Film Theory 2008

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.
net/publication/291694144
6 * Film Theory
Article in The Year s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory · June 2008
DOI: 10.1093/ywcct/mbn009
CITATIONS READS
0 14,108
2 authors:
Lisabeth During Lisa Trahair

Pratt Institute UNSW Sydney
11 PUBLICATIONS 21 CITATIONS 25 PUBLICATIONS 75 CITATIONS
SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE
Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:
film comedy View project
philosophy of comedy View project
All content following this page was uploaded by Lisa Trahair on 09 February 2017.
The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

6
Film Theory
Film Theory
lisabeth during and lisa trahair
This chapter is divided into four sections: 1. The Movies of Modern Life;
2. Cinema and Cultural Studies; 3. The New Bazinianism; 4. Film
Aesthetics; Sections 1, 2 and 3 are by Lisabeth During; section 4 is by
Lisa Trahair.
1. The Movies of Modern Life

Murray Pomerance’s edited collection, Cinema and Modernity could have been
a dutiful, disjointed exercise in manufacturing a common purpose for a
mixed bag of articles. It is not. Generally and in an impressive number of
its particulars, it occupies a level well above the average for such projects;
the quality of the writing (from well-known film scholars as Tom Gunning,
Patrice Petro, William Rothman and Tom Conley, but equally from writers
less familiar to me) has been carefully monitored, and it pays off. But the
question remains. What is to be learned from such an enterprise? Do we still
need a book about modernity and film? How much is left to be said about the
role of cinema in acknowledging whatever we take to be the conditions of
modernity?
As candidates for the ‘conditions of the modern’, this collection lines up
the usual suspects: global erosions and displacements, psychic uncertainties,
systems of surveillance and control, and the addictive fondness for move-
ment and speed. Still, there are other less familiar angles: Joe McElhaney
does interesting things with fast-talking and failure in Preston Sturges;
Murray Pomerance explores the ways in which the ‘choreographies’ of
modern organization permit the outrageous creativity of the con man in
Lang and in Spielberg. However, what justifies the effort involved in putting
such a volume together are two qualities prominent both in the editorial
introduction and in the individual contributions: an economy of means and a
generosity of outlook.
Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 16 ß The English Association (2008)
All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
doi:10.1093/ywcct/mbn009
Film Theory | 167
The editor shows both confidence and good sense in knowing what can
be left out, specifically debates about the theory (and timing) of modernity
that his readers can be assumed to have in hand. To talk intelligently of
modernity and the cinema, the conceptual stakes do not have to be raised to
a meaningless height of generality. ‘Cinema’, Pomerance states categorically,
is ‘modern life’; it is modernity’s ‘metaphor’. Philosophical or terminolog-
ical or sociological battles can be fought out elsewhere. The editor describes
his goal: ‘to understand the modern experience in light of cinema, and
cinema in light of the modern experience’. The project is not novel, but
is approached here without a fog of apologies, so that it avoids most of the
traps a reader might have feared. The volume is arriving late in the game:
there is no need to sue again for the right of movies to be considered
inexhaustible ‘metaphors’ for modernity—to be something more than symp-
toms and less than explanations. And this means that some daunting topics
can be put to the side. Nothing in the articles collected here puts into
question what movies are or tries to re-establish their credentials. Film
aesthetics and ontology are not dismissed; they are just not the main event.
Pomerance points out that film grew up with the modern world; it is not
waiting around for an introduction. There is little need for a single program
governing the way modernity can be reflected in film, although a cynicism
about surfaces and an expectation of displacement and dislocation seem to
be recurrent issues in one after another of the articles. While there is no
explicit preference for American cinema, American examples do outnumber
European films, and most of the contributors seem to take for granted the
formative role of American culture in the late 19th and early 20th century in
shaping the conventions, and conditions, of European modernism. Looking
back on ‘modern times’, the move from one brand of the ‘local’ to a
universal ‘global’ has the air of inevitability. But was it always that obvious?
Mobility and impermanence, social fluidity, epistemological skepticism and
the uncertainty about identity: these have been the common currency of
philosophical criticism since Montaigne. Not every chapter in the book of
modernism has an American author. Yet the enthusiasm with which the
movies became the defining American art helped to make such associations
semi-automatic: the American film was where the world saw what mode-
rnity looked like. And that is the point Pomerance makes persuasively.
A good example of how the theoretical language of modernity has
become indispensable in film scholarship comes late in the collection,
where Tom Gunning responds to his critics. Gunning’s thesis about ‘the
cinema of attractions’ has been an irresistible magnet for scholars of early
cinema. Yet there are some (he names David Bordwell and Charlie Keil)
168 | Film Theory
who object to what they see as an excessive emphasis on the transformations

of human perception and sensibility credited to modernity’s inexorable
movement towards rationalization (of time, of labor, of experience). Even
the hyperstimulation of the urban everyday now seems tired. For such
critics, modernity is, simply, overdone: its portrayal has become generic
and uninformative. Despite such objections, there are few people in and
outside film studies who would deny that modern modes of experience are
different, that communication, labor and daily life has changed, and that
cinema is probably our best witness to those changes, and our canniest
student of their aesthetic potentials. Because he can rely on these general
areas of agreement, Pomerance as editor can create a community without
forcing a consensus, and can count on interesting correlations without
expecting a collective definition, a shared premise, or a mass deference to
a ‘sacred’ word. It is, he says simply, just there, and there are, of course,
‘many origins’:
After mechanization, after the intermittent device that makes pos-
sible the opening and closing of the camera’s and projector’s aper-
tures, after the widespread availability of electrical illumination, after
the city filled with strangers, after the systematic commodification of
labor, after the jump cut, after the trolley, after the modern war—
modernity is in and around all of us, and cinema embodies, reflects,
and recharges that modernity everywhere. (p. 15)
This shared background, loose as it is, is enough to back up Pomerance’s
claim to be providing a shape, and not just a convenient catch-all, for his
essays. Certain features will turn up in any discussion of modern culture, and
these are not missing here. Modernity’s images are artificial and urban,
electrified and dark, and haunted by war and skepticism. Modernity
brings to the surface anxieties about class and money, about the stranger
and the disorienting meeting, about insanity, self-control, and bureaucracy.
Perhaps less predictable are the acknowledgments that modernity offers
new opportunities for impersonation and performance—comic as well as
sinister—and that film, with its flair for a naturalized exhibitionism, navi-
gates and comments on the social and psychological worries created by such
an availability of fabricated or appropriated selves. Identity, as well as experi-
ence, is notoriously more scattered and plastic in modernity, hence so many
films’ concern for impermanence and obsession, not only in the obvious
genres of noir, science fiction and thriller but also in the stories of masquer-
ade (The Talented Mr Ripley, Catch Me if You Can, The Lady Eve), and any
number of Hitchcock classics.
Film Theory | 169
The best feature of Pomerance’s plan to cast his term ‘modernity’ in

