Teaching film theory in a post-film era.

Abstract

Given the post-film, post-theory era in which we find ourselves, of what value is film theory to our students? My reflections on this question lead me to two conclusions. First, film theory provides a conceptual horizon against which students can assess what is both new and very old about "new media." Second, I think there is value in film theory itself, in the study of it, as one path to take in the pursuit of a liberal arts education. Through a discussion of canonical texts by Eisenstein, Bazin, and Barthes, I hope to evoke some sense of how students can be encouraged to "experience themselves otherwise" through their engagement with film theory--as passionate producers rather than cool consumers, as believers rather than facile skeptics, and as embodied rather than disembodied thinkers.

Teaching Film Theory in a Post-Film, Post-Theory Era

Self-contained: having all that is needed in oneself; independent; uncommunicative, reserved or restrained in behavior. That's how I would describe the students in my senior seminar this term. Images of the strong, silent type come to mind--The Duke, Clint, Arnold. Self-containment is valued in our culture--at least in the stories we like to tell ourselves about who we are or would like to be. And yet, there is something troubling to me about this particular group of students. They are terrific thinkers, many of them, and sweet, but they are also sad, manifesting little fire, little passion. In front of them, seeing myself in their eyes, I see old newsreel footage of Lenin or Trotsky haranguing a crowd, arms waving, carrying on obsessively. When self-containment is a value, enthusiasm in any form looks absurd. Making a spectacle of oneself is the ultimate social faux pas. The goal is to blend-in, look right--be cool. Recognize this worldview? It is that of consumer culture, wherein you are what you buy. Identity is assembled out of the contents of a shopping bag. Contrary to the exhortation of the Brad Pitt character in Fight Club, you are your bleeping khakis. If those khakis happen to be flat fronts from the GAP, so much the better.

It is to a group of cool customers, then, that I market my goods: film theory. That's right, film theory--at a time when the specificity of film as a medium is being digitized out of existence and theory is considered by many to be much less central than it was to the discipline of cinema studies. Film, in the words of Robert Stare and Ella Shohat (2000), is "dissolving into the larger bitstream of audio-visual media" (p. 394). To the extent that film is digitized, it will no longer be distinguishable from the content of other media such as the television or the computer. Marshall McLuhan's famous statement must be revised: the medium is no longer the message. Whatever "messages" are implicit in the "medium" are homogenized by digitization. A medium is merely one possible embodiment of a message that can have multiple embodiments, all derivable from the same data. One day soon, film as a photochemical medium will no longer be the primary aesthetic object anchoring the discipline of cinema studies.

Meanwhile, much of film theory is being called into question. Film scholars David Bordwell and Noel Carroll (1996) have mounted a campaign against so-called "Grand Theory," which includes the two most influential contemporary theory movements in cinema studies--screen theory and cultural studies. Screen theory gained prominence in the 1970s in the British film journal Screen, but it is rooted in French theory of the 1960s, in the structuralisms of Saussure and Levi-Strauss and the poststructuralisms of Lacan and Althnsser. There is a tendency in structural and poststructural theory to "bracket the referent," to privilege the interrelations between signs over those between signs and the real, material objects to which they refer. Consequently, screen theory has been taken to task for its ahistoricism, for detaching films from their social and historical contexts. Cultural studies offers itself as an alternative to the ahistoricism of screen theory, shifting the focus from film as film to the uses people make of all kinds of media representations. It gained prominence in the 1980s via the writings of scholars associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the UK, but its theoretical roots are also in the 1960s, in the writings of British leftists Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, and Stuart Hall. Whatever beef exists between screen theory and cultural studies is beside the point for Bordwell and Carroll, however. For them, screen theory and cultural studies are top-down, doctrine-driven Grand Theories that flame discussions of cinema "within schemes which seek to describe or explain very broad features of society, history, language and psyche" (p. 3). More "modest" alternatives are called for, they argue, including "middle-level research"--"tackl[ing] film-based problems without making overarching theoretical commitments" [Bordwell] (p. 3) and "piecemeal theorizing"--"building theories not of subjectivity, ideology, or culture in general but rather of particular phenomena" [Carroll] (p. 29).

