Review article

The work of film analysis: Systems,

fragments, alternation*

TOM GUNNING

The Analysis of Film, by Raymond Bellour, published by Indiana

University Press, primarily provides a translation of Bellour’s L’Analyse
du film published in France in 1979. Four somewhat earlier short essays
included in the original French edition [including Bellour’s important
‘Sur Fritz Lang’ which is available in English translation in the BFI
anthology Fritz Lang: The Image and the Look edited by Stephen Jenkins
(London: BFI Publishing, 1981)] have been omitted due to space —
‘regrettably’, as the volume’s editor, Constance Penley, indicates in her
insightful and concise preface to the book. In addition, an essay not
included in the original French edition and written shortly after its initial
publication, ‘To Alternate/ To Narrate’, has been added. While one may
share Penley’s regret that it was not possible to include the shorter early
articles (particularly those untranslated), one must affirm her editorial
good sense in creating a volume that, with the addition of ‘To Alternate/
To Narrate,’ maintains a sharp focus on Bellour’s approach to film
analysis from the decades of the seventies and early eighties.
The publication of a seminal volume in film studies slightly more than
two decades after its initial appearance raises the issue of belatedness.
Delayed publication of a translation can create an uncanny effect. That
Walter Benjamin’s essays were not translated into English until the late
sixties (and indeed waited until the mid-fifties to be collected in Germany)
now seems part of the cunning of history, a cultural time bomb set to
detonate at a later period ripe for its insights. But more frequently such a
lag in translation creates a sense of historical distance from the original
text. For instance, although it is dangerous to predict such things, I do not
expect a major revision in film studies to be triggered by the recent, much
delayed, translation and publication (also by Indiana University Press)
of the theoretical work of Jean Mitry (although I still feel a thorough

*Raymond Bellour, The Analysis of Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Semiotica 144–1/4 (2003), 343–357 0037–1998/03/0144 – 0343

# Walter de Gruyter
344 T. Gunning

collection and translation of the much earlier theoretical work of Jean

Epstein could have considerable impact).
However, one should not exaggerate the belated appearance of
the Bellour essays. Although they have never been gathered in a single
volume, nor given the coherence that Penley’s editorship and preface
provides, most of them have been available in English, (although
some, like the analysis of a sequence from Hitchcock’s The Birds, ‘System
of a Fragment’ only through the most out-of-the-way sources). Even the
previously untranslated ‘Symbolic Blockage’ had been summarized and
discussed in English (although to provide this long and formidable text
in a complete form in English performs a great service). Thus Bellour’s
work in the analysis of film has not only been previously available to
English scholars, but has been seminal, particularly in the early decades of
film studies. If American (and English language) film studies established
itself academically in the seventies as a discipline with a scholarly
methodology and a complex theoretical basis, it was largely due to a sort
of cultural invasion from France (often filtered, as a number of Bellour’s
essays were, through the British journal Screen or its BFI adjuncts) of
the works Christian Metz, Jean Baudry, and Raymond Bellour.
Thus, beyond providing an invaluable service to teachers and students
by bringing these scattered translations under one cover and making
their internal coherence clear, this volume provides an opportunity to
focus on the role of Bellour and the ‘analysis of film’ (which Penley
astutely points out is more than a synonym for ‘film analysis’) in this
founding legacy. Since psychoanalysis played an important role in French
theory’s influence on film study, it seems ironic that this legacy has in
recent years been subjected to, not only an often devastating critique, but
such a degree of hostility that one suspects Oedipal currents at work. This
review article does not allow space for a full rehearsal of the waves of
theory and counter-theory that have swept over American film studies
in the past decades (I say, with a sigh of relief more than regret). I must
confess that I find much of the critique of the founding theories of film
study both solid and important, especially the critique of the characteriza-
tion of film spectatorship provided by Baudry, which became known as
‘apparatus theory’. However, I should add that if I find the solutions
and descriptions offered by this pioneering theory confining and even
pernicious in effect, I still value its raising of basic issues about the nature
of the film medium, which I do not think can be reduced to principles of
experimental psychology. Grand theories of spectatorship, whether based
on the apparatus or investigations of cognitive behavior, seem equally
determined to reduce or ignore the challenges of the vast and complex
realm of film culture and history. But I would claim that the methods
 The work of film analysis 345

