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Classical Projections
Classical Projections
The Practice and Politics of Film Quotation
E L E N I PA L I S
1
3
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ISBN 978–0–19–755818–8 (pbk.)
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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197558171.001.0001
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Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada
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This book is dedicated to my οικογένεια.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Theorizing Film Quotation 1

1. Quoting Genre and Creating Canon 16
2. Film Quotation and the Oppositional Gaze 33
3. “D-I-Y” Quotation and Created Appropriation 55
4. Film Quotation and Visual Sovereignty 74
5. Foreign and Domestic Film Quotation 93
6. Cinephilic Pilgrimage and Authorial Scandal 111
Appendix: An Annotated List of Film Quotation 133

Notes 143
Index 165
Acknowledgments
This book proposes a new term, “film quotation,” as a tangible way to track in-
debtedness, influence, and inspiration among film and media texts. This book
is a literal and metaphorical collection of quotations, and it is a testament to the
many people who preceded and surrounded its writing.
First among them is Tim Corrigan, who has indelibly shaped this work with
his unique combination of rigor, generosity, and good humor. I owe him a great
deal. The heart of this book, Chapter 2, took shape from many encouraging and
generous conversations with Patty White, who remains a kind mentor. Karen
Redrobe helped me to sharpen my focus and my confidence, and she embodies
an academic standard toward which I strive. Peter Decherney challenged me to
define the limits and the future for this project, and Dana Polan lent his encyclo-
pedic knowledge and generous insight to this book’s shape and scope.
I am grateful for material support from the University of Pennsylvania
English Department, especially Salamishah Tillet, Emily Steinlight, and David
Eng, and the Penn Cinema and Media Studies Program. Special thanks to Ken
Raining and the team at Van Pelt Library and to my friends at Highlights for
Children magazine, especially Eldollar and Annigale. I’m grateful to the editors
and reviewers for Screen and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, where
versions of some of these ideas are published. Fellow panelists at many Society
of Cinema and Media Studies conferences have informed and invigorated my
work. Norm Hirschy at Oxford University Press shepherded this project with
enthusiastic support.
Glimmers of this project, and my early cinephilic life, began in Rochester,
New York, with my father and then continued in my first film class with Mary
Ann Satter and Jason Rauck. I am indebted to the George Eastman Museum,
especially the Dryden Theatre and Motion Picture Department staff. I was fortu-
nate to find mentors and friends at the University of Rochester, especially Sharon
Willis, Jason Middleton, and Tom Hahn.
I am grateful to the University of Tennessee English Department and
Cinema Studies program for their kindness and support and for the course re-
lease that allowed me to complete this manuscript. I am especially indebted
to my colleagues Maria Stehle, Paul Harrill, Misty Anderson, Katy Chiles, Bill
Hardwig, Chris Hebert and Margaret Lazarus Dean, Chris Holmlund, Brittany
Murray, and Elaine McMillion Sheldon. This book has also been shaped by my
fellow writing friends and teammates Riley McGuire, Bronwyn Wallace, Keyana
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Parks, Evelyn Soto, Daniel Davies, Dana Cypress, Sara Sligar, Julia Cox, and
Micah Del Rosario. Special thanks to the unofficial Penn English swim team,
Clare Mullaney, Shona Adler, and most especially, Alex Eisenthal, who kept me
afloat. I’m grateful to Rachel Rudnick, Lisa Waltzer, Hannah Steiner, Michal
Harel, Genevieve Lerner, and Becca Montag. Extra special love and gratitude to
Edda Baruch and Sarah Hulbert, for always.
Finally, I am most grateful to my family—and their immigrant spirit that
values education, especially education for women. My personal academic
heroes, Mary (Mia) Yerazunis, Stephen Yerazunis, and John D. Paliouras, are in-
delible examples of warmth, kindness, and pedagogical excellence, and I miss
them very much. James Palis, Christina Palis, Greg Palis, and Margaret and Theo
Palis provided immeasurable love and support during this book’s writing. Extra
special thanks to Betsy Palis, the big heart.
Introduction
Theorizing Film Quotation
In Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950), fictional actress Norma Desmond (Gloria

Swanson) demonstrates her opulence and bizarre insularity in her home movie
theater, an extravagant anachronism in 1950. As the sardonic voice-over marvels,
“ ‘We’d see a movie, right in her living room! . . . I guess I don’t have to tell you
who the star was. They were always her pictures, that’s all she wanted to see.’ ”
Norma watches her younger self—or rather, Swanson’s younger self—in Queen
Kelly (1929) while Queen Kelly’s director, Erich von Stroheim, plays Norma’s
butler, projectionist, and former director.1 In other words, Sunset Boulevard ret-
rospectively casts Swanson in Queen Kelly as Norma’s history, infusing this pre-
existing film with new meanings, new interpretations, new narrative demands.
This complex diegetic and extradiegetic layering across Swanson, von Stroheim,
and Queen Kelly creates simultaneously indexical and fictionalized artifacts and
presages a cluster of personal, archival, and political questions that intensified in
the decades after Sunset Boulevard.
Norma’s on-screen screen provides a site of literal and metaphoric projec-
tion—of desire, of re-viewing, of conflating and constructing “all she wanted to
see”—and models the potentiality of what I call “film quotation.” Film quotation
is the medium-specific reappropriation of preexisting film fragments, from brief
images to whole scenes, within a subsequent film. The film quotation’s visual,
spatial presence within another diegesis re-frames and re-views film history.
Whether offering rigorously argued indictments, deeply personal desires, or fab-
ricated histories, film quotations always involve psychological projection from
multiple vantages, from the quoting filmmaker, from on-screen characters, and
from us, as viewers. As Norma’s deliberate programming (“they were always her
pictures”) suggests, film quotations are neither dormant set-dressings nor apo-
litical aesthetic markers, but serve to memorialize and reify specific selections
of film history in contemporary cinema. While quotation facilitates visual,
physical, and psychological interaction across film history, the boundaries be-
tween Wilder’s and von Stroheim’s diegeses remain fixed; the sound-era Sunset
Boulevard gazes retrospectively on silent cinema, across a periodized chasm
(regarding both sound technology, but also a personal, gendered boundary
between Swanson as young, desirable femininity and an aging “has-been”).
Classical Projections. Eleni Palis, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197558171.003.0001
2 CLASSICAL PROJECTIONS
Throughout this book, film quotations embed moving images across techno-his-
torical contexts, imbricating personal self-inscription, archival inquiry, political
critique, and film historiography.
Classical Projections focuses on film quotations of classical Hollywood film—
shorthand for mainstream American studio production roughly from the pe-
riod 1915–1950—as quoted in post-classical Hollywood, roughly from 1960
to the present. Unlike already-theorized modes that reappropriate preexisting
footage— including documentary cinemas, newsreels, found- footage films,
essay films, and videographic criticism—film quotations quote and are quoted
within narrative feature films. Post-classical quotations of classical films not
only reflect increasingly citational, media-saturated American culture, but also
reframe Hollywood history and the seismic shift between classical and post-
classical cinema. Film quotation is a direct consequence of film history’s unprec-
edented availability in archives, on television, and in newly formed film studies
programs in the 1950s and 1960s. This archival access, coupled with the indus-
trial, political, cultural, and technological change that destabilized the classical
Hollywood studio system—including the 1948 antitrust Paramount Decision,
the Production Code Administration’s progressive demise, rebellious youth cul-
ture, second-wave feminism, and the Civil Rights Movement, to be discussed
further in detail—infused and enriched post-classical film quotation.
Quoting film history stages a uniquely visual, physical interaction between
cinema past and present that reveals the construction and constructedness of
film historical meaning. Through this historical and aesthetic frame, Classical
Projections asks, How does post- classical cinema visualize its own “belat-
edness,” its awareness of coming after a “classical” or “golden age”? How do
post-classical filmmakers claim classical history as their own or as their inher-
itance? How do historically disenfranchised post-classical filmmakers, whether
marginalized by race, gender, or sexuality, grapple with an exclusionary and
stereotype-riven canon? In answering these questions, film quotation emerges
as a constitutive element of post-classical authorship, retrospectively and stra-
tegically amassing and manufacturing “the classical.” To fully uncover the “clas-
sical” canon’s omissions and distortions, Classical Projections considers both
archival, indexical quotations and what I call “created-quotations,” fabricated
by the post-classical filmmaker to mimic classical aesthetics. Reading archival
and created-quotations together reveals the images, narratives, and artifacts oth-
erwise excluded, excised, underfunded, or unpreserved by classical Hollywood
cinema. Uniting archival and created classical histories, as told by post-classical
American filmmakers, crafts an inclusive, imagined Hollywood “history.”
As a visual corollary to literary quotation, “film quotation” as a label deliber-
ately invokes written reappropriation that embeds one writer’s words, in whole or
part, within a subsequent author’s text. These preexisting film fragments appear
Introduction 3
in diegetic movie theaters, televisions, and digital and mobile screens, in short,
domesticated within the diegesis, while also replicating how humanists, writers,
scholars, historians, and archivists make meaning. Pull-quotes, epigraphs, and
quotations continue to be the standard for citing evidence, invoking authority,
and building dialogic knowledge in literary and scholarly writing. Whether in
deference to or derision of another voice, quotation allows interaction among
authors, convening a critical conversation among predecessors through, as
Jennifer DeVere Brody calls it, “the simultaneous suturing and separating of
text(s).”2 DeVere Brody’s rhetoric, including suture and “seams,” metaphori-
cally invokes the way film editing sutures and stitches together disparate frames.
However, unlike literary quotation’s punctuation, or “quotation marks,” film
quotations appear without a comparable “” signal. Or in Marjorie Garber’s the-
orization, “quotation often blends, apparently seamlessly but with its seams and
its semes showing, into the parent text of the quoter . . . the location and com-
prehension of a quotation’s limits, and the degree to which its voice is marked as
different from the speaker’s, can radically alter both our sense of its truth-value
and its meaning.”3 Without “” punctuation, film quotations often show “seams
and semes” through what Stephen Prince calls “filmic artifacts,” including
scratches, grain, or monochrome, within the embedded film frame, across which
the inter-diegetic encounter takes place.4 Paul Grainge describes monochrome’s
power as a “chromatic punctuation of the visual norm,” literally articulating the
monochrome of quotation as a visual punctuation.5 For Grainge, monochrome
provides “a style and site for the articulation of a figuratively coherent and stable
past,” similar to the authenticating power of an epigraph or pull-quote.6 Even
when quotations are in color, past color processes such as Technicolor visually
mark quoted footage.
I argue that film quotation invokes visual authority whether the quotation is
indexical or created because both invoke what Jaimie Baron calls the “archive ef-
fect.” Archival status, Baron argues, is “an experience of reception rather than an
indication of official sanction or storage location.” Following Baron, “archival”
quotation exists “only insofar as the viewer of a given film perceives certain
documents within that film as coming from another, previous—and primary—
context of use or intended use.”7 By creating film quotations, the filmmakers
discussed in Chapters 2, 3, and 6 (Julie Dash, Cheryl Dunye, and, to different ef-
fect, Michel Gondry, Woody Allen, and Quentin Tarantino) author histories that
challenge existing, conventional historiographies and an over-commitment to
assurances of indexicality. Created-quotations can reveal archival gaps that yield
both “intellectual acknowledgement of how the archive effect can be simulated”
and “to an intensified experience of the archive affect, the overwhelming sense of
time’s passage and of all that has been irrevocably lost to the present.”8 Tracking
its affective, historiographic, and political stakes uncovers how film quotations
claim and constitute “classical” canons, always negotiating Hollywood’s racial,

ethnic, and sexual politics, past and present. Despite the dearth of film quotations
from silent cinema to the present, the film studies discipline has yet to examine
how quotations convene conversation among filmmakers and create new know-
ledge across time.
While film quotation only includes the physical presence of reappropriated
film footage, quotational aesthetics can operate on many filmic elements, in-
cluding lines of dialogue, gesture, costume, cinematography, mise en scène,
and special and post-production effects. From verbal references to reenact-
ment, these reappropriations engage broader labels such as pastiche, parody,
satire, and allusion. Noël Carroll offers allusion as “an umbrella term covering
a mixed lot of practices.” Though Carroll mentions “quotations” and “the inser-
tion of classic clips into new films” as “allusion,” this categorization is too broad.9
Building on Carroll’s foundational theorization, I offer film quotation as a par-
ticular, aesthetic strategy, distinguished by the visible presence of reappropriated,
preexisting narrative feature film footage on-screen. Film quotation concretizes
Carroll’s argument that allusions “identify their point of view on the material
at hand and thereby comment, with the force of an iconographic symbol, on
the ongoing action of the new film,” supplying a physical presence of the past
inhabiting the present, allowing shared space and interaction.10 In short, film
quotation warrants its own theorization.
Yet, “quotation” as a label circulates widely across scholarly and popular film
writing. Often, quotation denotes vocal repetition, as in Barbara Klinger’s work
on “karaoke cinema,” when home viewers “re-view films in order to memorize
lines so that they can quote them” during viewings or among friends.11 Michael
Z. Newman analyzes similar social sharing through the “culture of online quo-
tation.”12 Newman considers gifs, screenshots, Halloween costumes shared
on social media, and cosplay as “quoting” forms in which film fragments be-
come “units of meaning which circulate in a contemporary quotation culture”
on websites like Tumblr and Twitter.13 Conversely, several scholars examine
what I call film quotation—the physical presence of reappropriated footage—
without recognizing it as such. Christopher Ames offers a surface reading of
metacinematic “films in films” in his volume Movies about the Movies.14 More
substantively, Lee Carruthers catalogs archival film licensing difficulties and,
in beautiful language, describes how quotation “underscore[s]‌the terms of a
shared film history, where appropriation is not merely repetition, but renewal,
and the familiar is made strange once more by the force it gains from a new con-
text.”15 Re-viewing, re-considering, and re-interpreting film history through
quotation seems Carruthers’s implied, but unnamed focus. On the other hand,
several scholars use “quotation” as I do, though in casual, uninterrogated ways.
For example, Vivian Sobchack describes the two film quotations in The Last
Introduction 5
Picture Show (Bogdanovich, 1971) as “two overt cinematic quotes,” though she
does not theorize them as quotations.16 Similarly, New Vocabularies in Film
Semiotics defines “quotation” broadly and briefly, remarking “quotation can
take the form of the insertion of classic clips into films.”17 Followed by auteur
examples (all white, straight, male filmmakers, including Peter Bogdanovich,
Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, and Woody Allen), this definition encapsulates
film quotation’s “usual suspects,” who espouse New Hollywood and French New
Wave sensibilities (reductively, auteurism, patrimonious homage, and post-clas-
sical rebellion) that reinvigorated quotational aesthetics. Classical Projections
more rigorously theorizes film quotation.
Film quotation expands rich, interdisciplinary work that maps literary strat-
egies onto film, which includes auteur theory, film semiotics, adaptation theory,
and beyond. Even labeling DVD or Blu-ray “chapters” mimics book organ-
izations, and this fragmentation underwrites quotation. Or, in Laura Mulvey’s
terms, quotation “delays” the film image, offering an analytical opportunity in
“extracting [the image] from its narrative surroundings [that] also allows it to
return to its context and to contribute something extra and unexpected, a de-
ferred meaning.”18 Delay, Mulvey argues, is “the essential process behind textual
analysis.”19 As simultaneously creative and critical intervention, film quotations
are not props, but probes. Film quotation and its delay engage and reframe film
authorship, allowing film “authors” to write with, quote, or create film history
in a uniquely visual, physical interaction and film linguistic practice. Film-
quotational authorship invokes Catherine Russell’s definition of “archiveology,”
which “when applied to film practice, . . . refers to the use of the image archive
as a language.”20 Film quotation, as a strategy of archiveology, constitutes what
Russell calls “critical cinephilia,” which creatively uses “archival material to pro-
duce knowledge about how history has been represented.”21 Quotation provides
a canvas upon which filmmakers dramatize film historiography. While film
quotations can perpetuate selective memories, “classical” histories, and archival
gatekeeping, at its best, film-quotational writing accesses what Timothy Corrigan
calls the refractive essay film. This essay film mode “enact[s]‌and disperse[s] the
critical act of thinking cinematically itself.”22 As a refractive essayistic strategy,
film quotations “enact and disperse” cinematic inquiry across Hollywood his-
tory, historiography, archiving, and teaching, opening new avenues to interro-
gate and redress classical Hollywood’s ugliest legacies, especially race, gender,
and sexuality-based excisions and distortions that demand critical re-vision.
Film quotation is also a medium-specific manifestation along the spec-
trum of adaptation, both “a process and a product” and a “creative and in-
terpretive act.”23 Interpretive choices in quotation include clip selection,
contextualization, dramatized exhibition space and medium, and the spatial,
emotional, rhetorical, and visual relationship to diegetic viewers. Whereas
Linda Hutcheon defines adaptation as “repetition without replication,” film

