Andrew Film Studies

The Core and the Flow of Film Studies
Dudley Andrew
1. Film: Living Object, Field of Research, Discipline Decades ago, when the galaxy of lm was gradually swirling into existence and becoming visible within the university, it wasnt at all clear that academic oversight was pertinent or wholesome. From the perspective of the academy, movies could have the effect of devaluing the humanities, while from that of cinephiles the university might very well tamper with the organic rapport of audiences with movies, stunting or unnaturally twisting the development of both. Such a debate over the very propriety of its study seems primordial enough to distinguish lm from English or any other longstanding eld. You may believe the decision to have long since been rendered in favor of the academy; after all, the article you are reading was commissioned by Critical Inquiry for this issue devoted to the state of the disciplines. But suspend judgment, if you can, and imagine there to be a force in cinema still capable of tossing scholars from the saddle while they try to rein lms into disciplinary paddocks. This contest involving a once youthful subject and a set of self-condent methodologies is chronicled and celebrated in a ne new anthology, Inventing Film Studies.1 Its nal three essays stage a quiet debate that neatly exemplies distinct perspectives on lm (by any other name). D. N. Rodowick concludes the book on a sanguine note when he declares that the eclipse of lm by new media both in the entertainment world and in the minds of the coming cohort of scholars need not trouble us. For historically the interest in lms quickly led to lm theory and that impressive array of concepts has grown strong enough to
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 1. See Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham, N.C., 2008).
Critical Inquiry 35 (Summer 2009) 2009 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/09/3504-0002$10.00. All rights reserved.
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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 lm for modernity and visual culture, even if lm theory is retained as a privileged discourse. In his contribution to the anthology, titled Little Books, Betz traces the history of our elds book publishing to see how lms have been treated. He honors the effervescent period after 1965 when enterprising editors supported scores of edgling lm scholars, unashamed of being amateurs, who inated 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 lm study to a kind of nal 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 lm studies . . . reconnect with the impulses and the pleasures, the enthusiasm and the excitement, that were functional in breathing life into it in the rst place. . . . We are writing not in a dying eld 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.
D U D L E Y A N D R E W is R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Most recently, he is the coauthor, with Carole Cavanaugh, of Sansho dayu (2000) and, with Steven Ungar, of Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (2005). He is also the editor of The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography (1997).
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ing about lms 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 lm bequeathing to the university the serious concepts required to address what is no longer or only incidentallylm, 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 lm enthusiasts are reshaping cinephilia and creating a vibrant form of lm studies outside the academy in a thriving, if virtual, cine -club milieu.5 Where is lm 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 eld of cinema, which comprises phenomena surrounding lms that give them their signicance. Rodowicks eld 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 lms that graze or frolic in those elds. Of course, all three orientations whether toward lms, or toward the cinematic eld, or toward the protocols of pertinent discoursemust operate interdependently in lm studies whether or not we take this to be a legitimate discipline.6 Dynamism ows 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 lm 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, lm 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 lm 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 eld. More importantly, they also imply methods of studying and teaching what is in that eld. 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 eld) over which to exercise the power of their techniques. This dialectic may not be as easy to recognize in a disciplinary imposter like lm as in a putatively stable example like Englishwhich was immediately considered a likely model for lm. At rst blush, English certainly names a eld, one usually taken to be expanding outward from a core of anglophone literary classics, toward ofcial 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 gures 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 elds 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 lm? Emeritus faculty in English and in language and literature departments may recall how classic and modernist feature lms 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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torians) who offered lm appreciation, analysis, and history as variants of their literature courses. After all, the eld of lm seemed generally congruent with the literary eld, though smaller: a core of cinematic masterpieces spreading out to popular genres, then to documentary material, including governmental and amateur lms, then to animation, television, and a variety of media artifacts. Over the years this expansion once again attracted the intermittent attention of other disciplines that had been glancing at lm from the outset, recognizing new caches of material to mine: sociology, anthropology, history, psychology, and economics. Were it a wellformed eld, lm might prot from the way such poaching by these social sciences can fortify the literary and art-historical methods most lm scholars practice. However, the eld was never properly walked, as farmers say, and most traces of its original perimeter have been obliterated, such that its horizon line now extends as far as audio-visual culture. No single set of methods could possibly assert priority when the subject has lost denition in this way. And so, with agreement neither about the shape and size of its territory nor about pertinent work that should be undertaken there, the promise of a discipline, no matter what we name it, has become rather fanciful, the rhetoric of academicians. That promise was tendered as a battle cry in lms initial struggle for respect within the university; in those days the word discipline served as a rationale for the autonomy lm studies sought from the units in which it grew up. More recently, it is played as a trump card in the high-stakes game among leaders in a now-recognized, albeit undened, eld. For today, lm studies unquestionably stands as a legitimate member of the humanities, often commanding full voting rights. Those who teach and research in this eld exude that impression. The Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) boasts twenty-four hundred members, with fourteen hundred attending its 2008 convention to listen to nearly eight hundred papers given under the rubric of three hundred panels. The topics of those panels, like the arguments of the papers, may be subject to debate, but nearly everyone recognizes that the debate itself takes place within a legitimately constituted disciplinary eld. Whether it is currently emergent or residual, to use the terms of this inquest, is up for dispute, though there is no question that in the 1960s and for some time thereafter lm studies grew rapidly across whatever terrain it found at all hospitable. To sustain that growth, its identity and constituency has never ceased to expand. First it dropped its pretentious name, Society of Cinematologists, shortening things to SCS in 1966; to increase membership and authority, it took on an increasing number of topics until adding the M in 2002. Its website now announces that members of this scholarly organization are involved in
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various elds 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 lm studies its chief subset, but one that may be ceding ground, at least in many quarters, before the wildres known as new media that race across the university. The organizations 1959 birthdate has obscured earlier efforts at coordinate lm 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 lm) into an academic discipline (lm 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 elds 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 lm 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 rst 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 fty years? That chronicle, however, requires an immediate detour out of the U.S., where Polans study connes itself. For American lm 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.
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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 lm 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 eld (not unied, but identiable nonetheless) emerged on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1960s that was situated differently within each nations academic network. This single eld, however, presupposes lm studies to be effectively anglophone. This is what one might conclude from Inventing Film Studies, which, smart as it is, unapologetically xes on England and North America without even a hint that the eld 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 eld? 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 lms 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 lm studies has never achieved as much institutional visibility in Japan as elsewhere, when it is a country whose lm 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 lm scholars might recognize is that of the prolic 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 nd lm 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 lm scholars and the 2009 conference has just taken place in Tokyo.
