Beruflich Dokumente
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Film Theory
Film Theory
richard rushton
I have chosen six titles on which to focus here for the years 2013–14: two
significant works on Jean-Luc Godard’s later films—Late Godard and the
Possibilities of Cinema by Daniel Morgan (UCalP [2013]) and Jean-Luc Godard:
Cinema Historian by Michael Witt (IndianaUP [2013]); D.N. Rodowick’s
genealogy of contemporary film theory, Elegy for Theory (HarvardUP [2014]);
Sarah Cooper’s investigation of the term ‘soul’ and its relation to cinema in
The Soul of Film Theory (Palgrave [2013]); Adrian Martin’s journey through
film technique and interpretation in Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical
Hollywood to New Media Art (Palgrave [2014]); and finally Kristen Whissel’s
attempt to theorize contemporary Hollywood in Spectacular Digital Effects:
CGI and Contemporary Cinema (DukeUP [2014]). The chapter is divided into
five sections: 1. Late and Historical Godards; 2. Elegy for Theory; 3. The
Soul of Film Theory; 4. Mise en Scène and Film Style; 5. Spectacular Digital
Effects.
The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 23 ß The English Association (2015)
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234 | Film Theory
judging them’ (p. 261). Godard then takes up this method explicitly by
contrasting production stills of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell from
Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1941). And yet, as Godard states in Notre
Musique, Hawks fails here because he merely ‘shows the same thing twice’
(quoted p. 262). And such a claim might just take us to the heart of the
method of late Godard: projection (and montage and history) are a matter of
putting two things together that do not or cannot go together so that then
one can try to think through the consequences of that incongruity. It is a
matter, then, of trying to discern how something can ‘be two’. If montage is
a bringing together of images, then such images are not brought together
so they can be ‘one’; rather, Godard’s method is one of dividing and
multiplying.
Morgan also tackles, for much of Late Godard, the question of history. It is
here that the questions of montage and projection are again key concerns.
Across the range of films from Allemagne 90 neuf zéro onwards, Godard
follows an approach to history—including the history of cinema—which
refuses explanation or reduction so as to embrace a ‘complex creation of
historical knowledge’ (p. 212). Such a history—histoire—does not reduce
history but expands it, opens it up. Crucially, Morgan tries to tackle Jacques
Rancière’s strong criticisms of Godard’s approach in Histoire(s) du cinéma.
Ranciere’s critique functions on two fronts: firstly, that Godard takes histor-
ical clips entirely out of context so that he can, then, secondly, make those
clips conform to his own, personal, restricted view of history and cinema
history. Morgan counters Rancière by declaring him rather too quick to
judge. Instead of reducing history to his own narrative, Morgan claims,
Godard is opening up and dividing history—and film history—from
within itself. Thus, when commenting on the sequences on Alfred
Hitchcock from episode 4A of Histoire(s)—sequences central to Ranciere’s
critique—Morgan defends Godard’s approach by declaring that the images
and the voiceover are entirely inconclusive, and that Godard’s assessment of
Hitchcock must therefore be ambivalent. And furthermore, such ambiva-
lence is precisely what history itself is: it is impossible to contain. For
Morgan, that is what history can be. And: ‘That’s ok,’ he contends (p. 176).
These are compelling arguments, and Morgan approaches them with care
and subtlety. Michael Witt’s Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema Historian is, like
Morgan’s book, a survey that focuses on Godard’s late works. In Witt’s
book the question of history takes centre stage. Where Morgan is perhaps
overly praiseworthy of Godard’s openness and penchant for ambiguity, Witt
cuts directly to the chase: he provides a remarkably concise account of what
cinema history is for Godard, and from this point an entire picture of the
236 | Film Theory
history of the twentieth century (and beyond) is formed. For Godard, the
history of cinema goes something like this: It is underpinned by an equation
between cinema and montage, and it hinges on a conviction that the silent
cinema, in its best forms, had drawn on all the other arts to create something
unique and sublime. During the 1930s, however, the rise of the talking
picture turned cinema away from its former grandeur in the pursuit of
profit. The Second World War definitively sealed cinema’s fate: the inability
of cinema to counter Nazism or to document the Holocaust were sins from
which the cinema could barely recover. The emergence of television then
reduced the possibilities of cinema even more. Today, cinema can pretty
much only ever provide us with a ‘memory of montage’, and this is precisely
what Godard tries to do in Histoire(s) du cinéma.
