). Whereas poets and novelists (usually) work alone, filmmakers (usually) collaborate with cinematographers, art directors, actors, technicians, etc. While novels have characters, films have characters and performers, a quite different thing. Thus Pierre Louÿs’s 1898 novel The Woman and the Puppet features one entity (the character Conchita) while the Buñuel adaptation of the novel That Obscure Object of Desire features three (or more) entities: the character, the two actresses who play the role, and the dubber who dubs both actresses.
Film theory also inherits the history of reflection on literary genre. Etymologically drawn from the Latin genus (“kind”), “genre” criticism began, at least in what came to be known as the “West,” as the classification of the diverse kinds of literary texts and the evolution of literary forms.1 In the Poetics Aristotle proposed to treat “poetry in its various kinds, noting the essential quality of each.” Aristotle’s famous definition of tragedy touched on diverse aspects of genre: the kinds of events portrayed (an action of a certain magnitude); the social rank of the characters (nobles, better than ourselves); the ethical qualities of the characters (their “tragic flaws”); narrative structure (dramatic reversals); and audience effects (the purging of pity and fear through “catharsis”). In the third book of Plato’s Republic, Socrates proposed a tripartite division of literary forms, based on their manner of presentation: (1) pure imitation of dialogue (tragedy, comedy); (2) direct recital (dithyramb); and (3) the mixture of the two (as in epic). Refining on Plato, Aristotle distinguished between the medium of representation, the objects represented and the mode of representation. The “mode of representation” produced the familiar triad of epic, drama, and lyric, while the “objects” of imitation generated class-based distinctions between tragedy (the actions of nobles) and comedy (the actions of the nobles’ presumed inferiors). The film world, as we shall see shortly, inherited this habit of arranging artworks into types, some drawn from literature (comedy, tragedy, melodrama) and others more specifically cinematic: views, actualities, tableaux, travelogues, animated cartoons.
A number of perennial doubts plague genre theory. Are genres really “out there” in the world, or are they merely the constructions of analysts? Is there a finite taxonomy of genres or are they in principle infinite? Are genres timeless Platonic essences or ephemeral, time-bound entities? Are genres culture-bound or transcultural? Does the term “melodrama” have the same meaning in Britain, France, Egypt, and Mexico? Should genre analysis be descriptive or proscriptive? Genre taxonomies in film have been notoriously imprecise and heterotopic, having some of the qualities of Foucault’s Chinese encyclopedia. While some genres are based on story content (the war film), others are borrowed from literature (comedy, melodrama) or from other media (the musical). Some are performer-based (the Astaire-Rogers films) or budget-based (blockbusters), while others are based on artistic status (the art film), racial identity (Black cinema), locate (the Western) or sexual orientation (Queer cinema). Some, like documentary and satire, might better be seen as “transgenres.” Subject matter is the weakest criterion for generic grouping because it fails to take into account how the subject is treated. The subject of nuclear war, for example, can be generically rendered as satire (Dr Strangelove), docu-fiction (War Game), porn (Café Flesh), melodrama (Testament, The Day After), and satiric compilation documentary (Atomic Café). The Hollywood-on-Hollywood film can be a melodrama (A Star is Born), a comedy (Show People), a musical (Singinʼ in the Rain), a vérité documentary (Lionʼs Love), a parody (Silent Movie), and so on.
Filmic genre, like literary genre before it, is also permeable to historical and social tensions. The entire course of western literature, Erich Auerbach (1953) argues in Mimesis, has worked to erode the elitist “separation of styles” inherent in the Greek tragic model, through a democratizing impulse (rooted in the Judaic notion of “all souls equal before God”) by which the dignity of a noble style was gradually accorded to ever “lower” classes of people. Genres come equipped, then, with class connotations. In literature, the novel, rooted in the common-sense world of bourgeois facticity, challenges the romance, linked to aristocratic notions of courtliness and chivalry. Art revitalizes itself by drawing on the strategies of previously marginalized forms and genres, in conformity with what Viktor Shklovsky calls the “law of the canonization of the junior branch.” Some films explicitly connect class and genre. King Vidor’s Show People, for example, pits vaudevillian slapstick against Frenchified costume drama, portraying slapstick as the genre of the unpretentious people, and costume drama as the genre of the royalty-identified elite.
Film theory also inherits antecedent questions concerning artistic “realism.” An uncommonly contested and elastic term, “realism” comes to film theory heavily laden with millennial encrustations from antecedent debates in philosophy and literature. Classical philosophy distinguished between Platonic realism – the assertion of the absolute and objective existence of universals, i.e. the belief that forms, essences, abstractions such as “beauty” and “truth” exist independent of human perception – and Aristotelian realism – the view that universals only exist within objects in the external world (rather than in an extra-material realm of essences). The term “realism” is confusing because these early philosophical usages often seem diametrically opposed to “common-sense” realism – the belief in the objective existence of facts and the attempt to see these facts without idealization.
