Film theory began to take shape over the first half of the twentieth century as an informal practice among individual writers, filmmakers, and enthusiasts dedicated to the new medium and its distinctive features. Although there was no formal framework or guidelines for these efforts, these early theorists did share several common aims. First and foremost, they participated in a broader effort to legitimize film. At this time, there was an overriding assumption that film did not warrant serious attention – that its popular appeal, its commercial and technological foundations necessarily meant it was antithetical to art or culture in its rarified sense. To combat these general assumptions, early theorists made different claims on behalf of film’s artistic merits, typically by comparing or contrasting it with existing aesthetic practices such as theater. This also involved various attempts to identify film’s fundamental or essential qualities – the formal and technical attributes that distinguished it as a medium and the practices to which it was attuned and that were necessary in cultivating its aesthetic potential.
The efforts of early theorists were often tied to the emergence of film connoisseurship and, by extension, the grassroots clubs, networks, and film-focused publications that were springing up in cosmopolitan hubs across the globe. These groups were characterized by their exuberance for the new medium. They recognized right away film’s affinity for modern life and the new artistic possibilities that it presented. In expounding these merits, they helped to develop more sophisticated ways of expressing an appreciation for its distinctive features. In this regard, the emergence of film culture provided an important foundation for elevating cinema both aesthetically and intellectually. In France, film culture was tied to new venues for writing about film, viewing, and discussing films. These venues eventually fostered new forms of filmmaking as select theorists sought additional ways to augment and further articulate cinema’s key characteristics. There was, as a result, a tendency for theory and practice to blend together throughout this period. Finally, this context served to establish a culture of lively debate and ongoing exchange, one in which writers became increasingly self-conscious of their ability to identify a canon of key films, film-makers, distinctive performers, and genres.
While early theorists were linked in their effort to establish the new medium’s legitimacy and in their affiliation with a growing culture of film appreciation, there were also numerous challenges that impeded the coherence of early film theory. Some of these were tied to the fact that film was still a new invention and many of its formal practices were still evolving. Even with the Hollywood system in place by 1916, new technologies like sound and color stock required ongoing adjustments to its visual and narrative conventions. Another more pressing factor was the social, political, and economic turmoil that persisted throughout much of the first half of the twentieth century. Major crises in Europe did not only hinder the continent’s nascent film industries – thus assuring Hollywood’s ascent as the leading force in filmmaking – but in many instances also disrupted the efforts of individual intellectuals, filmmakers, and the burgeoning grassroots networks that were still forming. Despite these challenges, the field’s pioneering figures still managed to establish a body of writing and a series of key debates that became the foundation upon which later generations would develop theory into an important, academically rigorous, intellectual discourse.
The publication of two books marks the official beginning of film theory. First, the poet Vachel Lindsay provided an inaugural attempt to cast film as an important aesthetic endeavor in his 1915 account, The Art of the Moving Picture. One year later, Hugo Münsterberg followed suit with The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, also arguing that film presented a unique aesthetic undertaking. In both cases, simply writing about film was a statement unto itself – an implicit attempt to elevate the medium and an argument that it warranted serious consideration despite assumptions to the contrary. The two authors shared several additional similarities. Both, for instance, utilized their reputations in other fields to confer credibility on the fledgling medium. Both identified key formal characteristics and began the work of establishing the distinct aesthetic merits of these attributes. As part of this particular task, both considered the relationship between film and theater, drawing attention to the ways that film surpassed its predecessor. While Lindsay and Münsterberg anticipate the main developments of early film theory, they are most noteworthy for their idiosyncrasies in attempting to navigate this uncharted territory.
For most of his career, Vachel Lindsay was best known as an American poet who enjoyed fleeting success in the 1910s and early 1920s. He was also a lifelong aesthete with a rather unconventional sense of purpose. For instance, after briefly attending art schools in Chicago and New York, Lindsay built his reputation by embarking on several “tramping” expeditions, crisscrossing the country on foot and by train attempting to barter his poems in exchange for room and board. With these expeditions, Lindsay forged a romanticized bond with both the common folk and the physical landscape of America. He wanted to use these experiences to continue in the tradition of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but he was also adamant about cultivating a new and modern American aesthetic. Specifically, he envisioned a style that was more readily accessible to all, and that promised spiritual renewal as part of a utopian vision of the future.
Lindsay’s unusual beliefs about art and society indicate an ambivalence, one that was further complicated by his vacillation between populist undercurrents and a more modern sensibility. By 1914 Lindsay had published his two most famous poems, “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” and “The Congo,” in Poetry magazine. In short order, Lindsay became one of the country’s most visible poets both performing on a nationwide circuit and participating in Progressive Era programs such as the Chautauqua education movement. While he had a distinctive performance style that helped establish him among middle-class audiences, his peers – academics and poets of the period – mainly dismissed his work as sentimental and insipid. Lindsay nevertheless incorporated modern elements both in content and in form. He authored several odes celebrating Hollywood starlets such as Mary Pickford, Mae Marsh, and Blanche Sweet, and he introduced singing, chanting, and sound effects into his recitation. “The Congo,” for instance, incorporated the syncopated rhythms of ragtime, the spontaneity of jazz, as well as racist caricatures drawn from blackface minstrelsy, all as part of Lindsay’s effort to animate his poetry with the sounds of modern American life.
Such ploys were part of a broader synthesis that Lindsay termed “Higher Vaudeville.” In other words, he was interested in producing an elevated version of the popular variety theater that appealed to the American masses. This aesthetic aim was also evident in another term that he favored. “I am an adventurer in hieroglyphics,” Lindsay once claimed. He would soon use the same term to describe motion pictures, adding further that with the “cartoons of [Ding] Darling, the advertisements in the back of the magazines and on the billboards and in the street-cars, the acres of photographs in the Sunday newspapers,” America was growing “more hieroglyphic everyday” (Art of the Moving Picture 14). In moving pictures, he found the ideal extension of his personal aesthetic, the most dynamic and compelling iteration of this new and growing field of hieroglyphic arts. The main objective of The Art of the Moving Picture was indeed to establish the virtues of this new endeavor, and to suggest that it take a leading role in shaping modern American life.
Though Lindsay’s discussion of film is highly impressionistic, he does propose three specific types of films that highlight the medium’s specific qualities: the action film, the intimate film, and films of splendor. For each of these three categories he designates a corollary aesthetic distinction. The action film is described as sculpture-in-motion, the intimate film as painting-in-motion, and the splendor film as architecture-in-motion. These designations were not simply a matter of genre, but rather a way to foreground the medium’s specific strengths and the subject matter to which it is most attuned. For example, the action film is closely linked to the chase sequence, a formula based on editing techniques such as crosscutting and other innovations associated with the ground-breaking work of D.W. Griffith. This type of editing endowed cinema with dynamism – a rhythmic quality, an aptitude for speed, movement, and acceleration – that appealed to modern American society. This was considered sculptural in the sense that action emphasized the constituent features of the medium – its ability to capture and manipulate spatial and temporal relations. Just as the sculptor is trained to accentuate the materiality of a given medium, Lindsay believed that film should draw into relief that which “can be done in no medium but the moving picture itself” (Art of the Moving Picture 72).
While Lindsay emphasized the temporal dimension that film added to traditional spatial or plastic arts, he was also careful to distinguish it from time-based practices such as poetry, music, and especially theater. The reason for this was that film had begun to elicit perfunctory analogies with these other practices. Films were being described as photoplays or theatrical performances that had merely been photographed by a motion picture camera. This term had arisen as films increased in length, and as the emerging Hollywood studio system readily looked both to popular theater and proven classics for source material. On one hand, the term conferred some legitimacy, suggesting an amalgamation between cinema and an existing art. On the other hand, this association suggested a dependency, one that would enslave cinema to reputable but unadventurous conventions while forfeiting its own aesthetic specificity. Lindsay found this to be unacceptable and, instead, argued that adaptations “must be overhauled indeed, turned inside out and upside down” so that film might better adhere to the “camera-born” opportunities fostered by the new technology (Art of the Moving Picture 109).
It was in these moments that film most clearly captured his notion of hieroglyphics, or rather, the idea that film could communicate something more than what simply appeared before the camera. The term hieroglyph refers to a pictographic marking or symbol that is also part of a broader system of language – at the time, one that was primarily associated with ancient Egypt. Each figure stands for a word or idea while also encapsulating different levels of meaning or indirect associations. Lindsay discusses several examples from Griffith’s The Avenging Conscience (1914), including the close-up of a spider as it devours a fly. This was a particularly apt example in that the spider is at once part of the scenery and a highly symbolic figure or metaphor designed to enhance the film’s dramatic mood. In short, the spider is more than just a spider. It sets the tone of the scene while also evoking the macabre mood for which Edgar Allen Poe – the inspiration behind The Avenging Conscience – was so well-known (Art of the Moving Picture 90). More broadly, these figures could function like individual letters or words within a film, and, in turn, these units could be combined into increasingly complex patterns of signification.
The hieroglyph signaled an important advance in the emerging grammar of narrative cinema, but for Lindsay, it also was a sign of something far more decisive, a turning point in history. “The invention of the photoplay is as great a step as was the beginning of picture-writing in the stone age,” he wrote (Art of the Moving Picture 116). And America was poised to “think in pictures,” continuing the pursuit of cultural enlightenment that had been inaugurated by the Egyptians, the first “great picture-writing people” (Art of the Moving Picture 124, 117). This suggests that hieroglyphs might supplant language altogether, and Lindsay was adamant that the medium could serve as a universal visual language, or Esperanto, that was accessible to all. In this regard, he also believed that film was destined for an even higher calling. He proclaimed that it had the power to kindle spiritual renewal, and to nurture prophetic visions that would guide viewers to a utopian promised land. Such references made it easy for many to dismiss Lindsay as naively mystical or merely eccentric. But this evangelical zeal was also an integral part of his personality, a necessary asset for someone pioneering the entirely new and still unknown field of film theory.
Just as Lindsay is better known as a poet, Hugo Münsterberg is known primarily for his work in the field of psychology. While his 1916 account The Photoplay: A Psychological Study is certainly more scholastic in its composition, its overall impact is in many ways just as peculiar as Lindsay’s contribution. Münsterberg was born and educated in Germany, and he accepted a permanent faculty position at Harvard in 1897 after he was unable to secure a sufficiently prominent position in his home country. Münsterberg was appointed Professor of Experimental Psychology in Harvard’s Department of Philosophy at a time when psychology was still an emerging academic discipline. His work was particularly noteworthy for his commitment to empirical data collected through scientific experimentation. Once at Harvard, he immediately set up and became the director of a modern research laboratory, which contributed significantly to both his and his department’s overall reputation. Throughout his early career, Münsterberg published prolifically. In addition to authoring several books devoted to his core research interests, he wrote about the psychology of litigious testimony, optimizing workplace performance, current social debates, and the relationship between Germany and America. At times, his forays into these more general topics embroiled him in controversy. This was exacerbated by his obstinate allegiance to Germany in the lead up to World War I. At this time, Münsterberg seemed to intentionally provoke his Harvard colleagues, and he was eventually accused of being a German spy.
