Dudley Andrew - Core and Flow of Film Studies PDF

The Core and the Flow of Film Studies
Author(s): Dudley Andrew

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 4, The Fate of Disciplines Edited by James Chandler
and Arnold I. Davidson (Summer 2009), pp. 879-915
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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The Core and the Flow of Film Studies
Dudley Andrew
1. Film: Living Object, Field of Research, Discipline

Decades ago, when the galaxy of film was gradually swirling into exis-
tence and becoming visible within the university, it wasn’t at all clear that
academic oversight was pertinent or wholesome. From the perspective of
the academy, movies could have the effect of devaluing the humanities,
while from that of cinephiles the university might very well tamper with
the organic rapport of audiences with movies, stunting or unnaturally
twisting the development of both. Such a debate over the very propriety of
its study seems primordial enough to distinguish film from English or any
other longstanding field. You may believe the decision to have long since
been rendered in favor of the academy; after all, the article you are reading
was commissioned by Critical Inquiry for this issue devoted to the state of
the disciplines.
But suspend judgment, if you can, and imagine there to be a force in
cinema still capable of tossing scholars from the saddle while they try to
rein films into disciplinary paddocks. This contest involving a once youth-
ful subject and a set of self-confident methodologies is chronicled and
celebrated in a fine new anthology, Inventing Film Studies.1 Its final three
essays stage a quiet debate that neatly exemplifies distinct perspectives on
film (by any other name). D. N. Rodowick concludes the book on a san-
guine note when he declares that the eclipse of film by new media both in
the entertainment world and in the minds of the coming cohort of scholars
need not trouble us. For historically the interest in films quickly led to film
theory and that impressive array of concepts has grown strong enough to
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

1. See Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham, N.C., 2008).
Critical Inquiry 35 (Summer 2009)

© 2009 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/09/3504-0002$10.00. All rights reserved.
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880 Dudley Andrew / Core and Flow of Film Studies
direct and focus scholarship on audio-visual culture in all its manifesta-
tions long into the future. Film may be at the point of being unrecogniza-
bly transformed as a medium, Rodowick asserts, “yet the basic set of
concepts has remained remarkably constant. Moreover, the real accom-
plishment of cinema studies . . . is to have forged more than any other
related discipline the methodological and philosophical bases for address-
ing the most urgent and interesting questions, both aesthetic and cultural,
of modernity and visual culture,” including especially the changes taking
place in electronic and digital media.2 But Mark Betz is not ready to relin-
quish film for “modernity and visual culture,” even if film theory is re-
tained as a privileged discourse. In his contribution to the anthology, titled
“Little Books,” Betz traces the history of our field’s book publishing to see
how films have been treated. He honors the effervescent period after 1965
when enterprising editors supported scores of fledgling film scholars, un-
ashamed of being “amateurs,” who inflated their short monographs with
“grandeur.” These studies of directors, genres, and periods provided a
glowing backlight against which cinema as a whole stood out afresh and
the larger culture with it. However, after two decades such essays would be
discounted by an increasingly bureaucratic educational and publishing
establishment that gave priority to far weightier tomes; professors sought
academic credibility by anchoring their scholarship to tables, statistics,
bibliographies, and appendices. Betz rues “the migration of several forms
of film study to a kind of final resting home: the American academy,” but
then he immediately takes solace in “the current resurgence of little books
[such as the BFI Film Classics] . . . that are helping film studies . . . recon-
nect with the impulses and the pleasures, the enthusiasm and the excite-
ment, that were functional in breathing life into it in the first place. . . . We
are writing not in a dying field but rather in one too in thrall with scholarly
rules. . . . It is time again for a little grandeur.”3
The enthusiasm Betz ascribes to an earlier, more natural phase of writ-
2. D. N. Rodowick, “Dr. Strange Media, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Film
Theory,” in Inventing Film Studies, p. 394.
3. Mark Betz, “Little Books,” in Inventing Film Studies, pp. 340, 341. Betz undoubtedly
enjoys the irony that his own essay is replete with footnotes, statistics, and even an appendix.
D U D L E Y A N D R E W is R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative

Literature at Yale University. Most recently, he is the coauthor, with Carole
Cavanaugh, of Sanshô dayû (2000) and, with Steven Ungar, of Popular Front
Paris and the Poetics of Culture (2005). He is also the editor of The Image in
Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography (1997).
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2009 881
ing about films may return thanks to the very technologies that are said to
have marginalized it. So argues Alison Trope, who heralds “Home Enter-
tainment as Home Education” (the subtitle of her piece), whereby access
to information packed into DVD supplements and available on the Inter-
net Movie Database (IMDb) has triggered rampant autodidacticism.4
Enumerating the values of high-end DVDs like the Criterion Collection,
Trope reverses Rodowick’s formulation; rather than film bequeathing to
the university the serious concepts required to address what is no
longer— or only incidentally—film, she points to the persistence and vi-
tality of the movies in spaces far removed from the university and its rigid
codes and agendas. Several recent books go farther than Trope to identify
the emergence of electronic journals and personal blogs where film enthu-
siasts are reshaping cinephilia and creating a vibrant form of film studies
outside the academy in a thriving, if virtual, ciné-club milieu.5
Where is film studies, then, now that we have heard about its invention
and reinvention? What exactly do people with such training work on?
Trope evidently toils in the field of cinema, which comprises phenomena
surrounding films that give them their significance. Rodowick’s field
would seem to be that of the university and its discourses. My interest—to
lay out my own allegiance— has steadfastly remained with the herds of
films that graze or frolic in those fields. Of course, all three orientations—
whether toward films, or toward the cinematic field, or toward the proto-
cols of pertinent discourse—must operate interdependently in film studies
whether or not we take this to be a legitimate discipline.6
Dynamism flows from this interdependence. Discipline in the abstract
may characterize an attitude, a spiritual exercise, or an institutional pos-
ture, but any concrete discipline should also evoke the recalcitrant phe-
nomenon it aims to bring to order. The phenomenon of cinema has been
rambunctious enough, however, to keep from being entirely corralled.
With its subject matter continuing to overrun all names and borders, what
used to be simply film has bled into well-constituted academic disciplines
4. See Alison Trope, “Footstool Film School: Home Entertainment as Home Education,” in
Inventing Film Studies, pp. 353–73. Trope explicitly recognizes that the bottom-up, viewer-
controlled learning and exploration promised by DVDs is part of a top-down commercial
enterprise. Viewers may have escaped the classroom situation, but their freedom is that of a
highly regulated marketplace.
5. See Cinephilia: Movies, Love, and Memory, ed. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener
(Amsterdam, 2005); Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia, ed. Jonathan
Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin (London, 2003); and Cinephilia in the Age of Digital
Reproduction: Film, Pleasure, and Digital Culture, ed. Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperb (London,
2008).
6. For the record, in their respective essays in Inventing Film Studies, Rodowick explicitly
denies, while Betz accords, film studies the status of a discipline.
(English, art history, sociology, and so on) while it also challenges the new
programs that universities have designed to house it. Never labeled to
everyone’s satisfaction, the subject that was initially discussed by univer-
sities as film is now maturing under such rubrics as Cinema and Moving
Image Study (Concordia University), Modern Culture and Media (Brown
University), Screen Studies (Clark University), Cinema and Comparative
Literature (University of Iowa). Often the result of intense internal debate,
these names seem to designate a field. More importantly, they also imply
methods of studying and teaching what is in that field. Field and method
are, of course, dialectically related, as particular subjects seem to call for
tailored approaches, while the latter always seek additional opportunities
(an expanded field) over which to exercise the power of their techniques.
This dialectic may not be as easy to recognize in a disciplinary imposter
like film as in a putatively stable example like English—which was imme-
diately considered a likely model for film. At first blush, English certainly
names a field, one usually taken to be expanding outward from a core of
anglophone literary classics, toward official or personal documents, and
then toward zones of popular and folk expressions, including oral culture.
But English, perhaps more usefully, refers as well to a set of reading prac-
tices, a kind of schooled attention that distinguishes itself whenever faculty
from around the university happen to get together to discuss some com-
mon topic. On these occasions the English professor can be counted on to
address the complexities of representation and expression that constitute
or relate to the topic. Deliberately or automatically, she or he would be
likely to deploy some form of rhetorical analysis, be it formal, deconstruc-
tive, philological, generic, or what have you, often making a point through
elaborate figures of speech, allusions to literary works, and ornate diction.
The MLA houses language and literature scholars who think and talk this
way, including not just those in English but in the fields of Spanish, Slavic,
Japanese, and so on who share (or debate) this array of approaches and
attitudes that are meant to make sense of, and put into play, similar types
of subject matter.
Now what about film? Emeritus faculty in English and in language and
literature departments may recall how classic and modernist feature films
wedged their way into their territory in the 1950s and 1960s. It was only
then that inklings of a new discipline were felt in America, even if movies
had been taken up by individual scholars long before that. Things didn’t
start to coalesce until a critical mass was reached that was weighty enough
for those involved to lobby for a place in the curriculum and to form the
Society of Cinematologists in 1959. Social scientists could be found among
its members, but most were literature teachers (and occasionally art his-
torians) who offered film appreciation, analysis, and history as variants of
their literature courses. After all, the field of film seemed generally congru-
ent with the literary field, though smaller: a core of cinematic masterpieces
spreading out to popular genres, then to documentary material, including
governmental and amateur films, then to animation, television, and a va-
riety of media artifacts. Over the years this expansion once again attracted
the intermittent attention of other disciplines that had been glancing at
film from the outset, recognizing new caches of material to mine: sociol-
ogy, anthropology, history, psychology, and economics. Were it a well-
formed field, film might profit from the way such poaching by these social
sciences can fortify the literary and art-historical methods most film schol-
ars practice. However, the field was never properly walked, as farmers say,
and most traces of its original perimeter have been obliterated, such that its
horizon line now extends as far as “audio-visual culture.” No single set of
methods could possibly assert priority when the subject has lost definition
in this way. And so, with agreement neither about the shape and size of its
territory nor about pertinent work that should be undertaken there, the
promise of a discipline, no matter what we name it, has become rather
fanciful, the rhetoric of academicians.
That promise was tendered as a battle cry in film’s initial struggle for
respect within the university; in those days the word discipline served as a
rationale for the autonomy film studies sought from the units in which it
grew up. More recently, it is played as a trump card in the high-stakes game
among leaders in a now-recognized, albeit undefined, field. For today, film
studies unquestionably stands as a legitimate member of the humanities,
often commanding full voting rights. Those who teach and research in this
field exude that impression. The Society for Cinema and Media Studies
(SCMS) boasts twenty-four hundred members, with fourteen hundred
attending its 2008 convention to listen to nearly eight hundred papers
given under the rubric of three hundred panels. The topics of those panels,
like the arguments of the papers, may be subject to debate, but nearly
everyone recognizes that the debate itself takes place within a legitimately
constituted disciplinary field. Whether it is currently emergent or residual,
to use the terms of this inquest, is up for dispute, though there is no
question that in the 1960s and for some time thereafter film studies grew
rapidly across whatever terrain it found at all hospitable. To sustain that
growth, its identity and constituency has never ceased to expand. First it
dropped its pretentious name, Society of Cinematologists, shortening
things to SCS in 1966; to increase membership and authority, it took on an
increasing number of topics until adding the M in 2002. Its website now
announces that members of “this scholarly organization are involved in
various fields of study, including (but not limited to): Film Studies, Cin-
ema Studies, Television Studies, Media Studies, Visual Arts, Cultural Stud-
ies, Film and Media History, and Moving Image Studies.”7 Today media
studies stands as the society’s umbrella term, with film studies its chief
subset, but one that may be ceding ground, at least in many quarters,
before the wildfires known as new media that race across the university.
The organization’s 1959 birthdate has obscured earlier efforts at coor-
dinate film education. Dana Polan lays these out in Scenes of Instruction:
The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film, bringing to light and paying trib-
ute to individual scholars and the initiatives of particular universities. Po-
lan nicely summarizes the attributes that turn a common interest or topic
(the study of film) into an academic discipline (film studies) “with lin-
eages, legacies, commonly shared assumptions, and regularized proce-
dures.”8 He suggests that curricula, conferences, canon formation,
graduate students, journals, peer reviews, and other protocols of academic
fields are disciplinary in order to realize what is most essential, an idea of
progress and continuity. A discipline needs to see current work in relation
to the momentum of prior study, just as it needs to look forward to the
advancements that graduate students will make when they take up the
reins. It is here above all that the early scholars Polan celebrates—some as
prophetic, some as merely maverick— belong as a topic in film studies
more than as part of its root system. Polan resurrects the earliest glimmers
of academic interest in this popular entertainment around 1915 and traces
a series of independent projects and lines of thought up to the formation of
the first curricula (1937) that looked forward to, but did not really generate,
the programs and departments committed to the all-out study of cinema
that started to coalesce in the late 1950s.
With Polan’s prehistory as background, why not simply detail the
growth and vicissitudes of this academic entity over the past fifty years?
That chronicle, however, requires an immediate detour out of the U.S.,
where Polan’s study confines itself. For American film studies became
beholden to movements in England in the 1960s that were themselves
produced through contact with Paris. This crucial decade saw the transi-
tion “From Cinephilia to Film Studies,” the title of the endearing and
highly informative dialogue between Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen in
Inventing Film Studies.9 Given its more concentrated arena (London and
7. www.cmstudies.org/index.php?option⫽com_content&task⫽view&id⫽798&Itemid⫽168
8. Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film (Berkeley,
2007), p. 19.
9. See Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, “From Cinephilia to Film Studies,” in Inventing
Film Studies, pp. 217–32.
Oxford), the presence of the powerful British Film Institute with its jour-
nals Sight and Sound and Screen, and its proximity to continental Europe,
the UK registered the development of film studies in a far more dramatic
way than what occurred in the U.S. In any case, thanks to the avalanche of
the “little books” in the English language already mentioned (followed by
the heavy tomes), a single field (not unified, but identifiable nonetheless)
emerged on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1960s that was situated differ-
ently within each nation’s academic network.
This single field, however, presupposes film studies to be effectively
anglophone. This is what one might conclude from Inventing Film Studies,
which, smart as it is, unapologetically fixes on England and North America
without even a hint that the field may be larger than the institutions that
have come to rule in these places. Of course, we understand that scholars
write elsewhere in other languages, but how much do we credit their con-
tribution to a common field? And do we expect them to keep up with what
comes out in English? While its international scope should be a hallmark of
any mature discipline, many of us, even those who analyze films made
around the globe and are in dialogue with colleagues from Latin America,
Asia, Europe, and Africa, have become excessively concerned with the
institutional situations in the places where we operate.10 Can we expand
the purview without changing the subject?
Of course we can expand. What does it mean, for example, that film
studies has never achieved as much institutional visibility in Japan as else-
where, when it is a country whose film life over the last one hundred years
has arguably been second only to that of the U.S.? There has always been
feverish activity among private historian-archivists (collectors of books,
magazines, interviews, and ephemera) and critics (certain newspapers ran
powerful columns for decades, journals sprouted from the 1920s on). As
for large-scale studies of the medium, written by professors or public in-
tellectuals, the Japanese bibliography between 1913 and 1943 may be larger
than its English language counterpart. In the postwar era, perhaps the
name most Western film scholars might recognize is that of the prolific
Tadao Sato, as some of his work has appeared in English and French. Yet
only late in his career did this autodidact offer university courses. There
simply was not much opportunity. With the exception of Nihon Univer-
sity, which claims to have introduced the subject in 1927, one does not find
film studies taught within the university system until the 1960s when it was
introduced within Nihon University’s art department and Waseda’s liter-
10. To be fair, the SCMS held its 2004 conference in London so as to attract European film
scholars and the 2009 conference has just taken place in Tokyo.
ature program. Waseda boasts a tremendous theater program and library,
making it a natural place for the study of cinema to mature. In 1974, aiming
to broaden their reach beyond their respective campuses, these universi-
ties, joined by a few others (the number has grown to thirty), formed
Nihon Eizo-gakkai (the Japanese Society of Image Arts and Sciences
[JASIAS]), an umbrella organization fostering research in film, photogra-
phy, and television. Their annual conference (where Christian Metz gave
the keynote in 1981) and publication, Eizo-gaku, make it similar to SCMS.
In the late 1980s they added Iconics as a second publishing venture, with
nine issues thus far featuring articles in Western languages, many by lead-
ing Western scholars. Still, some universities that offer film remain un-
connected to JASIAS, whose conferences still only attract about 250
participants. The fabled rivalry among Japanese institutions, a conse-
quence of the lifetime allegiance one owes to one’s school, may keep a
single national organization from dominating. Since each university situ-
ation is different, film studies may have emerged anywhere on these cam-
puses, depending on the force of a given professor. At Meiji Gakuin, for
example, where the energetic Inuhiko Yomota holds a professorship in the
literature department, film studies thrives without affiliating with JASIAS.
In 1986, when Japan’s most influential critic, Shigehiko Hasumi, was de-
termined to finally bring film studies to the University of Tokyo (Japan’s
most prestigious institution of higher education and one where he would
soon reign as president), he lodged it in a new unit for the Interdisciplinary
Study of Culture and Representation, specifically bypassing the standard
paradigm exemplified by JASIAS and aligning it with philosophical cri-
tique. His ambitious plan placed film into a constellation of “pictorial
phenomena from drawing through computer graphics” and invites not
just the usual panoply of Western approaches (linguistics, psychoanalysis,
deconstruction, gender theory) but a new “scientific scholarship” specific
to the image.11 REPRE, an association that spun out of this program, has
run an annual conference since 2005 that seeks to foster this sort of re-
search and attract scholars from other top universities, including Meiji
Gakuin, Kyoto, and Waseda. Thus film studies in Japan follows several
paths, depending on which institution or professor one is affiliated with.
Such factionalism need not be fatal and indeed may produce a wider vari-
ety of approaches and with greater intensity than we in the West are ac-
customed to. Meanwhile, as might be expected from an overheated
electronic society that encourages what we might call passionate pastimes,
more film blogs are kept up in Japanese than in any other language with the
11. repre.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/
possible exception of Mandarin. Given all this activity on so many levels, it
would be naı̈ve to patronize the Japanese rapport with cinema as under-
developed.12
In France, film scholarship has been looked at suspiciously as well,
though less by university snobs than by sophisticated cinephiles who write
for the numerous French film journals. Many of them worry that the sav-
age power of the movies, their unpredictability, will be disciplined by ac-
ademic study, that is, brought into line and tamed. Inevitably, this
anarchist cry has become muffled over the years as the success of these very
journals has helped bring cinema into the mainstream of French life, in-
cluding its educational structure. So much is this the case that a film has
been included on the national baccalaureate exam every year since 1987. To
prepare thousands of high school students for this exam, academics have
turned out primers of film analysis and history, clarifying the findings of
research that now goes on in most French universities. In short, while
cinephilia and its particular forms of écriture (let’s just call it criticism)
remain robust in France, the fact is that a coordinated field has been laid
out by scholars there, most of whom belong to AFECCAV (Association
Française des Enseignants et Chercheurs en Cinéma et AudioVisuel).
This dialogue between the amateur and professional discourses encircling
cinema can be vibrant or sluggish, depending on when and where it occurs.
Take the case of Turkey, an especially lively site of interchange at the moment.
In the past twenty years the number of universities in Turkey has nearly trebled
to around 120, at least 30 of which have been careful to include some form of
cinema studies in the curriculum. Surely this responds to the increasing visi-
bility of their national cinema in Europe and its popularity at home, both of
which have been amplified by enthusiastic local critics. A growing number of
these critics participate in a network of Turkish film scholars that has met
annually for nearly a decade to debate topics, set standards, coordinate peda-
gogical initiatives, lobby the government on such issues as censorship, tech-
nology, and funding, and plan the next year’s meeting, inevitably larger in
scale. And yet Turkey’s most dynamic film monthly, Azlatyi, comes out of
Boğaziçi University, considered Turkey’s finest, an institution that has never
countenanced any sort of organized film curriculum or program. Instead, a
small but attractive film center sits in the middle of campus, attracting stu-
dents and professors from all fields for 35mm film screenings, visits by film-
makers, group discussions, and so on. Their basic library of books and videos
12. I owe much of this summary of the Japanese situation to conversations with Aaron
Gerow at Yale University and especially with Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano of Carleton University,
Canada.
serves the campus and supports the work of those who volunteer to edit the
journal—which, by the way, prints more copies than our comparable Film
Quarterly. Cameras and editing equipment can be checked out by anyone with
a funded project (several Boğaziçi University shorts have screened at Euro-
pean festivals), and the film center has recently helped produce a feature—
providing infrastructure, though no financing. Altogether, the center aims to
concentrate and channel the creativity and enthusiasm characteristic of cine-
philia, yet it maintains a healthy rapport with scholars and students coming
from other Turkish universities where disciplinary programs of film studies
are firmly in place. Sustained discussion of cinema being relatively recent in
Turkey, this current equilibrium of approaches may fall away as audio-visual
life there continues to expand and (post)modernize. My point is that even if
Turkish film culture is slightly out of phase with that of Europe it exhibits the
selfsame tension (seemingly productive in this case) between the cinephilic
and the disciplinary.
2. 1945–75: The French Take the Field