of film analysis and the conception of the film text laid out by Bellour’s
essays do not necessarily entail the dead-ends of apparatus theory.
Rereading these seminal essays by Bellour provides more than a
historical perspective on the foundations of modern film studies. Penley’s
preface explains Bellour himself has moved away from the methodology
inscribed here, and one hopes that this publication will be followed up by
a much needed translation of the work Bellour has done since these
essays. But far from being museum pieces, the methods described in this
volume are worthy of renewed debate, and remain, I feel, fundamental to
film study. Bellour himself prefaced the original French publication with
the essential essay ‘A Bit of History’ (another previously untranslated gem
this publication makes available), which places the collected essays within
a historical context. Here Bellour describes what was unique and new
about the approach to film study introduced in France in the sixties and
how his own work grows out of, and also deviates from it, especially
the semiology of Christian Metz. While Bellour strongly participates in
the currents and even methodology of French film studies in the late
sixties and seventies, with its basis in semiotic analysis and its attraction
to psychoanalysis as a mode of understanding textual operations, he
nonetheless fashioned a very unique approach whose subtle differences
are worth rediscovering. While it might not be entirely legitimate to
separate Bellour’s early work from the aporia that I feel apparatus theory
ultimately entails, I do feel that his methods of analysis offers an alter-
native view of the way textual energy operates in film than offered by
Metz or Baudry.
While he never worked it out as a theoretical opposition, Bellour chose
a different starting point for his method than that of Metz’s semiology,
specifically, his concern is with individual film analysis and stylistics.
Although Bellour indicates in ‘A Bit of History’ that he sees analysis as
something different from criticism (and I will return to his definition of
that difference later), his work is rooted in criticism. Of the three terms
that make up the canonical divisions of film study — theory, history, and
criticism — criticism remains the least explored. Part of Bellour’s unique
value lies in his continuing role as film critic, provided we can untangle
that term from the consumer guide embodied in the imperial thumbs up
and down of American film journalism.
Criticism and analysis both diverge sharply from Metz’s semiotics. As
Bellour puts it, Metz omitted film analysis, ‘with a justified concern for
generality’ (p. 7). In contrast to this thirst for the general, Bellour’s work
gives voice to ‘the desire for analysis,’ a desire ‘to respond to the ineluct-
able particularity of the object’ (p. 7). Differentiating his method from a
fetishistic connoisseurship of details, Bellour roots his method of analysis
346 T. Gunning

in a concern for the fragment as the mode of investigation. This method of

fragmentation constitutes for Bellour the threshold between criticism and
analysis. The discovery of the fragment as the essential tool of analysis
not only defines a new method, but marks an important historical and
technological turning point in the history of film study as well: the
replacement of the projector as the sole mode by which the film critic had
access to film by the appearance of a new critical use of viewing machines.
By ‘viewing machine’ I indicate any apparatus (editing table, analytical
projector, or today, the VCR or DVD — the substantial differences
between these modes is not my issue at the moment) that allows the
analyst to freeze the action of the film, to render the continuous time and
flow of the film suddenly discontinuous. Both criticism and analysis,
Bellour indicates, constitutes assaults on the object of their scrutiny, but
‘any true detailed analysis carries the murder of its object to its extreme’
(p. 2). In cinema, whose very nature involves movement and continuity,
the frozen image made possible by the viewing machine represents both
the death of the film phenomenon and the birth of analysis. But if Bellour
uses the violent metaphor of murder for this process, he does so under the
shadow of his obsession with Hitchcock, in which the act of murder
frequently displaces the act of love (see, for instance, Bellour’s discussion
of the scene in North by Northwest in which Thornhill, embracing Eve
Kendall, asks if he should murder her and she whispers erotically, ‘Please
do _’ [p. 93]). Bellour stresses the violence needed to wrest the fragment
from the body of the film, but he also hears a whispered ‘desire of the film’
that promises to ‘be concentrated in every fragment’.
Thus Bellour’s analysis, instead of seeking out the semiotic logic that
underlies all films, as Metz did, starts with the position profoundly stated
in his key essay ‘The Unattainable Text’, that a film resists analysis
because it cannot be, as literature can, quoted. This essay, originally
published in a special issue dedicated to Christian Metz of Ca Cinema,
parallels in some ways Metz’s early essays, which caution against the
impulse in early film semiology to find too quickly parallels between the
cinema and spoken or written language. As Metz does, Bellour stresses
the semiotic uniqueness of cinema. However, when Metz noted the
incommensurability of language and cinema on the paradigmatic level, so
that no film image truly corresponds to a word in language, he simply
switched his focus to larger categories, so that a generalized paradigmatic
system reasserted itself on the level of narrative segments. Although he
occasionally uses Metz’s Grand Syntagmique, Bellour’s impulse moves
in an entirely different direction. The incommensurability of written
language and the moving image puts in play an agonistic process of
analysis in which the analyst employing written language always misses
 The work of film analysis 347

