Exams

Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens by Caetlin Benson-Allott

by

David Cronenberg’s Videodrome

Benson-Allott, Caetlin. 2013. Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Caetlin Benson-Allott writes persuasively that the old theories of film spectatorship should now be adjusted based on the fact that the cinematic experience is no longer the most dominant form of filmic consumption. She argues that home video now holds the position of being the primary way one sees films (and that’s certainly true in the very present moment of Summer 2020, thanks to the dangers of COVID-19). She argues that because much of spectatorship theory is based on the cinematic apparatus as a structuring metaphor, the fact that most people now watch movies at home should trigger a revision of spectatorship based on the aspects of home video as the structuring metaphor. She continues to claim that the shift to home video has changed the way filmmakers compose their films and address their audiences, which covers everything from the prevalence of over-the-shoulder shots (that, she claims, provides a presence within the film that excuses the outside attention grabbers like a partner walking in front of the tv or other such distractions) to color changes (which, she argues comes with other shifts in the political nature of the films that have changed).

Similar to Connor‘s claims that films are always about their own making, Benson-Allott uses horror films, which are always about cultural anxieties, to show how many films within that genre are places where filmmakers worked through the anxieties related to the shift to home video viewership. This comes in the form of 5 close-reading-based chapters, which follow a general historical/temporal path. The first, a series of readings of George Romero’s Dead series sees how one filmmaker shifted storytelling and filmmaking techniques in response to changes in distribution models. Then Benson-Allott reads Videodrome and The Ring for their focus on the VHS as a space for thinking through anxieties of cultural imperialism and reproduction/piracy, with the former coming at the start of the home video phenomenon and Canada’s fears of US media imperialism and the latter coming at the inflection point between VHS and DVD, a supposedly more secure home video format which allowed the filmmakers to truly demonize the easy reproducibility inherent in VHS. Then Benson-Allott looks at the Grindhouse film(s) and how they create a simulacrum of what she calls “cinematicity” or the “unique process and experience of theatrical exhibition” as a singular cinema object even as they also prepare for their eventual permanent home on separate home video discs, a fate which would render that simulacrum even more visible and pointed in an effort to bring attention to the falseness of the cinematic “truth” (133). Benson-Allott wraps up her close readings with a chapter on what she calls “faux footage” horror films, from The Blair Witch Project to Cloverfield, each of which, she claims, calls attention to the dangers of peer-to-peer file sharing as a place where unverifiable footage (files) could lead to hauntings and other dangerous outcomes. 

Benson-Allott closes her book in a brief but dense conclusion, thinking through the supposed “freedom” that home viewers feel in relation to the films they watch. She claims that the freedoms associated with home viewership are still largely structured and controlled. In other words, you get some limited temporal control over the film you watch (you can choose when to start it, and to pause it for a moment or overnight if necessary, and you can of course rewind and fastforward and jump around) but that the temporal freedom is not total in that you are not able to choose different orders or takes or events to happen. The movie is still the movie. She also claims that things like DVD menus and the like are used to put your viewership of the film in a particular context, a certain limited perspective on the film. In other words, though the home video spectator is more empowered than the cinema spectator, who is traditionally seen as subjecting themselves before a film, that power is still quite limited and used to turn the spectator into a subject, just one of a different variety.

Benson-Allott’s readings and claims are largely persuasive, as she calls attention to a platform that has largely been either ignored or only marginally considered. I hope that my own work in the future can further extend some of the claims she makes here into the streaming age.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Benson-Allott’s major task is to decentralize spectator theory put forwards by apparatus theorists like Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, and company. She does so not by following other critiques of that theory on the grounds of its totalizing vision of the cinematic apparatus from which nobody can escape but by historicizing it as once being somewhat explanatory in its concept of the way films position their spectators but that movies now position their spectators differently because those spectators are most likely to be spectating at home. In the process of this project, she also responds to D. N. Rodowick’s musings on the “end of cinema” to claim that movies aren’t dying, just changing. She uses Vivian Sobchack’s phenomenology to talk about the way VHS and bodies interact in Videodrome, Barbara Creed’s concept of the monstrous feminine to write about the abject horror of the VHS tape as womb, and Derrida’s simulacrum to think about what it means for something to have cinematicity. Each of these theorists are given their due and woven into the larger work Benson-Allott is doing here.

As is becoming a refrain here, though, Benson-Allott’s book has its limitations in that it doesn’t quite come up to the present anymore. What does the proliferation of streaming channels, especially now that companies are consolidating many of their back catalogues under their own service mean for what she lays out here? In many ways her text is easily extensible to the present moment, which marks it as a very valuable text indeed. But it is limited in that she is necessarily unable to address the things that have come to be after the time of her writing.

Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Benson-Allott takes the concept of spectator theory and apparatus theory under a microscope using horror films for close readings in an effort to understand how spectatorship changes when one is sitting on their couch watching a movie on their tv instead of in a movie theater. Each close reading has several subsections, which usually revolve around explaining one aspect of the film-in-question’s nature, from the filmic techniques to the political and technological context, including often one major relevant film theorist as noted above.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Benson-Allott gets most of her rhetorical power from the strength of her close-readings and the context she provides in each chapter for those close readings. She adds on to spectator theory in a valuable and important way, critiquing it for being too narrowly focused and not adapting to the realities of spectatorship over time. In tracking how home video spectatorship was thought about through the films themselves, Benson-Allott is able to provide examples of how this work can be done beyond what she covers in her book as well, opening the door for further work done in her model after the fact. In that way, Benson-Allott provides a great example of scholarship, one to emulate.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

This one really opened some doors for me. For one, it triggered a breakthrough in my conception of the legacyquel as designed for home viewership on platforms like Disney+ (which houses all of the Star Wars films and much of the ancillary material) and HBO MAX (which houses many of the DC universe films). I’m excited to work through the details and consequences of this new area and way of thinking for my project.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

home video (as an expansive term encompassing basically any technology/platform that allows movies to be watched outside of a theater), spectatorship, apparatus, formats, spectator, simulacrum, cinematicity, postcinematic, control, power, film subject, video subject, phenomenology, abject

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

This study takes the polemical position that video distribution changed and is changing spectatorship and that film and new media theorists must attend to these changes. We must attend to the ways video platforms affect the motion picture experience if we want to continue to comment on the ideological significance of motion pictures for contemporary culture, politics, and subjectivity. (2)

Like movies about video and movies made possible by video (such as the aforementioned 1980s horror cycle or the concomitant increase in children’s features, or “kid vid”), movies made in periods of technological change offer a deep well of material for new theories of motion picture spectatorship in an age of multiplatform distribution. The producers and artists working within the US and Canadian entertainment industries know that most viewers approach their products through one video format or another; only “film studies” continues to insist on the primacy of the cinematic experience, and we do so in spite of our own video-enabled research and pedagogy. (6-7)

[…] I examine how innovations in motion picture exhibition have changed the way filmmakers imagine and address the spectator. What one can show influences what one can say, so the effect of video platforms on filmmaking matters not only because they influence production (as Janet Wasko, Frederick Wasser, and David Bordwell have shown) but also because they shape the transmission of ideas. By examining how the movies’ production design, cinematography, and editing anticipate video distribution, we begin to recognize new patterns and how they interpellate the spectator. By reading these formal innovations in conversation with the narratives they convey, we can see how filmmakers negotiate story, platform, and form to achieve a particular response and a viewer. (26)

Thus I argue (contra Neale and Bordwell) that the allegedly disposable shoulder represents not a concession to but a thematization of video exhibition, specifically of the other video viewers whose bodily presence remains irritatingly visible during televisual exhibition and so must be psychically repressed from one’s movie experience. This need does not exist in the same way at the cinema, where silhouettes of heads tend to block the bottom of the screen instead. Hence Romero’s “over-the-disposable-shoulder shot” – which was nowhere near as prevalent in Day of the Dead and non-existent in Dawn of the Dead and Night of the Living Dead – must be recognized as a new video convention that reflects the current mode of consumption. Indeed, it could even be read as creating a spectatorial continuum between the video viewer and the diegetic look that further involves the spectator in the narrative. (56)

Unlike remakes, reboots rarely follow the narratives of their antecedents and typically create new mythologies for the old horrors, mythologies that can then produce a new line of sequels. In some cases such reinventions can lead to innovations in the horror genre – such as the attention to feminine class markers in the new Texas Chain Saw Massacre – but most reboots merely cash in on name recognition. (59-60)

Videodrome (1983) was among the first narrative representations of home video and develops preexisting anxieties about the technology’s capacity for surveillance, psychic violence, and espionage. As early as 1977, movies like Demon Seed began to suggest that viewers beware lest their new consumer electronics consume their lives and identities. Yet few of the movies about video address the machines of exhibition themselves, much less our embodied encounters with them. Cronenberg’s Videodrome and Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002) are unique in their willingness to focus on videocassettes as material objects we manipulate – and are manipulated by. These two movies bookend the videotape’s reign as the dominant motion picture platform, and both use cassettes as metaphors for larger media takeovers (specifically the Americanization of Canadian media and the threat of digital piracy). They do not bear the traces of video distribution in the same ways that Romero’s later zombie movies do, but they do advance the artistic tradition of self-reflexive filmmaking by turning the camera on the VCR and the cultural battles it catalyzed. Through unsettling narrative and formal techniques they ask how home video reconstructs the film spectator and in whose interests these changes occur. (70)

As this chapter will show, Videodrome uses the story of Max Renn’s involvement with Videodrome to contend that video spectatorship forces the viewer to adapt physically to suit a new technological environment. It will then explore how the movie imbricates Max’s story in a series of explicit references to Canadian media history and uses these connections to ground its reading of consumer electronics in a surreal critique of the United States’ technocultural imperialism. After outlining this political intervention, I will argue that Videodrome offers its spectator a phenomenology of new media through a radically destabilizing form of first-person filmmaking. (71-2)

Grindhouse invokes cinematic abjection to emphasize the historical contingency of spectatorship. Its simulacrum of suboptimal viewing conditions thus brings the spectator’s attention to the here-and-now-ness of spectatorship and utopian fantasies about the cinema. For inasmuch as the movie depicts a cinematic utopia – and its idealized theatrical nonplace that never was – it drags the spectator into this fantasy as well, since she is also part of the motion picture apparatus. Indeed, the motion picture apparatus and the simulacrum interpellate the spectator similarly. (146)

By emphasizing the thrills of illicit viewing but associating it with inevitable death, [faux footage] movies make pirate spectatorship horrifying. Taken on their own, these movies can seem innocuous, far-fetched, even silly, but read within their industrial context, including the MPAA’s war on piracy, they offer intimations about the dire consequences of illicit spectatorship that may scare viewers away from the pleasures of piracy. Like Videodrome and The Ring, they promise death to pirates, yet they do so by uniting tropes from horror films, reality television, and MPAA public service announcements. Indeed, they teach the spectator not to go searching for underground videos, because what she finds could be deadly. (168)

