Escolar Documentos
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Author(s): By DudleyAndrew
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 4, The Fate of Disciplines Edited by James Chandler and
Arnold I. Davidson (Summer 2009), pp. 879-915
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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direct and focus scholarship on audio-visual culture in all its manifestations long into the future. Film may be at the point of being unrecognizably transformed as a medium, Rodowick asserts, yet the basic set of
concepts has remained remarkably constant. Moreover, the real accomplishment of cinema studies . . . is to have forged more than any other
related discipline the methodological and philosophical bases for addressing the most urgent and interesting questions, both aesthetic and cultural,
of modernity and visual culture, including especially the changes taking
place in electronic and digital media.2 But Mark Betz is not ready to relinquish film for modernity and visual culture, even if film theory is retained as a privileged discourse. In his contribution to the anthology, titled
Little Books, Betz traces the history of our fields book publishing to see
how films have been treated. He honors the effervescent period after 1965
when enterprising editors supported scores of fledgling film scholars, unashamed of being amateurs, who inflated their short monographs with
grandeur. These studies of directors, genres, and periods provided a
glowing backlight against which cinema as a whole stood out afresh and
the larger culture with it. However, after two decades such essays would be
discounted by an increasingly bureaucratic educational and publishing
establishment that gave priority to far weightier tomes; professors sought
academic credibility by anchoring their scholarship to tables, statistics,
bibliographies, and appendices. Betz rues the migration of several forms
of film study to a kind of final resting home: the American academy, but
then he immediately takes solace in the current resurgence of little books
[such as the BFI Film Classics] . . . that are helping film studies . . . reconnect with the impulses and the pleasures, the enthusiasm and the excitement, that were functional in breathing life into it in the first place. . . . We
are writing not in a dying field but rather in one too in thrall with scholarly
rules. . . . It is time again for a little grandeur.3
The enthusiasm Betz ascribes to an earlier, more natural phase of writ2. D. N. Rodowick, Dr. Strange Media, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Film
Theory, in Inventing Film Studies, p. 394.
3. Mark Betz, Little Books, in Inventing Film Studies, pp. 340, 341. Betz undoubtedly
enjoys the irony that his own essay is replete with footnotes, statistics, and even an appendix.
ing about films may return thanks to the very technologies that are said to
have marginalized it. So argues Alison Trope, who heralds Home Entertainment as Home Education (the subtitle of her piece), whereby access
to information packed into DVD supplements and available on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) has triggered rampant autodidacticism.4
Enumerating the values of high-end DVDs like the Criterion Collection,
Trope reverses Rodowicks formulation; rather than film bequeathing to
the university the serious concepts required to address what is no
longer or only incidentallyfilm, she points to the persistence and vitality of the movies in spaces far removed from the university and its rigid
codes and agendas. Several recent books go farther than Trope to identify
the emergence of electronic journals and personal blogs where film enthusiasts are reshaping cinephilia and creating a vibrant form of film studies
outside the academy in a thriving, if virtual, cine-club milieu.5
Where is film studies, then, now that we have heard about its invention
and reinvention? What exactly do people with such training work on?
Trope evidently toils in the field of cinema, which comprises phenomena
surrounding films that give them their significance. Rodowicks field
would seem to be that of the university and its discourses. My interestto
lay out my own allegiance has steadfastly remained with the herds of
films that graze or frolic in those fields. Of course, all three orientations
whether toward films, or toward the cinematic field, or toward the protocols of pertinent discoursemust operate interdependently in film studies
whether or not we take this to be a legitimate discipline.6
Dynamism flows from this interdependence. Discipline in the abstract
may characterize an attitude, a spiritual exercise, or an institutional posture, but any concrete discipline should also evoke the recalcitrant phenomenon it aims to bring to order. The phenomenon of cinema has been
rambunctious enough, however, to keep from being entirely corralled.
With its subject matter continuing to overrun all names and borders, what
used to be simply film has bled into well-constituted academic disciplines
4. See Alison Trope, Footstool Film School: Home Entertainment as Home Education, in
Inventing Film Studies, pp. 35373. Trope explicitly recognizes that the bottom-up, viewercontrolled learning and exploration promised by DVDs is part of a top-down commercial
enterprise. Viewers may have escaped the classroom situation, but their freedom is that of a
highly regulated marketplace.
5. See Cinephilia: Movies, Love, and Memory, ed. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener
(Amsterdam, 2005); Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia, ed. Jonathan
Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin (London, 2003); and Cinephilia in the Age of Digital
Reproduction: Film, Pleasure, and Digital Culture, ed. Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperb (London,
2008).
6. For the record, in their respective essays in Inventing Film Studies, Rodowick explicitly
denies, while Betz accords, film studies the status of a discipline.
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(English, art history, sociology, and so on) while it also challenges the new
programs that universities have designed to house it. Never labeled to
everyones satisfaction, the subject that was initially discussed by universities as film is now maturing under such rubrics as Cinema and Moving
Image Study (Concordia University), Modern Culture and Media (Brown
University), Screen Studies (Clark University), Cinema and Comparative
Literature (University of Iowa). Often the result of intense internal debate,
these names seem to designate a field. More importantly, they also imply
methods of studying and teaching what is in that field. Field and method
are, of course, dialectically related, as particular subjects seem to call for
tailored approaches, while the latter always seek additional opportunities
(an expanded field) over which to exercise the power of their techniques.
