)LOP7KHRU\LQ)UDQFH

6DUDK&RRSHU

)UHQFK6WXGLHV$4XDUWHUO\5HYLHZ9ROXPH1XPEHU-XO\SS
$UWLFOH

3XEOLVKHGE\2[IRUG8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV

)RUDGGLWLRQDOLQIRUPDWLRQDERXWWKLVDUWLFOH
KWWSVPXVHMKXHGXDUWLFOH

Access provided by Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana (8 Jun 2016 18:25 GMT)

French Studies, Vol. LXVI, No. 3, 376 – 382
doi:10.1093/fs/kns078

ÉTAT PRÉSENT
FILM THEORY IN FRANCE

SARAH COOPER
KING’S COLLEGE LONDON

Ever since the Lumière brothers screened their first film in 1895 at the Grand
Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, the fascinated response that this
shadow world elicited pivoted on questions of understanding exactly what the
new phenomenon was that the viewers were seeing and experiencing. The initial
captivating potential of cinema inspired the speculative concerns of the very
texts that were to form the body of early film theory in France, eclectic though
such writings on film within the classical period were.1 The ontology of film, its
impact on its spectators, its hermaphroditic birth as both art and science, its re-
lation to and difference from the other arts, its connection with its context,
whether sociological, geographical, or historical: these were just some of the
varied focal points of theoretical interest. The era of energetic, non-systematic
theorizing that extended, roughly, from cinema’s inception to the end of the
Second World War may now be long gone, but its legacy is still being worked
through. The present state of film theory in France registers this, albeit tacitly at
times and in spite of the declarations of epistemological breaks and historical
turns that have occurred over the years. Likewise, the multiple changes that have
taken place since the end of the war also feed into debates at the cutting-edge of
film theory today.
During the post-war period up to the late 1950s the theories of André Bazin
were highly influential. Bazin (1918 – 1958) was one of the co-founders, with
Joseph-Marie Lo Duca and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, of Cahiers du cinéma in
1951; in this and other publications he championed Italian neo-realism and also
celebrated a particular style of filming that valorized duration, the long take, and
deep focus (inaugurated by Orson Welles in Citizen Kane in 1941). He also sus-
tained a belief in the indexical link between film and its filmed subjects (that is,
between the subject and his or her imprint on photo-sensitive material), a con-
nection he had first proposed, with reference to photography, in his article
‘Ontologie de l’image photographique’, an early version of which appeared in
1945.2 This short piece reveals a further element in Bazin’s thinking that contrib-
uted to the impact that his work would have on his contemporaries and which

1
For an overview of the richness of these early writings see Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave,
1915– 1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984) and French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/
Anthology, 2 vols (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
2
André Bazin, ‘Ontologie de l’image photographique’, in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?, I : Ontologie et langage (Paris:
Cerf, 1958), pp. 9 – 17. The earlier version was published in Les Problèmes de la peinture, ed. by Gaston Diehl
(Lyon: Confluences, 1945).