the specific nature of the moving image. Aware that the film image always
remains in some sense out of reach, the devices of analysis, such as the
freeze frame, while never truly quoting the film, nonetheless reconfigure
the film as a text.
If the analyst creates the textual fragment of the cinema through the
violence inflicted on the body of the film, Bellour therefore avoids the
conundrum of defining the essential element of the cinema. Like Metz
he avoids an overly literal identification of either the frame or the
shot as the basic element of film analysis. But unlike Metz’s Grand
Syntagmatique, he does not move to a system of larger elements such
as narrative segments. Bellour’s avoidance of semiotic or linguistic
vocabulary in his analysis was a move whose boldness was never perhaps
remarked upon enough. Bellour uses shot breakdowns in his Hitchcock
analyses, but these function partly as a somewhat arbitrary means of
marking a place within a film. Likewise the larger figure of the segment
has for Bellour an avowedly arbitrary nature, rather than forming a
logical system as in Metz’s Grand Syntagmatique.
It would be a mistake, however, to underestimate the role that the shot
does play in both his analysis of The Birds and North by Northwest. The
shot remains the unit that displays the formal oppositions and similarities
that Bellour analyzes. But Bellour does not focus our attention on shots
as individual elements, but rather as fragments within a system whose true
structure is revealed by the play of alternation between shots. Bellour’s
profound insight into the nature of alternation in cinema stylistics
constitutes a key insight into the nature of cinematic form. But Bellour
does not limit the figure of alternation to a device of editing; it
never becomes simply one of the option of the Grand Syntagmatique as
it does with Metz.
In his essay on Gigi ‘To Segment/To Analyze’ alternation and rhyming
structure the film as a whole, relating, for instance, the film’s opening
formally to the ending. Alternation functions not only between shots, or
even between sequences, but also between what Bellour calls macro-
segments. Thus Bellour’s analysis avoids defining film segments in terms
of single characteristics (such as the presence of the cuts that define a shot,
or the rather vague unities of action that define Metz’s syntagmas).
Patterns of alternation, rhyming, repetition, and so forth, structure the
film text in a more dynamic manner. Thus, as he says in ‘To Segment/To
Analyze’: ‘A fragment of a shot _ turns out to be textually commutable
with a segment that it anticipates: a shot that is prolonged into a
scene _ ’ (p. 203). Patterns of opposition need not take the ready-made
segments of the decoupage as their elements, whether shots or sequences,
but can utilize anything ranging from elements larger than sequences to
348 T. Gunning

fragments of shots. The play of mirroring and alternation, or repetitions

and differences makes up the textuality of the cinema in Bellour’s ana-
lysis, rather than materially or structurally determined positive elements.
Bellour makes a move similar to that of Roland Barthes in S/Z, breaking
the text into lexias whose length is not determined by any preexisting
schema, but rather by the way they fit into the analysis.
The analyst moves freely through multiple levels of the text tracing the
play of repetition and difference, as Bellour puts it, ‘as much at the level of
the global destiny of the narrative, of its massive and manifest design, as it
is at the level of the infinite detail of each of its components’ (p. 12). The
extensive (a hundred and fifteen pages of text, images, and diagrams) —
and indeed often maddening — essay, ‘Symbolic Blockage’, takes up
precisely this tasks of tracing the plays of repetition across all the levels
of the text, from the macro structure of the narrative to the patterns of
spatial movement within shots.
Bellour’s originality lies partly in the way he conceives the elements of
analysis, but also in his understanding of the order in which to arrange
these elements into a system. As the ‘Symbolic Blockage’ essay
demonstrates most fully, Bellour traces an order that regulates the text,
evident in everything from details within shots to the basic opposition
within the narrative. Here we find Bellour at his most ingenuous, most
totalizing, most challenging, and in some respect most maddening. If
I am somewhat skeptical of this totalizing impulse, I acknowledge the
importance of Bellour’s concept of textual order, and admire his elegance
and intricacy in theorizing and demonstrating it.
Bellour’s conception of textual order is dynamic. He does not describe a
process of classification, nor a combinatoire of fixed elements, but sees the
text as the product of dynamic tensions that must be worked through and
resolved. Two basic principles rule his analyses. First and primary is the
dynamic opposition between symmetry and asymmetry. This opposition
operates both on the level of the shot and its formal properties and that
of narrative action, generating a dynamic process in which asymmetries
become symmetries and vice versa. As Bellour succinctly puts it in his
analysis of a segment from Howard Hawk’s The Big Sleep, ‘The Obvious
and the Code’; ‘It is not surprising, therefore, that it should be the
regulated opposition between the closing off of symmetries and the
opening up of dissymmetries that gives rise to the narrative, to the very
fact that there is a narrative’. Bellour’s analyses primarily trace this play
of symmetry and asymmetry through the film both on the formal and
the narrative level. The symmetries express themselves both through
repetitions, that is the reoccurrence of elements, as well as through the
somewhat more elusive concept of ‘rhyme’, which seems to indicate
 The work of film analysis 349