Münsterberg completed The Photoplay after he had fallen into disrepute and just months before he died in 1916. The book was a strange turn in what was already an unconventional career. For his entire life, Münsterberg had rejected the movies as an undignified commercial art. He claimed that he began a “rapid conversion” after deciding on a whim to see Neptune’s Daughter, a 1914 fantasy film starring the one-time professional swimmer Annette Keller-man (Hugo Münsterberg on Film 172). Some suspect that his turn to motion pictures may have been a calculated effort to repair his reputation and endear the American public that had recently censured him. The fact that it was both his final book and the only one to address the topic of film makes it difficult to fully situate in relationship to his earlier work. Still, the most striking assertion in The Photoplay is undoubtedly Münsterberg’s contention that several cinematic techniques resemble specific cognitive procedures.
For example, he argues that the close-up – a shot in which the camera magnifies or increases the scale of a particular detail – parallels the “mental act of attention,” the process by which we selectively concentrate on one aspect within a given field of sensory data. By heightening “the vividness of that on which our mind is concentrated,” he explains, it is as if the close-up “were woven into our mind and were shaped not through its own laws but by the acts of our attention” (Hugo Münsterberg on Film 88). In other words, the film formally replicates our mental faculties. This was also evident in the “cut-back,” or what became more commonly known as the flashback. In terms of narrative, a flashback is used to present an event out of chronological order. In the same way that editing allows filmmakers to alternate between different locations (i.e., cross-cutting), it is also possible to shift between different moments in time (e.g., cutting from a scene in an adult character’s life to an event that took place during their childhood). For Münsterberg, this technique further extends his point about the close-up: the flashback parallels the “mental act of remembering” (Hugo Münsterberg on Film 90). In both cases, it is again as if the “photoplay obeys the laws of the mind rather than those of the outer world” (Hugo Münsterberg on Film 91). The larger significance of these parallels is that they confirm the active role of cognitive faculties in shaping the cinematic experience. This upheld Münsterberg’s wider-ranging interests concerning the nature of psychology. This parallel has additionally been cited as a forerunner to later film-mind analogies in developments ranging from psychoanalytic accounts of spectatorship to the rise of cognitive film theories in the 1990s.
Like Lindsay, Münsterberg identifies the basic formal techniques that were integral in developing film’s stylistic conventions and expressive capacity. In addition to noting their psychological dimension, Münsterberg commented on how both the close-up and the flashback elicit a strong emotional connection with viewers. The close-up, for instance, tends to focus on an actor’s facial features, “with its tensions around the mouth, with its play of the eye, with its cast of the forehead, and even with the motions of the nostrils and the setting of the jaw” (Hugo Münsterberg on Film 99). The enlargement of such details not only heightens the psychological impact of what is shown but also serves as part of a syntactic configuration (i.e., the arrangement of individual shots to convey a larger unit of meaning). In an earlier discussion, Münsterberg poses a hypothetical example in which
a clerk buys a newspaper on the street, glances at it and is shocked. Suddenly we see that piece of news with our own eyes. The close-up magnifies the headlines of the paper so that they fill the whole screen.
(Hugo Münsterberg on Film 88)
In this example, the close-up produces an approximation of what the character sees within the story world. This shot/reverse-shot formula was part of a broader editing strategy that helped to advance the story by linking the viewer to the point of view of a character. To use the language of subsequent film theorists, it serves to interpellate the viewer into the narrative and engender a sense of sympathy or identification. Flashbacks mobilize this same principle. In these instances, the viewer is privy to what that character thinks about, imagines, or remembers. These formal devices provide evidence that narrative film possessed a unique ability to engage viewers through a series of complex psychological exchanges.
Part II of The Photoplay turns its attention to making a case for film’s aesthetic legitimacy. The purpose of art, for Münsterberg, was to be autonomous, or transcendent, by virtue of being entirely divorced from the world. Or, as he elaborated it
To remold nature and life so that it offers such complete harmony in itself that it does not point beyond its own limits but is an ultimate unity through the harmony of its parts, this is the aim of the isolation which the artist alone achieves.
(Hugo Münsterberg on Film 119)
This posed something of a conundrum considering the technological basis of film and the verisimilitude that was a perpetual reminder of its link to reality. Münsterberg, as a result, downplayed the medium’s intrinsic capacity for mimesis. This was consistent with a tendency by many early theorists to disavow film’s technological basis both because technology was the source of film’s initial novelty and because the instrumental logic of modern machinery seemed to foreclose the possibility of artistic intervention. To this end, Münsterberg foregrounds not only the techniques associated with film’s psychological implications but also the medium’s over-arching formal configuration. Despite its realistic appearances, for example, film presents an unusual visual perspective that combines the flatness of two-dimensional images with the depth and dynamism of three-dimensionality. As he puts it, “we are fully conscious of the depth [evident within the image], and yet we don’t take it for real depth” (Hugo Münsterberg on Film 69). This conflict is far from detrimental. On the contrary, it is what differentiates art from mere imitation. And, as Münsterberg further elaborates:
[Film’s] central aesthetic value is directly opposed to the spirit of imitation. A work of art may and must start from something which awakens in us the interests of reality and which contains traits of reality, and to that extent it cannot avoid some imitation. But it becomes art just in so far as it overcomes reality, stops imitating and leaves the imitated reality behind it. It is artistic just in so far as it does not imitate reality but changes the world, and is, through this, truly creative. To imitate the world is a mechanical process; to transform the world so that it becomes a thing of beauty is the purpose of art. The highest art may be furthest removed from reality.
(Hugo Münsterberg on Film 114–115)
Münsterberg’s emphasis on the use of formal devices as the basis of film’s aesthetic potential anticipates subsequent theorists such as Rudolf Arnheim and what has more broadly been termed the medium specificity thesis. Writing initially in the 1930s, Arnheim enumerated a detailed catalog of the techniques that differentiate film from mere imitation. For example, he discusses composition (i.e., the use of framing, scaling, lighting, and depth of field), editing, and special effects (e.g., slow motion, superimposition, fades, and dissolves). Arnheim celebrates these tools as the necessary means for creative intervention and for developing a poetic language that belonged exclusively to film. These tools, as he explains further, “sharpen” what appears before the camera, “impose a style upon it, point out special features, make it vivid and decorative” (Film As Art 57). In terms that closely echo Münsterberg, art according to Arnheim, “begins where mechanical reproduction leaves off, where the conditions of representation serve in some way to mold the object” (Film As Art 57). This type of emphasis later became known as formalism, the belief that film’s formal practices are its defining or essential feature, one that should take precedence over all other aspects of the medium. Formalism is primarily held in opposition to realism, the presumption that film’s verisimilitude should be its defining feature. This division became more entrenched as Arnheim adamantly rejected new sound technologies and the wider availability of color stocks, both of which promised to make film more realistic.
The ensuing debate between formalism and realism recalls the fact that new forms of art, especially those with some type of technological element, typically give rise to competing claims about what qualifies them as unique. As subsequent scholars like Noël Carroll have explored in detail, these arguments about medium specificity are usually a by-product of historical circumstance. They entail a struggle between existing aesthetic standards and a new generation willing to entertain the merits of new aesthetic practices. It is necessary for this latter group to claim legitimacy in some fashion and the easiest way to do so is to suggest that the new art form does something distinct that others cannot. With film, as is often the case, there were divergent claims regarding its fundamental qualities with different groups all vying to dictate which features should take precedence. Ultimately, these arguments testify to the fact that art is a matter of invention, and that medium specificity is culturally constructed through a combination of practical necessity and rhetorical posturing. In hindsight, it is easier to see that it is virtually impossible to reduce early theorists to one position or the other. Moreover, it is impossible to equate film’s merit with one property or the other. In this regard, labels like formalism and realism provide a convenient shorthand when surveying the emerging field of film theory but are problematic if taken too far. And despite their different views, both sides contributed to the larger goal of legitimizing film as an aesthetic enterprise. Debate simply served as a convenient vehicle for adding vigor and urgency to this larger effort.
In the aggregate then, Lindsay and Münsterberg along with Arnheim were successful in elevating film as an aesthetic practice and in laying part of the groundwork for subsequent theoretical inquiry. Yet, despite this general success, there are questions regarding their overall significance. Both Lindsay and Münsterberg’s individual efforts, at different times, became peripheral. Their books fell out of print and were not widely read or circulated during film theory’s later and more formative stages. Both remain better known for their accomplishments in other fields. Meanwhile Arnheim’s book was originally written in German in 1933 and then revised and republished in an abridged format in 1957, after he had moved on to a career in art history. While he was more widely read than Lindsay or Münsterberg, these irregularities added to a general discontinuity in early film theory’s formation.
Another mitigating factor was that these early theoretical works coincided with Hollywood’s own efforts to legitimize itself as an industry. Some of the major studios made brief overtures to the likes of Lindsay and Münsterberg in various publicity campaigns designed to enrich the public’s appreciation of the new medium. Though these efforts ended with questionable results, the film industry did have subsequent success in turning to other cultural gatekeepers including experimental university programs and the fledgling Museum of Modern Art. While film was gradually becoming more accepted, the specific arguments of Lindsay, Münsterberg, and Arnheim were largely overshadowed by the persistence of film’s more general critics on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Conservative critics were deeply suspicious of film and popular entertainment, claiming that such things were a threat to the moral character of the middle class in general and women, children, and immigrants more specifically. And at the other end of the spectrum, more radical critics were already concerned about the ways that Hollywood might be used as an instrument of social control.
As film studies developed into an academic field, single-authored books became an important standard by which scholarly accomplishment is measured. In this respect, the monographs produced by Lindsay and Münsterberg provide a convenient starting point, an apparent antecedent to what eventually came later. It is important to remember, however, that throughout the early stages of film theory, their particular approach was more of an exception than the rule. Few of the theorists considered throughout the remainder of this chapter wrote monographs devoted exclusively to film, and, if they did, they often remained un-translated or otherwise unavailable to English-speaking readers until much later. By contrast then, much of early film theory was written in a piecemeal, ad hoc fashion as an extension of new forms of criticism, ongoing debates, and artist manifestos. Theory, throughout this stage of development, was not the product of isolated research or meticulous scholarly analysis. Instead, it was part of an expanding film culture and growing array of enthusiasts devoted to the medium and its many possibilities.
France was at the center of this burgeoning film culture. It had played a significant role – certainly equal to the United States – in the invention of cinema, and it had been the leading producer of films throughout the first decade of the twentieth century. The start of World War I in 1914 quickly brought France’s film industry to a halt, and this allowed the emerging Hollywood studio system to take its place as the international leader in production. This changing of the guard did not, however, diminish the country’s enthusiasm for film, and actually may have even encouraged new forms of production and exhibition that would fortify a growing penchant for what became known as cinephilia, an ardent infatuation for the new medium. This affinity for film culture was stoked by the intellectual milieu of the day and the status of Paris as an international epicenter of art and culture. In general, the country had a tradition of salons and cafes supported by a bourgeois clientele that generally privileged cultural sophistication. This tradition contributed to the status of its capital as a hub for modern art and aesthetic experimentation. These factors helped to supply film with willing interlocutors and supportive patrons, both of whom were necessary in creating a culture of widespread appreciation and innovation.