It makes both political and common sense to keep one’s home institu-
tions in clearest focus,13 yet to keep perspective, and to tell the larger story,
let’s look elsewhere. This elsewhere, for me, has always been France be-
cause that country has maintained the most intensely public relation with
cinema. It is also a nation that credits disciplinarity to the limit. That is why
it should not surprise anyone that film studies found early and rigorous
expression there. As was true in the U.S., academics tried to bring cinema
onto campus during the silent era, first in relation to the Film d’Art move-
ment around 1910 and then in relation to the avant-garde appropriation of
cinema in the 1920s.14 But it wasn’t until just after the war that film studies
made its way inside the university in a manner that is recognizable today.
It wasn’t called film studies, but filmologie, and almost from the outset it
emanated from a genuine and well-funded institute at the Sorbonne. In-
deed, the outrageous ambition of its founders, particularly Gilbert Cohen-
13. See Dudley Andrew, “The ‘Three Ages’ of Cinema Studies and the Age to Come,”
PMLA 115 (2000): 341–51.
14. Film d’Art was a production company dedicated to upgrading cinematic production
through the use of serious threatrical scripts, actors from La Comédie Française, and music by
composers like Camille Saint-Saëns. Their inaugural production, L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise,
was held at the Opéra and was discussed in all the major cultural journals. Professors and
students took note. Cinema here was appended to theater. As for the 1920s, it was fine arts that
drew cinema into its space, as museums and galleries attracted patrons with screenings of films
by artists like Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray. An esthetician of the stature of
Elie Faure wrote a treatise on cinema in 1923. Whatever gains cinema may have had a chance of
making in the academy, however, were immediately lost with the coming of sound.
Séat, went far beyond anything dreamt of by America’s Society of
Cinematologists, which a decade later seems to have adapted a name, if not
an entire program, from the filmologists.
Cohen-Séat arrived on the postwar scene with an ambitious idea, ex-
pressed in a remarkably self-confident book, Essais sur les principes d’une
philosophie du cinéma.15 Taking cinema to be civilization’s ideal mix of
qualitative experience (a sum of the arts) and quantitative impact (a global
and mass phenomenon of unprecedented proportions), he called for a
superdiscipline to study it, combining aesthetics with sociology. He went
in search of scholars who could climb aboard a program he seems to have
laid out during the occupation. In a legendary maneuver, and with no
academic degree himself, he managed to successfully lobby the Sorbonne
to serve as an umbrella for his fledgling research group and the journal they
had inaugurated in 1948, La Revue internationale de filmologie. From the
moment of its official license, late in 1950, until the very end of the decade,
the institute benefited from significant support, visibly affecting the strato-
sphere of French education in the process. The ancient amphitheater of the
Collège de France was, for example, equipped for projection. Laboratories
were established for psychoperceptual and cognitive experiments. In ad-
dition to research, regular courses and lectures were offered, and a couple
of full-blown conferences took place.
The lectures and conferences had actually begun even before the insti-
tute’s investiture. In the late 1940s such luminaries as Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, Henri Lefebvre, and Jean Hyppolite had appeared before the group.
Cohen-Séat’s inspired strategy was to set cinema up as a magnet to attract
high-profile intellectuals from a spectrum of disciplines, principally the
human sciences. He laid before them a vision of how their methods could
be renewed by— or could develop through contact with—a vibrant phe-
nomenon like cinema. He handed them a means to demonstrate to the
public and, more importantly, to university and governmental commis-
sions the contemporary relevance of their academic pursuits. Cohen-Séat
held cinema to be broader than any discipline and yet to be something that
various disciplines could use as a ripe example. While pursuing one or
another hypothesis (concerning color and movement, the attraction of the
human face, collective behavior among adolescents, and so on), each re-
searcher believed he was contributing to the progressive illumination of an
ungainly but supremely influential phenomenon. Many of those who took
part confessed to having little prior experience with the movies, yet
Cohen-Séat convinced them to join a growing coterie of esteemed col-
15. See Gilbert Cohen-Séat, Essais sur les principes d’une philosophie du cinéma (Paris, 1946).
leagues making up his enterprise. Once inside the Sorbonne, he could offer
prospective members the opportunity to finance experiments, lectures,
and graduate students. Filmologie grew, as did Cohen-Séat’s international
profile. Spin-offs were planned throughout Europe and as far away as
Moscow and Buenos Aires.16 International in its ambition and purview, as
every discipline must be, filmologie thrived mainly in France, where it had
found space and financing.
The accomplishments of this group in the 1950s have been detailed by
Edward Lowry in his fine study.17 Its subsequent meltdown (for clandes-
tine, cold war reasons) have just been brought to light through Martin
Lefebvre’s tenacious historical research.18 Although it managed to reappear
in Milan in the 1960s—its journal rebaptised IKON—filmologie receded
from prominence. It is remembered, if at all, as an academic epiphenom-
enon of cinema’s general cultural ascendency during the 1950s. An emer-
gent filmologie foundered after a single decade because it was linked to the
changing profile of higher education and research rather than to that of its
subject; cinema’s value ballooned worldwide, and especially in France, in
the 1950s, yet filmologie took little note of this and did not try to abet it.
Aiming to analyze the everyday experience of film, not contribute to its
advancement, filmologie set itself at a distance from such growing cultural
manifestations as international film festivals, federations of ciné-clubs,
upstart journals, and repertory movie theaters that brought an art form
out of the circus of mass entertainment and into the high life of discrimi-
nating culture. As cinema attained its majority, its place in the university
seemed reserved in advance.19 And so it happened; cinema infiltrated the
universities of France, as well as the U.S., Britain, and elsewhere. However,
student interest in this newly available academic subject came not from
filmologie but was incubated in the (chiefly French) ciné-club movement
and the journals that fed cinephilia, especially Cahiers du cinéma. These in
16. John MacKay confirms that Grigorii Boltianskii petitioned the Soviet ministry to set up
a film center in Moscow starting in the late 1940s and continuing into the early 1950s. The
center would be established only later, however, and not on the filmologie model.
17. See Edward Lowry, The Filmology Movement and Film Study in France (Ann Arbor,
Mich., 1985).
18. See Martin Lefebvre, “L’Aventure filmologique: Documents et jalons d’une histoire
institutionnelle,” forthcoming in a special issue of CiNéMAS devoted to filmologie.
19. Jean Vidal employed this metaphor of maturation: “After the artists and writers, now
it’s time for professors to discover [cinema] in their turn” (Jean Vidal, “Filmologues
Distingués,” Écran Française 119 [Oct. 1947]: 11). Vidal notes the irony that this first
International Congress of Filmologie took place simultaneously with the Cannes festival, where
all the critics had gone. An additional irony came from the journal’s compositor, who placed
Vidal’s article above a report on activities of several ciné-clubs, graphically opposing two ways
of approaching the same phenomenon.
turn were tied to the growth of cinema as an art. In the 1950s this meant the
increasingly ambitious work of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and
Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as the mature films of Alfred Hitchcock,
Howard Hawks, and John Ford, all leading to the French New Wave. In the
issues of Cahiers du cinéma from the summer and fall of 1959 one could still
feel the echoes of the May Cannes festival that had crowned François Truf-
faut’s 400 Blows and where Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour had
produced the shock of the modern. You could read about Jean-Luc Go-
dard’s Breathless and Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, which were in produc-
tion then on the streets of Paris. On the other hand, La Revue internationale
de filmologie’s issue of the same months took on “Current Problems of
Cinema and Visual Information: Psychological Problems and Mecha-
nisms,” while mentioning not a single film title in its eighty-eight pages,
only a moment from an unidentified Chaplin short; such was its level of
abstraction.
This opposition between these Parisian groups is even more startling
because they followed a remarkably parallel timeline. Just as filmologie
appeared in 1946 but didn’t achieve its institutional stability till 1950, so the
ciné-club movement, dormant since 1930 and the coming of sound, sud-
denly mushroomed just after the war, with Cahiers du cinéma consolidat-
ing its gains when launched in 1951. Similarly just as filmologie completely
changed course at the end of the 1950s,20 Cahiers du cinéma experienced the
first of its own mutations, when its founder, André Bazin, passed away, and
its key critics (Truffaut, Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Claude
Chabrol) took up cameras. Yet the two groups were dedicated to com-
pletely different enterprises and so had no reason to intersect. Cahiers du
cinéma saw itself at odds with several of the many film periodicals of that
decade (its acrimonious relation with Positif is legendary), but La Revue
internationale de filmologie was hardly one of these.
A unique occasion allows us to compare their opposed politiques. In just
its fifth issue, September 1951, and less than a year after filmologie’s acces-
sion to the Sorbonne (that is, as both groups lobbied to gain footholds in
Paris), an article appeared in Cahiers du cinéma sarcastically titled “Intro-
duction à une filmologie de la filmologie,” under the name of Florent
Kirsch. Only his closest friends understood this to be Bazin’s occasional
pseudonym (an amalgam of his wife’s maiden name and the first name of
their son they had just brought into the world). Florent Kirsch received
20. The Sorbonne completely dissociated itself from the Institut de Filmologie in 1962, but
by the end of 1959 the writing was on the wall; the institute had but seven French students and
its journal moved to Milan. See Lefebvre, “L’Aventure filmologique.”
credit for about a dozen of Bazin’s twenty-six hundred articles. In this case
their ruse seems to have freed his normally genteel pen so he could slash
away at his target.21 Bazin cattily reports on Cohen-Séat’s astounding suc-
cess in convincing the crusty professors and crustier deans of the Sorbonne
to take up mere movies as an investment in the future of research and
teaching. Professors of dead languages, Kirsch states with the sarcasm of
the confirmed cinephile, have been watching in disbelief as their children
and their concierges line up week after week for spectacles that they them-
selves scarcely comprehend. It finally occurred to someone that the time
had come to train their formidable analytic and philological skills on this
new, living language called cinema, to put it through the rigors of full
analysis (physiology, psychology, and sociology). Bazin may have been
especially jealous of Cohen-Séat’s welcome at the Sorbonne, as his own
first “institutional” affiliation with cinema was adjacent to the Sorbonne’s
Maison de Culture, where he founded a ciné-club during the occupation.
In 1941, he had washed out of his final oral examination at the École Nor-
male Superieure (ENS) on account of an endemic stutter, and he took up
this ciné-club as a refuge that kept him active in Paris and in the world of
ideas during those dark years. This little club drew a hardcore left-bank
audience (Jean-Paul Sartre was known to come from time to time), but its
rapport with the Sorbonne was nominal, not even extracurricular. Still,
Bazin must have been proud to have kindled the flame of cinephilia among
a generation of academics. Lighting up a dark room for them, projecting
images that could sustain the imagination, including leftist political aspi-
rations, gave Bazin special satisfaction given his club’s setting on the edge
of France’s most renowned university.
And so when Cohen-Séat was able to waltz straight up to the adminis-
tration of the Sorbonne and come away with its full support for a program
that would finally elevate cinema to an object of genuine study, Bazin’s
resentment seeped onto the page. As leader of a band of “cinémaniacs,”
each of whom claimed to watch over five hundred films a year, he was
especially irked at filmologie’s calculated disinterest in its object of study.
To understand a phenomenon, they evidently felt that one must stand
back from it like a medical professor before a cadaver. It did not help to see
too many films or to mention titles, directors, or (God forbid!) actors
when writing up one’s findings. These distractions diverted the scholar’s
attention both from the specific workings of any-film-whatever and from
21. Actually Bazin would intervene briefly in a filmologie congress in 1955, his remarks
appearing in La Revue internationale de filmologie, nos. 20–24 (1955): 95–97. In the following
year, he promoted a lecture by Jean Wahl at the Institut de Filmologie in Cahiers du cinéma, no.
57 (Feb. 1956): 34.
the general function of the cinematic spectacle as seen by the philosophical
imagination. “Did Pavlov need to be a dog-lover?” Bazin asked, to draw the
line with finality.22
At Cahiers du cinéma they were, if nothing else, film lovers— cine-
philes.23 They took it as their obligation—their profession—to locate, from
the hundreds of films made each year, the most valuable ones, the ones that
attracted and sustained profound reflection and critical elaboration. Ba-
zin, who gave himself to amateur and scientific shorts, to compilations and
cartoons, as well as to features of all sorts, nevertheless insisted that intense
aesthetic engagement (close viewing) was a prerequisite for understanding
what cinema is and how it functions. His more elitist colleagues at Cahiers
du cinéma promoted an auteur policy that effectively excluded all but fea-
ture films and that filtered from this corpus the expressions of a limited
number of directors who were carefully ranked. They were flower arrang-
ers; he was a botanist or ecologist.
Without trying any further to distinguish Bazin from his disciples, or
Cahiers du cinéma from other Parisian film groups, or even French film
culture from that of other nations, in Florent Kirsch’s characterization of
filmologie we can recognize the two nearly irreconcilable attitudes toward
cinema and its study that have remained in tension in the academy. A few
individuals have managed to bridge this opposition. Bazin should have
been one of them, given his ENS education and his evident training in
disciplines like geology, geography, entomology, botany, philosophy,
rhetoric, theology, and psychology. Yet cinephilia won out in him, or
rather films themselves won out as centers of attraction whose existence
and value it was the duty and pleasure of the “disciplined” critic to artic-
ulate. Other polymaths who could bridge these approaches were Jean
Mitry and Edgar Morin, both of whom were more closely allied to univer-
sity life while always having been avid filmgoers, indeed occasional film-
makers. Mitry had assisted Abel Gance and had run ciné-clubs in the 1920s
and 1930s. He is listed as one of the founders of the Cinémathèque Fran-
çaise in 1935. After the war he taught at the brand new state-sponsored film
school, Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC), largely
because he had modest experience in production as an editor and assistant
director. Later he would manage to teach classes in a university setting.
Most tellingly, his massive publications (the two-volume Esthétique et psy-
chologie du cinéma and the five-volume Histoire du cinéma) were published
22. Florent Kirsch [André Bazin], “Introduction à une filmologie de la filmologie,” Cahiers
du cinéma, no. 5 (Sept. 1951): 38.
23. For an overview of this phenomenon, see Antoine de Baecque, La Cinéphilie: Invention
d’un regard, histoire d’une culture, 1944–1968 (Paris, 2003).
in the 1960s by Presses Univérsitaires de Paris, just as Cohen-Séat’s book
had been. Mitry felt himself a legitimate rival of filmologie, and superior for
having lived an entire life in the midst of the medium.24 The tables of
contents to his theoretical volumes presume the comprehensive and pro-
gressive exploration of a genuine discipline, as does the immense bibliog-
raphy that draws on every sort of science.25
Morin makes an even more interesting case because he was at one time
a prominent member of the filmologie group. In 1952, he was taken into the
sociology section of the prestigious Centre Nationale du Recherche Scien-
tifique (CNRS).26 A prolific scholar from very early in his career, he claims
to have also grown up a film addict, differentiating himself from his fellow
filmologists. Indeed, his books show him to be a connoisseur; in Les Stars
(1957), he wades right into the thick of popular experience, cataloguing the
names and qualities of scores of actors and actresses in a way that Bazin
would have approved.27 In fact, Bazin did approve, for he reviewed Les
Stars as well as Morin’s earlier and far more consequential Le Cinéma ou
l’homme imaginaire (1956). He wrote that he “generally subscribed” to
Morin’s far-reaching, even daring anthropological concepts.28 He praised
Morin for refusing what must have been a tempting claim, namely, that
cinema has altered the constitution of human beings by introducing brand
new processes of projection-identification. A sober Morin argues instead
that this medium merely exercises and exploits processes that have always
been part of everyday life. Bazin also cheers Morin for avoiding the kind of
occultism that might have made his book a bestseller. Cinema is unques-
tionably tied to spiritualism, particularly in its earliest phase, but Morin
demonstrates how a supple cinematic language has progressively evolved
from the magma of magic. Without losing its unconscious appeal, indeed
while banking on it, filmmakers have learned to control cinema’s uncon-
scious effects, as in, for example, the evolution of the superimposition
from an eerie image-effect to a commonly used grammatical technique of
narration: the lap dissolve. Indeed, Bazin wishes Morin had introduced
24. Mitry does cite with approval a few (but quite few) remarks by Cohen-Séat and studies
by filmologists doing perceptual psychology. See Jean Mitry, Aesthetics and Psychology of the
Cinema, trans. Christopher King (Bloomington, Ind., 1990), esp. pp. 161– 63.
25. For more information, see Brian Lewis, “Jean Mitry,” in The Routledge Companion to
Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (London, 2009), pp. 397–407.
Unfortunately this volume does not contain an entry either on Bazin or on filmologie.
26. These remarks on Morin are taken from Andrew, “Edgar Morin,” in The Routledge
Companion to Philosophy and Film, pp. 408–21.
27. See Edgar Morin, Les Stars (Paris, 1957); trans. Richard Howard under the title The Stars
(1960; Minneapolis, 2005).
28. André Bazin, “L’Homme imaginaire et la fonction magique du cinéma,” France
observateur 331 (Sept. 1956): 17.
even more of a refined discussion of cinema-specific techniques based on
conscious play rather than on unconscious participation. He suggests that
to Morin’s anthropology of magic be added an anthropology of play and
game (he surely had Roger Caillois in mind). Whereas le jeu can be said to
underwrite theater and even television, la magie is foundational for cin-
ema. Yet, Bazin reminds us, audiences cross from one form of spectacle to
the other, as do many techniques, not to mention actors, writers, and
directors. A comprehensive treatment of “imaginary man” in the twenti-
eth century would require that cinema be put in dialogue with the other
arts and media.
Morin would go on to do just this in L’Esprit du temps: Essai sur la
culture de masse.29 Increasingly concerned with large-scale issues at a time
when TV loomed as the format of the future, Morin wrote this book as a
comprehensive theory of mass communication. Yet he could hardly
downplay cinema since he had just codirected with Jean Rouch the inesti-
mably important Chronicle of a Summer (he was thus part of the New Wave
and its cinephilia, like it or not). And so in his new book cinema still plays
the major heuristic role as the century’s model cultural artifact, a spiritual-
material entity containing undeniable financial and aesthetic (imaginary)
value. However, Morin doesn’t subject cinema’s specific techniques and
properties to analysis. Working at a high level of generality, and with com-
munications as the umbrella term, he took on the kind of purview and
ethos that one could also see Marshall McLuhan testing out at the same
moment. Morin gladly joined the new journal bearing the title Communi-
cations, which was inaugurated in 1960 at the École Pratique en Sciences
Sociales. Alongside him on its editorial board was Roland Barthes. As for
filmologie, Morin had let it go even before it got into trouble and migrated
across the Alps.
From the outset Communications treated cinema as but one star in a
huge constellation of processes and artifacts. And it was determined to
treat cinema in a disciplined manner, as an alternative to the proliferating
“amateur” film journals of the New Wave era. At the same time Commu-
nications wanted to avoid merely applying traditional academic disciplines
to popular culture in the manner of the filmologie group, and it certainly
wanted to replace the latter’s positivist profile with something startlingly
new. Indeed, it hoped to score the same kind of revolution within the
academy as the New Wave had scored in the real world of film production
and distribution. The very first issue featured Barthes’s “The Photographic
Message,” an article that would become fundamental for film studies and
29. See Morin, L’Esprit du temps: Essai sur la culture de masse (Paris, 1962).
for its author’s later book Camera Lucida. Morin’s contribution was called
“The Culture Industry”; he also introduced a dossier on the current phe-
nomenon of the New Wave. The veering of this journal and of Morin away
from postwar aesthetics and sociology became unmistakable in the fourth
issue, titled “Recherches semiologiques” (1967). Promoting undisguised
disciplinary determination we find Claude Bremond and a very young
Tzvetan Todorov writing on literary systems, while Christian Metz debuts
with one of his most far-reaching essays, “Cinéma: Langue ou langage.”
Barthes appears twice, first with the famous “Rhetoric of the Image” and
then with the complete text of “Elements of Semiology.”30
I have always dated the advent of academic film studies at the moment
when Metz leapfrogged over Mitry as he reviewed the latter’s Esthétique et
psychologie du cinéma, the first installment of which came out in Critique in
1965.31 Mitry, we have seen, grew up in the old school, with roots in the
1920s and an eclectic if vast erudition. Like many before him (Léon
Moussinac, Jean Epstein, and Bazin) he cobbled together his “system” of
cinema by collecting observations and opinions expressed by filmmakers
and critics over the life of the medium. Mitry was a genuine encyclopedist.
His magnum opus organized just about everything significant that had
been written about cinema into categories and positions that he then ad-
judicated according to his own comprehensive and overarching argument.
Metz’s ascension came on the back of his seventy-five-page critique of
Mitry’s huge tomes. Trained in linguistics under A. J. Greimas, Metz wrote
as a human scientist, that is, he wrote as someone based in the heart of the
university, not like Mitry, who was a highly interesting guest occasionally
invited into the university from the real world.32 Metz systematically un-
dercut his elder’s humanism with a new structuralist vocabulary and
method.
Metz, we have come to learn, forms a substantial link between filmologie
and mainstream French film theory. The first essay in his first book, “A
propos de l’impression de réalité au cinéma,” takes off from Le Cinéma ou
l’homme imaginaire, which he calls “one of the richest works yet conse-
30. See Communications 4 (1964).

