By the end of the twentieth century, film theory had established itself as a distinct scholarly discourse. In the period detailed in Chapter 3, film theory gained formal recognition as film and media study were integrated into the Anglo-American university system, often as part of an inter-disciplinary expansion of the traditional humanities departments like literature. This institutional framework provided important support in the discipline’s advancement, facilitating access to additional resources (e.g. libraries, archives, screening venues, research assistance, etc.) and encouraging the field to develop more diligent professional standards. It also served to elevate the status of past developments like the debates initiated by early theorists and the influence of French theory. These steps were important in validating film theory’s intellectual merit; they provided it with a sense of history and a series of methods, and, in turn, fostered a growing number of outlets for further investigation.
Despite film theory’s overall success, the dilemmas associated with post-modernism in general and the Sokal Affair more specifically introduced a new crisis of legitimacy. This crisis no longer concerned the medium as such (as it had for film’s earliest theorists) but, rather, the methods by which theory was carried out and the intellectual value of its objectives. Many of these concerns had been well documented throughout theory’s ascent, but they became far more pronounced with David Bordwell and Noël Carroll’s 1996 co-edited collection, Post-Theory. This book raised the profile of theory’s critics and called into question many of the principles, especially those associated with French theory, that had dominated film theory for much of the past two decades. In addition to challenging these entrenched principles, theory’s critics offered a series of alternative methods that promised to correct the excesses and fallacies that had precipitated the more recent crisis of legitimacy. Post-Theory, in this respect, marks an important intervention, but in framing theory and its critics as incompatible adversaries it also infused certain debates with an inordinate degree of vitriol.
While some critics called for an outright rejection of all film theory, Post-Theory was in another sense consistent with the broader shifts taking place as part of the discipline’s changing institutional and intellectual status. As film and media studies were incorporated into the academy, theory in particular faced a kind of existential crisis. How would its anti-establishment politics, for instance, fit within the demands of academic standardization? How would the work of feminist, post-colonial, and queer theorists—specifically their analysis of power, difference, and identity along with their concurrent calls for counter-hegemonic forms of representation—be received amidst the corporatization of the university and mounting anti-intellectualism? To some extent, the angst prompted by these circumstances coincided with a growing affinity for introspection and re-evaluation within the discipline. In this regard, post-theory does not necessarily signal the end of theory. Instead, it largely means that as scholars have turned their attention inward to the discipline’s formation and its various faults, theory no longer functions as a primary organizing principle, certainly not in the way it once did. This does not mean, however, that this scholarship is not theoretically informed or that it is without theoretical implications.
THEORY’S CRITICS, COGNITIVE SCIENCE, AND HISTORICAL POETICS
Film theorists have almost always embraced a critical perspective and a willingness to question existing assumptions about film and culture. The earliest film theorists, for instance, went against the belief that film did not warrant serious consideration. Realist film theorists like André Bazin went on to develop a position that challenged earlier formalist principles. Film theorists in the 1970s, in turn, rejected Bazin’s beliefs about the medium’s most important properties while also drawing on a new set of theoretical principles that questioned social and psychological norms more generally. Even as film theory cohered around the influence of French theory in the 1970s, much of the ferment of this period was rooted in the array of ongoing debates and dissenting factions that flourished. For instance, as briefly noted in Chapter 3, part of Screen’s editorial board resigned in protest against its theoretical direction and its unwillingness to tolerate opposing views. In addition to this internal turmoil, Screen was simultaneously attacked from both sides of the political spectrum. More conventional film critics decried the journal and its theorists as a form of intellectual terrorism.1 Meanwhile, contemporary critics associated with journals like Jump Cut criticized Screen and its theoretical focus as a betrayal of its political radicalism.2
In some ways, the criticism directed at theory that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s was merely a continuation of this general pattern. Theory’s critics were questioning the tenets that had, over the course of the previous generation, become the discipline’s defining principles. But some of this questioning was clearly more than just healthy skepticism. The criticism that eventually culminated with Post-Theory often took on an ugly and more intense tone. To some extent, there is a correlation between this growing animosity and film study’s formal establishment within the academy. Within the university system, for example, certain institutional pressures become more prominent and these tend to fuel a zero-sum mentality. Theory’s critics, in this regard, were not just questioning the intellectual merit of established positions but also attacking the positions they believed had accrued a privileged status within the discipline. As part of a zero-sum mentality, the privileged status of certain positions necessarily means that other positions are rejected or marginalized. This mentality has meant that many debates about film theory have been loaded with personal and professional dimensions that complicate their overall scholarly significance.
While the publication of Post-Theory marks the point at which this antipathy reached a critical mass, many of its key points had been developing for some time. For instance, Noël Carroll’s 1982 review of Stephen Heath’s Questions of Cinema was one of the earliest and most emblematic examples of the claims taken up by theory’s critics. As part of a review that spans over seventy pages, Carroll quickly establishes his intention to mount a wholesale attack on what he terms, in the book-length account that followed, the “dominant form of film theory” (Mystifying Movies 2). Throughout the review, there are essentially three chief issues that concern Carroll. First, he questions the emphasis that Heath (and, by extension, all of film theory) puts on French theory. In a preliminary sense, Carroll takes exception to the way Heath makes reference to these other thinkers. Like most film theorists, Carroll writes, “Heath does not give his readers the argumentative justifications for the basic philosophical presuppositions in his book,” and this is in large part because he assumes readers “are familiar with, understand, and agree with the basic tenets of the Lacanian-Althusserian position” (“Address to the Heathen” 91). It is fairly clear, however, as Carroll lays siege to more specific terms like “perspective” and “suture,” that no amount of exposition would have helped Heath’s case. Carroll contends that these points have been fundamentally misconceived in part because of his second main concern. In his assessment, the most glaring problem for film theory lies in its assumptions about human subjectivity. He rejects in particular the ways in which both psychoanalysis and ideological interpellation frame human subjectivity as passive and inert. This is all the more problematic in that these views allow film theorists to overstate the illusory qualities associated with the cinematic image. He counters that this version “flies in the face of even casual observation. People do not mistake films for actual chains of events. The whole institution of film—with its emphasis on stars, the acquisition of new properties, etc.—is based on the audience’s knowledge that films involve processes of production” (“Address to the Heathen” 99).