By the 1910s, as Richard Abel has shown in great detail, Paris had established a fervent public forum devoted to film. This included a broad spectrum of publishing outlets – ranging from specialized film journals and magazines to regular review columns in daily newspapers – that attracted intellectuals, writers, and aspiring artists. For example, Louis Delluc, the most influential film critic of this period, abandoned his academic studies to become a critic first at Comoedia Illustré, a weekly arts magazine, and later the editor-in-chief of Le Film, one of the first magazines devoted entirely to the new medium. Delluc quickly became a prominent figure, organizing ciné-clubs and encouraging other aspects of France’s growing film culture. Throughout his writing, he engaged in speculative, sometimes polemical rhetoric to “provoke insight, new ideas, and action” (French Film Theory and Criticism 97). As with their counterparts in the United States, Delluc and others like Ricciotto Canudo were interested in establishing the aesthetic legitimacy of cinema. But whereas Lindsay and Münsterberg made their respective cases by defending film in its standard narrative format, Delluc and the early French critics took a more unconventional approach. For them, it was not about making film more respectable but about recognizing its artistic potential. This meant challenging incipient assumptions about film and its reception.
In this regard, Hollywood cinema had a different valence for the French critics. Like Lindsay and Münsterberg, they were wary of films that used theatrical conventions to attract a more respectable and affluent audience. For them, Hollywood provided a wholesale alternative as France gravitated in this direction with its film d’art movement. Hollywood, by contrast, appeared more modern and dynamic, more appealing to mass audiences, and more in sync with the technological basis of the new medium. Even so, it should also be noted that the celebration of these attributes was not the same thing as a straightforward endorsement of the entire Hollywood system. The studios were designed to produce commodities, and films were manufactured according to principles of efficiency and profitability. Early on, production companies minimized any acknowledgment of individual contributors, including actors and directors. Writers like Delluc were, by contrast, mainly interested in the directors, actors, genres, and techniques that exceeded the studio system’s instrumental logic. For example, they discussed their deep fascination with individual actors such as Charlie Chaplin and Sessue Hayakawa, most famous for his role in The Cheat (1915). In recognizing the unique qualities of individual performers, Delluc and other French critics like him undermined the notion that films were simply comprised of interchangeable parts. Moreover, their understanding that these figures demanded additional attention laid the groundwork for later theoretical endeavors and specifically identified authorship and stars as subjects worthy of critical analysis.
As for the specific interests of Delluc, the qualities associated with these figures were also a testament to the revelatory powers of cinematic technologies. Again, in contrast to Lindsay and Münsterberg, early French theorists did not shy away from either the technological basis of film or its ambiguities. Delluc noted in general that film was the only truly modern art “because it is simultaneously and uniquely the offspring of both technology and human ideals” (French Film Theory and Criticism 94). For this reason, he added, “cinema will make us all comprehend the things of this world as well as force us to recognize ourselves” (French Film Theory and Criticism 139). Ricciotto Canudo noted that while film adheres to modern scientific principles, recording with a “clockwork precision” that captures the outward appearance of contemporary life, it simultaneously allows for “a lucid and vast expression of our internal life” (French Film Theory and Criticism 63, 293). As a result, “Cinema gives us a visual analysis of such precise evidence that it cannot but vastly enrich the poetic and painterly imagination” (French Film Theory and Criticism 296). As these brief snippets suggest, it was common to juxtapose the technological components of film with the medium’s aesthetic capacity while also conceding that these two attributes were inextricably intertwined. These contradictions were also evident in various elaborations of photogénie, the conceptual centerpiece that tied France’s early film culture together. Finally, these debates anticipated the transition from critical assessment to creative participation. While early French critics clearly admired Hollywood cinema, they were not content to be mere consumers. As such, they quickly began to appropriate Hollywood’s stylistic innovations for the purpose of fostering their own alternative forms of filmmaking.
Delluc went on to write and direct six films before his death in 1924 at the age of only 33. He was followed by other key figures including Germaine Dulac and Jean Epstein. Dulac, who started her career writing for early feminist magazines, introduced the term impressionism to describe the cinematic style that would prevail as French critics began pursuing more creative outlets for their theoretical interests. Impressionism denoted a strong interest in using film techniques to explore the porous boundaries between interior life and exterior reality. As Dulac put it, the “cinema is marvelously equipped” to express dreams, memories, thought, and emotion (French Film Theory and Criticism 310). She specifically identified superimposition (i.e., the combination or overlap of two distinct images) as one way of rendering an internal process that would otherwise remain imperceptible. David Bordwell has further detailed how impressionist filmmakers utilized formal devices to indicate a character’s state of mind. Optical devices, he observes, were especially important in representing “purely mental images (e.g., a fantasy), affective states (e.g., gauze-focus over a character’s wistful expression), or optically subjective states (e.g., weeping, blindness)” (French Impressionist Cinema 145). The use of such devices to express psychological dimensions recalls Münsterberg’s earlier account, but the French filmmakers adopted these techniques in a more self-conscious manner and were more deliberate in using them to foreground film’s specificity. It is in this respect that Dulac cites examples from her own film, Smiling Madame Beudet (1923), to illustrate how a film author uses techniques such as the close-up “to isolate a striking expression” and further underscore “the intimate life of people or things” (French Film Theory and Criticism 310).
The emergence of impressionism coincided with the rise of surrealism, an important inter-war avant-garde movement, and its more experimental forays into film production. Art throughout the end of the nineteenth century had given rise to a succession of new and innovative styles that challenged existing aesthetic conventions. These practices are exemplified by movements such as Cubism and in the literary experiments of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. While these practices are often classified under the umbrella term of modernism, the term avant-garde more specifically refers to a self-defined group, or vanguard, formed explicitly to take a lead position in cultivating new artistic possibilities. The Italian Futurists and the Dadaists, first in Zurich and later in Berlin, were among the first major avant-garde groups of the early twentieth century. Both movements have been described as a kind of anti-art, combining a penchant for anarchy with a rejection of traditional aesthetic practices. Following in the wake of these earlier groups, André Breton authored the first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, calling for a turn to the intractable threshold between dream and reality.
In Paris, Breton assembled a group of like-minded artists, mainly writers and poets, and together issued a series of publications that explored unconventional topics ranging from occultism and madness to chance encounters. The Surrealists were especially interested in the new psychological theories developed by Sigmund Freud. Breton even attributed his inspiration for surrealism to a dream in which, “There is a man cut in two by the window.” This is as apt and elegant a description of psychoanalysis as anything. The Sur-realists also had a strong interest in images and the juxtaposition of visual materials, especially through techniques such as collage and photomontage. Although Surrealism had had a strong literary focus, these interests lent themselves to cinematic experimentation and the 1920s became one of the most fertile periods in terms of avant-garde cinema. Major works included the non-narrative, abstract films of Man Ray, Ballet méchanique (1924) by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, and René Clair’s Entr’acte (1924). These efforts culminated with the production of Un Chien andalou (1929), a collaboration by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. The film uses shock to challenge bourgeois sensibilities, while also combining standard editing conventions with the imagery of unconscious desire to create a rich and provocative dream-like logic.
There was a certain amount of overlap between the Surrealists and France’s still nascent film culture. Buñuel, for instance, briefly worked as an assistant on Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1928). Germaine Dulac meanwhile worked with Antonin Artaud on The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), which the Surrealists subsequently attacked for its supposed insufficiencies. Despite these occasional clashes, there were also clear commonalities in their work, photogénie being the best-known and most interesting point of intersection. The term originated in the 1830s in conjunction with the invention of photography, literally referring to the use of light as part of the creative process but more broadly signaling “a thing or a scene lending itself well to photographic capture” (Jean Epstein 25). Louis Delluc rediscovered the term in 1919, and it quickly became a ubiquitous slogan used throughout French film culture to distinguish cinema’s unique revelatory and transformative powers. The idea dovetailed with what the Surrealists found most interesting about the new medium. For example, surrealist poet Louis Aragon anticipated the main crux of photogénie in 1918 claiming that film endowed objects with a poetic value, transforming the prosaic into something menacing or enigmatic. Throughout the 1920s, Epstein quickly became a central figure both in terms of his theoretical contributions and as an important filmmaker, in effect taking up the role originated by Delluc. In his essay “On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie,” Epstein elaborates that “filmic reproduction” enhances certain things, imbuing them with “personality” or a “spirit” that otherwise remains “alien to the human sensibility” (French Film Theory and Criticism 314, 317). He further adds that film is a poetic medium with the capacity to reveal a new kind of reality: “the untrue, the unreal, the ‘surreal’…” (French Film Theory and Criticism 318).
Beyond the rhetorical parallels, there was a common goal within these accounts of photogénie. As Aragon noted, film had the power to make common objects appear strange and unfamiliar. This was consistent with the practice known as defamiliarization, one of the most common tactics adopted by various artists and avant-garde groups throughout this period. This could be used to evoke a sense of wonder, something beyond rational logic, and this could also be used to force viewers to question the nature of everyday existence and the relationships that allow reality to appear as a matter of fact. These objectives are also evident in Epstein’s account of “Magnification,” or the close-up, which he ordained the “soul of cinema” and the device that most clearly epitomized of photogénie (French Film Theory and Criticism 236). In a highly lyrical excursion, he offers the following description:
Muscular preambles ripple beneath the skin. Shadows shift, tremble, hesitate. Something is being decided. A breeze of emotion underlines the mouth with clouds. The orography of the face vacillates. Seismic shocks begin. Capillary wrinkles try to split the fault. A wave carries them away. Crescendo. A muscle bridles. The lip is laced with tics like a theater curtain. Everything is movement, imbalance, crisis. Crack. The mouth gives way, like a ripe fruit splitting open. As if slit by a scalpel, a keyboard-like smile cuts laterally into the corner of the lips.
(French Film Theory and Criticism 235–236)
Epstein’s enamored tribute to the close-up of a mouth as it begins to smile redoubles film’s formal powers. His poetic language makes the object he describes strange and unusual, nearly indecipherable, but in doing so, he also foregrounds the bewitching microscopic details of human physiognomy, transforming an otherwise mundane and entirely unremarkable action into something uncanny and enchanting.
Hungarian theorist and contemporary Béla Balázs celebrated the close-up in similar terms. He was likewise fascinated with film’s ability to capture facial expression in new and unprecedented ways. Balázs further noted that while film techniques may initially intensify feelings of estrangement and alienation, they were part of a new visual culture that promised to render legible the hidden life of things including the inner experiences that had been muted by much of modern society.
Though far removed from the more combative efforts of avant-garde groups like the Surrealists, Rudolf Arnheim also acknowledged defamiliarization as an important formal device. Citing the shot from Rene Clair’s Entr’acte, in which the camera records a ballet dancer while positioned beneath a glass panel, he writes, “The strangeness and unexpectedness of this view have the effect of a clever coup d’esprit (‘to get a fresh angle on a thing’), it brings out the unfamiliar in a familiar object” (Film As Art 39). For Arnheim, this produces a purely visual or aesthetic pleasure, a “pictorial surprise” for its own sake, “divorced from all meaning” (Film As Art 40). For later commentators, this approach placed too much emphasis on aesthetics while ignoring film’s other social dimensions. As a matter of association, the French writers and filmmakers of the 1920s were likewise considered naïvely romantic in aestheticizing the new medium, particularly in the way that they endowed it with an almost mystical aura while seemingly fetishizing expressive qualities like photogénie.
