Writing about Werner Herzog’s documentary film Grizzly Man (2005) in Cineaste magazine, Conrad Geller reminds his readers of one of the unforgettable scenes of the bear-loving naturalist, Timothy Treadwell. Geller writes of a moment selected by Herzog from Treadwell’s video blog, where Timothy is ‘fondling a large pile of bear dung. It was, he says, produced by one of his familiar bears, Wendy. “It’s still warm” he says wonderingly. “It was inside of her!”’ Geller characterises this film through such scenes, later asking ‘Did Treadwell do some good?’ He concludes that Grizzly Man ‘comes down to a kind of metaphysical debate between Treadwell and Herzog’ (2005: 52–3).
The type of approach that Geller takes typifies contemporary writing about film. An affectively resonant scene from a film is re-drawn with words with emotive emphasis (fondling; wonderingly), a conceptual index is applied to the film (metaphysical), and a philosophical argument concerning ethics is drawn in with the question of ‘doing good’. But how would we describe Geller’s own mode of theorisation? Would we label him a Marxist theorist as he looks to the relationship between Treadwell’s social world of film production and that world’s continuation of social inequities and hierarchies (not the least between man and animal)? Or would we categorise him using a phenomenological approach, where the ‘encounter’ is deliberately not reduced to representational terms, but can only be personified in terms of its sensate dimensions (for example, see Sobchack 2004)? Geller further asks us to consider auteurist theory (see Bazin 2008), with his equalising reference for both director and film subject (such as we see in other theoretical accounts of Herzog, such as Noys 2007). Or should we set up a polemic with Geller, and state that in fact what he describes is not metaphysical, but more to the point, a post-metaphysical, realist narrative (such as Ruiz 1995 might suggest), that is, contingent upon his authorial position as a spectator of the spectacle of ‘beast, man, and nature’? In fact, all of these approximations might be considered, but there are yet numerous other approaches we could take to analysing this curious film.
What is film theory?
Film theory is a written interaction with and of the images and objects and ideas produced in and of film, and the cinema industry. The film theorist is a transdisciplinary practitioner, a writer of sound-images, connecting the temporally determining worlds of moving sound-images with the materiality of writing. The work of these practitioners, as I explore in this book, creates and utilises a filmic grammar, one specific to the expression of the cinematographic. This grammar ranges from the opinionated story about watching a film of choice, to the construction of a rigorous technical theoretical system of analysis, to the production of speculative thought, abstract ideas that may or may not be realised. The theory may be class, race or gender specific, or it may be couched in broader terms, where ‘everyone’ is a complicit viewer. The grammar can be enriched through intergenerational, transdisciplinary and transtechnological research and teaching. Or the grammar shows itself to be gender-blind, racially impervious, politically, philosophically and theologically biased, and can be patronisingly colonial and/or patriarchal in tone.
In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, film theory is still marked by its medium obsession – look what this new technology can do!; and look, here is another site of a demolished movie theatre. But, as much as it must adhere to the restraints of a discipline that went under the university’s official radar for quite a while, being taught in classes such as Anthropology, Art History, Enthnography, English, Gender, Languages, Music, Sociology, Philosophy, film theory has been largely sidelined by the perceived vocational popularity of Media Studies in universities, and its fate is ironically somewhat more secure than other humanities disciplines, many of which from that list have been subject to cuts in the early twenty-first century (such as Gender Studies departments). It arrives, and is funded there, along with broadcast media, animation and games studies, as a technological medium that is recognised as playing a central role in politics and culture, and which can reap huge political and economic benefits.1 Meanwhile, as a commercial industry, filmmaking has shown itself to be forever tied to national funding models, restrictions of censorship and political ideological impositions, as the subject of propagandist themes, and the peddler of militarism, sexism, homophobia, racism and a general xenophobia. Regulation of the commercial markets in filmmaking (and I am not talking of the porn industry here) do provide some protections necessary for actions against women, and children, and some film theories will either list, or name some arenas of abuse on screen (cf. Projansky 2001; Wheatley 2009: 134; Hines and Kerr 2012). As an artistic practice, filmmaking is less constrained by the ties of the commercial market’s regulation by government and national censorship and regulatory bodies, and more self-regulated by funding opportunities, access to resources and opportunities for development. All types of filmmaking production are subject to the global as well as local economic and technological fluctuations, and both of these factors have determined many different outcomes for the practice and reception of filmmaking (see discussions on this by Elcott 2011: 45; Stiegler 2011: 35ff).