a relation of similarity, but not a strict repetition. Symmetries also refer to

larger patterns of balance, so that Bellour frequently finds centers within
segments that bifurcate the segment into subsegments on either side of
such a center and create proportions of balance (say in number of shots in
each sequence) — or stress the lack of balance.
The tracing of symmetries and asymmetries becomes more complex
with Bellour’s adoption of the two central rhetorical devices of psycho-
analysis: condensation and displacement. These are transformative terms.
As Freud points out in his use of them in the analysis of the unconscious
in dreams or parapraxis, they are methods for maintaining secret
relations of similarity beneath an apparent dissimilarity. Therefore, as
is evident primarily in his analysis of segments from Hitchcock’s The
Birds or North by Northwest, in charting the relation of rhyme or repeti-
tion or the proportional balance between subsegments, these displace-
ment or condensations can reveal repetitions or balances that were not
evident literally.
According to Bellour, in the American film, this movement between
balance and imbalance is ‘designed so as not to be perceived’. ‘But,’
Bellour adds immediately, ‘it exists, and from it the classical mode of
narration draws a part of its power’ (p. 72). This invisibility partly derives
from the way the formal play slides under the narrative significance.
However, Bellour does not see his analysis as a mode of discovering
the text’s ‘secret’ but rather as exposing its method of textual production.
The fitting together of the play of formal symmetry/asymmetry and the
structure of the narrative creates the final balance of the classical fiction
film. As Bellour states in ‘The Obvious and the Code’:

[I]n the classical American cinema, meaning is constituted by a correspondence in

the balances achieved — as a law of the text in development — throughout its
numerous codic and pluricodic levels, in other words, its systems. Multiple in both
nature and extension, these cannot be reduced to any unitary structure or semantic
relationship. (p. 75)

The work of analysis traces the work that the film undertakes to achieve
balance, rather than interpreting it. Bellour’s analyses trace these sym-
metries and asymmetries in both the level of the opposition of formal
traits and the level that carries narrative significance. One hesitates to
declare the two levels independent, since Bellour’s analyses demonstrate
the way they twine about and slide under each other. However, their
interrelation depends on a certain independence. Bellour demonstrates
that the logic of a fragment or sequence is based not simply on the expres-
sion of the narrative, but on a formal system not always immediately
evident and therefore in need of explication.
350 T. Gunning