Carroll’s third, and in many ways harshest, critique concerns the style of Heath’s prose. This was something of a moot point by this time, yet it was (and remains) the easiest and most effective line of attack against theory. It was easy to point to select passages and lambaste them for their opaqueness. These examples then serve to dismiss entire arguments and as a way to ridicule theory as a whole. It is here that Carroll’s account moves beyond mere evaluation and takes on a more baroque tone. For example, in the kind of passage that theory’s subsequent critics latched onto, he writes:
The style of Questions of Cinema is dense. The book is packed with neologisms, pleonasms, misuses, and strained uses of words and grammar—Heath, one surmises, enjoys calling things by the wrong name—and the book has strong tendencies toward formulaic repetition and belletristic rambling. If Questions of Cinema fails to become a favorite of graduate film students, this will undoubtedly be a consequence of its prose style. Throughout, the tone of the book is bullying. Heath liberally peppers his commentary with thus, and therefore—words that ordinarily signal the conclusion of a piece of reasoning—where there is no argument in the vicinity. The reader searches for nonexistent premises until he gives up—staring blankly at the poker-faced text. Heath also tends to overuse words like precisely and exactly at just those points in the exposition where he is least precise and exact.
(“Address to the Heathen” 153)
It is certainly the case that theoretical writing can be inhospitably abstruse or turgid in ways that cover over imprecise claims. Carroll’s condemnation, however, tends to overstate the role of style in general, suggesting that anything less than impeccable prose is tantamount to bad thinking. It also dismisses the performative dimensions implicit in the strategies associated with écriture and political modernism more generally. At the same time, Carroll’s attack is not without its own rhetorical embellishments. He makes exaggerated generalizations and disparaging jabs when they suit his needs. Considering that “stylistic flourishes are antithetical to the task of theorizing,” these asides betray Carroll’s calls for a more measured and precise approach to theoretical discourse (“Address to the Heathen” 155).
For Heath, the review illustrates a shift in the overall frame of reference. First, he notes that there is some irony in Carroll’s review appearing in October, a journal named after Sergei Eisenstein’s film and that much like Screen took as its pretense a belief that “revolutionary practice, theoretical inquiry and artistic innovation” were inextricably intertwined.3 More generally, Heath suggests that this type of attack is a clear effort to neutralize and de-politicize film theory as a practice: “In the new conservatism of the ‘80s, film theory, like so much else, is going to be brought to order, straightened out for academic discipline; what got into the academy is going to be got out; enough is enough” (“Le Père Noël” 112). To some extent Carroll would agree. He advocates for a new direction based on stricter logical standards and a different understanding of human subjectivity—one that rejects the problems and uncertainties associated with psychoanalysis. Heath, by contrast, associates this new direction with the rejection of ideology as a critical lens and an abandonment of film’s political implications. In addition to this, Heath questions the nature of an exchange that he disparages as “pathetic male jockeying” (“Le Père Noël” 65). Like a number of the other intractable exchanges that took place in Screen, Cinema Journal, and elsewhere, the back and forth between Heath and Carroll could certainly be described as grappling; a decidedly male form of hand-to-hand combat consisting of clinching, pummeling, and coercing submission through the force of one’s mass.4 Despite being physically exhausting, there is little to show in terms of actual consequence. By the end, these debates were in most cases largely fruitless. In this respect, they evoke another failed encounter, one in which the efficacy of epistolary exchange was more generally called into question. As Jacques Derrida put it in an unsettled debate regarding Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” sometimes a letter does not reach its destination. Despite stirring a great deal of consternation, this seemed to be the case as the exchanges between theorists and their critics often ended at an impasse.5
The polemical nature of these exchanges tended to divert focus away from actually developing alternative theoretical methods. Carroll, for instance, makes several references to an alternative understanding of human subjectivity in his review of Heath but these are mainly used in a rhetorical fashion. “Why,” he asks, “are no cognitive or perceptual structures included in Heath’s model of film reception when it seems so painfully clear that some such mechanisms must come into play when audiences recognize a given film as coherent? If Heath believes that these structures are inadequate to the task at hand, he owes the reader an explanation why” (“Address to the Heathen” 131). The fact that Heath does not disprove the validity of competing scientific explanations is taken as further evidence of his inadequacy, but this does little to elaborate how or why these alternative explanations warrant further attention. As a result, they largely fell to the wayside as various rebuttals focused on the motivating logic of these attacks rather than the merits of what seemed to be passing rhetorical questions.
