3.30.2006
The Oxford Guide to Film Studies - Selections (Film and Media Studies)
Title
Hill, John and Gibson, Pamela Church (eds.) The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Field
Film and Media Studies
Summary
I'm just going to break this down by the excerpts I read:
"Film Acting" Paul McDonald: Film acting hasn't really got much attention in film theory. Acting is often seen as good when it is "authentic," "truthful," etc. but it isn't just about that - acting is understood as such and part of that understanding is the technology of the film (angles, lighting, etc.) So gives the meaning? Well both. John Ellis says that the actor is part of the fetishistic mechanism of film, presense in absence. (this is with Bejamin and stuff) - but the problem with this is it doesn't really take into account the body of the actor. James Narramore talks about framing and how simply being within the frame of the film designates the actor as oversignified. Barry King talks about impersonation (Capote). Richard Dyer attempts to set up a way of analyzing acting, but Roberta Pearson, in her semiotic code of histrionic vs. verisimilar, does a better job at it. This is good, but we need to remember that there are different types of acting methods (Method, etc.)
"Impressionism, Surealism and Film Theory" Robert B. Ray: This essay is about the two schools of film making mentioned in the title and aims to answer the question of how the two, I guess, prongs of cinema work together (or not) - that it is like life or that it is magical, and how this can be shown mechanically and if it can be mass produced. So Eisenstein is on the side of art and magic - "a medium's aesthetic value is a direct functioning of its ability to transform the reality serving as its raw material." (68)This view, we can see, has triumphed over the surrealist and impressionist views. They emphasized mechanizism, "photogenie," to either show real life as real life, fragmentary and stuff, but also, being influenced by Psychoanalysis, the dream world was also of interest to them. "For the Impressionists, photogenie was untranslatable but intentional, the product of particularly talented film makers. For the Surrealists, on the other hand, it was often accidental, and thus capable of appearing anywhere." (71) However, there is photogenie in the Eisenstein school of film making, and seizing on to it (like with beautiful moments in a mass market film) aided the mass appeal of the big time movies. That is, while Surrealism/Impressionism, often get dismissed these days for over reliance on fetishism (photogenie as fetishism), it isn't like that can't be found in mass market films too. Then there is Andre Bazin, who argued "that film's true destiny is the objective representation of reality."(71) But at the same time, there is am ambivalence towards intentionality in Bazin (Bazin and his followers the Cahiers critics)that is evinced in the term "mise-en-scene...is not merely the gap between what we see and feel on the screen and what we can express in words, but also the gap between the intention of the director and his effect on the spectator." (Bazin, 72)But Eisenstein won in the end, we can possibly say that is because of path dependence (like why more people use PCs as opposed to Macs). Film studies as it moved to the universities was influenced by semiotics (structuralist, ideological, psychoanalytic and gender theory) but then, even Barthes had to admit, this started getting kinda old. The author advises for a "heuretic film studies [which] might begin whre photogenie, third meanings, and fetishism might intersect." (74)
"Film and Psychoanalysis" Barbara Creed:Psychoanalytic criticism had a huge impact on film studies. First the surrealists, with their Freudian interest in dream states. Then apparatus theory (Baudry, Metz) as a way that broadened the structuralist approach out - the viewer is going through some Oedipal drama when watching a movie, trying to unite with the absent presence - the imaginary signifer- on the screen but can't ever do it, or it can be read in a Lacanian mirror stage kinda way. Then there are the feminists like Laura Mulvey who notes that apparatus theory always posits a male viewer and wonder how women can look at film without, I guess, dying or something. It still works of the Oedipal triangle, positing Oedipal heroines. Then there are the people like Elizabeth Cowie who posit a more mobile gaze of the viewer by thinking about fantasy in relation to film - like child psychology stuff. Then the reactions of people like Richard Dyer and Kaja Silverman who also try to trouble what is going on with the gaze in cinema and think about how it doesn't always produce sadist men, but maybe masochistic men (who can't desire the male bodies on the scree, etc.) Then there were the cognitivists who lashed out at the psychoanalysts because they said that it was all based on unprovable crap and argued for a more sociological approach with studying actual viewers. Then some said it was ahistorical or that it only focused on ideal, non-existent viewers (basically, ignoring materialism). Cultural studies is a response to all this, not throwing out the psyschoanalysis (most of the time), but taking into account the critiques, too. Then, at the end, of course, there are the brown people who use psychoanalysis (Bhabha, et al) to critique filmic representations of the racialized other and queer theory who use it to critique gender binarism.