# The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for French Studies.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
 ÉTAT PRÉSENT: FILM THEORY IN FRANCE 377
would persist into current film theory: he argued poignantly that the photo-
graphic image contended with mortality but actually saved its subject from a
second spiritual death. The image of the Turin Shroud that accompanies the
publication of ‘Ontologie de l’image photographique’ (1958) suggests a bond
between the material and the spiritual dimensions, and this is a connection that
two theorists indebted to Bazin — Amédée Ayfre (1922 – 1964) and Henri Agel
(1911 – 2008) — were to focus on in their work on film. Both men were inter-
ested in producing a phenomenology of film, an endeavour cut short, in Ayfre’s
case, by his untimely death in a car accident, but continued thereafter by Agel.3
Ayfre believed that phenomenology unveiled a truth that could not be reduced
to logic.4 For Agel, rather than approach the art work from the standpoint of
linguistics or some other discipline, one must give oneself over to it on its own
grounds, which are those of experience rather than of knowledge or science. In
his understanding, which reveals the influence of both Bazin’s and Ayfre’s think-
ing, cinema is the experiential site of the expression of a world. In this particular
theory the cinema screen was deemed to provide the window on to a beyond,
whether a world of essences or a spiritual dimension. Praised for their originality
but criticized for failing to engage with the material conditions of cinema,5 these
thinkers were nevertheless the first to bring a phenomenological approach to the
field of film theory. The current resurgence of interest in phenomenological film
theory owes a great deal to subsequent critical dialogue with this first emergence,
yet is underpinned by a different philosophy. Although such interest is principally
rooted in an Anglo-American context, its philosophical heritage lies in the work of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty himself had a connection with film studies
in the 1940s (contemporaneous with Bazin yet independent of the latter’s sphere
of activity);6 this early excursion into the field predates his broader philosophical
work, which has acquired a new-found relevance within contemporary film
theory, especially in the more recent study of embodied responses to cinema and
the film experience.7
The political backlash against Bazin’s work that followed his death in the late
1950s went hand in hand with a growing preference for theories that rationa-
lized a structured understanding of film. Between the 1950s and the revolution-
ary late 1960s a sea change would take place in theoretical pursuits in film
studies, as across other disciplines within the humanities: film theorists turned to
linguistics to satisfy a desire for order and for a rigorous, rule-bound way of
3
Henri Agel, Poétique du cinéma: manifeste essentialiste ([Fribourg]: Éditions du Signe, 1973).
4
A theologian of the ‘septième art’, Ayfre often signed himself Abbé or p.s.s. (père Saint Sulpicien). Agel
speaks tenderly and fondly of Ayfre, whom he saw seldom and with whom he collaborated occasionally; see
Henri Agel, ‘Préface’, in Amédée Ayfre, Un cinéma spiritualiste, ed. by René Prédal (Paris: Cerf;
Condé-sur-Noireau: Corlet, 2004), pp. 5 –12.
5
See J. Dudley Andrew’s excellent outline of the work of Ayfre and Agel, but also note his critique on pre-
cisely these grounds, in ‘The Challenge of Phenomenology: Amédée Ayfre and Henri Agel’, in The Major Film
Theories: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 242 – 53.
6
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Le Cinéma et la nouvelle psychologie: que veut dire le film?’, in Sens et non-sens
(Paris: Nagel, 1948), pp. 61 – 75.
7
On this fitting revival of his philosophy see the pioneering work of Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye:
A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
378 SARAH COOPER