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ature program. Waseda boasts a tremendous theater program and library, making it a natural place for the study of cinema to mature. In 1974, aiming to broaden their reach beyond their respective campuses, these universities, joined by a few others (the number has grown to thirty), formed Nihon Eizo-gakkai (the Japanese Society of Image Arts and Sciences [JASIAS]), an umbrella organization fostering research in lm, photography, and television. Their annual conference (where Christian Metz gave the keynote in 1981) and publication, Eizo-gaku, make it similar to SCMS. In the late 1980s they added Iconics as a second publishing venture, with nine issues thus far featuring articles in Western languages, many by leading Western scholars. Still, some universities that offer lm remain unconnected to JASIAS, whose conferences still only attract about 250 participants. The fabled rivalry among Japanese institutions, a consequence of the lifetime allegiance one owes to ones school, may keep a single national organization from dominating. Since each university situation is different, lm studies may have emerged anywhere on these campuses, depending on the force of a given professor. At Meiji Gakuin, for example, where the energetic Inuhiko Yomota holds a professorship in the literature department, lm studies thrives without afliating with JASIAS. In 1986, when Japans most inuential critic, Shigehiko Hasumi, was determined to nally bring lm studies to the University of Tokyo (Japans most prestigious institution of higher education and one where he would soon reign as president), he lodged it in a new unit for the Interdisciplinary Study of Culture and Representation, specically bypassing the standard paradigm exemplied by JASIAS and aligning it with philosophical critique. His ambitious plan placed lm into a constellation of pictorial phenomena from drawing through computer graphics and invites not just the usual panoply of Western approaches (linguistics, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, gender theory) but a new scientic scholarship specic to the image.11 REPRE, an association that spun out of this program, has run an annual conference since 2005 that seeks to foster this sort of research and attract scholars from other top universities, including Meiji Gakuin, Kyoto, and Waseda. Thus lm studies in Japan follows several paths, depending on which institution or professor one is afliated with. Such factionalism need not be fatal and indeed may produce a wider variety of approaches and with greater intensity than we in the West are accustomed to. Meanwhile, as might be expected from an overheated electronic society that encourages what we might call passionate pastimes, more lm blogs are kept up in Japanese than in any other language with the
11. repre.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/
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possible exception of Mandarin. Given all this activity on so many levels, it would be na ve to patronize the Japanese rapport with cinema as underdeveloped.12 In France, lm scholarship has been looked at suspiciously as well, though less by university snobs than by sophisticated cinephiles who write for the numerous French lm journals. Many of them worry that the savage power of the movies, their unpredictability, will be disciplined by academic study, that is, brought into line and tamed. Inevitably, this anarchist cry has become mufed over the years as the success of these very journals has helped bring cinema into the mainstream of French life, including its educational structure. So much is this the case that a lm has been included on the national baccalaureate exam every year since 1987. To prepare thousands of high school students for this exam, academics have turned out primers of lm analysis and history, clarifying the ndings of research that now goes on in most French universities. In short, while cinephilia and its particular forms of ecriture (lets just call it criticism) remain robust in France, the fact is that a coordinated eld has been laid out by scholars there, most of whom belong to AFECCAV (Association Franc aise des Enseignants et Chercheurs en Cine ma et AudioVisuel). This dialogue between the amateur and professional discourses encircling cinema can be vibrant or sluggish, depending on when and where it occurs. Take the case of Turkey, an especially lively site of interchange at the moment. In the past twenty years the number of universities in Turkey has nearly trebled to around 120, at least 30 of which have been careful to include some form of cinema studies in the curriculum. Surely this responds to the increasing visibility of their national cinema in Europe and its popularity at home, both of which have been amplied by enthusiastic local critics. A growing number of these critics participate in a network of Turkish lm scholars that has met annually for nearly a decade to debate topics, set standards, coordinate pedagogical initiatives, lobby the government on such issues as censorship, technology, and funding, and plan the next years meeting, inevitably larger in scale. And yet Turkeys most dynamic lm monthly, Azlatyi, comes out of Bog azic i University, considered Turkeys nest, an institution that has never countenanced any sort of organized lm curriculum or program. Instead, a small but attractive lm center sits in the middle of campus, attracting students and professors from all elds for 35mm lm screenings, visits by lmmakers, group discussions, and so on. Their basic library of books and videos
12. I owe much of this summary of the Japanese situation to conversations with Aaron Gerow at Yale University and especially with Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano of Carleton University, Canada.
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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 Bog azic i University shorts have screened at European festivals), and the lm center has recently helped produce a feature providing infrastructure, though no nancing. 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 lm studies are rmly 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 lm culture is slightly out of phase with that of Europe it exhibits the selfsame tension (seemingly productive in this case) between the cinephilic and the disciplinary.
2. 194575: The French Take the Field It makes both political and common sense to keep ones home institutions in clearest focus,13 yet to keep perspective, and to tell the larger story, lets look elsewhere. This elsewhere, for me, has always been France because that country has maintained the most intensely public relation with cinema. It is also a nation that credits disciplinarity to the limit. That is why it should not surprise anyone that lm studies found early and rigorous expression there. As was true in the U.S., academics tried to bring cinema onto campus during the silent era, rst in relation to the Film dArt movement around 1910 and then in relation to the avant-garde appropriation of cinema in the 1920s.14 But it wasnt until just after the war that lm studies made its way inside the university in a manner that is recognizable today. It wasnt called lm studies, but lmologie, and almost from the outset it emanated from a genuine and well-funded institute at the Sorbonne. Indeed, the outrageous ambition of its founders, particularly Gilbert Cohen13. See Dudley Andrew, The Three Ages of Cinema Studies and the Age to Come, PMLA 115 (2000): 34151. 14. Film dArt was a production company dedicated to upgrading cinematic production through the use of serious threatrical scripts, actors from La Come die Franc aise, and music by composers like Camille Saint-Sae ns. Their inaugural production, LAssassinat du Duc de Guise, was held at the Ope ra and was discussed in all the major cultural journals. Professors and students took note. Cinema here was appended to theater. As for the 1920s, it was ne arts that drew cinema into its space, as museums and galleries attracted patrons with screenings of lms by artists like Fernand Le ger, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray. An esthetician of the stature of Elie Faure wrote a treatise on cinema in 1923. Whatever gains cinema may have had a chance of making in the academy, however, were immediately lost with the coming of sound.
