The only possible conclusion is that an enormous amount of work still remains to be done.
– Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969: 156).
The question most often asked about films seems straightforward: What is the film about? Yet to answer is not so simple, without engaging the most simplistic of value judgments: ‘I liked it’, or ‘it was good’, or ‘I didn’t like it ‘, or ‘it was bad’. Such answers are pure judgements based on subjective aesthetic criteria. While aesthetic preferences (which convey the contextual spectrum of value systems of political, moral, religious, economic, sexual, spiritual persuasion) form a part of the critical field, different choices for a modeling method will inevitably privilege one epistemic mode of thinking over another.
The film ends and the work of film theory begins. In Margarethe von Trotta’s Die Bleierne Zeit, a confrontational scene between the two sisters plays out with each questioning the value of the other’s work. The script embraces the materiality of their language and of their technological mediation explicitly; through institutions of religion, family, education and the law, and through the media of film, journalism and their predicated active bodies. Each invests time, labour and ultimately their entire life in commitment to their beliefs, in theory parallel, in practice oppositional. There is always a separation between theory and practice, even when one’s practice is the craft of writing, as the action of writing proceeds like every practice, perhaps within a model, plan or schema, but the action, however well designed, or not, will precede the intention. While the filmic sound-image continues to play within the minds of the beholders, film theory’s challenge is to not just respond to the film (this is the task of the film review), but to begin to direct readers toward a specific theoretical framework. The film theorist is a director of not just the film images, but of the potential of those images to infer and connect, of the film to be positioned in or outside of other films and images; of the cinema to be productive of certain kinds of thinking and of seeing the world and worlds of the imagination.
The work of the film theorist is to work with what exists, and what is imagined. One must choose which creative spectrum to work with. In this short book, I have attempted to provide an overview of three of the essential elements for the practice of film theorisation: first, a consideration of what kind of model of theory is being applied (as an epistemic method); second, a reminder to look at the technological platform being used to make the object of theory; and third, critical questions regarding what kind of cinematic spectatorship is in operation in theorisation.
Film theory has a short hundred-plus year history that provides some wonderful and traumatic images on the history of the twentieth century through which it developed, and images of alternative and fantastical worlds that counter or parallel that history. In its contemporaneous writing there are specific authors of this film theory; the film theorists, collectively they have produced this grammar and its rules. Its collective history has now produced an array of voices and theories. Online resources continue to swell the informational pool. Film theory concepts attest to the often passionate debates about how to articulate the agency and affects of the cinematic. Film theory uses and massages words into forms that place disparate technologies, materials, ideas and life onto a platform for examination, valuation and sometimes appreciation.
Reading through a selection of the past century’s film theories, I am struck by a recurring theme. This is where theory connects the technical possibilities of the cinema with the spectator, and the question of ‘reality’ comes to figure as a thematic question; as a ‘problem’ or ‘puzzle’ to be solved, understood, explicated. Underlying the myriad of modeling theories that film theory applies, the question of reality is something of an obsession. In broad groups there a number of ways that the question of realism has been approached in screen theory. First, are the socially active realist models engaged with political intent (Eisenstein and the Russian formalists, the Italian neo-realists, documentaries of John Harmondsworth, Agnès Varda, Connie Field, Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock). Second, there are those interested in the technical achievement of film that enabled detailing and recording of the vernacular, the scientific, and the creation of diverse forms of film genres and narratives (Len Lye’s materialist film, Free Radicals; Sadie Benning’s use of new technologies in Girl Power; the magic realism of El laberinto del fauno [Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo de Toro, 2006]) and different film theoretical paradigms (Kracauer’s materialism, Keaton’s comedies, De Lauretis’s Technologies of Gender, Stiegler’s grammatisation). Third, there are the approaches that critically questioned the preceding two modes, and looked to account for the nature of perception itself; through investigation into the movements of spectatorial positioning in temporal and spatialised terms (we see this evidence in the work of specific film groups, and/or individuals, and film projects, such as Sud sanaeha [Blissfully Yours, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2002]). Theorists are also divided into different polemical camps in terms of the interest in various accounts of reality. The question of the semiotic and/or materialist coded reality and/of realism provides the sub-context for my discussion on modeling methodologies of film theory. Those histories need to be untangled further to discern their coded agendas for the kinds of products they were interested in promoting.