Whereas cinema and television immerse the spectator in the illusion of voyeurism or indulge her in narcissistic fantasies of panoptical vision, the prerecorded video apparatus replaces such powers with temporal control. That is, all video playback technologies give their subjects (limited) temporal control over the motion picture and sustain the subjects fantasy of coherence and autonomy through an illusion of temporal mastery. (204)

Prerecorded video compromises some of those [cinematic spectatorial] pleasures by making the apparatus visible to the spectator and foregrounding her participation in it. Indeed, it can be rather difficult to prostrate oneself to a thirty-inch screen when other people, noises, or technologies keep interrupting. The prerecorded video apparatus compensates for these losses by allowing the viewer to fantasize that she is in possession of the text instead of being possessed by it. Not only can the spectator physically possess her video tape or disk, but she may experience similar feelings of possession regarding her digital files. […] Through possession, prerecorded video gives its spectator a powerful illusion that she can control time and marshal outside events to suit her schedule. (206-7)

In foregrounding pre-recorded video as an apparatus, I am suggesting that the video subject internalizes the prerecorded video interface much as she does the remoteness of the cinematic projector or the flow of various television channels. More than any individual technology, the persistence of the basic functions of video playback has come to unify and define the spectator’s experience of video. The video spectator possesses temporal control over a movie, but that is not the same as the power of self-determination, the power to imagine what it means to be a video subject. (207)

Thanks to prerecorded video, it now seems that we can watch what we want when we want, but who we understand ourselves to be in that moment remains a function of the motion picture apparatus, because spectatorship is always a power play. (208)

Fans: The Mirror of Consumption by Carl Sandvoss

by

J.J. Abram’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Sandvoss, Carl. 2005. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Malden, MA: Polity Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Carl Sandvoss sets out to first recap many of the ways that fandom has been theorized before his writing in the early 2000s before offering his own theory on how fans interact with the texts they’ve chosen to be fans of. Specifically, he refutes Fiske’s assertion that fandom is a place of inherent resistance to the desires and values of the “power bloc” Instead, he conceives of fandom through a four-step process which he uses to develop his idea that fandom is inherently self-reflective and therefore not inherently partisan or emancipatory, as fans are as likely to use their fandoms to close off revolutionary ideas within a text as they are to embrace them or perform revolutionary acts with their texts.

The first step in Sandvoss’s project is to develop a sense of fandom as a place with properties like that of Heimat, a sense of home with attendant notions of security and warmth but which also implies a hierarchy of those allowed within that Heimat and those who are excluded. While fandoms might give fans a sense of community and togetherness based on that shared adoration of a fan text, it also allows them to discriminate against those who deemed unworthy of belonging for whatever reason.

Sandvoss’ next task to to examine the psychoanalytic nature of fandom, which he mostly congeals into a combined act of projection and introjection which allows fans to see themselves in the text and see elements of the text within their own worldview. In this sense, the text doesn’t have much control over what a fan uses it for, and different fans can have wildly different uses for the same fan text. This is another reason why fandoms aren’t inherently emancipatory.

Developing this idea of intro-and-pro-jection further, Sandvoss borrows from several readings of the Narcissus myth, including Winnicott’s and McLuhan’s, to put forth his own thesis that objects of fandoms are more like mirrors than anything else. Fans see in them what they want to see, and the objects therefore reflect back what a fan puts into them. This is different, he says, from literature, which, according to Jauss, uses its gaps to expand readers’ “horizons of expectations.” In fandom, gaps and blanks are either worked around, ignored, or used for further reflection of the fan’s point of view. This is all possible because objects of fandom, Sandvoss claims, are so polysemic (open to possible readings) that they are in effect “neutrosemic” or open to any reading. Fans also tend to encourage this reflection by rejecting anything within a fan text (say, an episode of a tv show or a spinoff novel) that does not conform to their horizon of expectation. Fan texts and fandoms are then likely to conform to the status quo as fans use them only to confirm what they already believe, which is likely to be well within the boundaries set up by the “power bloc.”

Sandvoss does allow for one area where fandoms can be a force for change, however. It is in the discussion of an object of fandom which will necessarily feature fans with different perspectives (because they are based on the fan’s pre-established beliefs) talking to each other. Here Sandvoss imagines a place where fans might challenge each other’s understanding of the fan text and provide at least some expansion of the horizon of expectations.

Like Fiske before him, Sandvoss again creates a kind of totalizing system of fandoms, this time, however, not based in (again, totalized) class distinctions but instead on the (one more time, totalizing) universality of psychoanalysis. This allows Sandvoss to claim that all fandoms work in this one way, and that differences in identity or positioning matter little to his framework he’s developed. I tend to be skeptical of these kinds of projects, even as I am convinced by much of his argument. In other words, I think this works well as a framework but careful study of individual fandoms (and facets of fandoms based on different identificatory affiliations) should feel open to pushing back on some of the broader claims Sandvoss makes here. I think here of bell hooks’ proposition that black women filmgoers often watch with an oppositional gaze developed through years of being underserved by the white male dominated popular culture. What kind of resistance would this oppositional gaze bring to Sandvoss’s concept of fandoms as self-reflective?

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Sandvoss cites a heck of a lot of people here and builds on much of their work within fandom. He writes about the first, second, and third waves of fan studies and positions his work as building upon all of them. His is a theory deeply enmeshed in dozens of other voices. However, it’s also a product of its time. Sandvoss does mention some online fandom gathering places and the kinds of interactions that are performed there, but I could easily see a sequel study done which might expand greatly on what Sandvoss has already done here w/r/t online fandoms. I’ve found, for example, both an impulse towards the kind of self-reflective fandom and the push-back provided by other fans seemingly increase in intensity on the internet. Sandvoss also claims that fans have little to no input on how the objects of fandom are created, but recent examples like Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and the (eventual) release of the Snyder cut of Justice League would call that into question as well, never mind the historical examples of viewer feedback causing big changes in film serials, tv shows, and so on.

The fan group called the 501st Legion was used as extras on Disney’s The Mandalorian

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Sandvoss pulls a lot from previous fan studies for his examples, including his own study of sports fans. These are contextualized with theoretical frameworks like psychoanalysis and Marxist critical theory to try to get at what fandoms are, and what they can do. One might most accurately say that this is a study of prior studies, as it is more interested in developing an overarching theory than it is in actually looking at specific fandoms.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

The largest rhetorical move Sandvoss engages in is the introduction of several fan studies that have previously made claims about how fandom works in a specific area which Sandvoss engages with to explain and pick out the high points before discarding the majority of the theory for being not particularly useful. For example, he takes from Fiske the three kinds of fan productivity but disputes the larger claim Fiske makes about the emancipatory nature of fandoms. This lends Sandvoss a sense of both magnanimity as well as a logical superiority as his theory is developed on only the good parts of the many studies that have come before his. He also builds his case nicely, using each chapter after the second (the recap chapter) to develop one important part of his theory that is then used as the core of the next part. It makes for a clean, logical procession of ideas.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

As currently configured in my brain, my dissertation will end on a study of how the Star Wars fandom responded to the three legacyquel films (TFA, TLJ, TRoS), and I could very much see how Sandvoss’s theories would be directly applicable to what I’ve seen so far. It’s going to be central, I think, to that chapter.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

fans, fandom, fan text, object of fandom, Heimat, self-reflective, horizon of expectations, popular culture, literature, fan productivity, polysemic, neutrosemic, mirror, introjection, projection, identity, fan practices, consumption, habitus

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

For the purpose of empirical investigation and academic analysis, we therefore need to turn to observable aspects as defining marks of fandom. I thus want to suggest a definition of fandom focusing on fan practices. This admittedly devolves the problem to the question of which fan practices are most indicative of fans’ emotional investment and affect. (6)

I define fandom as the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text in the form of books, television shows, films or music, as well as popular texts in a broader sense such as sports teams and popular icons and stars ranging from athletes and musicians to actors. (8)

Consequently, fandom can be subversive, especially when based on textual productivity; yet there is no automatism which positions the tactics of reading in necessary opposition to the strategies of (mass) production. (29)

In this sense, I believe, fandom best compares to the emotional significance of the places we have grown to call home, to the form of physical, emotional and ideological space that is best described as Heimat. […] Understanding fandom as a form of Heimat thus accurately combines the significance of symbolical, personal space in fandom with the importance of territorial place within which such fandoms is physically manifested. However, these spaces differ from the territorial place conventionally understood as Heimat. Rather, as our discussion here has illustrated, they can be physical as well as textual, and hence can be accessed by fans in different mediated and unmediated ways, at different times, and from different localities. […] But the notion of fandom as a form of Heimat comes with its own implications with regard to the social and cultural consequences of fandom. The idea of Heimat is based upon notions of security and emotional warmth, but Heimat also always involves an evaluation and categorization of others. (64)

The theoretical challenge here is to account for the dual function of the object of fandom as experienced not in relation to the self, but as part of the self, despite constituting an external object. The basic premise of my argument, then, is that the object of fandom whether it is a sports team, a television programme, a film or pop star, is intrinsically interwoven with our sense of self, with who we are, would like to be, and think we are. (96)

Here, I want to take such arguments to their conclusion and suggest that in the intense interaction between self and object of fandom, acknowledgment of the object of fandom as an external object disappears. Rather than as a transitional realm between the self and an external world, the object of fandom forms part of the self, and hence functions as its extension. (100)

The object of fandom in this sense is not so much a textual possession; nor does it only define the self. It is part of the fan’s (sense of) self. For the object of fandom is as an external object – whether it is Bruce Springsteen or, say, Star Trek – to be experienced as part of the fan’s fabric of self, fans need to build an intense identification with their object of fandom. (101)

[Following McLuhan’s reading of the Narcissus myth,] [w]e may then be aware of parallels between ourselves and our objects of fandom, and even actively seek to foster and construct these, yet self-reflection is always based on a misrecognition of the external object. Our fascination with the object of fandom does not arise out of the fact that, objectively, it is like us, but is instead based on the projection of our own image. The object of fandom, like the river in the Narcissus myth, is the coincidental medium of self-reflection, whose true quality lies in its reflective capacity. (104)

Moreover, as the object of fandom becomes part of our fabric of self through processes of self-reflection, fans actively maintain this stage of self-performance and projection. Fans thus seek to emulate and emphasize parallels between themselves and what they recognize as external qualities of the object of fandom. […] Yet, beyond resemblance and imitation, the actual origin of meaning in either the fan object or the fan becomes unclear. In fans’ self-reflective relationship with their object of fandom, we cannot allocate the origins of personal beliefs and attitudes and either the fan or the fan object. (111)

From such a self-reflective reading it follows that texts allow not only for a multiplicity of meaning, but for any meaning. Only if fan texts function as a mirror, can fans find their reflected image in the object of fandom. Having stated that all texts are polysemic, because they cannot carry a single, definitive meeting, this supposes that at the end of the spectrum polysemic texts allow for so many different readings that they can no longer be meaningfully described as polysemic. The notion of self-reflection and fandom suggests that some texts come to function as a blank screen on which fans’ self-image is reflected. These texts are polysemic to a degree that they become neutrosemic – in other words, carry no inherent meaning. By ‘neutrosemy’, I describe the semiotic condition in which a text allows for so many divergent readings that, intersubjectively, it does not have any meaning at all. (126)