The core theoretical concepts of twentieth-century film thinking – auteur theory, psychoanalytic analysis, cognitive analysis, apparatus theory, feminist critique, post-colonial deconstruction – are still used and are useful. In 1987 Dana Polan called for film theory to be ‘re-assessed’, stating: ‘I will want to argue that, to be most useful, Film Theory should cease to exist as such’ (1987: n.p.). Polan’s comments are from the end of a decade of significant change in film theorisation, and they signal an historical time where a paradigmatic shift in the discipline occurred. Polan was right – the medium and the economics of distribution and the marketplaces have changed, as have consumer desires, and those disciplinary staples have been replenished and augmented in terms of their discussion of what film is and how it works. For example, in the time-span of the late 1980s to the 2010s, commercial screen-based technologies shifted from recording using analog to digital technologies. In the coming decades, further informational and technological changes are anticipated with the augmentation of digital with bio-platforms, and the continual modification and use of analog and digital for aesthetic and economic reasons.
It produces more images, more worlds, more objects and ideas to comprehend and write about. Unlike Polan’s call, this book will not be critiquing what film theory is and what its utility might or could be.2 Rather, this book aims to offer overviews of existing film theorisation, focusing on specific examples, and signal ways that this body of work enables different models of thinking about film that point to some of the future possibilities of and for film theory. What is at stake in our current moment as the poststructuralist theoretical legacy encounters new thinking concerning gender, feminism, decolonisation, political economy, materialism, embodiment, information networks, art, technology, performance, data storage, archives and digital platforms is another significant turning point for the practice of film theory. Film itself, as a technological medium, is undergoing significant changes in terms of the ways in which it is produced. Although it is a child of the twentieth century, it has in many eyes been outperformed by its younger, more agile siblings – television, gaming screens and mobile media – and military and government uses of film techniques, where surveillance, satellite and GPS screens dominate the perceptual field once the sole domain of the movies.
Aims of this book
This book has two inter-related aims, each of these are addressed to the student and the teacher of film, practitioner and theorist alike.
The first aim is to provide an accessible framework for thinking about the diverse practices and breadth of film theory. There are many very good books that outline core themes for film theory that detail the existing arguments, theoretical positions and their methods for analysis and exegesis (cf. Fischer 1989; Rony 1996; Guneratne and Dissanayake 2003; Galt 2006; Lapsley and Westlake 2006; Rushton and Bettinson 2010; Furstenau 2010). This book is an introduction to thinking about film theory; however, it invites the reader to turn those defined concepts into questions, and form new research agendas – ones that are of relevance to the reader, and their worlds, and to thinking about issues exterior to the reader’s life that films expose them to.
