We tend to think of ‘theory’ as something far removed from the professional task of filmmaking – or film ‘practice’ as it is sometimes called. It is as if they were two separate worlds – one of which is entirely concerned with the theoretical study of film, the other with the actual making of films. In fact, the two enterprises have consistently been very closely connected. Filmmakers have developed their own film theories and film theorists have been involved in making films. Indeed this was my own experience. After all, before I became a film theorist, I was already a screenwriter and during the 1960s, I lived partly by selling film scripts. But this was the decade in which certain books and essays, that would influence my work with film theory were being published. Roland Barthes’ first essay on Structuralism, Elements of Semiology, was published in 1964 as was Levi Strauss’ The Structural Study of Myths. Noam Chomsky’s Current Issues in Linguistic Theory came out in 1964, Jacques Lacan’s Ecrits in 1966. 1967 saw the beginnings of modern film theory: Umberto Eco talked about Ideology and Language in the Cinema at the Pesaro Film Festival and Christian Metz’s Essais sur la Signification au Cinéma was published. My own Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, was completed in May 1968 and published the following year. It was then republished in 1972 with a new ‘conclusion’, in which I particularly noted Jean-Luc Godard’s insistence on the ‘continual examination and re-examination of the premises of filmmaking accepted by filmmaker and spectator’ – theorists, directors and, of course, cinema-goers (Wollen 1998: 113).
Working as co-director with Laura Mulvey, I made a series of films during the 1970s. This was also the decade Screen magazine began to publish theoretical texts, in which we read Christian Metz’s Film Language: A Semiotics of Cinema (1974) and Raymond Bellour’s The Analysis of Film (1979). Signs and Meaning was reissued once again in 1998, with an interview added, in the course of which the interviewer, Lee Russell, asks me a pointed question: ‘So the theoretical aspects of your book are directly relevant to your filmmaking as well as to film study?’ To which I replied: ‘Absolutely!’ (Wollen 1998: 166). During the 1960s, I still had not done any filmmaking, but I was writing scripts and it was definitely there on the agenda. And then the arrival of the ‘new’ Godard and structural film and experimental narrative all set me thinking about filmmaking in terms of the avant-garde rather than the industry – a project related to Godard’s own interest in theory.
With the completion of the script of The Passenger in the early 1970s (released 1975) I had achieved all I wanted to as a screenwriter. So I then turned to filmmaking myself, but as an experimental filmmaker, working with Laura Mulvey. Our work as co-directors was closely connected to our work as theorists. And for me, of course, Eisenstein was a distant model for this. I went on to praise those filmmakers who, while working in the industry, had still retained their ongoing commitment to experimentation – I was thinking of films like Citizen Kane (1941) or Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963), Kubrick’s 2001 (1968), even Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). All these films had an experimental dimension. Lee Russell asked me bluntly: ‘Do you think theory and practice can be combined even in a film school?’ Perhaps my reply has some relevance to the issues at stake in this book … theory, experiment, film directing. I responded as follows:
Eisenstein taught directing in a way which included teaching theory. But that’s very rare. In my experience, even the best film schools keep the two well apart. They might argue that filmmaking simply does not leave enough time for serious study of film theory and vice versa, but I think that’s just a lazy way of avoiding the issue. In an ideal world, production students would have a solid grounding in history and theory, just as academic students should have a grounding in production. But will it ever happen? The divide between the two curriculums seems to get wider each year. (Wollen 1998: 167)
Hopefully one outcome of this book will be a further strengthening of the ties between theory and practice. ‘Does that matter?’ I was asked. ‘Yes, it does, very much so. It really troubles me that, in the University where I teach, students doing academic degrees – PhDs – never get a serious chance to make a film – and vice versa, production students don’t have the time or mind-set or the opportunity to think seriously about film theory’ (ibid.). Theory should ask questions of practice and vice versa. I was struck by an interesting question I was once asked – ‘You were saying that Signs and Meaning should be read in conjunction with viewing your films, weren’t you?’ I responded as follows, ‘Signs and Meaning asks the question, “What kind of films should we make?” which Riddles answers. And then Riddles asks “So what kind of theory do we need?”’