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Se at, went far beyond anything dreamt of by Americas Society of Cinematologists, which a decade later seems to have adapted a name, if not an entire program, from the lmologists. Cohen-Se at arrived on the postwar scene with an ambitious idea, expressed in a remarkably self-condent book, Essais sur les principes dune philosophie du cine ma.15 Taking cinema to be civilizations ideal mix of qualitative experience (a sum of the arts) and quantitative impact (a global and mass phenomenon of unprecedented proportions), he called for a superdiscipline to study it, combining aesthetics with sociology. He went in search of scholars who could climb aboard a program he seems to have laid out during the occupation. In a legendary maneuver, and with no academic degree himself, he managed to successfully lobby the Sorbonne to serve as an umbrella for his edgling research group and the journal they had inaugurated in 1948, La Revue internationale de lmologie. From the moment of its ofcial license, late in 1950, until the very end of the decade, the institute beneted from signicant support, visibly affecting the stratosphere of French education in the process. The ancient amphitheater of the Colle ` ge de France was, for example, equipped for projection. Laboratories were established for psychoperceptual and cognitive experiments. In addition to research, regular courses and lectures were offered, and a couple of full-blown conferences took place. The lectures and conferences had actually begun even before the institutes investiture. In the late 1940s such luminaries as Maurice MerleauPonty, Henri Lefebvre, and Jean Hyppolite had appeared before the group. Cohen-Se ats inspired strategy was to set cinema up as a magnet to attract high-prole intellectuals from a spectrum of disciplines, principally the human sciences. He laid before them a vision of how their methods could be renewed by or could develop through contact witha vibrant phenomenon like cinema. He handed them a means to demonstrate to the public and, more importantly, to university and governmental commissions the contemporary relevance of their academic pursuits. Cohen-Se at held cinema to be broader than any discipline and yet to be something that various disciplines could use as a ripe example. While pursuing one or another hypothesis (concerning color and movement, the attraction of the human face, collective behavior among adolescents, and so on), each researcher believed he was contributing to the progressive illumination of an ungainly but supremely inuential phenomenon. Many of those who took part confessed to having little prior experience with the movies, yet Cohen-Se at convinced them to join a growing coterie of esteemed col15. See Gilbert Cohen-Se at, Essais sur les principes dune philosophie du cine ma (Paris, 1946).
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leagues making up his enterprise. Once inside the Sorbonne, he could offer prospective members the opportunity to nance experiments, lectures, and graduate students. Filmologie grew, as did Cohen-Se ats international prole. 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, lmologie thrived mainly in France, where it had found space and nancing. The accomplishments of this group in the 1950s have been detailed by Edward Lowry in his ne 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 IKONlmologie receded from prominence. It is remembered, if at all, as an academic epiphenomenon of cinemas general cultural ascendency during the 1950s. An emergent lmologie foundered after a single decade because it was linked to the changing prole of higher education and research rather than to that of its subject; cinemas value ballooned worldwide, and especially in France, in the 1950s, yet lmologie took little note of this and did not try to abet it. Aiming to analyze the everyday experience of lm, not contribute to its advancement, lmologie set itself at a distance from such growing cultural manifestations as international lm 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 inltrated 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 lmologie but was incubated in the (chiey French) cine -club movement and the journals that fed cinephilia, especially Cahiers du cine ma. These in
16. John MacKay conrms that Grigorii Boltianskii petitioned the Soviet ministry to set up a lm 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 lmologie model. 17. See Edward Lowry, The Filmology Movement and Film Study in France (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1985). 18. See Martin Lefebvre, LAventure lmologique: Documents et jalons dune histoire institutionnelle, forthcoming in a special issue of CiNe MAS devoted to lmologie. 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 cran Franc Distingue s, E aise 119 [Oct. 1947]: 11). Vidal notes the irony that this rst 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.
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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 lms of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and John Ford, all leading to the French New Wave. In the issues of Cahiers du cine ma from the summer and fall of 1959 one could still feel the echoes of the May Cannes festival that had crowned Franc ois 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 lmologies issue of the same months took on Current Problems of Cinema and Visual Information: Psychological Problems and Mechanisms, while mentioning not a single lm title in its eighty-eight pages, only a moment from an unidentied 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 lmologie 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 cine ma consolidating its gains when launched in 1951. Similarly just as lmologie completely ma experienced the changed course at the end of the 1950s,20 Cahiers du cine rst 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 cine ma saw itself at odds with several of the many lm periodicals of that decade (its acrimonious relation with Positif is legendary), but La Revue internationale de lmologie was hardly one of these. A unique occasion allows us to compare their opposed politiques. In just its fth issue, September 1951, and less than a year after lmologies accession to the Sorbonne (that is, as both groups lobbied to gain footholds in Paris), an article appeared in Cahiers du cine ma sarcastically titled Introduction a ` une lmologie de la lmologie, 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 rst 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 lmologique.
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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 ats astounding sucaway at his target.21 Bazin cattily reports on Cohen-Se cess in convincing the crusty professors and crustier deans of the Sorbonne to take up mere movies as an investment in the future of research and teaching. Professors of dead languages, Kirsch states with the sarcasm of the conrmed 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 nally 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-Se ats welcome at the Sorbonne, as his own rst institutional afliation with cinema was adjacent to the Sorbonnes Maison de Culture, where he founded a cine -club during the occupation. cole NorIn 1941, he had washed out of his nal oral examination at the E male 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 ame 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-Se at was able to waltz straight up to the administration of the Sorbonne and come away with its full support for a program that would nally elevate cinema to an object of genuine study, Bazins resentment seeped onto the page. As leader of a band of cine maniacs, each of whom claimed to watch over ve hundred lms a year, he was especially irked at lmologies 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 lms or to mention titles, directors, or (God forbid!) actors when writing up ones ndings. These distractions diverted the scholars attention both from the specic workings of any-lm-whatever and from
21. Actually Bazin would intervene briey in a lmologie congress in 1955, his remarks appearing in La Revue internationale de lmologie, nos. 2024 (1955): 9597. In the following year, he promoted a lecture by Jean Wahl at the Institut de Filmologie in Cahiers du cine ma, no. 57 (Feb. 1956): 34.
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the general function of the cinematic spectacle as seen by the philosophical imagination. Did Pavlov need to be a dog-lover? Bazin asked, to draw the line with nality.22 At Cahiers du cine ma they were, if nothing else, lm lovers cine23 They took it as their obligationtheir professionto locate, from philes. the hundreds of lms made each year, the most valuable ones, the ones that attracted and sustained profound reection and critical elaboration. Bazin, who gave himself to amateur and scientic shorts, to compilations and cartoons, as well as to features of all sorts, nevertheless insisted that intense aesthetic engagement (close viewing) was a prerequisite for understanding what cinema is and how it functions. His more elitist colleagues at Cahiers du cine ma promoted an auteur policy that effectively excluded all but feature lms and that ltered from this corpus the expressions of a limited number of directors who were carefully ranked. They were ower arrangers; he was a botanist or ecologist. Without trying any further to distinguish Bazin from his disciples, or Cahiers du cine ma from other Parisian lm groups, or even French lm culture from that of other nations, in Florent Kirschs characterization of lmologie we can recognize the two nearly irreconcilable attitudes toward cinema and its study that have remained in tension in the academy. A few individuals have managed to bridge this opposition. Bazin should have been one of them, given his ENS education and his evident training in disciplines like geology, geography, entomology, botany, philosophy, rhetoric, theology, and psychology. Yet cinephilia won out in him, or rather lms themselves won out as centers of attraction whose existence and value it was the duty and pleasure of the disciplined critic to articulate. Other polymaths who could bridge these approaches were Jean Mitry and Edgar Morin, both of whom were more closely allied to university life while always having been avid lmgoers, indeed occasional lmmakers. Mitry had assisted Abel Gance and had run cine -clubs in the 1920s and 1930s. He is listed as one of the founders of the Cine mathe ` que Franc aise in 1935. After the war he taught at the brand new state-sponsored lm school, Institut des hautes e tudes cine matographiques (IDHEC), largely because he had modest experience in production as an editor and assistant director. Later he would manage to teach classes in a university setting. Most tellingly, his massive publications (the two-volume Esthe tique et psychologie du cine ma and the ve-volume Histoire du cine ma) were published
22. Florent Kirsch [Andre Bazin], Introduction a ` une lmologie de la lmologie, Cahiers du cine ma, no. 5 (Sept. 1951): 38. 23. For an overview of this phenomenon, see Antoine de Baecque, La Cine philie: Invention dun regard, histoire dune culture, 19441968 (Paris, 2003).