Although Carroll did not fully elaborate the parameters for an alternative method, his references to a more empirical-based approach to human subjectivity did serve as a point of departure for subsequent efforts. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, several scholars adopted cognitive science as the basis for this new approach. Their central presumption is that humans are rational creatures. Subsequently, emphasis is placed on the mental activities that take place as part of the viewing experience. While cognitive science refers to the study of mental activities in general, it is also a broad framework that allows for multiple sub-fields and different methodological undertakings. For example, cognitive science encompasses cognitive psychology, which tends to focus more specifically on mental faculties like memory, perception, and attention. In this regard, film scholars adopted cognitivism or cognitive theory to emphasize that this approach does not entail a unified or comprehensive theory, but rather a “perspective” or “frame of reference.”6 According to David Bordwell, the main concern of this perspective is “how spectators make sense of and respond to films” in conjunction “with the textual structures and techniques that give rise to spectatorial activity and response” (“Cognitive Film Theory” 24).
As part of this approach, it is assumed that the mind adheres to a formal logic and that it is possible to discern the pertinent computational procedures with regard to how individuals process sensory data. Although more recent research has broadened this approach to consider spectatorship in terms of neuroscience, it initially focused on the hypothetical relationship between spectators and films. The main task in this respect is to examine how spectators process the information provided as a matter of deductive reasoning. And this entails a kind of reverse engineering: the spectator’s mental activities are extrapolated based on the information encoded as part of the film and the assumption that spectators observe standard problem-solving protocols in their approach to this information. At the same time that cognitivism provides flexibility in terms of how to extrapolate the relevant mental processes, this approach generally works in tandem with the principles of analytic philosophy. This means that cognitive theorists, as Carl Plantinga explains it, “are committed to clarity of exposition and argument and to the relevance of empirical evidence and the standards of science (where appropriate)” (“Cognitive Film Theory” 20). References to analytic philosophy, in other words, serve to establish logical positivism as a priority regardless of the specific research topic or interests. More generally, this approach insists that theory adhere to a more scientific style of discourse, privileging logical argumentation and empirical verification.
One area in which this approach has proven especially productive is narrative comprehension. Following his work in detailing the historical and aesthetic basis of classical Hollywood cinema, David Bordwell incorporated several key principles from cognitivism as part of his 1986 book, Narration in the Fiction Film. The premise for this study is twofold. First, he adopts a constructivist theory of visual perception drawn from psychology and Hermann von Helmholtz. This not only assumes that humans are rational beings, but also that as spectators they are actively engaged in the meaning-making process. Mental activities such as “perceiving and thinking” are in this view “active, goal-oriented processes” (Narration 31). And as a result, sensory data does not alone determine its significance. Instead, its significance is constructed in this case by the viewer through different cognitive operations—inferences supplemented by certain expectations and background knowledge, among other things. As part of this dynamic psychological process, viewers draw upon schema, what Edward Branigan defines as “an arrangement of knowledge already possessed by a perceiver that is used to predict and classify new sensory data” (Narrative Comprehension 13). This occurs both in a local and a general sense. Viewers make hypotheses about the specific events within a film based on familiarity or some measure of probability. They also approach narrative as whole in a schematic sense; they approach it as an existing repertoire of prototypes, templates, and patterns. In this regard, Bordwell establishes what he considers a kind of default position for film viewing. As a matter of comprehending narrative film, “the spectator seeks to grasp the filmic continuum as a set of events occurring in the defined settings and unified by principles of temporality and causation” (Narration 34).
Having established the active nature of spectatorship, the remainder of the book shifts to Bordwell’s second premise regarding the function of film form and style. These are the cues that set up and determine the viewers’ ability to formulate hypotheses, make inferences, and mobilize existing knowledge. As such, they indicate how the selection and arrangement of story materials, what Bordwell defines as narration, aims to engage viewers by both activating and modifying existing schema. To illustrate, Bordwell details how discrepancies between story and plot serve to “cue and constrain the viewer’s construction of a story” (Narration 49). For instance, in a film that begins with the discovery of a murder victim, the viewer expects the story to include events that transpire both before and after the crime. The film, however, may choose to present these events in a way that constrains the viewer’s ability to accurately make sense of the information provided. Narrative cinema does this primarily by retarding or delaying the revelation of important story material. As part of this process the viewer continues to construct hypotheses, which are then either confirmed or negated. Although this process foregrounds the film’s ability to control information, it also confirms for Bordwell the active skill that spectatorship requires. As viewers are forced to revise and reconstruct their hypotheses, they become attuned to “a wider repertoire of schemata.” When submitted to new data and additional variations, this prompts the viewer to develop “perceptual and conceptual abilities [that are] more supple and nuanced” (Narration 31).
Bordwell’s approach to narration provided an important early step in establishing cognitivism as an alternative to the theoretical principles that took precedence throughout most of the 1970s and 1980s. Since 1986, scholars like Carl Plantinga, Richard Allen, Greg M. Smith, Gregory Currie, Murray Smith, and Torben Grodal have significantly advanced the field of cognitive film theory. In addition to incorporating cognitivism, Bordwell’s account of narration draws attention to how form and style vary in conjunction with different historical and industrial circumstances. While virtually all forms of narrative cinema regulate the range of information available to viewers, there can be more significant variations in the degree of self-consciousness or communicativeness that they exhibit in doing so. This is commonly illustrated by contrasting Hollywood cinema, which varies in its degree of self-consciousness but invariably values communicativeness to maximize the number of potential viewers, with European art cinema, which in some cases minimizes or eliminates spatiotemporal cues to a point where it is difficult to discern causation. Bordwell further elaborates these variations by contrasting narrative films from different historical contexts, emphasizing that comprehension varies since schema—the prototypes, templates, and patterns drawn on to understand narrative—are determined socially. This also serves to introduce historical poetics, one of the other major developments in the post-theory period and a point of increasing emphasis throughout Bordwell’s later work.