a variety of lights is the preference for solid, descriptive film criticism.
This produces the most interesting results in cases where a particular
generic variation—science fiction, detective story, romantic melodrama—
determines how film absorbs the contagions and displacements of modernity.
Occasionally, the habits of academic discourse overpower Pomerance’s good
intentions: David Sterritt’s flashy piece on Sam Fuller’s ‘Shock Corridor’
(1963) is a cautionary tale of allowing the theory to control the possibilities
of the material. Sterritt’s intuition was sound: a Foucauldian reading of
Fuller’s claustrophobic account of mental hospitals and loss of identity.
But the brilliance he devotes to it leads almost to a self-parody. In
Pomerance’s own piece on Spielberg’s ‘Catch Me if You Can’ (2002), on
the other hand, the notion of late capitalist labor as transforming an early
picture of rational, repetitive, goal-directed work into a world of pure
circulation, imposture and improvisation is both theoretically informed
and subtly demonstrated. The film is allowed to stretch and complicate
the analytic apparatus, rather than the other way around.
William Luhr and Peter Lehman’s ‘Experiment in Terror: Dystopian
modernism, the police procedural and the space of anxiety’ and considers
generic material that often falls outside the interests of academic film criti-
cism, including such gems as T-Men (1947) and Experiment in Terror (1960).
The space of fear, they argue, changes with modernity, and the fall-out from
the Second World War accustomed audiences to the sinister aspects of the
state apparatus. Fear itself is brought into a more intimate relation to the
individual, increasingly private and inescapable. Terror reaches its maximum
when the victimized person is unable to distinguish friend from enemy,
protector from predator. Modernity in its post-war American version
released the terroristic potential of social conformity and located it in the
familiar alienated urban landscapes of the noir and the thriller. After the war,
the problem was no longer ‘them’ but ‘us’. The world may look banal and
nondescript, but its menace is undiminished: the uncanniness of sameness
trumps the fear of the foreign. Banality disguises evil in police procedure, the
instruments of surveillance belong on the side of the law, and ostracism
threatens the victim rather than the criminal. Yet despite these intriguing
lines of research, the characterization of modernity proposed in the article is
too uncomplicated and its demons too familiar: the experience of modernity
is fragmented, the individual’s isolation is exacerbated by the ambiguity of an
urban or suburban environment where distinctive elements are rare and
visual homogeneity dominates. While the authors admit that the conventions
of the literature of anxiety which they describe were already present in
170 | Film Theory
Stevenson and Poe, they fail to explore what differentiates the noir and
police procedural of the 1940s, 50s and 60s from the staging of terror in
earlier literature and film.
Lucy Fisher’s ‘The Shock of the New’ looks at the impact of industrial,
domestic and recreational electrification in early cinema. Her premise is, as
she admits, reflexive: given that cinema and electricity are partners, there is
reason to expect that ‘shock’ is not just figurative. The more interesting
demonstration of Fisher’s brief piece is the role of urban pleasure parks as
metaphors or counterparts to the new popular art form: both are dependent
on electricity for their exhilaration and their existence; both turn night into
day and boredom into distraction. Wheeler Winston Dixon (‘The Endless
Embrace of Hell’) does some wonderful things with the American film noir,
celebrating, as its perfect examples, the cheap, fast, star-less products of
studios like PRC, Monogram and Republic. The films they brought out were
instant disposables: ‘desperate, shabby and unrelentingly bleak’, where
everyone is damned and betrayal and despair are the only reliable expecta-
tions. Dixon is fond of purple prose, but he uses it gracefully: ‘The modern
world of noir was specifically a zone of diffuse happenings, rawness, energy,
and immediacy: distinctively missing were classical polish, baroque embel-
lishment, sedate social and aesthetic graces, and the refinements of psycho-
logically repressing etiquette’ (p. 51). His case seems to be that the genre’s
modernism rests on fatalism different in kind, presumably, from the tragic
resignation of earlier aesthetic regimes. Because the shared, public world is a
shared site of elaborate double meanings and deceptions, no one has a special
right to being singled out, much less ennobled, by disaster; it goes with the
territory. That, Dixon suggests, is modern.
Steven Alan Carr’s discussion of Holocaust imagery (‘Mass Murder,
Modernity, and the Alienated Gaze’) begins unpromisingly, with the over-
seriousness and theoretical worries the collection otherwise avoids. Still,
Carr is on to something important here, with his account of how film
responds to the need to witness and his intelligent doubts about just how
far the act of looking can verify atrocity or fulfill our demands for truth. Yet
his attempt to turn the ‘alienated gaze’ into a positive strategy (knowing
about its very act of looking, and incorporating its own doubts, accusation
and incrimination) puts too much weight on acknowledgments that seem
self-evident by now. The essay lacks the energy of the others in the collec-
tion. On the other hand, Walter Metz’s essay on Lang and Hitchcock,
‘Modernity and the Crisis in Truth’, despite its reworking of familiar cine-
matic issues, manages to be confident, spirited and instructive. Metz finds
the problem of trust and the untrustworthy in both Lang and Hitchcock,
Film Theory | 171
but criticizes Hitchcock’s easy accommodation to the Cold War liberalism

and paranoia of the American 1950s in comparison to Lang’s less popular
retention of the Second World War trauma as key to his postwar American
films of city menace and encroachment.
Rebecca Bell-Metereau, writing on ‘The Capital Shape of Science Fiction
Heroes to Come’, argues that popular film genres pose certain problems for
a typology of modernity. Not that genre per se is ahistorical, but its char-
acteristics, and its identification, require a longer durée. Comedy was not
born yesterday, nor was melodrama or even the futurist fantasy, and versions
of each set in ‘modern’ landscapes both pull towards and away from an
engagement with the specifics of the modern. Gwendolen Audrey Foster’s
article on class, passing, and the maternal melodrama (‘Performing
Modernity and Gender in the 1930s’) has a harder task in attempting to
locate the modernist swerve in some fascinating Hollywood pictures of
sacrificing and embattled women. In comparison, science fiction fits fairly
smoothly into the modernist canon. These films are, after all, necessarily
fixated on visualizing the future with the tools of the present. Bell-Metereau
defends the transgressive flexibility of the sci-fi genre: gender, religion, sex,
economics, domesticity, all have been re-imagined in ways that either vio-
lently or subtly erode the reigning conventions. The one convention, how-
ever, that is hardly threatened in sci-fi cinema is the association of vitality and
novelty with the project of capitalism.
At the end of the collection, William Rothman introduces an odd
thought. How useful is it to expect film to introduce a radical shift in our
understanding of modernity in the arts given the peculiarities of its historical
emergence. After all, there was no film before modernism, and film’s mas-
sive success followed its embrace of narrative conventions and pleasures that
avoided the formal experiments that modernist artists were fixated on.
The American philosopher who has thought the most intently about film
is Stanley Cavell. And as Rothman reminds us, Cavell has never stopped
trying to convince us that our viewing of film—film at its most popular and
most attractive—poses precisely that challenge to our imaginations and to
our way of being in the world that modernity has bequeathed us but that we
all too commonly choose not to acknowledge. Cavell’s account of the way in
which film creates and engages with its own modern tradition follows from
the special meaning he gives modernism: not as a particular style, and not as
the repudiation of traditional art forms, but as the internal struggle, within
each art, to explain its conditions and justify its own existence. (To me, this
sounds a pretty good paraphrase of what Clement Greenberg also meant by
modernism, but curiously Greenberg is persona non grata in contemporary
172 | Film Theory
criticism while Cavell’s star is still, thankfully, rising.) Film is not just a
picture of modernity, modernity presented to the senses; as the book con-
cludes with the help of Cavell, it is the ‘thinking’ of modernity. And as such,
it is not likely to be superseded, even by some post-modern development.
The cinema of modern life is no longer a vision to be realized: it is a
tradition, a canon, a place to come back to.
2. Cinema and Cultural Studies: Manliness

and Art in America
It would be a mistake to pick up David Gerstner’s Manly Arts: Masculinity and
Nation in Early American Cinema (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2006) expecting a book about cinema, even if the subtitle invites
such an expectation. The reader deserves some explanation. Gerstner’s
work belongs to cultural studies, and it is a fine example of how that
discipline can be practiced. His theme—masculinity and nationhood—has
been part of the discourse of American identity and American inheritance at
least since Emerson. But the subtitle suggests that Gerstner intends to make
the invention of a new, democratic creature a formative issue for early
American cinema, and this is surely misleading. The institution and practice
of movie-making remain on the sidelines here. It is perhaps a sign of maturity
in cinema studies that films don’t require special pleading to be studied
intelligently and in context and that they can be drawn upon as just one
element in a larger argument. Did Gerstner switch horses in midstream,
expecting to write a history of specific moments in the emergence of cinema
as ‘an American art form’, only to find that he was more interested in how a
national imagination, both popular and avant-garde, shapes the cultural
performances of an unusual mix of American artists and public figures—
who include Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt, Lincoln Kirstein, Charles
Sheeler, Vincente Minnelli, and the nineteenth century matinee idol Edwin
Forrest?
Certainly there are films here to rediscover, and at least one genuine
curiosity. One chapter treats African American realism, gender and the
filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. Two films, Sheeler and Strand’s Manhatta and
the 1915 curiosity The Battle Cry of Peace, are central to Gerstner’s
thesis about American obsessions with national self-definition and ‘creative
destruction’. Yet the fullest treatment of a feature film, the chapter
titled ‘The Queer Frontier: Vincente Minnelli’s Cabin in the Sky’
(pp. 165–211), loses its way. There are wonderful elements, everything
from the American dance world of Katherine Dunham and Balanchine to
Film Theory | 173
religion and the gangster myth, but it does not add up to an analysis,
either of the film or of the cultural singularity Gerstner would clearly
like it to be.
His true quarry is the question of a distinctively American aesthetic and
political tradition, with Whitman as its patron, which remains preoccupied
with enigmas of race and virility for the hundred years Gerstner studies,
from Edwin Forrest’s theatrical duel with an English rival on the stage of the
Astor Place Opera House in 1849 to the white-directed and produced black
Hollywood musical Cabin in the Sky (1943). The aesthetic Gerstner intro-
duces us to is a native modernism, visibly brightened by imports from
European and artists, but one with its own popular, folkish and realist
inheritances, and one with a surprisingly fertile incorporation of racial and
sexual mixes. Queerness, as well as political radicalism, invigorated the
American avant garde, and Gerstner finds queerness in unexpected places:
predictably, in the extended cultural orbits of the Harlem Renaissance, but
also in the fusion of the ‘international style’ with American fantasies of
innocence and virile, corporeal realism, for which the native and African
Americans provided the privileged cultural and psychic resources. Stieglitz’s
vision of a new order, where spiritual life redeems the machinic object and
saves America from the decadent materialism of Europe, is not forgotten
when New York invents modern dance by bringing George Balanchine’s
romantic cult of the woman dancer into contact with Katherine Dunham’s
African influences.
Gerstner seeks to complicate the convenient view that modernism, as an
international style (now thoroughly harried into the shadows by the post-
modern), was an expression of white masculine and urban taste. That was
never true, and least of all in the United States. But there was always, as he
acknowledges, a disturbing ‘cannibalism’ in the way modernist sophisticates
‘engorged the Other’, and the way that helped to create the qualities of
America’s ‘national arts’—which turn out to be photography, dance, music,
and painting, not just film. In Gerstner’s reading, the ‘other’ is also queer,
and racial otherness can be fluid and slippery. There is nothing controversial
about saying that American culture is divided about race, or about identifying
the role of African-Americans (directly and indirectly) the growth and char-
acter of popular and avant-garde arts in the US. Gerstner’s work is more
interesting than that. The notion of a national aesthetic that is at once
populist and experimental, and the recognition of queer desire and subjec-
tivity as formative in this aesthetic, is less well-covered in the literature on
American cinema, and Gerstner does it with élan, even if his parameters are
narrow.
174 | Film Theory
By narrow I mean both that the objects Gerstner chooses and the focus
on American manhood enclose his arguments in ways that make it hard to
generalize fruitfully on the basis of his work, to go from it to other projects
that might also benefit from the integration of film with literature, theatre,
painting, photography and music. New Historicist scholarship, the closest
analogy to Gerstner’s project in terms of method and richness of detail,
succeeds in doing something more, in making us see an epoch differently.
Texts, when read by the best of the New Historicists, lose their fragile
autonomy, an autonomy that needed continual re-propping by the critical
investments of the academy and skilled, passionate readers. Such texts
become ‘thicker’, richer, less separable, indeed less ‘artistic’ and certainly
less ‘literary in the exclusive sense. In the readings of the New Historicists,
once the work is analysed, it re-enters a bigger world. The field to which the
text and art object or monument returns becomes a rougher, more histori-
cally busy affair, driven by economic desires and political or strategic dis-
agreements. I miss that re-channeling of the object into the world in Manly
Arts: its ambitions are more tentative than they need to be, and perhaps the
book would have benefited from a more continuous engagement with his-
tory. Gerstner makes his examples fascinating, but they do not re-order the
wider culture in which they must have participated. They remain tantalizing,
suggestive, but incomplete. It is a book that deserves a sequel.
3. The New Bazinianism