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in the 1960s by Presses Unive rsitaires de Paris, just as Cohen-Se ats book had been. Mitry felt himself a legitimate rival of lmologie, and superior for having lived an entire life in the midst of the medium.24 The tables of contents to his theoretical volumes presume the comprehensive and progressive exploration of a genuine discipline, as does the immense bibliography that draws on every sort of science.25 Morin makes an even more interesting case because he was at one time a prominent member of the lmologie group. In 1952, he was taken into the sociology section of the prestigious Centre Nationale du Recherche Scientique (CNRS).26 A prolic scholar from very early in his career, he claims to have also grown up a lm addict, differentiating himself from his fellow lmologists. Indeed, his books show him to be a connoisseur; in Les Stars (1957), he wades right into the thick of popular experience, cataloguing the names and qualities of scores of actors and actresses in a way that Bazin would have approved.27 In fact, Bazin did approve, for he reviewed Les Stars as well as Morins earlier and far more consequential Le Cine ma ou lhomme imaginaire (1956). He wrote that he generally subscribed to Morins far-reaching, even daring anthropological concepts.28 He praised Morin for refusing what must have been a tempting claim, namely, that cinema has altered the constitution of human beings by introducing brand new processes of projection-identication. A sober Morin argues instead that this medium merely exercises and exploits processes that have always been part of everyday life. Bazin also cheers Morin for avoiding the kind of occultism that might have made his book a bestseller. Cinema is unquestionably tied to spiritualism, particularly in its earliest phase, but Morin demonstrates how a supple cinematic language has progressively evolved from the magma of magic. Without losing its unconscious appeal, indeed while banking on it, lmmakers have learned to control cinemas unconscious effects, as in, for example, the evolution of the superimposition from an eerie image-effect to a commonly used grammatical technique of narration: the lap dissolve. Indeed, Bazin wishes Morin had introduced
24. Mitry does cite with approval a few (but quite few) remarks by Cohen-Se at and studies by lmologists doing perceptual psychology. See Jean Mitry, Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema, trans. Christopher King (Bloomington, Ind., 1990), esp. pp. 161 63. 25. For more information, see Brian Lewis, Jean Mitry, in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (London, 2009), pp. 397407. Unfortunately this volume does not contain an entry either on Bazin or on lmologie. 26. These remarks on Morin are taken from Andrew, Edgar Morin, in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, pp. 40821. 27. See Edgar Morin, Les Stars (Paris, 1957); trans. Richard Howard under the title The Stars (1960; Minneapolis, 2005). 28. Andre Bazin, LHomme imaginaire et la fonction magique du cine ma, France observateur 331 (Sept. 1956): 17.
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even more of a rened discussion of cinema-specic techniques based on conscious play rather than on unconscious participation. He suggests that to Morins anthropology of magic be added an anthropology of play and game (he surely had Roger Caillois in mind). Whereas le jeu can be said to underwrite theater and even television, la magie is foundational for cinema. Yet, Bazin reminds us, audiences cross from one form of spectacle to the other, as do many techniques, not to mention actors, writers, and directors. A comprehensive treatment of imaginary man in the twentieth century would require that cinema be put in dialogue with the other arts and media. Morin would go on to do just this in LEsprit du temps: Essai sur la culture de masse.29 Increasingly concerned with large-scale issues at a time when TV loomed as the format of the future, Morin wrote this book as a comprehensive theory of mass communication. Yet he could hardly downplay cinema since he had just codirected with Jean Rouch the inestimably important Chronicle of a Summer (he was thus part of the New Wave and its cinephilia, like it or not). And so in his new book cinema still plays the major heuristic role as the centurys model cultural artifact, a spiritualmaterial entity containing undeniable nancial and aesthetic (imaginary) value. However, Morin doesnt subject cinemas specic techniques and properties to analysis. Working at a high level of generality, and with communications as the umbrella term, he took on the kind of purview and ethos that one could also see Marshall McLuhan testing out at the same moment. Morin gladly joined the new journal bearing the title Communi cole Pratique en Sciences cations, which was inaugurated in 1960 at the E Sociales. Alongside him on its editorial board was Roland Barthes. As for lmologie, Morin had let it go even before it got into trouble and migrated across the Alps. From the outset Communications treated cinema as but one star in a huge constellation of processes and artifacts. And it was determined to treat cinema in a disciplined manner, as an alternative to the proliferating amateur lm journals of the New Wave era. At the same time Communications wanted to avoid merely applying traditional academic disciplines to popular culture in the manner of the lmologie group, and it certainly wanted to replace the latters positivist prole with something startlingly new. Indeed, it hoped to score the same kind of revolution within the academy as the New Wave had scored in the real world of lm production and distribution. The very rst issue featured Barthess The Photographic Message, an article that would become fundamental for lm studies and
29. See Morin, LEsprit du temps: Essai sur la culture de masse (Paris, 1962).
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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 nd Claude Bremond and a very young Tzvetan Todorov writing on literary systems, while Christian Metz debuts with one of his most far-reaching essays, Cine ma: Langue ou langage. Barthes appears twice, rst 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 lm studies at the moment when Metz leapfrogged over Mitry as he reviewed the latters Esthe tique et psychologie du cine ma, the rst 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 (Le on Moussinac, Jean Epstein, and Bazin) he cobbled together his system of cinema by collecting observations and opinions expressed by lmmakers and critics over the life of the medium. Mitry was a genuine encyclopedist. His magnum opus organized just about everything signicant 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-ve-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 lmologie and mainstream French lm theory. The rst essay in his rst book, A propos de limpression de re alite au cine ma, takes off from Le Cine ma ou lhomme imaginaire, which he calls one of the richest works yet conse30. See Communications 4 (1964). tape dans la re 31. See Christian Metz, Une E exion sur le cine ma, Critique 21 (Mar. 1965): 22748 and Proble ` mes actuels de the orie du cine ma, Revue desthe tique 20 (Apr.Sept. 1967): 180221; rpt. under the general heading Sur la the orie classique du cine ma: A propos des travaux de Jean Mitry, Metz, Essais sur la signication au cine ma, 2 vols. (Paris, 1968 72), 2:9 86. 32. Mitry often taught at IDHEC, the French lm school, and occasionally gave courses at the University of Paris. In the 1960s he was invited to teach at the University of Montre al and also spent a term in 1973 at the University of Iowa.
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crated to the seventh art.33 And it has long been known that lmologie furnished Metz with such categories as the lmic 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 lmologie and linguistics that will eventuate in Langage et cine ma.35 Published in 1971, this doctoral thesis underwrites lm 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 inuence 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 lm 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 cole Pratique des Hautes E tudes, where he their illustrious students at the E 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 mile Beneveniste, literature scholars accorded Ferdinand de Saussure, E
33. Metz, A propos de limpression de re alite au cine ma, Cahiers du cine ma, nos. 166 67 (MayJune 1965): 75 82; rpt. in Essais sur la signication du cine ma, 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-Se at proposed this distinction in his Essais sur les principes dune philosophie du cine ma, which Metz elaborated on at the outset of Langage et cine ma (Paris, 1971). Briey, the lmic 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, lm culture, and so on. 35. See Lefebvre, LAventure lmologique.
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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 na ve in the era of Noam Chomsky and generative grammar. Structuralism was hardly passe in Paris, where lm 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 lm scholars needed to learn was cinema specic. Codes related to cinematography, editing (his famous list of eight syntagms),36 punctuation (fades, dissolves), and so forth required schooling in close analysis and lm history.37 But much of the process of signication in cinema derives from codes that apply to other arts (theater, prose ction, painting, cartoons, photography) or from general cultural codes that lms 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 lm 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 specic 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 lm, genre, auteur, or national cinematic movement. Cine-semiotics was taken up by young lm 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 lm 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-Se ats program, for he had alerted academic administrators and government ofcials that cinemas untold consequences on human behavior needed to be investigated and calculated.38 However, in practice most lmologists had been content to pursue their