What, then, is montage? Like Morgan, Witt makes Godardian montage a
key theme. By way of montage the cinema enables disparate images to be
placed side-by-side in ways that invariably create an association between
them: connection, disjunction, shock, and anything else. The cinema created
this notion of montage in a way that no other art form had. The memory of
montage Godard creates in Histoire(s) is thereby also an experiment in the
coming together of montage and history, or more precisely, of montage
as history. All of this adds up to a conception of montage that is not
merely one that relates to specific cinematic materials—shots, frames,
images, sound—but also to relations between historical events, between
people, between spectator and image, image and world, and so on.
Much of this history can be summed up by Godard’s hostility towards
television. Where he associates cinema with montage, projection and revela-
tion, he associates television with ‘unlearning’ how to see (p. 170). If cinema
is projection, then television is merely programming. With television the
image is reduced and made irrelevant: seeing is eclipsed by speech and
language, and the image is there only as an illustrator for language. But
Witt takes us further into Godard’s critique here: with television a whole
visual repertoire of cinema is undone; there is a lack of attention to framing,
to the duration of shots, to scene composition and, perhaps most crucially,
television brings with it the disappearance of a sense of history (p. 176).
And, in the end, for Godard, the experiences of cinema and television are
entirely different: ‘experiencing films with strangers in the darkened theater
away from one’s family (and the transgressive promise of that experience),
and watching television at home’: the transgressive, open, public promise of
cinema is closed down and domesticated by television (p. 178).
Alongside this Witt articulates Godard’s distinction between cinema and
films. By ‘cinema’ Godard means something like an overarching sense that
Film Theory | 237
the films one goes to see and which have a life in a culture are things that also
shape that sense which a culture has of itself. A culture or nation that could
be defined as cinematic would be one that values those principles of projec-
tion, revelation and montage that the best films can provide. In other words,
cinema does not merely mean ‘the films one goes to see’ but it additionally
means the constellation and composition of the world that arises from a film
culture that cinematizes (my word) the world. By contrast, films are merely
those isolated things—call them commodities—that one might go to see, but
which have little bearing on the life and times of a culture. Films, then,
might just be one of the many things that add up to a generalized eclecticism
of contemporary culture: to eat at McDonalds, then go to the movies, then
listen to the Top 40 on the radio and watch a talk show on TV. For Godard,
today we still have films, but we do not have cinema; ‘We make films,
but not cinema,’ he declared in the 1980s (p. 140).
Witt takes readers on a journey through Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma
project from its initial conception, through its production trials and tribula-
tions, through its ancillary works (such as Je vous salue, Sarajevo (1993) or
De l’origine du XXIe siècle (2000)), while also charting the myriad influences
on the project, from historians—Michelet, Braudel, Péguy, Walter
Benjamin, and others—to art historians—Élie Faure, André Malraux—
cinema historians—Henri Langlois above all—found-footage essayists such
as Guy Debord, all the way through to significant cinematic influences such
as Welles, Cocteau, Bresson and Hitchcock.
What then is history for Godard? History is pretty much equated with a
conception of montage, but a conception of montage that privileges dialec-
tics, ‘constellation’, reconciliation and rapprochement (Witt pp. 181–3;
Morgan makes similar arguments, for example, p. 233). Such approaches
to montage foreground what Witt, after Godard, calls images in order that
the image be distinguished from mere representations or pictures. The image
emerges as a profound conception for Godard; it expresses a ‘combination,
tension, and dynamic interplay among a number of component elements’
(p. 180).