In recent years, film studies has become a much more philosophically inter-
esting place because of a re-engagement with the work of André Bazin.1 Two
recent books prove admirable contributions to this enterprise. Christian
Keathley’s wonderful vindication of the ‘magic’ of cinema argues for a
‘re-mobilisation’ of the cinephilia of pre-academic film studies, in the service
of a more passionate, and more poetic, method of doing materialist
film history. Bazin’s influence is everywhere in this book. Invoked for its
power to make cinematic rapture intelligent, studious, and historically
responsible, the Bazinian spirit merges gracefully with Keathley’s own a
1
Bazin receives the intelligent but never sycophantic attention he deserves in Ilone
Margulies’ excellent collection, Rites of Realism, in Philip Rosen’s Change Mummified:
Cinema, History, Theory (2001), and Daniel Morgan’s definitive piece in Critical Inquiry
(2006), ‘Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics’, which goes the furthest in
putting to rest what used to be the standard (or indexical) reading of Bazin’s conception of
realism as celebrating a naı̈ve ‘fidelity to our perceptual experience’.
Film Theory | 175
reading of the revelatory film detail—a reading that takes its bearings from
Benjamin and the recent new historicist school. If Keathley is a new figure
in film studies, Tom Conley is well-known, not only for his impeccable
translations, influential teaching, and his intelligent advocacy of the ideas
of Gilles Deleuze and Michel de Certeau, but also for a long-nurtured
interest in the history of mapping, both in early modern France and now
in the texts of films themselves. His book Cartographic Cinema (Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) presses with great insis-
tence the analogy between the film image and the topographic projection:
‘Maps appear in most of the movies we see, Even if a film does not display
a map as such, by nature it bears an implicit relation with cartography’ (p. 1,
italics mine).
We may not wonder very often about our ability to use maps for orien-
tation in the world, for getting our bearings and location in an unfamiliar
geography. Conley expects us to wonder, and to notice the similar oddness
about our position when we look at ‘where we are on a map’ and when we
look at a film.
Conley has thought with great persistence and not a little poetry about
the relationship of the cartographic to the cinematic, and it has led him to a
question close to Bazin’s concern for the ontology of film’s sensuous realism:
where is the film? Where is it while it is being projected; where is the screen
of the film, and the film on the screen? Is it in the world, or elsewhere,
in some aesthetic virtuality? Where are we while watching it? How does
the concrete and navigable geography on the screen establish its own con-
ditions of presence and plausibility? What is its ‘there’, and how do we know
what its ‘there’ is? Such questions are not formulated by Bazin himself,
at least not in the way I read him. They are oddly reminiscent of the
puzzle that analytic philosophers, generally but not always unsympathetic
to art, use to torture pre-postmodern aesthetics classes: where is Beethoven’s
Fifth Symphony? For film-viewers and scholars, unlike philosophers of that
vintage, the question of ‘where’ remains a rich one, if on no other grounds
than the fact that it forces attention away from the independence of the film
as a text or artifact and towards the social, psychological and passionate
experience of the spectator’s surrender to the film’s apparent truthfulness
and immediacy.
The question: ‘where is the film?’ Is not independent of the way the param-
eters of a legible geography are indicated to the film’s characters: defining
their terrain and their socio-economic background, locating them in relation
to cultural, vocational or political landmarks, providing a constant but often
unacknowledged registration of a world with its own stability and contours.
176 | Film Theory
If we, as Conley suggests, need to be shown where we are (and one of the
crucial innovations of modernity since the Renaissance is the way we take for
granted the power of maps to show us that), then so do film viewers and so
do those who inhabit the world of the film.
Although his use of the analogy ranges widely and is almost breath-taking
in its ambitions, Conley keeps returning to an observation that could change
our way of looking at movies in a moving picture, the presence of a map, and
that can include the geographic diagram in some wider sense, does some-
thing distinctive to our sense of reality and our investment in the cinematic
illusion, and we don’t always notice how or even that this is happening. Not
that the film and the map are similar in their construction, or their mode of
communication. But both demand from us a double process of seeing and
reading, and both employ perspective, abstraction, reduction and relief to
create in us the knowledge (but not the illusion) that we are ‘placed’, the
recognition that location, space and motion are the terms of our existential
and spectatorial reality. An awareness of the role of cartography makes
familiar films (Casablanca, Thelma and Louise, L’Atalante, Les Amants) look
different. When Conley’s close analyses work, they make it impossible to
overlook the degree to which the movements and decisions of the characters
in the film respond to the topographical and social markers of place that
Conley finds pervasive (maps, charts, pictures, signs). But just how far-
reaching is this recognition? And how important is it to our understanding
of the ontology of the film?
The cinematic image, Conley writes, has a language of its own, and so
does a map. But neither of them are languages in precisely the sense the
linguist had in mind. Indeed, its status as conveyance of information is not
entirely what makes the map ‘like’ a language: rather, as Wittgenstein
insisted, it is because both are the parameters of our world, and the condi-
tions of our meaning-making and meaning-registering experiences:
A map we see in a film may concern locale, if a film is a
documentary; or, if it tells a story, an itinerary. It may belong to
the places in which a viewer experiences a film. Like an intertitle or a
sign that tells us where the film is taking place, what it is doing,
or where its characters are going, a map in a movie provides
information; it whets the imagination. It propels narrative but
also, dividing our attention, prompts reverie and causes our eyes
to look both inward, at our own geographies, and outward, to rove
about the frame and to engage, however we wish, the space of
the film. (p. 1)
Film Theory | 177
Films are like maps in that both ‘locate and pattern’ the imagination. They
make some things visible and obscure others, carving out modes of action
and judgment, inviting conjecture, doubt and even deception. Yet it is of the
nature of the cartographic that it promises candour, forthrightness: the map
declares that it can present ‘where x really is’; it seeks to make available, to
bring something closer, to reveal and not to hide. That epistemic honesty is
what Bazin sought in his attempt to naturalise the photographic image.
Bazin’s photograph, ‘moulded’ in nature, is like a fossil or a cast; it wins
our trust through modesty and faithfulness. In Bazin’s essay on the ‘Evolution
of the Language of Film’ the presence of the natural world is even more
pronounced: the history of cinema is nothing short of geological; technical
changes disturb the surface, then pass into the slow shifts of the river’s rocky
sediment. This use of metaphor is important to Conley. It allows him to
claim that the ‘cartographic principles of cinema’ were not his discovery but
the legacy of Bazin. And they return in what Conley describes as Deleuze’s
‘schematic treatment of film’:
The geographic and cartographic underpinning of Bazin’s writing is
invoked at a turning point in his taxonomic history of film cinema
[sic]. It emerges as a foundation for Deleuze’s more extensive spatial
and cartographic theory of cinema. (p. 9)
Does Conley intend his work to offer a ‘grand theory’ of cinema in the
footsteps of Bazin or Deleuze? If so, there is a long way to go yet. What he
achieves is suggestive, but less than a final statement. The structure of the
book breaks into clearly demarcated chapters, each examining an auteur, a
film, a way of ‘making a movie into a map’: As you read on, the choices seem
increasingly inevitable: René Clair’s first film, Paris qui dort (1924), Renoir’s
films of the 1930s: Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932), Le Crime de Monsieur Lange
(1935), La Grande Illusion (1937) and La Règle du jeu (1939); Rossellini’s
Roma, città aperta (1945); four ‘journey’ films (High Sierra, Indiana Jones
and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Desperate Journey and Casablanca); Truffaut’s
Les Mistons (1956) and Les 400 coups (1959); Louis Malle’s Les Amants (1958);
Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995); and, finally, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000).
Despite many superb close readings, Conley provides no new model
for film theory and criticism, and some of the imaginative daring of the
introductory discussion pales as he turns to specific instances of the meetings
of map and movie. Yet Conley’s conception of cinematic realism as ‘loca-
tional machinery’ helps us appreciate even more what Bazin started. He
advances beyond what has become a rather static debate about the episte-
mology and sensory mechanics of cinematic perception, turning our
178 | Film Theory
attention to different considerations of how a shared world is created in the

