Showing papers in "Journal of Cinema and Media Studies in 1985"

The Politics of Film Canons

Abstract: Canon formation in film, as in any other area, can be located in a variety of projects. In film criticism, whether popular or academic, some films will be chosen for extensive discussion and analysis; others will be ignored. In theoretical writing, arguments are buttressed by films cited as examples of points. In histories, films are marked as worth mentioning for one reason or another (e.g., influence, aesthetic significance, typicality). This occurs not only for historiographical reasons (every causal explanation invariably privileges particular linkages or conjunctions), but for practical reasons as well: a history including every film would be trapped by the Tristam Shandy contradiction of constantly losing ground to the increasing number of films added daily to the list of those to be covered.' Even filmmakers are involved in canon formation. Those films chosen to be reworked, alluded to, satirized, become privileged points of reference, pulled out from the rest of cinema's predecessors.2 As ideal fathers, these select films are given homage or rebelled against. That canons exist in film studies and that canon formation is involved with the political sphere is evident.3 Much less evident is the shifting politics, past and present, of the factors contributing to canon formation. In attempting to identify and characterize some of these factors, as well as the limitations they impose on our understanding of cinema, I will consider which films our critics, theorists, historians, and filmmakers have chosen for study and why certain shifts have occurred in our canon even over the short period of cinema's existence-now only ninety years. In addition, I will be suggesting that escape from canon formation will be difficult to achieve. Competition in academics and the film industry reinforces canons and canon-making. However, my project is not to encourage a stance of relativity or political pluralism upon recognizing that all canonical projects are tied into a political activity but rather to make those politics self-evident, to find the political centers of particular enterprises. For even in revising and decentering dominant canons, new centers appear. My hope is to encourage as knowledgeable, humane, and progressive a choice as possible among the various politics.4

Tabu: The Making of a Film

Abstract: The making of Tabu stands as a major point in the careers of both Robert J. Flaherty and F. W. Murnau. For Flaherty, it was to be the last effort to work on a film distributed by a major American company, and the end of an attempt to make films for commercial U.S. release that lasted, sporadically, for nine years. For Murnau, who died shortly before the film's 1931 release, Tabu was to mark the termination and possibly, as Lotte Eisner claimed, the culmination of his career.

Rossellini and Cinematic Realism

Abstract: When Roberto Rossellini's early films Open City and Paisan first appeared in 1945 and 1946, respectively, critics, whatever else they liked or disliked, were nearly unanimous in praising their intense realism. Writing in The Nation, James Agee reported being so overwhelmed by Open City that he was incapable of reviewing it: "I will probably be unable to report on the film in detail for the next three or four weeks."2 Even forty years later, there is something one wants to call "realistic" about these films. I would like to begin here and consider more closely what we mean when we use this word to describe Rossellini's films. In the process, I want to tease out conflicting elements in these films, elements that work against their prevailing realism and thus call the presumed uniformity of the texts into question, in effect by destabilizing them. My interests center on how the pre-existing real, as distinct from the pro-filmic of a studio set, is incorporated into the texture of the realistic fiction, and the problems that arise from this process. It will be my contention that in these films it is the real (always already a representation, of course) which at first enhances our sense of the realism of a given film, but which can also call this realism into question, making the film text self-reflexive, continually threatening to reveal it as the second-level representation it always is. I also want to consider two other overtly stylized films Rossellini made during this period, Una voce umana (A Human Voice, 1948) and La macchina ammazzacattivi (The Machine to Kill Bad People, begun 1948, released in 1951), which, because they cannot be "tamed"-squeezed into the Procrustean bed of realism (largely derived, ironically, from Hollywood models) -have always been considered failures. In general, then, I want to make a provisional, "decentered" case for an expressionist Rossellini, both in terms of whole films which, not accidentally, are rarely seen in this country or even in Italy, and in terms of

The Studios Move into Prime Time: Hollywood and the Television Industry in the 1950s

Abstract: Contemporary observers and historians of both the motion-picture industry and the network television industry portray the decade of the 1950s as a period of traumatic change. In traditional film histories, the period represents the site of convergent crises: the divorcement of the major studios from their theaters, the loss of a major part of the film audience, the political blacklist. In such accounts, the rise of network television becomes another unwelcome external intrusion. No longer able to ignore television, the studios belatedly recognize the electronic market and leap into prime-time programming in 1955, simultaneously selling off their feature libraries to the hungry new medium.