In 1974 Christian Metz’s Essais Sur La Signification au Cinéma was translated into English and published as Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Metz raised a very important issue when he shifts aesthetic emphasis away from the script to the director: ‘A filmmakers cinema? What about the concept of a “filmmakers cinema”, as distinct from the old “scriptwriters cinema”?’ After all, ‘today’s cinema is often a “cinema cinema”, while the old cinema was often the secondary illustration of an already worked-out story’(1974: 201). It is at this point that Metz, quite naturally, turned to the example of Jean-Luc Godard. Godard’s films bore witness to his own narrative inventiveness. He was a director whose ‘inspiration can only be fired’, as Metz puts it, ‘during the actual shooting’(1974: 202), when he is able to draw upon his own constant reflection on the subject of the cinema, ‘what it is and what it could be…’. Godard was, of course, a dedicated cinephile, steeped in the cinema of the past while, at the same time, determined to break new ground and create a cinema of the present. He was a living example of the filmmaker who was also a film scholar and historian. His practical attitude to film theory was expressed in an ad hoc and paradoxical manner. For instance he once observed:
I like to say that there are two kinds of cinema: there is a Flaherty and there is an Eisenstein. That is to say that there is documentary realism and there is theatre, but ultimately, at the highest level, they are one and the same. Through documentary realism one arrives at the structure of theatre, and through theatrical imagination and fiction one arrives at the reality of life. To confirm this, look at the work of the great directors, how they pass from realism to theatre and then back again. (Sterritt 1998: 180)
For Godard Renoir was the model example as he represents a fusion of naturalism and theatricality. For instance, he points out that Renoir embraced a proto neorealism in Toni (1935), moved towards the theatrical with Le Carosse d’Or (1953) in the 1950s and then turned to television, in search of the utmost simplicity. Godard himself then commented on the linkage between realism and theatricality in his own film, Vivre Sa Vie (1962), ‘a realistic film and at the same time extremely unrealistic. It is very schematic: a few bold lines, a few fundamental principles’ (Sterritt 1998: 6). It is these ‘fundamental principles’ of course which are the material of film theory. After all, as Godard himself once put it: ‘Motion pictures were invented to look, tell and study things. They are mainly a scientific tool for seeing life in a different way.’ (Sterritt 1998: 176) Godard also discussed Eisenstein, observing that:
Eisenstein was on the way to montage but he didn’t reach it. He wasn’t an editor, he was a taker of angles. And because he was so good at taking angles, there was an idea of montage. The three lions in October are actually the same lion but taken from three different angles, so that the lion looks as if he’s moving – in fact it was the association of angles that brought montage. (Sterritt 1998: 190)
As for Godard’s own approach to filmmaking, he is quite clear about the process: ‘For me there are three equally important moments in making a film – before, during and after the actual filming. With somebody like Hitchcock everything is calculated down to the last second and so the editing is less important’ (Sterritt 1998: 172).
Yet Godard’s own A Bout de Souffle (Breathless, 1960) owes a great deal to montage. He himself admitted as much, noting that ‘it is a film in three movements, the first half-hour fast, the second moderato, and the third allegro vivace again’ (Sterritt 1998: 6). Clearly he is describing his film as if it were analogous to music, suggesting that the rhythm and timing were pre-eminently crucial to him. In an interview with David Sterritt, Godard described himself ‘half a novelist and half an essayist’ (1998: 176) yet he could also be described as half a documentarist. Godard also noted that he wrote the actors’ lines, but at the very last moment – a few bold lines and a few basic principles. Godard’s theory of cinema was clearly determined by the urge to combine theatre with reality.