As media networks rapidly and intensively increase the circulation of digitised life-images, and the technologies of film shift the traditional disciplinary understanding of that image, necessarily, the reception, theory and modeling of film has also changed. The terms of analysis of the images of film worlds seek to articulate positions on the status of the film image, variously as affective, canonic, ideological, indexical, imaginative, immaterial, experiential, locational, national, neurological, perceptual, political, as readymade, as sensorially, materially and epistemologically constituted. These various positions are articulated in relation to the media producer, film maker, theorist or philosopher as a spectator, participant or producer in and of the film world, by which they position themselves and/or the film world as a constituted, dynamic, incomplete, mediating or incomprehensible ‘reality.’
This reality, for film theory, is something that is produced and circulated by the film image. Analyses concerning the reality as produced by film worlds range according to the modes of applied methodology used; from the anxiety concerning the technologically-driven changes in image production that occurred between analog and digital in the 1990s (as Rodowick 2007 describes these in terms of the ‘virtual life’ of film), to the recognisable lines of post-Platonic analytic investigations (see Carroll 1988a; Casetti 1999) or post-Bergsonian (see Munsterberg 1970; Deleuze 1986, 1989; Martin-Jones 2011; Pisters 2012) or post-Frankfurt (see Hansen 2012), post-Kantian (see Beller, Stiegler) reflections on film worlds.
The spectator-participants of film worlds are, variously, bound by their community, or are cast as a global citizen, sometimes an abstract ideal, sometimes as a function of the technology of the cinema, sometimes as subject of film, sometimes a mimetic function of the author’s own body and experience. As standalone concepts, these theories of spectator, subject and reception are bound by their anthropogenic limits, authorial privileges, applied disciplinary jargon and the parochial and historically bounded fields of film theory. The historical territory that produced the film theory – its temporal, geographical, political and psychological milieu – directs the shape of its model of the conditions and situation on screen. The territory of a produced subjectivity is productive of the analysis or use of a concept or notion. As with all notions in theory, the differences in time, place, gender politics and technological shifts make some ideas not transferable, although as materially produced ideas; arising from the agential (cognitively and technologically) formed materiality of film work, then the subjective reception holds some common grounds. Visual cognition – including its histories – is determined by the contemporary moment of our audio visual-cultural landscape. We can only perceive of the past and the future through the lens of now; the reader’s embodied, lived duration. However, the paradigm shift from film to moving image as an object of study had taken hold. The archival emphases on materiality and media archaeology currently drives this change. We understand that the industrial machinery of image production today includes the social (aspects of labour, art forms), the technological (not only the terms of data recoding and storage as either analog or digital, but also the political contexts of production of technology, through specific territories of gender and other economically driven, and culturally specific forms of hierarchical power institutions), and the historical cultures of film (histories, epistemologies). To articulate a texts’ cognitive interests, ideological premises, aesthetic and thus political position, is to become aware of the driving forces/obsessions/passions behind a film theoretical text’s narrative, again issues that are historically materially and politically contingent.
Film theory is distinct from the writing of the film archivist, film actor, film curator, film director, film distributor, film producer, film publicist, film critic, film historian, film technician, scriptwriter, photographer, blogger, tweeter, and so on. While drawing from all of these professions’ writing modes, film theory creates a writing form that places the disparate media of commentaries of technologies and materials on a similar plane in order to interpret and measure their value against a range of other positions. The results are nearly always a qualitative account of an aspect that the film or its content or technical aspect enlivens in the writer. This is not an objective medium, despite protestations from those professing that they are using a ‘scientific’ methodology in order to explicate the filmic ‘essence’.
Canonic film theories have moved ‘us’ through the twentieth-century notions of being an active participant, trying to piece together the ellipses produced by the sparse inter-titles of silent film, to the passive audience of propaganda nationalist newsreel of global wars, back to the participant as active consumer of entertainment industries. Yet ‘we’ also know that this three-point summary of the first century of cinema is partially misrepresentative of individual and whole community’s experiences and understanding of the cinécriture of specific directors. Film theory is, more often than not, the film theorist themselves as spectator, whose memories and special political roles are produced through virtual images, the imaged territory, or the bodies of the actors of film, mediating the image through a perpetual ‘liveness’ (see Mazumdar 2012).