This dialectic may not be as easy to recognize in a disciplinary imposter
like film as in a putatively stable example like Englishwhich was immediately considered a likely model for film. At first blush, English certainly
names a field, one usually taken to be expanding outward from a core of
anglophone literary classics, toward official or personal documents, and
then toward zones of popular and folk expressions, including oral culture.
But English, perhaps more usefully, refers as well to a set of reading practices, a kind of schooled attention that distinguishes itself whenever faculty
from around the university happen to get together to discuss some common topic. On these occasions the English professor can be counted on to
address the complexities of representation and expression that constitute
or relate to the topic. Deliberately or automatically, she or he would be
likely to deploy some form of rhetorical analysis, be it formal, deconstructive, philological, generic, or what have you, often making a point through
elaborate figures of speech, allusions to literary works, and ornate diction.
The MLA houses language and literature scholars who think and talk this
way, including not just those in English but in the fields of Spanish, Slavic,
Japanese, and so on who share (or debate) this array of approaches and
attitudes that are meant to make sense of, and put into play, similar types
of subject matter.
Now what about film? Emeritus faculty in English and in language and
literature departments may recall how classic and modernist feature films
wedged their way into their territory in the 1950s and 1960s. It was only
then that inklings of a new discipline were felt in America, even if movies
had been taken up by individual scholars long before that. Things didnt
start to coalesce until a critical mass was reached that was weighty enough
for those involved to lobby for a place in the curriculum and to form the
Society of Cinematologists in 1959. Social scientists could be found among
its members, but most were literature teachers (and occasionally art his-
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various fields of study, including (but not limited to): Film Studies, Cinema Studies, Television Studies, Media Studies, Visual Arts, Cultural Studies, Film and Media History, and Moving Image Studies.7 Today media
studies stands as the societys umbrella term, with film studies its chief
subset, but one that may be ceding ground, at least in many quarters,
before the wildfires known as new media that race across the university.
The organizations 1959 birthdate has obscured earlier efforts at coordinate film education. Dana Polan lays these out in Scenes of Instruction:
The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film, bringing to light and paying tribute to individual scholars and the initiatives of particular universities. Polan nicely summarizes the attributes that turn a common interest or topic
(the study of film) into an academic discipline (film studies) with lineages, legacies, commonly shared assumptions, and regularized procedures.8 He suggests that curricula, conferences, canon formation,
graduate students, journals, peer reviews, and other protocols of academic
fields are disciplinary in order to realize what is most essential, an idea of
progress and continuity. A discipline needs to see current work in relation
to the momentum of prior study, just as it needs to look forward to the
advancements that graduate students will make when they take up the
reins. It is here above all that the early scholars Polan celebratessome as
prophetic, some as merely maverick belong as a topic in film studies
more than as part of its root system. Polan resurrects the earliest glimmers
of academic interest in this popular entertainment around 1915 and traces
a series of independent projects and lines of thought up to the formation of
the first curricula (1937) that looked forward to, but did not really generate,
the programs and departments committed to the all-out study of cinema
that started to coalesce in the late 1950s.
With Polans prehistory as background, why not simply detail the
growth and vicissitudes of this academic entity over the past fifty years?
That chronicle, however, requires an immediate detour out of the U.S.,
where Polans study confines itself. For American film studies became
beholden to movements in England in the 1960s that were themselves
produced through contact with Paris. This crucial decade saw the transition From Cinephilia to Film Studies, the title of the endearing and
highly informative dialogue between Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen in
Inventing Film Studies.9 Given its more concentrated arena (London and
7. www.cmstudies.org/index.php?optioncom_content&taskview&id798&Itemid168
8. Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film (Berkeley,
2007), p. 19.
9. See Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, From Cinephilia to Film Studies, in Inventing
Film Studies, pp. 21732.
Oxford), the presence of the powerful British Film Institute with its journals Sight and Sound and Screen, and its proximity to continental Europe,
the UK registered the development of film studies in a far more dramatic
way than what occurred in the U.S. In any case, thanks to the avalanche of
the little books in the English language already mentioned (followed by
the heavy tomes), a single field (not unified, but identifiable nonetheless)
emerged on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1960s that was situated differently within each nations academic network.
This single field, however, presupposes film studies to be effectively
anglophone. This is what one might conclude from Inventing Film Studies,
which, smart as it is, unapologetically fixes on England and North America
without even a hint that the field may be larger than the institutions that
have come to rule in these places. Of course, we understand that scholars
write elsewhere in other languages, but how much do we credit their contribution to a common field? And do we expect them to keep up with what
comes out in English? While its international scope should be a hallmark of
any mature discipline, many of us, even those who analyze films made
around the globe and are in dialogue with colleagues from Latin America,
Asia, Europe, and Africa, have become excessively concerned with the
institutional situations in the places where we operate.10 Can we expand
the purview without changing the subject?
