film studies critical approaches introduction

8/10/2019 film studies critical approaches Introduction

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ntroduction

There is no shortage of anthologies introducing key theories and figures in the field offilm studies. This anthology does not aim to join them. Less dutifully, our aim is not topay homage to the past but instead to distil key issues and problems of the contemporaryfield that are, as the British Workers Education Association once demanded of theknowledge it sought, really useful for the future. In this, the second century of moving

images, new questions, and new knowledge, animate the field. The essays collected here,many of them published for the first time, offer not grids to be a pp lied, bu t tools ofinvestigation through which to open up and explore the questions that confront us at thestart of the new century. They begin by asking of the specific areas with which they areconcerned: What do we need to know now? What theories, concepts, and methodologieswill help us to know? From this starting point they move on either to reframe or todepart from the concerns of the 1970s when film first became an academic subject o fstudy. The first aim of this collection is thus to explore the field in the light of thesereorientations. In the process we are not so much discarding the old questions nd

knowledge, but rethinking, refiguring, and restructuring whatis

most useful from thispast. t is in the spirit of postmodernist self-fashioning of new identities out of old thatwe call this book einventing film studies

This reinvention centres around five key issues: the interdisciplinary location of filmstudies as a means of engaging with the massness of cinema; film understood as asensory as well as meaning-producing medium; the conception of cinema asconstituting an alternative public sphere ; history and the postmodern; and, finally, theimpending dissolution of cinema within globalised multimedia and of Western filmstudies in their transnational theorisation.

First, then, film studies can no longer afford to ignore its interdisciplinary location.or some writers in this volume film studies reinvents itself by intersecting withneighbouring disciplines - medi studies, cultural studies, visual. culture - in anengagement with film as popular m d mass cuiture. This theoreticai move relocates themassness of the media at the heart of our theories of mass culture. t aims, as JaneGaines argues in her return to Ernst Bloch, to produce a theory for the mass rather thanabout them. Previous efforts to establish film studies as a distinct field elaboratedaesthetic, psychic, and ideological structures which separated film from the mess ofmovie-making and movie-going, providing disciplinary distance nd professional

justification, while depending on the silent presence of the mass, interpellated as filmtheory s intellectual other . For its part, media studies focused on issues of masscommunications, political economy, public policy, and media imperialism, nddetached itself from the soft issues of aesthetics, fantasy, and the body. Paradoxically,


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Introduction

the politically despairing perception of postmodernity as the saturation of the publicsphere by the mass-produced image has driven many critics back to the FrankfurtSchool. This encounter permits new readings of its work which allows us to face up to,rather than reject out of hand, the massness of modernity and to include the analyst as

situated within, rather than outside, the mass (Chapters 6, 7, 9, and 18).This retrieval of the massness of modernity paves the way to a second key issue of

reinvention: attention to the sensory experience of the cinematic mass medium. Whereearlier film studies had tended either to ignore or condemn the apparently mindless,sensual, and affective pleasures of film viewing, many of the essays in this collectionconfront the need to take account of movie-going as a concrete, physical experience with

distinctive, and historically changing, sensory appeal. Without shirking the massproduced nature of the cinematic production of the senses , several authors locate thisphysical-sensual appeal as the very hallmark of modernism now reconceived under the

influence ofpostmodernism (Chapters 3, 17, 18, and 19).Film studies suspicion of the massness of cinema rested to a large degree on the

perception of dominance - by ideology, by complicit formal structures, by anunderlying psychic substructure to which all difference would be reduced. Dominancelocked film studies into an unproductive binarism of progressive versus reactionary text.The political point of film analysis was to separate the progressive from the ideologicallycontaminated or the retrogressively nostalgic. Now the reinsertion of the body and theaffective into film reconceives the social, cultural, and aesthetic as equally significant butdistinct factors, mutually determining but not reducible to one another. This suggests

for some that ideology as formerly conceived is no longer useful as the basis of atotalising theory of film (Chapters 6 and 11), while others argue that a way ofreconceptualising the relation of films and the political is urgently needed (Chapters 3,5, and 20).