Overall, Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema Historian is quite simply a brilliant book,
a sustained meditation on Godard’s approach to history and his Historie(s) du
cinéma, but also an extraordinary summation of Godard’s entire career. Witt
seems to have an expert knowledge of pretty much all of Godard’s output
and is a master of the critical literature. Together with Morgan’s Late Godard,
scholars now have definitive surveys of Godard’s post-1979 works. Both
books prove that Godard remains a constant challenge for every considera-
tion of cinema.
238 | Film Theory
semiological perspective, Metz’s bets for a new film theory, indeed for
modern theory as such, are placed on the real, or at least a certain image
of the real’ (p. 187). And the real of cinema rubs up against the semiotic
programme: in short: ‘The image is in conflict with language’ (p. 187).
Therefore, the other methodology that Metz insists on acknowledging is
that of phenomenology; it is the link with phenomenology that forever
keeps the cinema away from language. Even more emphatically:
‘Linguistics [. . .] points the way to showing what film is not,’ writes
Rodowick, but at the same time it also points the way to ‘what it is, a
language or discourse of art’ (p. 196).
Rodowick argues that Metz, in founding something called film theory, had
always conceived of that theoretical project as an open one devoted both to
innovation and critique. The remainder of Elegy for Theory then tries to
review the progress of film theory during the 1970s and 1980s, particularly
under the weight of the notion of ideology derived from Louis Althusser.
The sense of ‘theoretical practice’ derived from Althusser was central to the
film theoretical project, and such a practice was devoted to analysing the
world—and cinema—with the goal of transforming that world—and of
transforming the cinema along with it. If nothing else, Althusser emphasized
above all that theory matters. Rodowick is full of praise: ‘Althusser’s concept
of Theory remains strongly present, if often unrecognized as such, in almost
every instance of contemporary theory’ (p. 246).
Finally, then, what comes after theory (or after Theory)? Much of
the point of Rodowick’s book is to question the critics of theory—those
advocates of Post-Theory (for example, D. Bordwell and N. Carroll (eds),
Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (UWisconsinP [1995]))—while at the
same time offering up something of a prelude to his own conception of what
might come after theory. The hints Rodowick gives are that a gesture
towards philosophy might be one way to carve out a destiny for theory
after theory. For that, however, readers will need to wait for a follow-up
book, Philosophy’s Artful Conversation (HarvardUP [2015]).
soul will always be cinematically expressed by the body: bodies are mirrors
of the soul. For Agel, in a similar manner, the cinema can show us the soul of
things because it can provide perceptual access to the delicate and hidden
details of everyday phenomena.
Such arguments are built upon from a far less religious perspective, and
thus in a more scientific spirit, by Edgar Morin in the 1950s—Morin is
another French writer of the period who makes ‘soul’ of central concern in
his writings on cinema. Morin takes the bold step of not merely concentrat-
ing on cinematic expression, but also on the relationship between the spec-
tator and the screen. Here, the transfer between the spectator’s soul and the
screen becomes paramount, and Morin’s rhetoric again stresses emotion and
feeling, with emanations of a ‘magico-affective zone’ (p. 91), ‘affective parti-
cipation’ (p. 93) and a ‘rational-affective system’ (p. 95) all drawn into the
theorization of cinematic soul. Christian Metz enters the discussion where
Morin exits and, although Cooper wants to claim that ‘Morin’s definition of
the soul bears a striking resemblance to the imaginary realm of Metz’s
account’ (p. 102)—noting, of course, the important influence of Morin’s
Cinema, or the Imaginary Man (1956) on Metz’s writings—she also wants to
mark the emergence of structuralism, semiotics and psychoanalysis in film
theory as marking a definitive end to explorations of cinematic soul.