At this point it might be as well to look at Alfred Hitchcock’s attitude to film theory. A film depended on its plot and the plot depended on the creation of gripping situations which arose from within it. Suspense was of crucial importance – the spectators should always be asking, ‘What will happen next?’ Hitchcock put forward the idea that the film script was comparable to a blueprint, describing the film shot by shot, image by image. He also noted that spectators should be given information that characters lacked, in order to increase suspense. It was the filmmakers job ‘to put things together visually, to embody the action and the juxtaposition of images that have their own specific language and emotional impact – that is cinema!’ (Gottlieb 1995: 214). He also insisted that a film should never rely on dialogue, which pulled the film towards theatre rather than pure cinema.
It was the director’s job, Hitchcock noted, ‘to move his action forward with the camera, whether the action is set on the prairie or confined to the telephone booth’ (Gottlieb 1995: 216). Hitchcock was also critical of Hollywood films, observing that ‘the plushy architecture of Hollywood militates against a pure atmosphere and destroys realism’ (Gottlieb 1995: 218). His own menu of ingredients will have considered that lighting creates mood, the camera dramatic impact, music would stir the emotions, colour would have an aesthetic effect and widescreen provide showmanship and spectacle - all of the elements needed for the machinery of the production. He was very clear about the process of filmmaking. First came the story synopsis, laid out on a single sheet of foolscap. Out of this synopsis he started to build the treatment – including characterizations, narrative and visual detail. The narrative itself should combine two different rhythms – the rhythm and pace of the action together with the rhythm and pace of the dialogue.
A necessary feature, of course, was suspense, which fell into two categories: the chase – ‘objective suspense’ – and suffering, as felt by the spectator – which Hitchcock referred to as ‘subjective suspense’. Particularly interesting, however, is his endorsement of Russian montage, as the key element of film, along with an analogy between film and music. In his exact words: ‘To me, pure film, pure cinema is pieces of film assembled. Any individual piece is nothing. But a combination of them creates an idea – montage, you can call it that. But there are many kinds of montage’ (Gottlieb 1995: 288). And, as just one example, he then cites Rear Window:
He observes. We register his observations on his face. We are using the visual image now. This is what I mean by pure cinema. Creative imagery. Every piece of film that you put in the picture should have a purpose. You cannot put it together indiscriminately. It’s like the notes of music. They must make their point. (Gottlieb 1995: 289)
Hitchcock, like Houston later, was also fascinated by Freud. Tippi Hedren (as Marnie) was given notes mentioning her ‘psychological complex’, her ‘childhood trauma’, her early ‘oedipal situation’, her ‘fantasy concerning her real-life father’ and her sense of guilt.
Eisenstein was, par excellence, a director who was interested in the theory of filmmaking. In his early texts Eisenstein mainly discussed the issue of montage, which he described as fundamental to cinema. He immediately stressed the importance of ‘angles’, just as Godard described, emphasising that ‘the work of the film director requires – in addition to a mastery of production, a repertoire of montage – calculated angles for the camera to capture’ (Eisenstein 2004: 106). He goes on to note that ‘these directorial considerations play a decisive role in both the selection of camera angles and the arrangement of the lights. No plot “justification” for the selection of the angle of vision of the light is necessary’ (ibid.). Subsequently Eisenstein established his own ‘Teaching and Research Workshop’ in which he was able to experiment and to develop his ideas, both theoretical and practical.