This new paradigm is often clearest in studies devoted to individual directors or national cinemas, for example Bordwell’s book on Yasujiro Ozu or his survey of popular Hong Kong cinema. In terms of an exact definition, however, poetics proves somewhat elusive. The explanation that Bordwell most frequently offers is that poetics “studies the finished work as the result of a process of construction” while placing a corresponding emphasis on a work’s specific “functions, effects, and uses” (“Historical Poetics” 371). The term “historical” serves to indicate, along the lines demonstrated in Narration and the Fiction Film, that these parameters change according to historical context. The challenge comes in distinguishing poetics from certain critical practices—Bordwell says poetics offers explanations whereas other practices merely furnish explications—while also accommodating synonymous terms like neoformalism. This latter term highlights the association between poetics and the emphasis that Bordwell and colleagues like Kristin Thompson place on rigorous formal analysis. While not wanting to dismiss the importance of such skills, Bordwell maintains that poetics cannot be reduced to a method of analysis. In another definition, he describes neoformalism as “a set of assumptions, an angle of heuristic approach, and a way of asking questions. It is frankly empirical and places great emphasis on the discovery of facts about films” (“Historical Poetics” 379). Despite this wavering, Bordwell does specify that there is an historical imperative at stake in this approach. As he reminds readers in Narration and the Fiction Film, “A little formalism turns one away from History, but a lot brings one back to it.”7 Although this reference is drawn from one of the members of what Bordwell later designated SLAB theory (a disparaging acronym for Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, and Barthes), it is meant to emphasize the difference between poetics and the abstractness of other theoretical models.
While Bordwell has produced numerous examples illustrating the merits of his poetical approach, his most interesting case for historical poetics is made somewhat indirectly in his book Making Meaning. In this instance he posits poetics as an antidote not only to theory but also to what he argues is a more widespread mode of fallible interpretation. To make this case, Bordwell outlines a history of writing on film whereby critics are beholden to a number of routine practices and formulaic conventions. Not entirely unlike the way viewers approach narrative cinema, Bordwell suggests that critics draw upon semantic fields in formulating hypotheses and ascribing meaning to film. He further details how interpretation changes over time with the dominant semantic field shifting from an artist-centered model (e.g. auteur criticism) in the 1950s and early 1960s to a form of symptomatic criticism that has reigned since the 1970s. In this regard, he reclassifies what generally constitutes theory as a series of interpretative conventions tailored to the requirements of a specific institutional context. To the extent that certain terms have become overused and certain figures have accrued a doctrinaire influence, he contends that this mode of interpretation has ceased to serve any kind of useful purpose. On the contrary, in fact, it has become conservative, a regulatory mechanism designed to subsume anything unfamiliar within an existing semantic field or set of heuristic protocols. And, “As if all this weren’t enough,” Bordwell finally adds, “it has become boring” (Making Meaning 261).
In the end, Bordwell returns to poetics as a way to escape both the failures of this interpretative paradigm and the misapplication of theory in general. As part of this move, he simultaneously establishes a more pronounced emphasis on historical scholarship. Though historical inquiry does not necessarily sidestep all of the vicissitudes of interpretation, it has the potential to generate a “more complex, precise, and nuanced” framework. In turn, such scholarship is “more likely to capture fresh and significant aspects” of film’s function, effect, and uses (Making Meaning 266). This has certainly been the case with the immensely productive turn to early cinema that began in the 1980s and that accelerated in the 1990s as film theory took a backseat to other interests. In several instances, this new work also calls into question the strict divide between theory and history. For example, Tom Gunning’s notion of the cinema of attractions not only illuminates the specificity of early modes of film exhibition but has also been used to advance a variety of different scholarly interests.
The success of this scholarship highlights the extent to which the post-theory period has been one of ongoing growth and development. While the turn to cognitivism and historical poetics is often situated in direct opposition to theory, this was not always or necessarily the case. There were many ways in which these different directions, despite the antagonistic rhetoric, mutually benefitted the larger field of film study. For instance, historical inquiry was to a certain extent made possible only after film theory helped to establish the discipline within the academy. It was only after the field’s intellectual merit had been formally recognized, in other words, that it then became prudent to return to previously overlooked areas of research. In turn, the revelations generated through historical inquiry prompted new efforts to reexamine neglected theoretical traditions. For instance, it was at this time that Vivian Sobchak inaugurated a return to phenomenology while Warren Buckland used the cognitive turn as an occasion to introduce a number of contemporary European theorists who combined cognitive science with film semiotics. In a broader sense, this is what D. N. Rodowick describes as a “metacritical or metatheoretical” turn within the discipline. As part of this development, scholars like Bordwell began “to exhibit fascination with the history of film study itself,” and then to reconsider “problems” within its established methodologies (“Elegy for Theory” 95).