Why did film theory abandon the soul? The main reason, argues Cooper,
is that it erased the body by privileging the mind and the psyche and by
foregrounding structures of meaning. By the 1990s, the body was brought
back in to film theory—Steven Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body (UMinnesotaP
[1993]), Vivian Sobchack’s Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience
(PrincetonUP [1992]), Laura Marks’s The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema,
Embodiment, and the Senses (DukeUP [2000])—but even here there was no
place for soul. Cooper thus ventures back to the phenomenology of
Merleau-Ponty and there she finds a very sympathetic approach to the
soul that has been removed from contemporary speculations on phenomen-
ology and film. The main enemy in these musings is rational thought, for the
soul, Cooper writes, is the enemy of rational thought and reflection, and,
against such mind-based rationalism Cooper finds in Merleau-Ponty the
possibility of a material, embodied encounter that suspends rational thought.
It is in this way that a novel conception of cinematic soul could potentially be
theorized.
The final chapter of Cooper’s book takes up this challenge in relation to
contemporary film theory, with her theoretical-philosophical markers being,
for the most part, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy. The former has,
of course, long been associated with the films of the Dardenne brothers,
242 | Film Theory
while the latter has been associated with Claire Denis’s films, and Cooper
explores these connections while trying also to figure out the relations
between body and soul at work there. Finally, there is a quite extraordinary
series of reflections on the writings of Henri Bergson—whom Cooper gets
to by way of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books—especially of an interview on
cinema with Bergson from 1914 and a lecture on ‘Body and Soul’ from
1912.
For all its attempts to concentrate on soul, The Soul of Film Theory must
nevertheless be positioned as a work that champions the body and phenom-
enological philosophy. Its clear enemy is rational thought and the psyche,
especially as these rose to prominence in film theory between the 1960s and
the 1980s. Of course, rather startlingly, Cooper overlooks the fact that
psyche is itself a conception of soul—‘soul’ is the most common way to
interpret the Greek term, psyche. And Cooper could look no further than
Freud himself for a complex and intricate theorization of soul, and perhaps
along with it, Julia Kristeva’s impressive New Maladies of the Soul (Fayard
[1993]), written very much from a psychoanalytic perspective. Cooper does
mention Freud’s use of Seele (pp. 12–13) and the Greek term psyche (p. 7) as
well as Kristeva’s book (p. 104), but somehow these are never considered
together in terms that might produce a theory of the soul. Cooper’s book
seems to eradicate all traces of psyche from the soul, and this might be its
greatest fault. Alongside such reservations is Cooper’s reluctance to ascribe
any sort of history to conceptions of the soul so that Michel Foucault’s
probing critique of the way that the meaning of soul was transferred from
a religious to a secular context in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is
absent from Cooper’s account. Foucault’s point, primarily in Discipline and
Punish (Gallimard [1975]), was that a new conception of soul as an interior
moral conscience was the harbinger of modern forms of self-discipline and
self-surveillance, forms of moral rectitude and self-denial. From such a
perspective, conceptions of soul might just be ones that offer only modes
of modern self-imprisonment and repression. Thus, there is a pretty strong
part of this reader that thinks perhaps conceptions of cinematic soul are best
treated with the utmost caution.
that discussions of mise en scène are mired either in a traditionalist stance that
foregrounds profilmic reality, the long take and depth of field à la Bazin, or
they are so confused and ambiguous that mise en scène ends up meaning both
nothing and everything. With such dilemmas in mind, Martin sets about
defining more clearly a range of options for mise en scène analysis which his
book then tries to make good on. Ultimately, Mise en Scène and Film Style can
be seen as something of a guide to the many and varied ways of thinking and
writing about mise en scène, and Martin admirably takes readers on a range of
journeys through the myriad possibilities, hopes and dreams of cinema from
the perspective of mise en scène.