quotation is replication without repetition.24 Creative recontextualizations of
quotation can dramatize active, creative, personal, or interpretive lens on our
“already ‘imaged’ ” past.25 Or, in Patricia White’s terms, film quotation allows
simultaneously creative and critical “retrospectatorship,” or “film reception
which is transformed by unconscious and conscious past viewing experi-
ence.”26 Yet, like other literary and film adaptation practices, film quotation
also depends on adaptation economies. Following Simone Murray’s work on
adaptation industries, back-catalogue licensing and legal negotiations often
inform quotational access and choice. The economic and industrial privilege
around licensing, which can cost approximately $10,000–15,000 per minute of
footage, informs many filmmakers’ choices to quote from the public domain or
from their own studio’s catalog.27
While the licensing structures are related, film quotation differs from
music licensing and hip-hop sampling aesthetics—the use of a riff, lyric, base-
line, drumbeat, or other pre-recorded music in a subsequent song. To co-opt
“sampling” as a label would obscure sampling’s historical and cultural speci-
ficity as a part of hip-hop and Black cultural expression of African American
and Afro-Caribbean youth culture in mid-1970s New York City.28 As a “black
techno- intervention,” sampling developed through new, innovative manip-
ulation of sampling machines.29 The complex musical and rhythmic fragmen-
tation, layering, and looping are sonic strategies, unique from film quotations’
visual specificity. The closest film-quotational approximations of sampling aes-
thetics appear in experimental films like Martin Arnold’s Pièce Touchée (1989)
or Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), which loops, repeats, and “scratches”
Andy Hardy film quotations to unsettling effect. Similarly, Jean-Luc Godard’s
eight-part video project Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–1998) layers its “samples”
by toggling between two superimposed film quotations or stills. While hip-hop
sampling provides productive juxtaposition, its resonances within experimental
film and video, rather than narrative mainstream feature film quotation, speak to
the avant-garde influence and power of Black cultural production and traditions.
How much film quotations will continue to absorb sampling aesthetics remains
an open and generative question.
As avant-garde approximations of looping, sampling, and scratches sug-
gest, film quotation draws on a long history of experimental forms—including
found-footage films and videographic criticism—and transposes these aes-
thetics into mainstream manifestations. In short, film quotations in narra-
tive fiction feature films domesticate experimental cinema style into narrative
form. Though Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma explicitly announces its dizzying
film quotations as a personal story/history of cinema, its historical, archival, or
film theoretical intervention is no more rigorous or persuasive than Spike Lee’s
Introduction 7
narratively contextualized film quotations of blackface minstrelsy amassed in

Bamboozled (2000). Similarly, personal documentaries like Rea Tajiri’s History
and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991) assemble, investigate, and fabri-
cate archives of both personal and sociohistorical insight. Other personal doc-
umentary and video essay forms emerge in films like Thom Anderson’s Los
Angeles Plays Itself (2003), which engages film quotations as indexical, documen-
tary records of space and place. Richard Misek reads Los Angeles with Christian
Marclay’s gallery installation The Clock (2010), a twenty-four-hour compila-
tion of quotations that feature on-screen clocks to keep time, theorizing both as
“appropriations film,” which navigate intellectual and spatial properties of quota-
tion.30 Whether in museum contexts and experimental forms or in mainstream
narrative cinema, film quotations replicate the avant-garde power to, in Jeffrey
Skoller’s terms, “produce new possibilities for a re-membering of the past in the
present. The artist is able to reinscribe new meanings onto old, once-discarded
images.”31 “Re-membering” captures the active re-formation, re-viewing, and
remaking involved in both avant-garde and mainstream film quotational forms.
Quotational aesthetics also productively overlap with videographic criti-
cism, defined by Christian Keathley as “short critical essays . . . typically read in
voice-over by the author and supplemented with carefully chosen and organ-
ized film clips.”32 Godard’s Histoire(s) provides a paradigmatic example of the
“poetic video essay,” in which “language (both spoken and written) . . . is one
component among many . . . in a collage of images and sounds.”33 The poetic
video essay unseats the primacy of the spoken or written explanation by “not
simply ‘explicat[ing]’ its theme, it seeks to perform it as well,” risking being mis-
or missed interpretation as criticism.34 The poetic video essay fuses creative and
critical artistry in a way similar to film quotation, which is also often overlooked
as criticism. Keathley theorizes videographic criticism as another intersec-
tion between literary and film theoretical forms, which “enables film scholars
[or filmmakers?] to write using the very materials that constitute their object of
study: moving images and sounds.”35 Film quotation further magnifies the poetic
video essay’s collaging, polyvocal aesthetic. While poetic video essays unite orig-
inal film sound, critical voice-over, and other sonic performance, film quotations
multiply and complicate the soundscape: voices emanate both from on-screen
characters, as overt or implied commentary, and from the filmmaker, expressed
through contextualization, framing, and thematization within the narrative.
Quotations’ performativity functions diegetically and extra-diegetically, that is,
both within the world of the narrative and outside it, and thereby perform si-
multaneously creative and critical, original and retrospective cinematic writing
with and about film history. Film quotation is the underanalyzed, largely analog
predecessor to digital videographic forms, meme culture, mash-ups, remixes,
gifs culled from film and media, and fan vids. Critical attention to “spreadable
media” and digital “participatory culture” misses post-classical filmmakers’ stra-

tegic and sustained deployment of film quotation in mainstream feature film.36
Though technological capabilities for film quotation have been available and
in use since silent cinema (as in Sherlock Jr. [Keaton, 1924], The Cameraman’s
Revenge [Starevich, 1912], and A Cottage on Dartmoor [Asquith, 1929],
establishing film quotational themes, including boundary crossing and vo-
yeurism), the mid-twentieth century explosion in film pedagogy, film publishing,
and film archival access facilitate a post-classical acceleration and immediacy in
film quotational practice. Carroll and Corrigan identify similar periodization;
for Carroll, post-classical allusionism “distinguishes the seventies and eighties
from every other decade in Hollywood’s past,” while Corrigan pinpoints a
“postwar move from adaptation as commentary to adaptation as criticism,”
which informs the refractive essay film.37 Television provided one of post-clas-
sical film’s broadest archival access points. Though classical Hollywood films
recirculated as reissues and revivals during the 1920s and 1930s, according to
Eric Hoyt, the late 1940s marks a crucial turning point, when in “the postwar pe-
riod of decline, studios reissued films theatrically at an unprecedented rate. Old
films also benefited from a turn toward the library in American culture—critics
and audiences expressed both nostalgia for and a desire to reevaluate works of
the prewar years.”38 Increased interest in retrospective spectatorship, coupled
with demand from television stations and labor union negotiations regarding
film rebroadcasting, made film history available on television as never before.
Primetime weeknight movies on television became the norm. In short, in the
1960s and beyond, studios “aggressively harness[ed] libraries as foundations
for cross-media expansion.”39 James Russell calls the film libraries’ increasing
monetary and cultural value a “fundamental change in the nature of the movie
business”—and indeed, for film appropriation practices.40 Library films gained
both aesthetic and economic importance; as Russell explains, “Today, the film
libraries owned by the majors are the main asset against which they borrow
money to fund film production.”41 In both monetary and aesthetic terms, the
film library casts a much longer shadow during the post-classical period than in
any other time in film history.
The Sunset Boulevard scene discussed at the outset anticipates this change,
as Norma’s home theater foreshadows “new patterns of reception” that allow
post-classical viewers to “literally possess images as ubiquitous backgrounds
and ornaments of their lives,” demonstrating active and creative relationships
to history available therein.42 The post-classical period’s unprecedented, and
increasingly varied, access to film history prompted a change of film philos-
ophy: reconceptualizing film, through the 1940s and 1950s, as an object “to be
debated, assessed, and evaluated.”43 This cultural shift toward film as an accessible
“art object” to interpret, interrogate, and quote occurred in many film-ancillary
Introduction 9
institutions, including museums, archives, film societies, and the academy.

Small-gauge formats also helped shape film studies as “an object-oriented disci-
pline—a model derived as much from literary fascination with the book as with
art history’s approach to the objet d’art.”44 The US Government and Office of War
Information (OWI) forged widespread small-gauge adoption networks to dis-
tribute World War II information and propaganda and, subsequently, provided
“the basis for rapid growth of MoMA’s lending library, American film councils,
film societies, and the increasingly formal networks of film study in American
universities.”45 The George Eastman Museum’s film archive and onsite theater,
which began screening archival films in 1951, and the Museum of Modern Art’s
(MoMA) circulating film library both model fusion of preservation, educa-
tion, and exhibition efforts.46 While MoMA in particular features prominently
in Peter Bogdanovich’s early film historical access and programming (discussed
in Chapter 1), his contemporaries, the so-called film school brats, studied film
as art object in film schools in the 1960s: for example, Brian De Palma (Sarah
Lawrence, 1964), Martin Scorsese (NYU, 1966), Francis Ford Coppola (UCLA,
1967), and Woody Allen (dropped out of NYU and CUNY). Film quotation
dramatizes a filmmaker’s dual role as student and maker, which became offi-
cial in early film school programs. The explosion of film degrees conferred be-
tween the 1970s and the 1990s (a near 300% increase) reflects new attention to
film historiography and pedagogy.47 As discussed in detail in Chapter 2, many
film generations emerged in the post-classical period, especially as increasingly
democratized formats, including small-gauge, video, and digital cinema, prolif-
erated. As the following chapters detail, the history and uses of film quotation
destabilizes conventional post-classical historiography and pedagogy.
Simultaneous with the institutional and technological shifts above,
movements for social justice, including the Civil Rights Movement, the Black
Power movement, the American Indian Movement (AIM), second-wave femi-
nism, and postmodernity writ large, rocked American society and culture’s re-
lationship to history. Corrigan theorizes a “cinema without walls” that radically
reconceptualized history, identity, and politics. During and after transformative
public, cultural activism and awakenings, spurred on by appropriative technol-
ogies, “audiences remove images from their own authentic and authoritative
place within culture and disperse their significance across the heterogeneous ac-
tivity that now defines them.”48 Weakened “authoritative walls” around classical
Hollywood distribution, exhibition, and valuation allowed new representational,
interpretive, and archival freedom. As one such “heterogeneous activity,” film
quotation by post-classical filmmakers takes on new agency and urgency to ask,
How will classical Hollywood history be told? And by whom? An inherent risk
in this book is that the most legible quotations to me, a young, eager film scholar,
threaten to replicate classed and education-based cultural capital hierarchies.
As Roger Beebe explains, such appropriations and critical feedback-loop “ulti-

mately plays a part in reinforcing that hegemony by mobilizing the theorist’s own
cultural capital and position of cultural authority to draw attention to and to can-
onize such works without examining the reasons that subtend such an evalua-
tion.”49 Following Beebe, Classical Projections deliberately prioritizes quotations
that posit historiographic critique, that question the unthinking hegemony of
classical Hollywood, and that interrogate quotational ethics and aesthetics,
working to, I hope, examine that which subtends supposed cultural capital and
authority. As Marjorie Garber argues, “every quotation is a quotation out of con-
text, inevitably both a duplication and a duplicity.”50 Tracking quotations as al-
ways duplicitous, always a “projection” through the eyes of a quoting filmmaker,
always infused with personal, authorial, and cultural preoccupations and anxi-
eties, always raises ethical and political questions.
To read the ethics of quotation, I follow Jaimie Baron’s contention that “every
reuse of a pre-existing recording is on some level, a ‘misuse,’ ” and “ethical
dilemmas and negotiations [are often] inherent in the form.”51 To parse appro-
priation ethics, Baron theorizes a “layered gaze” that imbricates gazes “of the film
subject, of the ethical stance of the original maker (which may be rooted in his
or her historical and social context) toward his or her material, and of the ethical
stance of the maker who has appropriated this material, editing and reframing
its images and sounds to a new end.”52 I interrogate the “appropriationist
gaze,” which chooses, edits, and reframes quotations, by contextualizing each
quotation’s origins (and at times, identifying previously unidentified quotations)
to unpack the ethics of quotation selection. Most film quotations add another
gaze to Baron’s layers: the gaze of diegetic spectating characters who communi-
cate their own “ethical stance” by reacting to and interacting with quoted images.
If, as Baron argues, each viewer must interrogate and “decide for herself if the
strategies and ends justify the misuse of the pre-existing recordings,” film quota-
tion productively complicates this task, layering the gazes of the original maker,
the filmmaker of the quoting film, the on-screen spectating characters, and fi-
nally, our gaze as extradiegetic viewers.53
In short, quotation invokes complex ethical negotiations. As Walter Benjamin
points out, “to quote a text involves the interruption of its context.”54 At risk in
this de-and re-contextualization is the way that, in Garber’s words, “quotation is
a kind of cultural ventriloquism, a throwing of the voice that is also an appropri-
ation of authority.”55 Garber highlights both authoritative appropriation and its
tendency toward potentially unethical appropriation and racial ventriloquism.
As each chapter traces both visual and ethical stakes of appropriation, they build
toward what Marita Sturken calls cultural memory, or the “contested meanings
in which Americans interact with cultural elements to produce concepts of the
nation,” wherein selective remembrance (or selective quotation) “says as much
Introduction 11
about desire and denial as it does about remembrance.”56 Film quotation is one of
many “technologies of memory” that “embody and generate memory and are thus
implicated in the power dynamics of memory’s production. . . . Just a memory is
often thought of as an image, it is also produced by and through images.”57 Film
quotations are always implicated in the power dynamics of memory produc-
tion, and each chapter centers part of these historiographic, political, and ethical
stakes.
The book begins with the most conventional, “usual suspects” of film quota-
tion, or those filmmakers who work to obscure the power dynamics inherent in
memory production after the classical Hollywood period. Chapter 1, “Quoting
Genre and Creating Canon,” centers on Peter Bodganovich and Martin Scorsese,
two mainstream, hyper- auteurist “film generation” filmmakers known for
their quotational aesthetics. Two early films, Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968) and
Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), both reflect the still-being-negotiated transition
between classical and post-classical industry, style, and structure in their pro-
duction histories and narratives. Therein, film quotation facilitates strategic au-
thorial and authenticating presences, through which Bogdanovich and Scorsese
can assemble, and then insert themselves into, a classical “canon.” Starting here,
this chapter interrogates the (incorrect) popular and scholarly assumption that
both allusion in general and film quotation in particular are unique to or rev-
olutionized by this first film school–educated generation. Rather, Bogdanovich
and Scorsese’s strategic, selective film quotational practice positions classical
Hollywood as their patrilineal “inheritance,” as young white, straight men
breaking into a historically white, straight, male-dominated industry. These
demographic claims to art-historical, industrial inheritance appear in their clas-
sical Hollywood quotations, which emphasize male-coded genre, especially the
Western and film noir, to validate masculine genealogy, ownership, and power
during Hollywood’s 1960s destabilization. I am grateful to studio executives at
Lionsgate and to Peter Bogdanovich himself, who generously granted me their
insight and expertise into the monetary and legal controls over archival access.
Through this vantage emerges a self-fulfilling prophecy in prioritized access,
allowing “inheriting filmmakers” easier access to quote—and thus, constitute—a
“classical” canon that lends their works authority and legacy, while perpetuating
the archive’s racial, ethnic, and sexual blind spots.
Chapter 2, “Film Quotation and the Oppositional Gaze,” interrogates these
blind spots through an alternate archive that prioritizes Black artistry, agency,
and enunciation in the face of industrial and archival racism. Chapter 2 also
counters popular assumptions that Chapter 1’s “film generation” is the only gen-
eration of quoting filmmakers inspired by and in conversation with film-educa-
tional institutions. Julie Dash’s Illusions (1982), Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon
Woman (1996), and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000) intervene in conventional,
oversimplified accounts of mainstream American film history through Black