The second aim is to connect the practices with the key historical points in the discipline. This book will quickly sketch out the core theoretical-historical premises and practices that provide the academic frameworks that one has to necessarily work with and against when engaging in a certain discipline’s activities. This is important as the invention of new paradigms of thinking and different neologisms draws many criticisms that reject the cyclical terms of fashion.3 Film theorists apply terms that draw from and/or reject historical and contextual thinking. Theoretical methodologies applied to film theorisation in the 2010s such as posthumanism, accelerationism, object-oriented ontologies, digital technologies and new materialism may retrospectively be the ‘postmodernisms’ of the 1980s, but how they play out is yet to happen. And this is the thing that film theory does: imagine, describe, hypothesise; not necessarily in that order, or all at the same time, but in putting forward positions and theorisations, there is evidenced in the words and texts of theory a scale of sharing of knowledge and ideas. A generosity of thinking can slide to an absolute pronouncement. There are the material facts of a film’s production and chemical and digital composition, and there are empirical, cognitive, speculative and connected theories. This book seeks to sketch out some different paradigms for thinking about what film theory is, how it works and what it produces by revisiting some of the core historical approaches to film theorisation while re-defining frames of reference. For students of film theory, this can be a gradual process. Film theorisation also involves a different technique of writing than that of film criticism (which tends to be a responsive and descriptive, rather than analytic, practice), and philosophy of film (which is more speculative, and seeks to create rather than describe), although there are many cross-overs with both forms of writing.4
The question of what film theorisation is for is addressed throughout. In answering the question, What is cinema? posed by André Bazin, we can first respond simply, and modify as we qualify the enquiry (see Andrew 2010). Cinema is a technological medium that captures moving images and sound and through its mechanisms it creates images and movements that change over time. Interfaces with the film object and experience of film vary through technological changes, consumer design and artistic practices, but the viewer or spectator of and in film is always implicated as a participant. As visual practices change, so too does language mutate to articulate and express the senses of change in perceptual practices due in part to technologies (cf. Crary 1990; Jay 1994; Parks 2005; Shaviro 2010), and through political changes that affect the construction and production of different types of images (cf. Ravetto 2001; Rancière 2004; Beller 2006; Jin 2006; Rancière 2009; Halberstam 2011; Pick 2011; MacCormack 2012; Beller 2013; Colebrook 2014). As paradigms of vision affecting epistemological material, histories and interfaces change significantly over time, so too does theory modify and mutate into something else. Theoretical histories and critical analyses no longer just point to technical changes in filmmaking as an industrial medium, or aesthetic changes in filmmaking as a creative art form, the ideological and biopolitical changes (where the classification and hierarchisation of cultural bodies change over time), but also attend to the geopolitical changes in the world, which impact upon the flows of information and resourcing of the film industry.
This volume is an exploration of the theories created or used by film theorists. The writing of film theory is in itself a creative practice. It is a writing that provides a theory of another creative practice. Yet filmmaking engages a medium arguably far more complex than the medium of writing. Writing is undertaken in response to and provoked by a range of interlocutors, writes itself as a response to sensorial, affective, instrumental, technological, historical stimulation. It may be a poetic act or it may be instrumental, it may take a polemical tone, an accusatory, a hagiographic tone, it may be precise and analytic in expression, or it may be full of baroque grammatical and rhetorical flourish and laboured expression. It produces concepts, arguments and histories. It may stimulate critical or reactionary thought, it may produce something new, or refresh something in the mind of the reader/receiver of the theory; however, it may be judged to be ‘good or bad’ theory. In its broadest sense then, film theory is an object unto itself; sometimes fully immersed in its object of reference (film, the cinema, the film image, the cinematic sound), but also operating at the other end of that scale where a singular film is not the primary focus of the theory. Both positions and all that fall in between this spectrum are productive of this object of study; what is film theory?
Film theory is a practice that uses the medium of language to write (and to speak) in response to a different medium altogether, one that creates visual and auditory moving images by using very specific technologies. Within the field of Media Studies, film is its own discreet object, no less subject to the terms of its own lived mediation of its ‘active’ and ‘ethical’ practice of ‘transforming matter’ (see Kember and Zylinska 2012: xvi-xvii; 71). Film produces its own film language; as many cinematographers, scriptwriters, directors and producers of film attest, there is a creative, and ethical (meaning to decide on a certain action and form), imperative that theorists describe in terms of its cinematic grammar, and detail in specific cases. This book takes the position that film theory is a form of writing that produces a unique cinematic grammar, which is in turn mediated by its readers and users.