In one respect, the developments of the post-theory period are evidence of an evolving discipline, the benefits of institutional support, and the increasing rigor of the overall field. Despite these positive effects, there are also several points at which the differences between film theory and its critics are utterly irreconcilable and where debate has become totally unproductive. This is evident, for example, in the extreme position that Carroll offers in the conclusion to his book-length critique Mystifying Movies. Theory, he states, “has impeded research and reduced film analysis to the repetition of fashionable slogans and unexamined assumptions. New modes of theorizing are necessary. We must start again” (234). For many scholars, this completely disregards the achievements of feminist film theory, post-colonial theory, and queer theory. Moreover, it diminishes their interest in issues of power, difference, and identity and their calls for new counter-hegemonic forms of representation, suggesting that these frameworks lack rigor and are somehow inimical to logical positivism or evidence-based argumentation. In other words, these matters fall outside the realm of “real” scholarship and “legitimate” theory. In addition to broadly discrediting all film theory, Carroll’s extreme position in Mystifying Movies begins to parallel some of the reactionary rhetoric taken up by cultural conservatives. This became explicit in his introduction to Post-Theory, where he condemns the political correctness of film theorists, asserting that this aims to protect “shoddy thinking and slapdash scholarship” while enforcing a conformist agenda that demands involuntary self-censorship (Post-Theory 45). In this regard, some post-theory sentiments evoke a much deeper antipathy for theoretical endeavors, for instance the Anglo-American rejection of esoterica as part of a broader Puritanical temperament and what Alexis de Tocqueville identified as America’s deep suspicion of speculative inquiry or anything else without immediate practical application.8
With its emphasis on logical reasoning and empirical evidence, many took this new direction to be a rejection of the social and political associations that had played a prominent role in film theory’s rise. And, by extension, many took this as an injunction against theory altogether. In response, Bordwell and Carroll offered a tenuous solution. They claimed they were not against theory but only Grand Theory, the variation of theory that had assumed an absolute position of infallibility throughout film study. Theory with a lower-case “t,” by contrast, encompasses what they variously refer to as a “middle-level,” “small-scale,” “problem-driven,” “moderate,” “catholic,” “piecemeal,” and “bottom-up” approach to theorizing. This, of course, is the same kind of programmatic binary logic that Peter Wollen had recourse to in his earlier distinction between dominant cinema and counter-cinema: one is a good object that should be emulated and the other is a bad object that should be abhorred. The other problem with this distinction is that it tends to overstate the status of even the most influential strands of French theory. It was certainly the case that certain theoretical concepts had gained prominence in film theory’s formative stages, but this is a far cry from saying that these theories were universally accepted or that they had assumed a hegemonic standing across the discipline.
As a corrective to the monolithic reign of Theory, Bordwell and Carroll call not just for a more modest version of theory but also for a profusion of these theories. There should be more quarreling, says Bordwell: “Dialogue and debate hone arguments” (Making Meaning 263). This sounds like an admirable call to further advance the field of film study, but the underlying logic is suspect. In a certain way, this call evokes the de-centering pluralism of post-modernism and post-structuralism. Is this, perhaps, an unwitting example of duplicity on their part? There were certainly instances in which Bordwell or Carroll resorted to the kind of punning word play that they otherwise condemned. Consider the title of Carroll’s review of Heath’s Questions of Cinema, “Address to the Heathen,” a rather tactless reference designed more to rile up an adversary than to “hone arguments.” But Bordwell and Carroll associate post-modernism and post-structuralism with Theory, which they have no interest in replicating in any way. The call for more vigorous theoretical debate isn’t disingenuous, but it does suggest a more fundamental problem in trying to distinguish Theory from post-theory. In a certain way, their position recalls the structural logic of what political theorist Giorgio Agamben, in a very different context, describes as a “state of exception.” Bordwell and Carroll call for a proliferation of theories only insofar as certain premises remain beyond questioning. In their view, more debate and more theory is welcome as long as one does not question basic assumptions like logical positivism, empirical evidence, or the rationality of human subjectivity. It isn’t that these are invalid assumptions or that the scholarship that adheres to them has nothing to offer film theory. But this mentality does at times contribute to an ugly dynamic in which different sides refuse to recognize their common interests and their relationship to a larger institutional structure of knowledge production.
DELEUZE AND THE RETURN OF PHILOSOPHY
Even as some of the debates surrounding Post-Theory suggested that theory had entered into a debilitating state of crisis, the field continued to produce a broad array of theoretically based scholarship. Some of this shifted its focus to Bordwell and Carroll’s “middle-level” approach or to historical inquiry more generally, but a good deal of it simply continued under the guise of Screen Theory. One new area of interest that developed at this time was the re-emergence of philosophy and, more specifically, the work of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze was a major figure within the French theory tradition and, for many, is best known for his 1972 book, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, co-written with his frequent collaborator Félix Guattari. Partly because of that book’s rejection of psychoanalysis, Deleuze found little favor among film theorists in the 1970s and 1980s. It became more difficult, however, to completely ignore Deleuze following the appearance of his own in-depth examination of cinema in The Movement-Image and The Time-Image. With D. N. Rodowick’s 1997 account of these two books, film studies began a more serious consideration of this work and, since then, Deleuze has been an important touchstone in developing new theoretical interests.
What’s both challenging and refreshing about Deleuze’s approach to cinema is that he casts aside virtually all of the theoretical models introduced throughout the 1970s and 1980s. He instead sets out to study the medium as a whole, renewing the approach undertaken by earlier theorists and the general question, “What is cinema?” Deleuze, in response, isolates a series of cinematographic concepts or types of images, which taken together serve as a taxonomy that changes over time. The two broadest categories are the movement-image and the time-image, the two image types that are used to draw a distinction between cinema in the first and second half of the twentieth century and that also act as titles for the two volumes that make up Deleuze’s study. Throughout the books, he illustrates these distinctions with detailed examples from various films and filmmakers, treating them as figures that think with images instead of concepts.