Of course we can expand. What does it mean, for example, that film
studies has never achieved as much institutional visibility in Japan as elsewhere, when it is a country whose film life over the last one hundred years
has arguably been second only to that of the U.S.? There has always been
feverish activity among private historian-archivists (collectors of books,
magazines, interviews, and ephemera) and critics (certain newspapers ran
powerful columns for decades, journals sprouted from the 1920s on). As
for large-scale studies of the medium, written by professors or public intellectuals, the Japanese bibliography between 1913 and 1943 may be larger
than its English language counterpart. In the postwar era, perhaps the
name most Western film scholars might recognize is that of the prolific
Tadao Sato, as some of his work has appeared in English and French. Yet
only late in his career did this autodidact offer university courses. There
simply was not much opportunity. With the exception of Nihon University, which claims to have introduced the subject in 1927, one does not find
film studies taught within the university system until the 1960s when it was
introduced within Nihon Universitys art department and Wasedas liter10. To be fair, the SCMS held its 2004 conference in London so as to attract European film
scholars and the 2009 conference has just taken place in Tokyo.
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serves the campus and supports the work of those who volunteer to edit the
journalwhich, by the way, prints more copies than our comparable Film
Quarterly. Cameras and editing equipment can be checked out by anyone with
a funded project (several Bogazici University shorts have screened at European festivals), and the film center has recently helped produce a feature
providing infrastructure, though no financing. Altogether, the center aims to
concentrate and channel the creativity and enthusiasm characteristic of cinephilia, yet it maintains a healthy rapport with scholars and students coming
from other Turkish universities where disciplinary programs of film studies
are firmly in place. Sustained discussion of cinema being relatively recent in
Turkey, this current equilibrium of approaches may fall away as audio-visual
life there continues to expand and (post)modernize. My point is that even if
Turkish film culture is slightly out of phase with that of Europe it exhibits the
selfsame tension (seemingly productive in this case) between the cinephilic
and the disciplinary.
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leagues making up his enterprise. Once inside the Sorbonne, he could offer
prospective members the opportunity to finance experiments, lectures,
and graduate students. Filmologie grew, as did Cohen-Seats international
profile. Spin-offs were planned throughout Europe and as far away as
Moscow and Buenos Aires.16 International in its ambition and purview, as
every discipline must be, filmologie thrived mainly in France, where it had
found space and financing.
The accomplishments of this group in the 1950s have been detailed by
Edward Lowry in his fine study.17 Its subsequent meltdown (for clandestine, cold war reasons) have just been brought to light through Martin
Lefebvres tenacious historical research.18 Although it managed to reappear
in Milan in the 1960sits journal rebaptised IKONfilmologie receded
from prominence. It is remembered, if at all, as an academic epiphenomenon of cinemas general cultural ascendency during the 1950s. An emergent filmologie foundered after a single decade because it was linked to the
changing profile of higher education and research rather than to that of its
subject; cinemas value ballooned worldwide, and especially in France, in
the 1950s, yet filmologie took little note of this and did not try to abet it.
Aiming to analyze the everyday experience of film, not contribute to its
advancement, filmologie set itself at a distance from such growing cultural
manifestations as international film festivals, federations of cine-clubs,
upstart journals, and repertory movie theaters that brought an art form
out of the circus of mass entertainment and into the high life of discriminating culture. As cinema attained its majority, its place in the university
seemed reserved in advance.19 And so it happened; cinema infiltrated the
universities of France, as well as the U.S., Britain, and elsewhere. However,
student interest in this newly available academic subject came not from
filmologie but was incubated in the (chiefly French) cine-club movement
and the journals that fed cinephilia, especially Cahiers du cinema. These in
16. John MacKay confirms that Grigorii Boltianskii petitioned the Soviet ministry to set up
a film center in Moscow starting in the late 1940s and continuing into the early 1950s. The
center would be established only later, however, and not on the filmologie model.
17. See Edward Lowry, The Filmology Movement and Film Study in France (Ann Arbor,
Mich., 1985).
18. See Martin Lefebvre, LAventure filmologique: Documents et jalons dune histoire
institutionnelle, forthcoming in a special issue of CiNeMAS devoted to filmologie.
19. Jean Vidal employed this metaphor of maturation: After the artists and writers, now
its time for professors to discover [cinema] in their turn (Jean Vidal, Filmologues
Distingues, Ecran Francaise 119 [Oct. 1947]: 11). Vidal notes the irony that this first
International Congress of Filmologie took place simultaneously with the Cannes festival, where
all the critics had gone. An additional irony came from the journals compositor, who placed
Vidals article above a report on activities of several cine-clubs, graphically opposing two ways
of approaching the same phenomenon.
turn were tied to the growth of cinema as an art. In the 1950s this meant the
increasingly ambitious work of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and
Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as the mature films of Alfred Hitchcock,
Howard Hawks, and John Ford, all leading to the French New Wave. In the
issues of Cahiers du cinema from the summer and fall of 1959 one could still
feel the echoes of the May Cannes festival that had crowned Francois Truffauts 400 Blows and where Alain Resnaiss Hiroshima mon amour had
produced the shock of the modern. You could read about Jean-Luc Godards Breathless and Robert Bressons Pickpocket, which were in production then on the streets of Paris. On the other hand, La Revue internationale
de filmologies issue of the same months took on Current Problems of
Cinema and Visual Information: Psychological Problems and Mechanisms, while mentioning not a single film title in its eighty-eight pages,
only a moment from an unidentified Chaplin short; such was its level of
abstraction.