film quotational authorship. Dash and Dunye create quotations, shooting
footage that masquerades as “indexical” Hollywood artifacts, to prove the need
for invention in an industry based on exclusion, excision, and marginalization
of the racial and gendered Other. Lee responds to the same stereotype-ridden
classical canon differently. Rather than inventing in the absences, Bamboozled
collects blackface minstrelsy artifacts, re-animates blackface performance, and
demonstrates stereotype’s toxic power, as his satire film turns to horror. All three
filmmakers operationalize what bell hooks calls “the oppositional gaze” in film
quotation, to rethink, not only Hollywood past and present, but also Black film
authorship through their emphatic “writing” with quotation.
The Watermelon Woman’s oppositional aesthetics, creating an archive to
counter an archival absence, is a standard-bearer for the political and ethical
capabilities of created-quotation. Chapter 3, “ ‘D-I-Y’ Quotation and Created
Appropriation,” explores how white indie filmmaker Michel Gondry mimics The
Watermelon Woman’s oppositional aesthetics through culturally appropriative,
cross-racial ventriloquism. Chapter 3 reads Be Kind Rewind (2008) through The
Watermelon Woman because, like that film, Be Kind creates an archive of clas-
sical quotations around a Black classical Hollywood artist—with a crucial differ-
ence. While The Watermelon Woman invented a fictional Black artist within an
archival absence, Be Kind creates over a real-life artist, Fats Waller. Gondry, the
white director, obscures a historical archive to fabricate a white-authored Black
character instead. Even if Be Kind seems a shallow echo of Watermelon Woman,
Be Kind illuminates the ethical implications of cross-racial ventriloquism. Be
Kind’s faux-35mm footage overlooks composer, artist, and activist Waller’s real
life and career and instead instrumentalizes “Fats Waller” as a signifier, an image,
a symbol of ancestral and commercial aura through monochrome’s cultural-
memory-making power. Be Kind has too long masqueraded as goofy comedy
without the critical weight to warrant interrogation of its cross-racial ventrilo-
quism and racist erasure. Focusing on film quotation reveals this film’s strange,
strained relationship to classical archive, Hollywood historiography, and race.
Chapter 4, “Film Quotation and Visual Sovereignty,” reframes these archival
and racial questions by interrogating film quotations as physical and visual
spaces that negotiate power, control, and sovereignty. The chapter focuses on
films that stage physical and metaphorical interactions between classical Western
genre quotations and spectating Native American characters. As a conceptual
frame, I borrow “visual sovereignty” from scholars Joanne Barker (Lenape) and
Michelle Raheja (Seneca), centering Native Americans’ unique relationship to
cultural geographies, identity, and self-determination. By reading quotations as
visually sovereign spaces, this chapter asks, How might classical Hollywood quo-
tation, especially of the Western genre, cede representational ground to Native
Introduction 13
American perspectives and politics? What role can film quotation play in post-
colonial, Indigenous sovereignty? And when is quotation complicit in repre-
sentational, political, and cultural domination of Native people? The three films
considered here adapt preexisting literary works that configure shifting racial,
political, and visual sovereignties. First, white director Jonathan Wacks adapts
Huron-Wendat writer David Seals’s 1979 novel Powwow Highway. The 1989 film
de-and then reterritorializes classical Western genre quotation, attempting to
revise the racial politics—or in other words, to manipulate the spatial and visual
sovereignty—with mixed results. Second, the white-directed, white-authored
The Indian in the Cupboard (Frank Oz, 1995) adapts Lynne Reid Banks’s 1980
novel, staging Hollywood Western quotation as a white-controlled space to
elicit and then expunge white guilt. In critical opposition, Thomas King’s short
film I Am Not the Indian You Had in Mind (2007) adapts his poem of the same
name and most successfully wrests Native American visual sovereignty from
within the colonial, classical archive. I Am Not the Indian quotes the “Hollywood
Indian,” or mainstream American stereotypes of noble, savage, and always disap-
pearing Native peoples, juxtaposed with self-representations that destabilize and
interrogate these anti-Indigenous representational landmarks. Pairing Native
American–authored texts (the novel Powwow Highway, King’s Not the Indian)
with white-authored texts and films (the film Powwow Highway, the novel and
film Indian in the Cupboard) reveals how film quotations always insert one visual
sovereignty within another, a spatial undertaking that can affect (but by no
means guarantees) decolonial intervention.
From the national spatiality and sovereignty in Chapter 4’s film quotations,
Chapter 5 projects ideologies of foreign and domestic identity, inclusion, mo-
bility, and control through film quotations in Wayne Wang’s Eat a Bowl of Tea
(1989). Chapter 5, “Foreign and Domestic Film Quotation,” interrogates clas-
sical Hollywood’s “foreign policy,” unpacking foreign and domestic dichotomies
elaborated in quotations to reveal their essential construction. Through quota-
tion, Eat a Bowl dramatizes how Hollywood’s projections of alterity and foreign
“Otherness” are anxious, disavowed elements of American identity, nationality,
and belonging. Eat a Bowl adapts Louis Chu’s 1961 novel of the same name.
Wang’s film quotations juxtapose the transnational movement of Hollywood
film’s foreign distribution and of Chinese immigrants to the United States, an
ironic comparison of mutually informing mobilities: Hollywood Orientalisms
encouraged domestic disenfranchisement and discrimination against Chinese-
American immigrants. Hollywood foreign policy appears most overtly in a
quotation of Frank Capra’s (adaptation of the literary) Orientalist epic Lost
Horizon (1937), which includes yellowface caricature, racialized sexual desire,
and visual elaboration of American Orientalist and imperial imaginaries. Wang’s
quotations reveal how Lost Horizon, The Lady from Shanghai (Welles, 1947), and
Holiday (Cukor, 1938) cast “foreign” spaces as exotic backdrop, dangerous ad-
venture, or adversary to externalize and disavow domestic anxieties. In critical,
quotational opposition, Eat a Bowl forges new representational space, claiming a
national, racial, and representational autonomy.
The Lady of Shanghai provides an interpretive opportunity across Chapters 5
and 6 because both Eat a Bowl of Tea and Manhattan Murder Mystery (Allen,
1993), discussed at length in the latter chapter, quote Shanghai, but to very
different effect. Chapter 6, “Cinephilic Pilgrimage and Authorial Scandal,”
returns to the white male mainstream, shaken yet resilient in the wake of con-
temporary #MeToo movements, begun by Tarana Burke. The chapter begins
by examining the “coincidence” of Ronan Farrow’s notoriety as both a lead in-
vestigative journalist reporting the Harvey Weinstein scandal and as Woody
Allen’s son. Imbricating the Weinstein reporting with memories of Allen’s earlier
scandal reframes Allen’s films, particularly The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and
Manhattan Murder Mystery, with contemporary filmmakers under fire for com-
plicity with Weinstein, especially Quentin Tarantino and his first post-Weinstein
film Once upon a Time . . . in Hollywood (2019), which, in an added wrinkle,
fictionalizes a traumatic episode in another “scandalous auteur’s” life, Roman
Polanski. Purple Rose, Manhattan Murder, and Once upon a Time all dramatize
absorptive/absorbing spectatorship on-screen, as characters physically or visu-
ally inhabit embedded quotations. Reading Allen, Polanski, and Tarantino to-
gether reveals shared quotational passages into film quotations, either magically,
visually, or digitally rendered, that answer contemporary #MeToo rhetoric about
whether “great artists” can be separated from their artwork when embroiled in
scandal. While undergoing extratextual revaluation, Allen and Tarantino insert
themselves and their characters into quotations of film archive, and film history,
as though to shore up their authorial stature and historical import under duress.
Classical Projections ends with an annotated list of film quotation that captures
only some of American film quotational aesthetics’ breadth and scope. To theo-
rize film quotation as expansively as possible, this Appendix organizes its filmog-
raphy through thematic, narrative, and representational categories that include
“Quotations or screenings used to cover up a crime,” in which crimes, illicit ren-
dezvous, or post-crime hideouts take place in movie theaters, and “Quotations
as backdrops for illicit trysts,” in which sexuality and cinema are repeatedly
paired. The Appendix wrangles over 150 examples of film quotation across his-
tory, industry, authorship, and genre. I hope the Appendix (though always in-
complete) might be a starting point for cinephiles and scholars interested in
the appropriative, quotational, and intertextual power that classical Hollywood
cinema still wields. Ending on a vast opening, cataloging a swath of quotational
examples aims to redress limited definitions of allusion and quotation that stop
at the most mainstream, well-publicized practitioners, overlooking quotations’
Introduction 15
oppositional, visually sovereign, nation- creating, and history-