31. See Christian Metz, “Une Étape dans la réflexion sur le cinéma,” Critique 21 (Mar.
1965): 227–48 and “Problèmes actuels de théorie du cinéma,” Revue d’esthétique 20 (Apr.–Sept.
1967): 180–221; rpt. under the general heading “Sur la théorie classique du cinéma: A propos des
travaux de Jean Mitry,” Metz, Essais sur la signification au cinéma, 2 vols. (Paris, 1968 –72), 2:9 –
86.
32. Mitry often taught at IDHEC, the French film school, and occasionally gave courses at
the University of Paris. In the 1960s he was invited to teach at the University of Montréal and
also spent a term in 1973 at the University of Iowa.
crated to the seventh art.”33 And it has long been known that filmologie
furnished Metz with such categories as the filmic fact and cinematic fact.34
But the surest connection is one that Martin Lefebvre has unearthed:
Metz’s initial proposal for research submitted to the CNRS in 1962—and
thus undoubtedly vetted by Morin— explicitly suggests the propitious
connection between filmologie and linguistics that will eventuate in Lan-
gage et cinéma.35 Published in 1971, this doctoral thesis underwrites film
semiotics and everything that gravitated to it. “Everything” would soon
come to mean psychoanalysis and (Althusserian) Marxism, the former of
which Metz was deeply schooled in. As for Louis Althusser, his star ruled
the post-1968 academic avant-garde. Once Foucault’s growing influence is
added to the recipe, Theory—as it would come to be known (and, by
many, ridiculed as Grand Theory)—appeared as a powerful concatenation
of disciplines, the convergence of the human sciences.
Looking back in 1978, Morin sheepishly declared his own film theory to
be presemiotic. He was, after all, a mere amateur when it came to the
sophisticated semiotics and narratology practiced by Metz, Barthes, and
their illustrious students at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he
would frequently run into them. Morin’s comprehensive understanding
of the medium twenty years earlier, based on an anthropological-
sociological model, had clearly been superseded by a younger generation.
In the late 1970s, from his Olympian post atop the social sciences, he could
observe how the emergent discipline of structural semiotics had spread
throughout French universities, then quickly to the UK (especially via
Screen) and the U.S., where comparative literature journals like Diacritics,
MLN, Boundary 2, and New Literary History proclaimed a new day for
cinema studies. That day dawned more brightly in Britain thanks to Wol-
len, who turned his position in a linguistics department toward cinema
semiotics. Nothing comparable occurred in American linguistics pro-
grams, most of which, I recall, scoffed at the attention that we comparative
literature scholars accorded Ferdinand de Saussure, Émile Beneveniste,
33. Metz, “A propos de l’impression de réalité au cinéma,” Cahiers du cinéma, nos. 166– 67
(May–June 1965): 75– 82; rpt. in Essais sur la signification du cinéma, 1:13–24, a book dedicated to
Georges Blin of the Collège de France, an important literary critic of the day and an academic
through and through; trans. Michael Taylor under the title “On the Impression of Reality in the
Cinema,” Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York, 1974), p. 4.
34. Cohen-Séat proposed this distinction in his Essais sur les principes d’une philosophie du
cinéma, which Metz elaborated on at the outset of Langage et cinéma (Paris, 1971). Briefly, the
filmic fact refers to the text and its internal system as experienced and comprehended, while the
cinematic fact refers to the system that makes the text possible, including the industry,
technology, stars, film culture, and so on.
35. See Lefebvre, “L’Aventure filmologique.”
and Louis Hjelmslev, not to mention Vladimir Propp and the Italians
(Umberto Eco, Emilio Garroni), all of whom were considered passé or
naı̈ve in the era of Noam Chomsky and generative grammar.
Structuralism was hardly passé in Paris, where film theory gave it a
brightly lit stage. The charismatic and tireless Metz presided over a whole
generation of graduate students, quite a few coming from abroad. Punc-
tilious, he professed that only some of what film scholars needed to learn
was cinema specific. Codes related to cinematography, editing (his famous
list of eight syntagms),36 punctuation (fades, dissolves), and so forth re-
quired schooling in close analysis and film history.37 But much of the pro-
cess of signification in cinema derives from codes that apply to other arts
(theater, prose fiction, painting, cartoons, photography) or from general
cultural codes that films seem to transmit with little interference. Theory
might be viewed as a superdiscipline capable of orchestrating the investi-
gation of the various determinants that go into cinema’s undeniable psy-
chosocial effects. A great many budding film scholars in the francophone
and anglophone academies (along with colleagues in Latin America, Ja-
pan, and Eastern Europe) set themselves the goal of mastering everything
that might be specific to the medium while at the same time balancing
enough psychoanalysis, Marxism, and (Foucauldian) historiography to be
able to account for the importance of an exemplary film, genre, auteur, or
national cinematic movement.
Cine-semiotics was taken up by young film scholars in the U.S. and the
UK with the elevated expectations and fervor of a full-blown program.
Adherents wanted their students to understand both the textual system
that comprises any film and the larger systems that make up the cinema,
regulating its function within economies of the psyche and of society. This
might seem close to Cohen-Séat’s program, for he had alerted academic
administrators and government officials that cinema’s untold conse-
quences on human behavior needed to be investigated and calculated.38
However, in practice most filmologists had been content to pursue their
36. See Metz, “La Grande Syntamatique du film narratif,” Communications 8 (1966): 120–
24.
37. The second part of Metz’s review of Mitry was translated by Diana Matias under the
title “Current Problems of Film Theory: Christian Metz on Jean Mitry’s L’Esthétique et
psychologie du cinéma, Vol. II,” Screen 14 (Spring–Summer 1973): 40– 87. Metz, Film Language: A
Semiotics of Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (Oxford, 1974) is a translation of only volume one of
Essais sur la signification du cinéma.
38. Already in 1948, filmologie was identified as the most abstract level of moral and
pedagogical film research. See André Lang, Le Tableau blanc (Paris, 1948). Lang makes it clear
that Cohen-Séat’s abstruse formulations are befuddling in the absence of specific practical
examples, which the latter had promised to be forthcoming.
private research projects under its beneficent conditions, so much in fact
that filmologie could be deemed more an institution than a method. Cine-
semiotics, on the other hand, considered itself part of a dominant struc-
turalist movement that wagered on the interlinked nature of the
disciplines making up the human sciences. Related to linguistics, semiotics
was taken to be a foundational human science, one that every film student
needed to master. Its basic elements were shown at work in example after
example of intricate readings of films, readings that didn’t shy away from
outrageously broad claims about the psychoanalytic or ideological conse-
quences of the atomic structures of signification that were inevitably dis-
covered to be operative. Stephen Heath’s seventy-page reading of Orson
Welles’s Touch of Evil, symptomatically titled “Film and System: Terms of
Analysis,” remains a thrillingly ingenious, if intimidating, exercise in this
mode. Published in Screen in two installments during 1975, it owed much
to Metz and to Raymond Bellour, whose series of analyses of the molecular
structure of classical Hollywood movies— especially Hitchcock’s—led
film scholars to believe that every film could be parsed into a web of over-
lapping codes, each of which could be cracked and whose overall structure
(the textual system), furthermore, could be related to larger systems work-
ing above the level of narrative.39
One of the first and most influential examples of a structuralist reading
is the collective text that the editors of Cahiers du cinéma devoted to John
Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln in 1970 (translated in Screen in 1972).40 Scarcely a
decade after Bazin’s death, the journal he founded had turned against him
and embraced the structuralist paradigm that was in the avant-garde of
Parisian university culture. Between 1965 and 1972, Metz published five
semiotic pieces in Cahiers; but it was the next, psychoanalytic phase of his
career (culminating in The Imaginary Signifier [1975]) that worked in con-
cert with the newly politicized version of Bazin’s famous journal, whose
editors were intent on leaving Bazin behind and adopting a more scientific
stance. Science in those days was understood of course in Althusser’s sense.
In such a charged atmosphere Bazin was reviled as a mystified and
mystifying idealist responsible for the excessive adulation of films and
auteurs that continued to pour from the pens of mere critics. And yet, as
has become increasingly apparent, his penchant for developing abstrac-
tions and for elaborating far-reaching metaphors, based on details mined
39. See Raymond Bellour, L’Analyse du film (Paris, 1979); trans. Constance Penley under
the title The Analysis of Film (Bloomington, Ind., 2000).
40. See Editorial Collective, “Young Mr. Lincoln de John Ford,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 223
(Aug.–Sept. 1970): 29–47; trans. Helen Lackner and Matias under the title “John Ford’s Young
Mr. Lincoln,” Screen 13 (Autumn 1972): 5– 44.
in close analysis, has remained a hallmark of French film studies. As its
collective text on Ford’s film demonstrates, Cahiers du cinéma might have
repudiated Bazin, Rohmer, and Truffaut after 1968, but it remained a place
where rich films were identified and then subjected to concomitantly rich
symptomatic readings. The difference of the 1970s was that of discipline.
Bazin’s Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? gives the appearance of a programmatic
analysis of the medium, something both Rohmer and Roger Leenhardt
underlined at the time.41 The fact is, however, that he did not work me-
thodically through the question posed by the title of his book. He was a
practicing critic, and the book anthologized just fifty-two of his twenty-six
hundred pieces, most of which had been dashed off as daily or weekly
reviews for the general public. He may have remained remarkably consis-
tent, suggesting a fully digested understanding of cinema, but he honed his
rhetoric to prepare a public for many different kinds of films, not to estab-
lish an academic field or even to map out a course of study. On the other
hand, Metz and the generation of structuralist-materialists that looked to
him addressed not a public but a subject, one they described as a system
that they were determined to explain systematically. And they did so
within a university structure, building their articles and books in seminars
populated by graduate students who aimed in their own theses to add to
the progress they sensed was being made semester after semester by their
illustrious professors.42
3. Our Turn: The Explosion of American Film Studies in the