Patrice Petro and Carol Flinn on Feminist Film Theory

Abstract: We write this in the hope of stimulating further debate over Stella Dallas and female spectatorship, and to respond in particular to E. Ann Kaplan's recent reply to Linda Williams's essay, "Something Else Besides a Mother: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama" (Cinema Journal 24, no. 1 [Fall 1984]). We believe both Kaplan's and Williams's essays provide useful insights into questions of female spectatorship. Nevertheless, we feel that Williams's essay, with its emphasis upon maternal melodrama and multiple identification, opens up a range of possibilities for feminist film theory that Kaplan's essay, with its stress upon a "monolithic position for the female spectator," tends to close down. To be sure, there are points of agreement between Williams and Kaplan: both recognize, for instance, that the female spectator of Stella Dallas partially identifies with Stella. Kaplan nevertheless believes that this female spectator "cannot simply identify differently than the male spectator in relation to the camera's look." She places considerable emphasis upon the film's closing moments, when Stella is standing forlorn in the rain passively watching as her daughter enters a patriarchal, upper-class marriage. And just as this routine Oedipalization of the daughter concludes the narrative, Kaplan asserts that Stella--and, by extension, the female spectator-must accept the loss demanded of woman by patriarchy. She writes: "Unless we hold back from the film at that moment and deliberately avoid looking at the screen, or slow down the projector, or disrupt the process in some other way, I don't see how we can refuse participating in the patriarchal visual economy for those cinematic moments." There is a contradiction in Kaplan's argument: on the one hand, she implies that socially constructed readers actively produce textual meanings when she questions whether "films themselves do the work" in exposing woman's ambivalent relationship to cinematic representation. On the other hand, she suggests that film texts dictate their own meanings when she claims that "Stella Dallas... ultimately... insist[s] on patriarchal norms." Kaplan adheres more to the latter view when she argues that the female spectator of Stella Dallas cannot resist being "'seduced' by the film's mechanisms." Such a view of how meanings are produced causes particular problems when Kaplan considers the historical audience for Stella Dallas. Kaplan writes that the 1937 female viewer did not have the option of critically distancing herself from the film, compelled as she "must" have been to over-identify with Stella's sense of loss and suffering. Instead

The Evolution of Orson Welles's "Touch of Evil" from Novel to Film

Abstract: The evolution of Touch of Evil from novel to film provides us with rich material for an inquiry into the making of an Orson Welles film. The movie is a film noir classic. Along with The Magnificent Ambersons and perhaps Lady from Shanghai, it is one of Welles's most intriguing films after his universally acknowledged masterpiece Citizen Kane. It is also, to some extent, a typical film for Welles-if any Welles film can be called typical-for it involves the adaptation of story material supplied by others. No controversy over "authorship" surrounds Touch of Evil, however, as is the case with Citizen Kane. No one doubts that Welles is the author of Touch of Evil in some meaningful sense of the word, despite the fact that the film is derived from a novel written by two other men and despite the fact it passed through the hands of a scriptwriter other than Welles before it reached him. It is tacitly assumed that Welles reshaped and deepened the material he inherited to give it more resonance or to suit his own interests. Yet precisely how this happened has not been adequately explained. One prominent Welles critic, Joseph McBride, has even reported erroneously that Welles never read the original novel,' and another critic, James Naremore, perhaps the ablest writer on Touch of Evil to date, has stated that the screenplay by the other scriptwriter is "not available for study."2 Primary documents, however, are available from various sources which allow us to examine the evolution of the work through its major stages, and to clarify the contributions by each of the parties involved. Such a project should reveal more precisely the extent of Welles's indebtedness to his previous sources and the ways in which he reshaped that material to make it his

On the Threshold of French Film Theory and Criticism, 1915-1919

Abstract: This essay is conceived as an archeological project whose site encompasses some of the earliest French writing on the cinema.' In the following pages, I mean to excavate the period of 1915 to 1919 and resurrect the significant texts that intersected with-and sought to either determine or respond to-the historical development of the cinema in France. Although it covers a good number of the same texts, this essay differs substantially from Stuart Liebman's "French Film Theory, 1910-1921," Quarterly Review of Film Studies (Winter, 1983). There Liebman is concerned with postulating an "ur-theory," a set of shared assumptions, which underlie most of the writing of the period.2 Here, by contrast, I wish to lay bare the multiplicity of that writing, to open up a space for the performance of voices, both recognized and unrecognized-e.g., Louis Delluc and Emile Vuillermoz-banded together or separate, all of them competing for dominance. And, I hope to tease out the network or tissue of discursive and non-discursive practices in French society (economic, political, technological, educational, aesthetic) out of which a "film theory and criticism" emerged and within which it remained partially enmeshed; and, to put in play what became, during this period, a quasi-autonomous discourse-namely, French film theory and criticism-a discourse with its own subject, loosely defined methodologies, and not always coherent manner of articulation. The result should be both the writing of history and the unearthing of an archive for further study and re-writing.