Eisenstein was interested in the relation between montage and language. For him, montage approach was the essential, meaningful and sole possible language of cinema and, furthermore, analogous to the role of the word in spoken material. This analogy between the film shot and the written or spoken word was ultimately to become almost a commonplace. However, as a result of joining a linguistics programme at the University of Essex, where film was readily accepted as a parallel form of language, with its own lexicon, its own syntax and its own semantics, I became interested in certain links between language and film. Film developed as a medium for storytelling. We might expect, therefore, that it would develop devices for making more complex narrative forms easier for spectators to follow and understand. These devices would speed up our pragmatic understanding of stories by coding certain features so they could work automatically, just as we interpret the features of verbal languages. For example, all known languages have a system that assigns tense, mode and aspect to verbs. Scholars argue that all known ‘Tense–Mode–Aspect’ (TMA) in systems can best be explained by looking at the structure of narrative, which consists of a series of actions in chronological order. To follow a complicated story, we need to know (1) whether an action is ongoing (sequence-shot); (2) whether it is real or imaginary (a dream sequence perhaps); and (3) whether it is in the past (flashback). Of course Hitchcock, in Stage Fright (1950), made use of a ‘lying flashback’.
Thus images can function as tenses, placing a situation in time, in the present or in a flashback or in a flashforward. Or images can function like modes, presenting different degrees of truth or likelihood or untruth – not only dream sequences, but fantasy sequences, as in Robbe-Grillet and Resnais’ Last Year In Marienbad (1961) or as brazen falsehoods, as in Robbe-Grillet’s own The Man Who Lies (1968). Aspect, however, relates to editing – whether the imagery is ongoing or complete. In all these various ways film functions as a practical language whose output is based on the intersection of time, image and plot. Using the concept of ‘action categories’, we can define situations as ‘stative’, ‘durative’ or ‘punctual’, as different verb forms are described in linguistics. The purpose of these categories is to define the different temporal characteristics of happenings or events. We know that reading is a durative action, that it continues over a period of time – not unlike watching a film. And we distinguish between the intransitive form of the verb ‘to watch’, which refers to an action which ends simply when the viewer has stopped watching and, on the other hand, the transitive form, ‘to watch a film’, where the action ends only when the viewer has finally watched the very last image on the very last reel. A film is structured to make sense of the various time-bound events or images which are the basic elements of a film. Actions might develop, and they change state – for example from running to walking to standing still. They also change action – as in giving a lecture and then answering questions.
Now I would like to return to the question of montage through the theories of Lev Kuleshov. Although he is best known for his intervention of the ‘Kuleshov effect’, he believed strongly that the shot was the basic unit of film. Filmmakers needed to think in terms of shots, to-be-photographed objects and actions which could be edited and arranged to create a story. Shots were, to so speak, ‘word equivalents’ or idea-phrases which could convey meaning through gestures of facial expressions, and could be edited into a ‘dramatic chain’, laid out like bricks. Kuleshov discussed the way a poet places one word after another, in a definite rhythm and the same was true of shots. Shots, Kuleshov believed, were like the ideograms in Chinese writing, images which produced meanings. He recommended that scriptwriters should create the content of the film by determining the character of the shot-material and that the director express the scriptwriter’s conception by creating a montage of shot-signs. In other words, writing should come first, then the shot breakdown (which would be storyboarded) followed by the actual filming and, crucially, the editing.
Kuleshov’s ideas about montage lead to questions of narrative through his close friendship with Russian linguistic scholar and folklorist, Victor Shklovsky who was specifically interested in the subject of the plot, its structure and its effect. Indeed they collaborated on Kuleshov’s first film By The Law (1926). Shklovsky was particularly interested in the way that ‘plot’ dominates in the cinema, emerging, for instance, as melodrama, adventure or farce. He distinguishes between the properties of story, which may be borrowed from any literary source, for instance, a novel, a drama, a poem or a folktale and, then, how a story is subsequently transformed, through segmentation, for film. This involves two processes. First of all the film is prefigured in a skeleton scenario, which takes into account the relation between individual shots and the overall ensemble. Secondly the shots, once photographed, are composed through montage, into sequences. As the plot is reconstituted through the selection and arrangement of shots, the film ultimately emerges out of its double raw material. Thus Shklovsky recommended that scriptwriters should create the content of the film and translate it into the shot-material. The director then expresses the scriptwriter’s conception by his montage of ‘shot-signs’. In other words, writing should come first, then the shot breakdown (which would be storyboarded) followed by the actual filming and, crucially, the editing.