1980s
It was largely thanks to continental critical theory—that jerry-rigged
edifice of semiotics, narratology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism—that
American film studies rose to prominence in the humanities, quickly be-
coming a hot spot in the second half of the seventies. Screen theory, as it
was sometimes called (because so much of it came through Screen), solid-
ified into a near orthodoxy that galvanized or intimidated just about ev-
eryone who taught film. This mainly included those several hundred
members of SCS who had gotten into the field by teaching art films along-
side literary texts or who had championed some beloved auteur or who did
their best to cover the history of cinema and ideas about it. While many
41. See Eric Rohmer, “La Somme d’André Bazin,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 91 (Jan. 1959):
36–45.
42. Despite the visibility of film within the French academic institutions of the time, it
wouldn’t be until 1986 that advanced degrees in cinema would be officially conferred. Lefebvre
believes this delay was caused by the bad taste that filmologie had left at the Sorbonne in the
early 1960s.
were shocked by the tone and method of cine-semiotics, others, especially
those working out of romance language and comparative literature de-
partments, found themselves joining a mission grander than any film,
grander than the cinema itself, a mission designated Theory.
My own case is symptomatic. In the early 1970s, wanting to instill rigor
in what appeared an “undiscipline” of largely belletristic commentary and
vague speculation, I developed lectures that became the book The Major
Film Theories. A decade later, things were very different. At best, those
major theorists now served as a preamble to a far more coordinated field of
study ruled by continental criticism whose Concepts in Film Theory I took
stock of in a 1984 book by that name. Yet I hadn’t registered that this Grand
Film Theory, though scarcely a decade old, was already on the wane, hav-
ing squandered its vigor in parochial feuds (structuralism undermined
from within by poststructuralism) or in the redundant, if ingenious, reas-
sertion of its doctrines, case after case. In Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film
Studies, whose title set an agenda in the mid-1990s, David Bordwell and
Noël Carroll claimed to have toppled this hegemony,43 doing it from the
top of the hill, for after 1980 straightforward American film scholarship
had begun to depose foreign intellectuals, with their obtuse, often untrans-
lated, vocabularies. A sociologist of knowledge might find that Grand Film
Theory simply did not leave enough room for the greatly expanded corps
of researchers streaming out of American graduate schools who needed to
come up with additional objects of study and new ways of studying them.
Historical and cultural topics provided endless opportunities, and this is
the direction film studies took in the U.S.
I resisted this wholesale abandonment of theory. The two final concepts
of my book, figuration and interpretation, registered a definite need for
fresh air but without throwing over the momentum of continental critical
thought. I wanted to open what seemed like a hermetic structuralism onto
the new and the unpredictable, letting films take the lead in our dialogue
with them rather than serve as symptoms to be analyzed. Both figuration
and interpretation bear a European pedigree. The first, graced by Jean-
François Lyotard’s Discours, figure (1971), could be felt in that author’s
enigmatic article “Acinema” (1978) and in the inimitable, recalcitrant writ-
ings of Jean-Louis Schefer. As for interpretation, it had been proclaimed by
Paul Ricoeur as the defining practice of humanistic inquiry. Why not
openly base a vigorous and consequential film studies on protocols of
43. See David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, introduction to Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film
Studies, ed. Bordwell and Carroll (Madison, Wisc., 1996), pp. xiii–xvii.
interpretation in history, criticism, and theory? What I didn’t realize was
that interpretation itself was caught in a crossfire in the 1980s.
Today it is clear that during the 1980s, amid the cacophony of small
arms fire, two big guns would dominate the field: The Classical Hollywood
Cinema, wheeled out in 1984 by Bordwell, Kristen Thompson, and Janet
Staiger; and Gilles Deleuze’s double-barreled cinema books, L’Image-
Mouvement and L’Image-Temps, which boomed in 1983 and 1985 respec-
tively and were translated into English in 1986 and 1989.44 Nothing else in
the 1980s was nearly as prominent as those explosive projects that recon-
figured the field of battle; their aftershocks still echo across film studies
today, setting off allegiances and allergies even in the era of new media.
Each mowed down the excesses of both interpretation and cultural studies,
yet they are anything but allies. The Classical Hollywood Cinema would
dispense with lofty theory altogether, building a historical poetics based on
a notion of image processing that Bordwell would soon ground in the
universals of cognitive psychology. Deleuze, on the other hand, was reso-
lutely antihistorical. What he and Bordwell shared in the 1980s was an
attention to the specific and systematic character of the medium. Both
denigrate interpretation, for it takes flight from films into airy speculations
that deploy humanist concepts and vocabularies available elsewhere. And
cultural studies spreads horizontally away from the field of cinema like
spores blown by the winds of fad or by social agendas. Bordwell, who at the
end of the decade explicitly demanded a research program that dispensed
with interpretation, built The Classical Hollywood Cinema around a set of
films chosen not by taste and judgment but by an algorithm. This was
meant to guarantee that the book’s description of the Hollywood system
would itself be systematic and immune to bias and fashion.
Deleuze’s project may appear to be based on taste (the canon of Cahiers
du cinéma, most reviewers agree) and on the reading of cinematic figures,
but, in fact, his cinema books lay out a conceptual network where films
function as nodes that connect lines of thought. As he would famously
proclaim, these lines are not human thoughts traversing films but the
thinking of the cinema machine itself. As for cultural studies, Deleuze
fought every effort to territorialize social energy, even into something as
progressive as emergent cultures. His anarchist politics may have triggered
a phrase like “the people are missing,”45 but this concept is less a descrip-
44. For a full account of Deleuze’s impact, see Andrew, “La Réception de Deleuze,” in
Deleuze et les images, trans. Hélène Frappat, ed. François Dosse and Jean-Michel Frodon (Paris,
2008), pp. 145–59. This passage translates part of the opening of that essay.
45. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(Minneapolis, 1989), p. 216.
tion of the Third World through Third Cinema than a concept marking
the location of a vortex around which subcultural and supracultural en-
ergy whirls out of human control.
Deleuze, no less than Bordwell, lashed out at semiotics and psychoanal-
ysis in part because they reduced the power of the films they tried to ex-
plain. Both men effectively bracketed what passed for the film theory of the
day and instead put themselves in dialogue with classical theory, especially
with theorist-cineastes like Epstein and Sergei Eisenstein. It was once again
legitimate to give serious attention to the major theories—some of them at
least—and not simply as background to a professionally constituted field
of theory. Returning to strong thinkers, like returning to strong films,
always was Deleuze’s method, although he was nevertheless a philosopher
who prized creativity and the future above all. The stupendous number of
films Deleuze cites and from which he elaborates his concepts shows him
to be a devotee of the ciné-clubs that we know he fervently attended in the
postwar years.46 Indeed, the first effect of Deleuze’s cinema books was to
bring largely canonical movies back to American film studies for serious
consideration, after a decade devoted to audiences, to special-interest
films, and to television. Deleuze, along with Serge Daney (onetime editor
of Cahiers du cinéma, small bits of whose writings made it into English),
heartened those of us who felt the field to be malnourished when cut off
from the kind of intellectually rambunctious film analysis that thrives in
Europe. I was particularly gratified that both men reconnected with the
fundament of the Cahiers du cinéma approach, acknowledging Bazin as an
indisputable wellspring and following his practice of writing expansively
and creatively about a variety of films chosen with discernment. Deleuze’s
cinema books urged us to return to the movies and did so at the very
moment when this became possible, as university libraries had begun to
acquire VHS and Betamax cassettes. What a pleasure it was to teach De-
leuze in the late 1980s and early 1990s with this new resource. In my own
seminar, each participant was responsible for one of the twenty-two chap-
ters of the cinema books, engaging Deleuze’s argument with the aid of clips
and stills taken from his plethora of examples. Chapter after chapter, the
films were shown to nourish the concepts; but they also took on a life of
their own, developing new concepts along the way. Deleuze would have
applauded.
It is explicitly cinema’s contribution of new concepts that prompts
Rodowick, in another state-of-the-field article, to hitch both Deleuze and
Stanley Cavell to an enterprise within “philosophy” rather than within
46. See Dosse, Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari: Biographie croisée (Paris, 2007).
“theory,” whose energy he declares to be drained.47 For theory seems too
programmatic and imperious, whether driven by science in Althusser’s
sense (Grand Theory) or by models taken from natural and cognitive sci-
ence (posttheory). Defending the latter, in a rebuke to Rodowick, Malcolm
Turvey proudly reminds us that once continental film studies had been
deracinated from the anglophone field, thanks largely to the relentless
analyses of Noël Carroll, room was cleared for specific, targeted, and useful
work. Turvey runs through a litany of recent and distinct gains in theories
of emotion, editing, perception, imagination, pleasure, music, compre-
hension, interpretation, character identification, narrative, and sus-
pense.48 While those who write books and articles in these areas invariably
do so by turning to well-developed notions in the social sciences or phi-
losophy, they do so, Turvey believes, from the strength of their own disci-
pline. Here he connects to something I have been advocating all along;
“most of us are not philosophers, sociologists, or economists but film
scholars. What this means is that, at the end of the day, we have to use our
expertise— gained from watching large numbers of films, observing them
and the response of viewers to them carefully, and learning about the
contexts in which they were made and exhibited—to evaluate the theories
we take from other disciplines in terms of whether they successfully ex-
plain (or not) film.”49
Posttheory evinces an attitude and an agenda that has, with some qual-
ification and dispute, been termed positivist, though Turvey might prefer
to call it professional. Perhaps a new generation of film scholars has come
to the fore, adroit and modest, ready to address not major issues so much
as targeted and circumscribed questions that arise from solutions to pre-
vious ones. This attitude has been fostered by an explosion of new archives,
databases, and published or recorded interviews. So much material has
been uncovered that countless film scholars find themselves on well-
groomed career paths. And, as Alison Trope notes, this ethos extends be-
yond the university, visible in the often highly detailed entries buried in the
IMDb, or in the extras on DVDs. While much of the newly uncovered
information and the many disseminated reports may be suspect, such an
avalanche of information has unquestionably democratized film studies.
The electronic network invites lay people, not just duly dubbed professors,
to contribute to the enterprise.
But how shall all these shards of information be catalogued, organized,
47. Rodowick, “An Elegy for Theory,” October, no. 122 (Fall 2007): 92.
48. See Malcolm Turvey, “Theory, Philosophy, and Film Studies: A Response to D. N.
Rodowick’s ‘An Elegy for Theory,’” October, no. 122 (Fall 2007): 110–20.
49. Ibid., p. 120.
and merged into a larger enterprise? How shall information become
knowledge and inquiry be disciplined? If the internet decenters research,
the university remains staunchly hierarchical, committed at some level to
selection, procedure, and evaluation. After all, its academic programs are
built on what we call the course that from some motivated beginning
promises to reach a plateau of understanding ten or fifteen weeks later.
Student plans of study put courses in relation to one another, and we call
the sum of courses, including their progression and interrelation, a curric-
ulum. Of all American film scholars, Bordwell has been most dedicated to
the film curriculum. His textbooks establish the bedrock information,
concepts, and skills that enable more sophisticated inquiry into what he
calls the historical poetics of the medium. He argues for and from first
principles and believes students should progress to higher-level courses
(and presumably can succeed in them) only after having mastered foun-
dational material (a modicum of film history) and skills (close analysis,
archive research, and so on). But rare is the department in the U.S. that has
implemented such a program, at least at the undergraduate level. Few film
professors would refuse—for lack of prerequisites—smart, eager neo-
phytes (English majors, say) who ask to join a senior seminar in feminist
film theory or in the globalization of film distribution. Except in its pro-
duction track, film studies does not take itself to be analogous to chemistry
or economics in this regard. Still, at the minimum film studies programs
should arrange things so that students can grow term by term in the depth,
breadth, and subtlety of their film analyses and historical inquiries.
Such abrasive curricular issues quickly strip away the veneer that makes
a term like discipline so attractive. As I have intimated throughout, the
word is an alloy composed of method and institution. As an institution
within the humanities, a film studies program houses a large variety of
courses that address or introduce films in some manner. A distribution
rule, guaranteeing breadth, usually governs student choice over the spec-
trum of courses on offer. But as a method film studies implies a sequenced
and hierarchical set of experiences, usually including a baseline of film
history and two or more levels of theory and analysis. If methodical cinema
studies once seemed on the verge of emerging at many universities, this
impulse largely dissolved once students and professors felt the attraction
and the need to cover larger swaths of media. The territory broadened at
the expense of methodological depth. After the growth of cultural studies,
the tent (no longer a house) may have been stretched to the point of
ripping.
Yet film studies persists, proving for some that theory is but one of its
aspects, on par with the rest. If we still insist on its depth, theory today no
longer stands in the middle of the field like a tentpole but rather spreads
itself into every inquiry across the field that submits itself to sustained and
coherent reflection (as historiography is the theory of historical practice,
for example). This change may be most apparent in the shift from the
apparatus theory of the 1970s to today’s media archeology. The former was
itself an apparatus, an instrument to explain the development of cinema’s
technologies, including their basic ideological effects. Dependent on a few
historical postulates (most centrally, that the camera lens reproduces the
conditions of vision established at the birth of capitalism with Renaissance
perspective), it was built out of passages from Plato, Freud, Lacan, and
Marx. Media archeology inverts this research agenda; in each of its many
excavations, historians probe aspects of film or other audiovisual phenom-
ena on the irregular rock face of cultural history. The theories of historians
of art and science (Jonathan Crary and Friedrich Kittler have been crucial
to those who dig into the nineteenth century) guide or fill out such re-
search. This dramatic shift is visible in the near disappearance of Althusser
from the works-cited lists of film scholars after 1985 and the nearly oblig-
atory presence there of Walter Benjamin, whose fragmentary style is itself
an amalgam of archival digging and philosophical speculation.
Benjamin’s name forces us to recognize the belated but unmistakable
arrival of Frankfurt school critical theory in the 1990s. This came at a time
when, except for a coterie of Deleuzeans, the Anglo-American victory over
French film theory seemed complete; on one side stood a politicized cul-
tural studies and, on the other, the more formalist cognitive film theory
(including historical poetics). While the former profits from sliding away
from the medium to examine whatever it finds of interest around it, the
latter resolutely holds onto the specificity of film. Critical theory, thanks to
its Marxist tenor, manages to be attentive to the formal, historical, and
political dimensions of the media simultaneously, thereby proposing a
disciplined alternative.
We should have been paying more attention. Thomas Elsaesser, shut-
tling frequently across the Atlantic from the late 1970s on and current with
developments in French, German, and English, had been pointing to the
place that critical theory, and especially the Frankfurt school, should oc-
cupy in any full-dimensional film studies. During the 1980s his perspective
teamed up with an avalanche of research on early cinema that had been
ongoing since the famous Brighton conference of 1978. Elsaesser staged a
conference in England in 1983 on various aspects of early cinema and even-
tually published a carefully wrought anthology through the British Film
Institute in 1990, where Benjamin’s name shows up in the first paragraph
to underwrite a “new archeology of the artwork, because of the fundamen-
tal change film had brought to the notion of time, space and material
culture.”50 After helping Noel Burch, André Gaudreault, Yuri Tzivian,
Charles Musser, Tom Gunning, and others blow apart the dominance of
the feature film, Elsaesser aimed to reassemble film studies by bringing to
traditional questions of form and narrative the integral dimension of social
experience that critical theory always turns forefront. Simultaneously
Miriam Hansen published Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American
Silent Film, contributing in a more concentrated way to the massive redis-
covery of silent (and presilent) cinema through a sophisticated under-
standing of experience.51 Of course, attention to viewing and viewers had
also been central for Morin, Metz, and Baudry. But, in her clarifying in-
troduction, Hansen rejected the hubris of French psychoanalytic theory
that had made spectators slaves to the apparatus. She remained even more
skeptical of American approaches, including both empirical research into
audience demography and the emerging cognitive paradigm that reaches
for universal, if specific, laws governing how narratives or individual
genres (for example, horror) are processed by the mind. Hansen promoted
a dialectic between films taken as historically inflected products and view-
ers taken as historically situated publics.
It was from Jürgen Habermas that she developed the notion that audi-
ences in particular times and places could constitute a kind of public
sphere, with all the political weight that term connotes. Habermas’s work,
along with that of his followers Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, had in
fact been available in English for nearly twenty years, mainly through New
German Critique, which had featured them in its inaugural year. But be-
yond that important journal and occasional invocations in dissertations
and articles they have had little impact on anglophone film studies, despite
Kluge’s powerful productions in film and TV. Unlike the French thinkers
who, for better or worse, seem able to reach the four corners of film studies,
key German thinkers have not often cropped up outside of discussions of
German cinema or beyond the gates of German and comparative literature
departments—that is, with the exception of Benjamin, whose ties to Pari-
sian culture (including surrealism and the Collège de Sociologie) make
him perhaps less a completely German figure than, say, Theodor Adorno.
Now, Benjamin’s work had been available in English since 1969, when
Illuminations first appeared. But for film studies, aside from “The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he really arrived in 1985 when
50. Thomas Elsaesser, “Early Cinema: From Linear History to Mass Media Archaeology,”
in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Elsaesser (London, 1990), p. 1.
51. See Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film
(Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
New German Critique devoted an entire issue to his relation to cinema,
followed by one on Weimar Film Theory. Then came Susan Buck-Morss to
trumpet the arcades project in her 1989 The Dialectics of Seeing.52 Benjamin
was suddenly indispensible to the way much film history, especially early
cinema, was conceived and written in the U.S. As a measure, the 1995
collection Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life finds him invoked in
nine of its fourteen selections and cited on forty of its four hundred pages.53
For the past ten years, Harvard University Press has been bringing out a
huge quantity of Benjamin’s writings and correspondence, including last
year’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” and
Other Writings on Media.54 Benjamin was unquestionably the greatest me-
dia theorist before the Second World War, writing brilliantly on photog-
raphy and radio.
Benjamin’s friend Siegfried Kracauer had a better chance to bring
Frankfurt-style critical theory to America, since From Caligari to Hitler
(1947) and Theory of Film (1960) were published here. The former could be
called a study of a cinematic public sphere, though a decidedly dysfunc-
tional one, while the latter (introduced in its latest edition by Hansen)
ranks as the most ambitious treatise on the cinema written by anyone from
this school of thought. Yet Theory of Film has until recently been largely
ignored. I contributed to this neglect in The Major Film Theories, being
relatively ignorant at the time of Kracauer’s journalism of the 1920s. And,
indeed, Kracauer’s Theory of Film did seem like an orphan, in dialogue
with no active discourse community—Frankfurt school or otherwise—
especially in comparison to Bazin, whose works, collected around the same
time, were written within an unbroken and vibrant French tradition of
criticism. Kracauer came off badly in the inevitable comparison with Bazin
at a time when realist theory as a whole, and Bazin’s star in particular, had
dimmed considerably. Kracauer was thus doubly cursed, at least until the
1990s when he benefited from Benjamin’s fame and from the fine biblio-
graphic recovery effort of Tom Levin, whose translation of The Mass Or-
nament appeared in 1995.55 These essays, more than Kracauer’s book-
length works, encouraged the kind of detailed and imaginative historical
52. See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project
(Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
53. See Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz
(Berkeley, 1995).
54. See “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” and Other Writings
on Media, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. (Cambridge, Mass.,
2008).
55. See Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y.
Levin (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).
research that Anglo-American film scholars had been pursuing, especially
in the area of early cinema and the culture it grew out of. Think of Gun-
ning’s wide-ranging array of essays; one could say that he writes, con-
sciously or not, in the Frankfurt school manner. Critical theory put film in
its place, so to speak, and interrogated it from that place. Perhaps its im-
pact could only be felt when American film studies began to realize that
media was integral to a discipline no longer bounded by dates or by specific
technologies.
Thus theory may have floundered as a metadiscourse, but numerous
theoretically sophisticated research fields have kept film scholars alive to
far-ranging consequences of the medium: early cinema research, the study
of documentary (its criteria, genres, technology, social consequences), or
even the history of film theory (as distinct from theory itself). This last-
mentioned area is currently very active, as international endeavors have
coalesced into a research group whose goal is to unearth, contextualize,
and eventually make available discourses from eras and places that have
not been heard from before: an anthology of Czech writings before the
Second World War,56 a 1913 Japanese treatise (recently reported on at a
professional meeting),57African ideas of art and design,58 and so on.
Notice that the endeavors just mentioned are all international in scope
and in practice. For fifteen years the internet has put scholars and projects
in touch with one another, providing an alternative to national traditions
of scholarship. Even before the internet, a surge in historical research had
started to emerge in France from underneath the loftier discussion of aes-
thetics that has dominated the field there. This turn can be credited in part
to the prestige of French historiography (several key members of the An-
nales school have now worked with film material). More important has
been the general access to documentation that formerly belonged to the
few. The establishment of the friendly and convenient Bibliothèque du
Film in 1990 has changed the way young scholars go about their work. In
addition, they now have more to work with, as stunning collections have
been added to the already rich French archives through donations and
accessions. If one took a census of top professors in France, the aestheti-
cians would still outnumber the historians, but parity is being reached, and
56. See Cinema All the Time: An Anthology of Czech Film Theory and Criticism, 1908 –1939,
trans. Kevin B. Johnson, ed. Jaroslav Andel and Petr Szczepanik (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2008).
57. A “permanent seminar on history of film theory” was established in 2007, housed by
the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin, Italy. See museonazionaledelcinema.it/filmtheories/.
Aaron Gerow and Markus Nornes reported on early Japanese film theory at this seminar’s
inaugural meeting in Udine, Italy, March 2008.
58. This was the subject of “Imagine,” Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, 2–4 March 2009.
the distinction has become less relevant. The optimists among us applaud
the way that, around the world, history is being theorized while theory is
historicized. At the same time, it is edifying to look to Paris, where renowned
intellectuals like Jacques Rancière, Marie-José Mondzain, Georges Didi-
Huberman, and Jean-Luc Nancy speculate on cinema or deploy ferociously
complex film analyses to address far larger questions.
4. The State of Things: Convergence and Its Gaps