In terms of defining the movement-image, Deleuze argues that cinema emerges only as the image comes to signify more than a series of isolated or static units. In this respect, cinema begins not with the invention of moving images in 1895, but with the emergence of formal techniques like montage editing and the mobile camera. Both of these techniques form individual images that foster a different relationship to that which constitutes the whole. These images are no longer subordinate to an abstract sense of wholeness, but, rather, they open up this larger dimension in a qualitatively different way. For example, the mobile camera allows for dynamic reframing that engenders a tension between the image and its off-screen space. “All framing determines an out-of-field,” according to Deleuze, “a larger set, or another set with which the first forms a larger one, and which can in turn be seen, on condition that it gives rise to a new out-of-field, etc.” (Cinema 1 16). The individual shot is part of a larger whole that cannot be totalized. It is instead like a “thread which traverses sets and gives each one the possibility, which is necessarily realized, of communicating with another, to infinity. Thus the whole is the Open, and relates back to time or even to spirit rather than to content and to space” (Cinema 1 16–17).
Deleuze develops this approach by drawing on the work of Henri Bergson, another French philosopher who had fallen outside of film study’s purview. According to Deleuze’s reading, terms like “the whole” and “the Open” are associated with what Bergson identifies as duration, time, and consciousness. These categories resist scientific rationality, meaning they cannot be reduced to isolated static units within an abstract system of measurement. In associating cinema with these categories, Deleuze further associates it with what Bergson terms creative evolution. In this regard, cinema has the capacity to act like a consciousness in which “The whole creates itself, and constantly creates itself in another dimension without parts— like that which carries along the set of one qualitative state to another, like the pure ceaseless becoming which passes through these states” (Cinema 1 10). To return to the example of reframing, each individual shot opens an indeterminate possibility, “a universe or a plane of genuinely unlimited content.” This plane is also described in terms of immanence, with the “capacity to open itself on to a fourth dimension which is time” (Cinema 1 17). In Rodowick’s assessment, this is the most important part of Deleuze’s engagement with cinema. While Deleuze’s larger objective may be “to understand how aesthetic, philosophical, and scientific modes of understanding converge in producing cultural strategies for imagining and imaging the world,” he is especially concerned with the question of time and how its shifting status is evident in the relationship between cinema and thought (Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine 5–6).
Although cinema’s conceptual potential is evident throughout Deleuze’s account of the movement-image, many of these strategies eventually came to be controlled by dominant commercial cinemas like Hollywood. Within the confines of such a system, these strategies become stagnant and conventional. In his second book, Deleuze turns his attention to the emergence of the time-image, the type of image in which cinema’s potential is more fully apparent. This new image emerges in the aftermath of World War II, and it is primarily associated with European art cinemas like neorealism and the French new wave. The time-image is initially linked to a number of new formal and thematic elements. For example, Deleuze shows that films are more dispersed, spatial and temporal linkages are weakened, there is a greater emphasis on existential trips, there is an awareness of cliché, and there is less emphasis on plot.
More generally, he observes that post-war cinema is characterized by a growing sense of indeterminacy and by the impotency of human agency. However, these characteristics simultaneously allow for aberrant relations that render time directly visible. The time-image, in turn, takes on a different relationship to thinking. In Deleuze’s words, “The sensory-motor break makes man a seer who finds himself struck by something intolerable in the world, and confronted by something unthinkable in thought. Between the two, thought undergoes a strange fossilization, which is as it were its powerlessness to function, to be, its dispossession of itself and the world” (Cinema 2 169). On its surface this may seem disconsolate, but for Deleuze this illustrates the potential of thought as “a force that continually renews the possibilities for change and the appearance of the new” (Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine 83). Following World War II, it was only by confronting the paralysis of thought that we might restore our relationship to the world and imagine the possibility of a future. Despite generally disregarding questions of power and difference, it was on this basis that subsequent scholars have taken up Deleuze as providing a model for a “minor cinema” capable of bringing into being those who have been excluded.
Following the initial delays in his reception, Deleuze has attracted growing attention among film theorists and his work has opened up new ways of exploring the relationship between philosophy and media. More broadly, his arrival corresponds with a greater willingness among both film scholars and philosophers to engage in common interests. One of the most prominent figures in this period has been Slavoj ŽiŽek, a Lacanian cultural theorist known for his audacious ability to put Continental philosophy in conversation with popular culture. Others like Friedrich Kittler, Paul Virilio, and, more recently, Jacques Ranciere and Alain Badiou have also considered cinema from a more philosophical perspective. While these thinkers represent very different approaches, they are emblematic of a growing convergence between theory and philosophy. Deleuze concludes Cinema 2 with a comment that both addresses this particular relationship and serves as a rejoinder to theory’s critics. He writes that,
The usefulness of theoretical books on cinema has been called into question . . . However, this remark does not show a great understanding of what is called theory. For theory too is something which is made, no less than its object. For many people, philosophy is something which is not “made” but is pre-existent, ready-made in a prefabricated sky. However, philosophical theory is itself a practice, just as much as its object. It is no more abstract than its object. It is a practice of concepts, and it must be judged in the light of the other practices with which it interferes. A theory of cinema is not “about” cinema, but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to and which are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices, the practice of concepts in general having no privilege over others, any more than one object has over others. It is at the level of the interference of many practices that things happen, beings, images, concepts, all the kinds of events. The theory of cinema does not bear on the cinema, but on the concepts of the cinema, which are no less practical, effective or existent than cinema itself.
(Cinema 2 280)
NEW MEDIA AND POST-FILM THEORY
By the end of the twentieth century film theory faced another challenge as the medium began to fundamentally change. Although many of the conventions associated with cinema remain, the introduction of digital technologies provided new forms of production, distribution, and exhibition. In particular, these developments have contributed to the decline of film as a photochemically based analog medium. These technologies have also had a broader effect in terms of reshaping the media and entertainment industries and in expanding the overall ubiquity of moving images and related screen technologies. This has created an environment in which the boundaries between film, television, and other competing formats are beginning to blur. Meanwhile, the term new media signals the emergence of more recent formats like video games, interactive devices, and internet-based platforms, as well as multi-media installations and art exhibits, that tend to be positioned in opposition to cinema. The overall expansion of visual culture has enlarged the scope of what counts as film and media study, but it has also generated some consternation regarding which methods and institutional perspectives should have priority.