The definition of textual boundaries forms a key strategy that allows fans to construct a self-reflective reading of the object of fandom. It is a simultaneous process of inclusion and exclusion. On the one hand, the discriminative power of fans to serves to maintain the object of fandom as a space of self-reflection. […] The object of fandom thus always consists of a textual hybrid, a meta- or super-text composed of many textual episodes whose boundaries are defined by the fan him- or herself. The reader, then, does not, as Rorty suggests, beat the text into a shape which will serve his or her own purposes (cf. Eco 1994), but cuts his or her own text out of all available signs and information like a figure out of a seemingly endless sheet of paper. (131-2)

The multiplicity of meanings in literary texts thus has a double function. In the first instance, it is reminiscent of the common interpretation of the notion of polysemy in media studies, in that it occurs in the different readings of the same text by different readers. There is, however, a second, qualitatively decisive dimension: the multiplicity of meanings within a given text experienced on the level of the individual reader, thus creating semiotic ambiguities and challenges to the value position of the reader, thereby invites a reflexive dialogue between reader and text. On this level of indeterminacy, literary texts differ fundamentally from fan texts. It is precisely these semiotic ambiguities and challenges that are lacking when the fan of a sports team can so easily project his values and beliefs onto the team, when the Bruce Springsteen fan finds her own philosophy readily represented in Springsteen’s songs, or when the fan of Star Wars finds no difficulty in relating the fan text to his own military career and aspirations. (143)

It is important to note that in all these cases texts are turned into fan texts through a relative judgment following the fan’s horizon of expectations, not any objective generic qualities. What comes to function as a fan text to one reader may still possess literary qualities to another reader. (144)

Secondly, reception aesthetics provides us with a useful tool for analyzing the reading of fan texts. However, while the relationship between fans and their object of fandom is at the heart of fandom, it does not account fully for all aspects of fan performance and social interaction. Beyond fan texts as fan objects are many texts, conversations and forms of communication which form part of fandom, yet lack the neutrosemic quality of the fan text. While in the mediated quasi-interaction between fans and the object of fandom the fan texts cannot intervene in the normalized, self-reflective meanings that fans construct, other fans and texts which we encounter in our fandom can. Secondary texts, including, of course, academic studies of fan texts, may challenge fans’ normalized, self-reflective readings. Moreover, the interaction with other fans through in situ consumption, everyday life conversation, fan meetings and online communication potentially constitutes an array of challenges to fans’ (self-reflective) interpretation of the fan texts, demanding forms of self-reflexivity not dissimilar to those that Iser ascribes to reading of literary texts. The challenge to fans’ horizon of experience and expectation consequently does not lie in the fan object but in the experiences and interactions that surround the relationship between fan and fan text – in other words in fandom as ‘interpretive community’. (147)

Commonly, this discrepancy – given the inherent textual distance of mediated quasi-interaction, as well as fans’ need to maintain their relationship by to the object of fandom based upon familiarity – will be kept at bay by the fan. However, different factors can trigger a decreasing textual, and hence growing aesthetic, distance between fan and object of fandom. First, the fan text is more complex in its boundaries over time and space than single literary texts. As dynamic texts evolving over time, fan texts cannot fully meet the fan’s horizon of expectations, and thus remain truly banal. The departure of a lead character from a given television show, the increasingly international labor market and professional sports, the new artistic direction of a given musician or band, or the death of one’s favorite star in this sense possess literary quality, in that they increase the aesthetic distance between text and fan. In these moments of rapture, the fan assumes a quality similar to that proposed by Iser for literary texts, in that it evades attempts at normalization and thus demands a reflexive reaction. […] In the first case the fan resolves the discord between his or her values and sense of self and the now altered fan text through rejection of the former object offend them. The fan text thus loses its significance, and the respective fandom comes to an end. […] Fans also overcome dissonance and indeterminacy by reinforcing the norms encapsulated in the fan texts, thus refashioning the self in an attempt to conform with its changing reflection and what I have previously described as the fan’s tendency to serve as servo-mechanism to the object of fandom. If textual blanks and aesthetic distance in the reading of fan texts, and subsequent processes of a reflexive readjustment of self, however, are created through the economic and social forces which already structure the conditions of modern industrial living, fandom cannot function as a space for the creation of new social norms; neither, then, can fandom reflexively challenge the macro parameters of the production of fan texts, which in turn are reflective of the economic and social status quo. (150-1)

“The Cultural Economy of Fandom” by John Fiske

by

Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Fiske, John. 1992. “The Cutlural Economy of Fandom.” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, edited by Lisa A. Lewis, 256. New York: Routledge.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

John Fiske builds upon Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital to put forth the idea of a fan culture that creates a “shadow cultural economy” which involves the appropriation of the products of the larger cultural economy while also providing for the production of its own products and output, which might involve the remixing/rewriting of the original texts (30). The idea is that, because the texts fan cultures are based on aren’t valued by the dominant culture, they are more amenable to this kind of adaptation and reuse, they contain within them space for fans to interact and create more readily than do the “texts” of the dominant culture. Fiske proposes that there is still a strong drive, at least among those who fit in well with the dominant culture (straight white men) to evaluate the fan-attracting texts as the dominant culture does to the dominant texts, hierarchically, meanwhile those less likely to fit in with the dominant culture care less about valuation and hierarchy as tools for interacting with their fan-accessible texts.

Fiske proposes that fans engage in three kinds of “productivity” in response to and conversation with the texts they are a fan of. The first, semiotic productivity, involves the reading and understanding of a text, and isn’t specific to fandom in particular. The second takes the ideas developed in that semiotic reading and turns it into dialogue in the form of enunciative productivity, which is, basically, fan talk. Writing first in 1992, Fiske argues that this fan talk is often limited because there is a relatively small chance of overlapping fandoms within a fan’s immediate vicinity. This will later explode with the popularization of the internet. The final kind of productivity is textual, which sees fans produce their own texts in a complex web of interactions with the original texts and personal desires/creative impulses.

Fiske notes that fans and the dominant culture both revolve around accumulating collections of cultural artifacts, but that fans are generally more interested in the size of the collection whereas the dominant culture is generally more concerned with the monetary value of their collected materials. He notes also that because fan-attached texts aren’t usually valued by the dominant culture, their collections and productions are less likely to be valuable economically.

Fiske holds one way of seeing the difference between the fan and dominant cultures as being almost inalienable: the dominant culture is always going to be uninterested in the fan-attracting texts except as ways of extracting money from fans, while the fans will be uninterested in the official, proscribed use of a fan-attracting text and will instead value it for what they can do with it and how they can undermine it or fundamentally change it.

Fiske also writes that gender is a primary differentiator in the world of fandom, that differences in how fans react or respond to texts will tend to vary with their gender. He notes that race might also be part of this calculation but doesn’t think that it holds as much explanatory or differentiating power as gender and class do. This point is obviously arguable.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

As stated above, Fiske is most interested in augmenting the work of Bourdieu to explicate the difference between the dominant cultural economy and the “shadow” cultural economy of fandoms. This is a valuable contribution, even if it only starts and doesn’t finish this conversation. Its own time of production in the pre-internet era severely limits its base explanatory power, though minor corrections and additions might address some of the new situations created by the internet. The biggest change that has made it less explanatory at this moment in time is the shift in the dominant culture to appropriate and absorb many facets of what was once limited to fan culture. the MCU, Star Wars, and the continued growth of videogames as a huge cultural product has made the relationship between fandoms and the dominant culture much more difficult to sharply distinguish from each other. How might this change in the relationship between the dominant and fan cultures explain the straight-white-male backlashes to diversity in popular (once-fan-based) media?

Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Fiske’s task is to take ideas from Bourdieu’s concept of cultural economy and tease out the differences that occur when the texts aren’t those specified as valuable by the dominant culture. He provides examples based on his and other research into different fandoms of how fan economies vary from the dominant economies.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

The biggest rhetorical move is the sharp distinction between the dominant and fan cultures, which holds some value still but has been complicated by changes in both landscapes over the past 30 years. The same has happened with the other rhetorical move Fiske performs as he prioritizes gender over race (or sexuality, or even the complexities of gender) as the dividing line between different kinds of fans. A more thorough investigation of fan cultures would attend to these other dimensions of fans and fandoms.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

I think the idea of looking at fandom through the lens of a cultural economy has its limitations, even as I understand how valuable it might be to my future studies. In the end, I think the economic lens can only go so far in explaining how fans respond to texts and why those responses come in the forms they do. That being said, I think Fiske will likely show up, in some form, in my later work.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

fandom, cultural economy, dominant culture, capitalism, industry, productivity, cultural knowledge, producerly, texts, gender, discrimination, hierarchy, habitus

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Fandom is typically associated with cultural forms that the dominant value system denigrates – pop music, romance novels, comics, Hollywood mass-appeal stars (sport, probably because of its appeal to masculinity, is an exception). It is thus associated with the cultural tastes of subordinated formations of the people, particularly with those disempowered by any combination of gender, age, class and race. (30)

We need to add to Bourdieu’s model gender, race and age as axes of discrimination, and thus to read his account of how culture works to underwrite class differences as symptomatic of its function in other axes of social difference. […] [H]e leaves proletarian culture and the proletariat as an undistinguished homogeneity. This leads him seriously to underestimate the creativity of popular culture and its role in distinguishing between different social formations within the subordinated. He does not allow that there are forms of popular cultural capital produced outside and often against official cultural capital. (32)

Fans discriminate fiercely: the boundaries between what falls within their fandom and what does not are sharply drawn. And this discrimination in the cultural sphere is mapped into distinctions in the social – the boundaries between the community of fans and the rest of the world are just as strongly marked and patrolled. (34-5)

Those who are subordinated (by gender, age or class) are more likely to have developed a habitus typical of proletarian culture (that is, one without economic or cultural capital): the less a fan suffers from these structures of domination and subordination, the more likely he or she is to have developed a habitus that accords in some respects with that developed by the official culture, and which will therefore incline to use official criteria on its unofficial texts. It would not be surprising in such a case to find that older fans, male fans, and more highly educated fans tend to use official criteria, whereas younger, female and the less educated ones tend towards popular criteria. (36-7)

Fan productivity is not limited to the production of new texts: it also participates in the construction of the original text and thus turns the commercial narrative or performance into popular culture. Fans are very participatory. […] This melding of the team or performer and the fan into a productive community minimizes differences between artists and audience and turns the text into an event, not an art object. […] The reverence, even adoration, fans feel for their object of fandom since surprisingly easily with the contradictory feeling that they also ‘possess’ that object, it is their popular cultural capital. (40)

Fan texts, then, have to be ‘producerly’, in that they have to be open, to contain gaps, irresolutions, contradictions, which both allow and invite fan productivity. They are insufficient texts that are inadequate to their cultural function of circulating meanings and pleasure until they are worked upon and activated by their fans, who by such activity produce their own popular cultural capital.  (42)

In the same way, the dominant habitus uses information about the artist to enhance or enrich the appreciation of the work, whereas in the popular habitus such knowledge increases the power of the fan to ‘see through’ the production process normally hidden by the text and thus inaccessible to the non-fan […]. This knowledge diminishes the distance between text and everyday life, […] or between star and fan. […] The popular habitus makes such knowledge functional and potentially empowering in the everyday life of the fan. (43)

In capitalist societies popular culture is necessarily produced from the products of capitalism, for that is all the people have to work with. The relationship of popular culture to the culture industries is therefore complex and fascinating, sometimes conflictive, sometimes complicitous or co-operative, but the people are never at the mercy of the industries – they choose to make some of their commodities into popular culture, but reject many more than they adopt. (47-8)

The Studios After the Studios by J.D. Connor

by

Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park

Connor, J.D. 2015. The Studios After the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood (1970-2010). Post-45. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

In this book, J.D. Connor writes a history of what he calls “neoclassical Hollywood,” which he defines as the period when the studios aspired to the kind of control over production that they had in the classical period and used that aspiration as inspiration in developing various strategies of control, which they in turn attempted to allegorize within the films they made. These allegorized authorial moves clashed with other authorial voices (both traditional (directors, writers, actors) and not (special effects artists, talent agencies)) such that Connor claims a movie can always be read as an allegory of its own making, as a struggle between competing authorial voices asserting the supremacy of their kind of control over the creative process.