film. Cognition, like physical reality, always passes through the social and
the historical: the film is not second nature but one of the maps through
which cultures interpret themselves. Here literary criticism has taught
Conley something that is often missing from the more philosophical and
semiotic forms of film theory: the acknowledgment that narrative needs
placement, and that its indicators of the ‘real’ must conform to certain
requirements of spatial and ontological consistency.
A more junior scholar, Christian Keathley, has also written a book in
the Bazinian spirit, called Cinephilia and History, or the Wind in the Trees
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006). It is an
immensely satisfying first study, modest, lyrical, and refined. If there are
still moments of bad feeling between partisans of grand theory and film
scholars working with the bread and butter of historical research, they are
a matter of indifference here. It is a generous, inclusive look at how specta-
torship, in the best and even the amateur sense, can be a model for the
writing of history: a history that is alive to the sensuous and the corporeal, a
history that respects the gaps and selectivity of memory, a history as vivid
and discontinuous as the viewer’s experience of the films in their life.
Keathley says that Bazin’s way of discovering ‘the complex fabric of the
objective world’ in the marginal and striking detail ‘is evidence of a highly
active and perceptive film viewer’ (p. 58). But Bazin’s attentiveness, and his
ability to convey the excitement of that attention to the reader, is no more
scrupulous than his own.
Can cinephilia be a good influence on history? It depends on what you
mean by cinephilia, and partly, on how you evaluate pleasure. Keathley finds
his cinephilia in the best circles, first in Bazin himself and then in the critics
taught by him, writers and film-makers associated with the Cahiers du Cinéma.
That moment of a coterie’s enthusiasm shaped what film criticism could be,
for many people. But changing conditions in the institutional embrace of film
scholarship and the vagaries of availability and distribution affected critical
viewing habits: tastes narrowed, and became parochial. Theory was born,
and political considerations (especially in the 1970s of Screen) made many
critical viewers encourage in themselves an ambivalence towards the very
objects they might otherwise covet. Cinematic passion, the urge to celebrate
film, and hence, cinephilia, were suspected of nurturing a self-deluding
fetishism, a possessiveness towards the image that was incompatible with
analyzing it. To be theoretical might require skepticism, and with that, a
certain bitterness towards the very thing that most allures. Academic film
studies belong to an age of disenchantment. Or so it seems. For who would
Film Theory | 179
study film in an academic context if they had not first been marked, and
marked personally, by the experience of the movies?
In defending cinephilia, Keathley is not asking to return to a pre-
reflective absorption. Cinephilia is to be re-understood. That does not
mean reversing history. Academic film scholarship, in order to constitute
itself as a discipline, had to renounce cinephilia. Yet it will only destroy itself
if it allows that renunciation to become permanent. The same absorption
which allows the fetishistic excesses of the fan and the collector is the
perceptual mode essential to capture what is most authentic, most irreplace-
able, in the cinematic image: the raw touch of nature, the unprogrammed
detail, the magic of contingency. Keathley quotes D.W. Griffith: ‘What’s
missing from movies nowadays is the beauty of the moving wind in the trees’
(1944). The same undeserved beauty—the very grace of nature—is what
Keathley sees Bazin as treasuring in his notion of cinema as ‘revelation’. But
the theological language must be kept in context: as mystical as Bazin’s eye
can be, it fastens on the same unmotivated ‘facts’—the unexpected splinters
of the real—that save Sartre’s decidedly unreligious Roquentin (in La Nausée)
from a fatal immersion in ‘nausea’.
The camera’s susceptibility to the spark of contingency, the unplanned
event, is also its license to act without a script, open to the play of
time: a ‘pencil of nature’. Whatever promise the camera held out to the
scientifically-entranced 19th century, with its passion for a truthfulness of the
fact, it continued to offer to a modernist avant-garde. Like the materialist
historian, or the flaneur aroused by curiosity from the waking sleep of
distraction, the cinephile ‘collects’ privileged moments, and hopes their
scatter is more than glitter, more than debris. Modernist perception is not
neutral or decontextualised: it is like an anticipatory memory, a desire
running ahead of itself. But it is never ‘constructionist’ in that tired sense
that has become the bane of some cultural studies. Keathley’s enthusiasm for
his subject, his delicacy of observation and his economic way with the
generalization, give his work an unusual mix of sophistication and innocence.
Like his inspiration, Bazin, he makes film history an event in the life of the
spirit, and not an exercise in expertise or system-building. It is an unusual
achievement.
4. Film Aesthetics
The three books reviewed in this section are each concerned with film
aesthetics and all three can claim to have produced new and daring theories
of film. Jacques Rancière’s Film Fables can be read as an attempt to shake up
180 | Film Theory
the Deleuzean approach to cinema that since the mid-1990s has entrenched
itself as one of the dominant modes of theorizing film. Indeed, in the very
middle of the book Rancière delivers a frank evaluation of precisely what he
sees to be at stake in Deleuze’s conceptualisation of cinema—a point that
will be returned to shortly. Yet his first and most vividly drawn opponent is
Jean Epstein, who exemplifies the position of ‘cinema purist’, the one who
celebrates the inimitable function of the mechanical eye of the cinematic
camera above any of the stories that films tell. In the quotidian and prosaic
melodrama of Thomas Harper Ince’s film, The Honour of his House, Epstein
finds the pure qualities of the cinematic image (or photogénie):
The real tragedy is in suspense. It looms over all the faces; it is in
the curtain and in the door-latch. Each drop of ink can make it
blossom at the tip of the pen. It dissolves itself in the glass of water.
At every moment, the entire room is saturated with the drama.
The cigar burns on the lip of the ashtray like a threat. The dust of
betrayal. Poisonous arabesques stretch across the rug and the arm
of the seat trembles . . . Cinema is true. A story is a lie. (p. 1;
Jean Epstein, Bonjour Cinéma, in Écrits sur le cinéma (Paris: Seghers,
1974, p. 86)
According to Rancière, Epstein thinks that in cinema life has finally found
an art:
capable of doing it justice, an art in which the intelligence that
creates the reversals of fortune and the dramatic conflicts is
subject to another intelligence, the intelligence of the machine
that wants nothing, that does not construct any stories, but
simply records the infinity of movements that gives rise to a drama
a hundred times more intense than all dramatic reversals of
fortune. (p. 2)
Beyond Epstein, Rancière finds the rationale for the cinema purists’ position
not, as it turns out, very emphatically in the writing of film theorists but in
what looks like a Greenbergian-type definition of modernist art combined
with the imperative of Flaubertian literature. The invention of the photo-
graphic image led Greenberg to redefine the duties of the visual artist who
was to relinquish his/her interest in the mimetic or representational capac-
ities of the craft in order to focus upon each media’s (i.e. painting, sculpture,
drawing, music) unique formal elements. Art’s self-realisation was not to
take place by means of a dialectical relation with the other but an internal
examination of its own essential qualities and a systematic eradication of
Film Theory | 181
those it shared with other media. Rancière’s twist on the Greenbergian