This opposition between these Parisian groups is even more startling
because they followed a remarkably parallel timeline. Just as filmologie
appeared in 1946 but didnt achieve its institutional stability till 1950, so the
cine-club movement, dormant since 1930 and the coming of sound, suddenly mushroomed just after the war, with Cahiers du cinema consolidating its gains when launched in 1951. Similarly just as filmologie completely
changed course at the end of the 1950s,20 Cahiers du cinema experienced the
first of its own mutations, when its founder, Andre Bazin, passed away, and
its key critics (Truffaut, Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Claude
Chabrol) took up cameras. Yet the two groups were dedicated to completely different enterprises and so had no reason to intersect. Cahiers du
cinema saw itself at odds with several of the many film periodicals of that
decade (its acrimonious relation with Positif is legendary), but La Revue
internationale de filmologie was hardly one of these.
A unique occasion allows us to compare their opposed politiques. In just
its fifth issue, September 1951, and less than a year after filmologies accession to the Sorbonne (that is, as both groups lobbied to gain footholds in
Paris), an article appeared in Cahiers du cinema sarcastically titled Introduction a` une filmologie de la filmologie, under the name of Florent
Kirsch. Only his closest friends understood this to be Bazins occasional
pseudonym (an amalgam of his wifes maiden name and the first name of
their son they had just brought into the world). Florent Kirsch received
20. The Sorbonne completely dissociated itself from the Institut de Filmologie in 1962, but
by the end of 1959 the writing was on the wall; the institute had but seven French students and
its journal moved to Milan. See Lefebvre, LAventure filmologique.
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credit for about a dozen of Bazins twenty-six hundred articles. In this case
their ruse seems to have freed his normally genteel pen so he could slash
away at his target.21 Bazin cattily reports on Cohen-Seats astounding success in convincing the crusty professors and crustier deans of the Sorbonne
to take up mere movies as an investment in the future of research and
teaching. Professors of dead languages, Kirsch states with the sarcasm of
the confirmed cinephile, have been watching in disbelief as their children
and their concierges line up week after week for spectacles that they themselves scarcely comprehend. It finally occurred to someone that the time
had come to train their formidable analytic and philological skills on this
new, living language called cinema, to put it through the rigors of full
analysis (physiology, psychology, and sociology). Bazin may have been
especially jealous of Cohen-Seats welcome at the Sorbonne, as his own
first institutional affiliation with cinema was adjacent to the Sorbonnes
Maison de Culture, where he founded a cine-club during the occupation.
In 1941, he had washed out of his final oral examination at the Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS) on account of an endemic stutter, and he took up
this cine-club as a refuge that kept him active in Paris and in the world of
ideas during those dark years. This little club drew a hardcore left-bank
audience (Jean-Paul Sartre was known to come from time to time), but its
rapport with the Sorbonne was nominal, not even extracurricular. Still,
Bazin must have been proud to have kindled the flame of cinephilia among
a generation of academics. Lighting up a dark room for them, projecting
images that could sustain the imagination, including leftist political aspirations, gave Bazin special satisfaction given his clubs setting on the edge
of Frances most renowned university.
And so when Cohen-Seat was able to waltz straight up to the administration of the Sorbonne and come away with its full support for a program
that would finally elevate cinema to an object of genuine study, Bazins
resentment seeped onto the page. As leader of a band of cinemaniacs,
each of whom claimed to watch over five hundred films a year, he was
especially irked at filmologies calculated disinterest in its object of study.
To understand a phenomenon, they evidently felt that one must stand
back from it like a medical professor before a cadaver. It did not help to see
too many films or to mention titles, directors, or (God forbid!) actors
when writing up ones findings. These distractions diverted the scholars
attention both from the specific workings of any-film-whatever and from
21. Actually Bazin would intervene briefly in a filmologie congress in 1955, his remarks
appearing in La Revue internationale de filmologie, nos. 2024 (1955): 9597. In the following
year, he promoted a lecture by Jean Wahl at the Institut de Filmologie in Cahiers du cinema, no.
57 (Feb. 1956): 34.
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for its authors later book Camera Lucida. Morins contribution was called
The Culture Industry; he also introduced a dossier on the current phenomenon of the New Wave. The veering of this journal and of Morin away
from postwar aesthetics and sociology became unmistakable in the fourth
issue, titled Recherches semiologiques (1967). Promoting undisguised
disciplinary determination we find Claude Bremond and a very young
Tzvetan Todorov writing on literary systems, while Christian Metz debuts
with one of his most far-reaching essays, Cinema: Langue ou langage.
Barthes appears twice, first with the famous Rhetoric of the Image and
then with the complete text of Elements of Semiology.30
I have always dated the advent of academic film studies at the moment
when Metz leapfrogged over Mitry as he reviewed the latters Esthetique et
psychologie du cinema, the first installment of which came out in Critique in
1965.31 Mitry, we have seen, grew up in the old school, with roots in the
1920s and an eclectic if vast erudition. Like many before him (Leon
Moussinac, Jean Epstein, and Bazin) he cobbled together his system of
cinema by collecting observations and opinions expressed by filmmakers
and critics over the life of the medium. Mitry was a genuine encyclopedist.