Using this strategy of reading films as allegories of their own making, Connor then traces various trends over the 40 years he covers in his book. He shows how auteur directors weren’t the only paranoid authorial voices in film production in the 70s, how a studio like Paramount asserted its power through a commitment to making movies with high concepts and an emphasis on design as a studio trademark up through the 80s, and how a talent agency was able to negotiate packages (of writer/director/actors) that assuaged studio fears by mitigating risks while asserting the talent and agency’s control over the process rather than the studio’s. He examines how Paramount was able to iterate on the idea of the pop-musicals from Saturday Night Fever through Footloose and at each turn assert more and more control over the film’s final form. He looks, also at that studio’s cultivation and control over the first decade+ of Eddie Murphy’s film career such that by the end of that time the studio could be credibly said to be embodied by Murphy (and vice versa). Then he turns towards the concept of chaos theory and how it both provided a handy storytelling device and an explanation for how the various competing forces of authorship in the neoclassical era interacted and created outcomes readable within the texts of the films.

It is a big ask that Connor makes of us, his readers, to believe that literally every movie made within this system could be read in this way. He asserts this way of thinking several times and in several ways, though I think the most valuable argument he makes is in the sheer volume of believable readings he does of dozens of films throughout the text. The other big claim he makes that I’m less sure about is the cutoff of the neoclassical period that he writes of. He looks at two phenomena that he claims signals the end of this neoclassical period: the failure of several large media-conglomerate mergers and the brief bout of epics like Gladiator, Troy, and Kingdom of Heaven which, he claims, are less about the founding of a national identity as the genre might have traditionally been understood but about the retreat of empire, which he allegorizes to the retreat of the studio. Here once again the problem of writing about recent history rears its head. While I can definitely see the retreat of the studios from a certain position in the epics Connor writes of here, the fact remains that the studios have only gotten more interested in asserting some kind of control over their output, and that, I’d argue has happened in the guise of superhero movies and legacyquels (my own area of study). Combine this with the increasing dominance of megastudios like Disney (who now owns Fox’s back catalogue and current productions) and you’ll see that the things Connor posits as signs of a changing industry aren’t necessarily the death knell he sees them as.

Connor touches even less than Langford did on the expanded possibilities for filmmakers in the 80s and 90s, and doesn’t really look too hard at the indie scene as a force within Hollywood, except to show that Hollywood was interested in creating what he calls “indiewood,” or the small, studio controlled “indie” centers like Fox Searchlight, but each of these is very readily subsumed within the larger corporate structure that Connor focuses on, peculiarities be damned.

Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Like Langford before him, Connor largely argues against the three-headed monster of Bordwell, Thompson and Staiger, who posited the dominant understanding of the classical era of Hollywood and each produced some update on that for what Connor calls the neoclassical era. Connor, like Langford, most directly counters Bordwell’s account of the intensified classicism that he claims dominates the post-classical era. While there may be some retained classicism, Connor proposes that it comes from the multi-valanced struggle for authorship and the studios’ aspiration to the kind of control they had under the classical system. Against Thompson he argues that the 3 act structure she identifies as central to the neoclassical Hollywood text could and should really be 4 acts, with the second split into two around a decisive turn at the midway point.

Mostly, though, Connor argues with the whole field’s desire to look towards the traditional channels of authorship while proposing his, which accounts for all the competing forces of authorship as exposed within studio histories and the films themselves.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

As stated above, Connor largely goes chronologically through the 40 years he covers here, though there is some overlap at either end of some chapters, addressing the industrial changes while showing how the studios (and occasionally other entities in contention with the studios) attempted to assert control over the production process in those various circumstances. He reads texts allegorically to excavate those struggles for authorial control within the very films themselves.

To get at the history side, Connor will look through interviews with studio heads or other relevant figures, earnings calls, financial statements, business media (like Variety), and promotional materials in addition to the films themselves.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Connor’s greatest strength is his breadth of scope and his ability to tie all kinds of seemingly disparate films into a singular narrative. While some may resist that kind of narrativizing, it is nonetheless compelling because it attends to a less-analyzed area of interest and is well-articulated.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

I found myself, like Connor assumes many of his readers would find themselves, in a kind of constant back and forth over whether I totally bought his claims or not. On the one hand, they’re intensely compelling, particularly in the areas like the discussion of high concept filmmaking and the brief reign of chaos theory within Hollywood. On the other, these kinds of readings are great for making a historical argument about what a studio’s intentions/motivations/commitments were at a given time, but less compelling (at least less necessarily compelling) when it comes to the more culturally based kinds of readings that I’m more interested in. Connor is also largely uninterested in the audience except as a concept within a studio’s decision-making process, which doesn’t really gel with my conception of what matters in filmmaking. However, I can’t say that I won’t go back to him as I start to think about my dissertation, especially as I find myself interested in the same kind of contestation of authorial voices that Connor writes about here and the circumstances that allow for certain kinds of production in certain cultural moments.

Steven Spielberg’s Jaws

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

studio, authorship, aspiration, neoclassical, classical, control, chaos theory, talent agency, conglomerate, logorrhea (the bleeding of the studio logo into the world of the film, which inculcates the studio as an entity within the film itself), allegory, design, metonymy

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

While critics find it easy enough to demonstrate that movies are about many things, and while historians have done prodigious work tracing the operations of the business itself, with very few exceptions we have not explored Hollywood’s peculiar sort of self-representation in sufficient detail, and we have not committed ourselves to reading films as corporate and industrial allegories as deeply as we should. […] We know that movies are at the center of the culture, or very near it; we know that years of labor and millions of dollars go into making and marketing them; we know that they solicit and often reward extreme levels of attention; yet somehow we don’t quite know how labor and capital are transmogrified into story and style – or, how this labor and this capital become this story spun this way. And whenever we do discover a path that leads from the production to the narrative, or from the story to the backstory, that path seems contingent and willful, a desperate mark left by a “defenseless” individual protesting a “ferocious” institution. (1)

I propose that movies (Hollywood movies, in this era) are about the business more intensely – both more personally and more collectively. They are representations of experience, yes, but they can be much besides: scenarios, strategies, suggestions, pleas, business plans – there’s no ruling out the role of the motion picture in the lives or careers or histories of its creators. The pressures that individuals, groups, guilds, professions, and corporations face can be channeled through their collective work on films. The balance between competing potential authors can be worked out on the page, on set, and on the screen far more precisely than criticism typically admits. Working out the correct balance among different accounts of the system and the individual’s role within it required the efforts of highly talented participants. And in the period I am discussing, from about 1970 to about 2010, these participants were guided by the conventions of their crafts and the imperatives of their industry toward classical values of necessity, continuity, and complementarity even when elements in the writing, or design, or effects were riotously excessive. Against those forces that would dissipate individual or corporate identity, Hollywood neoclassicism was in large part and effort to brand movies and their studios, and in the cases of the major franchises, it succeeded. In the process, movies became more intensely “about the business” than ever. (1-2)

The case of Greystoke suggests the following general form: allegory emerges where industrial pressures intersect and where creative actors are able to imagine symbolic solutions to real problems. As we trace the overarching question of the relationship between particular movies and the particular financial and labor relations underpinning their making and marketing, broader questions arise. There are questions of prevalence and significance, history and possibility, method and epistemology. How widespread are these allegories? And how important are they to the operation of the system? How and how intensely are movies about the business? On what occasions does the intensity wax and wane? Is there a history to the very possibility that a movie might be about the business? If movies are, at some level about the business, what are the contours of those levels? And if it is simple enough to say that movies are about the business, why don’t we take that idea seriously? How could our culture continue to elude our attempts to understand it? (5)

If the practical project of this book is to justify the allegorical interpretation of individual films, and the theoretical project is to explain how those allegorical intentions add up to and drive the Hollywood motion picture industry, then the historical project is to show how that sort of self-representation was also self-enabling, how movies retained their hold on the center of the entertainment media escape. How do motion pictures sustain their corporate prominence when the industry is no longer underwritten by the economic structures that supported the classical Hollywood studios? (10)

Logorrhea is an imaginary solution to a constellation of problems that range from the economic and ideological to the narrative and back to the image imaginary itself. And while logorrhea cannot dissolve these problems entirely, it can offer, at different times and in myriad ways, partial solutions. Yet what remains unsolved also remains available for further thought, for further repression, representation, systematization. If the opening of a neoclassical Hollywood film is a swamp of contingency reinscribed as the investigation of necessity, then the remainder of that contingency is available for further reinscription throughout the narrative. The bond between corporation and product can take the shape of an icon or a deus ex machina, of a protagonist or an emblem, of an element in a psychology or an ethics or in a discourse on economics. Yet in its most common form, the studio appears within the film as a place, a locus classicus, as it were. The mountainous landscape of Kauai is one way to bring Paramount into the picture; the Scottish highlands of Braveheart is another. As the property becomes more integral to the corporate imaginary, the logo reaches deeper into the film until the relationship between studio and story switches. Now, instead of slipping the logo into the film, the film takes place “inside” the logo, as in The Core, or Waterworld, or The Matrix. (26)

To see a contemporary film as a studio film is to realize this studio wanted to distribute this film badly enough that it passed on thousands of other possible stories and outcompeted its major rivals in order to put up the money for the project. The studio must have seen something it wanted to see when it agreed to make the film, and the task of its creative executives – aside from riding herd on the budget – must have been to keep that certain something alive. Labor and capital come together at this moment to perpetuate the studio after the studio. (35)