In this context, it is interesting to compare the ‘montage’-based cinema preferred by Kuleshov or Eisenstein to George Wilson’s description of the ‘Classic Hollywood Film’, as described in his book, Narration in Light. Wilson begins by discussing a montage sequence from Orson Welles’ Hollywood classic, The Lady From Shanghai (1947). Welles’ montage appears to break with logical sequence. Thus, a three-shot sequence, begins (1) with a shot from a car revealing that a truck has unexpectedly pulled out onto the road ahead of it, is followed (2) by a second shot of a woman pressing an unidentified button, followed in turn (3) by a third shot of the car, which contains two men, as it collides violently with a truck. Wilson notes that we are left with a sense of uncertainty as to how these images relate and their role in the ongoing story. There are a number of ways in which this shot sequence might be interpreted. Among them, for instance, he suggests that the sequence might function like Eisenstein’s sequence of the three lions. On the other hand, we might recall Jennifer Selway’s comment that in The Lady from Shanghai ‘Welles simply doesn’t care enough to make the narrative seamless’ (2008). Welles, I think, wanted to disturb his viewers.
On the other hand, Wilson also hypothesises that the sequence might suggest a memory image or perhaps an hallucination, experienced by one of the car’s occupants immediately before the crash. Luis Buñuel’s use of montage in Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929), a film with 300 shots lasting for 15 minutes (that is to say, an average of one shot every three seconds), exploits this kind of use of discontinuous or hallucinatory montage. For instance, Buñuel makes striking use of visual simile or metaphor – a woman’s underarm hair is matched with a sea urchin, a cloud crossing the full moon is matched with the notorious shot of a razor slitting an eye. Buñuel used montage to create effects of contrast or similitude and to provoke shock or even horror. In his fascinating book, The Secret Language of Film, Buñuel’s long-term screenwriter, Jean-Claude Carrière describes a sequence in Un Chien Andalou in which:
a character approaches a door and reaches for the handle. In the next shot, which links up with it perfectly, his hand, in close-up, opens the door. Between these two shots, which precisely succeed one another, Buñuel has inserted a fade-in. The two successive images melt into one another in a curious disequilibrium, as if to smuggle a slice of time into an apparent continuity. (1994: 119)
In Elia Suleiman’s film Divine Intervention (2002) a young Palestinian throws an apricot pit out of the window of his car, for no particular reason. As it happens the apricot hits a tank that is rumbling past and which instantly explodes. This introduces an element of discontinuity in narrative cause and effect: there is no reasonable ‘logic’ to these sequences of events, but there is certainly a meaning. In fact a set of meanings, which derive both from the editing and the story situation. In Suleiman’s film, the images only acquire meaning from narrative context.
Both Pier-Paolo Pasolini and Raul Ruiz (both of whom attacked the Hollywood cliché of ‘Central Conflict Theory’) were interested in ‘inconsequential’ montage in narrative. In his Poetics of Cinema, Ruiz argues the case for action scenes:
which follow in sequence without ever knitting into the same flow. For instance, two men are fighting in the street. Not far away a child eats an ice cream and is poisoned. Throughout it all, a man in a window sprays passers-by with bullets and nobody raises an eyebrow. In one corner, a painter paints the scene, while a pickpocket steals his wallet and a dog in the shade of a burning building devours the brain of a comatose drunk. In the distance multiple explosions crown a blood-red sunset. This scene is not interesting from the viewpoint of Central Conflict Theory unless we call it Holiday in Sarajevo and divide the characters into two opposing camps. (Ruiz 1995: 11)
These images also suggest the way in which film so easily incorporates, or slides into, dream. Dreams bring an irrationality, or inconsequentiality of their own which provides one way in which film theory has been so encroached upon psychoanalysis. Perhaps the most lucid exposition comes from the surrealists, quick to take note of the complex relationship of film and dream, brought to their attention, of course, by the films of Luis Buñuel, also present in a few Hollywood films, such as Hathaway’s Peter Ibbetson (1935), a film whose seamless transitions between reality and dream greatly endeared it to André Breton. Nor should we forget Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul (1926), masterpieces from the dream factory. Of course, Freud himself had little to say about films and I have discussed this in relation to John Huston’s film, Freud (1962), elsewhere (in my book Paris Hollywood, 2002).