"Feminism and Film" Patricia White: A lot of the insight here was in the Pyschoanalysis chapter. But it starts with reflection theory - that filmic representations reflect what society thinks - here you get people looking for good and bad representation - not really that helpful. Semiotics was a bit of a response to this - women as sign, perhaps multi-valent. Then pyschoanalysis (Mulvey et al) and the gaze, who looks, who is looked at. Then an interest in "women's films" like weepies and recent stuff like soap operas. It links the idea of spectatorship from Psych with the repsentations of the semiotics. Some say these films are bad some say that the pleasure derived from them can be..."liberating" isn't the right word, but you know what I mean. Also important to other feminist readings is reception studies and "intertextuality" - that the stars mean something outside of their representation on the film (Katherine Hepburn, etc.) Then we have to consider women's film making, Alice Guy-Blanche and Lois Weber and Dorothy Arzner. Further, there have been several women filmmakers in art, new national, documentary and third cinema. Finally, feminist film criticism has to content with "postmodernism" and the loss of the subject (I think this is kinda dumb, btw.)
"Gay and Lesbian Criticism" Anneke Smelik: Starts with a discussion of Russo's "The Celuloid Closet" but critiques it for assuming that there is some linear progession of oppression to outness in Hollywood. Gay and Lesbian crit first is focused on issues of stereotype and representation, but like reflection theory, this is kinda binaristic. Richard Dyer offers a way of understanding how these stereotypes are deployed strategically to guard against hetereosexual failure. Then authorship offered another problem as it arose around the time of authors dying (authoriship bad, unless it is a gay author) but it was still important to recognize pioneers like Dorothy Arzner. Gay and Lesbian crit undertakes oppositional readings of dominant texts a lot, also taking into account Gay and Lesbian spectatorship - this complicates pyschoanalytic feminist film crit, as you can imagine because it throws off Oedipal desire and can look at the male body as object of desire. Camp is one mode of reading against the dominant in film - humor inflected with pathos. Then of course, there is Gay and Lesbian film making to consider. This can be traced historically, in art house films which are usually not as political as identity politics based films which can be reductive which then get remedied by magical film makers with mutliple jeopardies like Marlon Riggs. Oh to be hybrid.
"Queer Theory" Alexander Doty: Queer film theory complicates the identitarian and binaristic thinking found in feminist and Gay and Lesbin film theory (although Queer is a heavily contested term - is it just a hip way of saying gay? can heterosexuals be queer? does it have something to do with authorship? etc.) but the way this article seems to read it is: "'queer' would be reserved for those films and popular culture texts, spectator positions, pleasures and readings that articulate spaces outside gender binaries and sexuality categories" (150) - it's a way of reading.
"Race, Ethnicity, and Film" Robyn Wiegman: The study of race and ethnicity in film has taken a different course than feminist/GBLT/Queer readings as it has generally followed the trajectory of specific ethnic group studies in the US as opposed to the progression of action/reaction of the former (at least, that is how it is posited in this book). We get a definition of ethnicity and race - note the invisibility of whiteness here. Like in GL/Queer studies of film, much of this work began with an examining of stereotype, with all its attendent problems. This essay looks at the different types of stereotypes for various racialized groups. There is more, but I feel like this essay is not really that worth summing up here. I hope that didn't sound bad.
"Early American Film" Tom Gunning: This essay is about the pre-classical period of cinema. It has been often neglected in film studies because it is so radically different from what we can even begin to understand. "Early cinema can be understood as 'pre-classical,' standing in varying degrees outside the codes of spatial and temporal relations that define the stability of the classical Hollywood film...I felt that the essential gesture of early cinema (which could not be described as an incomplete mastery of storytelling) lay in its aggressive address to the spectator's attention." (257) So you have things exploding or other arresting large gestures as opposed to narrative of the classical period. "Narrative coherence was supplied in the act of reception, rather than inherent in the film itself."(259) This leads to the ways in which at first, when film didn't have such centralized distribution, there was more local variation to the way it was received by the audience. There is a question of the class of this audience - while vaudvilles catered to more middle class audiences, nickelodians were attended by the lower clases (this is heatedly debated, thought). From 1913-15 things got more narativized and centralized in terms of distribution. Some say this had to do with wanting to make the cinema more respectable as opposed to the bang-zoom appreciated by the lower class. The chapter closes with a discussion on the effects of modernity on the ways in which early cinema progressed.