But if the elements of high concept are nothing new, why did it seem to be new? New to whom? Into what industrial configuration did high concept erupt, and what did it leave behind? These questions are methodologically decisive. By making high concept a matter of professional ideology and not, initially and essentially, a matter of style, we avoid battles over definitions. Instead, we operate at one remove: The thing we want to pay attention to exists at the level of the concept (what the studios and producers want) and not the level of style (how the film achieves that). As a consequence, what we are looking for when we look for evidence and attributes of high concept becomes evidence of professional attention. (69-70)

Allegorical readings are naturally the products of experience. But it is a particular experience, the experience of design. Indeed, for all the discussion of high-concept narrative and stylistic allusion, what has been less remarked is the new prominence of production design within Hollywood’s division of labor. Design establishes the contours of the continuous experience in which we develop our expertise. High concept is frequently blamed on philistines in the industry, on the dominance of studio by “suits,” or on some change in the power of marketing within the studio to create movies it deemed salable. But in this chapter and chapter 5, I want to show how the advent of high concept depended on an essential leap of reading that confused image and author, how Paramount in particular made that leap of reading more widely available, and how that leap uniquely suited the studio and its efforts to brand itself into the eighties. What we want to know is how Paramount went from making films that looked like The Conversation to films that looked like Top Gun. That story ranges from the diffuse beginnings of the studios reawakenings through a wide array of examples that included a host of neomusicals and the launching of Eddie Murphy’s cinematic career. (71)

I have been using the term “control” because it suggests the social and organizational aspects of the process, but for Paramount, the crucial term would be “design.” (105)

There were two phases to the CAA plan, which in this martial context we might call the attractive encampment and the fortification. To make an attractive encampment, the agency pursued film personnel with the same focus it had brought to television. In addition to signing a critical mass of above-the-line talent, CAA sought to distinguish its talent pool within the agency oligopolies: It would particularly target directors and writers. In that way, CAA would be able to offer potential stars a vehicle that already came with a vision. After the writers and directors were on board, the agency would hunt out the biggest stars, those whose work seemed allergic to the crapshoot complacency of the movie business. The agency would seek to demonize risk, arguing that certain stars, once committed to a project, would inoculate the studio against financial losses. Still, there was little new in this strategy; it simply amounted to doing what the other agencies did but doing it better. (137)

Form and organization drew closer to one another, overcoming the distance between instance and system, bridging the gap not through Romantic will but through mutually reinforcing connecting threads. As the new form congealed, it suggested that we might judge the success of this corporate redesign and reconception through its practical effects. And within this new paradigm of judgment, we find a way of periodizing Hollywood history: When the allegorical implications of the studios films no longer seem tendentious, then, we might say, has neoclassicism arrived. (189)

Chaos theory provided a way to think about the general situation of the contemporary studio, yet however widely it might be applied, each instance would take on some of the unique coloring of the studio responsible for the reflection. Sometimes, chaos theory appears to impart a cult knowledge to its initiates, the way Sun Tzu’s Art of War did in the eighties. But in other instances, this science of natural recursion seemed ready to guide Hollywood studios through a thicket of indeterminacy back toward the actuality of filmmaking, back, in other words, toward the sort of literalism Hollywood does so well. (219)

The “happy” endings of classical Hollywood have given way to “stable” endings that demonstrate self-similarity at all scales. The consequences are far-ranging. Where the happy ending seemed forced – as in a Douglas Sirk melodrama, a film noir, or even a Preston Sturges comedy – it encouraged an oppositional or even subversive reading. But the stable ending seems tentative and encourages elaboration. To imagine a sequel, one need only imagine the expansion of a single scale – a character, a setting, a plot point. Jurassic Park projects to The Lost World by reversing the scalar relationship between the finished product and the prototype (or pitch), while The Bourne Ultimatum nests most of its action within the space of a cut in The Bourne Supremacy. Narrative closure yields pride of place to the introjection of downstream revenues, and the movies become advertisements for themselves. (242)

Neoclassical Hollywood aestheticizes its own systematicity. When it loses faith in that system, its interest in systemic allegory dies. The allegories may go on (they do), but the system falls out of self-saturation, leaving not genre-as-cycle but studio-as-cycle. Such an event only compounds our questions. What does it mean for a corporation to lose faith in the system? And if that loss of faith amounts to a history, how is that history not the most naïve idealism? Finally, what does this loss of faith have to do with oceans? (251)

In short, the major studio epics that followed Gladiator tell the story of the studios retreat from the genre in the guise of stories of imperial retreat as such. And given their uncertainty about the success of the enterprise, they begin to fret over something supposedly more durable: the imperial legacy. (297)

Post-Classical Hollywood by Barry Langford

by

Steven Spielberg’s Jaws

Langford, Barry. 2010. Post-Classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style, and Ideology Since 1945. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Barry Langford takes it upon himself to write a history of the three forces mentioned in the subtitle of his book, film industry (technological, economic, and the constellation of creative and financial figureheads working towards making films), style (with a specific attention to the kinds of movies being made and how the technological changes influence and are influenced by the creative demands of the studios and filmmakers, as well as the changes in filmmaking techniques as influenced by outside filmmakers (European New Wavers, indies)), and ideology (examinations of how national politics and attitudes influenced and were influenced by the production of mainstream films, with an emphasis on genres and generic changes that occurred in each of the three eras Langford identified).

That’s a lot to cover, but Langford smartly lays out his book in chronological order to keep the sense of temporal change at the forefront. He also splits each era in to three chapters, with each time period getting first an examination of the industrial changes that occurred over the decades covered, then (usually) an investigation of the ideological changes before he examines the stylistic transformations that were usually driven by the changes present in the previous two chapters. This order gets switched around in the middle segment, which covers what Langford calls the Hollywood Renaissance era up through the beginning of the 80s during which he argues the stylistic experimentation largely drove the ideological elements of film rather than the other way around as is, he posits, normal. In between most of these chapters, Langford has a brief examination of the most popular and Best Picture Oscar winner for every year ending in 5 between 1945-2005. These provide him with a chance to explicate how closely Hollywood’s ideals about itself match with public conception and demonstrate the often wide gap between the two, even as they also overlap in a few cases (The Sound of Music in 1965, for example). And each era starts with a brief introduction to the way theatrical distribution had evolved over the time period covered in the next three chapters as exemplified by my current home base of Columbus, Ohio, aka America’s Test City for its representative population and mix of big city and suburban and farmlands all within a pretty small space. It was interesting to follow the change from downtown single-screen movie palaces and smaller local neighborhood cinemas to the suburban-based multi/mega-plexes.

Langford’s large claim is that there exists within Hollywood not a dedication to doing one thing as best as it can (as posited by David Bordwell and company) but rather that Hollywood is best at adapting to changing circumstances of economic pressures, audience desires, ideological pulls, and technological advancements. While Hollywood often seems reluctant to change, its status as a business, or collection of businesses, force it to change in response to all of these vectors. Langford often gets to his own point by summarizing a totalizing narrative about Hollywood during a certain era or in a certain context and then explains why that viewpoint ignores some important heterogeneity in the way Hollywood operates. Even the large shifts Langford identifies, for example in the Hollywood Renaissance’s shift toward auteurist creative freedom, come with concurrent other movements (Blaxploitation) or just business as usual. Langford basicaly claims that it’s impossible to create a totalizing narrative of Hollywood moving as one entity unless your analysis also accounts for the myriad ways that what looks like a collective effort of one big mass is actually the individual movements of hundreds of independent actors, each responding to the same or at least similar stimuli such that the overall movement might be in one direction, but that movement also includes some spreading out to the sides and some trailing behind.

The industrial changes Langford focuses on come in the form of who owns the studios and what other technologies challenge film’s “place of pride” in the public’s conception of the hierarchy of entertainment possibilities. He covers the splitting of the production and projection that comes in the Paramount Supreme Court Case, which leads into the studios realizing that television production might be an additional source of income rather than an enemy (a realization that happens again with home video and, though Langford couldn’t possibly know, the present streaming moment). He looks at how the conglomerization of film studios, first under really broad umbrellas and then as part of media empires (which are also under really broad umbrellas) allowed for the auteurist boom of the Renaissance before the idea of the franchise, which could leverage those large media empires to pre-sell movies to eagerly waiting audiences, began to dominate the landscape. Langford shows how the tentpole film became a way for studios to make almost sure-hits while gambling on the lower-cost movies that made up the majority of films produced and distributed by the studios.

The idological shifts often come in the form of national politics as emblematized by the sitting US president. Langford, for example, shows that the big ideological shift towards a politics of the self as initiated by Reagan’s revanchist rhetoric and policies still haven’t reall left the public consciousness, at least at the time of his writing. Meanwhile, he convincingly argues that, though the auteurs of the Renaissance were able to make more ideosyncratic films, it was really only the older holdovers from the end of the big studio era who leveraged that freedom into really revolutionary political films. The rest were most interested in interrogating the assumptions of the previous Hollywood era(s) without really challenging them in any meaningful ways. We might see this in the willingness to display the problems of toxic masculinity that has always been present in Hollywood films without fully condemning them or showing a different way of being. This coincides with the still strict limit on who would be allowed to make these films, aka generally straight white cis men. The few Black filmmaker who were given space in the studio system during the time of the Renaissance were confined to making Blaxploitation films while they were temporarily profitable. Langford notes that the late 90s has led to a somewhat noticable shift in who is given the reins on studio products, but only because the entire history of Hollywood production is overwhelming aligned with the stright white cis man. Langford also traces most of these changes via examinations of changes in genres, either what genres are popular or how genres shift to respond to the dominant ideology of the time. The Western is the prime example, with the action/adventure taking over in the 80s tentpole era and still quite dominant. These movies ultimately reflect a changing sense of the relationship between the individual and society at large. Langford also wisely points to the war films following the Vietnam war as a way of claiming victory in the world of fantasy where it didn’t exist in real life. He ties this to Reagan’s desire to return to a time when the US was unquestionably (yeah, right) righteous.

The style sections are the least revealing, I thought, as they are best at tying the other sections together in a more grounded sense as Langford actually looks at films in depth in these chapters. Most interestingly, Langford spends about half of the final style section basically explaining how every theorist who has written about the late-80s and 90s Hollywood output is wrong. He shows that the bemoaning “jeremiads” against MTV-influenced editing and overly formulaic narratives actually are based on bad assumptions and mistake some trends for the entirety of Hollywood’s productions, a proposition already disproven. Langford ably argues that the dismissive criticism he calls out are not only dismissive of studios and filmmakers, but also audiences who have not either surrendered themselves to the spectacle of near-fascist nature nor are too passive to follow along with less conventional editing or storytelling.

William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Langford’s biggest interlocutor here is Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger, with Bordwell getting the brunt of the response. Their desire to treat their study of the “classical Hollywood style” as scientific is problematic, according to Langford, as it relies upon flawed conceptions pulled from faulty data sets. Langford’s more broad and historical approach is implicitly held up as the right way to study these kinds of industrial changes, movements, forces because he is able to contextualize them in several different ways.