Here I engage the word ‘grammar’ to infer a number of possible meanings and contexts. In addition to the filmic grammar of the tools of filmmaking is the linguistic meaning of grammar. As with other forms of writing, film theory attends to the arrangement of words, to direct and to redirect their lexical meaning, enabling a play of words, just as an edited play of images on screen can redirect the contextual meanings of discreet objects. In addition to these two standard uses of grammar and film theoretical writing, I extend the term grammar through Bernard Stiegler’s concept of ‘grammatisation’. Stiegler renegotiates aspects of Derrida’s ‘grammatology’ (a thesis concerned with the de-centering of structures [see Derrida 1976; Gaston and Maclachlan 2011]). Where Derrida’s grammatology was intented to overthrow the speech-writing hierarchy, Stiegler’s grammatisation repositions technological culture as the writing of the world. Grammatisation is an open-ended term that articulates how societies hold and develop the literal tools of ‘culture’, which are reliant upon memory, itself subjected to and mediated by industrialisation processes (see Stiegler 2010, 2012). Memory requires ‘prosthetics’, Stiegler argues (2011: 60). These prosthetics include recording technologies such as books, records, photographs and film, necessary for cultural memories to be maintained and be reproducible. Stiegler’s theory describes how societies have different technological systems and models with which to remember their cultural practices. This memory takes three different stages; first, the primary experiences of passing time, second are secondary retentions of the memory of those passages, and third are the tertiary forms of retention of experience and memory, through externalised processes. Grammatisation thus describes the techniques and systems with which a society will maintain and feed its externalisation of memory models. Stiegler’s grammatisation is a concept that is not without its critics (cf. Lebedeva 2009; Bunyard 2012) and discussants (cf. Hansen 2004; Barker 2009; Kember and Zylinska 2012: 167), as it tends to draw a universalist paradigm of the affects that capitalist visual cultures have had over its consumers. Thus Stiegler’s polemic glosses over those consumers in terms of their different genders, ethnicities, class experiences of those cultural forms. In this book, I apply grammatisation as a positive term and as a way of indicating and connecting certain points where a convergence of technological epistemes of film occurs in theorisation. Similar to how Foucault’s archaeologies of the controls of subjectivity and sexuality (1978; 2008), or Haraway’s account of gender and technology (1991) provide modes of historicisation, grammatisation engenders discussion of the conceptualisation of material conditions – which need to be situated (in terms of their human, political and geographic factors) before being specific.
Thinking about film theory: methodological approaches
The vocabulary of film theory as applied often reads as inadequate to the experience of the film event. When film theory draws up its model to express what it sees or experiences ‘at the movies’ then a mismatch or disjunction from what other theories describe can occur. Film theory invents new expressions to accommodate and capture and express the film event. But the questions of whose event?, facilitated through which modes of technological access (privileged by race, class or gender?) and from what position (what systems are in play?, what agential concepts?) is it viewed (spectatorial intent?) remain politically problematic but are nonetheless vital questions for the theorist to ask herself. There are many different ways of doing film theory, the polemics of which are not the concern of this book (for some of the conflicting positions on the practice of film theory see Carroll 1988b; Smith 2010; Sinnerbrink 2010, 2011: 13ff; Clayton and Klevan 2012; Buckland 2012b).
This book approaches film theory in an empirical sense, by highlighting some core connections that cinematic grammars have created. This is done so with the intention to share conceptions as well as raise issues and ideas, with the aim that theoretical consideration can facilitate all kinds of relationships of the present and future writing of the making and the realised cinematic. It is not the intention of this book to proclaim either the ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’ of theories, or the accuracy of any of the grammars invented or used. That is for the reader to test. As the theoretical work done attests, cinematic grammatisation can facilitate all manner of connections. It remains up to the user how to apply them, and to decide for what purpose.
In using the multiple aspects of the term grammar, this volume takes the grammar of the film theorist to explore the common questions of the discipline. This approach is in itself a question that film theorists’ pose, one that they critique in the prose of others, and a historical point in film theoretical work that offers ways of ‘reading’, ‘hearing’ and ‘seeing’ film as a cinematic language. It should be noted that this book sets out with the intention not to advocate one way or another as the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to do film theory. Some theories focus upon the visuals and not the sound, some do both, some do cognitive, some do sociological readings, and so on.
Like all grammars, film theory forms part of the system of rules that govern a language, and is thus applicable to a wider range of media forms. In their creation, film theories contribute an epistemological resource that connects the technologies of filmmaking and film composition. This book explores these connections through film theorisation of processes of the modeling of cinematic matters (territory, temporality, politics, subjectivity) of the filmic world into specific discourses of film. Film theory uses a specific critical discourse, what this book describes as a cinematic grammar of creation. The grammar of this theory, the matter of its creation, and the forms of its address in relation to the film world – ideas, concepts, other theories, technics, and spectators – are discussed in the following chapters.