"Concepts of National Cinema" Stephen Crofts: National cinema is tought because nations are tough - why do we consider French films particularly French, etc. At least, this wasn't problematized much until the 80s, predictably arising alongside postcolonial studies. So we have arguments for nation-state cinema to be defined not just on geo-political boundaries but on other categories of classicafication informed by the nation-state as locus (Production, Distribution and exhibition, Audiences, Discourses, Textuality, National-cultural specificity, Cultural specificity of genres, the role of the state, and the global range of nation-state cinemas). Further,we need to think of films as being Industrial, Cultural or Anti-state and different cinemas (Hollywood, Art, and Third Cinema respectively, for example) slot into those places.
"Modernism and the Avant-Gardes" Murray Smith: How is the avant-garde understood in film theory and history? The avant-garde is made outside the classical Hollywood (or I guess Industrial if we look at the above framework and want to globalize our categorization) purview. It is not art cinema. It can be understood as parallel or reactive, but eitherway as alternative and radically other. Often it challenges narrative and realism. Modernism can be seen in relation to the rise of the Avant-Garde. Some Avant-garde is political some isn't. There is a lot of inspiration from DADA, which leads to surrealism - but avant-garde always has a dialectical relationship to the mainstream. After WWII, we see the rise of art cinema (not avant garde), counter-cinema (Brechtian influence), and Third Cinema (anti-state, usually out of the global south, seems to implicate the importance of brown people having to die to make it). Then there is the post-war period in New York (Richter, Deren, Brakhage). Also Andy Warhol in the 60s and 70s. There is also a feminist avant-garde, obviously more political than some of the stuff discussed above. The chapter concludes with a discussion of "postmodernism" and the avant-garde - can anything be avant in the age of pomo?
Hill, John and Gibson, Pamela Church (eds.) The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Field
Film and Media Studies
Summary
I'm just going to break this down by the excerpts I read:
"Film Acting" Paul McDonald: Film acting hasn't really got much attention in film theory. Acting is often seen as good when it is "authentic," "truthful," etc. but it isn't just about that - acting is understood as such and part of that understanding is the technology of the film (angles, lighting, etc.) So gives the meaning? Well both. John Ellis says that the actor is part of the fetishistic mechanism of film, presense in absence. (this is with Bejamin and stuff) - but the problem with this is it doesn't really take into account the body of the actor. James Narramore talks about framing and how simply being within the frame of the film designates the actor as oversignified. Barry King talks about impersonation (Capote). Richard Dyer attempts to set up a way of analyzing acting, but Roberta Pearson, in her semiotic code of histrionic vs. verisimilar, does a better job at it. This is good, but we need to remember that there are different types of acting methods (Method, etc.)
