Film Theory: Creating a Cinematic Grammar

SHORT CUTS

INTRODUCTIONS TO FILM STUDIES

OTHER SELECT TITLES IN THE SHORT CUTS SERIES

THE HORROR GENRE: FROM BEELZEBUB TO BLAIR WITCH Paul Wells

THE STAR SYSTEM: HOLLYWOOD’S PRODUCTION OF POPULAR IDENTITIES Paul McDonald

SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA: FROM OUTERSPACE TO CYBERSPACE Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska

EARLY SOVIET CINEMA: INNOVATION, IDEOLOGY AND PROPAGANDA David Gillespie

READING HOLLYWOOD: SPACES AND MEANINGS IN AMERICAN FILM Deborah Thomas

DISASTER MOVIES: THE CINEMA OF CATASTROPHE Stephen Keane

THE WESTERN GENRE: FROM LORDSBURG TO BIG WHISKEY John Saunders

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA: THE PLAY OF SHADOWS Vicky Lebeau

COSTUME AND CINEMA: DRESS CODES IN POPULAR FILM Sarah Street

MISE-EN-SCÈNE: FILM STYLE AND INTERPRETATION John Gibbs

NEW CHINESE CINEMA: CHALLENGING REPRESENTATIONS Sheila Cornelius with Ian Haydn Smith

ANIMATION: GENRE AND AUTHORSHIP Paul Wells

WOMEN’S CINEMA: THE CONTESTED SCREEN Alison Butler

BRITISH SOCIAL REALISM: FROM DOCUMENTARY TO BRIT GRIT Samantha Lay

FILM EDITING: THE ART OF THE EXPRESSIVE Valerie Orpen

AVANT-GARDE FILM: FORMS, THEMES AND PASSIONS Michael O’Pray

PRODUCTION DESIGN: ARCHITECTS OF THE SCREEN Jane Barnwell

NEW GERMAN CINEMA: IMAGES OF A GENERATION Julia Knight

EARLY CINEMA: FROM FACTORY GATE TO DREAM FACTORY Simon Popple and Joe Kember

MUSIC IN FILM: SOUNDTRACKS AND SYNERGY Pauline Reay

MELODRAMA: GENRE, STYLE, SENSIBILITY John Mercer and Martin Shingler

FEMINIST FILM STUDIES: WRITING THE WOMAN INTO CINEMA Janet McCabe

FILM PERFORMANCE: FROM ACHIEVEMENT TO APPRECIATION Andrew Klevan

NEW DIGITAL CINEMA: REINVENTING THE MOVING IMAGE Holly Willis

THE MUSICAL: RACE, GENDER AND PERFORMANCE Susan Smith

TEEN MOVIES: AMERICAN YOUTH ON SCREEN Timothy Shary

FILM NOIR: FROM BERLIN TO SIN CITY Mark Bould

DOCUMENTARY: THE MARGINS OF REALITY Paul Ward

THE NEW HOLLYWOOD: FROM BONNIE AND CLYDE TO STAR WARS Peter Krämer

ITALIAN NEO-REALISM: REBUILDING THE CINEMATIC CITY Mark Shiel

WAR CINEMA: HOLLYWOOD ON THE FRONT LINE Guy Westwell

FILM GENRE: FROM ICONOGRAPHY TO IDEOLOGY Barry Keith Grant

ROMANTIC COMEDY: BOY MEETS GIRL MEETS GENRE Tamar Jeffers McDonald

SPECTATORSHIP: THE POWER OF LOOKING ON Michele Aaron

SHAKESPEARE ON FILM: SUCH THINGS THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF Carolyn Jess-Cooke

CRIME FILMS: INVESTIGATING THE SCENE Kirsten Moana Thompson

THE FRENCH NEW WAVE: A NEW LOOK Naomi Greene

CINEMA AND HISTORY: THE TELLING OF STORIES Mike Chopra-Gant

GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST CINEMA: THE WORLD OF LIGHT AND SHADOW Ian Roberts

FILM AND PHILOSOPHY: TAKING MOVIES SERIOUSLY Daniel Shaw

CONTEMPORARY BRITISH CINEMA: FROM HERITAGE TO HORROR James Leggott

RELIGION AND FILM: CINEMA AND THE RE-CREATION OF THE WORLD S. Brent Plate

FANTASY CINEMA: IMPOSSIBLE WORLDS ON SCREEN David Butler

FILM VIOLENCE: HISTORY, IDEOLOGY, GENRE James Kendrick

NEW KOREAN CINEMA: BREAKING THE WAVES Darcy Paquet

FILM AUTHORSHIP: AUTEURS AND OTHER MYTHS C. Paul Sellors

THE VAMPIRE FILM: UNDEAD CINEMA Jeffrey Weinstock

HERITAGE FILM: NATION, GENRE AND REPRESENTATION Belén Vidal

QUEER CINEMA: SCHOOLGIRLS, VAMPIRES AND GAY COWBOYS Barbara Mennel

ACTION MOVIES: THE CINEMA OF STRIKING BACK Harvey O’Brien

BOLLYWOOD: GODS, GLAMOUR AND GOSSIP Kush Varia

THE SPORTS FILM: GAMES PEOPLE PLAY Bruce Babington

THE HEIST FILM: STEALING WITH STYLE Daryl Lee

INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AND FILM: SPACE, VISON, POWER Sean Carter & Klaus Dodds

FILM THEORY

CREATING A CINEMATIC GRAMMAR

FELICITY COLMAN

A Wallflower Press Book

Wallflower Press is an imprint of

Columbia University Press

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cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © Felicity Colman 2014

All rights reserved.

E-ISBN 978-0-231-85060-5

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ISBN 978-0-231-85060-5 (e-book)

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Written Matter of a Cinematic Grammar

1    Models

2    Technology

3    Spectators

Conclusion: Film Theory as Practice

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to the students and teachers of film theory that I have worked with, and all encounters that have helped my thinking on and through this discipline, especially Angela Ndalianis and Barbara Creed.

Special thanks to Apollonia Zikos, Erin Stapleton, Anna Hickey-Moody, Roy and Dr Tang, who have helped me immeasurably in vital moments.

Thanks to Yoram Allon, Commissioning Editor at Wallflower Press, for his tireless support of the discipline of film studies.

INTRODUCTION: THE WRITTEN MATTER OF A CINEMATIC GRAMMAR

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