36. See Metz, La Grande Syntamatique du lm 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 LEsthe tique et psychologie du cine ma, 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 signication du cine ma. 38. Already in 1948, lmologie was identied as the most abstract level of moral and pedagogical lm research. See Andre Lang, Le Tableau blanc (Paris, 1948). Lang makes it clear that Cohen-Se ats abstruse formulations are befuddling in the absence of specic practical examples, which the latter had promised to be forthcoming.
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private research projects under its benecent conditions, so much in fact that lmologie could be deemed more an institution than a method. Cinesemiotics, on the other hand, considered itself part of a dominant structuralist movement that wagered on the interlinked nature of the disciplines making up the human sciences. Related to linguistics, semiotics was taken to be a foundational human science, one that every lm student needed to master. Its basic elements were shown at work in example after example of intricate readings of lms, readings that didnt shy away from outrageously broad claims about the psychoanalytic or ideological consequences of the atomic structures of signication that were inevitably discovered to be operative. Stephen Heaths seventy-page reading of Orson Welless Touch of Evil, symptomatically titled Film and System: Terms of Analysis, remains a thrillingly ingenious, if intimidating, exercise in this mode. Published in Screen in two installments during 1975, it owed much to Metz and to Raymond Bellour, whose series of analyses of the molecular structure of classical Hollywood movies especially Hitchcocksled lm scholars to believe that every lm could be parsed into a web of overlapping codes, each of which could be cracked and whose overall structure (the textual system), furthermore, could be related to larger systems working above the level of narrative.39 One of the rst and most inuential examples of a structuralist reading is the collective text that the editors of Cahiers du cine ma devoted to John Fords Young Mr. Lincoln in 1970 (translated in Screen in 1972).40 Scarcely a decade after Bazins death, the journal he founded had turned against him and embraced the structuralist paradigm that was in the avant-garde of Parisian university culture. Between 1965 and 1972, Metz published ve semiotic pieces in Cahiers; but it was the next, psychoanalytic phase of his career (culminating in The Imaginary Signier [1975]) that worked in concert with the newly politicized version of Bazins famous journal, whose editors were intent on leaving Bazin behind and adopting a more scientic stance. Science in those days was understood of course in Althussers sense. In such a charged atmosphere Bazin was reviled as a mystied and mystifying idealist responsible for the excessive adulation of lms and auteurs that continued to pour from the pens of mere critics. And yet, as has become increasingly apparent, his penchant for developing abstractions and for elaborating far-reaching metaphors, based on details mined
39. See Raymond Bellour, LAnalyse du lm (Paris, 1979); trans. Constance Penley under the title The Analysis of Film (Bloomington, Ind., 2000). 40. See Editorial Collective, Young Mr. Lincoln de John Ford, Cahiers du cine ma, no. 223 (Aug.Sept. 1970): 2947; trans. Helen Lackner and Matias under the title John Fords Young Mr. Lincoln, Screen 13 (Autumn 1972): 5 44.
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in close analysis, has remained a hallmark of French lm studies. As its collective text on Fords lm demonstrates, Cahiers du cine ma might have repudiated Bazin, Rohmer, and Truffaut after 1968, but it remained a place where rich lms were identied and then subjected to concomitantly rich symptomatic readings. The difference of the 1970s was that of discipline. Bazins Quest-ce que le cine ma? gives the appearance of a programmatic analysis of the medium, something both Rohmer and Roger Leenhardt underlined at the time.41 The fact is, however, that he did not work methodically through the question posed by the title of his book. He was a practicing critic, and the book anthologized just fty-two of his twenty-six hundred pieces, most of which had been dashed off as daily or weekly reviews for the general public. He may have remained remarkably consistent, suggesting a fully digested understanding of cinema, but he honed his rhetoric to prepare a public for many different kinds of lms, not to establish an academic eld or even to map out a course of study. On the other hand, Metz and the generation of structuralist-materialists that looked to him addressed not a public but a subject, one they described as a system that they were determined to explain systematically. And they did so within a university structure, building their articles and books in seminars populated by graduate students who aimed in their own theses to add to the progress they sensed was being made semester after semester by their illustrious professors.42
3. Our Turn: The Explosion of American Film Studies in the 1980s It was largely thanks to continental critical theorythat jerry-rigged edice of semiotics, narratology, psychoanalysis, and Marxismthat American lm studies rose to prominence in the humanities, quickly becoming a hot spot in the second half of the seventies. Screen theory, as it was sometimes called (because so much of it came through Screen), solidied into a near orthodoxy that galvanized or intimidated just about everyone who taught lm. This mainly included those several hundred members of SCS who had gotten into the eld by teaching art lms alongside literary texts or who had championed some beloved auteur or who did their best to cover the history of cinema and ideas about it. While many
41. See Eric Rohmer, La Somme dAndre Bazin, Cahiers du cine ma, no. 91 (Jan. 1959): 3645. 42. Despite the visibility of lm within the French academic institutions of the time, it wouldnt be until 1986 that advanced degrees in cinema would be ofcially conferred. Lefebvre believes this delay was caused by the bad taste that lmologie had left at the Sorbonne in the early 1960s.
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were shocked by the tone and method of cine-semiotics, others, especially those working out of romance language and comparative literature departments, found themselves joining a mission grander than any lm, grander than the cinema itself, a mission designated Theory. My own case is symptomatic. In the early 1970s, wanting to instill rigor in what appeared an undiscipline of largely belletristic commentary and vague speculation, I developed lectures that became the book The Major Film Theories. A decade later, things were very different. At best, those major theorists now served as a preamble to a far more coordinated eld of study ruled by continental criticism whose Concepts in Film Theory I took stock of in a 1984 book by that name. Yet I hadnt registered that this Grand Film Theory, though scarcely a decade old, was already on the wane, having squandered its vigor in parochial feuds (structuralism undermined from within by poststructuralism) or in the redundant, if ingenious, reassertion of its doctrines, case after case. In Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, whose title set an agenda in the mid-1990s, David Bordwell and Noe l Carroll claimed to have toppled this hegemony,43 doing it from the top of the hill, for after 1980 straightforward American lm scholarship had begun to depose foreign intellectuals, with their obtuse, often untranslated, vocabularies. A sociologist of knowledge might nd that Grand Film Theory simply did not leave enough room for the greatly expanded corps of researchers streaming out of American graduate schools who needed to come up with additional objects of study and new ways of studying them. Historical and cultural topics provided endless opportunities, and this is the direction lm studies took in the U.S. I resisted this wholesale abandonment of theory. The two nal concepts of my book, guration and interpretation, registered a denite need for fresh air but without throwing over the momentum of continental critical thought. I wanted to open what seemed like a hermetic structuralism onto the new and the unpredictable, letting lms take the lead in our dialogue with them rather than serve as symptoms to be analyzed. Both guration and interpretation bear a European pedigree. The rst, graced by JeanFranc ois Lyotards Discours, gure (1971), could be felt in that authors enigmatic article Acinema (1978) and in the inimitable, recalcitrant writings of Jean-Louis Schefer. As for interpretation, it had been proclaimed by Paul Ricoeur as the dening practice of humanistic inquiry. Why not openly base a vigorous and consequential lm studies on protocols of
43. See David Bordwell and Noe l Carroll, introduction to Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. Bordwell and Carroll (Madison, Wisc., 1996), pp. xiiixvii.