interrogating
potential. Film quotation as a strategic aesthetic practice deserves sustained,
systematic study of both its complicity with mainstream classical Hollywood
historiographies and its potential to disrupt and expand foreclosed film canons.
As this book reveals how exclusionary, myopic canons are built and emboldened
by quotational tellings of film history, it also uncovers opportunities to construct
more capacious cultural memory.
1
Quoting Genre and Creating Canon
“All the good movies have been made.” So laments Peter Bogdanovich, playing
fictional filmmaker Sammy Michaels in Targets (Bogdanovich, 1971). Sammy
sulks in front of a television screen that moments before held The Criminal
Code (Hawks, 1931). His next line, abruptly demanding, “What’d you do with
my script!?” encapsulates the paradoxical Hollywood Renaissance iden-
tity: simultaneously freighted with film historical awareness (and insecurity)
while attempting to forge their own Hollywood careers.1 The “film genera-
tion,” Hollywood Renaissance cohort in the late 1960s and early 1970s arrived
in Hollywood on the heels of the classical period, with unprecedented access
to past films in archives, academia, repertory screenings, and on television—
keenly aware of all the “good movies that had been made”—while trying to break
into and potentially reshape the destabilized industry. One of the Hollywood
Renaissance filmmakers’ key strategies for negotiating this ambivalence is film
quotation, or reappropriating past “good movies’ ” footage into their films,
staging a physical, visual, and cultural claim upon (and perhaps mastery over)
history with self-serving selectivity.
Targets epitomizes this strategy by claiming and controlling footage from
The Criminal Code and its now-aged star, Boris Karloff, here playing a fiction-
alization of himself, Byron Orlock. By staging Karloff watching his younger self,
Bogdanovich flaunts considerable mastery over these indexical artifacts. Karloff
himself ventriloquizes this show of agency when he describes his spectatorship
saying, “I was just watching a relic I had a hand in.” While “relic” seems a self-
deprecating reference to age, The Criminal Code as a reliquary, a rarefied artifact,
invokes a reverential mysticism that reflects Bogdanovich’s relationship to the
film “canon.” Yet, while Thomas Leitch interprets Targets’ reverence as homage,
“pay[ing] tribute to an earlier film rather than usurp[ing] its place of honor,” val-
orizing “earlier films which are in danger of being ignored or forgotten,” the on-
screen relationship to film quotation is more complex.2 While Leitch correctly
characterizes Bogdanovich’s fervent film-historical proselytizing in books like
This Is Orson Welles (1992), Who the Devil Made It (1997), Peter Bogdanovich’s
Movie of the Week: 52 Classic Films for One Full Year (1999), Who the Hell’s in
It: Portraits and Conversations (2004), and the book and film Directed by John
Ford (1971), Bogdanovich’s film quotations in Targets are different. In direct op-
position to Leitch, I see Bogdanovich’s reverential posture as strategically aiming
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197558171.003.0002
Quoting Genre and Creating Canon 17
to usurp honored, classic films. If The Criminal Code quotation and Karloff him-
self function as classical Hollywood relics, Bogdanovich positions himself as
high priest, presiding over, modulating access to and understanding of sacred
artifacts.
While quotation selection and contextualization always involves cultural cap-
ital, canon-formation, and authority, for Hollywood Renaissance filmmakers
specifically, authoritative voice and belonging became urgent questions in
Hollywood’s destabilized, reformulating industry. As J. D. Connor points out, “in
the late sixties and early seventies, studios turned to a variety of new directors
in a rather desperate attempt to return to profitability,” and then these new dir-
ectors, “these self-conscious auteurs reinvented the studio as a powerful entity in
its own right.”3 Film quotation corroborates Connor’s diagnosis of a turn toward
neo-classicism, as Hollywood Renaissance filmmakers’ quotations “re-view” and
reinvent the studio as physically and visually powerful, a presence on-screen.
Connor diagnoses deep anxieties about and within Hollywood because “as stu-
dios have become ‘mere’ financiers and distributors, anxieties about identity and
reputation have grown as well,” such that films themselves “become the home
of collective reflection, where competing visions of the current industrial con-
figuration can play out.”4 I argue that film quotation is a specific, perhaps most
direct opportunity for collective reflection on Hollywood past and present, a
vantage onto the aesthetic, industrial, and historical anxieties of the immediately
post-classical period. In an “individual package” system, where stability and au-
thority seemed increasingly tenuous, Hollywood Renaissance filmmakers, or, as
Connor calls them, “the paranoid auteurs dreamed the studios back into power
in the seventies.”5 Film quotation allows interaction with this dreamed and dra-
matized past. Through quotation, Hollywood Renaissance filmmakers can si-
multaneously constitute, reify, and then claim an authoritative past to solidify
their futures. Though in part a bid for branding, film quotation also serves a per-
sonal and imaginative function, as filmmakers model paternal and pedagogical
yearning across quotation.
This chapter considers two anxious Hollywood Renaissance auteurs,
Bogdanovich and Martin Scorsese, who model two relationships to classical
Hollywood’s presence, proximity, and imagined impact. While Bogdanovich
insistently identifies the Criminal Code quotation, Scorsese’s Mean Streets
(1973) obscures the source-films, directors, and even the stars of its classical
Hollywood quotations. Both early 1970s films model what Harold Bloom,
writing in the early 1970s calls “the anxiety of influence,” or “each poet’s fear that
no proper work remains for him to perform,” or rather, as Bogdanovich says in
Targets, “all the good movies have been made.”6 Self-consciously confronting
the aspirational, yet “anxiety-making” history and archive, Bogdanovich and
Scorsese quote masculine-coded classical Hollywood genre films (the crime
film, the Western, and film noir) to claim these legacies as their genealogical,
generic inheritance. Both Targets and Mean Streets anxiously center genera-
tional struggle. In the example provided earlier, Targets’ quotation of Hawks’s
Criminal Code dramatizes generational turnover: Bogdanovich is twenty-nine
years old, while Hawks was seventy-two, almost the same age as Bogdanovich’s
biological father. Whether through Bogdanovich’s openly admiring source-text
identification or Scorsese’s sly, uncredited appropriations, both quotational
styles use gendered and genre-coded imaginaries to “dream the studios back
into power.” Claiming personal and artistic inheritance from the classical co-
hort of “father figures,” Bogdanovich and Scorsese simultaneously constitute
and shore up a “classical cohort.” As Janet Staiger argues, “Those films chosen
to be reworked, alluded to, satirized”— and quoted— “become privileged
points of reference, pulled out from the rest of cinema’s predecessors. As ideal
fathers, these select films are given homage or rebelled against.”7 Staiger’s pa-
ternal language accurately reflects how Bogdanovich and Scorsese’s quotations
center a preceding white, male film generation as father figures. Yet, their pa-
ternal invocations lack “awareness of the politics of the chosen criteria” or the
“politics of eliminating power of some groups over others, of centering at the
expense of marginalizing classes, genders, sexual orientations, or cultures.”8
For Bogdanovich and Scorsese, such “awareness” or “politics” would demand
authorial self-awareness, an acknowledgment that their inheritance relies on
replicating past Hollywood prejudices and politics. Instead, obscuring canon-
formation negotiations and politics at work here bolsters Bogdanovich and
Scorsese’s authorial posturing as genealogical inheritors during the Hollywood
Renaissance.
This selective, strategic “collective reflection” on classical Hollywood in-
dustry, artistry, and inheritance relies on unprecedented archival access. While
Bogdanovich never enrolled in film school, Scorsese’s education (New York
University, BA 1964, MFA 1966), like those of contemporaries like George Lucas
(University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts, BFA 1967) and
Francis Ford Coppola (University of California Los Angeles Film School, MFA
1966), participated in the late 1960s and 1970s explosion in “the number of film
courses, film programs, professors, and student enrollments.”9 Film quotation, as
a method of cinephilic and scholarly engagement, is indebted to and invigorated
by the disciplinization of film studies. Bogdanovich’s backstory highlights film
studies’ diverse origins and influences, including, as Lee Grieveson and Haidee
Wasson describe it, “the porous nature of film institutions” and “its imbrication
with filmmakers, cinephiles, artists, collectors, galleries, museums, cooperatives,
and marginalized political groups.”10 Bogdanovich’s work across several porous
film institutions nuance his (reductively summarized) film-critic-turned-di-
rector auteur persona. Rather, his involvement in performance, programming,
and financing reflects film studies’ unwieldy history that grew in gray areas
within and around conventional film, theater, and academic institutions.
Though Targets is not a “student film” in affiliation with an academic insti-
tution, it touts both a student ethos and a pedagogical function. Oddly, Roger
Corman and his production company American International Pictures (AIP)
provide a quasi-educational institution behind Targets, where Bogdanovich
“studied” independent film production. As Noel King remarks, “Corman’s influ-
ence on the New Hollywood can scarcely be overestimated,” providing a training
ground for many young, post-classical filmmakers.11 Noël Carroll similarly
heralds AIP films as “conducive to the aesthetic proclivities of the cinephile.”12
Corman crafted a cinephilic pedagogy within Targets’ production, dictating
several production stipulations for Bogdanovich to follow, not unlike a film-
school assignment. Corman tasked Bogdanovich to use two days of shooting
with Karloff (owed to Corman from a previous picture) and populate the rest of
the film with a secondary plot and with footage from Corman’s recent film The
Terror (1963), which was covertly co-directed by Francis Ford Coppola and Jack
Nicholson. In other words, Corman challenged Bogdanovich to integrate New
Hollywood (represented by The Terror) and classical Hollywood (embodied by
Karloff). Further, Corman’s stipulations position Karloff as a “relic,” an artifact
of an earlier time (both Corman’s earlier production and classical Hollywood
cinema) that, combined with “another forty minutes with some other actors,” will
yield “a new 80-minute Karloff picture.”13 In other words, “Karloff ” is a powerful,
ontological signifier of market value and cultural meaning. Further, Targets’
assignment-style production ended with academic exhibition. Bogdanovich
first screened Targets in Professor Arthur Knight’s USC class where trade pub-
lication reviewers were able to see the film (and their reviews ultimately alerted
Paramount executives to the film). Targets’ quasi-academic production and dis-
tribution contexts further postures Targets as a slant student film.
As the faithful student, Bogdanovich adopts Corman’s suggested structure,
weaving together two plotlines, one classical and one post-classical. The former
follows Karloff as Byron Orlock, an aging classical Hollywood horror genre
actor, who resolves to retire from the movies, much to director Sammy’s (played
by Bogdanovich, named in homage to Samuel Fuller who advised on Targets’
script) chagrin.14 In parallel to Orlock’s plotline, Targets fictionalizes a real-life
mass murderer, following Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly), a young, disaffected
white male suburbanite, who buys a gun and goes on a sniping rampage that
culminates at a drive-in movie theater playing The Terror. Bobby and Orlock’s
paths cross during Orlock’s final in-person appearance at The Terror’s drive-in
screening and, playing upon Bobby’s disorientation at seeing Orlock’s diegetic
and extradiegetic presences (on-screen and in person in front of the drive-
in screen), Orlock successfully disarms Bobby and ends the shooting spree.
Metaphorically, then, classical Hollywood holds the power to stem the flow of
contemporary mass shooting horrors and facilitate a Hollywood happy ending.
As will be discussed, this ending reifies a classical past that can symbolically
“save” contemporary film industry, artistry, and spectatorship, and thus “dreams
the studios back into power.”
I argue that the scene in which Karloff and Bogdanovich watch the Criminal
Code quotation together provides Targets’ thematic and aesthetic linchpin.
Narratively, the scene bridges the film’s key turning point, immediately following
Bobby’s murder-spree preparations, but before his attacks begin. Juxtaposed
with Bobby’s flat, dissociated television spectatorship in the preceding sequence,
Orlock’s keen spectatorship signals a shift. The quotation scene begins with a
shot of the TV screen that initially masks the transition from one storyline to an-
other, showing a monochrome, blurry clock, like a visual cue for a shift backward
in time (or backward in representation). The camera pans off of the television
screen and onto a clock in Bogdanovich’s mise en scène, linking the two diegeses
and priming a thematic, aesthetic meditation on time. Finally, the pan lands on
Orlock’s fond retrospective spectatorship and yields uncertain star signification,
especially after a cut back to the TV shows a much younger Karloff. In quota-
tion, the younger Karloff, dressed as a butler wheeling in a tea tray, startles an old
woman who exclaims, “Oh! I wish you wouldn’t sneak up on me like that!” Her
alarm both foreshadows how Orlock’s daunting frame will “sneak up on” Bobby
during Targets’ final showdown and invokes Karloff ’s monster-movie career, in-
cluding Frankenstein (Whale, 1931) and The Mummy (Freund, 1932). As Vivian
Sobchack muses, “We watch Orlock watching Orlock as we also watch Karloff
watching Karloff,” but “whom are we really watching? We are made to question
our total responses to the actor as person, the actor as actor; in fact, we are made
to question our response to the medium of film itself.”15 In other words, Targets
uses quotation to craft a post-classical meditation on film history and ontology.
This sequence operationalizes Karloff ’s cult star persona, which Mark Jancovich
and Shane Brown describe, saying, “Rather than a faceless actor who was hidden
beneath his make-up, Karloff was celebrated as a distinctive personality that the
cult connoisseur could recognize and appreciate,” sparing him some of the type-
casting that plagued Bela Lugosi.16 Yet, Sobchack’s question “whom are we really
watching?” could also reference how Bogdanovich inserts himself. In this scene,
we watch Bogdanovich stage his own authorial power and control by strategi-
cally operationalizing Karloff ’s star signification and industrial history. By cut-
ting between Karloff-as-Orlock and the younger, indexical Karloff in Criminal
Code, Bogdanovich inserts Orlock, his fictional character, into film history—and
by extension, inserts himself and his authorship into the classical film canon and
alters our interpretation of Howard Hawks’s film.17
Bogdanovich concretizes his intervention when he, as Sammy, knocks at the

door and interrupts the quotation. Like Karloff ’s scrambled star signification,
Bogdanovich’s on-screen presence as a diegetic and extradiegetic director raises
ontological questions. Following Cecilia Sayad’s work on the on-screen auteur,
Bogdanovich’s presence “invit[es] us to think of [cinematic authorship] not
as critical construction, but as self-construction—not as an artificial attempt
to humanize the source of the film’s discourse through a reading practice, but
as the filmmaker’s performance of the processes that lead to the fabrication of
meaning.”18 Here, Bogdanovich performs authorial “self-construction” through
blocking, framing, and dialogue around both the film quotation and Karloff to
demonstrate a personal, affective relationship to film history.19 After Sammy
knocks at the door, Orlock mutters a (generically consistent) macabre quota-
tion, wondering, “who is that tapping at my chamber door?” Quoting Edgar
Allan Poe’s “The Raven” invokes Corman’s 1963 film adaptation of the poem
and, cheekily, references how The Terror covertly reused The Raven’s sets (vis-
ible in Targets’ drive-in quotation scene). Within this constellation of autho-
rial invocations, from Poe to Corman, Bogdanovich-as-Sammy enters and, with
almost comic speed upon seeing the TV, exclaims, “Hey! The Criminal Code!”
His eager and prompt identification fits a student ethos, as does his personal ad-
mission, “I saw this at the Museum of Modern Art.” When Orlock quips, “I am
a museum piece,” Sammy answers defensively, “Howard Hawks directed this!”
In other words, Bogdanovich as Sammy, in deliberate, heavy-handed dialogue,
identifies the quotation’s source-film, director, and a retrospective exhibition
history with pedagogical certitude.20 Bogdanovich’s identification of and with
the film quotation reflects his career-long, hagiographic, archivally oriented au-
thorship and his attempt to answer what Connor calls “the fundamental late-
seventies quandary of the screenwriter-auteur: Is he the proper heir of the great
studio heads?”21
Bogdanovich shores up his answer in the affirmative through both his on-
screen reverence for Hawks and by mentioning MoMA, a deliberate nod to
Bogdanovich’s collaborative work with MoMA to recirculate archival “relics.”
MoMA began its “public and noncommercial” film library in 1935, striking
deals with MGM and Paramount to pioneer a “model of permanence” for li-
brary films.22 Bogdanovich recalls that in the 1950s, “My father would take me
to afternoon screenings of silent films at the Museum of Modern Art,” where
Bogdanovich blended paternal fondness, spectatorship, and pedagogy by
keeping “a private card file on every movie [he] saw,” 3,661 features from 1952
to 1973, noting ratings, credits, and comments.23 Bogdanovich’s studious view-
ership anticipates his work programming film retrospectives for MoMA during
the 1960s. Indeed, Bogdanovich’s line, “I saw this at the Museum of Modern
Art,” rings with false modesty because Bogdanovich himself programmed The
Criminal Code at MoMA in June 1962 for a Howard Hawks Retrospective. The
Retrospective’s press release alludes to a layered, dual authorship, announ-
cing, “The 27 films which Peter Bogdanovich has assembled for this exhibition
will also show both young and old that Hawks’s work is that of a man with a
sharply individual view of men and women.”24 In other words, Bogdanovich
recirculates “relics” for the worshipping masses while inserting himself as a cru-
cial intermediary, as the one “assembling” the relics to reveal a predetermined
argument about what “this exhibition will show to both young and old,” or per-
haps, classical and post-classical vantages.25 Bogdanovich also served as a figur-
ative and literal intermediary between the film museum and industry when, as
Bogdanovich explains,
I went to Paramount and I said, “If I can get MoMA to do a Howard Hawks
retrospective connected to the opening of Hatari! [Hawks, 1962], will you guys
pay for it?” And Paramount said yes. So I called the Museum and I said, “If
Paramount pays for it, will you do a retrospective of Howard Hawks?” They said
yes. . . . They paid me $200 a week for that job. That was good money, and it was
the first time I had a job in a Hollywood studio. The following year, I did the
same thing with Hitchcock and Universal [Studios] and the Museum in con-
nection with the opening of The Birds. That’s the three retrospectives I did at the
Museum, and they were very, very successful. (personal interview)
Bogdanovich exploits this fortuitous moment in film institutions when, as he

explains, “most of the old masters were still alive and either making films or
at least able to talk about how they had been made,” so that “the old masters”
provide Bogdanovich an “education and apprenticeship,” approximating other
Hollywood Renaissance filmmakers’ educations.26 In the balance between studio
economics and the Museum’s cultural demands, Bogdanovich inserts himself
as a bridge between film institutions: a young director championing (and co-
opting) old masters.
This strategy informs Bogdanovich’s reuse of The Criminal Code and use
of Karloff in Targets—exploiting an opportunity to triangulate a kind of tran-
sitive, relational authorial status, built on the shoulders of Karloff and Hawks.
Bogdanovich structures Targets as a reliquary, a vessel for the sacred film quo-
tation artifact, that both perpetuates and co-opts Hawks’s and Karloff ’s “mythic
power,” as Leitch calls it, and their generic, thematic, and aesthetic invocations.
However, Bogdanovich obscures this strategic invocation with deceptive non-
chalance. During an interview with Bogdanovich, I asked how and why he chose
to quote The Criminal Code, and he explained simply, “I was looking for a picture
that Howard Hawks had directed and that featured Karloff. I think he was also in
Scarface, but I thought the clip of him as the butler was funny, so I got in touch
with Columbia Studios and I asked for permission. I think it cost a few bucks.
I asked Howard if it was OK with him, and it was OK with him, and that was
it.”27 His privileged casualness, flaunting the ease, accessibility, and minimal cost
of quotation (especially when one’s friends hold the film rights) starkly diverges
from filmmakers with less institutional privilege, as dramatized by Cheryl
Dunye’s struggle for history in Chapter 2. As “Howard’s” protégé, Bogdanovich
selects this “funny” quotation from seemingly unlimited options, following
comedy caprice. On closer examination, however, the Criminal Code quotation’s
selection and contextualization reveal nuanced posturing. Bogdanovich strate-
gically positions himself as a Hawksian inheritor, co-opting authorial prestige
by elaborating and extending The Criminal Code’s social commentary into the
late 1960s.
Hawks’s 1931 The Criminal Code follows Bob Graham (Phillip Holmes), a hap-
less man convicted of murder, caught between two interpretations of “the crim-
inal code.” District attorney and prison warden Mark Brady (Walter Huston)
embodies the official penal code of law, symbolized by the central prop, a heavy,
bound “criminal code” book. Conversely, convict Ned Galloway (Karloff)
enforces “the code” among criminals, demanding loyalty to incarcerated friends
and retribution against those who “squeal” on fellow inmates. The Criminal Code
ends with Graham welcomed back to the right side of the law, rehabilitated by
heteronormative romance, while Karloff-as-Galloway kills the prison guard who
wronged him (as Galloway darkly intones, “The guy that squealed is in here too.
I got an appointment with him”). His “kept appointment” (murdering the cor-
rupt guard and sacrificing himself) provides the film’s violent, dramatic climax
before love and family furnish the happy ending.
Targets’ quotation of Criminal Code focuses only on Galloway and his violent
masculinity, eliding the law-abiding Mark Brady storyline completely. The quo-
tation comes from Galloway’s first on-screen murder in Criminal Code, in which
Galloway, dressed as a butler, doctors the old woman’s tea in order to tempo-
rarily incapacitate her, allowing him to slip away to commit murder undetected.
His victim, Runch (Clark Marshall), has violated the “code” of inmates loyalty by
betraying their escape plan. Yet, Targets’ quotation bypasses this backstory. As
Bogdanovich-as-Sammy approaches the quoting television screen, Bogdanovich
the director lingers on the quotation, including more than 15 seconds before
Galloway attacks Runch, which showcase the prison inmates “yammering,” or
making noise to disturb the guards, helping Galloway avenge Runch’s trans-
gression. The yammering scene contextualizes the murder that follows as a col-
lective, community-sanctioned attack, with Karloff-as-Galloway as enforcer.
Through expressive superimposition, prisoners across the compound com-
municate solidarity through sound. This segment also strategically showcases
Hawks’s auteurism in, as Tony Williams describes it, “a perverse version of mu-
sical accompaniment” to murder.28 The quotation ends on a close-up of Runch,
lit through a window that casts a shadowy “X” onto his sweat-soaked face. As
Williams points out, “visual meaning” emerges through “the symbolic use of the
‘X’ in Scarface” showcasing how, “at this time in his career Hawks experimented
with visual technique.”29 Bogdanovich encourages an auteurist gaze on this quo-
tation in statements on-screen and off. On-screen, Bogdanovich-as-Sammy
proclaims, “Howard Hawks directed this!” and Orlock replies, “I know. Thanks to
him, it was my first really important part.” In an interview with me, Bogdanovich
explained that Karloff improvised this line because “Boris liked Howard very
much, had respect for him.” Similarly, Bogdanovich describes his on-screen at-
tribution of this quotation (through Sammy’s dialogue) as a “way of publicizing
Howard Hawks. He was a good friend at that point. I wanted to give credit to
Howard.” Thus, both actors on-screen metatextually honor their auteur friend,
model rapt devotion to classical Hollywood, and at the same time, shape and
modulate the Targets audiences’ access to film history. In comic excess, Sammy
repeatedly shushes Orlock’s attempts to make conversation during the quota-
tion, prioritizing the indexical, archival Orlock over the real-life “relic,” and slyly
implying that Bogdanovich is more devoted to this history than even Karloff
himself. In shot-reverse shots between Sammy and Orlock’s spectatorship and
the quoting television screen, the quotation follows the imperious, looming
Galloway as he stalks Runch in a silent, suspenseful long take. When Runch fi-
nally turns and flees, Galloway flips open his switchblade, deftly blocks Runch’s
escape, and at knifepoint, forces Runch through a door to obscure the bloody
retribution: a classical Hollywood intertwining of crime and horror (Fig. 1.1).
Physically and thematically, Bogdanovich claims and controls The Criminal
Code quotation and its meanings: physically, Bogdanovich sits between Karloff
and the quotation, offering pedagogical, contextualizing insights in dialogue and
modeling serious spectatorial focus and attention; thematically, the Criminal
Code quotations elaborate a blueprint, a legacy, a generic history for Targets.
Deliberately naming the source text (“Hey, The Criminal Code!”), Bogdanovich
invokes the film’s central meditation on official and unofficial “criminal codes,”
on which Targets takes sides. The quotation isolates Galloway killing Runch,
showcasing violence without its “codified” justification. Removed from Criminal
Code’s larger narrative that rationalization and retribution for Runch’s murder
(Runch’s disloyalty earlier caused two inmates’ deaths; Galloway is ultimately
punished for this killing), the quotation shows only Galloway’s cold, calcu-
lated murder. In Rick Altman’s terms, this quotation obstructs “syntactic”
genre markers, or elements of film syntax including “plot structure, character
relationships or image and sound montage.”30 Decontextualized, the quotation
bears only “semantic” genre markers, including mise en scène, costume, star
Figure 1.1 On a television screen in Targets (Bogdanovich, 1968), Boris Karloff