Understanding our mass-mediated culture as the only terrain on which we have towork has thus gradually led to a third major reinvention: the displacement ofbinarismby a dialogical conception of the media as constituting arenas of exchange andnegotiation, in what is now conceived as an alternative public sphere (Chapters 7 and18). This shift has enabled many of these essays to reinfuse aesthetic concepts such as

realism, melodrama, genre, and fantasy with analytical purchase on the cinema slocation within mass culture and on the way it works as public sphere. Thus aestheticconcepts that had until recently been caught up either in a deliberately self-distancingformalism or trapped in an ideological binarism have again become useful. Many ofthese essays wrest the concept of an imaginary from its narrowly psychoanalytic

, definition to define the space where reality is discursively shaped and a resulting social; imaginary becomes materially and aesthetically concrete. A key perception emerging

rom these essays is the significance of the image and imaginary as sites of cultural, construction (Chapter 15 and contest (Chapter 12 . In particular, the rethinking and

use of genre in many of these essays (Chapters 12, 13, 15, and 18 suggest its renewedvalue for exploring the location of cinema at the heart of a social imaginary. So wheregenres, modes, and cultural formations were once viewed as in the service of anoverarching dominant narrative, we can now relocate them in a more complex matrix of


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cultural forms, practices, and effects that do not necessarily add up to master narrativesChapter 3) butwhid1 Qa_ v:gpglitical purchase

TI e present challenge of postmodernity - even if one does not accept the radicalrupture of the modern by the postmodern and of old technologies by new - has, ifnothing else, compelled a new urgency in the understanding of film history. As TomGunning demonstrates in his essay on cinema s forgotten future (Chapter 17), writtenafter I 00 years of films , history is never fully about then and always about now. A fourthreinvention thus occurs as the pressure of the notion of the postmodern has created anew perception of the massness of the public sphere and opened up the possibility of anew kind of history- a history for the present. The essays included in Part 4, on theReturn to History (Chapters r 6 - 1 9 ) , a r o n g ~ t hseveral others (Chapters 7 20, and 23),

share a sense of fluid identities and total mediation of all aspects of life that necessitatesa reinvention of the very concept of cinema.

The massness and global reach of film raise for some of these essays the issue ofdifferent national conditions of modernisation. These include the ambivalent formationof the popular in the encounter between indigenous cultural traditions, Western mediaimperialism, national politics, and the appropriateness of the theories and protocols ofWestern film studies. For Rey Chow, writing about Chinese cinema (Chapter 21), a keyquestion is how a third world cinema manufactures an alterity that it gives back to thefirst world but also what alterity it sees in its own reflection. For Ravi Vasudevan,writing about Bombay cinema (Chapter 8), a key question is how the spectator of atransitional/national cinema is addressed, while Ana L6pez, writing about Latin

American cinemas (Chapter 22), examines the various ways they have faced up te )Hollywood. For all of these writers the film medium constitutes a vital political issue. Asmass media break down national barriers and national attempts to reinvent discretecultural identities, the reviewing of film studies from positions outside the West forcesthe field to a fifth arena of reinvention - remaking itself as a site of international .e x c h ~ C h a p t e r s6 8 and 20-22). __ j

Predominantly, however, this volume - with its British and US co-editors -represents a self-reflexive venture on the part of a specifically located Anglo-Americanfilm studies. In asking Where is film studies now? many of these essays localise the

grand theories that once guided the establishment of the discipline in the 1970s while atthe same time seeking more global understanding. The essays written on either side ofthe Atlantic suggest the impact of their different historical, cultural, and politicallocations on the development of the discipline and the uses of theory for each. Theinception of film studies in Britain outside the academy, and its continuing politicalstruggles for existence within it, account for a stronger sense of frustration in some of theBritish essays with both the political stagnation of a grand theory based on ideologicaland subjective interpellation and postmodernism s apparent loss of grip on culturalpolitics. In contrast, the blockage perceived in some of the American essays lies in a

textual totality which, distilled from the neo-Marxist and structuralist theoreticalferment of the 1970s, emphasises a universal poetics and cognitive effectivity of anarrative form remote from the mess of daily cultural practice and political demands.

einventingfilm studies has five sections of four to five chapters each. The first two or


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three essays of each section open up key problems, issues, and debates, exploring theconsequences of particular theoretical approaches. A case study in each section offers aconcrete example of what these approaches can deliver in relation to a particular work orgenre. Part , Really useful theory , begins with questions about film meaning and film

theory, asking why we need film theory and what are the really useful theories today.Part 2 Film as mass culture , poses the relation of film studies to mass culture,refiguring the nature of the Hollywood dream factory in relation to hopeful wish-fulfilment, reception research, stardom, and the public sphere. Its case study looks atBombay cinema, one of the most popular cinemas in the world. Part 3, Questions ofaesthetics , tackles the formal and fantasmatic dimensions of cinema, rethinking suchkey topics as the classical text, ideology, genre, and aesthetics. Its case study is of a genrethat has heretofore gone unrecognised in film studies: the ubiquitous and essential trialmovie. Part 4, The return to history , then takes up the many new ways historians have

engaged in theoretically informed historiography, asking first what film history is thenengaging in historical research on the mass audience s sensory involvement in themedium. Part 5 Cinema in the age of global multimedia , concludes with essaysinvestigating local and global identities in a postmodern, international context whichincludes unequal exchanges of media products and theories, a case study on the labourof social fantasy in Chinese cinema, and new directions for technologies of multimedia.