The concept of realism, while ultimately rooted in the classical Greek conception of mimesis (imitation), gained programmatic significance only in the nineteenth century, when it came to denote a movement in the figurative and narrative arts dedicated to the observation and accurate representation of the contemporary world. A neologism coined by French critics, realism was originally linked to an oppositional attitude toward romantic and neo-classical models in fiction and painting. The realist novels of writers like Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, George Eliot, and Eça de Queiròs brought intensely individualized, seriously conceived characters into typical contemporary social situations. Underlying the realist impulse was an implicit teleology of social democratization favoring the artistic emergence of “more extensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of subject matter for problematic–existential representation” (Auerbach, 1953, p. 491). Literary critics distinguished between this deep, democratizing realism, and a shallow, reductionistic, and obsessively veristic “naturalism” – realized most famously in the novels of Emile Zola – which modeled its human representations on the biological sciences.
The beginnings of cinema coincided with a kind of crisis within the veristic project as expressed in the realist novel, in the naturalist play (with real meat hanging in staged butcher shops), and in obsessively mimetic exhibitions. An ongoing aesthetic debate within film theory has to do with arguments about whether cinema should be narrative or anti-narrative, realist or anti-realist; in short, with film’s relation to modernism. Artistic modernism, i.e. those movements in the arts (both in Europe and outside of Europe) which emerged in the late nineteenth century, flourished in the early decades of the twentieth century, and became institutionalized as “high modernism” after World War II, was interested in a non-representational art characterized by abstraction, fragmentation, and aggression. Despite its superficial modernity and technological razzle-dazzle, dominant cinema inherited the mimetic aspirations that Impressionism had relinquished in painting, that Alfred Jarry as well as the symbolists had attacked in the theater, and that James Joyce and Virginia Woolf had undermined in the novel. Yet in the cinema this realist/modernist dichotomy can easily be overdrawn. When Hitchcock collaborates with Salvador Dali on the dream sequence in Spellbound is he still pre-modernist? Was Hitchcock ever pre-modernist? When Buñuel makes genre films within the Mexican industry, does he remain an avant-gardist?2
The issue of realism also had to do with intercultural dialogue. In the case of European modernism, as Bakhtin and Medvedev (1985) suggest in The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, non-European cultures became the catalysts for the supercession, within Europe, of a retrograde culture-bound verism. Africa, Asia, and the Americas provided a reservoir of alternative trans-realist forms and attitudes. In film theory, Sergei Eisenstein invoked extra-European traditions (Hindi rasa, Japanese kabuki) as part of his attempt to construct a film aesthetic which went beyond mere mimesis. A realist or, better, illusionist style was revealed by the modernist movement to be just one of many possible strategies, and one marked, furthermore, by a certain provinciality. Vast regions of the world, and long periods of artistic history, had shown little allegiance to or even interest in realism. Kapila Malik Vatsayan speaks of a very different aesthetic that held sway in much of the world:
A common aesthetic theory governed all the arts, both performing and plastic, in South and South East Asia. Roughly speaking, the common trends may be identified as the negation of the principle of realistic imitation in art, the establishment of a hierarchy of realities where the principle of suggestion through abstraction is followed and the manifestation in the arts of the belief that time is cyclic rather than linear.… This tradition of the arts appears to have been persuasive from Afghanistan and India to Japan and Indonesia over two thousand years of history. (Quoted in Armes, 1974, p. 135)
In India, a two-thousand year tradition of theater, which has impacted Indian cinema, circles back to the classical Sanskrit drama, which tells the myths of Hindu culture through an aesthetic based less on coherent character and linear plot than on the subtle modulations of mood and feeling (rasa). Chinese painting, in the same vein, has often ignored both perspective and realism. The African art which revitalized modernist painting, similarly, cultivated what Robert Farris Thompson calls “mid-point mimesis,” i.e. a style that avoided both illusionistic realism and hyperabstraction.
Non-realist traditions also exist within the West, of course, and in any case there is nothing intrinsically “bad” about occidental realism. But as the product of a specific culture and historical moment, it is just one of many possible aesthetics. Indeed, realism as a norm can be seen as provincial even within Europe. In Rabelais and His World Bakhtin speaks of the “carnivalesque” as a counter-hegemonic tradition with a history that runs from Greèk Dionysian festivals and the Roman Saturnalia, through the grotesque realism of the medieval “carnivalesque,” on through Shakespeare and Cervantes, and finally to Jarry and Surrealism. As theorized by Bakhtin, carnival embraces an anti-classical aesthetic that rejects formal harmony and unity in favor of the asymmetrical, the heterogenous, the oxymoronic, the miscegenated. Carnival’s “grotesque realism” turns conventional aesthetics on its head in order to locate a new kind of popular, convulsive, rebellious beauty, one that dares to reveal the grotesquerie of the powerful and the latent beauty of the “vulgar.” Within carnival, all hierarchical distinctions, all barriers, all norms and prohibitions, are temporarily suspended, while a qualitatively different kind of communication, based on “free and familiar contact,” is established. Within carnival’s cosmic gaiety, laughter has deèp philosophical meaning; it constitutes a special perspective on experience, one no less profound than seriousness and tears.