The political positions of the practitioners have also meant the continued sidelining of certain theorists’ work, in blanket rejections of positions seen as ‘too political’ (as was the case with Pasolini), and as continues today in blind review practices of academic work. However, what needs to be detailed are some of the philosophical host positions of such political statements – not so much tied to Plato, Aristotle or Kant, but to other politically determining names: Papandreou, Berlusconi, Cameron, Merkel, Putin; the political controllers of the era of the production and destruction of cultures that make and use images. Models that methods for analysis of screen modes use are engaged through institutional structures that will validate, support, or reject and dismiss. It is in local and global political trends for governmental policy (for humanities’ research funding, for example) and institutional management’s economically-oriented philosophy that the directing of the type of forms that critical theorists are encouraged to conform to, or can take. The question for a film theorist begins with ‘how does this work’ but ends with (and I think must be the place in which film theory is situated) ‘who is the host of this work?’ and ‘for which audience?’ How does the image emerge? By what means do I, as a viewer of this image, synthesise what I see and comprehend, and am affected by? What have different forms of cinematic materiality facilitated? What have different materialist media convergences created?
Film theory describes the filmic text as a construction of many different discourses that enter the film at the site of its production and, after, its distribution. However, film theory is about the questioning of beliefs, and as such it presents an epistemologically critical materialist grammar of film, film images and the industry of cinema. These beliefs are historically determined by technology and by knowledge systems, which are dynamic. As Jean-Claude Carrière writes of film language: ‘No manual of film grammar– aesthetic, practical, commercial – survives longer than ten years. Everything constantly takes itself apart and reassembles itself’ (1994: 26).
Writing this book has been a difficult task, primarily for the reason that Carrière notes; film theory is a dynamic medium. In a constant state of change, film theory is responsive to its contemporaneous contexts, engaged with the language of its productive era, the recognition of which shifts as the sciences, technologies and the politics that drive and govern societies redirect attention and affect creative practices that are attentive to and governed by a range of institutional, economic and personal factors. Yet the time of change is not always rapid – it may take centuries before potentials of the cinematograph are realised, but to what political and thus ecological ends we can only but speculate. Although I have been teaching film theory at universities since the early 1990s, and have worked closely with artist and student filmmakers for just as long on the processes of articulation of the moving sound-image, I find re-reading each of the published texts at different times and different places both exciting and frustrating, as they are in constant dialogue with new and changed developments and directions. My models for ‘good theory’ also shift and change as I forget what I have learned and some of what I have seen, and then find new things, new images, and find myself redirected to different theoretical paradigms. Thus the words written by Teresa De Lauretis in 1984 can be as salient as those that Germaine Dulac penned in 1925. The advocacy of certain film theses can present useful knowledge on filmmaking processes, but when framed in problematic terms (for example as sexist, or racist, or even as gender or generationally blind) then grammars of exclusion in operation require naming. If, as Pasolini writes, ‘reality is, in the final analysis, nothing more than cinema in nature’ (2005: 198), then the spectator is required by that cinematic reality to develop a language that will account for what the cinema expresses, in non-representational terms, critique what ‘nature’ is representative of, and further, as Deleuze writes, ‘to make visible, relationships of time which cannot be seen in the represented object and do not allow themselves to be reduced to the present’ (1989: xii). Film theory often describes the ‘how it works’ in terms of the technics of film editing, cinematography and production, but that discussion may be at the expense of a consideration of what that construction is depicting about the political and aesthetic situation of a subject.
Expanding research through the development of different arguments where categorically possible by plugging ideas to different theoretical modes enables new theories to begin to formulate. The trick is to renew one’s own perceptual and polemic capacities by connecting films with texts through one’s own words and responses. I am aware of all that is not included in here, or what has been glanced over for the sake of word economy. All I can do is indicate the paradigms that I think may be useful for future work in this teenage discipline.