His magnum opus organized just about everything significant that had
been written about cinema into categories and positions that he then adjudicated according to his own comprehensive and overarching argument.
Metzs ascension came on the back of his seventy-five-page critique of
Mitrys huge tomes. Trained in linguistics under A. J. Greimas, Metz wrote
as a human scientist, that is, he wrote as someone based in the heart of the
university, not like Mitry, who was a highly interesting guest occasionally
invited into the university from the real world.32 Metz systematically undercut his elders humanism with a new structuralist vocabulary and
method.
Metz, we have come to learn, forms a substantial link between filmologie
and mainstream French film theory. The first essay in his first book, A
propos de limpression de realite au cinema, takes off from Le Cinema ou
lhomme imaginaire, which he calls one of the richest works yet conse30. See Communications 4 (1964).
31. See Christian Metz, Une Etape dans la reflexion sur le cinema, Critique 21 (Mar.
1965): 22748 and Proble`mes actuels de theorie du cinema, Revue desthetique 20 (Apr.Sept.
1967): 180221; rpt. under the general heading Sur la theorie classique du cinema: A propos des
travaux de Jean Mitry, Metz, Essais sur la signification au cinema, 2 vols. (Paris, 1968 72), 2:9
86.
32. Mitry often taught at IDHEC, the French film school, and occasionally gave courses at
the University of Paris. In the 1960s he was invited to teach at the University of Montreal and
also spent a term in 1973 at the University of Iowa.
crated to the seventh art.33 And it has long been known that filmologie
furnished Metz with such categories as the filmic fact and cinematic fact.34
But the surest connection is one that Martin Lefebvre has unearthed:
Metzs initial proposal for research submitted to the CNRS in 1962and
thus undoubtedly vetted by Morin explicitly suggests the propitious
connection between filmologie and linguistics that will eventuate in Langage et cinema.35 Published in 1971, this doctoral thesis underwrites film
semiotics and everything that gravitated to it. Everything would soon
come to mean psychoanalysis and (Althusserian) Marxism, the former of
which Metz was deeply schooled in. As for Louis Althusser, his star ruled
the post-1968 academic avant-garde. Once Foucaults growing influence is
added to the recipe, Theoryas it would come to be known (and, by
many, ridiculed as Grand Theory)appeared as a powerful concatenation
of disciplines, the convergence of the human sciences.
Looking back in 1978, Morin sheepishly declared his own film theory to
be presemiotic. He was, after all, a mere amateur when it came to the
sophisticated semiotics and narratology practiced by Metz, Barthes, and
their illustrious students at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, where he
would frequently run into them. Morins comprehensive understanding
of the medium twenty years earlier, based on an anthropologicalsociological model, had clearly been superseded by a younger generation.
In the late 1970s, from his Olympian post atop the social sciences, he could
observe how the emergent discipline of structural semiotics had spread
throughout French universities, then quickly to the UK (especially via
Screen) and the U.S., where comparative literature journals like Diacritics,
MLN, Boundary 2, and New Literary History proclaimed a new day for
cinema studies. That day dawned more brightly in Britain thanks to Wollen, who turned his position in a linguistics department toward cinema
semiotics. Nothing comparable occurred in American linguistics programs, most of which, I recall, scoffed at the attention that we comparative
literature scholars accorded Ferdinand de Saussure, Emile Beneveniste,
33. Metz, A propos de limpression de realite au cinema, Cahiers du cinema, nos. 166 67
(MayJune 1965): 75 82; rpt. in Essais sur la signification du cinema, 1:1324, a book dedicated to
Georges Blin of the Colle`ge de France, an important literary critic of the day and an academic
through and through; trans. Michael Taylor under the title On the Impression of Reality in the
Cinema, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York, 1974), p. 4.
34. Cohen-Seat proposed this distinction in his Essais sur les principes dune philosophie du
cinema, which Metz elaborated on at the outset of Langage et cinema (Paris, 1971). Briefly, the
filmic fact refers to the text and its internal system as experienced and comprehended, while the
cinematic fact refers to the system that makes the text possible, including the industry,
technology, stars, film culture, and so on.
35. See Lefebvre, LAventure filmologique.
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and Louis Hjelmslev, not to mention Vladimir Propp and the Italians
(Umberto Eco, Emilio Garroni), all of whom were considered passe or
nave in the era of Noam Chomsky and generative grammar.
Structuralism was hardly passe in Paris, where film theory gave it a
brightly lit stage. The charismatic and tireless Metz presided over a whole
generation of graduate students, quite a few coming from abroad. Punctilious, he professed that only some of what film scholars needed to learn
was cinema specific. Codes related to cinematography, editing (his famous
list of eight syntagms),36 punctuation (fades, dissolves), and so forth required schooling in close analysis and film history.37 But much of the process of signification in cinema derives from codes that apply to other arts
(theater, prose fiction, painting, cartoons, photography) or from general
cultural codes that films seem to transmit with little interference. Theory
might be viewed as a superdiscipline capable of orchestrating the investigation of the various determinants that go into cinemas undeniable psychosocial effects. A great many budding film scholars in the francophone
and anglophone academies (along with colleagues in Latin America, Japan, and Eastern Europe) set themselves the goal of mastering everything
that might be specific to the medium while at the same time balancing
enough psychoanalysis, Marxism, and (Foucauldian) historiography to be
able to account for the importance of an exemplary film, genre, auteur, or
national cinematic movement.