As a result, the importance of the French theorists of the 1920s has in certain respects been unfairly diminished. Later scholars, in the 1970s for instance, did not take them seriously since they were merely enthusiasts writing in a fragmentary, and often inchoate, journalistic manner. They were further dismissed for lacking theoretical rigor or a sufficiently critical perspective. The efforts of contemporary film scholars like Richard Abel have begun the process of rediscovery and renewed engagement. For instance, there are now newly translated materials by Jean Epstein, as well as several recent scholarly accounts that reassess his theoretical scope and sophistication. This larger project will undoubtedly shed new light on this period and its overall contribution to film theory. For the time being, however, it should be clear that France’s film culture of the 1920s was more than just a mere celebration of cinema’s potential. The increased interest in film was closely tied to the appearance of new outlets for writing about film, new venues for screening and debating individual films, and new alternative means of production. These developments were an important pre-condition for the later expansion of theory. They were also evidence of a new cultural vanguard deeply invested in film and its ability to produce new ways of thinking about art and modern society.
World War I had devastating consequences for all of Europe, but its most dramatic impact may have been in Russia, the country that in 1917 was swept up in a tumultuous revolution and subsequent civil war. Compared to the rest of Europe, Russia was an unlikely candidate for such a drastic transformation. The country was largely rural with a disproportionate number of uneducated peasants, it had yet to embrace full-scale industrialization, and the autocratic government, still in the hands of Tsar Nicholas II, suggested a rigid hierarchy resistant to change. Nonetheless, the combination of World War, which had quickly descended into a horrific stalemate, and inadequate material conditions at home prompted a revolutionary vanguard, led by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, to seize control of St. Petersburg and establish the first Communist government. The immediate aftermath was not only chaotic and acrimonious but also steeped in a certain sense of exhilaration. The prospect of creating a new society, embracing technology and modern principles for the betterment of all, and pioneering a new political model brought the promise of excitement and innovation. It was this excitement that was at the center of Soviet Russia’s embrace of cinema and its development of montage theory.
Like many key terms within film theory and criticism, montage is a French expression and in its main sense it refers to editing (i.e., the splicing together of individual shots). In the 1920s, however, the term took on additional distinction by virtue of its association with the leading Soviet film theorists and practitioners Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. It not only represented an important technique for these filmmakers, but it also dovetailed with the ideological underpinnings of the revolution and with broader artistic and intellectual interests of the time. From a political standpoint, the Communist revolution had been inspired by the ideas of Karl Marx, one of the most important and influential thinkers of the modern era. Though Marx was a trained philosopher, he was drawn to politics and soon became involved in various socialist and workers’ movements. In 1848, amidst widespread revolutionary ferment throughout the industrialized cities of Europe, Marx co-authored the Communist Manifesto with his frequent collaborator Frederick Engels. In it, Marx and Engels warn that a specter haunts Europe, the specter of radical social change in which the working class or proletariat rise up to demolish the existing hierarchy. Both in the manifesto and throughout his later, more sustained theoretical work, Marx aimed to raise class-consciousness by encouraging the proletariat to reclaim the labor that had been systematically alienated from them – extracted for the sole purpose of maintaining a system of inequality and dehumanizing exploitation.
Amidst the transition that followed the revolution, Lenin endorsed film as an important instrument for the new Soviet state. In 1919, the film industry was nationalized and placed under the direction of Narkompros, the new state-run ministry of culture. That same year, the Moscow Film School or All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (abbreviated as VGIK) was established. It was meant to serve primarily as a training facility, but due to the severe shortage of film stock and other equipment at the time, it was necessary to explore other types of curricula. Lev Kuleshov, a fledgling director who began working in the pre-revolutionary period, set up a workshop in association with the school where he and his students began exploring the formal structure of film and the innovative uses of editing in American films like Griffith’s Intolerance (1916). For Kuleshov, “the essence of cinematography” was without question a matter of editing. “[W]hat is important is not what is shot in a given piece,” he explained, “but how the pieces in a film succeed one another, how they are structured” (Kuleshov On Film 129). Ultimately, the workshop became best known for an experiment labeled the “Kuleshov effect.” By editing the same initial shot together with several different reverse shots, the experiment suggested that an actor’s appearance is determined less by his facial expression than by what he is looking at. Kuleshov’s investigations quickly became the foundation for an ensuing generation of Soviet filmmakers and editing became the primary means by which they sought to advance the new medium.
As a practical technique, editing also resonated with elements of Marx’s conceptual framework. His theoretical method is sometimes referred to as dialectical materialism, a combination of Hegelian dialectics and his own account of economic determinism in which material conditions account for one’s social class. Marx believed that class struggle, and more specifically the conflict between opposing class interests, was the engine that would move history forward. Eisenstein, while often fast and loose in his interpretations of Marx, was the most explicit in his efforts to introduce a dialectical approach to film form. As he bluntly put it, “montage is conflict” (Eisenstein Reader 88). While art in general aimed to forge new concepts through “the dynamic clash of opposing passions” (Eisenstein Reader 93), editing allowed for the ongoing juxtaposition of individual shots. In this regard, editing promised to serve in a dialectical manner. It was tantamount to smashing film’s basic material units – the individual shot – apart in order to generate something like the “explosions of the internal combustion engine” (Eisenstein Reader 88). Film form would act as a catalyst, a kind of fuel that was necessary to ensure intellectual and historical progress.
The turn to editing was not only a matter of revolutionary rhetoric but also part of a broader zeitgeist that extended to art and intellectual circles that had existed prior to the events of 1917. The Russian Futurists were a loosely formed avant-garde group intrigued by the dynamism of industrial modernity, especially its speed and complexity. This group included key figures like Kazimir Malevich, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, working in different media – painting, theater, and poetry, respectively. After the revolution these artists, joined by Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky – both of whom specialized in photography and graphic design, pioneered a new movement known as constructivism. One of its main principles was that artists should serve as a new type of engineer capable of using scientific techniques to construct “socially useful art objects – objects that would enhance everyday life” (Art Into Life 169). Their slogan “art into life” carried the broader belief that the Revolution had set the stage for an entirely new and egalitarian society, one in which art would play a practical role. At the same time, the exact way this was to take place was a matter of contentious debate. As in France, various factions within this group issued polemical manifestos, often attacking one another, engendering intense debate within the pages of LEF, the journal of the Left Front of the Arts, and other avant-garde publications.
Soviet montage theory was also influenced by the contemporaneous emergence of the Russian Formalists, an informal network of intellectuals and scholars that included groups such as the Moscow Linguistic Circle and the Society for the Study of Poetic Language in St. Petersburg. The Formalists shared an interest in language and were inspired by the developing science of modern linguistics. In the same way that linguistics focused its attention on the basic units of language, the formalists attempted to critically engage the basic units of literature. They drew, for example, a distinction between fabula and syuzhet. The former refers to the chronological order of events, or story. The latter refers to the actual arrangement of these events, or plot. This distinction allowed for a more precise interrogation of the relationship between form and content, and established how literature, as well as film, functioned as a multidimensional textual system.
In addition to their interest in specific structural elements, the Formalists proposed a broader theory of art. According to Victor Shklovsky, one of the most prominent members of this group, art should produce knowledge by “enstranging objects and complicating form” (Theory of Prose 6). As life becomes habitual and routine, we are no longer able to see things as they really are. Art provides the devices that are necessary for us to see these things anew. Shklovsky’s notion of ostranenie, the Russian term for “making strange,” clearly resonated with the French avant-garde’s use of defamiliarization. This term also became closely associated with “alienation effects,” a technique later developed by German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Such sentiments were also evident in various accounts of montage. Dziga Vertov, for instance, argued that Kino-Eye (i.e., the umbrella term he used to describe his style of filmmaking) should be used to make “the invisible visible, the unclear clear, the hidden manifest, the disguised overt,” all as part of a coordinated effort to transform, “falsehood into truth” (Kino-Eye 41). While defamiliarization indicates an important parallel between the Russian Formalists and Soviet filmmakers, there were also notable variations. Most significantly, the Russian Formalists were part of a larger undertaking they termed poetics. This refers to a form of literary analysis that examines individual texts in order to extrapolate their governing formal properties. Their growing interest in this type of analysis marked a departure from the group’s earlier affinity for avant-garde techniques and has, somewhat confusingly, served as a point of reference for subsequent movements ranging from American New Criticism to structuralism. Starting in the 1980s, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson revived some of these terms, variously describing their own approach as a type of neo-formalism or historical poetics (see Section II in Chapter 4).
These different influences are all apparent in the work of Eisenstein, the director and theorist who quickly emerged as the leading figure in Soviet cinema. While briefly serving with the Red Army, Eisenstein began working in theater. After the civil war, he continued to pursue this as a professional career, first as a set designer at the Proletkult Theater in Moscow and then as a director. Between 1920 and 1924, Eisenstein studied both with the constructivist director Vsevolod Meyerhold and with the Petersburg-based Factory of the Eccentric Actor or FEKS. This experimental group embraced “low arts” like the cabaret, fairground amusements, and cinema as a way “to attack the hegemony of ‘high’ art” (Film Factory 21). It was at this time that Eisenstein developed his notion of the attraction, an aggressive device “calculated to produce specific emotional shocks in the spectator” (Eisenstein Reader 30). He further advocated for a combination, or montage, of these devices. In his first full-stage production, for instance, Eisenstein created a circus-like atmosphere, incorporating clowns and acrobats to emphasize kinesis and to challenge traditional notions of set construction. The play was also infamous for its grand finale. According to Eisenstein, fireworks were placed beneath each seat in the auditorium and set to explode just as the play came to an end. In this regard, the attraction was designed to agitate the audience through a combination of cerebral and sensory provocations. This was not only meant to physically incite spectators but also to attune them to the force necessary to overcome the inertia of existing ideological structures.
As Eisenstein moved on to film production – completing his first film, Strike, in 1924 – he argued that the attraction would continue to serve as an important tactic. For example, he described the final sequence of Strike as an “attractional schema” (Eisenstein Reader 39). The film concludes with a scene that cuts between images of fallen workers and the slaughter of a bull. This was designed to emphasize the “bloody horror” of the workers’ defeat (Eisenstein Reader 38). Here, the attraction is both a precursor and a transition to Eisenstein’s more elaborate theories of montage as a strictly cinematic technique. In terms of his example from Strike, he says that the intercutting engenders a “thematic effect,” producing an association or correspondence that ultimately amounts to something more than the sum of its parts (Eisenstein Reader 38). Eisenstein subsequently developed this notion in reference to hieroglyphs and other written characters. In the essay “Beyond the Shot,” he compares the juxtaposition of individual film shots to how Japanese ideograms combine specific graphic references in order to produce abstract concepts. In this same essay, Eisenstein takes a stronger rhetorical position by claiming that these individual parts are not simply interlocking units but rather an occasion for engendering dialectical opposition. In developing this position, he further amplified the aggressive aspects of the attraction, going so far as to compare his style of montage to a fist. It was in this capacity that montage was intended to pummel the audience with a “series of blows” (Eisenstein Reader 35).