position however is that the anti-representational hermeticism of modernist
art entails a fundamental passivity toward the world. Hence, he notes how
Flaubert’s dream of writing a book of pure style led to a removal of all signs
of the artist’s hand, and to a work:
composed instead of the indifferent swirl of specks of dust and of
the passivity of things with neither will nor meaning . . . The work
of style was to affect the passivity of the empty gaze of reasonless
things in its exposition of everyday actions, and it would only succeed
in its task if it itself became passive, invisible, if it painstakingly
effaced the difference between itself and the ordinary prose of the
world. (p. 8)
The aim was thus not to represent the world but to somehow capture it.
Cinema, more than any of the other arts, seemed set to realise the impera-
tive emblematised in Flaubert’s strivings. It is expressed in the concept of
cinematic automatism, the concept Rancière identifies as the essence of
cinema as it is understood by the cinema purists.
Rancière argues, however, that the emphasis on purity and refinement
comes at a cost. For the disavowal of impurities is also a failure to understand
that cinema is an art ‘whose meaning cuts across the borders between the
arts’ (p. 4). Rancière’s central thesis is that cinema, like other art forms, is
generated by an encounter between two very different and in many respects
antithetical conceptions of aesthetics. Or better, between an aesthetic of film
that celebrates the aesthetic and a second that foregrounds its representa-
tional proclivity. The first is Romantic in origin and derives predominantly
from Schlegel and Schelling. The second is classical and Aristotelian. The
‘aesthetic regime of art’ thus derives from the modernist ethos that opposes
‘the representative regime of art’, the classicism that appears in Rancière’s
account to have found a wormhole from the fourth century BC straight
through to the early twentieth century. The tenor of Rancière’s argument
is that the cinema purists’ renunciation of the representative aspect of
art has resulted in a number of lopsided interpretations of film (as is evi-
denced, in his view, in the work of Bazin, Godard and Deleuze). When
modernist accounts of cinema forget about the story, the whole relation
to the Aristotelian legacy is thrown out the window; the arrangement of
the plot, the structure of events, the protagonist’s reversal of fortune, the
alteration in his/her state of knowledge are all forgotten in favour of the
brute materiality of the sensible world captured for the first time without
mediation by either the hand or the consciousness of the artist. The intention
182 | Film Theory
and the effect of Rancière’s argument is in the first instance to return to the
stories that cinema tells.
Yet Rancière’s use of the term fable warrants some comment. The term
gains advantage from a certain imprecision on his part in identifying its
targets. Certainly he deploys the concept in the first place to direct us
toward the neglected representative aspect of cinema. With regard to
Epstein’s description of the Murnau film, for example, Rancière observes
that the fable is the very ordinary ‘filmed melodrama’ from which Epstein
extracts an idea of pure cinema (pp. 4–5). At times Rancière makes the term
synonymous with the story and uses it with reference to Aristotle’s emphasis
on plot in the Poetics; at other times it resonates with the Platonic idea. If the
word fable insistently directs us to film narrative, its connotations are less
academic than those of narrative and create no expectation of the strictly
structural or formal analysis we find in the likes of Bordwell, Branigan,
Barthes, or Genette. Fable also has a much more creative resonance than
narrative because of its allegiances with fantasy, invention and fabrication.
In many cases, Rancière’s interpretations of the filmmakers’ stories encap-
sulate their entire oeuvre, so that the fable being discussed is not strictly
reducible to the script, nor even the narrative of a given film, nor its plot
structure, but invented by Rancière himself. Most strikingly, Rancière also
uses the term to refer to the work of theorists such as Epstein, Eisenstein,
and Deleuze who can spin a yarn about the nature of cinema. For example,
fable is used to designate the ‘tragedy in suspense’ identified by the cinema
purists that opposes clearly orchestrated dramaturgy. In these instances,
Rancière emphasises the fabulator’s somewhat parasitical relation to the
material, sensuous, phenomenal world, accusing not only theorists but film-
makers and audiences alike of constructing their fables ‘from the body of
another’ (p. 5).
In the second instance, Rancière does not want to deny the importance
of the aesthetic regime—but rather to grasp the productive and beautiful
outcomes of the encounter between the aesthetic regime and the represen-
tative regime. To put Rancière’s argument in a nutshell, if the drive toward a
pure aesthetics aimed to overcome the representative art, such overcoming
entails not so much a sublation as a thwarting of mastery through servitude,
a servitude that emanates in the first place from the passivity of the medium.
Fable and form encounter each other in a dialectical relationship. The
thwarting of classical representation by modernist aesthetics is not a cause
for celebration; not, however, because its aims were badly conceived in the
first place—but rather because it cannot retain the position it sought to
secure for itself. Beauty comes on the scene when form thwarts fable.
Film Theory | 183
Beauty for Rancière is always fallen beauty, begotten by the aesthetic regime
thwarting the representative regime only to tragically fall once again into the
very representativeness it had sought to escape. So while sovereignty
expresses itself in this struggle, it doesn’t mean that art achieves freedom.
The beauty borne of the aesthetic regime’s encounter with the represen-
tative regime is a slave twice over: first in the aesthetic overcoming the
mastery of representation by mobilising servitude (its passivity) and second
because this servitude results in the restoration of the very order it had
sought to subvert (p. 11).
What is interesting in Rancière’s book is not just the way he sticks
implacably to this formulation of the dialectic to provide readings of cine-
matic works but also the variation of the formulation he finds in different
films and different directors. The book is organised into four parts
and eleven chapters. Part I ‘Fables of the Visible’ deals with cinema as
a form wedged between the age of theatre and the age of television.
Part II ‘Classical Narrative, Romantic Narrative’ undertakes analyses of
the Westerns of Anthony Mann and Nicholas Ray’s film noir They Live by
Night. Part III ‘If There is a Cinematographic Modernity’ includes chapters
on Deleuze’s differentiation between the movement-image and the time-
image, Rossellini’s aestheticisation of political content and Godard’s concep-
tion of cinematic Marxism. Part IV ‘Fables of the Cinema, (Hi)stories of a
Century’ examines the complex articulations of memory, history, documen-
tary and fiction in Chris Marker’s The Last Boshevik and Jean-Luc Godard’s
Histoire(s) du cinéma.
Film theorists will be particularly interested in Rancière’s chapter on
Deleuze’s cinema books. Unlike the other chapters, the body from which this
fabulation is extracted is not a film but Deleuze’s primary argument in the
cinema books. It is Rancière’s synthesis of aspects of Deleuze’s argument,
perhaps more than his criticism, that readers will most value. Indeed, the
engagement with Deleuze, is part commentary, part clarification, part cri-
tique, but most of all it is a subordination of Deleuze’s theory of the cinema
to the correctness of Rancière’s own dialectical treatment of cinema in the
age of modernity.
Undoubtedly, the most striking point of Rancière’s discussion of
Deleuze’s work is his location of it on the side of the cinema purists, the
model witnesses and thinkers of cinematographic modernity who uphold the
idea of ‘the autonomous power of the image’ (p. 107). And second to this is
his insistence that Deleuze’s project aims at the production of a ‘natural
history of images’. The primary ‘paradox’ that Rancière struggles to come to
grips with is Deleuze’s conception of two supposedly distinct orders of the
184 | Film Theory
cinematic image—the movement-image and the time-image—and his histor-

icisation of the rupture in the logic of the first order that causes the second
to come into existence. For Rancière, the two questions that Deleuze’s work
on cinema (and not, it should be noted Deleuze himself) raises concern the
logic of the connection between the ruptures of history in general and an
internal fissure within a specific art form and the concrete means of recog-
nising the break between the two ages in specific cinematic examples. After
rehearsing various ways of accounting for the logic of Deleuze’s differentia-
tion between the movement-image and the time-image, and failing to settle
with any one of them, Rancière returns to his initial thesis that there is a
fundamental contradiction in what Deleuze is postulating and that the his-
toricisation of images by an external event (the Second World War) is
untenable. The only thing to do is to recast the terms of Deleuze’s concep-
tion of the two orders of the cinematic image according to the logic of his
own theory. Rather than propose a natural history of images and face the
problem of trying to account for their differences without recourse to either
art history or general history, why not understand them dialectically, as
Rancière does?
In the course of his discussion about Deleuze’s work, Rancière delivers
some wonderful insights, among them an account of the way Deleuze has to
resort to allegory to comprehend the shift from the movement-image to the
time-image and a suggestion that it is, after all, the problem of thought that
Deleuze’s interest in cinema is trained on. With regard to the former, for
example, Rancière describes how Hitchcock’s cinema as it is interpreted by
Deleuze both completes the constitution of the movement-image by inte-
grating all of its components in the mental-image and announces its crisis.
Rancière observes that instead of bringing an end to the artistic movement
(as would be expected in the natural development of a cycle of aesthetic
innovation), Hitchcock’s work displays an exhaustion with the schema and a
crisis of confidence in its claims. The exhaustion very pertinently (given that
the dominant regime is movement) manifests itself as paralysis. Rancière
notes that this paralysis occurs not at the level of the image, but at the level
of the protagonist—it is Jimmy Stewart who is immobilized by his fear of
heights in Vertigo, and who is cocooned in a plaster cast and relegated to the
function of pure seer in Rear Window. Rancière very astutely points out that
the logic of the movement-image ‘is not at all paralysed by the fictional
situation . . . the paralysis is symbolic . . . Deleuze treats these fictional situa-
tions of paralysis as simple allegories emblematic of a rupture in the action-
image and its principle: a rupture of the sensory-motor link’ (p. 116). The
problem for Rancière is that because the rupture is allegorised, it has no
Film Theory | 185
impact on the image itself: ‘it cannot be identified as an actual difference