Film theory is a particular mode of writing that we can identify through the form and places of its practice. The film theorist is the explicador of the film, writing not only of the film object, but also of the film experience and its position within contemporaneous critical discourses with their political and thus aesthetic limiting factors. While philosophies of film are primarily concerned with the ontological implications of film-as-object, film theory has always had a broader remit. Film theory writes about the technical aspects of film (the script, production, industry constraints, national markets, festivals, censorship, institutions, marketing, screening, distribution, preservation) and the critical discourses that the film event creates. Both aspects contribute to the knowledge economy of the film; its epistemology. In writing the grammar of this epistemology of creation, film theory not only performs the activity of recording its contemporaneous event, but also enters the film event and film technology into an active dialogue and performative connection with other film events and technologies.
Describing a methodology that is applied, or used, or developed in a film theory can involve a very technical form of writing. A methodology applied, however, is different from a method taken. So when writing a response to a film, or to a question concerning film theory, one might begin by thinking about what method to take: (i) What aspect of the film or theory is of interest? (ii) What is the political agenda, or agential issue held in mind when using the film images to write? (iii) What is it about the film/image/theory/sound that has inspired the thinking or writing about or responding to this work? Answers to each of these questions will use a different method to then create their own writing form. The first response may involve an analytical method that turns then to cognitive or feminist methodologies and methodological tools in order to respond. The answer to the second question may develop through individuated (culturally given, intuited or experiential) knowledge. The third question requires rephrasing after consideration of the first two. The question would be: how does the film/image/theory/sound make one think, and act? Some film theory texts provide now historicised names for this ‘how’ question, detailing methods that in fact are the agents for thinking: formalism, modernism, narratology, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, postmodernism, realism, structuralism, and so on. Other film theories focus on the how question, by examining the structures and modes of individuated agency, through terms such as affect, agency, cognitive analyses, deconstruction, ethics, schizoanalysis, semiotic studies, and so on.
As with any theoretical approach, methodologies are beset with limitations for thinking and application. Common problems encountered with film theory include:
• limitations of a concept application
• too broad a proposal
• categorical errors of argument
• ahistorical comparisons where the temporal context of the viewer and of the subject are collapsed
• comparative arguments: compare to means liken to; compare with means make a comparison
• inadequately evidenced arguments, such as reception theories.
• how does the author know (God-like) what an audience/viewer experiences in front of a singular or series of films?
• racial bias
• ethnic bias
• gender biases in play in the analysis
• epistemic focus that ignores technological determinates
• exclusion of political context
Paradigms of film theory: models, technology, spectators
In this book, I divide the polyphonic grammars of film theory by reference paradigms; points with which theory navigates its personal aesthetic and produces and demonstrates a specific theoretical position, whether explicitly stated or not. First, I consider the ways in which film theory diagrammatises its filmic objects and creates film theoretical concepts that have a very specific purpose by modeling. Second, I look at the types of film theoretical positions on technology, an often neglected aspect of film theory. Third, I consider the ways in which film theories engaging the subject of spectator/s, and the subject of film, have produced a thus far fairly anthropocentric cluster of thoughts, expressions, associations, modifications and new theoretical conversations that themselves are a part of the production of film work.
Feeding into and within each of these three reference points – models, technology, spectators (the titles of the three chapters of this book) – are the main ways that film theory organises its object; as a technologically conceived and produced object, and as an account or event. In each approach, film theory is writing an epistemic grammar of the cinematic, each with a specific intention to situate the film as something. Under these terms we might ask what separates the theorist of film from the philosopher of film? While the philosopher of film might answer that they are in pursuit of what might be the ontological thing of the film, the film theorist might provide a more representative answer, in accounting for the contextual and industrial form that the film has been able to assume. It is difficult to generalise, and impossible to account for all the forms and regional variations of filmmaking practice, so it is intended that the following discussion provides a framework for thinking about the aspects of film in which the reader is interested, without being prescriptive or dismissive of existing scholarship.