There have also been divided views regarding the overall significance of these new developments. While some scholars remain wary of these new technologies, others have enthusiastically embraced their transformative powers. In terms of theorizing what distinguishes new media and the digital image in particular, scholars tend to identify technical differences while also adopting a comparative approach. For example, Lev Manovich identifies distinct new media features like modularity, automation, and programmability to indicate how media functions more like computer data. In this regard, new media follows a different structural logic. It is defined by its ability to be translated into multiple formats. At the same time, Manovich introduces the term “transcoding” to illustrate the way that new media absorbs and reconceptualizes older cultural categories. In the process of becoming new media, cinema, for instance, has become a form of animation or “subgenre of painting,” which reconceptualizes the history of the medium. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin introduce a similar idea with their term remediation, or the intensification of mediated exchange that takes place as old and new media attempt to both replace and reaffirm one another. This interest in comparing the dynamic relationship between different types of media has prompted broader attempts to reconsider earlier instances, as in Jonathan Crary’s account of nineteenth-century visual technologies, in which new and old media practices converge.
The turn to new media and the specificity of new digital technologies corresponded with a growing interest in how audiences were engaging with these developments. Henry Jenkins introduced the idea of convergence culture to describe the general relationship between contemporary media and society. On one hand, this term refers to technological convergence (e.g. the ability to watch movies on different platforms such as television or the internet) and corporate convergence (e.g. the strategy used by major media conglomerates to integrate complementary business ventures), as well as the growing prevalence of transmedia storytelling (e.g. the deployment of select characters or story elements across multiple media formats and platforms). On the other hand, Jenkins is primarily interested in what convergence means for audiences: the new forms of participation and sense of community that have emerged alongside new media’s emphasis on interactivity and social networking. In a certain sense, this approach stems from the cognitivists’ reappraisal of viewers, mainly that they are not merely passive dupes but active participants, even, for Jenkins, capable of resistance, subversion, and transgression through tactics like textual poaching. Despite the emphasis on the benefits of this new era, there are also deep suspicions that surround the digital image. Those who are critical of these new technologies focus on the intense commercialization of new formats like the internet as well as issues like surveillance and privacy.
While many scholars have embraced the newness associated with new digital technologies, several scholars have deemphasized the magnitude of this shift. This implies that film theory’s existing principles and methods are still applicable even in a post-film world. As part of his ongoing return to the work of André Bazin, Dudley Andrew, for example, asserts that cinema “does not rise or fall with technology. A cinema of discovery and revelation can employ any sort of camera” (What Cinema Is! 60). Although Andrew concedes that the proliferation of digital technologies has inadvertently diminished the taste for this type of discovery, he points to recent digital films—Zhang-ke’s Still Life (2006) and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005)—to illustrate how global art cinema continues to invoke Bazin’s notion of realism. In a different type of example, David Bordwell argues that contemporary Hollywood maintains the principles of classical narrative cinema regardless of the new camera and editing techniques associated with digital technologies. Faster editing and the increased use of mobile cameras may have intensified established practices, but, he stresses, they continue to “serve traditional purposes” (The Way Hollywood Tells It 119).
Many of these new interests have resulted in productive scholarly research. At the same time, however, these new directions recall the angst associated with the post-theory debates, raising concerns about the discipline’s cohesiveness and its overall durability. Partly as a rejection of these new directions, D. N. Rodowick responds that “a discipline’s coherence derives not from the object it examines, but rather from the concepts and methods it mobilizes to generate critical thought” (Virtual Life xi). This means that even in a post-film era, film theory remains important and need not alter its identity.
Rodowick continues his point by raising the stakes of medium specificity. To this end, medium specificity is not reducible to old frameworks like realism or formalism, though the intensity of those earlier debates and the uncertainty of film’s status because of those debates is part of its distinct ontological status. His primary point of reference is Stanly Cavell’s The World Viewed, a largely underappreciated work, which, together with Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Rodowick describes as the “last great work of classical film theory” (Virtual Life 79). In the definition he extrapolates from Cavell, Rodowick explains the ontology of film as an expression of “our being or being-in-the-world, not necessarily as film spectators, but rather as a condition expressed in photography and cinema as such. This is a manifestation of a mind recognizing something that has already happened to itself” (Virtual Life 63). This means that film is less about what it represents and more about the relationship it produces between itself and the world, and how that relationship resembles our own relationship to the world. In other words, film encounters the world in a way that is akin to our “subjective condition of modernity” (Virtual Life 63). What’s more, the relationship that film makes palpable is simultaneously about temporality, the irrevocable passing of time, the nature of history. What we see in film is the past, a reminder that we will also one day be part of that past. “What we register and seek to overcome or redeem in looking at photographs and films is [this] temporal alienation.” In certain cases, when these images ignite “a circuit flowing between an external, surface perception of things and an inward movement characterized by memory and subjective reverie,” this becomes possible (Virtual Life 77).