Cine-semiotics was taken up by young film scholars in the U.S. and the
UK with the elevated expectations and fervor of a full-blown program.
Adherents wanted their students to understand both the textual system
that comprises any film and the larger systems that make up the cinema,
regulating its function within economies of the psyche and of society. This
might seem close to Cohen-Seats program, for he had alerted academic
administrators and government officials that cinemas untold consequences on human behavior needed to be investigated and calculated.38
However, in practice most filmologists had been content to pursue their
36. See Metz, La Grande Syntamatique du film narratif, Communications 8 (1966): 120
24.
37. The second part of Metzs review of Mitry was translated by Diana Matias under the
title Current Problems of Film Theory: Christian Metz on Jean Mitrys LEsthetique et
psychologie du cinema, Vol. II, Screen 14 (SpringSummer 1973): 40 87. Metz, Film Language: A
Semiotics of Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (Oxford, 1974) is a translation of only volume one of
Essais sur la signification du cinema.
38. Already in 1948, filmologie was identified as the most abstract level of moral and
pedagogical film research. See Andre Lang, Le Tableau blanc (Paris, 1948). Lang makes it clear
that Cohen-Seats abstruse formulations are befuddling in the absence of specific practical
examples, which the latter had promised to be forthcoming.
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tion of the Third World through Third Cinema than a concept marking
the location of a vortex around which subcultural and supracultural energy whirls out of human control.
Deleuze, no less than Bordwell, lashed out at semiotics and psychoanalysis in part because they reduced the power of the films they tried to explain. Both men effectively bracketed what passed for the film theory of the
day and instead put themselves in dialogue with classical theory, especially
with theorist-cineastes like Epstein and Sergei Eisenstein. It was once again
legitimate to give serious attention to the major theoriessome of them at
leastand not simply as background to a professionally constituted field
of theory. Returning to strong thinkers, like returning to strong films,
always was Deleuzes method, although he was nevertheless a philosopher
who prized creativity and the future above all. The stupendous number of
films Deleuze cites and from which he elaborates his concepts shows him
to be a devotee of the cine-clubs that we know he fervently attended in the
postwar years.46 Indeed, the first effect of Deleuzes cinema books was to
bring largely canonical movies back to American film studies for serious
consideration, after a decade devoted to audiences, to special-interest
films, and to television. Deleuze, along with Serge Daney (onetime editor
of Cahiers du cinema, small bits of whose writings made it into English),
heartened those of us who felt the field to be malnourished when cut off
from the kind of intellectually rambunctious film analysis that thrives in
Europe. I was particularly gratified that both men reconnected with the
fundament of the Cahiers du cinema approach, acknowledging Bazin as an
indisputable wellspring and following his practice of writing expansively
and creatively about a variety of films chosen with discernment. Deleuzes
cinema books urged us to return to the movies and did so at the very
moment when this became possible, as university libraries had begun to
acquire VHS and Betamax cassettes. What a pleasure it was to teach Deleuze in the late 1980s and early 1990s with this new resource. In my own
seminar, each participant was responsible for one of the twenty-two chapters of the cinema books, engaging Deleuzes argument with the aid of clips
and stills taken from his plethora of examples. Chapter after chapter, the
films were shown to nourish the concepts; but they also took on a life of
their own, developing new concepts along the way. Deleuze would have
applauded.
It is explicitly cinemas contribution of new concepts that prompts
Rodowick, in another state-of-the-field article, to hitch both Deleuze and
Stanley Cavell to an enterprise within philosophy rather than within
46. See Dosse, Gilles Deleuze et Felix Guattari: Biographie croisee (Paris, 2007).
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longer stands in the middle of the field like a tentpole but rather spreads
itself into every inquiry across the field that submits itself to sustained and
coherent reflection (as historiography is the theory of historical practice,
for example). This change may be most apparent in the shift from the
apparatus theory of the 1970s to todays media archeology. The former was
itself an apparatus, an instrument to explain the development of cinemas
technologies, including their basic ideological effects. Dependent on a few
historical postulates (most centrally, that the camera lens reproduces the
conditions of vision established at the birth of capitalism with Renaissance
perspective), it was built out of passages from Plato, Freud, Lacan, and
Marx. Media archeology inverts this research agenda; in each of its many
excavations, historians probe aspects of film or other audiovisual phenomena on the irregular rock face of cultural history. The theories of historians
of art and science (Jonathan Crary and Friedrich Kittler have been crucial
to those who dig into the nineteenth century) guide or fill out such research. This dramatic shift is visible in the near disappearance of Althusser
from the works-cited lists of film scholars after 1985 and the nearly obligatory presence there of Walter Benjamin, whose fragmentary style is itself
an amalgam of archival digging and philosophical speculation.