Chapter 1: Models
I use the term ‘model’ to infer that the model is distinct from the film, or film sound-image that produced it, and it does not always directly refer to that image in a direct way. A ‘model’ also infers some kind of pre-determination, such as we have to work with in academic disciplines, where a ‘normative’ standard operates. Film theory as practiced and taught will thus first refer to its normative model before it might innovate, or investigate, the possibility of creating something new, or of opening a different pathway for thinking, and thus theorising. This form of theory – normative standard and difference (most obvious in Hollywood v. Art Cinema comparisons) – has the effect of creating a dialectical structure, where the binary of same/different makes it impossible to detail differences with any innovative thinking. The style of writing within the discipline has changed over its one hundred-plus years of work, as writing styles and language usage change according to the technologies facilitating expression. In film theory these changes in style are seen, for example, in the early 2000s with the advent of blogging techniques, and open-access academic publishing, where journals such as Senses of Cinema, or Rouge provide refereed, academic open-access film theory (as opposed to the pay-per-institution, or individual access of commercial publishers, where authors must pay to access their own – unpaid – work) and with the increase in more fictionalised narratives of theory (which always existed, but were not accepted as potential canonic texts; see for example, Pasolini 2005). The terms of film theory are not the absolute blueprints for designing a model (despite the insistence on ‘canonic’ texts), but do function to provide paradigms, boundaries and invitations for theorisation. However, it can be fatiguing for the student and teacher to approach writing about film through the textual diet of the standard classificatory models of film theory when looking for ways to articulate a film experience, technique, interest, concept or history, however commercial, avant-garde, challenging or confirmative that film may be.
Because there are so many different types of models that film theory utilises, I have chosen to focus on two complementary areas of theory that problematise the notions of film theory’s grammatical practices of modeling: the semiotic and the material. In this choice I display my own methodological bias, by drawing on the work done on Félix Guattari’s diagrammatic approach to his philosophical/psychiatric practice, as mapped out by Gary Genosko (2009) and Janell Watson (2009).
This chapter explores the different ways that technology, and the technology image, can be theorised. Technologies direct our thinking of the aestheticisation, commodification and mediation of all ideas and activities. The consideration of the technological and the technology of film underpins theoretical models of films. Often, a focus on the technology of the film is couched in quite different ways to a film theory that is concerned to describe or narrativise film. Film is an industrial technology and as industry, its material is subject to the laws of the market in which it is created, produced, distributed and consumed. Film theory is not always attentive in making connections between the technology of filmmaking and its forms. Discussion of the practical or the material processes of this industrial medium has been somewhat limited to focus upon specific arenas, such as to film sound theory (cf. Brophy 1998, 1999, 2002; Chion 2005, 2009; Harper et al. 2006; Altman 2007), or to the formal innovations of technology (in a modernist sense), but has also expanded the language of film theory through making new connections and implications of different technology and its politics (cf. De Lauretis 1987; Bolter and Grusin 2000; Hubbs 2004; Beller 2006; Keeling 2007; Shaviro 2010; Halberstam 2011). In particular, new forms of use of cheaper, more flexible technologies for filming and flexible computer coding and input programming devices (such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Makey Makey) enable new kinds of film processes to be made. The technological platform used will always affect the content, but what are the questions for film theory when discussing technology? Using the conceptual framework of three different films – Pine Barrens (Nancy Holt, 1975), Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991) and Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, 2012), the chapter explores the notion of technology-images, and indicates how different theoretical positions on this topic (for example, Doane 2002; Virilio 2005; Stiegler 2011) have redirected the spine of what film theory is and can be.