Given the post-film, post-theory era in which we find ourselves, it seems reasonable to expect that a question about the value of teaching film theory might arise. But when a senior colleague let loose with it recently, I was caught off guard. I fumbled my way towards an answer that seemed to satisfy him, but I felt unsettled by our exchange. I realized I hadn't really thought about why I encourage the current generation of students to study film theory. For me, it was as if film theory was a mountain to be climbed for no other reason than because it was there. I was aware that developers were leveling the mountain. Why was I still asking students to climb it? My reflections on this question have led me to two conclusions. First, I agree with film scholar D. N. Rodowick (2001) that film theory is "the most productive conceptual horizon against which we can assess what is new, and yet very old, in the new media" (p. 1404). Against this conceptual horizon, my students can recognize what is different about how new media mobilize our vision and desire. Or what is cinematic ("old") about the architecture of video games ("new"). Or that the aesthetic touchstone for digital imagery ("new") is still, anachronistically, photographic realism ("old"). Dudley Andrew (2000) writes that we can best prepare students to grapple with the implications of new media "by grounding them through cinema in traditions and theories of storytelling and image making that reach to the roots of modernity" (p. 342). The medium to which my students now have access is digital video rather than photochemical film, but their objectives with regard to this "new" medium are in fact "old." They want to tell stories. They want to make images. This is why I continue to make a place in our curriculum for the 100+ year history of film as a photochemical medium and for the theories that facilitate our understanding of this medium. For it is "through cinema," as Andrew suggests, that we can best comprehend our digital present and future.

Secondly, I think there is value in film theory itself, in the study of it, as one path to take in the pursuit of a liberal education. My task, in coaching students along this path, is to provide them with opportunities to become better readers, speakers, writers, and thinkers. This process has the potential to produce some interesting side effects. Literary critic Norman Holland (1988) argues that when we read, we use texts to symbolize and replicate our own identities. Confronted with a group of bright but unusually self-contained students, I catch myself fantasizing about the opposite possibility: can we use the experience of reading to replicate the self not as self but as other? Can our encounter with film theory be a means of liberation from the constraints of consumer coolness? What other constraints specific to my students' experience of self in contemporary culture are hindering their efforts to acquire an education? In order to entertain these questions, I propose to begin where most students of film theory begin, by reading the canonical essays of Sergei Eisenstein (1929), Soviet filmmaker and theorist, and Andre Bazin (1945, 1946), French theorist and critic. I will then devote my attention to Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida (1981), a book I like to situate on my syllabus as a sequel to Bazin's writings. In my discussion of these pieces, I hope to evoke some sense of how students can be encouraged to "experience themselves otherwise" through their engagement with film theory--specially, as passionate producers rather than cool consumers (via the words of Eisenstein), as believers rather than facile skeptics (via the words of Bazin), and as embodied rather than disembodied thinkers (via the words of Barthes). Before we proceed, I wish to beg the indulgence of my reader as I carve a path through the thicket of film theory. Reading film theory, a discourse which has been known to bring out the obscurantist in many a writer known for the clarity of his or her prose, may seem to be more trouble than it's worth, especially for readers interested primarily in exploring the experience of teaching. But only by engaging with film theory itself can we hope to catch a glimpse of the transformative potential it holds in store for our students and for us as teachers, specialists in film studies and non-specialists alike.

We begin with Eisenstein. His manifesto-style writings evoke for my students the qualifies of an on-line rant: fragmented sentences, capitalized words. In one essay (1929), he manages to assemble his fragmented assertions into the following thesis: "The most varied branches of Japanese culture are permeated by a purely cinematic element--montage" (p. 25). Skeptical, we tuna back to the words on the page for supporting evidence. We delineate the montage potential in the ideogram, taking care to note that which is specious in his argument, and then track his more sophisticated examples in Japanese poetry, figurative art, and theater until--suddenly--Eisenstein abandons the thread of the argument, and therein, abandons us. He wants to say something other than what we might want or expect him to say at this moment, and he will not be denied (this, incidentally, is melodrama, which I intentionally cultivate as a means of encouraging students' engagement with the material). In a two and a half page digression, he expounds on the idea about which he is most passionate: his theory of cinematic montage, how it differs from that of Lev Kuleshov, his former teacher. Upon comparing the two theories--Eisenstein's and Kuleshov's--and speculating on what role the "anxiety of influence" may have played in Eisenstein's theory, I venture the opinion that the best students will always synthesize and overcome, dialectically, the ideas of their teachers. In doing so, I implicitly challenge my students to become other, to "become" Eisenstein--passionate, rather than cool, and dialectically engaged with ideas, including mine.