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interpretation in history, criticism, and theory? What I didnt realize was that interpretation itself was caught in a crossre in the 1980s. Today it is clear that during the 1980s, amid the cacophony of small arms re, two big guns would dominate the eld: The Classical Hollywood Cinema, wheeled out in 1984 by Bordwell, Kristen Thompson, and Janet Staiger; and Gilles Deleuzes double-barreled cinema books, LImageMouvement and LImage-Temps, which boomed in 1983 and 1985 respectively and were translated into English in 1986 and 1989.44 Nothing else in the 1980s was nearly as prominent as those explosive projects that recongured the eld of battle; their aftershocks still echo across lm studies today, setting off allegiances and allergies even in the era of new media. Each mowed down the excesses of both interpretation and cultural studies, yet they are anything but allies. The Classical Hollywood Cinema would dispense with lofty theory altogether, building a historical poetics based on a notion of image processing that Bordwell would soon ground in the universals of cognitive psychology. Deleuze, on the other hand, was resolutely antihistorical. What he and Bordwell shared in the 1980s was an attention to the specic and systematic character of the medium. Both denigrate interpretation, for it takes ight from lms into airy speculations that deploy humanist concepts and vocabularies available elsewhere. And cultural studies spreads horizontally away from the eld of cinema like spores blown by the winds of fad or by social agendas. Bordwell, who at the end of the decade explicitly demanded a research program that dispensed with interpretation, built The Classical Hollywood Cinema around a set of lms chosen not by taste and judgment but by an algorithm. This was meant to guarantee that the books description of the Hollywood system would itself be systematic and immune to bias and fashion. Deleuzes project may appear to be based on taste (the canon of Cahiers du cine ma, most reviewers agree) and on the reading of cinematic gures, but, in fact, his cinema books lay out a conceptual network where lms function as nodes that connect lines of thought. As he would famously proclaim, these lines are not human thoughts traversing lms but the thinking of the cinema machine itself. As for cultural studies, Deleuze fought every effort to territorialize social energy, even into something as progressive as emergent cultures. His anarchist politics may have triggered a phrase like the people are missing,45 but this concept is less a descrip44. For a full account of Deleuzes impact, see Andrew, La Re ception de Deleuze, in Deleuze et les images, trans. He le ` ne Frappat, ed. Franc ois Dosse and Jean-Michel Frodon (Paris, 2008), pp. 14559. This passage translates part of the opening of that essay. 45. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis, 1989), p. 216.
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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 lms they tried to explain. Both men effectively bracketed what passed for the lm 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 eld of theory. Returning to strong thinkers, like returning to strong lms, always was Deleuzes method, although he was nevertheless a philosopher who prized creativity and the future above all. The stupendous number of lms 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 rst effect of Deleuzes cinema books was to bring largely canonical movies back to American lm studies for serious consideration, after a decade devoted to audiences, to special-interest lms, and to television. Deleuze, along with Serge Daney (onetime editor of Cahiers du cine ma, small bits of whose writings made it into English), heartened those of us who felt the eld to be malnourished when cut off from the kind of intellectually rambunctious lm analysis that thrives in Europe. I was particularly gratied that both men reconnected with the fundament of the Cahiers du cine ma approach, acknowledging Bazin as an indisputable wellspring and following his practice of writing expansively and creatively about a variety of lms 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 lms 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-eld article, to hitch both Deleuze and Stanley Cavell to an enterprise within philosophy rather than within
46. See Dosse, Gilles Deleuze et Fe lix Guattari: Biographie croise e (Paris, 2007).
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theory, whose energy he declares to be drained.47 For theory seems too programmatic and imperious, whether driven by science in Althussers sense (Grand Theory) or by models taken from natural and cognitive science (posttheory). Defending the latter, in a rebuke to Rodowick, Malcolm Turvey proudly reminds us that once continental lm studies had been deracinated from the anglophone eld, thanks largely to the relentless analyses of Noe l Carroll, room was cleared for specic, targeted, and useful work. Turvey runs through a litany of recent and distinct gains in theories of emotion, editing, perception, imagination, pleasure, music, comprehension, interpretation, character identication, narrative, and suspense.48 While those who write books and articles in these areas invariably do so by turning to well-developed notions in the social sciences or philosophy, they do so, Turvey believes, from the strength of their own discipline. Here he connects to something I have been advocating all along; most of us are not philosophers, sociologists, or economists but lm scholars. What this means is that, at the end of the day, we have to use our expertise gained from watching large numbers of lms, observing them and the response of viewers to them carefully, and learning about the contexts in which they were made and exhibitedto evaluate the theories we take from other disciplines in terms of whether they successfully explain (or not) lm.49 Posttheory evinces an attitude and an agenda that has, with some qualication and dispute, been termed positivist, though Turvey might prefer to call it professional. Perhaps a new generation of lm scholars has come to the fore, adroit and modest, ready to address not major issues so much as targeted and circumscribed questions that arise from solutions to previous ones. This attitude has been fostered by an explosion of new archives, databases, and published or recorded interviews. So much material has been uncovered that countless lm scholars nd themselves on wellgroomed career paths. And, as Alison Trope notes, this ethos extends beyond the university, visible in the often highly detailed entries buried in the IMDb, or in the extras on DVDs. While much of the newly uncovered information and the many disseminated reports may be suspect, such an avalanche of information has unquestionably democratized lm studies. The electronic network invites lay people, not just duly dubbed professors, to contribute to the enterprise. But how shall all these shards of information be catalogued, organized,
47. Rodowick, An Elegy for Theory, October, no. 122 (Fall 2007): 92. 48. See Malcolm Turvey, Theory, Philosophy, and Film Studies: A Response to D. N. Rodowicks An Elegy for Theory, October, no. 122 (Fall 2007): 11020. 49. Ibid., p. 120.
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and merged into a larger enterprise? How shall information become knowledge and inquiry be disciplined? If the internet decenters research, the university remains staunchly hierarchical, committed at some level to selection, procedure, and evaluation. After all, its academic programs are built on what we call the course that from some motivated beginning promises to reach a plateau of understanding ten or fteen weeks later. Student plans of study put courses in relation to one another, and we call the sum of courses, including their progression and interrelation, a curriculum. Of all American lm scholars, Bordwell has been most dedicated to the lm curriculum. His textbooks establish the bedrock information, concepts, and skills that enable more sophisticated inquiry into what he calls the historical poetics of the medium. He argues for and from rst principles and believes students should progress to higher-level courses (and presumably can succeed in them) only after having mastered foundational material (a modicum of lm history) and skills (close analysis, archive research, and so on). But rare is the department in the U.S. that has implemented such a program, at least at the undergraduate level. Few lm professors would refusefor lack of prerequisitessmart, eager neophytes (English majors, say) who ask to join a senior seminar in feminist lm theory or in the globalization of lm distribution. Except in its production track, lm studies does not take itself to be analogous to chemistry or economics in this regard. Still, at the minimum lm studies programs should arrange things so that students can grow term by term in the depth, breadth, and subtlety of their lm analyses and historical inquiries. Such abrasive curricular issues quickly strip away the veneer that makes a term like discipline so attractive. As I have intimated throughout, the word is an alloy composed of method and institution. As an institution within the humanities, a lm studies program houses a large variety of courses that address or introduce lms in some manner. A distribution rule, guaranteeing breadth, usually governs student choice over the spectrum of courses on offer. But as a method lm studies implies a sequenced and hierarchical set of experiences, usually including a baseline of lm history and two or more levels of theory and analysis. If methodical cinema studies once seemed on the verge of emerging at many universities, this impulse largely dissolved once students and professors felt the attraction and the need to cover larger swaths of media. The territory broadened at the expense of methodological depth. After the growth of cultural studies, the tent (no longer a house) may have been stretched to the point of ripping. Yet lm studies persists, proving for some that theory is but one of its aspects, on par with the rest. If we still insist on its depth, theory today no