appears as the monstrous criminal, stalking his victim in The Criminal Code
(Howard Hawks, 1931).
iconicity, music, and dialogue perceptible in a short quotation. Without nar-

rative contextualization and genre syntax, film quotation can reveal a genre’s
otherwise-sublimated semantic undercurrents. Here, Targets’ selective viewing
unleashes the Karloff character’s violent energy that The Criminal Code’s larger
narrative had justified, wrangled, subsumed, and ultimately, punished. Without
its syntactic context, this quotation becomes an aestheticization of monstrous,
unprovoked violence and provides a precursor for what Targets’ sniper Bobby
continues into the 1960s.
Bogdanovich’s film quotations reveal generic overlap between crime and
monster movies that has existed since the classical Hollywood era. As Jancovich
and Brown argue, “rather than distinct generic categories, the gangster and the
horror film were intimately linked” during the 1930s and 1940s because “many
horror monsters were little more than criminal masterminds,” and “Karloff ’s
performances as gangsters in The Criminal Code and Graft led Whale to cast him
as the monster in Frankenstein.”31 While the generic insights are not new, Targets
visualizes a genre history that it can then claim and perpetuate. Bogdanovich
crafts a self-serving genre history to shore up his own narrative of monstrous
criminality with classical history, legacy, and authority. To use Timothy
Corrigan’s terms, this quotation is “generic debris” from which one “can select,
across an expanded galaxy of images, other roads, other generic rituals, and
other subjectivities with which to try to formulate different histories within other
generic economies.”32 Bogdanovich formulates a genre history even as he quotes.
However unfettered his access to and choice among the galaxy of genre images,
we should not forget the selection—and selectively self-serving—process he un-
dertook from among an expanded (and ever expanding) wealth of generic debris
to formulate cultural, aesthetic, and generic histories; Bogdanovich creates a his-
tory that welcomes him.
Quotation unleashes a genre construction: an anti-hero freed from classical
Hollywood’s narrative containment and resolving punishment—and models
a history in which Bogdanovich can participate. This refines Noël Carroll’s ar-
gument that Targets is “the most enterprising early exercise in allusionism,”
invoking “film history—in the person of Boris Karloff—to defend film violence
from its puritanical detractors.”33 Carroll defines allusion as a device “that dir-
ectors use to make comments on the fictional worlds of their films,” which for me
offers an umbrella term under which quotation works.34 Bogdanovich’s specifi-
cally quotational allusionism amends Carroll’s claims, revealing how quotations
dramatize a film history that Bogdanovich can co-opt as a legacy and a defense.
Just as the Criminal Code quotation shows Galloway’s murderous attack without
explanation, Targets’ anti-hero Bobby shoots anonymous drivers and drive-in
spectators without explanation. Through quotation, Bogdanovich shapes Karloff
into Bobby’s forebear by isolating the quoted murder from the “code” that made
it palatable for classical Hollywood audiences, unleashing a monstrous crim-
inal instead. Bogdanovich manipulates The Criminal Code into a historical an-
tecedent for Targets’ monstrous violence, a mastery over and a measure of genre
evolution.
This aesthetic, generic, and historical claim expands into an authorial and
author-izing claim in the dialogue that follows the quotation. The quotation ends
with a jarring cut to commercial break, a rude awakening that reflects the paradox
of library films rebroadcast on television, at once widely accessible while often
formally fragmented by commercial breaks. As a commercial blares, Sammy
shakes his head in admiration and, referring to Hawks, sighs, “he really knows
how to tell a story,” and then, more downcast, laments, “all the good movies have
been made.” This rhetorical turn encapsulates a post-classical cinephile auteur
paradox: simultaneously inspired and threatened by classical Hollywood. Or in
Connor’s terms, “In a context of potentially overwhelming anxiety the movie
becomes the home of collective reflection, where competing visions of the cur-
rent industrial configuration can play out.”35 Bogdanovich projects his anxiety
and ambivalence onto Orlock, whose dialogue explains the industrial and aes-
thetic shift in progress. Orlock/Karloff, a diegetic and extradiegetic horror genre
luminary, explains, “ ‘Mr. Boogeyman! King of Blood’ they used to call me,” but
now “my kind of horror isn’t horror anymore.” In hyper-literal, metacinematic
terms, Bogdanovich stages a genre-coded star announcing a “genre cycle” ending
and heralding a new genre beginning. Orlock’s/Karloff ’s metacinematic speech
act performs what Altman calls “the genrification process,” or the cultural evo-
lution by which genre labels expand and incorporate cultural artifacts.36 Though
Bogdanovich quotes the classical canon to provide Targets’ legacy and history,
he also uses Orlock’s dialogue to confer and corroborate Targets’ innovation and
timeliness, a projection of deep authorial anxieties. Then, Orlock hands Sammy
a newspaper headline that reads, “Youth Kills Six in Supermarket,” and remarks,
“no one’s afraid of a painted monster,” and Bogdanovich-as-Sammy answers,
“which is why you should do my movie.” Positioning Targets as inheriting the
horror genre, blessed and suggested by Karloff himself, Bogdanovich brings
crime/horror into the late 1960s. As Targets ends triumphally, with Karloff
looming out of The Terror quotation to disarm Bobby, Bogdanovich emphati-
cally wields classical Hollywood relics with post-classical mastery, performing
author-ized genrification.
The anxious pursuit of aesthetic, generic, and paternal blessing is further
elaborated in Mean Streets’ quotations two years later.37 Though Mean Streets’
film quotations invoke generic iconography without Bogdanovich’s overt au-
thorial identification and genre metacommentary, they model a similarly anx-
ious relationship to history and author-ity. Like Targets, Mean Streets’ quotations
also link film spectatorship, crime, and violence.38 As in other Scorsese films,
the movie theater is a transgressive space, at times a hideout after crime and an
arena for new indiscretion. But in this particularly post-classical manifestation,
anxieties about breaking rules and breaking in, stealing, or being apprehended
and expelled allegorize post-classical insecurities around authorship, legiti-
macy, and belonging. As Sharon Willis says of Jean-Luc Godard, another anx-
ious, post-classical auteur, he “regularly treats the theater as ambiguous liminal
site, often a site of passage, where fugitives take refuge, and where a variety of
illicit activities take place.”39 Scorsese’s diegetic theaters, too, appear as ambig-
uous liminal sites that negotiate identity and belonging, both for its small-time
gangster characters and for Scorsese himself. In Mean Streets, Charlie (Harvey
Keitel) aspires to be like his crime-boss uncle, but finds himself repeatedly ham-
pered by his immature, unpredictable friend Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro).
Charlie is secretly dating Johnny Boy’s cousin Teresa (Amy Robinson), though
Charlie’s uncle disapproves. After Johnny Boy repeatedly, rudely refuses to pay
back money he owes to Michael (Richard Romanus), another gangster, Michael,
and his henchman (played by Martin Scorsese) shoot Charlie, Johnny Boy, and
Teresa as they try to leave New York City.
Narratively, admission to the theater that hosts Mean Streets’ first film quota-
tion is financed by small-time crime. Michael robs a “coupla kids” and with the
money, he suggests, “let’s go to the movies!” An extreme-long establishing shot
of theater marquees obscures which theater they choose, denying any context or
framing for the abrupt cut to a full-screen, dusty ranch exterior. The second, brief
shot of this quotation shows two tussling cowboys in dirt-caked jeans, boots, and
vests, before cutting back to Scorsese’s diegetic audience. While semantic genre
markers clearly introduce the Western genre, for me, the source-text for these
two shots is difficult to identify, even on repeat viewing (Fig. 1.2). Surprisingly,
scholars including Marc Raymond, Giorgio Bertellini, and Jacqueline Reich un-
problematically identify this quotation, bypassing a methodological opportunity
in mis-or missed recognition. What is gained when we discard the scholarly pre-
tension to recognize brief quotations? Quotations identification (or lack thereof)
invokes Linda Hutcheon’s distinction between “knowing and unknowing
audiences” of adaptation, those with and “without the palimpsestic doubleness
that comes with knowing.”40 Mean Streets’ first quotation reveals how generi-
cally coded quotations are palimpsestic even for unknowing audiences. Genre
markers in quotation address multiple audiences: knowing, unknowing, and the
mistaken in-between.
In short, genre signifies without source-text attribution. As André Bazin says
of adaptation, “the ghosts of famous characters rise far above the great novels
from which they emanate.”41 Similarly, recognizable star icons or genre tropes,
like brawling cowboys or fedora-topped noir heroes, function as ghosts of the
films “from which they emanate” through genre signification, even if unknowing
audiences cannot identify their source-texts. These quoted cowboys convey
genre expectations, assumptions, and memories through what Jane Gaines calls
the “genius of genre,” or the “enormity of [genre’s] repertoire, its vast cultural
storage, its knowledge of both itself and the socioemotional raw material of the
Figure 1.2 An unnamed and unattributed Western genre quotation within Mean
Streets’ (Scorsese, 1973) diegesis.
cultures that sustain it.”42 Spectators’ interactions with genre create meaning, and
Gaines provocatively asks, “If genre is the locus of genius, however, is not ‘theirs’
more properly ‘ours’?”43 Relaxing a (scholarly instinctual) insistence on authori-
tative labeling, historical contextualization, or critical valuation reveals the gaps,
blind spots, and creative manipulations that exceed a film-studies-sense of what
quoted film “means.” Scorsese allows us to reevaluate what The Searchers (Ford,
1956) “means” within Mean Streets, freed from The Searchers’ heavily laden
critical-scholarly “meaning.”44 The quotation mutes The Searcher’s iconicity by
bypassing the silhouetted door frame, the Monument Valley vista, John Wayne’s
sardonic “that’ll-be-the-day” sneer. Instead, the fight between Laurie Jorgensen’s
(Vera Miles) love interests, a comic subplot outside the titular search, is indis-
tinguishable from most rough-and-tumble Western brawls for masculine dom-
inance. Embracing source-text uncertainty sidesteps the dualistic, one-to-one
adaptation studies pitfall perhaps best exemplified in George Bluestone’s now-
dated Novels into Films. Rather, as an “unknowing audience” unable to compare
source-text and quotation, the “genius of genre” might reveal the inherent vio-
lence in Western genre masculinity, even in supposedly comedic moments.
However, the interpretive opportunity in comparing knowing and un-
knowing meanings should not obscure Scorsese’s highly selective quotational
strategy that, like Bogdanovich, crafts the classical canon into his ideal intertext.
Scorsese avoids The Searchers’ obsessive white supremacist, vitriolic anti-
Indigenous racism and misogyny, and instead highlights physical violence in
male competition for heterosexual success.45 In other words, Charlie’s specta-
torship seems to transform The Searchers, a canonical, overdetermined film, into
a refraction or echo of Charlie’s struggle throughout Mean Streets. As in Targets,
quotation activates Western genre elements that Mean Streets carries forward in
its own genre formulation. Scorsese mutes and disavows the Western’s racism
and misogyny in ways that serve white convenience more than any progressive
racial politics. While Marc Raymond is correct that “clips shown from other
films” reveal “Mean Streets as a film consciously trying to position itself within
a group of ambitious Hollywood films reworking the conventions of its past,”
Mean Streets’ difficult-to-identify quotation also demonstrates mastery over
the archive by altering The Searchers’ meanings and rendering most viewers
“unknowing” audiences for quotation.46 Unlike Bogdanovich’s pedagogical
pronouncements, Scorsese’s covert quotation flaunts an authorial and archival
“insider” status that has informed his auteur persona, not only as a student or
inheritor of the classical archive, but also as a maker. In 1990, Scorsese founded
the Film Foundation, “dedicated to protecting and preserving motion picture
history,” by partnering with archives and studios to preserve and distribute ar-
chival films.47 Scorsese’s archive-formation also plays out in films like A Personal
Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies (1995), a videographic
documentary of Scorsese’s personal, subjective version of American film history.