Coolness is not the only attribute of contemporary selfhood impeding my students' efforts to learn. They are also skeptical of everything. Skepticism can be a positive thing, of course. In ancient Greece, a skeptic was someone who engaged in constant inquiry and reflection. My students are more in tune with the derisive skepticism of South Park and Conan O'Brien, however. An antidote is needed, something that will allow my students to experience themselves otherwise--as believers rather than skeptics. For this, the writings of the French critic and theorist Andre Bazin seem made to order. In contrast to the analytical discourse of contemporary post-theorists such as Bordwell and Carroll, Bazin advances his arguments ambiguously, by way of metaphor or analogy. Here are some examples of Bazin in action, which I have paraphrased: "The impact of filmmaker Jean Renoir's style on the classical styles of the Hollywood and French cinemas of the 1930s is like the effects of geological movements on the equilibrium-profile of a river: imperceptibly causing serious erosion." And, "filmmaker Roberto Rossellini's orientation to reality is like that of Matisse or Hemingway, Faulkner, and Dos Passos: as a filterer of facts." Rossellini changes nothing about reality, but leaves some things out. What he selects and leaves out is the key to recognizing his style. Put differently: "A filmmaker's style in relation to fragments of concrete reality is like a magnet in relation to iron filings: polarizing." And how do we find meaning in Rossellini's "image-facts" (which are more concrete than mere shots)? Once again, to paraphrase Bazin, "our minds leap from image-fact to image-fact as one leaps from stone to stone in crossing a river." Here, I perpetuate Bazin's mode of expression, at the risk of annoying my students more than I already have, by comparing Bazin's elliptical writing style to Rossellini's elliptical film style: paradoxically, both are complete, but it is up to us to make the meaning.

Groans are better than nothing. I'm thinking the students are with me, with Bazin, despite the unspoken message they've been sending me about the "bogus" nature of this exercise. They're hooked enough to wonder where I'm going with this. They're waiting for the moral of the story, the punchline in this joke. But we've only set the stage for telling the story of Bazin's film theory. The story we need to tell begins with yet another of Bazin's analogies, this one from the world of mathematics: The relationship of cinema to reality is like an asymptotic line approaching a given curve: ever closer, but never meeting. It is upon this analogy that Bazin bases one of his most provocative theses, which registers with my students like the tag-line of a TV commercial: cinema has not yet been invented. Cinema existed in the minds of human beings as a Platonic ideal long before the technology of film was invented, like the wings of Icarus before the airplane made human flight possible. In its ideal form, in what Bazin (1946) calls "the myth of total cinema," cinema not only duplicates reality--"recreates the world in its own image" via an "integral realism"--but offers an added advantage over reality: control over time (p. 202). Every scientific invention takes us closer to the ideal of "total cinema"--from the addition of sound and color to film, to the creation of three-dimensional interactive virtual realities. But the ideal has not yet been achieved: cinema has not yet been invented. A gap still remains between the asymptote and the curve, representation and reality, the image and its model.