"Impressionism, Surealism and Film Theory" Robert B. Ray: This essay is about the two schools of film making mentioned in the title and aims to answer the question of how the two, I guess, prongs of cinema work together (or not) - that it is like life or that it is magical, and how this can be shown mechanically and if it can be mass produced. So Eisenstein is on the side of art and magic - "a medium's aesthetic value is a direct functioning of its ability to transform the reality serving as its raw material." (68)This view, we can see, has triumphed over the surrealist and impressionist views. They emphasized mechanizism, "photogenie," to either show real life as real life, fragmentary and stuff, but also, being influenced by Psychoanalysis, the dream world was also of interest to them. "For the Impressionists, photogenie was untranslatable but intentional, the product of particularly talented film makers. For the Surrealists, on the other hand, it was often accidental, and thus capable of appearing anywhere." (71) However, there is photogenie in the Eisenstein school of film making, and seizing on to it (like with beautiful moments in a mass market film) aided the mass appeal of the big time movies. That is, while Surrealism/Impressionism, often get dismissed these days for over reliance on fetishism (photogenie as fetishism), it isn't like that can't be found in mass market films too. Then there is Andre Bazin, who argued "that film's true destiny is the objective representation of reality."(71) But at the same time, there is am ambivalence towards intentionality in Bazin (Bazin and his followers the Cahiers critics)that is evinced in the term "mise-en-scene...is not merely the gap between what we see and feel on the screen and what we can express in words, but also the gap between the intention of the director and his effect on the spectator." (Bazin, 72)But Eisenstein won in the end, we can possibly say that is because of path dependence (like why more people use PCs as opposed to Macs). Film studies as it moved to the universities was influenced by semiotics (structuralist, ideological, psychoanalytic and gender theory) but then, even Barthes had to admit, this started getting kinda old. The author advises for a "heuretic film studies [which] might begin whre photogenie, third meanings, and fetishism might intersect." (74)
"Film and Psychoanalysis" Barbara Creed:Psychoanalytic criticism had a huge impact on film studies. First the surrealists, with their Freudian interest in dream states. Then apparatus theory (Baudry, Metz) as a way that broadened the structuralist approach out - the viewer is going through some Oedipal drama when watching a movie, trying to unite with the absent presence - the imaginary signifer- on the screen but can't ever do it, or it can be read in a Lacanian mirror stage kinda way. Then there are the feminists like Laura Mulvey who notes that apparatus theory always posits a male viewer and wonder how women can look at film without, I guess, dying or something. It still works of the Oedipal triangle, positing Oedipal heroines. Then there are the people like Elizabeth Cowie who posit a more mobile gaze of the viewer by thinking about fantasy in relation to film - like child psychology stuff. Then the reactions of people like Richard Dyer and Kaja Silverman who also try to trouble what is going on with the gaze in cinema and think about how it doesn't always produce sadist men, but maybe masochistic men (who can't desire the male bodies on the scree, etc.) Then there were the cognitivists who lashed out at the psychoanalysts because they said that it was all based on unprovable crap and argued for a more sociological approach with studying actual viewers. Then some said it was ahistorical or that it only focused on ideal, non-existent viewers (basically, ignoring materialism). Cultural studies is a response to all this, not throwing out the psyschoanalysis (most of the time), but taking into account the critiques, too. Then, at the end, of course, there are the brown people who use psychoanalysis (Bhabha, et al) to critique filmic representations of the racialized other and queer theory who use it to critique gender binarism.
"Feminism and Film" Patricia White: A lot of the insight here was in the Pyschoanalysis chapter. But it starts with reflection theory - that filmic representations reflect what society thinks - here you get people looking for good and bad representation - not really that helpful. Semiotics was a bit of a response to this - women as sign, perhaps multi-valent. Then pyschoanalysis (Mulvey et al) and the gaze, who looks, who is looked at. Then an interest in "women's films" like weepies and recent stuff like soap operas. It links the idea of spectatorship from Psych with the repsentations of the semiotics. Some say these films are bad some say that the pleasure derived from them can be..."liberating" isn't the right word, but you know what I mean. Also important to other feminist readings is reception studies and "intertextuality" - that the stars mean something outside of their representation on the film (Katherine Hepburn, etc.) Then we have to consider women's film making, Alice Guy-Blanche and Lois Weber and Dorothy Arzner. Further, there have been several women filmmakers in art, new national, documentary and third cinema. Finally, feminist film criticism has to content with "postmodernism" and the loss of the subject (I think this is kinda dumb, btw.)
"Gay and Lesbian Criticism" Anneke Smelik: Starts with a discussion of Russo's "The Celuloid Closet" but critiques it for assuming that there is some linear progession of oppression to outness in Hollywood. Gay and Lesbian crit first is focused on issues of stereotype and representation, but like reflection theory, this is kinda binaristic. Richard Dyer offers a way of understanding how these stereotypes are deployed strategically to guard against hetereosexual failure. Then authorship offered another problem as it arose around the time of authors dying (authoriship bad, unless it is a gay author) but it was still important to recognize pioneers like Dorothy Arzner. Gay and Lesbian crit undertakes oppositional readings of dominant texts a lot, also taking into account Gay and Lesbian spectatorship - this complicates pyschoanalytic feminist film crit, as you can imagine because it throws off Oedipal desire and can look at the male body as object of desire. Camp is one mode of reading against the dominant in film - humor inflected with pathos. Then of course, there is Gay and Lesbian film making to consider. This can be traced historically, in art house films which are usually not as political as identity politics based films which can be reductive which then get remedied by magical film makers with mutliple jeopardies like Marlon Riggs. Oh to be hybrid.