While Eisenstein made montage the cornerstone of both his theoretical and practical approaches to film, he was also relatively elastic in adapting and expanding his exact methods. As part of his effort to emphasize conflict, for example, he recognized that other formal elements could be just as important as editing and the simple relationship between individual shots. In his second film Battleship Potemkin (1925), Eisenstein used staging and graphic counterpoints within the mise-en-scene, most famously in the climactic “Odessa Steps” sequence, to sensational effect. In a 1928 statement co-authored with Vsevolod Pudovkin and Grigori Alex-androv, Eisenstein expressed his interest in sound cinema. Though he understood that this new technology would be predominantly used to create the illusion of synchronicity, he also believed that as a new formal element sound could be used to create discord. It could thus be used to further enhance the principles of montage. As Eisenstein expanded his understanding of montage, he also began exploring more abstract variations on his earlier, more materially focused, dialectical approach. It was at this point that he introduced new categories such as tonal and overtonal to his more standard notions of montage based on acceleration, alternation, and rhythmic calculation. Tonal montage refers to scenes organized around a dominant thematic or emotional motif – as in the conclusion to Strike. In terms of introducing multiple themes or ideas, these could be juxtaposed over the course of a sequence to produce additional, conceptual overtones. In certain cases, these overtones could be further coordinated to engender a more complex association in what Eisenstein termed intellectual montage. To illustrate, he cites a famous sequence in October (1928), whereby several religious idols are joined together in a montage designed to illustrate religion’s hypocrisy. Although intellectual montage remained a difficult and evasive concept, it illustrates Eisenstein’s effort to continually expand montage both as a formal practice and as part of a larger theoretical project.
As Eisenstein developed increasingly complex notions of montage, he continued to work within a narrative framework. This distinguished him from Dziga Vertov, the other major practitioner of montage during this time and Eisenstein’s occasional rival. Vertov began working with film in 1918 as part of the state’s initial campaign to tour the country with short, propagandistic newsreels that were meant to rally support for the new government. While working with his brother, cinematographer Boris Kaufman, and his wife, editor Elizaveta Svilova, Vertov developed a program that called for Kino-pravada or film truth. Throughout various manifestos and short writings, they collectively celebrated the camera’s ability to capture and record reality. These efforts helped to pioneer a new genre known as documentary. Contemporaries like Robert Flaherty and John Grierson were exploring similar terrain, which they described as “the creative treatment of actuality.” While documentary emphasized film’s verisimilitude, government officials in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, like those in the Soviet Union, were all eager to explore the possibilities of film as a mass medium. These governments held certain notions that film would function as a public service, but their efforts often amounted to something akin to state-sponsored propaganda.
Even though Vertov maintained a fundamental allegiance to select documentary principles, he simultaneously embraced formal experimentation including the use of trick photography, optical effects, and self-reflexive commentary. These techniques were necessary to demonstrate cinema’s ability to see what the human eye could not. In his 1924 film Kino-glaz, for example, he uses reverse motion to track the origin of a commodity, in this case the piece of meat that is being sold at a local market. In doing so, he shows the transformation that the commodity must undergo and the labor incumbent within that process. The sequence serves to defamiliarize a common commercial good while also deconstructing commodity fetishism more generally. In his masterpiece, Man With a Movie Camera (1929), Vertov cuts between several scenes of manual labor, including the assembly of textiles, and shots of his editor Svilova as she combines individual celluloid frames. This not only illustrates the Formalist doctrine of laying bare the devices that underlie artistic production but also draws attention to parallel structures of labor within industrialized society. This was another facet of Vertov’s Kino-Eye. It aimed to elicit “the internal rhythm” that linked modern machinery to different forms of labor (Kino-Eye 8).
With the international success of Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein quickly became an iconic representative of cinema’s potential as a serious art. Between 1929 and 1932, his reputation continued to grow while he traveled the world as an ambassador for Soviet culture and the principles of montage. And yet even with this success, Eisenstein’s actual situation was a bit more complicated. Some of his admirers in the West celebrated his cinematic accomplishments with little consideration for his political or theoretical concerns. Political dissidents and the intelligentsia meanwhile welcomed him as a comrade-in-arms but did not fully understand or appreciate his aesthetic sensibility. Many others were wary of the new Soviet experiment writ large and condemned anyone associated with it as a subversive enemy. In addition to all of this, the Soviet Union had become a very different place by the time Eisenstein returned in 1932. The sense of exhilaration and avant-garde ferment of the 1920s quickly disappeared as Joseph Stalin rose to power. Formalism was officially denounced in favor of “socialist realism.” Artists like Eisenstein and Vertov were censured, never able to work again entirely on their own terms. By the time the Soviet Union entered World War II, and then the Cold War, the revolutionary euphoria of the 1920s was a distant memory.
As World War I came to an end, Germany, much like the Soviet Union, was engulfed by social and political disarray. The new Weimar Republic, the parliamentary government installed in 1919 as a condition of Germany’s surrender to the Allied Powers, attempted to institute democratic reforms but remained fundamentally unstable, hindered in part by the economic volatility brought on by debt and astronomical inflation. It was in this context that Felix Weil, together with the financial support of his industrialist father Herman, founded the Institute of Social Research in 1923. As a student, Weil had participated in emerging debates about Marxist principles and socialist politics, and after completing his studies, he became a patron to various leftist endeavors. With the Institute, Weil sought to establish a permanent framework for conducting research and for supporting scholars interested in new forms of social theory. In this regard, it was designed to facilitate the types of interdisciplinary, critical perspectives that had essentially been prohibited within the rigid confines of the official education system.
The Institute was affiliated with Frankfurt University, one of the newer and more liberal universities, but maintained a signifi-cant degree of intellectual and financial independence due to Weil’s generous support. This ensured the freedom to pursue unorthodox topics and more generally provided the resources that were necessary to conduct serious academic research. For instance, the Institute’s endowment specifically provided funding for staff, library materials, and additional support for graduate students. While the Frankfurt School is often used as an interchangeable euphemism for the Institute itself, it also serves as a more inclusive designation. The Frankfurt School encompasses the Institute’s multiple variations as it was forced to relocate following the Nazi’s rise to power and, more importantly, it includes the intellectuals that were only nominally affiliated with the Institute. It is in this respect that Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin are considered representative figures. Though they shared many of the same influences and interests (ranging from the philosophy of Hegel, Kant, and Nietzsche as well as the more recent work of sociologists Georg Simmel and Max Weber), they never gained the Institute’s full support. It may be because of this that they were also among the few members of the Frankfurt School to vigorously consider the theoretical implications of film.
Kracauer was deeply enmeshed in the intellectual life of Weimar Germany and he, like Benjamin, maintained personal friendships with many of the Institute’s leading members. At the same time, he had taken a much more eclectic professional path than the other scholars associated with the Institute. He spent most of his life as a journalist and freelance writer. Throughout most of the 1920s, he served as a regular contributor, and later as a full editor, to the cultural section in the Frankfurter Zeitung, one of Germany’s most prominent bourgeois newspapers. The rise of the Nazis prompted Kracauer to leave for Paris in 1933 where he continued working for the newspaper. While writing extensively about popular culture and film among other things, Kracauer developed an aptitude for juggling rhetorical dexterity with conceptual complexity. When he eventually gained entry to the United States in 1941, he threw his full focus into film, publishing in 1947 From Caligari to Hitler, a critical history of German cinema during the Weimar period, and, then in 1960, Theory of Film, a deft and sweeping overview of the medium and the critical debates that it had generated. But with these accomplishments, he seemed to have adopted a more pedantic approach that left him, in Dudley Andrew’s words, doubly cursed, both disconnected from his earlier intellectual milieu and out-of-step with the newly emerging sensibilities that were about to drastically alter the direction of film studies.
The inopportune timing of these later efforts threatened to spoil Kracauer’s reception altogether. Theory of Film, much like Jean Mitry’s The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema, which shared a similar orientation and sense of ambition, would be blithely dismissed by several generations while its affiliation with realism served as a pretext for condemnation. This was a recurrent theme for many early film theorists. Kracauer would eventually enjoy a major revival, though not until the 1990s when his Weimar writings were made available in English in a collection entitled, The Mass Ornament. Miriam Hansen, the most instructive proponent in a crucial reassessment of several Frankfurt School figures, contends that much of Kracauer’s output reads as a series of untimely refractions, meaning in part that his early- and late-work cannot be understood independently of one another. In her introduction to the most recent edition of Theory of Film, for instance, Hansen highlights where and how it is encrypted with Kracauer’s earlier concerns, specifically his complex views regarding modernity and film’s ability to reverse its negative impact.
Hansen goes on to further note that even with Kracauer’s belabored and overly schematic organization, it is difficult to avoid the reverberation of more nuanced undercurrents. She points specifically to his repeated references to Marcel Proust’s discussion of a photograph in Remembrance of Things Past. To take another example, consider a brief mention of the close-up, a captivating figure among early viewers and fledgling theorists alike. Kracauer writes that the “close-up reveals new and unsuspected formations of matter” such that
skin textures are reminiscent of aerial photographs, eyes turn into lakes or volcanic craters. Such images blow up our environment in a double sense: they enlarge it literally; and in doing so, they blast the prison of conventional reality, opening up expanses which we have explored at best in dreams before.
(Theory of Film 48)
Contrary to his detractors, the passage is rich and suggestive. More importantly, it conceptually deviates from his supposedly stolid endorsement of film’s realist function.
In his brief account of the close-up, film becomes an intersection of divergent forces. It is at once organic (skin-like), technical and abstract (an aerial photograph), material (resembling natural and geological phenomena), and imaginary (dream-like). This is not entirely surprising since Kracauer had welcomed this type of dialectical entanglement throughout his early writings. It was precisely through the interplay between these opposing forces that Kracauer sharpened his critical analysis of modern life. He more broadly termed this method the “go-for-broke game of history” (Mass Ornament 61). This method can also be seen in his account of the mass ornament, a label Kracauer specifically adopted to describe the new popular fashion in which individuals were assembled into larger patterns or formations. He was thinking of marching demonstrations and dance troupes such as the Tiller Girls, but the phenomenon would soon also be prominently featured in film, most spectacularly in the baroque musical numbers orchestrated by Hollywood director Berkeley Busby. Kracauer starts his analysis with a harsh critique of these new configurations. In effect, they aestheticize the calculated, instrumental logic of the capitalist production process. The mass ornament, in this respect, produces a complete and pleasurable structure in which its individual parts are rendered imperceptible. This process closely parallels the manner whereby the labor necessary to manufacture a commodity is obscured in the final product. “Everyone,” as Kracauer notes, “does his or her task on the conveyor belt, performing a partial function without grasping the totality” (Mass Ornament 78).