Of course, any history that runs up to the “present” (in 2008) runs into some interesting problems as hindsight has proven Langford wrong, say, in how much emphasis he puts on physical home media as a guaranteed source of additional income for the studios. He mentions the first MCU movie in Iron Man but doesn’t foresee how it is a harbinger of a huge new way of making films. Nor can he recon with how Hollywood responded to the recession of 2008, though he mentions that it has begun. What makes Langford’s criticism valuable, however, is how easily I can see the principles he wrote about during the past 60 years of filmmaking history would (and did) influence the events that happened at the end of the period he writes about here. So his writing is only dated in that it doesn’t directly address things it couldn’t possibly know of, and not in the much worse way where his claims don’t apply outside of his window of study.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

I’ve mostly laid this out above, but here I’ll talk about the sources Langford pulls from to create a broad base for his analysis. He looks at the local history of Columbus, for example, taking into account not only what theaters existed but also how they were advertising in local newspapers. Langford also investigates the way that the new media landscape allows for tv commercials, print ads, billboards, radio spots, infotainment shows, late-night talk shows, and traditional trailers can be leveraged by the company that owns all of these outlets and the studio making the film in order to sell it. In other words, Langford’s objects of analysis aren’t just the films but the entire contexts within which they exist. This is crucial for his project’s scope and aims.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

The chapter makeup and order signify Langford’s biggest rhetorical moves as he aims to show the interactions between the three areas of study he has identified. The chain he claims works for the majority of the time period covered in the text is industrial influences the ideological influences the stylistic, though there is obviously cross-influence between all three. Langford’s choice to respond to what has become a normalized story of Hollywood as perpetuated by Bordwell et al. is also important to his task of interrogating the multivalent mass that is Hollywood filmmaking.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

This one will be crucial to my own work as I am fiercely interested in these three areas of study in the era that comes directly after the one mention here (and is still ongoing). His text will be a guide and a constant companion during my future writing and study.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

Hollywood, heterogenous, homogenous, industry, ideology, style, conglomerates, history, change, auteur, tentpole, blockbuster, home video, “classical Hollywood style”

George Lucas’ Star Wars

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Stylistic analysis and critical interpretation have demonstrated conclusively that the meanings and motives of Hollywood films cannot be adequately understood without systematic explication of the architecture of Hollywood: the dominant frameworks and conventions, the historical contexts and the governing attitudes which enable certain films to be successfully made and marketed, others to fail, and countless others never to reach the multiplex or to disappear into ‘development hell’. (xii)

I hope to show, by contrast, that the stories Hollywood films tell – the kinds of stories they can tell – are profoundly influenced by, and responsive to, both concrete historical issues and events (such as anti-communism or the Vietnam War and its aftermath) as well as the ideological currents that circulate around and through such events and supply the terms on which they are available to be understood. Because this obviously does not happen in an unmediated or straightforward fashion, these chapters will pay extensive attention to generic trends, using genre as a means of mediating the relationship between film and social, political and economic contexts. (xv)

But European avant-garde techniques were typically ‘tamed’ and accommodated to Hollywood’s established needs (though as Henry Jenkins points out, one should not understate the degree of adjustment and destabilization involved in the ‘adoption of alien aesthetic norms’). The subjective camera work of German films […] – which became known in the trade as ‘Ufa shots’ – and even the montage techniques of 1920s Soviet cinema were normalized in this way. Short bursts of distorted imagery clearly marked as a character’s dream, derangement or intoxication came to feature in Hollywood films from the late 1920s and enhanced interiority in characterization. ‘Montage sequences’ meanwhile became such a standard Hollywood tool for compressing long periods of elapsed (narrative) time, repeated actions of a similar kind (a quick succession of a bar and nightclub vignettes interspersed with neon signage to portray a bar crawl, as in The Best Years of Our Lives) or important contextual information (such as the flood of refugees out of Nazi occupied Europe at the start of Casablanca), that studios created specialist units to produce them, and in the 1970s reflexive films such as Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York would knowingly recreate them as nostalgic homages to the classical style. (77)

The point, perhaps, is the unexceptionable one that the Hollywood style evolved alongside the system that begot it, and its classicism was – thoroughly in the American vein – a matter of pragmatism as much as, or more than, principle. (81)

It was less clear whether Bluhdorn had the prescience in 1966 to realize that acquiring a movie studio would give his company a strategic advantage in the rapid evolution the US economy was already undergoing. American white-collar workers had outnumbered blue-collar workers since 1956: the US had become the world’s first ‘post-industrial’ economy. The Paramount takeover was a first step towards what was not yet called the information economy – the intangible world of ideas, images, knowledge and the systems to deliver them which over the next thirty years would transform American business even as the old economy activities in which Gulf + Western were in 1966 so heavily invested continued to decline in both value and importance. (111)

As ‘diversification’ yielded to ‘synergy’ as buzzwords of the moment among business theorists and strategists, [giant conglomerates] would emerge retooled and rebranded as new species, the dedicated media conglomerate, tightly focused on the business of media and information in all its varieties. (111)

In so doing, they affected industry thinking in three particularly important ways. Firstly, such hits [as Love Story, The Godfather, The Exorcist, Jaws, and Star Wars] exerted an absolute domination over their competition, earning perhaps twice as much as the films placed second or third that year. Success is such as these could single-handedly sustain a studio’s yearly operations, underwriting less profitable and loss-making releases. […] The annual quest for such ‘tentpole’ pictures became a marked feature of studio filmmaking as the decade drew on. Second, Jaws and Star Wars in particular exponentially expanded the familiar post-war concept of an ‘event’ movie to an inescapable transmedia presence, something like a ubiquitous nationwide obsession. Audiences, it appeared, eagerly wished to participate – often repeatedly – in the ‘experience’ these ineffable phenomena offered. […] While there was no way to ensure a game-changing success such as Star Wars, massive promotional campaigns aimed at making the ‘brand identity’ of each new product unmissable and inescapable offered as good a chance as any. Finally, the post-Jaws mega-hits were alike in one other conspicuous regard: none were promoted on the basis of art or auteurism. (124-5)

A shared structure of feeling marks many Renaissance movies and connects them to the political climate of the time: that the values and institutions that had served America’s post-war generation had become, or had always been, illusory, and that Hollywood Cinema is culpable for persisting in and promulgating those values, and now shares in their bankruptcy. Without attempting (or having the tools or the inclination to attempt) a conventional or comprehensive political analysis of the reasons for America’s crisis of political and economic legitimacy, the Hollywood Renaissance set about what could best be described as an imminent critique of the ideology of Hollywood cinema itself. (176-7)

Yet this is a paradoxical project – to attack Hollywood using Hollywood’s own devices – and it has an appropriately paradoxical outcome. (178)

DVDs’ attractiveness as consumer products sparked off a new culture of collecting and library-building: an unexpected bonus for the studios was the appeal of boxed sets of TV series (many of them produced by the majors’ TV and cable divisions, like Time Warner’s HBO). The success of the DVD revolution saw the value of the studios’ libraries soar. (201-2)

For the studios, a home-run is a film from which a multimedia ‘franchise’ can be generated; the colossally expensive creation of cross-media conglomerates predicated on synergistic rewards provides an obvious imperative to develop such products. (207)

SF-fantasy and superhero franchises, replete with eye-catching artifacts (monsters, spaceships, lightsabers, ‘technical manuals’, and the like) are of course especially suitable for tie-in promotions and licensing activities targeted at children) toys, costumes, memorabilia, etc.) and also circulate within a pre-existing fan subculture receptive to memorabilia, collectibles and the like. The rise of SF and fantasy moreover offers an obvious showcase for spectacular state-of-the-art technologies of visual, sound and above all special-effects design, the key attractions that provide a summer release with crucial market leverage. The genre is well suited to the construction of simplified, action-oriented narratives with accordingly enhanced worldwide audience appeal, potential for the facile generation of profitable sequels (often, as with the two Jurassic Park sequels, virtual reprises), and ready adaptability into profitable tributary media such as computer games and rides at studio-owned amusement parks. (207)

Their [the ‘regressive texts’ made in the Reagan era and beyond] distinctive contribution was to stake out a terrain of cultural politics around the politics of private life, family, gender and (to a lesser degree) sexuality that marked a clear break with the public-policy preoccupations of their seventies precursors. […] To the extent that Hollywood films during his presidency adopted Reaganism, they mostly did so less in terms of explicit New Right ideology (with the partial exception of foreign policy) than through a similar reliance on streamlined, affirmative and restorative fictions, deploying both renovated and new generic forms to do so. (221)

The advent of new digital technologies in the 1990s, ubiquitous by the end of the century, move the action film in both obvious and not-so-obvious ways. The most apparent, of course, was the capacity via computer generated imagery (CGI) to deliver spectacle on a scale unknown since the fifties widescreen era and with a degree of verisimilitude never approached before. A bifurcation started to emerge within the blockbuster. On the one hand, large scale fantasy adventures […] heavily marketed to youthful audiences, moved away from any visible connection to social or personal relations beyond a sort of residual nod to heterosexual romance. Other films meanwhile, especially a series of increasingly colossally scaled natural disaster movies, […] along with some comic book superhero adaptations […] and above all the Harry Potter franchise, all return insistently and almost obsessively to themes around parents and children. Both options might be thought to reflect the increasing importance of the family (meaning child) audience/market to the blockbuster as an industrial product. In terms of ideology, the increasingly virtual greenscreen environments in which these narratives take place tend to abstract them from any evident social relation – which of course may partly be the point. (234-5)

Various reasons might be suggested for this [lack of radical films] beyond studio executives obvious reluctance to court political controversy. One might be that whereas, as we have seen, the Hollywood Renaissance was enabled by circumstances including the industries severe financial crisis of 1969-72, no comparable industry-wide malaise afflicted Hollywood in the 1990s. On the contrary, not withstanding periodic bouts of introspection and anxiety about increasing costs and formulaic blockbuster production such as those expressed in Jeffrey katzenberg’s 1989 memo, this was a period of rising revenues and expanding markets. If the apple cart was not upset, in the eyes of the studios there was no justification for radical departures from convention. […] the socio-historical context lacked the critical mass of protest, war, violence and governmental malfeasance that drove politics on to American screens in the 1970s. America’s problems at the turn of the millennium seemed (prior to 9/11, Iraq and the crash of 2008) chronic rather than acute and consequently both hard to dramatize […] and apparently lacking in urgency. (238)