between types of images’ (p. 116).
These insights aside, Rancière’s identification of Deleuze as one of the
‘cinema purists’ can be queried. The categorisation is often achieved by
a sleight of hand: it is in fact Epstein who provides the strongest rendition
of the stance in Rancière’s work and Flaubert who gives a concrete explana-
tion of what drives it. Indeed, while cinematic automatism was theorised by
Benjamin as the optical unconscious and subsequently noted by Kracauer and
more recently Cavell, it is not a concept that is widely utilised in film studies
or film theory, even if it is a component of the cinematic medium/mechan-
ism that warrants more attention. If it crops up from time to time in
Deleuze’s cinema books, its significance is only really emphasized at the
very end of the second book. And yet, the way Rancière makes it a
structural component of his (that is, Rancière’s) analysis is undoubtedly
one of the most exciting things about his argument. Added to this,
Rancière refuses to acknowledge that the basis for Deleuze’s focus on the
cinematic image—the aesthetic regime—at the expense of the story derives
from a genuine attempt to develop an approach to cinema that doesn’t
subordinate the image to the linguistic code (such as we find in Metz’s
work) by showing that the opposite is in fact the case: ‘narration is only a
consequence of the visible [apparent] images themselves and their direct
combinations—it is never given’ (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p.
26). Finally, one wonders whether Rancière’s incapacity to reconcile
Deleuze’s ‘natural history of images’ (as both ontological and cosmological)
with general history on the one hand and art history on the other originates
in Rancière himself skewing the actual parameters in which Deleuze sets out
his project. In the ‘Preface to the French edition’ Deleuze writes:
This study is not a history of the cinema. It is a taxonomy, an attempt
at the classification of images and signs . . . We will be referring
to the American logician Peirce (1939–1914), because he established
a general classification of images and signs, which is undoubtedly
the most complete and the most varied. It can be compared with
Linnaeus’s classifications in natural history . . . (p. xiv, Cinema 1:
The Movement-Image)
Perhaps the allegiance to natural history is Peirce’s more than Deleuze’s? Or
perhaps the salient simile is classification. Just because Deleuze says he isn’t
undertaking a history of cinema doesn’t necessarily mean his goal is a natural
history of images. It could be simply an admission that his classification is
ahistorical or a recommendation against historicising his schematisation too
186 | Film Theory
rigidly. While Rancière acknowledges the difference between the image and
the sign (the latter being the genetic component of the image), he does not
sufficiently trace the vicissitudes of the relation between images and signs as
they are developed throughout the cinema books to make the label of
‘natural history’ stick. What, for example, does Deleuze’s insistence that
the time-image sees the reversal of the relations between image and sign
imply for Rancière’s point that there is no way of locating the differences
between the orders of movement and time in the image itself?
The impetus for Laura Mulvey’s recent monograph Death 24x a Second:
Stillness and the Moving Image derives from the impact of video and digital
technology on understandings of film and cinematic viewing practices. What
she has achieved is a new, innovative, systematic treatment of film in the
age of digital technology. In the course of the book, Mulvey not only delves
into the way cinema has been transformed by its reproduction in a
non-cinematic medium and how technological inventions have changed
viewing practices, she also theorises how such technologies have redefined
the semiotic structure of cinematic meaning, reconfigured the temporal
order of film and constituted a need for new deployments of psychoanalytic
theory in order to interpret them. Mulvey thus convincingly argues that
new image technologies have dramatically impacted on film aesthetics. To my
knowledge, hers is the first systematic account of what this new aesthetics
entails.
Whereas freezing the frame was once available only to film scholars
working with the reels of film and flatbed editing tables, the VCR and the
DVD player have now opened up non-linear ways of viewing to audiences
in general. Not only can the film be arrested at any moment whatever,
audiences can navigate to any point they want in the narrative without
having to negotiate the material conditions of the roll of celluloid. The
conjunction of the continuous movement of the old technology and the
frozen image made possible by the new technology brings two temporal
orders into play: on the one hand, the temporality of the continuum, of
unfurling action and of aesthetic absorption and immersion; on the other, the
temporality of the instant, of frozen moments available for deep contempla-
tion and reconnection to other moments. The relation between these two
orders is theorised by Mulvey by developing an analysis of the operations of
repetition, return and delay. Mulvey teases out the implications of these new
viewing practices for both cinematic ontology and cinematic meaning and
uses this reconception in turn to reflect upon the nature of the ‘film’
spectator, articulating in turn the dispositions of the possessive viewer and
the pensive viewer.
Film Theory | 187
The most significant contribution to film theory in the book is Mulvey’s

redeployment of the Peircean concept of the index within a psychoanalytic
schema. Motioning firstly towards Freud’s concept of nachtraglichkeit
(deferred action) and the unconscious as a necessary consequence of this,
and then towards his articulation of the uncanny, Mulvey also puts a psycho-
analytic spin on the relation between two orders of time. Nachtraglichkeit
is used to convey the unconscious preservation of a given experience,
so that its traumatic effect is realized in a later associated event (p. 8).
While Mulvey admits the parallel to cinema is ‘loose’, it is nevertheless
pivotal to understanding the peculiar nature of her mobilisation of Peirce’s
notion of the index to explain the mechanics of repetition, return and delay.
The preservation of the moment by cinema, its storage in a film that can be
returned to at a later date, is compared by her to ‘the memory left in the
unconscious by an incident lost to consciousness. Both have the attributes of
the indexical sign, the mark of trauma or the mark of light, and both need to
be deciphered retrospectively across delayed time’ (p. 9). The indexical sign
is ‘produced by the ‘‘thing’’ it represents’ (p. 9) and according to Mulvey
it can be used to explain both the unconscious’ preservation of a memory
and the cinema’s preservation of a moment of time. Importantly, Mulvey
foregrounds the indexical nature of the photographic/cinematic image, not
in the name of providing indisputable evidence of reality and the certainty of
its interpretation that many modes of realism seek but exactly the opposite:
the very facticity of the raw material, of the ‘real image of reality across
time’, effects an uncertainty regarding interpretability (p. 10). Here she puts
forward a very interesting argument, noting the way the material trace
evident in the index does not exhaust its capacity to mean something. The
meaning of an indexical sign rests not just on its cause, but on its iconic or
symbolic status as well. The index she argues is thus ‘overwhelmed or
betrayed’ by these other sign functions (p. 10).
Chapter One, ‘Passing Time’, develops the relation between indexicality
and temporality further, suggesting that digital technology both calls into
question the indexical nature of the cinematic image and reflects upon it.
While there is a change in cinematic ontology and a crisis in the deployment
of the photographic sign as index of reality, the cinematic image of the past
becomes the flesh of the history of a century. The index also gestures toward
the uncanny as an oscillation between the living and the dead. In the second
chapter, Mulvey uses the concept of the uncanny to understand the phenom-
enon of cinema as between life and death and between the animate and the
inanimate and to account for the nature of audience investment in proto-
cinematic optical attractions and different kinds of early cinema (credulity,
188 | Film Theory
superstition and uncertainty in the post-Enlightenment world), and their