Even Hugo (2011) integrates considerable silent film history through quotation
and preaches about film preservation. In other words, Scorsese’s work popu-
lating and perpetuating film archives consistently showcases his “in-the-know”
status and rarefied access to the archive.
Mean Streets’ second classical Hollywood film quotation appears at the very
end of the film, a finale that emphasizes Scorsese’s archival control. After Michael
and his hit-man gun down Charlie, Johnny Boy, and Teresa, the last scene of
the film chronicles the ensemble cast, including our injured protagonists, their
Little Italy neighbors, and Charlie’s uncle. In a somewhat disjunctive edit, we see
Charlie stagger from his car, leaving Teresa in the wreckage, and then a classical
Hollywood quotation appears, showing Glenn Ford rushing to a burning car and
heroically pulling a woman free. Though tenuously contextualized as Charlie’s
uncle’s point-of-view shot on his television screen, the expressive editing frees
and expands this televisual exhibition, allowing the quotation to haunt, reflect,
and refract Charlie’s car crash. Again, Scorsese quotes a famous genre film, this
time, the film noir The Big Heat (Lang, 1953), without diegetically announcing
or labeling it as such, allowing individual spectators (and their film noir famil-
iarity) to determine whether we are knowing or unknowing audiences for this
quotation.
Recognizing The Big Heat contextualizes this scene as Detective Dave
Bannion (Glenn Ford) at his most hypermasculine. As Chris Straayer delineates,
“only via contrast with the feminine good girl, however much she is relegated
to the diegetic background, can the film noir’s male protagonist maintain his
claim to masculine gender next to the femme fatale.”48 Indeed, Bannion’s wife
is a hyper-stereotypical “good girl,” perpetually cooking steak and serving beer,
so that Bannion is most firmly masculine while saving his weakened (nearly
dead) good girl. Her death motivates Bannion, narratively and emotionally, to
dismantle the mob. In short, she facilitates the noir hero’s agency: this exploded
car is the precipitating indignity that sparks his quest; for Charlie in Mean
Streets, the car crash is the final indignity on which the film ends. Bannion’s
hypermasculine agency and vigor, bounding to the car and wrenching open
the door, emphasizes Charlie’s comparative impotence. And because the quota-
tion appears as Charlie’s uncle’s spectatorship, the quotation associates classical
Hollywood cinema with a formidable and more capable preceding generation.
While Leo Braudy interprets the uncle’s spectatorship as looking “for hints on
how to be a gangster,” I see the uncle casting a knowing, masterful gaze on clas-
sical antecedents, embodying Charlie’s/Scorsese’s post-classical anxiety about
not being able to measure up to the generation that came before.49 Across quo-
tation, an interpersonal, generational, and gendered struggle for identity, ac-
ceptance, and authority unfolds.
Yet, if the spectator fails to recognize The Big Heat as source-text, the
quotation’s semantic film noir genre markers, including its violence, low-key
lighting, and agential male hero, come to the fore. If The Big Heat communicates
film noir violence— stylized, heroic, and narratively necessary— its quoted
recontextualization reveals gentrification, or a generic trope in the process of
evolving. The slant graphic match between the classical noir hero (Bannion) and
post-classical hero (Charlie) navigating parallel violence (car aflame, love in-
terest trapped inside) ruptures in a failed match-on-action; Bannion completes
the action (opening the dented car door, freeing the woman inside) that Charlie
cannot begin. Like Targets’ manipulation of classical quotation to create a history
for an evolving horror genre, Mean Streets too strategically invokes a classical an-
tecedent for its neo-noir. Quotation postures Charlie’s crash as intra-genre pas-
tiche, or as Richard Dyer’s defines it, “a kind of imitation that you are meant to
know is an imitation.”50 As Dyer argues, “genres do not spring immediately into
existence, they must be identified and promulgated as such, and pastiche plays its
part in this.”51 Quotation as pastiche here facilitates generic evolution. Whether
or not we identify its source-text, quotation postures Charlie as a 1970s iteration
of the noir hero who navigates a changed genre landscape. While Teresa’s hand
convulses in the shattered windshield and Charlie crumples to the ground, in
quotation Bannion’s wife is seen collapsing gracefully into Bannion’s arms; clas-
sical Hollywood models a now-seemingly unattainable choreography.
Symbolically, Charlie’s failure to match Bannion’s quoted actions dramatizes
Scorsese’s personal, anxious relationship with film history, archive, and post-
classical making. Like Bogdanovich’s lament at the outset of this chapter, Scorsese
too seems to wrestle with the worry that “all the good movies have been made.”
Yet, instead of adopting a student or pedagogical attitude toward film history
and genre, Scorsese casts quotations as lyrical ghostly hauntings, as though Mean
Streets’ violence summons its classical Western and noir predecessors to drama-
tize its tonal shift within movie violence. Like Bogdanovich, Scorsese uses clas-
sical Hollywood carnage to perform generic evolution, diegetically dramatizing
what Christian Keathley diagnoses as a post-Vietnam shift in which “formal
codes associated with documentary filmmaking that were disseminated largely
by television news” were used “to evoke an almost wholly unmediated repre-
sentation of reality, much like Americans encountered in nightly news coverage
of Vietnam.”52 Juxtaposing classical and post-classical movie violence through
quotation, Mean Streets seems nostalgic for manageable, studio-manufactured
violence even while positioning itself as more realist violence, shaped by the hor-
rific, newly viewable violence in Vietnam.53 While Altman laments “the near in-
visibility of the genrification process while it is underway [which] facilitates a too
easy assumption that radical differences separate classical and contemporary ge-
neric practices,” here, quotation reveals genrification.54 These generically coded
quotations measure the distance between classical and post-classical genre. They
simultaneously codify and claim a classical canon, assembling antecedents that
validate burgeoning forms that emerge between and because of this intergenera-
tional, intra-generic interaction.
As suggested throughout this chapter, these Hollywood Renaissance auteurs
quote masculine-coded classical genres—the crime film, the Western, and
the film noir—as ideal archival foundations upon which to posture their clas-
sical inheritances. As Barry Langford points out, gendered genres post-
1920 “feminized” melodrama “based upon assumptions about femininity itself
as ‘hysterical’: unreflective, irrational, easily swayed and prone to outbursts of
violent, excessive and undirected passionate emotion,” overlooking how the
Western and gangster films’ “personified moral oppositions, conventionalized
characterizations, action-packed stories, scenery and emotion” might “destabi-
lize the apparently secure gender/genre categories of such ‘male’ forms as the
Western, the combat film or the gangster film.”55 Bogdanovich and Scorsese se-
lect and contextualize quotation in ways that uphold these gender/genre cate-
gories, without critically or thoughtfully engaging any genre theory, gender, or
history—despite their claims to pedagogical or “insider” knowledge. Their sol-
ipsistic self-reflective quotational style upholds insistently masculinized genres
to create and claim a classical inheritance, legacy, and genealogy for themselves,
in their own image; these young men quote older men’s masculine genre films
to craft an aesthetic, archival, and thematic legacy for generic violence. Reading
Bogdanovich and Scorsese together reveals their strategic, anxiety- ridden
quotational aesthetics as bids for authority, history, and memory and, I hope,
complicates the unthinking ease with which straight, white men inherited clas-
sical Hollywood.
2
Film Quotation and the Oppositional Gaze
Diana: “So, tell me more about this project you’re working on. Is it for school?”
Cheryl: “Do I look like I’m a student?”
Diana: “I don’t know. You could be.”
Cheryl: “Well, I’m a filmmaker.”
This dialogue from Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996) highlights
crucial questions about visibility, representation, and status of the look implicit
in any Hollywood historiography—especially historiography conveyed through
film quotation. While on the surface, Cheryl’s evasive retort about “looking like”
a student teases to age and appearance, this dialogue is deceptively rich. Her quip
about what a student or filmmaker “looks like” works doubly, suggesting both
the object of a gaze (the student or filmmaker’s outer appearance) and the subject
and quality of a gaze (as in, how a student or filmmaker “looks” at the world).
Cheryl challenges Diana, and us, to reconsider the visual, both demographic and
aesthetic, expectations that dictate what a film student or maker—and in turn,
archivist, historian, teacher, and viewer—invested in classical Hollywood “looks
like.”1 Dunye offers a visual metaphor to elaborate her complex relationship with
vision, redefining the classical auteur position traditionally associated with sin-
gularity of gaze. Proclaiming herself a proud Black, lesbian filmmaker, Cheryl
wields a “look” that is both a demographic intervention and an auteurist “re-vi-
sion,” offering a self-referential, archival, and pedagogically oriented authorship.
Dunye’s raced and gendered authorial specificity reframes the standard nar-
rative of filmmaking after the so-called turn toward the library in American cul-
ture, when film archiving, reissue, rebroadcast, and film studies’ disciplinization
helped to meld the “student” and “filmmaker” roles that Cheryl delineates in the
dialogue at the outset.2 The academic, archival, and industrial changes that grew
the film “library” (as Eric Hoyt explains, a studio term for “films and television
programs they own that have already gone through the first cycle of distribu-
tion”) coincided with a cultural shift “toward the library,” of renewed interest
and indebtedness to past films.3 Cheryl’s quip reveals the insistent masculine
whiteness of mainstream historiographies that recount Hollywood’s post-clas-
sical turn toward the library, epitomized by the so-called film generation of
New Hollywood “movie brats.” Cheryl’s insistent identification as a Black, les-
bian auteur counters both popular and scholarly “film generation” accounts that
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197558171.003.0003
often mythologize this first, most prominent white, straight, male film students-
turned-makers, inevitably profiling the same five or six filmmakers from film
school to Hollywood.4 As Chapter 1 argues, these filmmakers used quotation
to solidify their inheritance from classical Hollywood, encouraging auteurist
treatments that “deify a select group of in-touch ‘geniuses’ ” supposedly “ ‘saving’
Hollywood from disaster.”5 However, as Noël Carroll points out, during the
1960s–1970s, filmmakers and critics’ “budding film-historical sensibilit[ies]”
created a mutually reinforcing system of signification with and about film his-
tory, which waned into “dull, predictable, and authority-bound” allusion by the
1980s, “taking their marching orders from established criticism.”6
In critical opposition to this authoritarian strain, Dunye—and the other
two filmmakers considered here, Julie Dash and Spike Lee—challenge viewers
to consider multiple “film generations” who engage and reconfigure many film
institutions in the latter half of the twentieth century, including the museum, the
archive, and the academy. The film quotations in Dash, Dunye, and Lee’s work
between 1980 and 2000 disengage the persistent association of quotational prac-
tice and white, male authorship/authority. By highlighting the expectations for
what practitioners of film quotation “look like,” these filmmakers intervene in
traditional, oversimplified accounts of mainstream American film history, ped-
agogy, and auteurism by performing historical pedagogy and practice through
insistently Black film quotational authorship. As Carroll argues, “the boom of
allusionism is a legacy of American auteurism,” and Dash, Dunye, and Lee use
quotation to interrogate film-historically oriented authorship.7 Attending to
their underanalyzed quotations wrests quotational practice (both allusiveness in
general and film quotation in particular) from the (white, male) New Hollywood
elite—and redefines how an allusive auteurism “looks” at and operationalizes
history.
Julie Dash’s Illusions (1982), Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (1996),
and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000) each showcase previously unseen “film
generations,” each espousing an institutional in-between-ness and an ambivalent
relation to Hollywood (straddling mainstream and independent production).
Sporadically adopting student, teacher, viewer, archivist, and maker roles, Dash,
Dunye, and Lee operationalize what bell hooks calls “the oppositional gaze” in
their authorial practice—especially in their use of film-quotation. As opposi-
tional auteurs, Dash, Dunye, and Lee convey resistant, interrogative, and critical
gazes on both personal institutional experiences and larger industry histories.
Their oppositional auteurism, born out of experiences as “subordinates in rela-
tions of power [who] learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that
‘looks’ to document, one that is oppositional. In resistance struggle, the power of
the dominated to assert agency by claiming and cultivating ‘awareness’ politicizes
‘looking’ relations—one learns to look a certain ‘way’ in order to resist.”8 Dash,
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and who attribute to the general government a right utterly
incompatible with what all acknowledge to be its limited and
restricted character; an error originating principally, as I must think,
in not duly reflecting on the nature of our institutions, and on what
constitutes the only rational object of all political constitutions.
It has been well said by one of the most sagacious men of
antiquity, that the object of a constitution is to restrain the
government, as that of laws is to restrain individuals. The remark is
correct, nor is it less true where the government is vested in a
majority, than where it is in a single or a few individuals; in a
republic, than a monarchy or aristocracy. No one can have a higher
respect for the maxim that the majority ought to govern than I have,
taken in its proper sense, subject to the restrictions imposed by the
Constitution, and confined to subjects in which every portion of the
community have similar interests; but it is a great error to suppose,
as many do, that the right of a majority to govern is a natural and not
a conventional right; and, therefore, absolute and unlimited. By
nature every individual has the right to govern himself; and
governments, whether founded on majorities or minorities, must
derive their right from the assent, expressed or implied, of the
governed, and be subject to such limitations as they may impose.
Where the interests are the same, that is, where the laws that may
benefit one will benefit all, or the reverse, it is just and proper to
place them under the control of the majority; but where they are
dissimilar, so that the law that may benefit one portion may be
ruinous to another, it would be, on the contrary, unjust and absurd
to subject them to its will: and such I conceive to be the theory on
which our Constitution rests.
That such dissimilarity of interests may exist it is impossible to
doubt. They are to be found in every community, in a greater or less
degree, however small or homogeneous, and they constitute,
everywhere, the great difficulty of forming and preserving free
institutions. To guard against the unequal action of the laws, when
applied to dissimilar and opposing interests, is in fact what mainly
renders a constitution indispensable; to overlook which in reasoning
on our Constitution, would be to omit the principal element by which
to determine its character. Were there no contrariety of interests,
nothing would be more simple and easy than to form and preserve
free institutions. The right of suffrage alone would be a sufficient
guarantee. It is the conflict of opposing interests which renders it the
most difficult work of man.
Where the diversity of interests exists in separate and distinct
classes of the community, as is the case in England, and was formerly
the case in Sparta, Rome, and most of the free states of antiquity, the
rational constitutional provision is, that each should be represented
in the government as a separate estate, with a distinct voice, and a
negative on the acts of its co-estates, in order to check their
encroachments. In England the constitution has assumed expressly
this form, while in the governments of Sparta and Rome the same
thing was effected, under different but not much less efficacious
forms. The perfection of their organization, in this particular, was
that which gave to the constitutions of these renowned states all of
their celebrity, which secured their liberty for so many centuries, and
raised them to so great a height of power and prosperity. Indeed, a
constitutional provision giving to the great and separate interests of
the community the right of self-protection, must appear to those who
will duly reflect on the subject, not less essential to the preservation
of liberty than the right of suffrage itself. They in fact have a common
object, to effect which the one is as necessary as the other—to secure
responsibility; that is, that those who make and execute the laws
should be accountable to those on whom the laws in reality operate;
the only solid and durable foundation of liberty. If without the right
to suffrage our rulers would oppress us, so without the right of self-
protection, the major would equally oppress the minor interests of
the community. The absence of the former would make the governed
the slaves of the rulers, and of the latter the feebler interests the
victim of the stronger.
Happily for us we have no artificial and separate classes of society.
We have wisely exploded all such distinctions; but we are not, on that
account, exempt from all contrariety of interests, as the present
distracted and dangerous condition of our country unfortunately but
too clearly proves. With us they are almost exclusively geographical,
resulting mainly from difference of climate, soil, situation, industry,
and production, but are not, therefore, less necessary to be protected
by an adequate constitutional provision than where the distinct
interests exist in separate classes. The necessity is, in truth, greater,
as such separate and dissimilar geographical interests are more liable
to come into conflict, and more dangerous when in that state than
those of any other description; so much so, that ours is the first
instance on record where they have not formed in an extensive
territory separate and independent communities, or subjected the
whole to despotic sway. That such may not be our unhappy fate also,
must be the sincere prayer of every lover of his country.
So numerous and diversified are the interests of our country, that
they could not be fairly represented in a single government,
organized so as to give to each great and leading interest a separate
and distinct voice, as in governments to which I have referred. A plan
was adopted better suited to our situation, but perfectly novel in its
character. The powers of the government were divided, not as
heretofore, in reference to classes, but geographically. One general
government was formed for the whole, to which was delegated all of
the powers supposed to be necessary to regulate the interests
common to all of the states, leaving others subject to the separate
control of the states, being from their local and peculiar character
such that they could not be subject to the will of the majority of the
whole Union, without the certain hazard of injustice and oppression.
It was thus that the interests of the whole were subjected, as they
ought to be, to the will of the whole, while the peculiar and local
interests were left under the control of the states separately, to whose
custody only they could be safely confided. This distribution of
power, settled solemnly by a constitutional compact, to which all of
the states are parties, constitutes the peculiar character and
excellence of our political system. It is truly and emphatically
American, without example or parallel.
To realize its perfection, we must view the general government and
the states as a whole, each in its proper sphere, sovereign and
independent; each perfectly adapted to their respective objects; the
states acting separately, representing and protecting the local and
peculiar interests; acting jointly, through one general government,
with the weight respectively assigned to each by the Constitution,
representing and protecting the interest of the whole, and thus
perfecting, by an admirable but simple arrangement, the great
principle of representation and responsibility, without which no
government can be free or just. To preserve this sacred distribution
as originally settled, by coercing each to move in its prescribed orb, is
the great and difficult problem, on the solution of which the duration
of our Constitution, of our Union, and, in all probability our liberty,
depends. How is this to be effected?
The question is new when applied to our peculiar political
organization, where the separate and conflicting interests of society
are represented by distinct but connected governments; but is in
reality an old question under a new form, long since perfectly solved.
Whenever separate and dissimilar interests have been separately
represented in any government; whenever the sovereign power has
been divided in its exercise, the experience and wisdom of ages have
devised but one mode by which such political organization can be
preserved; the mode adopted in England, and by all governments,
ancient or modern, blessed with constitutions deserving to be called
free; to give to each co-estate the right to judge of its powers, with a
negative or veto on the acts of the others, in order to protect against
encroachments the interests it particularly represents; a principle
which all of our constitutions recognize in the distribution of power
among their respective departments, as essential to maintain the
independence of each, but which, to all who will duly reflect on the
subject, must appear far more essential, for the same object, in that
great and fundamental distribution of powers between the states and
general government. So essential is the principle, that to withhold
the right from either, where the sovereign power is divided, is, in
fact, to annul the division itself, and to consolidate in the one left in
the exclusive possession of the right, all of the powers of the
government; for it is not possible to distinguish practically between a
government having all power, and one having the right to take what
powers it pleases. Nor does it in the least vary the principle, whether
the distribution of power between co-estates, as in England, or
between distinctly organized but connected governments, as with us.
The reason is the same in both cases, while the necessity is greater in
our case, as the danger of conflict is greater where the interests of a
society are divided geographically than in any other, as has already
been shown.
These truths do seem to me to be incontrovertible; and I am at a
loss to understand how any one, who has maturely reflected on the
nature of our institutions, or who has read history or studied the
principles of free government to any purpose, can call them in
question. The explanation must, it appears to me, be sought in the
fact, that in every free state, there are those who look more to the
necessity of maintaining power, than guarding against its abuses. I
do not intend reproach, but simply to state a fact apparently
necessary to explain the contrariety of opinions, among the
intelligent, where the abstract consideration of the subject would
seem scarcely to admit of doubt. If such be the true cause, I must
think the fear of weakening the government too much in this case to
be in a great measure unfounded, or at least that the danger is much
less from that than the opposite side. I do not deny that a power of so
high a nature may be abused by a state, but when I reflect that the
states unanimously called the general government into existence
with all of its powers, which they freely surrendered on their part,
under the conviction that their common peace, safety and prosperity
required it; that they are bound together by a common origin, and
the recollection of common suffering and common triumph in the
great and splendid achievement of their independence; and the
strongest feelings of our nature, and among them, the love of
national power and distinction, are on the side of the Union; it does
seem to me, that the fear which would strip the states of their
sovereignty, and degrade them, in fact, to mere dependent
corporations, lest they should abuse a right indispensable to the
peaceable protection of those interests which they reserved under
their own peculiar guardianship when they created the general
government, is unnatural and unreasonable. If those who voluntarily
created the system, cannot be trusted to preserve it, what power can?
So far from extreme danger, I hold that there never was a free
state, in which this great conservative principle, indispensable in all,
was ever so safely lodged. In others, when the co-estates,
representing the dissimilar and conflicting interests of the
community, came into contact, the only alternative was compromise,
submission or force. Not so in ours. Should the general government
and a state come into conflict, we have a higher remedy; the power
which called the general government into existence, which gave it all
its authority, and can enlarge, contract, or abolish its powers at its
pleasure, may be invoked. The states themselves may be appealed to,
three-fourths of which, in fact, form a power, whose decrees are the
constitution itself, and whose voice can silence all discontent. The
utmost extent then of the power is, that a state acting in its sovereign
capacity, as one of the parties to the constitutional compact, may
compel the government, created by that compact, to submit a
question touching its infraction to the parties who created it; to avoid
the supposed dangers of which, it is proposed to resort to the novel,
the hazardous, and, I must add, fatal project of giving to the general
government the sole and final right of interpreting the Constitution,
thereby reserving the whole system, making that instrument the
creature of its will, instead of a rule of action impressed on it at its
creation, and annihilating in fact the authority which imposed it, and
from which the government itself derives its existence.
That such would be the result, were the right in question vested in
the legislative or executive branch of the government, is conceded by
all. No one has been so hardy as to assert that Congress or the
President ought to have the right, or to deny that, if vested finally
and exclusively in either, the consequences which I have stated
would not necessarily follow; but its advocates have been reconciled
to the doctrine, on the supposition that there is one department of
the general government, which, from its peculiar organization,
affords an independent tribunal through which the government may
exercise the high authority which is the subject of consideration, with
perfect safety to all.
I yield, I trust, to few in my attachment to the judiciary
department. I am fully sensible of its importance, and would
maintain it to the fullest extent in its constitutional powers and
independence; but it is impossible for me to believe that it was ever
intended by the Constitution, that it should exercise the power in
question, or that it is competent to do so, and, if it were, that it would
be a safe depository of the power.
Its powers are judicial and not political, and are expressly confined
by the Constitution “to all cases in law and equity arising under this
Constitution, the laws of the United States, and the treaties made, or
which shall be made, under its authority;” and which I have high
authority in asserting, excludes political questions, and comprehends
those only where there are parties amenable to the process of the
court.[82] Nor is its incompetency less clear, than its want of
constitutional authority. There may be many and the most dangerous
infractions on the part of Congress, of which it is conceded by all, the
court, as a judicial tribunal, cannot from its nature take cognisance.
The tariff itself is a strong case in point; and the reason applies
equally to all others, where Congress perverts a power from an object
intended to one not intended, the most insidious and dangerous of
all the infractions; and which may be extended to all of its powers,
more especially to the taxing and appropriating. But supposing it
competent to take cognisance of all infractions of every description,
the insuperable objection still remains, that it would not be a safe
tribunal to exercise the power in question.
It is an universal and fundamental political principle, that the
power to protect, can safely be confided only to those interested in
protecting, or their responsible agents—a maxim not less true in
private than in public affairs. The danger in our system is, that the
general government, which represents the interests of the whole,
may encroach on the states, which represent the peculiar and local
interests, or that the latter may encroach on the former.
In examining this point, we ought not to forget that the
government, through all of its departments, judicial as well as others,
is administered by delegated and responsible agents; and that the
power which really controls ultimately all the movements, is not in
the agents, but those who elect or appoint them. To understand then
its real character, and what would be the action of the system in any
supposable case, we must raise our view from the mere agents, to
this high controlling power which finally impels every movement of
the machine. By doing so, we shall find all under the control of the
will of a majority, compounded of the majority of the states, taken as
corporate bodies, and the majority of the people of the states
estimated in federal numbers. These united constitute the real and
final power, which impels and directs the movements of the general
government. The majority of the states elect the majority of the
Senate; of the people of the states, that of the House of
Representatives; the two united, the President; and the President
and a majority of the Senate appoint the judges, a majority of whom
and a majority of the Senate and the House with the President, really
exercise all of the powers of the government with the exception of the
cases where the Constitution requires a greater number than a
majority. The judges are, in fact, as truly the judicial representatives
of this united majority, as the majority of Congress itself, or the
President, is its legislative or executive representative; and to confide
the power to the judiciary to determine finally and conclusively what
powers are delegated and what reserved, would be in reality to
confide it to the majority, whose agents they are, and by whom they
can be controlled in various ways; and, of course, to subject (against
the fundamental principle of our system, and all sound political
reasoning) the reserved powers of the states, with all of the local and
peculiar interests they were intended to protect, to the will of the
very majority against which the protection was intended. Nor will the
tenure by which the judges hold their office, however valuable the
provision in many other respects, materially vary the case. Its highest
possible effect would be to retard, and not finally to resist, the will of
a dominant majority.
But it is useless to multiply arguments. Were it possible that
reason could settle a question where the passions and interests of
men are concerned, this point would have been long since settled for
ever, by the state of Virginia. The report of her legislature, to which I
have already referred, has really, in my opinion, placed it beyond
controversy. Speaking in reference to this subject, it says, “It has
been objected” (to the right of a state to interpose for the protection
of her reserved rights), “that the judicial authority is to be regarded
as the sole expositor of the Constitution; on this subject it might be
observed first that there may be instances of usurped powers which
the forms of the Constitution could never draw within the control of
the judicial department; secondly, that if the decision of the judiciary
be raised above the sovereign parties to the Constitution, the
decisions of the other departments, not carried by the forms of the
Constitution before the judiciary, must be equally authoritative and
final with the decision of that department. But the proper answer to
the objection is, that the resolution of the General Assembly relates
to those great and extraordinary cases, in which all of the forms of
the Constitution may prove ineffectual against infraction dangerous
to the essential rights of the parties to it. The resolution supposes
that dangerous powers not delegated, may not only be usurped and
executed by the other departments, but that the judicial department
may also exercise or sanction dangerous powers beyond the grant of
the Constitution, and consequently that the ultimate right of the
parties to the Constitution to judge whether the compact has been
dangerously violated, must extend to violations by one delegated
authority, as well as by another—by the judiciary, as well as by the
executive or legislative.”
Against these conclusive arguments, as they seem to me, it is
objected, that if one of the parties has the right to judge of infractions
of the Constitution, so has the other, and that consequently in cases
of contested powers between a state and the general government,
each would have a right to maintain its opinion, as is the case when
sovereign powers differ in the construction of treaties or compacts,
and that of course it would come to be a mere question of force. The
error is in the assumption that the general government is a party to
the constitutional compact. The states, as has been shown, formed
the compact, acting as sovereign and independent communities. The
general government is but its creature; and though in reality a
government with all the rights and authority which belong to any
other government, within the orb of its powers, it is, nevertheless, a
government emanating from a compact between sovereigns, and
partaking, in its nature and object, of the character of a joint
commission, appointed to superintend and administer the interests
in which all are jointly concerned, but having, beyond its proper
sphere, no more power than if it did not exist. To deny this would be
to deny the most incontestable facts, and the clearest conclusions;
while to acknowledge its truth, is to destroy utterly the objection that
the appeal would be to force, in the case supposed. For if each party
has a right to judge, then under our system of government, the final
cognisance of a question of contested power would be in the states,
and not in the general government. It would be the duty of the latter,
as in all similar cases of a contest between one or more of the
principals and a joint commission or agency, to refer the contest to
the principals themselves. Such are the plain dictates of reason and
analogy both. On no sound principle can the agents have a right to
final cognisance, as against the principals, much less to use force
against them, to maintain their construction of their powers. Such a
right would be monstrous; and has never, heretofore, been claimed
in similar cases.
That the doctrine is applicable to the case of a contested power
between the states and the general government, we have the
authority not only of reason and analogy, but of the distinguished
statesman already referred to. Mr. Jefferson, at a late period of his
life, after long experience and mature reflection, says, “With respect
to our state and federal governments, I do not think their relations
are correctly understood by foreigners. They suppose the former
subordinate to the latter. This is not the case. They are co-ordinate
departments of one simple and integral whole. But you may ask if the
two departments should claim each the same subject of power, where
is the umpire to decide between them? In cases of little urgency or
importance, the prudence of both parties will keep them aloof from
the questionable ground; but if it can neither be avoided nor
compromised, a convention of the states must be called to ascribe the
doubtful power to that department which they may think best.”—It is
thus that our Constitution, by authorizing amendments, and by
prescribing the authority and mode of making them, has by a simple
contrivance, with its characteristic wisdom, provided a power which,
in the last resort, supersedes effectually the necessity and even the
pretext for force; a power to which none can fairly object; with which
the interests of all are safe; which can definitely close all
controversies in the only effectual mode, by freeing the compact of
every defect and uncertainty, by an amendment of the instrument
itself. It is impossible for human wisdom, in a system like ours, to
devise another mode which shall be safe and effectual, and at the
same time consistent with what are the relations and acknowledged
powers of the two great departments of our government. It gives a
beauty and security peculiar to our system, which, if duly
appreciated, will transmit its blessings to the remotest generations;
but, if not, our splendid anticipations of the future will prove but an
empty dream. Stripped of all its covering, and the naked question is,
whether ours is a federal or a consolidated government: a
constitutional or absolute one; a government resting ultimately on
the solid basis of the sovereignty of the states, or on the unrestrained
will of a majority; a form of government, as in all other unlimited
ones, in which injustice and violence, and force, must finally prevail.
Let it never be forgotten, that where the majority rules, the minority
is the subject; and that if we should absurdly attribute to the former
the exclusive right of construing the Constitution, there would be in
fact between the sovereign and subject, under such a government, no
constitution; or at least nothing deserving the name, or serving the
legitimate object of so sacred an instrument.
How the states are to exercise this high power of interposition
which constitutes so essential a portion of their reserved rights that it
cannot be delegated without an entire surrender of their sovereignty,
and converting our system from a federal into a consolidated
government, is a question that the states only are competent to
determine. The arguments which prove that they possess the power,
equally prove that they are, in the language of Jefferson, “the rightful
judges of the mode and measure of redress.” But the spirit of
forbearance, as well as the nature of the right itself, forbids a
recourse to it, except in cases of dangerous infractions of the
Constitution; and then only in the last resort, when all reasonable
hope of relief from the ordinary action of the government has failed;
when, if the right to interpose did not exist, the alternative would be
submission and oppression on the one side, or resistance by force on
the other. That our system should afford, in such extreme cases, an
intermediate point between these dire alternatives, by which the
government may be brought to a pause, and thereby an interval
obtained to compromise differences, or, if impracticable, be
compelled to submit the question to a constitutional adjustment,
through an appeal to the states themselves, is an evidence of its high
wisdom; an element not, as is supposed by some, of weakness, but of
strength; not of anarchy or revolution, but of peace and safety. Its
general recognition would of itself, in a great measure, if not
altogether, supersede the necessity of its exercise, by impressing on
the movements of the government that moderation and justice so
essential to harmony and peace, in a country of such vast extent and
diversity of interests as ours; and would, if controversy should come,
turn the resentment of the aggrieved from the system to those who
had abused its powers (a point all important), and cause them to
seek redress, not in revolution or overthrow, but in reformation. It is,
in fact, properly understood, a substitute where the alternative would
be force, tending to prevent, and if that fails, to correct peaceably the
aberrations to which all political systems are liable, and which, if
permitted to accumulate, without correction, must finally end in a
general catastrophe.
Speech of Henry Clay
In Defence of the American System[83] in which is given the Previous