"Queer Theory" Alexander Doty: Queer film theory complicates the identitarian and binaristic thinking found in feminist and Gay and Lesbin film theory (although Queer is a heavily contested term - is it just a hip way of saying gay? can heterosexuals be queer? does it have something to do with authorship? etc.) but the way this article seems to read it is: "'queer' would be reserved for those films and popular culture texts, spectator positions, pleasures and readings that articulate spaces outside gender binaries and sexuality categories" (150) - it's a way of reading.
"Race, Ethnicity, and Film" Robyn Wiegman: The study of race and ethnicity in film has taken a different course than feminist/GBLT/Queer readings as it has generally followed the trajectory of specific ethnic group studies in the US as opposed to the progression of action/reaction of the former (at least, that is how it is posited in this book). We get a definition of ethnicity and race - note the invisibility of whiteness here. Like in GL/Queer studies of film, much of this work began with an examining of stereotype, with all its attendent problems. This essay looks at the different types of stereotypes for various racialized groups. There is more, but I feel like this essay is not really that worth summing up here. I hope that didn't sound bad.
"Early American Film" Tom Gunning: This essay is about the pre-classical period of cinema. It has been often neglected in film studies because it is so radically different from what we can even begin to understand. "Early cinema can be understood as 'pre-classical,' standing in varying degrees outside the codes of spatial and temporal relations that define the stability of the classical Hollywood film...I felt that the essential gesture of early cinema (which could not be described as an incomplete mastery of storytelling) lay in its aggressive address to the spectator's attention." (257) So you have things exploding or other arresting large gestures as opposed to narrative of the classical period. "Narrative coherence was supplied in the act of reception, rather than inherent in the film itself."(259) This leads to the ways in which at first, when film didn't have such centralized distribution, there was more local variation to the way it was received by the audience. There is a question of the class of this audience - while vaudvilles catered to more middle class audiences, nickelodians were attended by the lower clases (this is heatedly debated, thought). From 1913-15 things got more narativized and centralized in terms of distribution. Some say this had to do with wanting to make the cinema more respectable as opposed to the bang-zoom appreciated by the lower class. The chapter closes with a discussion on the effects of modernity on the ways in which early cinema progressed.
"Concepts of National Cinema" Stephen Crofts: National cinema is tought because nations are tough - why do we consider French films particularly French, etc. At least, this wasn't problematized much until the 80s, predictably arising alongside postcolonial studies. So we have arguments for nation-state cinema to be defined not just on geo-political boundaries but on other categories of classicafication informed by the nation-state as locus (Production, Distribution and exhibition, Audiences, Discourses, Textuality, National-cultural specificity, Cultural specificity of genres, the role of the state, and the global range of nation-state cinemas). Further,we need to think of films as being Industrial, Cultural or Anti-state and different cinemas (Hollywood, Art, and Third Cinema respectively, for example) slot into those places.
"Modernism and the Avant-Gardes" Murray Smith: How is the avant-garde understood in film theory and history? The avant-garde is made outside the classical Hollywood (or I guess Industrial if we look at the above framework and want to globalize our categorization) purview. It is not art cinema. It can be understood as parallel or reactive, but eitherway as alternative and radically other. Often it challenges narrative and realism. Modernism can be seen in relation to the rise of the Avant-Garde. Some Avant-garde is political some isn't. There is a lot of inspiration from DADA, which leads to surrealism - but avant-garde always has a dialectical relationship to the mainstream. After WWII, we see the rise of art cinema (not avant garde), counter-cinema (Brechtian influence), and Third Cinema (anti-state, usually out of the global south, seems to implicate the importance of brown people having to die to make it). Then there is the post-war period in New York (Richter, Deren, Brakhage). Also Andy Warhol in the 60s and 70s. There is also a feminist avant-garde, obviously more political than some of the stuff discussed above. The chapter concludes with a discussion of "postmodernism" and the avant-garde - can anything be avant in the age of pomo?
# posted by SMRT : 9:45 PM