In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics Bakhtin speaks of the “Menippea,” a perennial artistic genre linked to a carnivalesque vision of the world and marked by oxymoronic characters, multiple styles, violation of the norms of etiquette, and the comic confrontation of philosophical points of view. Although not originally conceived as an instrument for cinematic analysis, the category of the Menippea has the capacity to deprovincialize film-critical discourse, which is too often tied to nineteenth-century conventions of verisimilitude. Filmmakers like Buñuel, Godard, Ruiz, and Rocha, in this perspective, are not the mere negation of the dominant tradition but rather heirs of this other tradition, renovators of a perennial mode characterized by protean vitality.
Film and Film Theory: The Beginnings
Film theory is what Bakhtin would call a “historically situated utterance.” And just as one cannot separate the history of film theory from the history of the arts and of artistic discourse, so one cannot separate it from history tout court, defined by Fredric Jameson as “that which hurts” but also as that which inspires. In the long view, the history of film, and therefore of film theory, must be seen in the light of the growth of nationalism, within which cinema became a strategic instrument for “projecting” national imaginaries. It must also be seen in relation to colonialism, the process by which the European powers reached positions of economic, military, political, and cultural hegemony in much of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. (While nations had often annexed adjacent territories, what was new in European colonialism was its planetary reach, its attempted submission of the world to a single “universal” regime of truth and power.) This process reached its apogee at the turn of the twentieth century, when the earth surface controlled by European powers rose from 67 percent (1884) to 84.4 percent (1914), a situation that began to be reversed only with the disintegration of the European colonial empires after World War II.1
The beginnings of cinema, then, coincided precisely with the very height of imperialism. (Of all the celebrated “coincidences” – of the beginnings of cinema with the beginnings of psychoanalysis, with the rise of nationalism, with the emergence of consumerism – it is this coincidence with imperialism that has been least studied.) The first film screenings by Lumière and Edison in the 1890s occurred shortly after the “scramble for Africa” that erupted in the late 1870s, the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, the massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890, and countless other imperial misadventures. The most prolific film-producing countries of the silent period – Britain, France, the USA, Germany – also “happened” to be among the leading imperialist countries, in whose clear interest it was to laud the colonial enterprise. The cinema combined narrative and spectacle to tell the story of colonialism from the colonizer’s perspective. Thus dominant cinema has spoken for the “winners” of history, in films which idealized the colonial enterprise as a philanthropic civilizing mission motivated by a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny. Programmatically negative portrayals helped rationalize the human costs of the imperial enterprise.
The dominant European/American form of cinema not only inherited and disseminated a hegemonic colonial discourse, but also created a powerful hegemony of its own through monopolistic control of film distribution and exhibition in much of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Eurocolonial cinema thus mapped history not only for domestic audiences but also for the world, in a manner which has profound implications for theories of film spectatorship. African spectators were prodded to identify with Rhodes, Stanley, and Livingstone against Africans themselves, thus engendering a battle of national imaginaries within the fissured colonial spectator. For the European spectator, then, the cinematic experience mobilized a rewarding sense of national and imperial belonging, but for the colonized, the cinema produced a sense of deep ambivalence, mingling the identification provoked by cinematic narrative with intense resentment.
The medium of cinema, as Ella Shohat has pointed out, formed part of the same discursive continuum that included such disciplines as geography, history, anthropology, archeology, and philosophy. The cinema could “chart a map of the world, like the cartographer; it could tell stories and chronicle events, like the historiographer; it could ‘dig’ into the past of distant civilizations, like the archeologist; and it could narrate the customs and habits of exotic peoples, like the ethnographer.”2 The audiovisual media, in sum, were available as instruments for the intellectual dispossession of non-European cultures. That the implications of this dispossession were noted, overall, only by the victims of these processes suggests the extent to which Eurocentric habits of mind have been taken as axiomatic by most film scholars and theorists. It took hard work, as Toni Morrison might say, not to notice such things.