The Subject of "The Conversation"

Abstract: I think that I know how to look, if it's something I know, and also that every looking oozes with mendacity,... Julio Cortazar, "Blow Up"' I'm going to present here a variety of overlapping operations, and in each I will be concerned with questions of boundary. Initially, on the level of the textual, I will be reading Francis Coppola's The Conversation as one of a series of early 1970s crime movies which, in presenting their protagonists with "unreadable" mysteries which defy solution, seem to out-noir the classic film noir. Such a reading runs quickly into difficulty, however, because The Conversation cannot be resolved by its audience any more than the mystery which confronts its protagonist can be solved within the diegesis. Unlike Chinatown or The Parallax View, in which the failure of the hero to figure out his mystery is recuperated in the audience's successful comprehension of the "plot" (in both senses of the term), there is no final ironic resolution to aid the spectators as they put their coats on and head up the aisle. For this reason the film has been read variously as nihilistic, "arty," or failed. Without trying to assign it to any of these categories, I talk about the film on another level of possible appreciation-the intertextual. The open-endedness of its diegetic situation can be understood (i.e., resolved or closed) in terms of the way the movie seems to refer outside itself to a variety of films against which it sets itself up to be read. Its filial relationship to Hesse's Steppenwolf, to Antonioni's Blow Up and Cortizar's story of the same name, and its parental relationship to De Palma's Blow Out, for example, provide ways of talking about the work which free us from having to determine whether the film "makes sense." This question of the text's referral outside itself parallels a third possible level of intervention, which concerns the functioning of the text in the regime of the spectatorial. This analysis involves a discussion of the film's failure to mean in the context of its relatively idiosyncratic suturing operation. Where the classic cinema involves the spectator in the text by means of a continual appropriation of her or his look by the characters on the screen, The Conversation undercuts this involvement by establishing untraditional relationships between images and sounds. The opacity of the plot is thus paralleled-and perhaps caused byan unusual demand system made upon the spectator-auditor. This problem further involves a discussion of the way in which the subject is created by the

Ruminations of an Ex-Cinematologist

Abstract: What first occurred to me as I began thinking about the origins and development of cinema studies in this country was that I was on some sort of an archeological dig. When I realized that rather than the digger I am one of the ancient objects being unearthed, I abandoned that conceit. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I could see myself as a sailor on the stern of a ship, looking back at its wake. But, as ships move, wakes disappear, from sight and memory. (Also, the noun wake has another meaning that distracted me.) Leaving these poetic flights, I settled in the familiar educational valleys of remembered articles and dissertations, discussions and anecdotes that do remain from years of observing the teaching of film. Personal recollections, then, are the primary source for my ruminations.

Film Study and Filmmakers

Abstract: In the world of film (which I take to include structured audio-visual images, fixed by any technology), modes of production, distribution, and exhibition are changing rapidly, and continued technological and market developments promise more of the same. Within the past year or two, films made far from traditional production centers, inexpensive films, non-linear films, and films directed by those who only a few years ago would have been doing 16mm documentaries, have been achieving mainstream distribution. Even as the network market share declines, broadcast groups such as Taft, Gannett, Post-Newsweek, and Metromedia join with regional children's theaters, contract with independent filmmakers, and otherwise use emerging talent to generate ambitious programming for barter and syndication. HBO, Showtime, and The Disney Channel are likewise commissioning new products. Videocassettes are becoming a primary (rather than merely a supplementary) market for theatrical movies and other film products, making it much easier for members of the creative community to gain relatively direct access to audiences, with special-interest projects. At the same time, accomplished craftspeople who look to traditional patterns for future employment see their skills becoming less important, even irrelevant, in a period of rapid technological shift from film to videotape. At the Directors Guild, several hundred members have enrolled in our own film school, devoted to retraining and broadening working professionals for the evolving marketplace. In this volatile period, the best preparation film educators can offer students is the training to adjust to a future which may look very little like the past. I think this should be anchored in an interdisciplinary liberal arts approach to western culture, using film and its components as the central frame of reference.