understanding the conditions of possibility for films to signify and become

meaningful to their audiences. Prior to the establishment of structuralism within
the academy of film studies in France, however, a different movement arose that
paved the way for a more holistic, systematized approach to film.
The work of Gilbert Cohen-Séat (1907 – 1980) and Étienne Souriau (1892 –
1979) was central to the post-war film era and the initial drive towards a more
structured approach to film. Cohen-Séat coined the term ‘filmologie’ for the im-
partial and scientifically objective study of the filmic, the cinematic, and their
links to the social sphere. In September 1946, after the publication of his book
Essai sur les principes d’une philosophie du cinéma,8 he founded the Association
Française pour la Recherche Filmologique. This filmological branch of study
would involve numerous disciplines and subject areas, from sociology to aesthet-
ics, psychology to linguistics, physiology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, and its
approach would be characterized by methodical thinking and rigorous observa-
tion. In July 1947 the Revue internationale de filmologie was founded,9 as was the
Institut de Filmologie de l’Université de Paris, which took up residence at the
Sorbonne in September 1948. A number of significant publications emerged
from this filmology research, not least of which was Étienne Souriau’s edited
collection of essays L’Univers filmique;10 some of the terms used in this volume —
‘diégétique’ and ‘profilmique’, for example — continue to form part of the tech-
nical lexicon within film studies today. Another important way in which the
legacy of filmology lives on is in its interdisciplinary connections, most notably
with philosophy, connections that were also evident in the early twentieth
century.
In the 1940s, filmologists were already bringing out the interdisciplinary focus
of the institutionalization of film theory, and philosophy was very much a part
of the Institut de Filmologie from its moment of inception. This Institute
housed a truly collective research endeavour that extended into technical, com-
parative, and psychological studies, as well as philosophy, and involved
Merleau-Ponty, along with Raymond Bayer, Pierre Francastel, Georges Sadoul,
Léon Moussinac, Mario Roques, and Henri Wallon. However, an engagement on
the part of filmmakers and theorists with philosophy specifically had been
present in France much earlier. The debate that Pascal Emmanuel Heu has
termed the ‘querelle de 1917’ turned on the relevance of Henri Bergson’s work
to the understanding of film. It involved literary critic Paul Souday, music and
film critic Émile Vuillermoz, and the filmmaker Marcel L’Herbier, the two last
being more open to the possibilities of the philosophical and filmic relation than
was Souday himself.11 Bazin’s work also had a Bergsonian influence, and such
connections between film and philosophy have multiplied over the years,
8
Gilbert Cohen-Séat, Essai sur les principes d’une philosophie du cinéma, I : Introduction générale; notions fondamentales et
vocabulaire de filmographie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1946).
9
Since 1962 it has been published in Milan under the title Ikon.
10
L’Univers filmique, ed. by Étienne Souriau (Paris: Flammarion, 1953).
11
Pascal Manuel Heu, ‘La Querelle de 1917’, in Le Temps du cinéma: Émile Vuillermoz, père de la critique cinémato-
graphique, 1910 – 1930 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), pp. 189– 98.
 ÉTAT PRÉSENT: FILM THEORY IN FRANCE 379
extending well beyond the work of Bergson and generating a burgeoning field of
research within film studies. Much of the work done within this field today takes
French philosophy into consideration. The abiding interest in film on the part of
philosophers is registered in contemporary theory through the work of Jean-Luc
Nancy and Jacques Rancière in particular. Nancy’s intermittent dialogue with the
work of Claire Denis, from his articles on her films Beau Travail (1999) and
Trouble Everyday (2001)12 through to her inspired filmic response to his book
L’Intrus and to their dialogue thereafter, turns attention to tactility, the senses,
along with sense-making, and broader ethico-political questions. Rancière, in
turn, has considered film from the position of a critical disciple of Louis
Althusser, viewing aesthetics and politics as two communicating vessels.13 While
filmology contained the seeds of the interdisciplinary connection with philoso-
phy that has become so important in the contemporary era, it ceded place in the
immediate post-war period to a sustained search for structural understandings
of film.
Paving the way towards a thoroughgoing structuralist approach is the intricate
concern with form and structure in the pathbreaking work of Noël Burch.14
Although Burch’s attention to structure is not pursued in the manner adopted in
subsequent Saussurean-inspired film theory, and does not take up the Peircean
logic espoused by Italian semiologists Umberto Eco and Pier Paolo Pasolini and
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, his work reflects the post-war interest in
seeking out a more formal approach to film. Likewise, Jean Mitry’s theory of the
aesthetics and psychology of cinema results in an understanding of cinematic
signification but does not quite pursue the sustained engagement with linguistics
that characterizes the work of Christian Metz.15 Metz’s theory gave rise first of
all to an interrogation of the relevance of Saussurean linguistics to cinema,
before he proclaimed the mismatch between the two and located cinema closer
to the spoken énoncé. Indeed, in an early paper (1964) he argued that film is a
language without a language system and that it is closer to speech than to
writing.16 His subsequent attempt to construct a general model of the system
underlying all films is the grande syntagmatique: in Essais sur la signification au cinéma, 1
Metz tries to define filmic specificity in terms of a specific combination of five
overlapping traits — iconicity, mechanical duplication, multiplicity, movement, and
mechanically produced multiple moving images.17 Taken in isolation, no trait is
specific to cinema; cinematic particularity lies in their combination. Metz’s theories
of filmic enunciation were eventually to lead him into psychoanalytic and ideo-
logical terrain and the era of post-structuralist theory.
12
See Jean-Luc Nancy: ‘L’Areligion’, Vacarme, 14 (2001) ,http://www.vacarme.eu.org/article81.html.
[accessed 27 February 2012]; and ‘Icône de l’acharnement’, Trafic, 39 (2001), 58 – 64.
13
For broader works on politics and aesthetics see Jacques Rancière, Le Partage du sensible: esthétique et politique
(Paris: La Fabrique, 2000) and Malaise dans l’esthétique (Paris: Galilée, 2004). For a direct discussion of cinema in
light of his philosophy see his La Fable cinématographique (Paris: Seuil, 2001).
14
Noël Burch, Praxis du cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).
15
Jean Mitry, Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma (1963 – 65; Paris: Cerf, 2001).
16
Christian Metz, ‘Le Cinéma: langue ou langage?’, Communications, 4 (1964), 52 – 90.
17
Christian Metz, Essais sur la signification au cinéma, 1 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968).
380 SARAH COOPER