Chapter 3: Spectators
In this chapter I explore aspects of the subject, subjectivity and spectatorship in order to observe the differences and similarities, and overlaps in their use, as users, in film theory. Instead of looking at where film theory has defined spectatorship in terms of a predicative role – that is, for example, the spectator as fan, as horror genre lover, as feminist, I examine some of the roles that film theory has assigned the spectator, who, for example, may be a user of ‘Netflix grammar’ (see Madrigal 2014), or who may be seeking some form of ‘identification’ with the performers on screen (see Mulvey 1986). Film theory can be descriptive as well as analytic, and a question to ask of the theory is in terms of its scope – is it framing an issue of instrumentality? – leading to the design of the spectator by the film and its analysis of the terms and visual logics that films produce. Transdisciplinary work across gender and feminist issues concerning technological cultures (cf. Haraway 1991; Butler 1993; Hayles 2005; Halberstam 2011: 78ff), in physics (Barad 2007), science and technology have fuelled a new materialist critique that examines the informational codes that create meanings (Haraway 1991: 161ff) and the political ecology of things (Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Bennett 2010; Coole and Frost 2010). The terms of current theoretical debates for film theory are still writing with the 1960/1970s materialist and structuralist film debates, film and cultural studies, gender, political, economic and geological work engaged and debating the material production of the film, inclusive of the economic, ecological and political terms of the complex spectator, her environment and the ethics of her construction. After post-structuralist critiques, the posthuman and the non-human figure more prominently across film theory.
Writing film theory
Film theory sometimes promises a universal analysis of a film, yet in doing so it displays its discursively limited constitution. In film theoretical analysis we find the instrumental and the poetic modes of reception and response to a film work. There can be a focus on the possible ideas generated and harvested by the cinema, yet analysis of these ideas is contingent upon the political and aesthetic position of the author/s of the film theory. It is a recognisably distinctive mode of writing, yet film theory shares commonalities with other writing modes that are responsive to the cinema, such as film criticism and philosophies of film. There is no singularly identified ‘correct’ film theoretical position. The commonality to be found in film theory is its medium, that is, its use of language as spoken and as written text in order to describe, interpret, analyse or read the medium of film, where film is a moving sound image, and or the cinema as an industry is also variously addressed as a text, or work.
As a discipline, the range of approaches to film theory’s subjects, in terms of methods, aims and philosophical positions, are readily identifiable through practices that signal their acceptance of certain theoretical legacies and hierarchies of the particular methodological, and thus political, position and potential agency. By this we might take any film, for example, where the ethics of its world as presented could be either celebrated or afford a reflective critical disagreement. Or we might take a film whose ‘meaning’ is contestable. Film theories should be able to tackle any of those positions and provide some analysis of the operation of the image, plus its significance.
The field can be broadly divided between those film theories practicing an applied or technical (practical) exposition, and those film theories engaged in work aimed at critically creating new schematic or innovative theorisation. Sometimes the discipline is divided by analytic vs. continental methodologies, but there is too much crossover of research aims and intentions to see that as an absolute categorical divider. Within these divisions are many sub-categories for theorisation, which can also be classified by their methods and aims, and how far they might stray from their orthodox positions. Each and every position taken has a specific political and aesthetic legacy behind it, where even the nonsensical or abstract position holds just as much ‘meaning’ and political resonance as a theory that declares itself to be concerned with sensibility or concrete issues. This volume is not concerned with definitions of the ‘meanings’ of the content of films or the cinema, but implicitly does concern itself with how those things are prescribed and created by and in film theories. This book identifies some of the core theoretical positions and their critical contributions to the discipline of film theory, but it can only indicate some of the areas that film theory investigates. The few filmic examples I use are for signposting ideas for the reader; readers should be able to substitute a film that they are thinking about to test their own modeling. In this book I focus on the film theoretical aspect of the discipline. The philosophy of film, or film-philosophy, engages another discipline, that of the writing of philosophy, which some will see as just another theoretical position, while others regard it as distinctive. Where crossovers are produced I signal them, but a comparative discussion of film theory and film philosophy is not the focus of this book. This book does not attempt to be an exhaustive survey text, rather it presents theories for their indicative work, or influence in the discipline. There are many voices absent here, this does not indicate that I thought they were not of value, but for the sake of economy and polemical narrative, there is necessarily some editing for economy. I would also note that while I display certain biases toward theoretical positions, this book is not intended to provide a standpoint on one or another theoretical model. Rather, this book seeks to offer ways in which the reader might think about the connective points for theorising screen-based media such as film. Multiple examples are given so that the reader can find an access point to the discussion. Connective points are made through concepts that shift over time, such as the terms of spectatorship, the notion of a cinematic landscape or territory, considerations of temporality, politics, ethics, subjectivity, or the consideration of materiality and technology. As connectives, their grammar, and the terms of their grammatisation, provide commentary on what is unique about film theory as an interdisciplinary study of visual cultures; a technologically materialist theory of audio visual media forms.