So far, so good. The math majors have had an opportunity to clarify for the English majors the meaning of "asymptote," and our speculations on the utopic and dystopic implications of foreclosing on the distinction between reality and representation have fired our imaginations. We dive into Bazin's essay on the ontology of the image (1945), only to be stopped short by the following startling assertion: "No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model" (p. 198). Say what? The image is the model? Doesn't this contradict the idea we've just explicated about there being a gap between image and model, between image and reality, that has not yet been bridged in the service of achieving total cinema? If students are to become converts to Bazin's film theory, here is where it happens, for implicit in the dilemma we outline together are the great themes of love and death. Bazin struggled with ill health through his adult life, until his premature death at age 40, of leukemia. One wonders if intimations of mortality were ever far from his mind. Perhaps his experience of illness intensified his love for reality--his love for life itself. In any case, central to his film theory is what he describes variously as a "mummy complex" or "preservation obsession," the desire to rescue reality (and ourselves) from the corruption of time (and death) by capturing and preserving it (and ourselves) in representation. We no longer preserve ourselves in the literal sense--as mummies--but sculpture and painting, at their origins, functioned as "substitute mummies," allowing us to preserve life through representation. With the invention of perspective in the fifteenth century, reality could be represented three-dimensionally, fueling our obsession with likeness or realism. This obsession is not "satisfied" (to the extent that an obsession, which is by definition irrational, can ever be satisfied) until the advent of photography and cinema. For while the painting is always a subjective representation of reality, photographic and cinematic images are objective. By objective, Bazin means objective for us as intending subjects, in the sense of philosophical phenomenology. In phenomenology, we can never know the world apart from how we intend it; we can never know the "thing-in-itself." To the extent that something is objective, this quality has been conferred upon it by us. It is objectivity, subjectively realized. And it is precisely because photographic and cinematic images are objective for us that they are more credible, as representations of reality, than paintings or drawings. Photographic and cinematic images have the "irrational power" to "bear away our faith" (p. 198), to make us believe in them not simply as representations of reality, but as reality itself.

This brings us back to the contradiction in Bazin's writings between, on the one hand, the failure of the asymptote of cinema to ever meet the curve of reality, and, on the other hand, the assertion that the image is the model, is reality. Of course Bazin knows that cinematic representation and reality are and will be forever distinct--the fantasy of The Matrix notwithstanding. He knows that cinematic images are only like reality--analogous to reality--and not reality itself. The analogy he choose--the asymptote--expresses this knowledge. He disavows this knowledge, however, in his assertion that the image is reality. In effect, the contradiction in Bazin's writings can be expressed as one of disbelief versus belief. To paraphrase the classic formulation for disavowal ("I know very well, but even so ..."), Bazin knows very well that the cinema is not reality, but even so ... he is willing to suspend his disbelief in cinema as mere representation, choosing instead to believe it is reality. In a leap of faith, he bridges the gap between the asymptote of cinema and the curve of reality, rescuing both himself and his beloved reality from the corruption of time and certain death. Here, I remind my habitually skeptical students that a leap of faith is central to the experience of the cinema. Giving oneself over to the cinema entails a willingness to believe in the "reality" of the images, despite the evidence of one's senses. The contradiction at the heart of Bazin's film theory simply allegorizes the contradiction at the heart of all film spectatorship: whether to believe in the images, or not, that is the question.

If the writings of Bazin make it possible for my students to rediscover themselves as believers, the writings of Roland Barthes afford me an opportunity to render explicit a notion implicit in my conversations with students thus far: theory is not divorced from feeling and personal experience. Theory is a product of mind and body; to consign it to the realm of abstract thought at the expense of emotion is to undermine its meaningfulness as well as some of the pleasure we might find in it. We can take Eisenstein to task for his logical inconsistencies, but we can also admire how passionate he is about his topic--even if that passion is alien to my students in their consumer coolness. Eisenstein's passion may lead to leaps in logic, but it also sweeps us across those gaps, and therein is one of the pleasures we might find in his film theory: to be caught up, as he is, in a passion for film. Similarly, we can criticize as naive Bazin's willingness to invest belief in the image as reality, but we can also identify with a dying man's leap of faith, especially when we realize that it is essentially no different from our own everyday psychic and affective investments in the cinema. Theory comes alive for my students to the extent that I can locate it in the embodied experience of real human beings and render it a narrative. Narrative is not the only way to organize knowledge, but it can be one of the most effective ways, especially when it comes to reaching students who may be encountering these ideas for the first time. Thus, my students encounter the differences in Eisenstein's and Kuleshov's theories of montage as a melodramatic face-off between a student and his teacher, and Bazin's argument about the ontology of the image as a love story that ends tragically, but not without hope. In Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, my students encounter a sequel to Bazin's love story, and an example of theory that is explicitly personal and emotional.