The tether to the vertical pole of theory having loosened in the 1980s,
film studies spread out from its traditional center. Deleuze’s and Bord-
well’s books may stand out from that era because their ideas took shape in
and around a longstanding corpus—the art film and classical Holly-
wood— but that corpus was on the verge of exploding under the pressure
of cultural studies. For anglophone film studies in that decade dove
straight into this rising river, trying not to drown in the process. Not only
were new modes and genres dredged up for discussion, films themselves
were increasingly set aside in favor of other objects of study (audiences,
television, advertising).59 As for cinema studies, it has lost much of the
vague definition it had, yet as an institution, a “society,” it swelled with new
types of scholars, many of whom found movies and related phenomena to
be a fine— even an exceptional—site to monitor social processes.
Like many organisms, once a critical size had been reached, film studies
effectively split into separate interest groups. In the midst of the videotape
revolution, media came to serve as the common term to buffer cultural
studies and film studies. For media studies inevitably belongs to the former
while it includes the latter as one of its manifestations. If any discipline in
the humanities can claim to be emergent it would surely be media studies.
Always taken as an institution rather than a method, media studies encom-
passes— besides film, the first technological medium to win recognition in
the academy—television, radio, and sometimes journalism, even public
relations. Most importantly, it features new media at its cutting edge. Me-
dia studies effectively amounts to communications reborn in the post-
modern era. A growing bibliography of media theory may satisfy skeptics
about its seriousness, yet media studies has a difficult time, more difficult
than film studies, proving itself to be methodical in any sustained manner.
By the time the SCS added media to its name in 2002, the transforma-
59. This shift was visible across the humanities. In an analogous case, my former colleague
Garrett Stewart claims to envy those of us in comparative literature for the fact that our
letterhead at least seems to identify our subject, whereas in English departments the subject
now figures as just one among many topics up for grabs in the classroom and, indeed, in
professional journals.
tion of the landscape had already occurred. One of the strongest new grad-
uate programs to arise in the country, that of the University of Chicago,
had baptized itself the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies. At
Brown University, prominent film scholars work within a department
called Modern Culture and Media. And the six-hundred page The Oxford
Handbook of Film and Media Studies, which the publisher describes as a
“state-of-the-art survey of current thinking and research” in the field as it
now seems constituted, has now been published. Robert Kolker’s fine in-
troduction puts in play every permutation of the book’s two key terms and
the objects they deal with.
Traditional film studies starts with the individual work, genre, or di-
rector, and moves outward to larger issues of the ideologies of pro-
duction and reception, to gender issues, to the effects of distribution
on viewership, and increasingly to the ways globalization is affecting
national cinemas, always attempting to solidify its ground in theory.
Media studies starts with larger textual entities, sometimes isolating a
media artifact—a genre of music, a television series, a social-networking
site, a computer game— often analyzing these from the perspective of
subcultural, audience-specific interaction. Perhaps film studies has never
quite removed itself from the aura of art, and perhaps media studies still
retains roots in methodologies of sociology and cultural history.60
Kolker, a former president of SCS, finds film studies to be hampered by
being tied to a large yet circumscribed set of texts. It revolves around
objects whose density is great enough to keep a complex array of issues in
orbit. Media studies, on the other hand, is not tied down by such gravity. It
floats through a universe that contains artifacts of all sorts, not just the
beautiful Milky Way of films but other galaxies, gaseous clouds, space
junk, and the solar winds that carry it along. Artifacts precipitate from the
processes and forces that are media studies’ true concern. Once nearly the
exclusive province of social science approaches, this field has emerged
within the humanities as a type of cultural studies. The latter, while infil-
trating and sometimes taking over numerous departments, seldom con-
stitutes an academic unit since the topics it takes up are so vast, so
variegated, and so amorphous.61 By contrast, media studies is far more
definable, yet indefinite, for its two central concepts, flow and remedia-
60. Robert Kolker, introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies, ed.
Kolker (New York, 2008), p. 16.
61. See the disenchanted article by William B. Warner and Clifford Siskin, “Stopping
Cultural Studies,” Profession (2008): 94 –107.
tion, betray the instability and evanescence of its object. Media studies
thrives as a virtual discipline; it is the discipline of the virtual.
The first two contributions to The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media
Studies establish the potential rivalry of film and media in the entertain-
ment world and, by implication, its academic study. Jay Bolter, coauthor of
the seminal Remediation (1999), opens the volume by clearly drawing, then
intertwining, two lines that might distinguish film among the media.62
Film was the first in a series of technological media aiming for transpar-
ency, whereby the spectator would feel copresent with what is displayed.
An inevitable delay in its projection may thwart this dream of perceptual
immediacy, but narrative integration restores it on a different plane. By the
time of D. W. Griffith, spectators could feel themselves englobed by the
fictional world on the screen, participating in it. Today, video games make
good on cinema’s promise, on both levels. Player interaction with the
screen functionally instantiates the present tense of the game’s display,
while quasicinematic plots extend what is onscreen across an entire fic-
tional world (Grand Theft Auto is Bolter’s example). He concludes on a
generous note, celebrating the diversity of available entertainment, from
auratic and authored narrative films to interactive internet games, while
indicating the many crossovers between these (such as interactive features
on the DVDs of some feature films).63 To study cinema today, he implies,
one must become a media studies scholar.
The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies follows with Brian
Price’s “The Latest Laocöon: Medium Specificity and the History of Film The-
ory,” whose very title intends to redraw the borders that Bolter has just erased.
Price insists that in an environment of incessant flow and remediation no
object will command attention in and as itself and that the aura of any given
film, like that of cinema in toto, will evaporate.64 He worries that the conver-
gence of all media into an indefinitely malleable electronic stream or reservoir
would seem to destabilize cinema studies if not cinema itself. Art history may
sense itself in a parallel situation as objets d’art now share attention with in-
numerable phenomena comprising the strategically undefined zone of visual
culture. Presumably most of those scholars who now identify their field as
visual studies proudly rely on a disciplined background in art history that
honed the skills they wield in researching and analyzing all manner of things.
The same should apply to those film scholars who have left the cinema-
62. See Jay David Bolter, “Digital Media and the Future of Filmic Narrative,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Film and Media Studies, pp. 21–37.
63. See ibid., pp. 35–37.
64. See Brian Price, “The Latest Laocoön: Medium Specificity and the History of Film
Theory,” in The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies, pp. 38–82.
dominant twentieth century for the unpoliced period of nineteenth-century
audiovisual entertainments or for a twenty-first century that holds out a future
of ever-newer media. Anyone who has learned to deal with artifacts as com-
plex as films, whose textual systems they know how to analyze and whose place
within socioeconomic systems they routinely trace, may feel confident when
traveling to meet other media phenomena.
I have always held that film studies grew unusually strong because films
themselves (especially powerful ones) have been able to stand up to the
discursive weight that cinephiles (critics) and academics (theorists) have
brought to bear on them. A field was constituted thanks to a fortuitous
conjuncture of postwar cinematic modernism running up against a social
imperative in the 1960s and new paradigms in the humanities that precip-
itated out of the events of 1968. Films became ideal objects of analysis
because they are fabricated within corporate and semiotic systems, yet they
speak back to those systems because they are collectively made and viewed.
And they immediately showed themselves to be more than mere illustra-
tions within scholarly debates; they fueled every discussion that engaged
their scarcely manageable images and narratives. This multiplied the
stakes and consequences—the excitement— of taking films seriously, ul-
timately producing the lectures, courses, articles, and books whose debates
make up a fertile field, if not a discipline.
The prospect of the decline of those debates in a media studies milieu is
more worrisome than the putative mutation of their topic. For our sea-
soned ability to understand how the movies have functioned and to ques-
tion how they came to function this way can guide the study of whatever
audio-visions attract our attention.65 The fact is that many of the best
minds in the humanities turned from literary, philosophical, sociocul-
tural, or historical pursuits to account for the most imposing medium of
the twentieth century. They produced often complex, ingenious, and pas-
sionate arguments and positions. They produced a way of thinking and
cultivated an instinct of looking and listening. Even if much of what has
been written could be discarded without real loss, this discourse—this
drive to understand the workings of films—is precious. To have this sub-
sumed by some larger notion of the history of audio-visions, to have it
dissipate into the foggy field of cultural studies, for instance, or become
one testing ground among others for communication studies would be to
lose something whose value has always derived from the intensity and the
focus that films invite and often demand.
65. I elaborate on this view in Andrew, “A Film Aesthetic to Discover,” CiNéMAS 17