Bellour’s method consists partly of taking a sequence and isolating

a fairly limited number of formal opposition and deducing patterns from
their distribution through the segment. Typical formal oppositions
between shots are: static/moving (this can be applied both to the action
within the shot and the movement of the camera creating two sets of
oppositions); closer or more distant shot sizes (which can include inter-
mediary sizes); direct or angled camera positions; presence or absence
of specific characters; subject or object of the look (as in the point of view
[POV] structure). For the most part the selection of these categories
derives from the stylistics of the film. In his Hitchcock analysis, the
opposition subject/object of the look derives from the director’s elaborate
and consistent use of POV. But in Bellour’s analysis of the segment from
The Big Sleep, which does not employ POV cutting, the angle of the
camera in relation to the character is analyzed instead. However, Bellour
does not really explicate his choice of oppositional features, leaving
an impression that the choices are obvious. I have no doubt that dif-
ferent analyses could be made of these sequences based on a different,
but possible, choice of oppositional features. This is not a devastating
criticism of Bellour’s method, but it does indicate that the role of
critical and interpretative choice, a key aspect of Bellour’s method, is
sometimes neglected in these early essays, producing a false appearance
of methodological objectivity.
A closer look at one of Bellour’s analyses will display primarily the
strengths I think this method offers, but also, secondarily, the conun-
drums of the intricate obscurity it can entail. In ‘System of a Fragment’,
Bellour convincingly argues that shot 33 of the segment of Melanie’s boat
trip from The Birds, forms a center to this sequence. In this shot Melanie,
having entered the Brenner house, places the card reading ‘To Cathy’ on
the bird cage she leaves there and tears up a card addressed to Mitch
(transforming an erotically charged joke gift into a child’s birthday
offering, a semantic loaded metamorphosis Bellour does not really
unfold). On the narrative level, Melanie here achieves the purpose of her
boat trip and her completed action divides the sequence symmetrically
into the previous trip out from the town dock to the Brenner house and
the forthcoming trip back from the house to the town dock. But shot 33,
and the shots surrounding it of Melanie in the interior of the Brenner
house, also stand out as different on the level of formal oppositions.
During these shots the POV pattern of edited alternation between Melanie
and what she sees, maintained throughout most of the boat trip to the
house, is interrupted. Similarly, the alternation between close and distant
views that characterized the boat trip out, is replaced by a series of shots
of similar framing sizes.
 The work of film analysis 351

Bellour’s analysis does not stop with isolating this center that displays
a classical symmetry. Following a baroque logic, he posits a second
center to the segment. What Bellour terms the ‘architecture of the scene’
(p. 52), reveals an asymmetry between Melanie’s boat trip out and her
return trip, a disproportion evident in the number of shots devoted to
the very first part her boat trip out, her departure from the town dock
(3 shots), in contrast to the prolonged approach to the town dock
on her return trip, which takes up 12 shots. As Bellour notes, this
asymmetry is easily explained on the narrative level by the fact that
after her departure from the Brenner house, Melanie’s boat is noticed by
Mitch Brenner, and the sequence no longer simply presents Melanie’s
point of view but alternates between Melanie and Mitch. Thus
Bellour discovers a second center to the sequence, the shot in which
Mitch sees Melanie through his binoculars, which initiates this second
alternation.
This second center divides Melanie’s return trip into two subsegments,
the sequence in which she waits in her boat to watch Mitch’s reaction to
her gift and then her starting and running the boat after he sees her. As
Bellour points out, her return trip alternates between her boat and Mitch’s
car as he drives around the water to meet her at the dock. In terms of
formal symmetry this description of a second center more fully describes
the ‘architecture’ of the segment, since the act of Mitch seeing Melanie
motivates an asymmetry in the second half of the segment, making the act
of returning into two trips by two characters in two different vehicles.
Further, the act of seeing here is thematized, as Bellour discusses later in
the essay. Bellour’s recurring claim for the key role of the romantic couple
in maintaining the narrative balance of classical cinema is here articulated
through the exchange of mutual looks, emphasized by the device of the
binoculars.
I am fully in accord with this formal analysis and the role of balance it
traces. However, Bellour later claims that shot 33 ‘shows Melanie where
it ought to show Mitch.’ Here I have trouble following the analysis. I find
both the displacement on which he bases this counter-intuitive claim too
difficult to follow, and have no sense of where this ‘ought’, this force of
necessity, comes from. Is the formal necessity that these two centers must
display homologies? Bellour makes it clear in the following paragraph
that, ‘It makes no sense to invoke the lack of this shot [of Mitch] unless it
signifies the transferential operation taking place between Mitch and
Melanie’. In other words, unless we reach into the interpretive realm,
rather than the harmonies of formal symmetries, the scandalous absence
of Mitch need not even come up as an issue. Why then invoke formal
homology? Again I do not dispute the interpretive moves Bellour makes,
352 T. Gunning