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longer stands in the middle of the eld like a tentpole but rather spreads itself into every inquiry across the eld that submits itself to sustained and coherent reection (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 lm 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 ll out such research. This dramatic shift is visible in the near disappearance of Althusser from the works-cited lists of lm 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 lm theory seemed complete; on one side stood a politicized cultural studies and, on the other, the more formalist cognitive lm theory (including historical poetics). While the former prots from sliding away from the medium to examine whatever it nds of interest around it, the latter resolutely holds onto the specicity of lm. 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 lm 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 rst paragraph to underwrite a new archeology of the artwork, because of the fundamen-
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tal change lm had brought to the notion of time, space and material Gaudreault, Yuri Tzivian, culture.50 After helping Noel Burch, Andre Charles Musser, Tom Gunning, and others blow apart the dominance of the feature lm, Elsaesser aimed to reassemble lm 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 specic, laws governing how narratives or individual genres (for example, horror) are processed by the mind. Hansen promoted a dialectic between lms taken as historically inected products and viewers taken as historically situated publics. It was from Ju rgen 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 lm studies, despite Kluges powerful productions in lm and TV. Unlike the French thinkers who, for better or worse, seem able to reach the four corners of lm 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 gure than, say, Theodor Adorno. Now, Benjamins work had been available in English since 1969, when Illuminations rst appeared. But for lm 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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New German Critique devoted an entire issue to his relation to cinema, followed by one on Weimar Film Theory. Then came Susan Buck-Morss to trumpet the arcades project in her 1989 The Dialectics of Seeing.52 Benjamin was suddenly indispensible to the way much lm history, especially early cinema, was conceived and written in the U.S. As a measure, the 1995 collection Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life nds him invoked in nine of its fourteen selections and cited on forty of its four hundred pages.53 For the past ten years, Harvard University Press has been bringing out a huge quantity of Benjamins writings and correspondence, including last years The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media.54 Benjamin was unquestionably the greatest media theorist before the Second World War, writing brilliantly on photography and radio. Benjamins friend Siegfried Kracauer had a better chance to bring Frankfurt-style critical theory to America, since From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and Theory of Film (1960) were published here. The former could be called a study of a cinematic public sphere, though a decidedly dysfunctional one, while the latter (introduced in its latest edition by Hansen) ranks as the most ambitious treatise on the cinema written by anyone from this school of thought. Yet Theory of Film has until recently been largely ignored. I contributed to this neglect in The Major Film Theories, being relatively ignorant at the time of Kracauers journalism of the 1920s. And, indeed, Kracauers Theory of Film did seem like an orphan, in dialogue with no active discourse communityFrankfurt school or otherwise especially in comparison to Bazin, whose works, collected around the same time, were written within an unbroken and vibrant French tradition of criticism. Kracauer came off badly in the inevitable comparison with Bazin at a time when realist theory as a whole, and Bazins star in particular, had dimmed considerably. Kracauer was thus doubly cursed, at least until the 1990s when he beneted from Benjamins fame and from the ne bibliographic recovery effort of Tom Levin, whose translation of The Mass Ornament appeared in 1995.55 These essays, more than Kracauers booklength works, encouraged the kind of detailed and imaginative historical
52. See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). 53. See Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley, 1995). 54. See The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. (Cambridge, Mass., 2008). 55. See Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).
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research that Anglo-American lm scholars had been pursuing, especially in the area of early cinema and the culture it grew out of. Think of Gunnings wide-ranging array of essays; one could say that he writes, consciously or not, in the Frankfurt school manner. Critical theory put lm in its place, so to speak, and interrogated it from that place. Perhaps its impact could only be felt when American lm studies began to realize that media was integral to a discipline no longer bounded by dates or by specic technologies. Thus theory may have oundered as a metadiscourse, but numerous theoretically sophisticated research elds have kept lm scholars alive to far-ranging consequences of the medium: early cinema research, the study of documentary (its criteria, genres, technology, social consequences), or even the history of lm theory (as distinct from theory itself). This lastmentioned area is currently very active, as international endeavors have coalesced into a research group whose goal is to unearth, contextualize, and eventually make available discourses from eras and places that have not been heard from before: an anthology of Czech writings before the Second World War,56 a 1913 Japanese treatise (recently reported on at a professional meeting),57African ideas of art and design,58 and so on. Notice that the endeavors just mentioned are all international in scope and in practice. For fteen years the internet has put scholars and projects in touch with one another, providing an alternative to national traditions of scholarship. Even before the internet, a surge in historical research had started to emerge in France from underneath the loftier discussion of aesthetics that has dominated the eld there. This turn can be credited in part to the prestige of French historiography (several key members of the Annales school have now worked with lm material). More important has been the general access to documentation that formerly belonged to the few. The establishment of the friendly and convenient Bibliothe ` que du Film in 1990 has changed the way young scholars go about their work. In addition, they now have more to work with, as stunning collections have been added to the already rich French archives through donations and accessions. If one took a census of top professors in France, the aestheticians would still outnumber the historians, but parity is being reached, and
56. See Cinema All the Time: An Anthology of Czech Film Theory and Criticism, 1908 1939, trans. Kevin B. Johnson, ed. Jaroslav Andel and Petr Szczepanik (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2008). 57. A permanent seminar on history of lm theory was established in 2007, housed by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin, Italy. See museonazionaledelcinema.it/lmtheories/. Aaron Gerow and Markus Nornes reported on early Japanese lm theory at this seminars inaugural meeting in Udine, Italy, March 2008. 58. This was the subject of Imagine, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, 24 March 2009.
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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 lm analyses to address far larger questions.
4. The State of Things: Convergence and Its Gaps The tether to the vertical pole of theory having loosened in the 1980s, lm studies spread out from its traditional center. Deleuzes and Bordwells books may stand out from that era because their ideas took shape in and around a longstanding corpusthe art lm and classical Hollywood but that corpus was on the verge of exploding under the pressure of cultural studies. For anglophone lm studies in that decade dove straight into this rising river, trying not to drown in the process. Not only were new modes and genres dredged up for discussion, lms themselves were increasingly set aside in favor of other objects of study (audiences, television, advertising).59 As for cinema studies, it has lost much of the vague denition it had, yet as an institution, a society, it swelled with new types of scholars, many of whom found movies and related phenomena to be a ne even an exceptionalsite to monitor social processes. Like many organisms, once a critical size had been reached, lm studies effectively split into separate interest groups. In the midst of the videotape revolution, media came to serve as the common term to buffer cultural studies and lm studies. For media studies inevitably belongs to the former while it includes the latter as one of its manifestations. If any discipline in the humanities can claim to be emergent it would surely be media studies. Always taken as an institution rather than a method, media studies encompasses besides lm, the rst technological medium to win recognition in the academytelevision, radio, and sometimes journalism, even public relations. Most importantly, it features new media at its cutting edge. Media studies effectively amounts to communications reborn in the postmodern era. A growing bibliography of media theory may satisfy skeptics about its seriousness, yet media studies has a difcult time, more difcult than lm studies, proving itself to be methodical in any sustained manner. By the time the SCS added media to its name in 2002, the transforma59. This shift was visible across the humanities. In an analogous case, my former colleague Garrett Stewart claims to envy those of us in comparative literature for the fact that our letterhead at least seems to identify our subject, whereas in English departments the subject now gures as just one among many topics up for grabs in the classroom and, indeed, in professional journals.