(Autumn 2007): 47–71.
And so even as attention drifts to other objects (to TV, the internet,
virtual reality, GPS) the peculiar nature of the film object urges the con-
tinued growth of film studies. The film object should be treated as distinc-
tive enough— hard enough—to withstand, at least provisionally, the
processes of remediation that devalue any given text. The film object in
itself and as it funds analysis and interpretation ought not to recede in the
academy because its peculiar characteristics make it stand out as anoma-
lous in the constellation of media artifacts.
Here is why. Technological media may generally strive for and promise
immediacy,66 but cinema quickly became—and, at its most interesting,
still remains—an object of gaps and absences. From the outset, cinema’s
remarkable psychological and cultural voltage has been built on delay and
slippage. What I have dubbed décalage lies at the heart of the medium and
of each particular film, a gap between here and there as well as now and
then.67 This French term connotes discrepancy in space and deferral or
jumps in time. At the most primary level, the film image leaps from present
to past, for what is edited and shown was filmed at least days, weeks, or
months earlier. This slight stutter in its articulation then repeats itself in
the time and distance that separates filmmaker from spectator and spec-
tators from each other when they see the same film on separate occasions.
The gap in each of these relations constitutes cinema’s difference from
television and new media. Films display traces of what is past and inacces-
sible, whereas TV and certainly the internet are meant to feel and be
present. We live with television as a continual part of our lives and our
homes; sets are sold as furniture. Keeping up a twenty-four-hour chatter
on scores of channels, TV is banal by definition. In contrast, we go out to
the movies, leaving home to cross into a different realm. Every genuine
cinematic experience involves décalage, time-lag. After all, we are taken on
a flight during and after which we are not quite ourselves.
The film object exists differently, or not at all, when kidnapped by con-
sumers and sequestered on their computer desktops. Not only do individ-
uals watch films on PCs at their leisure (stopping and starting at will,
sampling chapters, and so on), they watch them on one window among
several that may be running simultaneously (including those that hold
email messages, the IMDb entry on the film, notes, a blog, and the current
weather). Cinema constitutes just one kind of software content available to
the powerful Windows operating system and the all-encompassing PC
66. Bolton makes this point as well as anyone.