but feel they are being camouflaged by dubious formal necessities as

if they were something to be embarrassed of.
I find enormous value in both levels of Bellour’s analyses. First, his
systematic investigation of symmetries and asymmetries on what he calls
the micro-level I believe absolutely reveals something about the systematic
nature of the order given to shots through film’s historical relation to
narrative. As Bellour’s masterful essay on Griffith’s, ‘To Alternate/To
Narrate,’ shows, American narrative film in its early stages seized upon
the alternation created by the introduction and resolution of similarities
and dissimilarities as a fundamental mode of storytelling. The freedom in
space and time that editing allowed was reconceived by Griffith as a
systematic play with and resolution of differences. As the essay on The Big
Sleep likewise demonstrates, this play of alternation became part of the
‘invisible’ structure of classical Hollywood. And, as the essays on
Hitchcock display, authors such as Hitchcock (and I would add Griffith)
working within the classical mode also found ways to systematize the
play of symmetries/asymmetries into an almost obsessive system and,
as Bellour brilliantly claims in the end of ‘System of a Fragment’, and
develops more fully in his brilliant essay on Marnie, ‘To Enunciate,’ the
system is used as a means of inscribing authorship in their films.
Likewise the interpretive stretch in Bellour’s analyses, a gesture whose
force I feel he sometimes tries to cloak with his more formal and
systematic analyses, supplies great insights. The convergence he claims
between Mitch’s gaze at Melanie and the attack of the gull that ends his
segment seems to me a compelling reading, marshaling chains of
association across the film and across Hitchcock’s oeuvre. But I do not
think it is necessitated by the formal symmetries traced in the analyses.
These are different sorts of analytic claims even if they are intricately
interwoven by the critic.
But I am not claiming that the formal symmetries/asymmetries are
irrelevant to the interpretive moves. Frequently the sliding of one under
the other that Bellour performs/reveals is fully convincing. Thus formal
repetitions and variations signal the pertinence of certain moments for
interpretation by revealing their privileged positions within a segment.
The two centers Bellour isolates in the segment from The Birds highlight
key moments, rich semantic as well as structural, knots. Hitchcock
particularly seems to work in this manner and it also explains some of the
classical style’s ‘invisibility’ as formal complexity directs attention to
narrative significance. In the segment of Melanie’s boat trips the direct
opposition set up between the anodyne love birds Melanie transports in
the beginning of the segment and the down-swooping gull that invades
the end of the segment is rendered more salient by their symmetrical
 The work of film analysis 353

placement at the end and the beginning. The key positions of the two
centers Bellour isolates in the segment makes us re-examine them in
thinking through this transformation of the segment’s tone from harmless
to wounding. Thus the role of Mitch’s gaze in the wounding of Melanie
becomes cued through the formal structure of the segment. Likewise
Bellour points out that the segment’s dominant POV alternation between
Melanie looking and the object of her gaze becomes suddenly inverted
at the narrative climactic moment when she looks at herself (instead of
elsewhere) and sees the blood from the wound on her glove. The asym-
metry introduced by this new use of POV coincides powerfully with the
violent nature of the moment and raises again the ambiguities of the role
of the look in Hitchcock.
Bellour’s longest essay, ‘Symbolic Blockage’, pursues these relations
between formal systems and narrative structures further. Here the ‘system
of a fragment’ — Bellour’s painstaking analysis of the repetitions,
rhymes, symmetries and asymmetries, displacements and resolutions of
even subshot elements — is balanced by a consideration of the structure
of the film as a whole. This essay not only traces ‘the desire of the film
concentrated in every fragment’, but tackles the relation of these frag-
ments to the film’s complete narrative. Psychoanalysis plays an essential
role, not only through the rhetoric of displacement and condensation, but
by supplying a metanarrative for the plot: the Oedipal drama. The essay
begins with a complex reading of North by Northwest, discovering beneath
the film’s espionage thriller plot the Oedipal trajectory of Roger
Thornhill’s separation from his mother and his achieving a true hetero-
sexual relation with Eve Kendall. This trajectory moves Thornhill’s
through the (symbolic) murder of the father, as he endures the threat of
castration and achieves reconciliation and identification with the father
embodied in the figures of law and order, followed by a final dif-
ferentiation from the father, thus attaining his own status as patriarchal
authority. This analysis primarily employs symbolic interpretations
(e.g. Vandamm and the murdered Townsend show many characteristics
of a patriarch figure: authority, dignity, etc.; the garden shears that
sinisterly clip off the head of a flower refer to castration), as well as
following rhymes that effect displacements (a scene with Thornhill and his
mother in a hotel rhymes with a later hotel scene with Thornhill and Eve).
Bellour’s analysis, of course, is more complex than my summary here. He
provides one of the finest psychoanalytical readings of any film, one I find
consistent and convincing, even if I believe Hitchcock plays with and
parodies these Freudian elements as much as he exemplifies them.
But embedded within the Oedipal narrative is Bellour’s extended
analysis of Segment 14, the famous crop-dusting sequence. The method
354 T. Gunning