The object of Barthes' theoretical inquiry is the photochemical image. He remarks that when he looks at a photograph, he sees the referent, "the desired object, the beloved body" (p. 7) rather than the photograph itself. How is he to locate the essence or "noeme" of this invisible medium? His first step is to reject the typical modes of classification organizing photographic knowledge. In the context of his ontological inquiry, it matters little whether a photograph is taken by a professional or amateur or whether it is a landscape or portrait--these categories are external to the object itself Critical discourses such as sociology, semiotics, and psychoanalysis also prove unsatisfactory: too reductive, he concludes. Instead, like Bazin, he chooses the path of phenomenology, but a "vague, casual, even cynical phenomenology" (p. 20) that allows for an overtly emotional rather than strictly logical apprehension of phenomena. "Instead of following the path of a formal ontology (of a Logic)," Barthes writes, "I stopped, keeping with me, like a treasure, my desire or my grief; the anticipated essence of the Photograph could not, in my mind, be separated from the 'pathos' of which, from the first glance, it consists" (p. 21). Selecting a few favorite photographs, the ones he is sure "exist" for him emotionally, he opts to make himself--his desire, his grief at the recent death of his beloved mother--the starting point for his investigation.

He begins by delineating the possibilities available to him as an embodied and intending participant in the practice of photography: he can take photographs, he can be photographed, and he can look at photographs. In each of these cases, he cannot shake the feeling that photography is a medium haunted by death, the image a trace of the passed away, silent and immobile. Having not engaged in photography himself ("too impatient"), he has the least to say about the desire of the photographer, although it is apparent to him that the photographer must struggle to "keep the photograph from becoming Death" (p. 14). Despite the photographer's contortions to produce lifelike effects, when Barthes himself poses for the lens, he claims to experience a "micro-version of death" in the transition from living subject to photographed object (p. 14). Furthermore, as the spectator of his own image, he sees that he has become, most disturbingly, "Death in person" (p. 14).

Rather than surrender to these morbid initial impressions, he resolves to follow the dictates of his desire, to seek out images that resist death. These images, he discovers, are characterized by a duality, the co-presence of two elements: the studium and the punctum. The studium is the network of cultural habits and knowledges that prompts our polite, general interest in the image: it is "of the order of liking, not of loving" (p. 27). Journalistic photographs often engage our interest in various ways--informing, surprising, even shocking us--but they are for the most part "unary" images, invested with no more than our studium. Occasionally, however, in the "habitually unary space" of the public photograph, the studium is "traversed, lashed, striped by a detail which attracts or distresses" us--the puncture (p. 40). In order to clarify what he means by the punctum, Barthes must let us in on his private and unconscious obsessions. The straps on a woman's shoes, a boy's bad teeth, a girl's bandaged finger: these are the partial features that linger in his fetishistic imagination after examining a series of photographs. The presence of the punctum does not depend on the skill of the photographer. Neither is it always possible to name why a particular detail is disturbing. Sometimes, the source of the disturbance is unlocatable: a photograph "holds him," but he "cannot say why" (p. 51). Ultimately, the punctum is the detail in the image that engages his unconscious desire and "animates" him, but also the desire that he, in turn, invests in that image, animating it. To the extent that a photograph has a punctum, it has been endowed (by us) with the power of cinema to expand metonymically into the space off-frame, releasing everything in-frame (and us) from absolute death.