Broader Alliances: Focusing the Field

Abstract: The importance of addressing non-commercial film and television rests on the prevailing economic and political configuration of the moving-image arts in the United States. They are expensive, their accessibility is privately controlled, they are largely monopolistic, and the communication exchange between the owner-producers and the public market is unilateral since discourse production flows in only one direction. The latter is a normal capitalist market relationship, but the reason for concern here is that film and video have become like reading and writing in their importance to the exchange of information. If American democracy is founded on the necessity of universal education and literacy, then access to film and video production and knowledge have become a social imperative.'

Janet Staiger Replies to Dudley Andrew and Gerald Mast

Abstract: If there is any meeting ground between "Romantic" auteur critics (I'll accept the label, for now-I only have 1000 words) and the "scholastic" ideological critics (I can add an adjective too), perhaps it is in an underlying sensitivity of the Staiger essay: that neither of these positions can be adopted without consciousness of the difficulties and limitations of doing so. I'm not sure if that critical self-consciousness is enough to produce either useful film criticism or progressive social consequences, but it seems to be about all that many of us share-the "place" in the middle where we can meet to discuss these problems. If there is no practical alternative to pluralism except a "party line," some of us understandably prefer pluralism.

Film as a Museum Object

Abstract: The films that interest us as cinema scholars are primarily museum objects rather than typical, lively expressions of popular or fine art. I believe that many scholars in our field fail to take this into account and that this failure to recognize what for us is film's primary mode of appearance distorts the curricula, pedagogy, and the initial and final aims of university departments where cinema studies try to flourish. When I first passed these ideas along to some colleagues a few months ago, they were supportive but perplexed. For example, one film archivist suggested, "It is too early to relegate the movie-going experience to a museum exhibit." Another colleague accepted the idea that there is a museumlike component to the films we use in our scholarship but took issue with my emphasis on the primacy of the "museum object" idea by pointing out that to our students, "Laurel and Hardy are contemporary with Bonnie and Clyde as lively arts." Yet another, more technologically oriented colleague, responded that if I was thinking of silver image film being replaced by electronic imaging, that was much too far off to worry about, that 86 percent of our moving images are still film originated and edited, there are 19,000 commercial screens in our country now with more on the way, and the industry is a 3.8 billion dollar one and cannot even keep up with the current demand for products. In effect, things have never been so good, so why think of a museum?

From Photoplays to Texts: Film Theory, Film Studies, and the Future.

Abstract: When Vachel Lindsay enthusiastically began to theorize about the nature and possibilities of the cinema, he probably never imagined that "photoplays" would become available in every living room, bedroom, and kitchen, in supermarkets, truck rental outfits, candy stores, and even on screens as small as watch crystals. But in 1915, the ideosyncratic Lindsay had already identified the photoplays of pioneers like D. W. Griffith as allies in his life-long battle for cultural democratization. Lindsay believed that photoplays would quickly become instrumental in our social and cultural development: they would spread the gospel of Beauty, generate national artistic standards, and thus help to unify our very heterogeneous nation. The photoplay itself seemed to him to fulfill the goals of his own artistic activity. He believed that the kind of bardic communication he had tried to accomplish by disseminating his poetry from door to door could be instantaneously achieved by the simultaneous screenings of films across America. Lindsay was a visionary pioneer of film studies, though, as even his staunchest supporters admit, he was also undoubtedly a fool. Nevertheless, Lindsay's rudimentary work in film theory and his reasons for undertaking this work highlight the kind of inquiry I would like to pursue in this paper. What Lindsay's interest in "photoplays" underscores for me are the motivations behind the theoretical study of film. Why have individuals devoted substantial time and effort to produce and study film theory? What can we hope to gain from film theory now? What should we hope to gain from it in the future? In other words, what is the point of film theoretical discourses?' I hope to present a brief historical survey of the motivational underbelly of "classical" film theory in order to show that although film theory has been studied in strikingly diverse ways, the motivations underlying these studies have been strikingly similar. And "film studies" can benefit from the appreciation and reaffirmation of these motivations, for they provide the field with one of its most singular characteristics. I should note that I am concerned with neither the objects nor the methods of film theory in this presentation. Theoretical explorations of the status of the object of film theory and of the methods utilized to describe and explain that object are terribly important. (Is Gone With the Wind the same