67. See Andrew, “Time Zones and Jetlag: The Flows and Phases of World Cinema,” in
World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, ed. Natasa Durovicová and Kathleen Newman
(forthcoming).
hardware. Called up on demand or via YouTube, a movie appears on a flat
panel, where many windows are displayed—as many as the user chooses,
then shuffles, moving them around like cards in a game of solitaire. Mon-
itor and display seem more apt terms than screen to designate the visual
experience that computers deliver. The computer monitor of the twenty-
first century, just like the cinématographe of the nineteenth, presents the
viewer with the present, with immediate attractions, no matter what is on
display. Cinema, which ruled the twentieth century, pulls the viewer into
another world and an encounter with something that has passed and is just
out of reach.
Perhaps it took later media—and particularly the new media of video
games, the interactive internet, and virtual reality—to let us recognize that
cinema has never really been about immediacy. Its spontaneity and con-
tingency—its neorealism— has always been the lure by which it offers an
experience that, properly speaking, is not immediate at all, but reflective,
resonant, and voluminous. Films provide experiences in such number and
variety and to such powerful effect that they deserve and have received
sustained study. They discipline us so that we can learn from them. This is
a relationship we should not grow out of.

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The Core and the Flow of Film Studies

Author(s): Dudley Andrew

1. Film: Living Object, Field of Research, Discipline

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

Critical Inquiry 35 (Summer 2009)

D U D L E Y A N D R E W is R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative

2. 1945–75: The French Take the Field

30. See Communications 4 (1964).

3. Our Turn: The Explosion of American Film Studies in the

4. The State of Things: Convergence and Its Gaps

65. I elaborate on this view in Andrew, “A Film Aesthetic to Discover,” CiNéMAS 17

66. Bolton makes this point as well as anyone.

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