These analyses offer a powerful account ofA different, less judgmental (of filmmakers and, implicitly, audiences) take on this might simply say that changing assumptions about audience preferences and capabilities have been a necessary part of Hollywood practice since before the shift to features. Given that films are now more likely to be consumed on home video than in cinemas, directors may elect to give audiences more than they can handle at one viewing in the knowledge that there can always be a second, and third, aided if needs be with the pause/frame advance button to catch the fleeting or suggestive detail. Of course, Hollywood has often misunderstood or underestimated its public, but so have cultural commentators: in light of assertions about the cinema of postmodern attractions, it’s also worth noting that early cinema provoked somewhat similar jeremiads from contemporaries whose class or cultural location predisposed them to disapprove of the new medium. the workings of the contemporary blockbuster. However, their force is at least partly dissipated if the blockbuster spectacle can be shown to be less novel, or its consequences for narrative less apocalyptic, than has been claimed; and a good deal of skeptical scholarship has set out to prove exactly that. One immediate difficulty is how far they seem to rely on an outright opposition of narrative and spectacle which, as we have already seen, is not borne out by the history of Hollywood cinema. Spectacular elements, often highly intrusive and in strictly narrative terms excessive if not superfluous – like extravagant musical numbers or panoramic views of casts of thousands – have co-existed with more straightforward storytelling throughout much of Hollywood history. The historically exceptional sobriety of the immediately proceeding Hollywood Renaissance – a stylistic shift driven, as we have seen, by industrial and institutional factors – threw the re-emergence of spectacle into high relief and made it seem more novel than it might have done otherwise. So we surely do not have to rewind film history all the way back to Griffith and beyond to find sources for the kinds of dominating visuals associated with contemporary blockbusters. (251)

Allusionism thus became another Renaissance-era tactic repurposed for the 1990s. A culture of referencing older films remains very much part of contemporary Hollywood, but both the film-historical co-ordinates and the intention of these illusions have changed. […] But once identified, there is nothing much else to say: the critical stance that informed the illusionism and genre of revisionism of the 1970s and linked them back to their social contexts has been supplanted by a hermetic, pure textuality with no ‘larger’ agenda. (259)

A different, less judgmental (of filmmakers and, implicitly, audiences) take on this might simply say that changing assumptions about audience preferences and capabilities have been a necessary part of Hollywood practice since before the shift to features. Given that films are now more likely to be consumed on home video than in cinemas, directors may elect to give audiences more than they can handle at one viewing in the knowledge that there can always be a second, and third, aided if needs be with the pause/frame advance button to catch the fleeting or suggestive detail. Of course, Hollywood has often misunderstood or underestimated its public, but so have cultural commentators: in light of assertions about the cinema of postmodern attractions, it’s also worth noting that early cinema provoked somewhat similar jeremiads from contemporaries whose class or cultural location predisposed them to disapprove of the new medium. (261)

Perhaps then post-classical style consists in this consciousness – present and visible at every stage of the conceptualization, production, distribution and exhibition of a Hollywood film – that [it] is the world beyond film that in fact defines it. (263)

It should not be forgotten, however, that ‘classical Hollywood cinema’ was, when these men created it, not ‘classical’ at all, but an entirely new way of creating and delivering mass entertainment. By the same token, there seems little reason to doubt that what the world still knows as Hollywood will continue to reinvent itself for the as-yet-unforeseeable entertainment worlds of the next fifty years. Above and beyond any defined or definable set of stylistic parameters or industrial practices, this ongoing reinvention may be the most classical of all Hollywood’s enduring traditions. (282-3)

Concepts in Film Theory by Dudley Andrew

by

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr

Andrew, Dudley. 1984. Concepts in Film Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

In his follow up to Major Film Theories, which looked at the world of pre-1960s film theory through investigations, theorist by theorist, into the big ideas of film theory of the era, Dudley Andrew inverts his methods to instead follow the broader range of film theories roughly between the mid 60s and early 80s. Here he’ll ping-pong back and forth between theorists as he works through a progression of central ideas, categorized by different focuses. Since many theorists are interested in, say, both “identification” and “figuration,” you’re likely to see the same names pop up throughout the text (Mitry, Metz, Barthes, Lacan, all the hits). Writing in the mid 80s, Andrew is enamored with the semiotic and figural theories that dominated the discourse of high theory at the time.

And make no mistake, this is the highest of high film theory. It isn’t an introductory text, either, as Andrew doesn’t do enough to introduce the ideas, terms, or their relationships he’s writing about here so the novice (or not-so-novice) reader can fully follow along. Indeed, as focused as he is on the brainiest of the brainy, he largely ignores the rumblings of other kinds of theory that have since come into fashion (thankfully!). These include feminist film theory (I noticed 3 total women cited in this text, and one of those was a throwaway reference to Susan Sontag), most of cultural theory (which gets passing nods here and there), and any mention of anybody who isn’t heavily invested in the overly jargon-laden high theoretical discussions Andrew loves diving into here. I tend to lean towards that kind of writing as being not just obscure and obtuse but also just not super useful to me as the authors (and Andrew is no exception here) tend to be more invested in showing off their theoretical muscles rather than doing any real heavy lifting.

Anyways, here’s the breakdown of the chapters, which I’m going to keep to basically just a table of contents because, though the ideas feed into each other, each idea is difficult enough to understand in Andrew’s attempt at summary and even more difficult to understand in conjunction with each other. Suffice to say that Andrew’s project is to build up to the area of theory that he feels is most useful in the final chapter by way of showing how each chapter generally leads to the next, which takes what was in the previous chapter(s) and adds another layer on top.

The State of Film Theory

Perception

Representation

Signification

Narrative Structure

Adaptation

Valuation (of Genres and Auteurs)

Identification

Figuration

Interpretation

He concludes by writing that interpretation of figures in film theory is the most valuable current (again, published in ’84) way of dealing with film texts. He’s big into hermeneutics, which is great for him.

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Andrew doesn’t do a whole ton of debating himself, he mostly lets summaries of film theories duke it out among themselves. As I wrote about above, this book is definitely a product of its time, that time being an era when film theory with a capital F and T was at a premium, and when the text was seemingly less important (given the absence of films almost throughout this book). As a tract which is apparently written to both give an overview of the, well, concepts in film theory as well as advocate for the author’s choice in the vague hierarchy he sets up here, it fails almost entirely. I could pick out nuggets of useful/decipherable writing here and there, but for the large part I was floundering around for a handhold to grasp onto. It seems that Andrew is trying to be at the center of the field, pulling everything together into one relatively small book. But instead he mostly feels like he’s positioning himself above the field, subtly and not-so-subtly suggesting what is important and what is a waste of time. Fine if you agree with him, kind of terrible if you don’t.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Like Feminist Film Studies by Janet McCabe, the idea here is to create an overview of the field via short summaries of the major theoretical areas of interest at the time of the book’s writing. There is some sense of a development over time, though this happens under the top level of the book’s discourse, popping its head up here and there rather than coming at its forefront as it does in McCabe’s text. Importantly, it also lacks any real engagement with films themselves, instead Andrew suffices with an overly generalized conception of the cinema and the film without attending to any meaningful examples. The few times he did use an example to illustrate a point were also, not coincidentally, the few times where I was able to follow along for paragraphs at a time.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Andrew’s most obvious and important bit of rhetoric is the structure of the text, which presents the concepts of film theory as a kind of twirling vine wrapping itself around a pole. As the book progresses, the vine grows and new ideas are added to the old all the while reaching towards the zenith that is hermeneutic interpretation. Great. We did it.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

I don’t engage with this text. It is a text written to engage only those who are already true believers in the gospel of high theory, and I am decidedly not that.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

perception, representation, signification, narrative structure, adaptation, valuation, genres, auteurs, identification, figuration, interpretation, sign, signifier, signified, figure, hermeneutics,perception, representation, signification, narrative structure, adaptation, valuation, genres, auteurs, identification, figuration, interpretation, sign, signifier, signified, figure, hermeneutics,

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

For this is the state of film theory as it has come to be, an accumulation of concepts, or, rather, of ideas and attitudes clustered around concepts. Film theory is, in short, a verbal representation of the film complex. (3)

In sum, film theory today consists primarily in thinking through, elaborating, and critiquing the key metaphors by which we seek to understand (and control) the cinema complex. This can be done only in public, discursive events, in classrooms, journals, and conferences. It can be done only collectively. (12)

The questions named by the terms perception, representation, signification, narration, adaptation, valuation, identification, figuration, and interpretation have always been with film theory. Yet these new names are not merely the product of pretension and fad. They are a response to the social reconstruction of the terrain of the humanities. Film theory has not only profited from that reconstruction, but has actively contributed to it by recognizing itself as a social practice and picturing and repicturing our understanding of film, of society, and of art. This is the basis of its growth and its pride. (17-8)

In other words, realism in the cinema is driven by a desire to make the audience ignore the process of signification and to grasp directly the film’s plot or intrigue; for most film viewers, the plot is precisely and fully what a film represents. In this way realism stabilizes the temporal dimension of film, turning the flow of pictures into a single large picture whose process of coming into being has been hidden behind the effect of its plot. (48)

This, I would say, has been the mark of the 1970s, to contaminate a limpid structuralism with the living processes of interpretation and to thwart the egalitarian ideal that made all texts equal as versions of the same structure (the same myth). instead, post structuralism has upheld the priority of texts that question themselves and thereby seem to rewrite themselves for every epoch. (95)

In sum, the category of figuration is paramount because it involves structure and process simultaneously, and because by its very nature it insists on the primacy of interpretation. In this, it helps write the topsy-turvy world of film studies by restoring to the text themselves an integrity worthy of discussion, and by fostering an interplay of theory and interpretation rather than a dominance of the former. (159)

Interpretation invokes the context for meaning and establishes whatever is pertinent about such meaning. History is one of its most common guises as it brings the “otherness” of texts into the life of individuals and cultures. (172)

Film, A Sound Art by Michel Chion

by

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner

Chion, Michel. 2009. Film, A Sound Art. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

In this giant text, Michel Chion attempts to revise the way we think of film’s relation to sound, specifically to move towards a way of thinking about images and sounds in an inextricably entwined way such that any analysis which takes the two realms as separate (or even ignores one) would be seen as fundamentally deficient. In an attempt to make his argument as forcefully as possible, Chion splits his text into two parts, with the first tracing the technical and aesthetic history of sound’s relation to image in cinema before a longer section that sees him more thoroughly investigating some of the claims, theoretical nooks and crannies, and expansions of the ideas first presented in the history section.

The history section contains Chion’s most thoroughly organized thoughts on how ideas about sound’s integration with image developed via a complex interrelation between technological advancements, artistic experimentation, and cultural factors (the prevalence of disembodied sound via the radio, for example). Here he calls what is traditionally termed “silent” cinema “deaf cinema” instead (a play on the French term “mute cinema”) because it was never silent in the first place, it just couldn’t fully respond to the sounds that were being played alongside the images. He also claims, convincingly, that sound film is a palimpsestic art form where the silence of the first type of cinema remains underneath the integrated sound film, waiting for the soundtrack to die down to return. In this section he also writes about the way that the technology advancements of the 70s (problematically but still effectively collected under the branded Dolby designation), which featured not just the splitting of audio tracks into locationally distinct speaker locations (aka surround sound) but also a broader dynamic range of possible sounds, allowed for the (re)development of impressionistic creation of space via sound. The introduction of digital recording and playback is the last technological advancement that Chion writes of in this section, and he claims that it allows for true silence in a way that optically recorded and played sound couldn’t, as well as the further development of microediting sounds that makes sound effects a more powerful and varied tool for filmmakers.