Acknowledgements: Special thanks go to Lesley Riddle for patience and enthusiasm, toPaul Fitzgerald Matthew Collins and Luke Collins for friendly sustenance, and to ll our friendsand colleagues whose work and support have contributed to this book.


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eally useful theory

Editors introduction

Most of the contributors to this section on theory agree that whatever filmtheory is today it can no longer be the kind of overarching, grand theory thatflourished in the 1970s. These theories tended towards tolalising philosophicalor scientific quests for big truths, whether truths of history and revolution (Marx,Althusser), sell and identity (Freud, lacan), or language (Saussure, semiotics).

achwriter may define

thenature,

thepitfalls, and

theultimate value o f grandtheory differently, but all agree that the kind of theorising about cinema that

needs to be done today must be more concretely located and, as Bill Nicholsputs it in Chapter 3, historicised. Theory must now be seen as havingdebatable historical legacies rather than philosophical essences. Once placedwithin these debatable contexts, Nichols argues, theories can become reallyuseful conceptual frames within which historically situated generalisations canaddress significance and value. Theory, like cinema itself, thus comes to beseen as a socially constructed, historical category, serving socially significant

and historical and therefore politicised ends.Geoffrey Noweii-Smith, in the opening essay, How films mean, or, from

aesthetics to semiotics and half-way back again , reviews the current state offilm theory by asking how the emphasis on film meaning came about andwhether it can be sustained in the relative absence of the grand theories thatonce animated the field. Arguing that the grand theories of history, linguistics,and psychoanalysis had displaced an earlier concern with aesthetics, NoweiiSmith illustrates the various ways in which aesthetic questions, albeit in adifferent form, ore back on the agenda. Yet if Noweii-Smith, along with other

contributors to this part of the book, is critical of overarching grand theories,he does not will the end of theory or even the end of the (now more limited andsituated) political goals and loundational concerns of many of those earliergrand theories.


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6 Part : Really useful theory

In similar vein, in Chapter 2, Gill Branstan dissects same al the blockagesal grand theory far those who have most practical need of it - teachers andtheir students seeking to understand the work of media in the world in whichwe find ourselves. Nevertheless she endorses the value of theory (and curiosity)

as ' life skills for the twenty-first century' (page 31 . Arguing for both theordinary nature of theory as well as its necessarily distanced and reflexive

specialisation, Branston answers the question, Why theory?' with an accountof some of the more modest yet irrefutable theoretical achievements that haveabsolutely changed the way we think and argue about films: the recognition ofthe ways realism is coded, the recognition of genres that depict repetition nd

difference, and the recognition of stars as constructed.In endorsing the kind of 'middle range theorising that moves easily from

bodies of evidence to more general arguments and implications' (page 29)

favoured by Bordwell and Carrell in their, perhaps inaptly, named book Past-theory, Branston stresses their political value. This call t political situotednessis pursued by Bill Nichols in Chapter 3. He vigorously argues the value for filmtheory of three key concepts- visual culture, representation, and rhetoric- thatretain a foundation in grand theory but provide a more culturally andmulticulturolly sensitive perspective. While not specific to film theory, but ratherinhabiting a cultural studies framework, these concepts, unlike the cognitivepsychology of Bordwell, enable us to think about film in relation to the social,political, and identilicatory concerns that motivated grand theory but in more

historically and locally specific ways. These concepts are broad and fluidenough to situate film studies within larger interdisciplinary frameworks withinwhich it can carry on conversations that will continue to vitalise its work.

Nichols interestingly situates film studies, along with other new disciplinessuch as women's studies and gay and lesbian studies, within a problematic ofcultural visibility that encompasses both cultural difference and the appeal tothe senses os a crucial, but often unacknowledged, form of knowledgeproduction. Thus visual culture, a field of study and a conceptual frame thatextends well beyond the specific medium of film, allows film studies to take upissues such as the appeal of cinema to the senses (addressed in Part 4 in thechapters by Hansen and Williams (Chapters 18 and 19)) that have beendismissed in earlier theory.