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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 lm 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 eld as it now seems constituted, has now been published. Robert Kolkers ne introduction puts in play every permutation of the books two key terms and the objects they deal with. Traditional lm 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-specic interaction. Perhaps lm 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, nds lm 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 oats through a universe that contains artifacts of all sorts, not just the beautiful Milky Way of lms 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 eld has emerged within the humanities as a type of cultural studies. The latter, while inltrating 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 denable, yet indenite, for its two central concepts, ow 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 rst two contributions to The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies establish the potential rivalry of lm 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 lm among the media.62 Film was the rst 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. Grifth, spectators could feel themselves englobed by the ctional 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 ctional world (Grand Theft Auto is Bolters example). He concludes on a generous note, celebrating the diversity of available entertainment, from auratic and authored narrative lms to interactive internet games, while indicating the many crossovers between these (such as interactive features on the DVDs of some feature lms).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 Laoco on: Medium Specicity 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 ow and remediation no object will command attention in and as itself and that the aura of any given lm, like that of cinema in toto, will evaporate.64 He worries that the convergence of all media into an indenitely 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 undened zone of visual culture. Presumably most of those scholars who now identify their eld 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 lm 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 Laocoo n: Medium Specicity and the History of Film Theory, in The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies, pp. 3882.
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dominant twentieth century for the unpoliced period of nineteenth-century audiovisual entertainments or for a twenty-rst century that holds out a future of ever-newer media. Anyone who has learned to deal with artifacts as complex as lms, whose textual systems they know how to analyze and whose place within socioeconomic systems they routinely trace, may feel condent when traveling to meet other media phenomena. I have always held that lm studies grew unusually strong because lms themselves (especially powerful ones) have been able to stand up to the discursive weight that cinephiles (critics) and academics (theorists) have brought to bear on them. A eld was constituted thanks to a fortuitous conjuncture of postwar cinematic modernism running up against a social imperative in the 1960s and new paradigms in the humanities that precipitated out of the events of 1968. Films became ideal objects of analysis because they are fabricated within corporate and semiotic systems, yet they speak back to those systems because they are collectively made and viewed. And they immediately showed themselves to be more than mere illustrations within scholarly debates; they fueled every discussion that engaged their scarcely manageable images and narratives. This multiplied the stakes and consequencesthe excitement of taking lms seriously, ultimately producing the lectures, courses, articles, and books whose debates make up a fertile eld, if not a discipline. The prospect of the decline of those debates in a media studies milieu is more worrisome than the putative mutation of their topic. For our seasoned ability to understand how the movies have functioned and to question how they came to function this way can guide the study of whatever audio-visions attract our attention.65 The fact is that many of the best minds in the humanities turned from literary, philosophical, sociocultural, or historical pursuits to account for the most imposing medium of the twentieth century. They produced often complex, ingenious, and passionate arguments and positions. They produced a way of thinking and cultivated an instinct of looking and listening. Even if much of what has been written could be discarded without real loss, this discoursethis drive to understand the workings of lmsis precious. To have this subsumed by some larger notion of the history of audio-visions, to have it dissipate into the foggy eld of cultural studies, for instance, or become one testing ground among others for communication studies would be to lose something whose value has always derived from the intensity and the focus that lms invite and often demand.
65. I elaborate on this view in Andrew, A Film Aesthetic to Discover, CiNe MAS 17 (Autumn 2007): 4771.
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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 lm object urges the continued growth of lm studies. The lm object should be treated as distinctive enough hard enoughto withstand, at least provisionally, the processes of remediation that devalue any given text. The lm 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 de calage lies at the heart of the medium and of each particular lm, 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 lm image leaps from present to past, for what is edited and shown was lmed at least days, weeks, or months earlier. This slight stutter in its articulation then repeats itself in the time and distance that separates lmmaker from spectator and spectators from each other when they see the same lm 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 denition. In contrast, we go out to the movies, leaving home to cross into a different realm. Every genuine cinematic experience involves de calage, time-lag. After all, we are taken on a ight during and after which we are not quite ourselves. The lm object exists differently, or not at all, when kidnapped by consumers and sequestered on their computer desktops. Not only do individuals watch lms 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 lm, 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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hardware. Called up on demand or via YouTube, a movie appears on a at panel, where many windows are displayedas many as the user chooses, then shufes, moving them around like cards in a game of solitaire. Monitor and display seem more apt terms than screen to designate the visual experience that computers deliver. The computer monitor of the twentyrst century, just like the cine matographe of the nineteenth, presents the viewer with the present, with immediate attractions, no matter what is on display. Cinema, which ruled the twentieth century, pulls the viewer into another world and an encounter with something that has passed and is just out of reach. Perhaps it took later mediaand particularly the new media of video games, the interactive internet, and virtual realityto let us recognize that cinema has never really been about immediacy. Its spontaneity and contingencyits neorealism has always been the lure by which it offers an experience that, properly speaking, is not immediate at all, but reective, resonant, and voluminous. Films provide experiences in such number and variety and to such powerful effect that they deserve and have received sustained study. They discipline us so that we can learn from them. This is a relationship we should not grow out of.

Andrew Film Studies

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The Core and the Flow of Film Studies

Dudley Andrew / Core and Flow of Film Studies

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2009

Dudley Andrew / Core and Flow of Film Studies

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2009

Dudley Andrew / Core and Flow of Film Studies

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2009

Dudley Andrew / Core and Flow of Film Studies

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2009

Dudley Andrew / Core and Flow of Film Studies

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2009

Dudley Andrew / Core and Flow of Film Studies

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2009

Dudley Andrew / Core and Flow of Film Studies

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2009

Dudley Andrew / Core and Flow of Film Studies

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2009

Dudley Andrew / Core and Flow of Film Studies

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2009

Dudley Andrew / Core and Flow of Film Studies

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2009

Dudley Andrew / Core and Flow of Film Studies

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2009

Dudley Andrew / Core and Flow of Film Studies

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2009

Dudley Andrew / Core and Flow of Film Studies

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2009

Dudley Andrew / Core and Flow of Film Studies

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2009

Dudley Andrew / Core and Flow of Film Studies

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2009

Dudley Andrew / Core and Flow of Film Studies

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2009

Dudley Andrew / Core and Flow of Film Studies

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2009

Dudley Andrew / Core and Flow of Film Studies

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2009

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