By contrast, digital images are very different. Digital images have a fundamentally different relationship to the world and, as a result, change the cognitive process by which we perceive such images. This in turn entails a different set of relationships. Whereas film “holds us in a present relation to the past and sustains our belief in a past world through the qualities of automatic analogical causation, digital screens require us to acknowledge others through efficient communication and exchange: I think because I exist in a present time of exchange with others, who are not present to me in space” (Virtual Life 179). Though cinema is still possible in the post-film age, this new type of relationship has become increasingly conspicuous. Digital media functions primarily as a form of communication whereby information is considered valuable only as a unit of exchange within the logic of continuous circulation.
It is precisely because of this shift that Rodowick places such emphasis on film theory. Film theory constitutes the body of thinking devoted to understanding the importance of film in its specificity. Insofar as that medium has ceased to exist, that body of thinking can tell us even more about both the complexity of what used to be and the degree of difference with regard to what has taken its place. As Rodowick puts it, even as film is remediated as digital images, “the main questions and concepts of film theory persist, and we should pay careful attention to how they define a certain history of thought, how they can be used to reexamine that history, and how they form the basis for a critical understanding of new media and old. And at the same time, the core concepts of film theory are being recontextualized in ways that extend and render more complex their critical powers” (Virtual Life 188). In direct opposition to so much of the post-theory animus that claims theory is on the wane, Rodowick contends that it has greater critical power now than ever before. The reason for this is that images, and the overwhelming spread of digital culture are certainly testament to this, are so deeply ingrained in our society and ability to think about society that it is no longer possible to think without images and, by extension, the history of thinking about film images. In this regard, film theory has much to offer not only film or media studies in particular, but the advance of philosophy, culture, and critical thinking more generally. The title of his follow-up book, Elegy for Theory, emphasizes his lament, in effect mourning film theory’s premature dismissal and the field’s failure to reinvent it as part of a larger intellectual project. However, he also invokes elegy in another sense, as a praise song: “To feel one’s self at the end of something inspires reflection on its ends, which may imply a defensiveness toward past incarnations, nostalgia, and longing for better days, or anxiety before an uncertain future. However, times of uncertain ends and historical self-examination suggest another possible direction. ‘The past of theory demonstrates that theory has a future’” (Elegy 207).
Film theory has changed significantly over the course of its 100-year history and it is difficult to know what form it might take in the future. It is clear that film theory is deeply intertwined with its object of study. It was film that motivated various thinkers, scholars, critics, and artists to ask fundamental questions: What is cinema? What does it do? Why does it matter? Throughout the history of film theory these questions have been answered in terms of aesthetics, psychology, culture, politics, and so on. But more importantly than that, the different ideas and writings that emerged about cinema provided a basic sense of knowledge—descriptions and explanations—that paved the way for additional debate, analysis, and thinking. This material was successful to the extent that it became part of a larger conversation. It resonated to the extent that it was able to say something that wasn’t otherwise possible, articulating something that existing assumptions and cultural standards had fundamentally precluded. The fact that film has given way to cinema, moving images, and digital media more broadly means that film theory now finds itself in a strange predicament. It is a body of knowledge without an object, but, as Rodowick argues, this may make it all the more interesting as it moves forward.
In the same way that film theory has been deeply intertwined with its object of study, it is an intellectual discourse that is completely contingent on historical context. It has changed as the medium has changed, in particular as the industrial conditions of its production and distribution have changed as well as when, where, and how it has been viewed by theorists. It has changed as the theorists who have written it have changed. And it has changed as its readers have changed. Early theorists had the biggest challenge in terms of writing about a medium of questionable merit. Film theory today is part of an established academic field of study. In this regard, film theorists enjoy the benefits of institutional stability along with the support of a professional association and other academic resources. This also means that film theory is a very specialized scholarly discourse, one that is subject to idiosyncratic standards that make it obscure or inaccessible to the general public. Throughout much of the second part of the twentieth century film theory was also closely related to a number of social and political movements. There was a belief that it was possible to not only write about cinema but also to do so in a way that changed it for the better and in ways that contributed to broader forms of social progress. Film theory continues to transform and part of its continuing relevance will depend on its ability to come to terms with both its past and its present. As long as there are images, there will always be a reason for theory, but what that theory is able to do is up to those who take on that task.
In the two decades following its successful assimilation into the academy, film theory has entered a new and sometimes perilous period. Growing concerns about reigning models and the influence of French theory more generally came to a crescendo as select scholars enjoined the field of film study to adopt new objectives and different theoretical frameworks. Widespread technological changes have also raised questions. As film gives way to digital media and as cinema is recast as a form of visual information, it is uncertain whether film theory will remain the dominant conceptual lens for the critical analysis of moving images. Some of these questions have been tempered by the emergence of new figures like Gilles Deleuze and by film theory’s potential affinities for broader philosophical concerns.
Questions
1. What are the main objections to so-called Grand Theory? What new directions are proposed to take its place and what are the advantages of these new directions?
2. What is different about Gilles Deleuze’s approach to cinema? Why were there initial reservations about his approach and why does his work now resonate so strongly with film theorists?
3. How do digital technologies call into question some of film theory’s main principles?
4. How does the introduction of new media change cinema as a social practice? And how does it change the kinds of questions we ask about its philosophical implications?
5. Does film theory have a future? Why or why not?
1 See Bolas (2009): 233.
2 See, for example, Rich, Kleinhans, and Lesage (1978).
3 “About October.” October 1 (Spring 1976): 3.
4 See the exchange between Barry King (1987) and Bordwell (1988), between Peter Lehman (1997) and Bordwell (1998), and between Buckland (1989) and Carroll (1992).
5 See Muller and Richardson (1988).
6 See Bordwell (1989b).
7 See Barthes (1957): 112 for the original.
8 De Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Trans. George Lawrence. New York: HarperPerennial, 1969. 459.