The influence of post-Marxist Althusserian thinking on the discipline of film

theory in the post-structuralist French context led to ideologically motivated the-
orizing, bound up with challenges to authority prevalent within the wider socio-
historical context. It was within the broad arena of ideological criticism that
Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni recognized that film is a product made
within a precise economic system, and a product determined by the ideology of
that economic system.18 Serge Daney and J.-P. Oudart also made important con-
tributions to this theorizing, deepening the equivalence set up by bourgeois
ideology between vision and knowledge, along with addressing the status of the
visible per se inside and outside of filmic representation.19 This ideological
thrust, coupled with Lacanian psychoanalysis, and related to Barthesian and
Derridean critiques, informed a broader intellectual climate of mistrust in the
grand theorizing of previous decades, epitomized by structuralism. Discussion
of the cinema screen as mirror from a psychoanalytic perspective displaced the
earlier Bazinian and phenomenological vision of the screen as window on a
world. Metz’s psychoanalytic theory of the projections, identifications, and disi-
dentifications that we are engaged in as spectators chimed with Jean-Louis
Baudry’s analysis of the cinematic apparatus and its ideological effects.20 Metz’s
and Baudry’s so-called apparatus theory still underpins some psychoanalytic
work in cinema today, but, with an Anglo-American return to Lacan (through
the work of Todd McGowan) that privileges Lacan’s work on the objet a and his
Quatre Concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse rather than his article on the mirror
stage,21 the debt to a particular area of Lacanian psychoanalytic film theory has
been broadened out, and film theorists have also drawn more widely on the
work of other analysts. The work of Didier Anzieu, for example, has yielded
new insights, especially in the domain of touch.22 Although psychoanalysis still
has a place in contemporary film theory, it has been displaced by different theor-
etical concerns that challenge the ocularcentric focus of its 1970s proponents
and thereby open out to the wider realm of the other senses.
One of the most significant recent turning points within contemporary film
theory in France that led to this move away from the psychoanalytic (and the
semiotic) was occasioned by philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who turned his atten-
tion to cinema in two volumes published in 1983 and 1985.23 Severing definitive
links with the semiotic and psychoanalytic orthodoxies that had been prevalent
in the 1950s and 1960s and associated principally with the work of Metz,
Deleuze was nonetheless indebted to Charles Sanders Peirce’s work on signs
18
Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, ‘Cinéma/Idéologie/Critique’, Cahiers du cinéma, 216 (1969), 11 – 16.
19
Serge Daney and J.-P. Oudart, ‘Travail, lecture, jouissance’, Cahiers du cinéma, 222 (1970), 39 – 50.
20
See Christian Metz, Le Signifiant imaginaire: psychanalyse et cinéma (Paris: Union générale d́éditions, 1977); and
Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘Cinéma: effets idéologiques produits par l’appareil de base’, Cinéthique, 7 – 8 (1970), 1 – 8.
21
See Jacques Lacan, Les Quatre Concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969). See also Todd
McGowan, The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007).
22
See Didier Anzieu, Le Moi-Peau (Paris: Bordas, 1985). See also Naomi Segal, Consensuality: Didier Anzieu,
Gender and the Sense of Touch (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009).
23
Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma, I : L’Image-mouvement (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1983); II : L’Image-temps (Paris:
Éditions de Minuit, 1985).
 ÉTAT PRÉSENT: FILM THEORY IN FRANCE 381
and logic, preferring to use this, along with the philosophy of Bergson, to reveal
his understanding of film. Deleuze articulated a theory through which film was
understood, on a par with philosophy, to think, but using images rather than
concepts. Furthermore, his belief that film was an a-signifying mass indicated
that spectators were brought into contact with a new form of materiality, one
with a dynamism of its own, and this contact allowed freer access to the other
senses, opening up further avenues for theorists to explore.24 Deleuze’s focus
on affect, time, and the body — its capacities to think and feel — is original in
itself, yet his work has a rich inheritance that can be traced back in the French
context in particular to the Impressionist filmmaking of the 1920s. In the theory
and films of the pioneering director Germaine Dulac, a firm connection is
established between film and thinking, which, though rooted in an understand-
ing of film as an art of subjectivity, in a manner that contrasts with the dissol-
ution of the subject in subsequent decades, is still an important precursor to
more recent work on film and the processes of thought.25 Still more pertinently,
Jean Epstein’s own philosophical conception of the relationship between reason
and affect — lyrosophie — informs all of his writings, and his repeated explora-
tions of cinematic movement and time make his theoretical work a richly sug-
gestive forerunner to that of Deleuze.26 Deleuze is not, however, the only figure
in French film theory to have offered alternative pathways out of psychoanalysis
and semiotics/semiology through a focus on film and thinking in the contem-
porary era.
The Metzian debates from which Deleuze’s study distanced itself also served
as a point of critical departure for the North American branch of cognitivism
inaugurated by David Bordwell in the 1980s. While the North American cogniti-
vists believe in the immediacy of thoughts to consciousness without the involve-
ment of language, and thereby produce theories of narration and engagement
with film without recourse to linguistics, their French and European counter-
parts revisit Metz, albeit critically, in order to forge a relationship between cogni-
tivism and semiotics, mental activity and language. Michel Colin, for instance,
develops a cognitive film semiotics within a communicative framework, turning
to Bordwell’s rejection of the communication model of narration and the role of
the narrator.27 Colin, along with Dominique Chateau,28 has been working with
Noam Chomsky’s theories since the early 1970s to bind linguistics to mental
24
A measure of Deleuze’s importance is that his work has had an impact not only in the French context, but
has also inspired work on cinema and the senses, most notably touch and haptics (see, for example, in the US,
Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2002)), as well as intelligent readings of French cinema from this perspective (see Martine Beugnet, Cinema and
Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007)).
25
Germaine Dulac, Écrits sur le cinéma, 1919 – 1937, ed. by Prosper Hillairet (Paris: Éditions Paris expérimental,
1994).
26
Jean Epstein, La Lyrosophie (Paris: Éditions de la Sirène, 1922).
27
Michel Colin: Langue, film, discours: prolégomènes à une sémiologie générative du film (Paris: Klincksieck, 1985); ‘The
Grande Syntagmatique Revisited’, in The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind, ed. by Warren Buckland (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 1995), pp. 45 –86; ‘Film Semiology as a Cognitive Science’, in ibid., pp. 87 – 110.
28
Dominique Chateau, Le Cinéma comme langage (Brussels: AISS – IASPA; Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne,
1987).
382 SARAH COOPER