Finally, 12 quotations:
1. In the New Oxford Dictionary, the editors define ‘theory’ as: ‘An idea or set of ideas that is intended to explain something.’ Or else ‘a set of principles on which activity is based, as in “a theory of education”,’ – or presumably ‘a theory of film’.
2. The French artist Daniel Buren observed that ‘art works [as well as films] signal the existence of certain problems … Exact knowledge of these problems will be called theory. It is this knowledge or theory which is now indispensable.’ (1969: 155)
3. Gregory Ulmer has described the role of contemporary theory as follows: ‘It will not be hermeneutics, the science of interpretation, but will look to photography, the cinema, television and the computer as the sources of ideas about invention.’ (Ray 2001: 13)
4. Victor Shklovsky: ‘History exerts its influence on the work of art – the film – through style and ideology in contrary directions.’ (Wollen 1976: 492)
5. Hitchcock: ‘I don’t care about subject matter. I don’t care about acting, but I do care about the pieces of film and the photography and the sound track and all the technical ingredients that make the audience scream.’ (Pomerance 2004: 66)
6. Jean-Luc Godard: ‘Sternberg cut every sequence in his head before shooting it and never hesitated while editing.’ (Wollen 1972: 137)
7. Antonin Artaud: ‘In the scenario which follows I have tried to realize my conception of a purely visual cinema, where action bursts out of psychology.’ ([1927] 1976: 150)
8. From Buñuel’s scriptwriter, Jean-Claude Carrière, who once noted, ‘we all live with disconcerting rhythms – cosmic, seasonal, respiratory, cardiac, as well as cinematic’. (1994: 119)
9. Alfred Hitchcock: ‘Sometimes I select a dozen different events and shape them into a plot.’ (Hitchcock 1939)
10. Franz Kafka: ‘Was at the movies. Wept. Lolotte. The good pastor. The little bicycle. The reconciliation of the parents. Boundless entertainment. Before that sad film.’ (Nervi 2004)
11. Noel Burch: ‘Antonioni creates a relationship between his characters as they speak and his camera as it records them speaking, which can best be described as a ballet.’ (1973: 76)
12. Robert Bresson: ‘Hide the ideas but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.’ (Bresson 1975: 44)
But I nearly forgot! A last-minute postscript: In November 1928, the psychoanalyst Hanns Sachs observed that: ‘The film can be effective only insofar as it is able to externalise and make perceptible – if possible in movement – invisible inward events. (Walton 2001: 47)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Artaud, A. (1976 [1927]) ‘Cinema and Reality’, in S. Sontag (ed.) Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 150–4.
Barthes, R. (1967) Elements of Semiology. Second edition. London: Jonathan Cape.
Bellour, R. (1979) The Analysis of Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bresson, R. (1975) Notes sur le cinématographe. Paris: Gallimard.
Burch, N. (1973) Theory of Film Practice. London: Secker and Warburg.
Burren, D. (2000 [1969]) ‘Beware’, in A. Alberro and B. Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: a Critical Antholog. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 144–57.
Carriere, J. C. (1994) The Secret Language of Film. New York: Pantheon Books.
Chomsky, N. (1964) Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. The Hague: Mouton and Co.
Eisenstein, S. (2004) ‘The Montage of Attractions’, in P. Simpson, A. Utterson and K.J. Sheperdson (eds) Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, vol. 1. London: Routledge, 99–110.