used here follows the basic principles laid out in ‘System of a Fragment’,
detailing the dynamic relations between symmetries and asymmetries.
Bellour stresses here something evident but less thematized in the earlier
analysis, the role of interruptions, moments in which patterns of alter-
nation are broken. The analysis Bellour produces takes on the nature
of an obsessive cataloguing of the elements of the segment, its spatial
coordinates, patterns of movement within its locale, the paradigmatic
sequence of vehicles that pass through the sequence and the patterns of
POV alternation in which the editing divides subject and object of vision,
often then to interrupt this alternation with a shot that contains both
elements. The play between symmetries and asymmetries uncovered by
this analysis becomes dizzying, but fully explicates the logic of sequence.
My skepticism here circles around two issues. First, many of the
patterns of symmetry/asymmetry arise from a series of binary oppositions
(such as looking/object seen) that are applied to them. Described in terms
of binary oppositions elements will necessarily arrange themselves into
ordered sets, but this is a product of the analysis, not necessarily an
attribute of the elements in themselves. A photograph can be digitally
broken down into binary units of degrees of dark and light, which says a
great deal about the nature of digital reproduction but less about the
structure of the original photograph. Within a succession of elements
described in terms of binary oppositions, the symmetry of repetition will
either be maintained or be interrupted. That the analysis will produce a
pattern of symmetry/asymmetry and their interruptions and resolutions is
hardly surprising, since it is contained within the assumptions of the
method. The value of such analysis therefore must depend on the choice
of oppositional elements and the significance of these choices. The struc-
ture of POV we know to be an important device in Hitchcock’s oeuvre,
allowing him both a mode of narration (seeing action from the point of
view of a character) and an important thematic element (the look,
thematized most obviously in Rear Window). Therefore Bellour’s analysis
of the alternation based on point of view in this sequence seems to me
quite valuable and significant.
I am less engaged by the detailed discussion of the directions of the
vehicles and their order. Given the limited number of options available to
them, any series of choices can form an ordered set, particularly if an
interruption of order can become part of the system. The vehicles can
either arrive or depart. Since we are at crossroads, they have only four
directional options. Since the airplane need not follow the road, it seems a
deviant vehicle, and Bellour’s plotting of its trajectory seems to me an
ingenuous but ultimately dubious project. Having raised these objections,
however, let me modify them, but in a manner that Bellour does not
 The work of film analysis 355

pursue in his analysis. The unique nature of this scene (which has made it
legendary) comes largely from its desolate location in which options for
running and hiding are limited. It is essential to Hitchcock’s dramaturgy
that the locale be fully comprehensible to the viewer, that the viewer have
a strong sense of its rather minimal geography: intersection of roads, dried
out corn fields, empty spaces. Thus the systematic laying out of the space
through both the arrival and departure of the various vehicles and the
systematic deployment of Thornhill’s POV guarantees the segment’s
dramatic effect. Bellour’s analysis demonstrates how this is done, even if
he does not describe it in these terms.
My second skepticism focuses on Bellour’s claim about the relation
between the macrolevel of narrative and the microlevel of shot and
subshot elements. Clearly the order found on both levels involves the play
of symmetries and asymmetries, their opening up and their resolution of
disparities, but this is due to the fact that a similar method is used on both
levels. The question is, Does the balancing act Bellour traces on what he
calls the microlevel, the shot-to-shot level of the segment, actually have
consequences for the balancing act on the macrolevel of narrative?
Bellour’s answer is extremely subtle. He acknowledges a gap between the
two systems, but a productive one. The microsystem ‘always seems to
escape the narrative while never ceasing to construct it’ (p. 190). But
ultimately he claims the homology of method, the ebb and flow of
symmetries and asymmetries, and unites them in this labor of con-
struction: ‘The back-and-forth movement that carries the general rhyme
from degree zero to the absolute limit of the system is the pulse of the
symbolic commanded from its beginning to its end by the signification of
desire to the law that governs it’ (p. 190). This claim rests on a meta-
psychology of the spectator, ultimately Lacanian in inspiration, in which
the very nature of signification repeats the play between law and desire
inherent in the Oedipus complex. If one accepts this foundation, there is
literally no way out of such a total system.
My point here is not to argue with this metapsychology. I do think it
plays an ultimate role in suturing the micro- to the macrolevel in Bellour’s
analysis. But that does not necessarily mean that the whole method rests
upon it. The value of Bellour’s method of analysis does not rest on
its dependence on a Lacanian view of the subject’s relation to language.
Bellour’s analysis of the microlevel of film employs refined and sophisti-
cated formal analysis independent of Lacanian assumptions. His
Freudian analysis of the macrolevel uses essentially traditional methods
of interpretation. I make these claims not to diminish Bellour’s method,
but to demonstrate its usefulness (indeed to announce its survival) outside
the collapse of Lacanian-inspired spectatorial theory.
356 T. Gunning