What, then, is mise en scène for Martin? It is many things (perhaps too
many): style and stylistic patterns (p. 4), the materiality of film rather than
story or content or meaning (p. 4), affect (p. 18), spatio-temporal relation-
ships (p. 19); it encompasses editing (p. 55), it embraces textual analysis
(end of Chapter 2), the long take (p. 78), aspects of sound, speech and voice
(Chapter 6); it advocates links with the real world, of social and cultural
codes—what Martin dubs ‘social mise en scène’ (Chapter 7); it defends
audiovisual layering, especially as this pertains to contemporary television,
Reality TV and internet films (Chapter 8). Finally, in Chapter 9 of the book,
Martin theorizes a new notion of the dispositif, which he tries to distance
from earlier conceptions of apparatus, appareil and dispositif—especially that
of Jean-Louis Baudry from the early 1970s—in order to focus on a concep-
tion of the ‘contraption’. Martin claims that the dispositif is a key factor in
contemporary adventurous filmmaking and that it is a matter of conceiving of
the filmmaking process in terms of a game that has specific rules. In other
words, a filmmaker like Abbas Kiarostami will often set out to make a film
according to specific constraints in order to then see what will come of it—
for example, Ten (2000) is filmed entirely from digital cameras mounted in
front of a car’s windscreen, or Shirin (2008) is composed entirely of shots of
people (women) who are themselves watching a film (an imaginary film,
more to say). Martin’s point is that these kinds of films are very much
experiments in mise en scène: they play with, explore and push the boundaries
of film style.
Do I have reservations? Yes. Throughout Mise en Scène and Film Style an
opposition between ‘classical’ film style and its other—a more ‘adventurous’
style of filmmaking—is utilized in order to ensure film style is prioritized
over anything else it is that films might do. Especially and above all, film
style—and mise en scène analysis—is placed above anything in film that has to
do with merely ‘telling a story’. This is most clearly brought out in the
distinction between expressive and excessive that frames the book’s second
244 | Film Theory
emancipation, while at the same time the morph also seems to signal a
crippling, robotic sense of constraint and control. The T-1000 character
from Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) provides an excellent example: the
T-1000 can shift and morph into any kind of substance (a promise of freedom)
but at the same time is constrained to the most one-dimensionally specific
command—to kill John Connor. Thus, the digital morph is an emblem that
gives expression to contemporary anxieties of freedom and control, human
bodies and identities, as well as those between humans and machines.
Whissel concludes Spectacular Digital Effects with a brief consideration of
how some non-blockbuster films have also used digital effects emblems, most
notably Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2010). The book’s concluding state-
ments ring true:
Effects emblems are stunning (and often computer-generated or
digitally enhanced) visual effects that give spectacular expression to
the major conceits, themes, anxieties, and desires both of the films in
which they appear and of the historical moments in which they were
produced and exhibited. (p. 171)
‘While many critical works,’ Whissel adds, ‘have defined elaborate visual
effects as either discontinuous or empty spectacle devoid of meaning [. . .],
‘‘effects emblems’’ in fact function as spectacular sites of intense and often
complex signification’ (p. 172). Spectacular Digital Effects is the finest account
I have read of cinema’s digital age.
Books Reviewed
Cooper, Sarah. The Soul of Film Theory. Palgrave. [2013] pp. 224. hb £50 ISBN 9 7802
3036 5131.
Martin, Adrian. Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New
Media Art. Palgrave. [2014] pp. 272. hb £60 ISBN 9 7811 3726 9942.
Morgan, Daniel. Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema. UCalP. [2013] pp. 304.
pb £19.95 ISBN 9 7805 2027 3337.
Rodowick, D.N. Elegy for Theory. HarvardUP. [2014] pp. 304. hb £29.95 ISBN 9 7806
7404 6696.
Whissel, Kristen. Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema.
DukeUP. [2014] pp. 213. pb £16.99 ISBN 9 7808 2235 5885.
Witt, Michael. Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema Historian. IndianaUP. [2013] pp. 288. 261
illustrations. pb $35 ISBN 9 7802 5300 7285.
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