The writing of film theory involves the invention of different types and styles of inscriptive systems. The grammatical practice of film theory is something often commented upon, as writing is the medium. Amongst theorists, there are many variations of opinion on the topic (see, for example, Metz 1974a, 1974b; Heath and Mellencamp 1983). Noël Carroll states, unequivocally: ‘Cinema is not a language’ (1996: 187), but immediately has to qualify this absolute. He argues a case for the term ‘verbal image’ (‘primed’, or ‘proper’) for media forms, including filmmaking, that allude to the visual, even though their medium may be neither word nor image. There are many kinds of languages – visual, verbal, auditory, sensory; language is a slippery term, and in this sense suitably ambiguous for writing about a medium such as film, which similarly has no definitive ‘purpose’ or ‘meaning’, but film has and is put to absolute purpose, that of ideological media supports for various political propaganda.
The grammar of film theory is like any language; in order to use and engage it, one has to learn the rules thoroughly, before being able to be able to break them. But in having to learn the rules, much of what is practiced under film theory can be dull, predictable and uncritical of itself. There are standard terms that one expects to find in a discussion labeled film theory, yet after over a hundred years of film theory practice, this grammar is showing signs not of a ‘crisis’ but instead the opposite, of a renewal into something different; the creation of new rules by new users who are not limited by the canonic texts or historical rules of authorship and critical practices. But it is also the result of a development of the film industry, where a genuine passion and enthusiasm for the medium and discussion of all aspects of the medium has proliferated the language. The encouragement of transdisciplinary work in education and research practices has also resulted in some fertile connections between ideas and knowledge. Those rules have been broken; in many places their historical systems remain but the potential for different, perhaps more robust, ways of being in dialogue with the film and the film industry are appearing. The grammar of film is expanding. While some theorists may say that this expansion is due to the expansion of the film industry and its products, not all theorists would agree. Changes are due to a myriad of reasons: the politics of each territory; the changes in educational equity; the ongoing activities of militarism in different regions of the globe; the unstable and iniquitous economic systems in action around the globe; the changes in technologies such as digital media forms; the changes in the film industries’ capacity for distribution and reception; the changes in educational discipline specificity; the film product is in most cases a collaborative effort, which involves modification, testing and development of ideas before completion.
Film theory is not about studying or applying some form of blanket dogma, as Pauline Kael (1966), Bill Nichols (1991), Raúl Ruiz (1995) and Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (2000) (among others) remind us. Theory provides us with tools for thinking, a method with which to approach a film, and a conceptual structure to hang onto when meaning starts to slip away. Theory enables us to deconstruct representations, and grasp issues larger than ourselves through access to other dimensions, as produced in a filmic world. Contemporary cinema has changed and contemporary theory has moved to accommodate shifts in theorising the nature of contemporary film, and the development of a cinematic consciousness of the differences of activity and of imagination within the world. The following chapters explore film theories’ concepts in terms of how they present connections of ideas as economies of knowledge for film analysis.
Notes
1 See Polan 2007 for an account of film ‘instruction’ in the US; De Brigard 1975 on the use of film in ethnography; Elsaesser and Hagener 2010 on the changing structures of film theory study.
2 For books that explain what film theory is and its utility, from a range of modeling viewpoints, see Diawara 1993; Young 1995; Dyer 2001; Codell 2006; Rushton and Bettison 2010; Andrew 2010; Etherington-Wright and Doughty 2011; Thornham 2012; Andrews 2013.
3 See Barthes (1990a) and Baudrillard (1996) for discussion on fashion cycles.
4 For examples of cross-over writing that uses both disciplinary methods of film theory and philosophy of film, see Bellour 2000; Buckland 2000b; Bolton 2011.