Within a hermeneutic tradition, the relation between the micro- and

macro-levels does not necessarily pose a problem, but rather describes the
way a text works within a circle of mutual dependency. The choice of
oppositional elements for analysis on the microlevel comes partly from
decisions about significant elements on the macrolevel (for instance,
the importance of the look in Hitchcock). But this is not to claim a top
down order, in which microanalysis is slaved to a master macrolevel
interpretation. Indeed, due to its greater material specificity, the micro-
analysis may guide the choice of significant elements on the macrolevel.
The predominance of POV cutting with its alternation between seeing and
seen in Hitchcock’s stylistics alerts the analyst to the thematic importance
of the look in Hitchcock, even in films where it is not an obvious theme
on the narrative level (hence its importance in Psycho as much as Rear
Window).
But this is not to claim that the only important patterns on the
microlevel are those that can be elaborated into thematic elements on the
macrolevel. In fact, the greatest value of Bellour’s analysis of the fragment
lies in revealing an obsessive order underlying the classical American film
and not necessarily calling attention to itself. Bellour describes it this way:

the profound tendency of the classical film, specifically the American film, to
constitute itself into scenes, into segments, whose closure guarantees systematic
autonomy: to the point of perversion, to the point of turning a partial system into
an almost limitless nesting of relations. But this closure is deceptive; it has no
reality but to found the narrative that traverses it, feeds on it, reproduces itself in
its image in order to seem in turn to close into its own system. (p. 188)

Here Bellour describes the relation between the micro- and macro-order
with great subtlety. However, I would claim that the ordering of the
classical film often functions as a neutral ground on which the narrative
is projected, rather than a mirror reflection reproducing its own image.
In other words, much of the order of the microsystem of classical film
corresponds to the basic rules of continuity editing: the 180-degree rule,
the continuity of action over cutting, the structure of the POV system, etc.
These elements create a consistency of orientation, providing the viewer
with a ‘taken for granted’ background on which, or within which, the
narrative plays itself out. But I would also maintain that there is another
level I would identify with stylistics, which constitutes the manner in
which an individual film plays with this underlying order, making its
devices of correspond to the demands of storytelling. Thus, as Bellour has
demonstrated, devices of alternation constitutes a nearly constant practice
in the classical cinema. But the use to which The Lonedale Operator or
Marnie puts alternation creates the unique stylistic of these films. I feel in
 The work of film analysis 357

Bellour’s analyses a tension between the desire to uncover an order

underlying all classical films (an impulse Lacanian metapsychology
encourages) and the desire embodied in his engagement with detail
to chart the unique stylistics of individual films, and authors. At the
moment, I find the later project more fruitful than the first. But there is
no question the two projects must interrelate, since individual stylistics
implies a knowledge of common practice.
Bellour’s analyses uncover the methods of the classical film: the play
of symmetry and asymmetry, the patterns of rhymes, repetitions, and
interruptions. But he allows that this method always remains in play; it
never becomes a mere template laid across a film text in order to reveal
its mandated conformity. Rather, the patterns he describes constitute a
playing field in which unique games are played, following and occa-
sionally challenging the rules. Bellour does more than give us the rules of
the game, he supplies the play-by-play analysis only an observant and
passionate critic can provide.

Tom Gunning (b. 1949) is Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago
5tgunning@midway.uchicago.edu4. His principal research interests are in early cinema,
film, and culture. His major publications include D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American
Narrative Film (1993), and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity
(2000).
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