At the same time, Kracauer was wary of simple bourgeois condemnations of popular culture and the kneejerk Marxist interpretations that dismissed such things as mere capitalist exploitation. Indeed, what distinguished Kracauer from his friends in the Institute was his willingness to engage new forms of mass culture with the same intellectual rigor that many believed was warranted only by more refined forms of culture such as literature and music. And while Kracauer ultimately preferred many of the same modernist and avant-garde practices that his peers would privilege in their analyses of modern culture, his approach differed significantly in at least one key respect. Other Frankfurt School scholars followed precursors like the Soviet montage theorists in advocating for the specific methods that were considered capable of challenging social and aesthetic conventions. Kracauer, by contrast, embraced a more dialectic form of ideology critique. He generated critical diagnoses based on his interpretation of existing culture and its various symptoms. But he also did so in a way that both fully confronted the complexity of mass culture and the potential ways in which contemporary audiences could respond to such forms.
To this end, Kracauer suggests that the “inconspicuous surface-level” expressions within mass culture cannot be taken entirely at face value even if they simultaneously hold the key to “the fundamental substance” of things (Mass Ornament 75). And as a result, it is necessary not only to attend to the surface and its subterranean complement but also to the way that they “illuminate each other reciprocally” (Mass Ornament 75). This maneuvering allows Kracauer to revise his initial critique of the mass ornament. Though the aestheticization of industrial society does disguise its brutal realities, it also has the potential to reveal the shortcomings of the capitalist system. In particular, Kracauer suggests that the mass ornament shows how the rational logic that undergirds this system does not go far enough. Instead, it is a testament to capitalism’s reliance on superficial distraction and the “mindless consumption of the ornamental patterns” in order to preserve traditional social hierarchies and consolidate power in the hands of a few. In his 1927 essay, “Photography,” Kracauer had identified similarly paradoxical dynamics, establishing a model for both the mass ornament and his later sweeping account. In these views, he held out hope for the revelatory potential of mass culture, a hope that culminated in film’s “redemption of physical reality,” the telling subtitle to Theory of Film. This attribute, as he writes in its epilogue, was not a matter of straightforward realism but rather a facet of film’s ability to render “visible what we did not, or perhaps could not, see before its advent.” Film allows us to discover the material world anew, to redeem it “from its dormant state, its state of virtual nonexistence.…” Film helps us “to appreciate our given material environment” and to “virtually make the world our home” once again (Theory of Film 300).
The return to Kracauer as an important Frankfurt School theorist is a recent development. By contrast, Walter Benjamin attracted a strong following rather quickly after the English translation of his work in the 1968 collection, Illuminations. In fact, Benjamin has become so prominent that he is likely the best-known representative of the Frankfurt School. This is odd since he, like Kracauer, had a tenuous, and often peripheral, relationship with the Institute. His marginal status was compounded by the fact that he was never able to secure a university position despite his formal training and obvious erudition. He was, as a result, forced to cobble out a meager living as a freelance writer, often relying on the financial support of his bourgeois family. When Benjamin died in 1940, committing suicide while attempting to escape fascist Europe, he was an obscure and little-known figure.
When his work did finally become more widely available, it was his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (alternately known by variations such as “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”), that drew the most interest. In it, Benjamin suggests that modern technology has fundamentally changed art. Most notably, he says that its aura has been rendered obsolete, meaning that art has lost its sense of authenticity or singularity, and, by extension, the cult-like rituals that it once supported. In the dominant reading of the essay, Benjamin is seen as celebrating technology, with film as his primary example, as a democratic tool, capable of emancipating society from the traditional forms of power such as religion. Though this reading continues to hold sway, Miriam Hansen, as part of her overall re-evaluation of the Frankfurt School, has made an extensive and convincing case for at least a partial reassessment of this view.
Part of Benjamin’s overall appeal has been his unique approach to an eclectic, and sometimes obscure, range of topics. This was evident in his first book, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, a work that Benjamin originally submitted as his post-doctoral thesis only to apparently bewilder his academic supervisors. As a key part of this analysis of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Baroque dramaturgy, Benjamin identified allegory both as a structuring device within this period and as a method for accessing the historical undercurrents within certain cultural formations. It became an important concept throughout his larger body of work and was the guiding principle in the never-completed Arcades Project, Benjamin’s attempt to excavate a history of modern Paris through an idiosyncratic account of its shop-lined, enclosed walkways. This unique approach was equally apparent even as he engaged more conventional topics. For instance, his “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” quickly shifts from away from poet Charles Baudelaire to a much broader consideration of the relationship between technology and modern life. While borrowing from Freud’s account of shock in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Benjamin suggests that we have necessarily adopted a protective shield in order to mitigate the sensory overload and other negative effects brought on by modern, industrialized society. As a result, it is necessary for art, in this case Baudelaire, to produce “harsh” images capable of reaching an audience that has otherwise grown numb to certain types of experience. Film, Benjamin adds in the same essay, is especially adept at producing these new forms of stimuli. In producing these shocks, the medium has the potential to breach the protective shield that has rendered society’s masses docile and apathetic.
What’s challenging in Benjamin’s account is that technology is at once the problem and a potential solution. When applied on a mass scale as part of industrialization, technology incapacitates its users. When enlisted in the service of certain types of art, it can be used to reverse technology’s negative impact. In this regard, Benjamin’s position resembles Kracauer’s account of the mass ornament as both acutely emblematic of the capitalist system and a prescient cipher capable of revealing the limits and contradictions of that system. Benjamin further developed his paradoxical view of technology in his essay, “Little History of Photography,” and, more specifically, in what he termed the optical unconscious. Contrary to strictly realist accounts of photography and the cinematic image, Benjamin argues that even, “the most precise technology can give its products a magical value,” that these mechanically produced documents bear traces of an alien “here and now,” the “tiny spark of contingency” that confirm, “it is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye” (Selected Writings v. 2 510). This “other” nature is akin to what Freud identified as the unconscious, a realm within human subjectivity where unfiltered desires and repressed, or socially unacceptable, thoughts are made to reside. Though Benjamin, prompted by the Surrealists’ embrace of psychoanalysis, was an able reader of Freud, he was less concerned with the term as a matter of psychological doctrine than as an evocative figure. Film was capable of registering that which was omnipresent within the visible world yet somehow unseen, the “physiognomic aspects” that “dwell in the smallest things.” These further encompass the fleeting details that are “meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams” (Selected Writings v. 2 512). In this regard, the optical unconscious was related to the avant-garde practice of defamiliarization. And yet Benjamin also found examples of the optical unconscious within contemporary cinema. Popular figures such as Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Mouse were simultaneously familiar and strange, uncanny in their ability to provide mass entertainment while also bearing witness to the barbarism inherent in industrialized modernity.
Although the dominant reading of the “Work of Art” essay emphasizes the eradication of aura as a necessary condition in the democratic enlistment of cinema, Benjamin’s interest in the optical unconscious suggests a more ambivalent position. In some respects, for instance, film’s ability to render certain “magical” attributes within its images comes dangerously close to reclaiming aura as an inescapable feature of the medium. Moreover, Benjamin appeared willing to complicate the idea of aura in his specific discussion of the relationship between film actors and their audience. Film, in contrast to theater, creates an irrevocable divide between the actor and the audience. Initially, Benjamin suggests that this void, and the loss of shared presence, underscores film’s annihilation of aura. He goes on, however, to say that this produces a new relationship whereby actor and audience bond by virtue of their connection with the camera, the apparatus that mediates their exchange. This is made all the more interesting in that the camera is absent within the image. The “equipment-free aspect of reality” that appears on screen, by strange turn then, becomes “the height of artifice” (Selected Writings v. 4 263). In other words, it serves as a dialectical image that contains both what is there and what is not. And in this sense, it also functions allegorically, reverberating the absent relationship between actor and audience.
In most cases, the Hollywood system and its ilk simply neutralized the radical potential of these dynamics. The strange and alienating effects associated with the optical unconscious were subordinated to the commercial logic of the entertainment industry. Show business responds by building up the “personality” of its stars, creating a cult-like fascination that preserves a kind of “magic” or contrived aura in its most valuable commodities (Selected Writings v. 4 261). Even with this being so, Benjamin maintained the possibility that film, along with other facets of modern culture, had the potential to reshape the way we see the world and, by turn, fundamentally transform social relations. In an essay exalting the Surrealists, Benjamin linked this potential to what he designated profane illuminations. Although there were different ways of producing these transformative moments, they were to a certain extent structurally implicit within film’s basic formal methods. In a passage that recalls the avant-garde ethos of Epstein and Vertov, Benjamin writes that film’s arrival has “exploded this prison-world with the dynamite of the split second.” This is tied to techniques such as the close-up, which expands space, bringing “to light entirely new structures of matter,” and to slow motion, which discloses “unknown aspects” within familiar movements (Selected Writings v. 4 265–266). These techniques promise not only a “heightened presence of mind,” but also a model for using new technologies as part of a larger effort to improve social conditions and catapult history forward.
Whereas Kracauer and Benjamin developed a complex series of ideas with respect to film, the Frankfurt School as a whole became closely identified with a more critical position. This is clearest in the work of Theodor Adorno, a leading figure in the actual Institute and a major philosopher and social critic in his own right. Unlike Kracauer and Benjamin, Adorno did not have much hope for the new medium. On the contrary, Adorno is best known for condemning popular culture – especially popular music and jazz – while instead endorsing various modernist practices and the possibilities he associated with autonomous art. His critical views are epitomized in “The Culture Industry,” an essay co-written with Max Horkheimer while both were living in the United States exiled by Nazi Germany. Throughout the essay they offer a devastating critique of film and mass culture more generally as a homogenous and fundamentally brutal facet of modern society. “Entertainment,” they write, “is the prolongation of work under late capitalism. It is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labor process so that they can cope with it again” (Dialectic of Enlightenment 109). In this regard, the culture industry is considered synonymous with certain sadomasochistic dynamics. Film and other forms of popular entertainment such as cartoons present viewers with images of violence that mask the violence that they themselves must accept as a condition of their work-a-day world. The laughter elicited by such cartoons serves as a form of compensation. But it is also one that further accustoms viewers to the exploitive rhythms of modern, industrialized society.
The culture industry critique was not only representative of the Frankfurt School’s position, but it also became the general line for many intellectuals and social critics in the years that followed World War II. In some cases, the mass culture critique posited by Dwight MacDonald and related arguments made by Clement Greenberg suggested a return to earlier cultural hierarchies, which allowed elites and intellectuals to simply ignore film and popular culture. This made for a rather contradictory legacy. The Institute provided an initial model for generating serious theoretical scholarship engaged in the rigorous analysis of culture and society. Yet, with Adorno and Horkheimer’s wholesale condemnation, the Frankfurt School appeared to foreclose further consideration of mass culture, essentially undoing much of the work that other early theorists had undertaken. On the other hand, the Frankfurt School practice of Critical Theory, an interdisciplinary synthesis of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and ideology critique, anticipated many of the theoretical interests that took root in post-war France. Despite such obvious affinities, however, they rarely, if ever, came to be anything more than that. In relatively short order, the Institute returned to Germany after the war’s conclusion and operated in some manner of isolation, detached from the larger intellectual developments underway in other parts of the west. Aside from Herbert Marcuse’s contributions to the New Left in the 1960s, Kracauer and Benjamin comprise the early Frankfurt School’s most influential legacy, especially for film theory. Of course, just as the Institute existed out of place during much of this period, Kracauer and Benjamin were forced to adopt an untimely perspective that placed them even further outside the accepted purview of their contemporaries. This propensity adds yet another layer to their already poignant thinking. Making sense of all these complexities certainly remains an ongoing project.