Whereas Barthes gains insight into the workings of his desire by examining public images, he turns to his personal collection of family photographs in the second half of Camera Lucida in order to locate the universal, "that thing which is seen by anyone looking at a photograph" (p. 60). He begins by searching backward in time (in yet another retreat from death) for the image of his mother that coincides with her being and his grief at her recent death. He finds it in the famous (but unseen) Winter Garden photograph. This image of his mother as a five-year-old is the Ariadne's thread leading him to the noeme of photography. What he discovers at the center of the labyrinth is this: the photograph is a certificate of presence. More than any other system of representation, the photograph testifies to the fact that someone or something has actually existed. The painter can conjure up an image without reference to a model, but the referent in photography is necessary. The stubbornness with which the referent adheres to the surface of the image gives the photograph its astonishing evidential force. In certain images, however, the recognition of photography's power of authentication is compounded with a secondary realization: the referent belongs to the past. What is seen in the image "has been here, and yet immediately separated; it has been absolutely, irrefutably present, and yet already deferred" (p. 77). The noeme of photography is therefore not only the expression of a reality, there-it-is, but the superimposition of reality with the past, that-has-been. The realization of the "that-has-been" is the "catastrophe" of every photograph, but we tend to experience it with indifference. The Winter Garden photograph rouses Barthes from indifference; out of his embodied experience of love and grief, he arrives at a theory of the photographic image.

Although my students' response to Camera Lucida varies--one student, outraged by the emotionalism of the prose, is dismissive of it; another, identifying with it, discreetly wells up in tears--our discussions of the book allow me to drive home an important point: theory is the product of embodied experience. It entails the engagement of the mind as well as the body, logic as well as emotion. Through it, we seek answers to questions that actually matter to us. Is cinema a language like other languages (semiotics)? Can film, collectively produced, express the worldview of an individual (authorship)? Do genre films function ritualistically to express our collective desires, or are they structures through which Hollywood lures us into taking up its own ideological positions (genre theory)? Which films transmit ideology transparently, and which intercept it and make it visible (ideology)? How do the interlocking shots in film not only "speak" the film (semiotics again), but also us, as spectators (suture theory)? Is cinema rooted in unconscious processes such as mirror identification, voyeurism, and fetishism (psychoanalysis)? How, and why, are men and women represented differently in the cinema (gaze theory)? What are the historical roadblocks to theorizing the erotic objectification of the male body, and to conceptualizing the female spectator (gaze theory)? What reception practices do spectators use in relation to cinematic representations they perceive as racist (spectatorship and race)? How can fandom or queerness be understood as critical practices or modes of reception (cultural studies, queer theory)? And finally, how does current digital theory challenge the "critical distance" of traditional academic theory (digital theory)? There are compelling narratives to be constructed out of the attempts of various theorists to answer these questions. My task is to tell the story of film theory, and to engage my students in the telling of it, for it will ultimately be up to them to narrate the episodes of the future.

References

Andrew, D. (2000, May). The "three ages" of cinema studies and the age to come. PMLA, 115 (3), 341-51.

Barthes, R. (1981). Camera lucida: Reflections on photography. New York: Hill and Wang.

Bazin, A. (1945). The ontology of the photographic image. In L. Brandy and M. Cohen (Eds.), Film theory and criticism: Introductory readings (195-199). New York: Oxford.

Bazin, A (1946). The myth of total cinema. In L. Braudy and M. Cohen (Eds.), Film theory and criticism: Introductory readings (199-203). New York: Oxford.

Bordwell, D. & Carroll N. (1996). Post theory: Reconstructing film studies. Madison: Wisconsin.

Eisenstein, S. (1929). Beyond the shot [The cinematographic principle and the ideogram]. In L. Brandy and M. Cohen (Eds.), Film theory and criticism: Introductory readings (15-25). New York: Oxford.

Holland, N. N. (1988). Reading and identity: A psychoanalytic revolution. In K. M. Newton, Twentieth-century literary theory: A reader (204-209). New York: St. Martin's.

Rodowick, D. N. (2001, October). Dr. strange media; Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love film theory. PMLA, 116 (5), 1396-1404.

Stam, R. & Shohat, E. H. (2000). Film theory and spectatorship in the age of the posts. In C. Gledhill and L. Williams (Eds.), Reinventing film studies (381-401). New York: Oxford.

Carol Donelan, Carleton College, MN

Donelan is an Assistant Professor in the Media Studies Program, where she teaches courses on film, television, and new media.