Steven Cohan, in a case study on Singin in the Rain demonstrates theusefulness of theory in generating film interpretation (Chapter 4). Interpretingan enduringly popular, now canonical, musical of the 1 950s from a numberof different, theoretically informed, perspectives, Cohan elegantly illustrateshow meaning changes according to the theoretical framework applied. Bydemonstrating how Films exist as textual objects of inquiry thot lend themselvesto theoretically informed interpretation Cohon reasserts the value of textualreading even os he shows how various it con be. These different perspectivesdo not rigorously duplicate the march from totolising grand theory' to the moresituated cultural studies theories described by some of the other authors in this


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Part Really useful theory 7

section. However, the initial structuralist anolysis of the film's norrotiveopposition does follow a rough development from structuralism throughcultural studies ond queer theory. Structural opposition gives woy to a 'poststructuralist' Derridian deconstruction which gives way to a psychoonolyticand feminist interpretation of sexual difference to a cultural studiesinterpretation of Gene Kelly's star status too queering of this image. As Cohonshows, each of these theoretical interpretations olso yields on onolyticalmethod ond a politics thot determines whet we see and why it motters.

In asking the question, Who (and what) is it for?', Tessa Parkins exploresthe relationship between the academy, theory, film-making, ond politics(Chopter 5). like Bill Nichols she revisits the 'grand theories' of the 1960s and1970s ond the various 'turns' taken by film studies since in on attempt todissolve the problems they posed ond to accommodate the changing contextsof both politico and academic scenes. In so doing Parkins outlines a somewhatdifferent, British, theoretical history from that described by Nichols. or Britishfilm studies, 'empiricism' rather then 'formalism' hos been the main problem,with 'politics', arising outside higher education, forcing theory- especially the'continental', neo-Marxist ond psychoanalytic kind - on to the reluctontagendas of a number of ocademic disciplines. In the heady decodes of the1960s ond 1970s, film theory was developed in the pages of Screen, in British

ilm Institute Summer Schools, and among the widening circles of teochers,cultural activists, and film-mokers in order to promote o larger 'film culture' as

partof

an interventionist cultural politics.Tessa

Parkins offers an acute analysisof the political, theoretical, and cultural reasons for the dispersal of this energy,while reminding us not only of its achievements but also of the paramountimportance, exemplified in the needs of marginalised, oppressed, andunrepresented groups, of developing holistic theoretical frameworks capableof grasping the shifting relations of capitalism, the media, audiences, and theworkings of cultural power.


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How films mean or fromaesthetics to semiotics andhalf-way back again

eoffrey Noweii-Smith

The revolution which took place in film studies in the 1970s was, to use the jargon of thetime, highly overdetermined. t had a significant political dimension, spun off from theradicalism of 1968. Philosophically it vaunted its materialism, in opposition to idealismsof every kind. Thirdly (this list is not intended to be exhaustive), it w s aligned with the

grand structuralist project to understand human culture s a whole in terms of patternsof meaning.

In a sense this revolution has done its work too well. t has successfully shifted thefocus of film study. Theory has come first and foremost to concern itself with meaning,often with the aim of bringing to the surface those aspects of meaning which can becharacterised s ideological. Meanwhile, the impulse behind the shift in focus has beenlost or mislaid, leaving unexplained the reasons why it w s thought to be necessary andwhat it w s that the revolution set out to overthrow. Changes in intellectual fashion -structuralism has been post -ed and Marxism overhastily consigned to the capacious

dustbin of history have left much of film theory high and dry, no longer supported bythe more general theories on which it used to rely.

In reviewing the current state of film theory it is therefore worth focusing on twoquestions in particular: first, how did the current focus on meaning come about; and,second, can it be sustained in the absence of the impulses that gave it force at thebeginning?

In the definition given to it by the magazine creen in the mid-1970s, film theory wasseen s addressing three distinct but overlapping problems: the relation of the film to theworld it represents; the internal organisation of filmic discourses; and the reception ofthe film by the spectator. The methodologies for investigating these problems werederived, respectively, from historical materialism, semiotics, and psychoanalysis.Subsequent developments have seen historical materialism sidelined, psychoanalysiscontested, and semiotics, at a scientific level, more or less abandoned. But the problem

film studies critical approaches introduction

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