The vibrant film culture that had flourished in France during the 1910s and 1920s largely came to an end in the decade leading up to World War II. The exact reasons for this are not clear though external factors like international economic depression and the rise of political regimes hostile to modern art certainly took a toll. Other factors, like the introduction of sound technology and internal power struggles among avant-garde groups like the Surreal-ists, may have also contributed. Regardless of which circumstances were most responsible for this decline, France’s film culture following World War II had to be reinvented anew. This task largely fell to André Bazin, a perspicacious and dedicated enthusiast who worked tirelessly in the post-war aftermath to develop a new culture of informed criticism and sustained engagement. As part of these efforts, Bazin inspired a younger generation of critics and fledgling filmmakers many of whom went on to have a dramatic impact long after his death in 1958. Bazin also wrote extensively during this time, mainly short articles and essays for a variety of journals and other publications. His organizing efforts culminated with the founding of Cahiers du cinéma, one of the most well-regarded sources of writing on film and a major touchstone in the establishment of film studies as a serious academic subject. It was here that Bazin inaugurated a decisive shift to realism and officially recognized the aesthetics that came to dominate post-World War II European art cinemas.
In the 1930s, the French film industry gave rise to a style of narrative filmmaking known as poetic realism. Directors like Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné used this style to create lyrical yet unembellished portraits of everyday, often working-class, life. While still adhering to narrative conventions, these films tended to adopt the more naturalistic aesthetics of documentary. With this style, Bazin found the basis for what he believed was film’s defining feature: its ineffable bond with the social world and an ability to truthfully depict life’s beauty and complexity. Unlike the montage theorists, Bazin was not interested in producing calculated effects through the manipulation of film’s formal structure. Nor was he convinced, like earlier theorists Münsterberg and Arnheim, that film’s most important feature lay in the limitations of its verisimilitude. To make his case to the contrary, Bazin, like Kracauer and Benjamin before him, began by turning to film’s technological precursor. In his essay, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Bazin broadly suggests that the purpose of art is to preserve life. The photograph succeeds at this task insofar as it eliminates the human component from the process. Indeed, the mechanical nature of photography satisfies our “irrational” desire for something in its original state. And to this end, Bazin infamously declared, “The photographic image is the object itself.” It is not a reproduction, but, rather, “it is the model” (What Is Cinema? v. 1 14). The exact meaning of Bazin’s assertion has been the source of tremendous consternation. Some suggest that he recognized film’s indexical quality, a distinction established in an unrelated context by Charles Sanders Peirce to indicate signs that share an existential bond with their referent (e.g., fingerprints). For others, the claim was simply evidence of Bazin’s errant ways: his naïve idealism, his Catholicism, and his unapologetic faith in the camera as an objective recording apparatus.
This understanding of the photographic image was the linchpin in Bazin’s commitment to realism. At the same time, he extended his support to a range of practitioners and techniques that adhered more to the spirit than the letter of this commitment. In addition to Renoir, Bazin identified Erich von Stroheim, Orson Welles, Carl Theodore Dreyer, and Robert Bresson as key directors who “put their faith in reality” (What Is Cinema? v. 1 24). As Bazin saw it, they favored techniques that forced reality to reveal its “structural depth.” These techniques included the long take and deep focus, both of which located meaning objectively within the images themselves as opposed to imposing it through juxtaposition as in the case of montage. In other words, such techniques aimed to maintain, rather than manipulate, spatial-temporal relations. The long take, or sequence shot, preserved the continuity of dramatic action, thereby engendering “objectivity in time” (What Is Cinema? v. 1 14). Deep focus, on the other hand, kept multiple planes (e.g., foreground and background) simultaneously in focus, allowing for spatial unity within the image.
In Bazin’s view, both devices marked an important “step forward in the history of film language” (What Is Cinema? v. 1 35). The long take and deep focus not only made for a more realistic aesthetic practice but also fundamentally altered how spectators related to the cinematic image. Bazin endorsed these attributes not because they simplified cinematic representation, but rather because they foregrounded the ambiguity and uncertainty that were a significant part of modern experience. In this regard, realism even shared some underlining traits with defamiliarization. “Only the impassive lens,” writes Bazin, is capable of stripping away the preconceptions, “the spiritual dust and grime,” which piles up and obscures the world around us (What Is Cinema? v. 1 15). It is only by seeing it anew that we might begin to reclaim our capacity to be part of the world and change it for the better.
Bazin’s theoretical focus was further supported by the emergence of Italian neorealism, a style shared by a group of filmmakers that gained prominence in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The movement featured the work of directors Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, and Vittorio De Sica. Building on the traditions of poetic realism, these directors utilized non-professional actors and filmed on location to create a more direct or authentic account of reality. Another central figure in the movement, screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, further advocated for a turn away from overly contrived plots and the general artifice on which commercial cinema relied. Bazin not only appreciated these specific practices but also suggested that there was something more to the neorealist approach. In De Sica’s Umberto D (1955), for example, the film emphasizes, “a succession of concrete instances of life,” passing moments that lack obvious drama. But in presenting these “facts,” the film transforms what can be considered as such. As the maid makes coffee, “The camera confines itself to watching her doing her little chores” (What Is Cinema? v. 2 81). These passing moments challenge our capacity to see the world as it really exists, and in certain instances, as when the maid “shuts the door with the tip of her outstretched foot,” the camera transforms these moments of life into “visible poetry” (What Is Cinema? v. 2 82).
Although Bazin was adamant in his defense of realist aesthetics, he was not necessarily doctrinaire in doing so. Categories like truth and reality were never absolute but rather malleable and often contradictory. Bazin also understood that film was still evolving and that it was important to embrace new practices so long as they complemented the medium’s main qualities. In an example of his willingness to adapt, he discusses the use of elision in Rossellini’s Paisà (1946). While the technique is used to maintain “an intelligible succession of events,” cause and effect “do not mesh like a chain with the sprockets of a wheel.” Instead, the mind is forced “to leap from one event to the other as one leaps from stone to stone in crossing a river,” knowing there is a chance that “one’s foot hesitates between two rocks, or that one misses one’s footing and slips” (What Is Cinema? v. 2 35–36). Bazin, contrary to his earlier emphasis on spatial and temporal unity, endorses the use of ellipsis as a way of heightening the viewer’s role while also escaping the stringent cause-and-effect logic of classical Hollywood cinema. In his discussion of Rossellini, and in his later defense of Federico Fellini as a neorealist, Bazin foreshadows the use of ambiguity and indeterminacy that became a staple in post-war art cinema.
Bazin’s ability to adapt was also an important practical skill as he became deeply involved in France’s post-war film culture. Bazin had made it his mission to elevate the cultural status of film, organizing numerous clubs and writing for a wide assortment of publications as part of a larger campaign to connect intellectuals with a younger generation of aficionados. Cahiers du cinéma, the film journal that Bazin co-founded with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Lo Duca in 1951, signaled a culmination of these efforts. It provided an outlet for further developing the serious analysis of film and helped to cultivate young critics Eric Rohmer, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claude Charbol, a group that within the next decade would comprise the leading directors of France’s nouvelle vague, or new wave style of filmmaking. Although Bazin had an immense editorial influence at Cahiers and the journal generally subscribed to his notion of realism, its younger contributors, the so-called young Turks, were also eager to make their own mark. It was in part because of these efforts that the journal’s defining concept soon became la politique des auteurs. While the idea that certain directors should be considered the principal creative author or that some directors were decidedly more skilled than others was already established, the Cahiers critics, despite Bazin’s reservations, advanced a much more audacious and antagonistic version of this view.
The Cahiers critics did not only draw attention to successful Hollywood directors like Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, and Howard Hawks, but also made a point of elevating, at the time, less prominent directors like Samuel Fuller, Nicholas Ray, and Vincente Minnelli. In this regard, these critics were becoming increasingly self-conscious of their capacity to exert influence. This view of authorship was contingent on their ability to identify a director’s unique style within the mise-en-scene and to discern thematic patterns across multiple films regardless of extraneous circumstances such as the commercial imperatives of the Hollywood system. This same principle extended to the delineation of new genres, most notably film noir, as another category worthy of critical investigation. These categories were instrumental in expanding film criticism as a critical endeavor and, by extension, for facilitating the development of subsequent theoretical principles.
In this way, Cahiers had a profound impact on the serious study of film. But its success was not without certain contradictions. By the early 1960s, the Cahiers’ notion of authorship had gained considerable traction in Britain and the United States. In the hands of Andrew Sarris, the most prominent American proponent of authorship, the concept took on a more doctrinaire, and occasionally chauvinistic, tone. Authorship was used to erect a pantheon of great directors, in effect celebrating traditional aesthetic values in ways that were consistent with both the marketing interests of Hollywood and broader aesthetic conventions (i.e., that art was the province of individual genius). These more conservative undertones ran contrary to the increasingly radical politics that were taking hold throughout the 1960s and that were eventually embraced by journals like Cahiers. The emergence of these later perspectives eventually precipitated a more fundamental divide. Critics and theorists began to distinguish their work from what came to be labeled classical film theory. This term was partly a matter of periodization, designed to indicate the theoretical work that had taken place prior to 1960. But it also implicitly functioned as a pejorative. In effect, it was used to demarcate and reject ideas like authorship and realism that – at least from the vantage point of the late-1960s and 1970s – appeared naïve and incompatible with subsequent theoretical concerns.
In many ways, Bazin has come to stand as the most telling representative of film theory’s early period. He serves as a kind of junction point, bringing together the many disparate strands of thinking that had sprung to life throughout the first half of the twentieth century while also laying a foundation that would both enable growing intellectual zeal and inspire creative breakthroughs like the French New Wave. In assuming this role, however, Bazin simultaneously became a convenient scapegoat of sorts, a totem of another time that would have to be buried, however prematurely, so that another incarnation of film theory might flourish in his wake. The classical period, in this respect, wasn’t simply a nascent stage in which film theory gathered momentum, slowly cohering into a more fully formed state. Instead, it suggests something more like the liminality of adolescence, where identity formation and extreme transience are compressed together into an unwieldy interlude. As is all too often the case, it is a period that we rush to escape only to later look back on keenly, always with a bit of nostalgia but also usually better able to appreciate its richness and complexity in ways that were previously impossible. In recent years, film studies has seen classical film theory return from its once circumscribed position on the margins of the discipline to become one of the most central concerns in current scholarship. As part of this, Bazin has become emblematic again. However, he now serves as an occasion for returning to past thinking while seeing it in a new light.