Benjamins name forces us to recognize the belated but unmistakable
arrival of Frankfurt school critical theory in the 1990s. This came at a time
when, except for a coterie of Deleuzeans, the Anglo-American victory over
French film theory seemed complete; on one side stood a politicized cultural studies and, on the other, the more formalist cognitive film theory
(including historical poetics). While the former profits from sliding away
from the medium to examine whatever it finds of interest around it, the
latter resolutely holds onto the specificity of film. Critical theory, thanks to
its Marxist tenor, manages to be attentive to the formal, historical, and
political dimensions of the media simultaneously, thereby proposing a
disciplined alternative.
We should have been paying more attention. Thomas Elsaesser, shuttling frequently across the Atlantic from the late 1970s on and current with
developments in French, German, and English, had been pointing to the
place that critical theory, and especially the Frankfurt school, should occupy in any full-dimensional film studies. During the 1980s his perspective
teamed up with an avalanche of research on early cinema that had been
ongoing since the famous Brighton conference of 1978. Elsaesser staged a
conference in England in 1983 on various aspects of early cinema and eventually published a carefully wrought anthology through the British Film
Institute in 1990, where Benjamins name shows up in the first paragraph
to underwrite a new archeology of the artwork, because of the fundamen-
tal change film had brought to the notion of time, space and material
culture.50 After helping Noel Burch, Andre Gaudreault, Yuri Tzivian,
Charles Musser, Tom Gunning, and others blow apart the dominance of
the feature film, Elsaesser aimed to reassemble film studies by bringing to
traditional questions of form and narrative the integral dimension of social
experience that critical theory always turns forefront. Simultaneously
Miriam Hansen published Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American
Silent Film, contributing in a more concentrated way to the massive rediscovery of silent (and presilent) cinema through a sophisticated understanding of experience.51 Of course, attention to viewing and viewers had
also been central for Morin, Metz, and Baudry. But, in her clarifying introduction, Hansen rejected the hubris of French psychoanalytic theory
that had made spectators slaves to the apparatus. She remained even more
skeptical of American approaches, including both empirical research into
audience demography and the emerging cognitive paradigm that reaches
for universal, if specific, laws governing how narratives or individual
genres (for example, horror) are processed by the mind. Hansen promoted
a dialectic between films taken as historically inflected products and viewers taken as historically situated publics.
It was from Jurgen Habermas that she developed the notion that audiences in particular times and places could constitute a kind of public
sphere, with all the political weight that term connotes. Habermass work,
along with that of his followers Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, had in
fact been available in English for nearly twenty years, mainly through New
German Critique, which had featured them in its inaugural year. But beyond that important journal and occasional invocations in dissertations
and articles they have had little impact on anglophone film studies, despite
Kluges powerful productions in film and TV. Unlike the French thinkers
who, for better or worse, seem able to reach the four corners of film studies,
key German thinkers have not often cropped up outside of discussions of
German cinema or beyond the gates of German and comparative literature
departmentsthat is, with the exception of Benjamin, whose ties to Parisian culture (including surrealism and the Colle`ge de Sociologie) make
him perhaps less a completely German figure than, say, Theodor Adorno.
Now, Benjamins work had been available in English since 1969, when
Illuminations first appeared. But for film studies, aside from The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he really arrived in 1985 when
50. Thomas Elsaesser, Early Cinema: From Linear History to Mass Media Archaeology,
in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Elsaesser (London, 1990), p. 1.
51. See Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film
(Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
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the distinction has become less relevant. The optimists among us applaud
the way that, around the world, history is being theorized while theory is
historicized. At the same time, it is edifying to look to Paris, where renowned
intellectuals like Jacques Rancie`re, Marie-Jose Mondzain, Georges DidiHuberman, and Jean-Luc Nancy speculate on cinema or deploy ferociously
complex film analyses to address far larger questions.
tion of the landscape had already occurred. One of the strongest new graduate programs to arise in the country, that of the University of Chicago,
had baptized itself the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies. At
Brown University, prominent film scholars work within a department
called Modern Culture and Media. And the six-hundred page The Oxford
Handbook of Film and Media Studies, which the publisher describes as a
state-of-the-art survey of current thinking and research in the field as it
now seems constituted, has now been published. Robert Kolkers fine introduction puts in play every permutation of the books two key terms and
the objects they deal with.
Traditional film studies starts with the individual work, genre, or director, and moves outward to larger issues of the ideologies of production and reception, to gender issues, to the effects of distribution
on viewership, and increasingly to the ways globalization is affecting
national cinemas, always attempting to solidify its ground in theory.
Media studies starts with larger textual entities, sometimes isolating a
media artifacta genre of music, a television series, a social-networking
site, a computer game often analyzing these from the perspective of
subcultural, audience-specific interaction. Perhaps film studies has never
quite removed itself from the aura of art, and perhaps media studies still
retains roots in methodologies of sociology and cultural history.60
Kolker, a former president of SCS, finds film studies to be hampered by
being tied to a large yet circumscribed set of texts. It revolves around
objects whose density is great enough to keep a complex array of issues in
orbit. Media studies, on the other hand, is not tied down by such gravity. It
floats through a universe that contains artifacts of all sorts, not just the
beautiful Milky Way of films but other galaxies, gaseous clouds, space
junk, and the solar winds that carry it along. Artifacts precipitate from the
processes and forces that are media studies true concern. Once nearly the
exclusive province of social science approaches, this field has emerged
within the humanities as a type of cultural studies. The latter, while infiltrating and sometimes taking over numerous departments, seldom constitutes an academic unit since the topics it takes up are so vast, so
variegated, and so amorphous.61 By contrast, media studies is far more
definable, yet indefinite, for its two central concepts, flow and remedia-
60. Robert Kolker, introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies, ed.
Kolker (New York, 2008), p. 16.