Gottlieb, S. (ed.) (1995) Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews. London: Faber and Faber.
Lacan, J. (1966) Ecrits. London: Tavistock Publications.
Metz, C. (1968) Essais sur la signification au cinéma. Paris: Éditions Klincksieck. _____ (1974) Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pomerance, M. (2004) An Eye for Hitchcock. Piscataway, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press.
Ray, R. B. (2001) How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ruiz, R. (1995) The Poetics of Cinema. Paris: Editions Dis Voir.
Shepherdson, K. J. (2004) Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge.
Sterritt, D. (ed.) (1998) Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Strauss, C. L. (1968) ‘The Structural Study of Myth’, in Structural Anthropology. London: Allen Lane, 206–31.
Walton, J. (2001) Fair Sex, Savage Dreams. Durham: Duke University Press.
Wilson, G. (1988) Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wollen, P. (1972) Signs and Meanings in the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press/BFI.
_____ (1976) ‘Cinema and Semiology: Some Points of Contact’, in B. Nichols, Movies and Methods: Vol. I. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 481-492.
_____ (1998) Signs and Meanings in the Cinema. 2nd edn. London: BFI Press
_____ (2002) Paris Hollywood: Writing on Film. London: Verso.
Wilson, G. M. (1986) Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
FILMOGRAPHY
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Directed by Stanley Kubrick [DVD]. Amazon: MGM Distribution Company.
A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) (1959) Directed by Jean-Luc Godard [DVD]. Amazon: Sony.
Blade Runner (1982) Directed by Ridley Scott [DVD]. Amazon: Warner Brothers.
By the Law (1926) Directed by Lev Kuleshov [Film]. Brooklyn, NY: New York Film Annex.
Le Carosse d’Or (1953) Directed by Jean Renoir [DVD]. Amazon: Criterion Collection.
Un Chien Andalou (1929) Directed by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali [DVD]. Amazon: Transflux Films.
Citizen Kane (1941) Directed by Orson Welles [DVD]. Amazon: Turner Home Entertainment.
Divine Intervention (2002) Directed by Elia Suleiman [DVD]. Amazon: Koch Lober Films.
Freud (1962) Directed by John Huston [DVD]. Amazon: Universal Pictures.
Lady from Shanghai, The (1948) Directed by Orson Welles [DVD]. Amazon: Medusa Pictures.
Last Year in Marienbad (1961) Directed by Alain Resnais [DVD]. Amazon: Rialto Pictures.
Man Who Lies, The (1968) Directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet. [Film]. New York: Grove Press.
October 1917 (1927) Directed by Sergei M. Eisenstein [DVD] Amazon: Tartan Video.
Passenger, The (1975) Directed by: Michelangelo Antonioni [DVD]. Amazon: Sony Pictures.
Peter Ibbetson (1935) Directed by Henry Hathaway [DVD]. Amazon: Universal Pictures.
Rear Window (1954) Directed by Alfred Hitchcock [DVD]. Amazon: Universal Studios.
Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) Directed by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen [DVD]. London: Mulvey.
Rope (1948) Directed by Alfred Hitchcock [DVD]. Amazon: Warner Brothers.
Secrets of a Soul (1926) Directed by G. W. Pabst [DVD]. Amazon: Transit.
Shock Corridor (1963) Directed by Sam Fuller [DVD]. Amazon: Criterion.
Spellbound (1945) Directed by Alfred Hitchcock [DVD]. Amazon: MGM (Video & DVD).
Stage Fright (1950) Directed by Alfred Hitchcock [DVD]. Amazon: Warner Home Video.
Toni (1935) Directed by Jean Renoir [DVD]. Amazon: Eureka Video.
Vivre sa Vie (1962) Directed by Jean-Luc Godard [DVD]. Amazon: Madman Entertainment.