Over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, a series of pioneering figures established film as a serious aesthetic and cultural practice. Although their interests and exact methods varied widely, early theorists succeeded in legitimizing a medium that had been considered disreputable because of its technological and commercial origins. They did this by identifying film’s defining characteristics (i.e., its verisimilitude) and formal techniques (i.e., montage), and by developing a body of terms, concepts, and debates that served as the foundation for additional investigation. These were important steps in the later development of film studies as an appropriate scholarly topic.
All quotes attributed to Vachel Lindsay are from The Art of the Moving Picture (Modern Library, 2000 [1915]). Additional background information about Lindsay can be found in Davis Edwards’ “The Real Source of Vachel Lindsay’s Poetic Technique” (Quarterly Journal of Speech 33.2, 1947, 182–195) and T. R. Hummer’s “Laughed Off: Canon, Kharakter, and the Dismissal of Vachel Lindsay” (The Kenyon Review 17.2, Spring 1995, 56–96).
Quotes attributed to Hugo Münsterberg are from The Photo-play: A Psychological Study (1916). This text has been republished as part of Hugo Münsterberg on Film (Routledge, 2002), a collection that features additional short writings by Münsterberg. Additional background information can be found in Frank J. Landy’s “Hugo Münsterberg: Victim or Visionary?” (Journal of Applied Psychology 77.6, 1992, 787–802), Jutta and Lothar Spillmann’s “The Rise and Fall of Hugo Münsterberg” (Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 29, October 1993, 322–338), and Giuliana Bruno’s “Film, Aesthetics, Science: Hugo Münsterberg’s Laboratory of Moving Images” (Grey Room 36, 2009, 88–113). For more on film-mind analogies, see Noël Carroll’s “Film/Mind Analogies: The Case of Hugo Münsterberg” (The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46.4, Summer 1988, 489–499).
The quotes by Rudolf Arnheim are from Film as Art (University of California, 1957 [1933]). Additional information about Arnheim can be found in the collection, Arnheim for Film and Media Studies (Ed. Scott Higgins, Routledge, 2011). See also Part I in Andrew’s The Major Film Theories.
Medium specificity has been extensively considered by Noël Carroll. Select essays on this topic are available in his Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge, 1996) and The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Blackwell, 2008). See also his Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton, 1988), which addresses several figures from this chapter.
For related discussion, see Dana Polan’s Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film (University of California, 2007), Haidee Wasson’s Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (University of California, 2005), and Peter Decherney’s Hollywood and the Cultural Elite (Columbia, 2005). For a more general account, see Lary May’s Screening Out the Past (University of Chicago, 1980). For a more specific account of the shifting politics around the relationship between work and leisure, see George Mitchell’s “The Movies and Münsterberg” (Jump Cut 27, July 1982, available online at www.ejumpcut.org).
In Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking (Harvard, 1992), Alan Williams provides an instructive overview of the period covered in this section. Two additional key texts are referenced throughout: Richard Abel’s edited collection, French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, Volume I 1907–1939 (Princeton, 1988) and David Bordwell’s French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory, and Film Style (Arno Press, 1980). Abel’s collection includes writings by Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac, and Ricciotto Canudo. For an extended discussion of Canudo, see D.N. Rodowick’s Elegy for Theory (Harvard, 2014, 80–89). For a more detailed account of cinephilia, see Christian Keathley’s Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (Indiana, 2006).
For more on André Breton, see his Manifestos of Surrealism (Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1972). See also Paul Hammond’s collection, The Shadow and Its Shadow (3rd ed., City Lights Books, 2000), which includes Louis Aragon’s “On décor” (the source for the quote on page 40), and Rudolf E. Kuenzli’s collection, Dada and Surrealist Film (MIT, 2001).
Edited by Peter Gay, The Freud Reader (Norton, 1989) can be a useful point of entry. Alternately, Pamela Thurschwell’s Sigmund Freud (Routledge, 2000) is an accessible and worthwhile initial guide. For an extended analysis of Buñuel and Dalí’s Un Chien andalou, see Linda Williams’ Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film (University of California, 1981).
In addition to the writings by Epstein included in Abel’s French Film Theory and Criticism, several recent publications have made his work more widely available. See, for example, The Intelligence of a Machine (introduced and trans. Christophe Wall-Romana, Univocal, 2014), Wall-Romana’s monograph, Jean Epstein (Manchester, 2013), and Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul’s collection, Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam, 2012).
For Béla Balázs account of the close-up, see his Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art (Trans. Edith Bone, Dover, 1970). Additional writings have been collected in Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory (Trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Erica Carter, Berghahn Books, 2010).
Jay Leyda’s Kino (3rd ed., Princeton, 1983) provides a detailed historical account of Russian and Soviet cinema. This work is complemented by Denise J. Youngblood’s Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918–1935 (University of Texas, 1991) and Yuri Tsivian’s Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception (Trans. Alan Bodger, Routledge, 1994). Another valuable text is The Film Factory (Routledge, 1994), a collection edited by Richard Taylor and Ian Christie. Quotes attributed to Kuleshov are from Kuleshov on Film (Trans. and ed. Ronald Levaco, University of California, 1974).
The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker, Norton, 1978) provides a general survey of Marx’s key writings. Many of these can also be found online, for instance, in the Marx Engels Archive (www.marxists.org/archive/marx). A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (2nd ed., ed. Tom Bottomore, Blackwell, 1998) is a helpful reference in navigating some of Marx’s more complex terms and concepts.
For more information about groups associated with Constructivism, see Stephen Bann’s collection, The Tradition of Constructivism (Da Capo, 1974) and Art Into Life: Russian Constructivism, 1914–1932 (the catalogue for a 1990 art exhibit held at the University of Washington’s Henry Gallery). The quoted passage by Shklovsky can be found in his Theory of Prose (Trans. Benjamin Sher, Dalkey Archive Press, 1990). For similarities between defamiliarization and Brecht’s notion of alienation effects, see his work collected in Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic (Ed. and trans. John Willett, Hill and Wang, 1992).
Quotes from Eisenstein are all taken from The Eisenstein Reader (Ed. Richard Taylor, BFI, 1998), a concise but cogent representation of his main ideas. The four-volume series, S. M. Eisenstein: Selected Works, also edited by Richard Taylor, is a more comprehensive collection, and the two volumes Film Sense (1947) and Film Form (1949) edited by Jay Leda are probably the best known. Additional information about Eisenstein can be found in David Bordwell’s The Cinema of Eisenstein (Routledge, 2005) and Anne Nesbet’s Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking (I.B. Tauris, 2007).
A main point of reference for Dziga Vertov is Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Ed. Annette Michelson, University of California, 1984). See also Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties (Ed. Yuri Tsivian, published in conjunction with the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, 2004) and John McKay’s remarkably detailed, Dziga Vertov: Life and Work, 1896–1921 (Academic Studies Press, 2018). Vertov is also discussed in studies devoted to documentary. For example, see Erik Barnouw’s classic account, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (2nd ed., Oxford, 1993). For additional definitions of documentary, including texts by key figures like Robert Flaherty and John Grierson, see Jonathan Kahana’s comprehensive collection, The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism (Oxford, 2016).
For more information about the history and significance of the Frankfurt School, see Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Little, Brown, 1973) and Rolf Wiggershaus’s The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Trans. Michael Robertson, MIT, 1994).
Over the last three or four decades, there has been a significant increase in the number of published materials devoted to Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. The most valuable and directly relevant work is Miriam Bratu Hansen’s Cinema and Experience (University of California, 2012).
Major works by Kracauer include:
See also Gertrud Koch’s Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction (Trans. Jeremy Gaines, Princeton, 2000), Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke’s collection of essays Culture in the Anteroom (University of Michigan, 2012), and Johannes von Moltke’s The Curious Humanist (University of California, 2016).
Some of the works by Walter Benjamin referenced in this section include:
Among the many additional materials devoted to Benjamin, Esther Leslie’s account in Walter Benjamin (Reaktion, 20007) offers a lucid starting point. Leslie’s Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (Verso, 2002) is also of interest, though it extends beyond Benjamin. Similarly, Ian Aitken’s European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction (Indiana, 2001) provides an insightful consideration that addresses many of the theorists covered in this chapter.
The essay, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, is included in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Trans. Edmund Jephcott, Stanford, 2002 [1944]). The “mass culture critique” can be found in Dwight MacDonald’s “A Theory of Mass Culture” in Mass Culture: Popular Arts in America (Eds. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, Free Press, 1959) and in Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Beacon, 2006 [1939]). See also Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (Beacon, 1964). For additional details about the Institute’s return to Germany, see the Epilogue in Jay’s Dialectical Imagination.
André Bazin’s best-known essays are included in the two volumes of his What Is Cinema? (Trans. Hugh Gray, University of California, Volume I: 1967 and Volume II: 1971). See also Bazin At Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties (Ed. Bert Cardullo, trans. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo, Routledge, 1997) and André Bazin’s New Media (Ed. and trans. Dudley Andrew, University of California, 2014). Dudley Andrew has been Bazin’s most ardent supporter in the anglophone world. His biographical study, André Bazin (Revised edition, Oxford, 2013), provides a vital guide. In his preface to the revised 2013 edition, Andrew recounts the unevenness of Bazin’s reception in relationship to different contextual factors.
The term indexicality, and its application to Bazin, was introduced by Peter Wollen in his Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Indiana, 1972). For further reference, see Charles Sanders Peirce, Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce (Ed. James Hoopes, University of North Carolina, 1991). See also Section I in Chapter 3.
For an overview of international art cinema, see Robert Phillip Kolker’s The Altering Eye (Oxford, 1983) or András Bálint Kovács’ Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema, 1950–1980 (University of Chicago, 2007). For more specific movements, see The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks (Eds. Peter Graham and Ginette Vincendeau, BFI, 2009), Peter Bondanella’s Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present (Expanded edition, Continuum, 1998), and Millicent Marcus’ Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism (Princeton, 1986). Cesare Zavattini’s “A Thesis on Neo-Realism” is included with related texts in Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neo-Realism (Ed. and trans. David Overbey, Archon Books, 1979).
Emilie Bickerton’s A Short History of Cahiers du cinéma (Verso, 2009) provides an informative overview of the journal that Bazin helped to start. See also Jim Hillier’s three-volume anthology, the most relevant volume for this section being Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s, Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Harvard, 1985). For more about authorship, see Barry Keith Grant’s collection Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader (Blackwell, 2008). Writings by Andrew Sarris are collected in The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 (Da Capo, 1996).
The recent return to Bazin is indebted to Dudley Andrew’s dedication. See his What Cinema Is! (Blackwell, 2010). See also Daniel Morgan’s “Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics” (Critical Inquiry 32, Spring 2006, 443–481), David Bordwell’s On the History of Film Style (Harvard, 1997), Philip Rosen’s Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (University of Minnesota, 2001), and Ivone Margulies’s Rites of Realism (Duke, 2003). For more recent scholarship, see Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife (Ed. Dudley Andrew with Hervé Joubert-Laurenin, Oxford, 2011), Blandine Joret’s Studying Film with André Bazin (Amsterdam, 2019), and Angela Dalle Vacche’s André Bazin’s Film Theory (Oxford, 2020).