61. See the disenchanted article by William B. Warner and Clifford Siskin, Stopping
Cultural Studies, Profession (2008): 94 107.
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tion, betray the instability and evanescence of its object. Media studies
thrives as a virtual discipline; it is the discipline of the virtual.
The first two contributions to The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media
Studies establish the potential rivalry of film and media in the entertainment world and, by implication, its academic study. Jay Bolter, coauthor of
the seminal Remediation (1999), opens the volume by clearly drawing, then
intertwining, two lines that might distinguish film among the media.62
Film was the first in a series of technological media aiming for transparency, whereby the spectator would feel copresent with what is displayed.
An inevitable delay in its projection may thwart this dream of perceptual
immediacy, but narrative integration restores it on a different plane. By the
time of D. W. Griffith, spectators could feel themselves englobed by the
fictional world on the screen, participating in it. Today, video games make
good on cinemas promise, on both levels. Player interaction with the
screen functionally instantiates the present tense of the games display,
while quasicinematic plots extend what is onscreen across an entire fictional world (Grand Theft Auto is Bolters example). He concludes on a
generous note, celebrating the diversity of available entertainment, from
auratic and authored narrative films to interactive internet games, while
indicating the many crossovers between these (such as interactive features
on the DVDs of some feature films).63 To study cinema today, he implies,
one must become a media studies scholar.
The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies follows with Brian
Prices The Latest Laocoon: Medium Specificity and the History of Film Theory, whose very title intends to redraw the borders that Bolter has just erased.
Price insists that in an environment of incessant flow and remediation no
object will command attention in and as itself and that the aura of any given
film, like that of cinema in toto, will evaporate.64 He worries that the convergence of all media into an indefinitely malleable electronic stream or reservoir
would seem to destabilize cinema studies if not cinema itself. Art history may
sense itself in a parallel situation as objets dart now share attention with innumerable phenomena comprising the strategically undefined zone of visual
culture. Presumably most of those scholars who now identify their field as
visual studies proudly rely on a disciplined background in art history that
honed the skills they wield in researching and analyzing all manner of things.
The same should apply to those film scholars who have left the cinema62. See Jay David Bolter, Digital Media and the Future of Filmic Narrative, in The Oxford
Handbook of Film and Media Studies, pp. 2137.
63. See ibid., pp. 3537.
64. See Brian Price, The Latest Laocoon: Medium Specificity and the History of Film
Theory, in The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies, pp. 3882.
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And so even as attention drifts to other objects (to TV, the internet,
virtual reality, GPS) the peculiar nature of the film object urges the continued growth of film studies. The film object should be treated as distinctive enough hard enoughto withstand, at least provisionally, the
processes of remediation that devalue any given text. The film object in
itself and as it funds analysis and interpretation ought not to recede in the
academy because its peculiar characteristics make it stand out as anomalous in the constellation of media artifacts.
Here is why. Technological media may generally strive for and promise
immediacy,66 but cinema quickly becameand, at its most interesting,
still remainsan object of gaps and absences. From the outset, cinemas
remarkable psychological and cultural voltage has been built on delay and
slippage. What I have dubbed decalage lies at the heart of the medium and
of each particular film, a gap between here and there as well as now and
then.67 This French term connotes discrepancy in space and deferral or
jumps in time. At the most primary level, the film image leaps from present
to past, for what is edited and shown was filmed at least days, weeks, or
months earlier. This slight stutter in its articulation then repeats itself in
the time and distance that separates filmmaker from spectator and spectators from each other when they see the same film on separate occasions.
The gap in each of these relations constitutes cinemas difference from
television and new media. Films display traces of what is past and inaccessible, whereas TV and certainly the internet are meant to feel and be
present. We live with television as a continual part of our lives and our
homes; sets are sold as furniture. Keeping up a twenty-four-hour chatter
on scores of channels, TV is banal by definition. In contrast, we go out to
the movies, leaving home to cross into a different realm. Every genuine
cinematic experience involves decalage, time-lag. After all, we are taken on
a flight during and after which we are not quite ourselves.
The film object exists differently, or not at all, when kidnapped by consumers and sequestered on their computer desktops. Not only do individuals watch films on PCs at their leisure (stopping and starting at will,
sampling chapters, and so on), they watch them on one window among
several that may be running simultaneously (including those that hold
email messages, the IMDb entry on the film, notes, a blog, and the current
weather). Cinema constitutes just one kind of software content available to
the powerful Windows operating system and the all-encompassing PC
66. Bolton makes this point as well as anyone.
67. See Andrew, Time Zones and Jetlag: The Flows and Phases of World Cinema, in
World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, ed. Natasa Durovicova and Kathleen Newman
(forthcoming).
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