History of Tariff Contests in the Senate of the United States,
February 2d, 3d and 6th, 1832.
[Mr. Clay, having retired from Congress soon after the establishment of the
American System, by the passage of the Tariff of 1824, did not return to it till 1831–
2, when the opponents of this system had acquired the ascendency, and were bent
on its destruction. An act reducing the duties on many of the protected articles,
was devised and passed. The bill being under consideration in the Senate, Mr. Clay
addressed that body as follows:]
In one sentiment, Mr. President, expressed by the honorable
gentleman from South Carolina, (General Hayne,) though perhaps
not in the sense intended by him, I entirely concur. I agree with him,
that the decision on the system of policy embraced in this debate,
involves the future destiny of this growing country. One way I verily
believe, it would lead to deep and general distress, general
bankruptcy and national ruin, without benefit to any part of the
Union: the other, the existing prosperity will be preserved and
augmented, and the nation will continue rapidly to advance in
wealth, power, and greatness, without prejudice to any section of the
confederacy.
Thus viewing the question, I stand here as the humble but zealous
advocate, not of the interests of one State, or seven States only, but of
the whole Union. And never before have I felt more intensely, the
overpowering weight of that share of responsibility which belongs to
me in these deliberations. Never before have I had more occasion
than I now have to lament my want of those intellectual powers, the
possession of which might enable me to unfold to this Senate, and to
illustrate to this people great truths, intimately connected with the
lasting welfare of my country. I should, indeed, sink overwhelmed
and subdued beneath the appalling magnitude of the task which lies
before me, if I did not feel myself sustained and fortified by a
thorough consciousness of the justness of the cause which I have
espoused, and by a persuasion I hope not presumptuous, that it has
the approbation of that Providence who has so often smiled upon
these United States.
Eight years ago it was my painful duty to present to the other
House of Congress, an unexaggerated picture of the general distress
pervading the whole land. We must all yet remember some of its
frightful features. We all know that the people were then oppressed
and borne down by an enormous load of debt; that the value of
property was at the lowest point of depression; that ruinous sales
and sacrifices were everywhere made of real estate; that stop laws,
and relief laws, and paper money were adopted to save the people
from impending destruction; that a deficit in the public revenue
existed, which compelled government to seize upon, and divert from
its legitimate object the appropriations to the sinking fund, to
redeem the national debt; and that our commerce and navigation
were threatened with a complete paralysis. In short, sir, if I were to
select any term of seven years since the adoption of the present
constitution which exhibited a scene of the most widespread dismay
and desolation, it would be exactly that term of seven years which
immediately preceded the establishment of the tariff of 1824.
I have now to perform the more pleasing task of exhibiting an
imperfect sketch of the existing state of the unparalleled prosperity
of the country. On a general survey, we behold cultivation extended,
the arts flourishing, the face of the country improved, our people
fully and profitably employed, and the public countenance exhibiting
tranquillity, contentment and happiness. And if we descend into
particulars, we have the agreeable contemplation of a people out of
debt, land rising slowly in value, but in a secure and salutary degree;
a ready though not extravagant market for all the surplus
productions of our industry; innumerable flocks and herds browsing
and gamboling on ten thousand hills and plains, covered with rich
and verdant grasses; our cities expanded, and whole villages
springing up, as it were, by enchantment; our exports and imports
increased and increasing; our tonnage, foreign and coastwise,
swelling and fully occupied; the rivers of our interior animated by the
perpetual thunder and lightning of countless steam-boats; the
currency sound and abundant; the public debt of two wars nearly
redeemed; and, to crown all, the public treasury overflowing,
embarrassing Congress, not to find subjects of taxation, but to select
the objects which shall be liberated from the impost. If the term of
seven years were to be selected, of the greatest prosperity which this
people have enjoyed since the establishment of their present
constitution, it would be exactly that period of seven years which
immediately followed the passage of the tariff of 1824.
This transformation of the condition of the country from gloom
and distress to brightness and prosperity, has been mainly the work
of American legislation, fostering American industry, instead of
allowing it to be controlled by foreign legislation, cherishing foreign
industry. The foes of the American System, in 1824, with great
boldness and confidence, predicted, 1st. The ruin of the public
revenue, and the creation of a necessity to resort to direct taxation.
The gentleman from South Carolina, (General Hayne,) I believe,
thought that the tariff of 1824 would operate a reduction of revenue
to the large amount of eight millions of dollars. 2d. The destruction
of our navigation. 3d. The desolation of commercial cities. And 4th.
The augmentation of the price of objects of consumption, and further
decline in that of the articles of our exports. Every prediction which
they made has failed—utterly failed. Instead of the ruin of the public
revenue, with which they then sought to deter us from the adoption
of the American System, we are now threatened with its subversion,
by the vast amount of the public revenue produced by that system.
Every branch of our navigation has increased.
Whilst we thus behold the entire failure of all that was foretold
against the system, it is a subject of just felicitation to its friends, that
all their anticipations of its benefits have been fulfilled, or are in
progress of fulfillment. The honorable gentleman from South
Carolina has made an allusion to a speech made by me, in 1824, in
the other House, in support of the tariff, and to which, otherwise, I
should not have particularly referred. But I would ask any one, who
can now command the courage to peruse that long production, what
principle there laid down is not true? what prediction then made has
been falsified by practical experience?
It is now proposed to abolish the system, to which we owe so much
of the public prosperity, and it is urged that the arrival of the period
of the redemption of the public debt has been confidently looked to
as presenting a suitable occasion to rid the country of evils with
which the system is alleged to be fraught. Not an inattentive observer
of passing events, I have been aware that, among those who were
most early pressing the payment of the public debt, and upon that
ground were opposing appropriations to other great interests, there
were some who cared less about the debt than the accomplishment of
other objects. But the people of the United States have not coupled
the payment of their public debt with the destruction of the
protection of their industry, against foreign laws and foreign
industry. They have been accustomed to regard the extinction of the
public debt as relief from a burthen, and not as the infliction of a
curse. If it is to be attended or followed by the subversion of the
American system, and an exposure of our establishments and our
productions to the unguarded consequences of the selfish policy of
foreign powers, the payment of the public debt will be the bitterest of
curses. Its fruit will be like the fruit
“Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden.”
If the system of protection be founded on principles erroneous in