relevance (or lack thereof) for understanding contemporary viewing prac-
tices. In pursuing this discussion, Mulvey brings Jentsch’s conception of the
uncanny as pertaining to the new and the novel closer to Freud’s theorisation
of it in terms of the old and the archaic to account for contemporary
cinema’s combination of old and new technologies and more particularly
the cinematic deployment of the female body as the site of a confusion
between the animate and inanimate, the organic and the mechanical. For
Mulvey, ‘eviscerated, mechanized, femininity masks and marks a disavowal
of both the site of castration and the womb, the ‘‘first home’’. The element of
uncertainty emanates not only from the blurred distinction between the
inorganic and the organic but also from the uncertain nature of femininity
itself’ (pp. 50–1).
Mulvey’s third chapter ‘The Index and the Uncanny: Life and Death in
the Photograph’ provides a deft reading of the connection between Bazin’s
conception of the ontology of cinema and Roland Barthes’ later contempla-
tion of the ontology of the photographic image. According to Mulvey, Bazin
and Barthes both try to come to terms with the apparent contradiction that
still photography rests at the crossroads of spiritualism and science, and of
the index and the uncanny, Bazin by explicitly addressing cinema, Barthes by
focussing exclusively on photography, but nevertheless making observations
that resonate with Bazin’s earlier work. Weaving her way through the most
significant remarks by each, Mulvey arrives at the still photograph’s specifi-
city: ‘For Bazin, the photograph is ‘‘an image that is a reality of nature,
namely an hallucination that is also a fact’’’ (p. 64); Barthes similarly ‘moves
from the material (the photograph as index, its inscription in and of time)
to the immaterial (the photographic image as a ‘‘return of the dead’’, the
hallucination) to a resonance between photography and religion itself’
(p. 64–5). The photograph, according to Mulvey, ultimately gives not just
a frozen or embalmed moment of time, but a piece of ‘intractable reality’, in
the order of Lacan’s tuche or Real. This is an important point in Mulvey’s
argument. First, she uses the Lacanian Real to position the photographic
image both in relation to Freud’s uncanny and the uncertainty it invokes in
its audience: ‘The concept of an ‘‘intractable reality’’ leads back to Freud’s
theory of trauma as an event or experience that arouses too much psychic
excitement for the subject to be able to translate its significance into words’
(p. 65). But the Lacanian Real also functions to make the image an index of
trauma: ‘[t]rauma leaves a mark on the unconscious, a kind of trace of an
original event’ (p. 65). Mulvey then moves from the photograph to the
cinema, noting the way the elusiveness of cinema ‘[t]he insubstantial and
Film Theory | 189
irretrievable passing of the celluloid film image is in direct contrast to the

way that the photograph’s stillness allows time for the presence of time
to emerge within the image’ (p. 66). And yet, new image technologies
allow the return to the stillness of the photograph if only by illusion: ‘the
frozen frame restores to the moving image the heavy presence of passing
time and of the mortality that Bazin and Barthes associate with the still
photograph’ (p. 66).
The stillness of the freeze frame is then related to film endings and
Freud’s conception of the death drive, by way of an extended analysis of
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948) and Michael
Snow’s film Wavelength (1967). Mulvey argues that the freeze frame impacts
in two different ways on both the narrative and the materiality of the film:
the freeze frame metaphorically fuses the death drive in the narrative with
the movement to an inorganic, inanimate state; at a material level the freeze
frame counters cinema’s conventional illusion of movement with an illusion
of stasis. The book’s thematics of stillness, death, and the uncanny maternal
are further contemplated in Chapter Five, ‘Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho’
(1960). Mulvey here takes up Deleuze’s characterisation of Hitchcock’s
cinema offering a moment of transition between the action-image and the
mental-image in order to show that the film is not so much the expression of
the death drive and the uncanny as a reflection upon them. At the very least
the film renders the thematics associated with the unconscious not just
‘visually and physically’ but conceptually as well (p. 91).
In Chapter Six Mulvey uses Rossellini’s film Voyage to Italy to displace the
conventional neorealist focus on realism onto the uncanny. Once again
cinema’s uncanny dimension, its willingness to engage the logic of primitive
belief (in terms of magic, superstition, miraculous occurrences and ghostly
apparitions) is given considerable attention here, but this time within the
framework of a discussion of a neo-realist cinema seeking to loosen the
shackles of narrative drive. Mulvey argues that through the star performance,
forced improvisation and abandoning the script, Rossellini replaced ‘realism,
a style of cinematic fiction, with reality, documenting places and people,
passers-by in the street, as well as his stars. The fictional journey undertaken
by Alex and Katherine Joyce is partially pushed to the side by history,
geography and geology’ (p. 113).
The first substantial explication of the aesthetic of delay is found in the
chapter on Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Here Mulvey argues for the
relation of delay to trauma and uncertainty on the one hand and the sup-
planting of a realist aesthetic as a result of an irruption of the Real on the
other. Undertaking a reading of Kiarostami’s trilogy Where is my Friend’s
190 | Film Theory
House? (1987), And Life Goes On (1991) and A Taste of Cherry (1997), and
making use of Peter Brooks’ comments on the significance of repetition in
death drive narratives, Mulvey observes the textual effect of repetition as a
means of delaying the end and deferring the narrative impetus toward
closure. The narrative line is thus understood not as straight and resolute
but as deviation (p. 124), giving rise to narrative forms of suspense,
digression, and aleatory meanderings (p. 125). Following this, the chapter
‘Delaying Cinema’ examines the extent to which the textual analysis of the
film theorist itself depends on a process of delay to fragment the film and
provide for the emergence of unexpected meanings: ‘the flow of a scene is
halted and extracted from the wider flow of narrative development; the
scene is broken down into shots and selected frames and further subjected
to delay, to repetition and to return’ (p. 144).
As already noted, the rise of digital technology has meant that the
interpretive practice once available only to the film theorist is extended to
the cinephile. The temporality of delay and the fragmentation of film form
thus sees a growing tension between fetishism and understanding, between a
possessive spectator who wants to own fragments of film and a meditative
pensive spectator who ‘extracts and then replaces a fragment with extra
understanding back into its context’ (p. 144). Mulvey uses the occasion of
the imbrication of the possessive and pensive spectator to examine her own
investment in Douglas Sirk’s cinema, both when she first fell in love with it
‘through the lens of the Cahiers du Cinéma’ and in the present (p. 145). For
her, Sirk’s style and mise-en-scène combine to adopt ‘almost an extra-die-
getic mode of address’ so that meanings ‘are encapsulated, materialized and
mapped onto the image through the signifying potential of cinema itself’
(p. 147). Such filmmaking in turn demands the deployment of delay by the
viewer, a fragmentation of the text and a practice of repetition and return to
its components. Mulvey explains that the new technological capacity to slow
down and halt the movement of the image allows all the more attention to
be paid to these processes so that ‘an object’s referential status is overtaken
by the rhetoric of ‘‘semiotic value’’’ (p. 149). Fragments are thus hyper-
cathected to point of becoming symptoms: objects become emblems and
their significance is superadded, overladen. Particularly exemplary here is
Mulvey’s observation that in the opening sequence of The Imitation of Life,
viewed at 24 frames per second, it appears that Annie is the only black figure
in the sequence, but watched slowly one finds black extras too, whose pres-
ence at the edges of the frame and thus away from the image’s centre
of gravity, enables a contemporary reading of ‘Annie’s invisibility as
the worker on whom Lora’s visibility depends’ (p. 157) and indeed ‘the
Film Theory | 191
mass of ‘‘coloured people’’ rendered invisible by racism and oppression, very

particularly by Hollywood’s culture and representation’ (p. 158). In this
sense, we see how Mulvey invokes the operation of the unconscious at
two distinct levels, one feeding into the narrative itself and another reconfi-
guring the narrative by operating across time. While Mulvey at first sight
seems to have relinquished her interest in the index in this discussion, it is
worth recalling her initial argument that the indexical status of the image
shifts from being caused by the profilmic to emanating from the viewer’s new
deployment of the materiality of the film.
Mulvey attributes the constitution of the possessive spectator to the
fleeting nature of cinema itself and the technology’s capacity to correct it:
the accessibility of delay made possible with home projection apparatuses
allows the viewer to hold onto the image, a spectatorial disposition that
contributes to a renewed iconophilia of the Hollywood star. Her interest
is both in the star’s sign function (which combines indexical, iconic
and symbolic registers) and star performance (which focuses the spectator’s
eye by combining energy with the stillness of display, fluidity of movement
with the pose). Returning to her earlier essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema’, Mulvey speculates here about how its central tenets are both
reinforced and broken down by the viewing practices facilitated by
delayed cinema. These viewing practices undermine the authority of the
male protagonist and his control over the action by upsetting the fluid
forward movement of the story, and disrupt the viewer’s identification
with him. Delay and fragmentation thus have castrating effects and the
result is a feminization of the aesthetic of the film by a shift toward the
pose, stillness, lighting and the choreography of character and camera that
had previously been associated with the eroticisation and passivity of the
female spectacle (p. 165).
Expanding Bellour’s argument that when the cinematic image incorporates
the still photograph a pensive spectator comes into being, Mulvey’s final
chapter reworks some of Barthes’ ideas about the photographic image in
order to show their pertinence to the new cinematic apparatus, and to
open a space in film for the consciousness of the ‘thinking’ spectator. For
Mulvey the capacity to suspend the movement of the cinematic image allows
the viewer to become conscious of the contradictory temporalities imbricated
in it—the time of registration and the time of fiction, the time of the perfor-
mance and the present time of viewing. And it isn’t just that the image ‘stilled’
by the photograph or the pause button on the DVD player recalls the death
inherent in, but inevitably concealed by, the moving image, and that the
reflection it demands disappears when the mechanism is put into motion
192 | Film Theory
again. Rather the imbricated temporalities impact dialectically on the specta-