The common assumption that the cinema is an exclusively western technology is incorrect. Science and technology are often thought of as western, but historically Europe has largely borrowed them from others: the alphabet, algebra, astronomy, printing, gunpowder, the magnetic compass, mechanical clockwork, irrigation, vulcanization, and quantitative cartography all came from outside Europe. While the cutting-edge of technological development over recent centuries has undoubtedly centered on Western Europe and North America, this development has been very much a “joint venture” (in which Europe owned most of the shares) facilitated in the past by colonial exploitation and now by neo-colonial “brain draining” of the “Third World.” The wealth of Europe, as Fanon put it in The Wretched of the Earth, “is literally the creation of the Third World.” If the industrial revolutions of Europe were made possible by the control of the resources of colonized lands and the exploitation of slave labor – Britain’s industrial revolution, for example, was partially financed by infusions of wealth generated by Latin American mines and plantations – then in what sense is it meaningful to speak only of Western technology, industry, and science?
The object of film theory – films themselves – is profoundly international in nature. Although the cinema began in such countries as the United States, France, and Britain, it quickly spread throughout the world, with capitalist-based film production appearing roughly simultaneously in many places, including in what are now called Third World countries. Brazil’s cinematic bela epoca, for example, occurred between 1908 and 1911, before the country was infiltrated by American distribution companies in the wake of World War I. In the 1920s India was producing more films than Great Britain, and countries like the Philippines were producing over 50 films a year by the 1930s. What we now call Third World cinema, taken in a broad sense, far from being a marginal appendage to First World cinema, has actually produced most of the world’s feature films. If one excludes made-for-TV films, India is the leading producer of fiction films in the world, producing between 700 and 1,000 feature films a year. Asian countries, taken together, produce over half of the yearly world production. Burma, Pakistan, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and even Bangladesh produce over 50 feature films a year. Despite its hegemonic position, then, Hollywood has contributed only a fraction of the annual worldwide production of feature films. “Standard” film histories, and standard film theory, unfortunately, rarely engage with the implications of this filmic cornucopia. The Hollywoodcentric formulation reduces India’s giant film industry, which produces more films than Hollywood, and whose hybrid aesthetics mingle Hollywood continuity codes and production values with the anti-illusionist values of Hindu mythology, to a mere mimicry of Hollywood. Even the branch of cinema studies that is critical of Hollywood often recenters Hollywood as a kind of langue in relation to which all other forms are but dialectal variants; thus the avant-garde becomes little more than the shadowy alter ego of Hollywood, a festival of negations of dominant cinema.
Early Silent Film Theory
Reflexion on film as a medium began virtually with the medium itself. Indeed, the etymological meanings of the original names given to the cinema already point to diverse ways of “envisioning” the cinema and even foreshadow later theories. “Biograph” and “animatographe” emphasize the recording of life itself (a strong current, later, in the writings of Bazin and Kracauer). “Vitascope” and “Bioscope” emphasize the looking at life, and thus shift emphasis from recording life to the spectator and scopophilia (the desire to look), a concern of 1970s psychoanalytic theorists. “Chronophotographe” stresses the writing of time (and light) and thus anticipates Deleuze’s (Bergsonian) emphasis on the “time image,” while “Kinetoscope,” again anticipating Deleuze, stresses the visual observation of movement. “Scenarograph” emphasizes the recording of stories or scenes, calling attention both to decor and to the stories that take place within that decor, and thus implicitly privileges a narrative cinema. “Cinematographe,” and later “cinema,” call attention to the transcription of movement.
One might even expand the discussion to examine the proto-theoretical implications of the etymologies of the words for pre-cinematic devices: “camera obscura” (dark room) evokes the processes of photography, Marx’s comparison of ideology to a camera obscura, and the name of a feminist film journal. “Magic lantern” evokes the perennial theme of “movie magic” along with Romanticism’s creative “lamp” and the Enlightenment’s “lantern.” “Phantasmagoria” and “phasmotrope” (spectacle-turn) evoke fantasy and the marvelous, while “cosmorama” evokes the global world-making ambitions of the cinema. Marey’s “fusil cinématographique” (cinematic rifle) evokes the “shooting” process of film while calling attention to the aggressive potential of the camera as a weapon, a metaphor resurrected in the “guerrilla cinema” of the revolutionary filmmakers of the 1960s. “Mutoscope” suggests a viewer of change, while “phenakistiscope” evokes “cheating views,” a foreshadowing of Baudrillard’s simulacrum. Many of the names for the cinema include some variant on “graph” (Greek “writing” or “transcription”) and thus anticipate later tropes of filmic authorship and écriture. The German lichtspiel (play of light) is one of the few names to reference light. Not surprisingly, given the “silent” beginnings of the medium, the appelations given the cinema rarely reference sound, although Edison saw the cinema as an extension of the phonograph and gave his pre-cinematic devices such names as “optical phonograph” and “kinetophonograph” (the writing of movement and sound). The initial attempts to synchronize sound and image generated such coinages as “cameraphone” and “cinephone.” In Arabic the cinema was called sum mutaharika (moving image or form), while in Hebrew the word for cinema evolved from reinoa (watching movement) to kolnoa