theory, pernicious in practice—above all if it be unconstitutional, as
is alleged, it ought to be forthwith abolished, and not a vestige of it
suffered to remain. But, before we sanction this sweeping
denunciation, let us look a little at this system, its magnitude, its
ramifications, its duration, and the high authorities which have
sustained it. We shall see that its foes will have accomplished
comparatively nothing, after having achieved their present aim of
breaking down our iron-foundries, our woolen, cotton, and hemp
manufactories, and our sugar plantations. The destruction of these
would, undoubtedly, lead to the sacrifice of immense capital, the ruin
of many thousands of our fellow-citizens, and incalculable loss to the
whole community. But their prostration would not disfigure, nor
produce greater effect upon the whole system of protection, in all its
branches, than the destruction of the beautiful domes upon the
capitol would occasion to the magnificent edifice which they
surmount. Why, sir, there is scarcely an interest, scarcely a vocation
in society, which is not embraced by the beneficence of this system.
It comprehends our coasting tonnage and trade, from which all
foreign tonnage is absolutely excluded.
It includes all our foreign tonnage, with the inconsiderable
exception made by treaties of reciprocity with a few foreign powers.
It embraces our fisheries, and all our hardy and enterprising
fishermen.
It extends to almost every mechanic art: * * *
It extends to all lower Louisiana, the Delta of which might as well
be submerged again in the Gulf of Mexico, from which it has been a
gradual conquest, as now to be deprived of the protecting duty upon
its great staple.
It affects the cotton planter himself, and the tobacco planter, both
of whom enjoy protection.
Such are some of the items of this vast system of protection, which
it is now proposed to abandon. We might well pause and
contemplate, if human imagination could conceive the extent of
mischief and ruin from its total overthrow, before we proceed to the
work of destruction. Its duration is worthy also of serious
consideration. Not to go behind the constitution, its date is coeval
with that instrument. It began on the ever memorable fourth day of
July—the fourth day of July, 1789. The second act which stands
recorded in the statute book, bearing the illustrious signature of
George Washington, laid the corner-stone of the whole system. That
there might be no mistake about the matter, it was then solemnly
proclaimed to the American people and to the world, that it was
necessary for “the encouragement and protection of manufactures,”
that duties should be laid. It is in vain to urge the small amount of
the measure of the protection then extended. The great principle was
then established by the fathers of the constitution, with the father of
his country at their head. And it cannot now be questioned, that, if
the government had not then been new and the subject untried, a
greater measure of protection would have been applied, if it had been
supposed necessary. Shortly after, the master minds of Jefferson and
Hamilton were brought to act on this interesting subject. Taking
views of it appertaining to the departments of foreign affairs and of
the treasury, which they respectively filled, they presented, severally,
reports which yet remain monuments of their profound wisdom, and
came to the same conclusion of protection to American industry. Mr.
Jefferson argued that foreign restrictions, foreign prohibitions, and
foreign high duties, ought to be met at home by American
restrictions, American prohibitions, and American high duties. Mr.
Hamilton, surveying the entire ground, and looking at the inherent
nature of the subject, treated it with an ability, which, if ever
equalled, has not been surpassed, and earnestly recommended
protection.
The wars of the French revolution commenced about this period,
and streams of gold poured into the United States through a
thousand channels, opened or enlarged by the successful commerce
which our neutrality enabled us to prosecute. We forgot or
overlooked, in the general prosperity, the necessity of encouraging
our domestic manufactures. Then came the edicts of Napoleon, and
the British orders in council; and our embargo, non-intercourse,
non-importation, and war, followed in rapid succession. These
national measures, amounting to a total suspension, for the period of
their duration, of our foreign commerce, afforded the most
efficacious encouragement to American manufactures; and
accordingly they everywhere sprung up. While these measures of
restriction, and this state of war continued, the manufacturers were
stimulated in their enterprise by every assurance of support, by
public sentiment, and by legislative resolves. It was about that period
(1808) that South Carolina bore her high testimony to the wisdom of
the policy, in an act of her legislature, the preamble of which, now
before me, reads:
“Whereas, the establishment and encouragement of domestic
manufactures, is conducive to the interests of a State, by adding new
incentives to industry, and as being the means of disposing to
advantage the surplus productions of the agriculturist: and whereas,
in the present unexampled state of the world, their establishment in
our country is not only expedient, but politic in rendering us
independent of foreign nations.”
The legislature, not being competent to afford the most efficacious
aid, by imposing duties on foreign rival articles, proceeded to
incorporate a company.
Peace, under the treaty of Ghent, returned in 1815, but there did
not return with it the golden days which preceded the edicts levelled
at our commerce by Great Britain and France. It found all Europe
tranquilly resuming the arts and business of civil life. It found
Europe no longer the consumer of our surplus, and the employer of
our navigation, but excluding, or heavily burthening, almost all the
productions of our agriculture, and our rivals in manufactures, in
navigation, and in commerce. It found our country, in short, in a
situation totally different from all the past—new and untried. It
became necessary to adapt our laws, and especially our laws of
impost, to the new circumstances in which we found ourselves.
Accordingly, that eminent and lamented citizen, then at the head of
the treasury, (Mr. Dallas,) was required, by a resolution of the House
of Representatives, under date the twenty-third day of February,
1815, to prepare and report to the succeeding session of Congress, a
system of revenue conformable with the actual condition of the
country. He had the circle of a whole year to perform the work,
consulted merchants, manufacturers, and other practical men, and
opened an extensive correspondence. The report which he made at
the session of 1816, was the result of his inquiries and reflections,
and embodies the principles which he thought applicable to the
subject. It has been said, that the tariff of 1816 was a measure of
mere revenue, and that it only reduced the war duties to a peace
standard. It is true that the question then was, how much and in
what way should the double duties of the war be reduced? Now, also,
the question is, on what articles shall the duties be reduced so as to
subject the amounts of the future revenue to the wants of the
government? Then it was deemed an inquiry of the first importance,
as it should be now, how, the reduction should be made, so as to
secure proper encouragement to our domestic industry. That this
was a leading object in the arrangement of the tariff of 1816, I well
remember, and it is demonstrated by the language of Mr. Dallas. He
says in his report:
“There are few, if any governments, which do not regard the
establishment of domestic manufactures as a chief object of public
policy. The United States have always so regarded it. * * * The
demands of the country, while the acquisitions of supplies from
foreign nations was either prohibited or impracticable, may have
afforded sufficient inducement for this investment of capital, and
this application of labor; but the inducement, in its necessary extent,
must fail when the day of competition returns. Upon that change in
the condition of the country, the preservation of the manufactures,
which private citizens under favorable auspices have constituted the
property of the nation, becomes a consideration of general policy, to
be resolved by a recollection of past embarrassments; by the
certainty of an increased difficulty of reinstating, upon any
emergency, the manufactures which shall be allowed to perish and
pass away,” &c.
The measure of protection which he proposed was not adopted, in
regard to some leading articles, and there was great difficulty in
ascertaining what it ought to have been. But the principle was then
distinctly asserted and fully sanctioned.
The subject of the American system was again brought up in 1820,
by the bill reported by the chairman of the committee of
manufactures, now a member of the bench of the Supreme Court of
the United States, and the principle was successfully maintained by
the representatives of the people; but the bill which they passed was
defeated in the Senate. It was revived in 1824; the whole ground
carefully and deliberately explored, and the bill then introduced,
receiving all the sanctions of the constitution, became the law of the
land. An amendment of the system was proposed in 1828, to the
history of which I refer with no agreeable recollections. The bill of
that year, in some of its provisions, was framed on principles directly
adverse to the declared wishes of the friends of the policy of
protection. I have heard, without vouching for the fact, that it was so
framed, upon the advice of a prominent citizen, now abroad, with the
view of ultimately defeating the bill, and with assurances that, being
altogether unacceptable to the friends of the American system, the
bill would be lost. Be that as it may, the most exceptional features of
the bill were stamped upon it, against the earnest remonstrances of
the friends of the system, by the votes of southern members, upon a
principle, I think, as unsound in legislation as it is reprehensible in
ethics. The bill was passed, notwithstanding all this, it having been
deemed better to take the bad along with the good which it
contained, than reject it altogether. Subsequent legislation has
corrected the error then perpetrated, but still that measure is
vehemently denounced by gentlemen who contributed to make it
what it was.
Thus, sir, has this great system of protection been gradually built,
stone upon stone, and step by step, from the fourth of July, 1789,
down to the present period. In every stage of its progress it has
received the deliberate sanction of Congress. A vast majority of the
people of the United States has approved and continue to approve it.
Every chief magistrate of the United States, from Washington to the
present, in some form or other, has given to it the authority of his
name; and however the opinions of the existing President are
interpreted South of Mason’s and Dixon’s line, on the north they are
at least understood to favor the establishment of a judicious tariff.
The question, therefore, which we are now called upon to
determine, is not whether we shall establish a new and doubtful
system of policy, just proposed, and for the first time presented to
our consideration, but whether we shall break down and destroy a
long established system, patiently and carefully built up and
sanctioned, during a series of years, again and again, by the nation
and its highest and most revered authorities. Are we not bound
deliberately to consider whether we can proceed to this work of
destruction without a violation of the public faith? The people of the
United States have justly supposed that the policy of protecting their
industry against foreign legislation and foreign industry was fully
settled, not by a single act, but by repeated and deliberate acts of
government, performed at distant and frequent intervals. In full
confidence that the policy was firmly and unchangeably fixed,
thousands upon thousands have invested their capital, purchased a
vast amount of real and other estate, made permanent
establishments, and accommodated their industry. Can we expose to
utter and irretrievable ruin this countless multitude, without justly
incurring the reproach of violating the national faith?
Such are the origin, duration, extent and sanctions of the policy
which we are now called upon to subvert. Its beneficial effects,
although they may vary in degree, have been felt in all parts of the
Union. To none, I verily believe, has it been prejudicial. In the North,
every where, testimonials are borne to the high prosperity which it
has diffused. There, all branches of industry are animated and
flourishing. Commerce, foreign and domestic, active; cities and
towns springing up, enlarging and beautifying; navigation fully and

Classical Projections The Practice and Politics of Film Quotation Eleni Palis Full Chapter

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Classical Projections: The Practice and

Politics of Film Quotation Eleni Palis

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Introduction: Theorizing Film Quotation  1

Appendix: An Annotated List of Film Quotation  133

In Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950), fictional actress Norma Desmond (Gloria

claim and constitute “classical” canons, always negotiating Hollywood’s racial,

Linda Hutcheon defines adaptation as “repetition without replication,” film

narratively contextualized film quotations of blackface minstrelsy amassed in

media” and digital “participatory culture” misses post-​classical filmmakers’ stra-

institutions, including museums, archives, film societies, and the academy.

As Roger Beebe explains, such appropriations and critical feedback-​loop “ulti-

oversimplified accounts of mainstream American film history through Black

oppositional, visually sovereign, nation-​ creating, and history-​

Bogdanovich concretizes his intervention when he, as Sammy, knocks at the

Bogdanovich exploits this fortuitous moment in film institutions when, as he

Figure 1.1 On a television screen in Targets (Bogdanovich, 1968), Boris Karloff

iconicity, music, and dialogue perceptible in a short quotation. Without nar-

documentary of Scorsese’s personal, subjective version of American film history.

In Defence of the American System[83] in which is given the Previous

If the system of protection be founded on principles erroneous in

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Introduction: Theorizing Film Quotation 1

Appendix: An Annotated List of Film Quotation 133

media” and digital “participatory culture” misses post-classical filmmakers’ stra-

As Roger Beebe explains, such appropriations and critical feedback-loop “ulti-

oppositional, visually sovereign, nation- creating, and history-