activity. Roger Odin’s semio-pragmatic film theory looks into the film spectator’s
competence, the tacit knowledge that informs each spectator’s psychical dispos-
ition (or mode of attention) when she or he watches a film.29 When cognitivism
is spoken about with regard to modes of address or, indeed, spectatorship, the
focus is on mental activity, rather than on passivity, when viewing film.
Most recently, as a corollary to work on thought and cognition in film theory,
a focus on the body and its emotions has also been prevalent, most notably in
the work of Raymond Bellour. Bellour’s monumental undertaking Le Corps du
cinéma turns attention to the body of the spectator caught up inextricably in a re-
lation with the body of cinema. He makes a comparison between cinema and
hypnosis, reflects on the emotions, and interrogates the relation between this
body of hypnosis and emotion and that of the animal.30 Marie-José Mondzain’s
philosophical work Homo spectator also casts renewed attention on the figure of
the spectator both inside and outside cinema.31
In relation to the continuities indicated at the outset of this article between
early film theorizing in France and more recent trends, and in spite of the cata-
clysmic shifts of war and revolution that cause the context to adjust and lend
necessary specificity to the present historical moment in all its complexity, the
current focal points of film theory in France indicate how valuable it is to look
backwards in order to move forwards. Classic models of hypnosis and a rethink-
ing of philosophical understandings of human beings inform both Bellour’s and
Mondzain’s work, just as earlier trends in thinking and affect connect Deleuze
with Epstein, and as semiotic theory has had a renaissance in cognitive models
in a French context. That the current state of play in film theory is indebted to
the past is a banal observation, but tracing the ways in which the past is interro-
gated, and either preserved or superseded in the process, tells us much about
what this branch of the discipline of film studies might yet become.

29
Roger Odin: ‘La Sémio-pragmatique du cinéma sans crise, ni désillusion’, Hors cadre, 7 (1989), 77 – 92;
‘Approche sémio-pragmatique, approche historique’, Kodikas/Code: Ars semiotica, 17.1 –4 (1994), 27 – 36; ‘For a
Semio-Pragmatics of Film’, in The Film Spectator, ed. by Buckland, pp. 213 – 26.
30
Raymond Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L, 2009).
31
Marie-José Mondzain, Homo spectator (Paris: Bayard, 2007).