tor to instantiate a new synthesis. The spectator returns to movement
now understood as ‘the inseparability of stillness from movement and flow’
(p. 186). This new, more complicated temporality, is also part of cinema’s
aesthetics. To paraphrase Mulvey, cinematic time has become palpable, not
because of the fleetingness of the halted second but because of the fleetingness
of the sequence in process. The immediate yet elusive present tense ‘now’ is
experienced as fading into the ‘then’. Mulvey suggests: ‘[t]he specific time that
characterizes the still photograph extends into the continuous transformations
of ‘‘nows’’ into ‘‘thens’’ as the screen image moves forward. As a film’s
representation of time ‘‘shifts’’, the stillness of the frame comes to be of
less interest than the succession of 24 frames per second’ (p. 189).
Mulvey’s book makes a new and interesting contribution to contempo-
rary practices of film viewing and film aesthetics and she is to be congratu-
lated for pursuing a more broadly psychoanalytic interpretation of cinema
than is conventional in film studies. Although it seems to be unfashionable at
present to burden one’s film analysis with too much theoretical exposition,
the book at several points would have benefited from deeper conceptual
explication. A case in point: a more detailed explanation of Peirce’s distinc-
tion between different kinds of sign (icon, index and symbol) would have
made for a fuller interpretation of the significance of the star’s capacity to
shift the signifying registers. The detail provided on the index in Bazin’s and
Barthes’ writing is excellent, but how does their understanding of it com-
pare with the nature of its utilisation by film theory of late? The use of the
concept within a psychoanalytic framework is a provocative move on
Mulvey’s part, but some attention to its current usage would have made
the originality of her deployment of it much more pronounced. Another
immensely interesting argument comes from the analogy between the
indexicality of reality across the time-cinema relation and the uncon-
scious–conscious relation but it could have been supported by some atten-
tion to the difference between the cinematic and psychical components of
the relation as well as their sameness. At times there’s a danger that the
psychoanalytic concepts lose their concreteness and hence their force. Since
when, for example, is the unconscious the storehouse for memory as it is
conventionally understood?
If Mulvey’s work is caught between observing the death of an old technol-
ogy and celebrating its reconfiguration by new media technologies, Daniel
Frampton’s book Filmosophy (London: Wallflower, 2006) celebrates the
coming of a new hybrid, born of the century old art of film and the two
and a half millennia old discipline of philosophy. The book comes with
Film Theory | 193
no less than ten endorsements on its jacket. Film theorists like Vivian
Sobchack, David Rodowick, Ian Christie and Tom Conley generally concur
that Frampton has made a significant contribution to a new way of thinking
about film as philosophy. Many film scholars will be familiar with the term
‘filmosophy’ and with Frampton’s pioneering work in bringing the disciplines
of film studies and philosophy into a meaningful conversation with each other
by founding the salon-journal film philosophy and thus facilitating the most
significant international discussion forum on the topic. As someone deeply
interested in the film-philosophy interface, it was with much anticipation that
I picked up the latest output of perhaps its most dedicated contributor.
The book undertakes important preliminary evaluations of the relation-
ship between film and philosophy, examining, for example, the encounter
between the two in the phenomenological work of Merleau-Ponty and Vivian
Sobchack, the contributions of philosophers like Deleuze and Cavell to film
studies, and the work of film scholars (such as Paul Messaris, V.F. Perkins,
Noël Carroll, Murray Smith, Gregory Currie and David Bordwell) who
analyse film in the name of cognitive philosophy. At the same time
Frampton is careful to consider historical precedents for the philosophical
approach to film. Chapter Four, for example, considers a number of earlier
attempts to theorise film as thinking: Antonin Artaud’s pure cinema, Jean
Epstein’s lyrosophy, Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage, Jean-Louis
Schefer’s concept of the experimental dummy.
But the book is much more than an evaluation of contemporary philo-
sophical approaches to film. Frampton argues that his work is nothing less
than an attempt to develop an organic philosophy of film that takes into
account strategies of narration, significant aspects of film form and the
disposition of the viewing subject. Indeed, Frampton characterises his filmo-
sophical approach as integrating theories of para-narrational showing with
mise-en-scène aesthetics in order to regard the entire film as ‘intended’. In
this respect, he stands at the other extreme of the philosophers who use film
as a pedagogical instrument for demonstrating the existence of philosophical
concepts. Instead he wants to show a more poetic entry point into the
intelligence of film, analysing it at the level of components like image,
colour, sound, focus, speed, framing, movement and editing in order to
understand it as a distinctive mode of the thought and consider how under-
standing film as philosophy creates a particular idea of spectator that he calls
the filmosophical filmgoer.
The book is divided into two parts and has ten chapters as well as an
introduction and a conclusion. Part I comprises an historiographical inves-
tigation of the links between film and thinking through four notions: film
194 | Film Theory
minds, film-beings, the experience of the film-world and film-thinking. Part

II sets out in more concrete terms what Frampton’s conception of filmoso-
phy comprises, defining and developing the parameters of such central con-
cepts as the ‘filmind’ as the creative origin of the film-world and ‘film-
thinking’ as a ‘transubjective and postphenomenological’ intending through
film form. These concepts are further developed in relation to classical
theories of narration, mise-en-scène and spectatorship. Interestingly, chapter
9 takes a polemical stance against current approaches to film criticism that
overemphasise film technique, arguing that film’s poetic and dramatic struc-
tures provide a better point of focus. The filmosophical filmgoer, he argues,
‘is encouraged to see thinking (thoughtful intention) rather than technique’ (p. 175).
The final chapter considers the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and
Cavell in order to reflect on what filmosophy stands to offer conventional
philosophy. Frampton thus outlines filmosophy’s reorientation and reworking
of key philosophical assumptions, arguing for it as the creation of pure
concepts in a post-metaphysical non-philosophy. Frampton also develops
his theory of filmosophy through analysis of numerous films, in fact too
many to mention here, but he illustrates what he means by film-thinking
by undertaking extended readings of Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr’s
Damnation, Werkmeister Harmonies, Austrian Michael Haneke’s Funny Games,
Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher, Time of the Wolf and Hidden and the Belgian
filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s The Promise, Rosetta,
The Son and The Child.
Frampton’s book comes with its own byline: the front cover announces its
generic status as ‘a manifesto for a radically new way of understanding
cinema’. As with other manifestoes it is bursting with energy and revolution-
ary zeal. But it is also more tempered than one might expect. If it has an edge
of dogmatism, it is slightly ironic. Its refutations of other approaches are more
scholarly than vitriolic. And while its assertions are often righteous, they are
coupled with a palpable and inspiring belief in the possibilities of film, thinking
about film and thinking through film that promises to revitalise original and
innovative film investigation. The neologisms by which Framptom conveys his
new approach to cinema are consistent with the form of the manifesto, but
they are also somewhat inelegant and tend to make what is a very serious
contribution to the discipline of film studies something of a gimmick.
Books Reviewed
Conley, Tom. Cartographic Cinema. UMinnP. [2007] pp. viii þ 264. $25 ISBN 0 8166
4356 3.
Film Theory | 195
Frampton, Daniel. Filmosophy. Wallﬂower. [2006] pp. 254. $24 ISBN 1 9047 6484 3.
Gerstner, David. Manly Arts: Masculinity and Nation in Early American Cinema.
DukeUP. [2006] pp. 336. $22.95 ISBN 0 8223 3775 4.
Keathley, Christian. Cinephilia and History, or the Wind in the Trees. IndianaUP.
[2006] pp. x1v þ 212. $19.95 ISBN 0 2533 4648 7.
Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. Reaktion Books.
[2006] pp. 216. $24.95 ISBN 1 8618 9263 2.
Pomerance, Murray. Cinema and Modernity. RutgersUP. [2006] pp. ix þ 373. $24.95
ISBN 978 0813538167.
Rancière, Jacques. Film Fables. trans. Emiliano Battista. Berg. [2006] pp. viii þ 196.
$29.95 ISBN 1 8452 0168 X.
View publication stats

Film Theory 2008

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Film Theory 2008

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

Lisabeth During Lisa Trahair

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

film comedy View project

philosophy of comedy View project

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

1. The Movies of Modern Life

who object to what they see as an excessive emphasis on the transformations

The best feature of Pomerance’s plan to cast his term ‘modernity’ in

but criticizes Hitchcock’s easy accommodation to the Cold War liberalism

2. Cinema and Cultural Studies: Manliness

3. The New Bazinianism

attention to different considerations of how a shared world is created in the

those it shared with other media. Rancière’s twist on the Greenbergian

cinematic image—the movement-image and the time-image—and his histor-

impact on the image itself: ‘it cannot be identified as an actual difference

The most significant contribution to film theory in the book is Mulvey’s

superstition and uncertainty in the post-Enlightenment world), and their

irretrievable passing of the celluloid film image is in direct contrast to the

mass of ‘‘coloured people’’ rendered invisible by racism and oppression, very

again. Rather the imbricated temporalities impact dialectically on the specta-

minds, film-beings, the experience of the film-world and film-thinking. Part

View publication stats

You might also like