The second part of Chion’s text takes a different tack, abandoning a linear progression of events and developments for a topic-by-topic trip through the various ways that sound and image relate to each other on film. One big theme that runs through this section is that the relationship between those two realms is not nearly as neat or easy to understand as it seems. He calls the audiovisual relationship a continuous “vertical” Kuleshov effect because at every moment the image is influencing how we perceive the sounds while the sounds influence how we perceive the images (231). Sounds come from different realms, ranging from simple on-screen representation to complicated interplays of off-screen sounds and music and dialogue that can greatly effect how an image is understood.

Chion also writes about how sound creates a sense of time and place within (alongside? throughout?) a film. Because sounds have a definite duration (even if that duration is endless) they are the elements of film that create time more profoundly than the shot, the image, which might be as short or as long as the director wants. A ticking clock creates a sense of time much more than the image of a clock does. Similarly, the filmmaker can use sound to create a sense of an expansive vista with wind sounds and the recorded (or recreated) sounds of bugs chirping in such a way that gives more life to the image of such a scene. Sound can expand beyond the screen, and so can be used to manipulate the way an audience feels about the images they are seeing on that screen.

Chion writes also of the critical role voice plays in film, noting that even films that decenter intelligible speech (the works of Tati, to call out Chion’s favorite exemplar) still rely upon the vocal to structure the film and specifically the sounds of the film. Even sounds of speech that cannot be distinguished from each other and given their full meaning are being used to specifically deny the vocal’s power. He also writes that the voice might be considered another kind of special effect as actors manipulate their voices for volume, intelligibility, and timbre, to say nothing of post-processing that further changes that vocal performance. Of course, voices can sing as well, and join in with the musical element of filmmaking, and we all know examples of dialogue that have been called melodic. Again, things are not easily categorizable.

Finally, Chion writes convincingly about the way that music structures film experiences, as most films do not feature a full-length score. The music then becomes an important signifier of crucial moments, either as a type of drumroll that sets up an important action, scene, or bit of dialogue, or instead plays underneath such an event to color that event differently (either increasing or decreasing the intensity of the event or instead providing some other way of thinking about it entirely). Music with words, Chion argues, is largely useful for turning the specifics of a scene into a more universally applicable situation. A love scene with a song featuring lyrics about “she and he” or “you and I” turns that love scene into a scene about all romantic pairings, including ones featuring the “I” of an audience member.

Chion concludes the book by writing about how sound is used to “equalize” film, to smooth off the edges of the film viewing experience to create something immediately understandable and graspable in the way that, he says, great art does. It returns us, he claims, to the state of the child experiencing things anew and marveling at the way they work rather than categorizing them into hierarchies in the way that our society would expect of us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG-HRiBWrlM

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

The scholar most frequently cited in this text is Rick Altman, the other major theorist who wrote primarily about the use of sound in film. Even then, he is most frequently cited to say that another scholar has indeed already touched upon the idea at hand. Chion doesn’t overly reference other scholars, instead taking a pretty (although not entirely) wide base of films up for discussion as his method for ensuring a breadth of ideas. It is clear, from the title through the text itself, that Chion’s project is an intervention into the discussion of aesthetics, poetics, and the history of film arguing that those areas of film scholarship have ignored or downplayed the importance of sound to film. Even though the introduction of sound is indeed a large part of film history, Chion still thinks that scholars have not yet fully understood or dealt with the implications of its introduction on cinema or lasting effects.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

As I wrote about above, the book is split into two parts. In the first half the ideas are presented chronologically, following the development of sound technologies, strategies, and effects as they were introduced to film. In this section the technology becomes the dominant element, and the theory and examples come out of it. In the second section, which is arranged thematically around big ideas or kinds of film sounds, Chion will often start with one big idea or term before outlining several different ways that cinema has operationalized those ideas or terms via copious examples. This might also happen several times in a chapter as Chion touches upon a few different but related ideas or bits of theory.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

The biggest rhetorical move that Chion engages in is to first call forth a (bad or incomplete) understanding of how something related to sound in film works before explaining why it is wrong and then explaining his way of conceiving it. This works pretty well for his project to assert the importance of sound in the analysis of film.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

Probably the biggest complaint one might make in regards to Chion’s text (aside from its length!) is the somewhat limited scope of his filmic examples. He brags at one point about how he’s not afraid to look at the non-auteurist works that his fellow French theorist apparently ignore. But that largely amounts to an obsession with (the admittedly great) Blade Runner and everybody’s favorite, Hitchcock. The rest of his examples come from American and European Art House movies with brief stays in Japan ever few chapters. This aligns him pretty strongly with the stuffy movies that people think film theorists usually write about. Plenty of Tarkovsky and Bresson here, for example. He claims to be working on a book that would complement this one focused on world cinema, and I hope he does eventually publish it if only to broaden his scope beyond the staid grounds he’s mostly treading here.

Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

He’s got a whole glossary and invents a new term or two every chapter, so he’s got a heck of a lot of key terms. The ones that stick out for me are: sound, image, synchresis, time, space, music, voice, Dolby, silence, montage, onscreen, offscreen, the “fundamental noise of cinema,” realism

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

The “whirring of the machine” is, of course, the first noise of the cinema. This noise that would persist, concretely or symbolically, into the sound film is what I call the fundamental noise, in other words the sound that refers ultimately to the projection mechanism itself. (8)

This is what the so-called sound cinema made possible, even when films were not taking advantage of its ability to make dialogue audible. The new cinema standardized film projection speeds once and for all (at twenty-four frames per second, imposed by the demands of sound reproduction), whereas previously both cameras and projectors could run at variable speeds, generally anywhere between twelve and twenty frames per second. Henceforth the cinema could literally count on constancy in the reproduction of actors movements and gestures. Moreover, it allowed the auteur director, the era’s king (think of Stroheim before his problems with the studios or of Murnau, Gance, Eisenstein, and Clair), to control the music – and the silence – down to the second and to know that all audiences would hear exactly what he desired. (35)

But even before Dolby, in the history of the sound film, sound slowly expanded farther into the low and high frequency ranges; It became denser and more refined. This often went unnoticed. No one said at a particular moment that the sound was different. But things on the screen were perceived to have more physical presence, and the film’s time became more urgent. […] On the screen everything looks right, but in the découpage, the construction of screen space, everything has changed. The image no longer establishes the scenic space – sound does that – now the image only presents points of view on it. (119)

There is no pure silent cinema on one side and sound (or talking) cinema on the other; they mutually implicate each other. (184)

The absence of a clear rhetoric for sound is also linked to the absence of any symbolic mediator of our hearing, something that would function as the “symbolic microphone” allowing us to participate in the effects and at the same time keep our distance from them, a double position readily occupied by the “symbolic camera.” (212)

Indeed, as I see it, the audiovisual relation is 90% a generalized Kuleshov effect, but it is a Kuleshov effect that is “vertical” (through the projection of one element onto another simultaneously) instead of “horizontal” (projection of the meaning or the effect of one element onto another that precedes or follows it), such that it is much more immediate and perennially produces an illusion of redundancy. (231)

Synchresis can thus override the perception of realism. Cinema has created codes of “truth” – in fact what feels true – that have nothing to do with what is true. Cinema prefers the symbol, the emblematic sound, over the sound of reality. The proof is the alarm or siren sound in city scenes. (241)

Can’t we say that the voice is the mother of all special effects – one that requires the least technology and expense? A good actor or comic imitator, and practically anyone who has had some training and practice, is capable of altering his or her voice and giving it all kinds of inflections, using only the natural bodily resources that nature has provided. Moreover, an individual’s voice changes through life much more than his or her face changes (this is particularly so for males, whose vocal timbre changes significantly at puberty). Though it is common to see facial features in childhood photos that survive in the grown adults, there is unlikely to be any relation between an individual’s voice as a child and his or her voice in middle age. (337)

A song would seem, a priori, to be the opposite of a talking film: the first is set to music while films are mostly spoken; a song is often composed of verse, with rhyme and rhythm, while movie dialogue is in prose. A song posits an I, you, he, and she that are indeterminate, often symbolic or generalized, while sound films present specific characters. A song takes place over a short, highly structured length of time with predictable symmetries and repetitions, while a film is expected to advance without repeating itself. Finally, a song can have extremely varied modes of existence – played with instruments only, hummed, whistled, shouted, la-la-la’d, recited – while dialogue most often comes in only one form. It is precisely because the song is so different that above and beyond its centrality to musicals, in many films it takes the role of a pivot or turntable, a point of contact. The song opens a horizon, a perspective, and escape route for characters mired in their individual story. The song is what often creates a link between individual characters’ destinies and the human collectivity to which they belong. When we hear a film referring to “you and me,” in a scene where two characters are getting together or breaking apart, we think of a “she” and a “he” that transcend the woman and man we see on the screen. We leave behind any individual psychologism that often circumscribes the sound film. (428)

These fundamental noises are like reminders of the sound of the movie projector, the mechanical place from which the film unwinds to begin and then returns at its end. The fundamental noise – always a complex sound mass – is the emergence of the background noise of the film’s apparatus; it represents the sound out of which everything emerges and into which everything melts back and is reabsorbed. (454)

Film Form by Sergei Eisenstein

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Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin

Eisenstein, Sergei. 1949. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Translated by Jay Leyda. New York City: Harcourt Inc.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Sergei Eisenstein writes (though several of these were transcripts of speeches, too) as a filmmaker and theorist who is deeply invested in the ideological implications of the film form that he writes about. Primarily, Eisenstein affirms the value of montage (as a way of presenting inner thought via the collision of images) in opening the possibilities inherent in cinema (as opposed to other artistic media) for promoting the collectivity and solidarity of socialism. Occasionally Eisenstein dips into uncomfortable territory, especially as he writes about the Japanese cinema and, in a somewhat strange digression, Alexandre Dumas, with an unfortunate tendency to dip into cultural and racial stereotypes. He also has a clear bias towards the Soviet cinema for its ideological and formal superiority. As the book is more a collection of essays, I’ll hit the highlights of those instead of trying to pull them all together here, likely missing something in the process.

“Through Theater to the Cinema” – your standard early film theory trope of distinguishing the form from other related forms. Here Eisenstein claims that the shot is the “minimum ‘distortable’ fragment of nature” and that the cinema derives its power from its “natural” ability to capture reality and re-present it differently via montage.

“The Unexpected” – the first of two essays looking at Japanese forms for their relation to the cinema. This first looks at kabuki theater for its “monistic ensemble,” or how each element (sound, costume, action, etc.) is interrelated. This is the start of his later ideas about the evolutions of montage into an organic mechanism.

“The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram” – the second of the Japanese-related essays looks at how the “hieroglyphs” of Japanese writing does what montage does by combining two image-based expressions to create a wholly new expression. It is this which allows for the creator’s imposition upon the events of a film, and it is that process which he refers to as a collision which is like the explosions that drive an internal combustion engine. This is in direct opposition to Kuleshov, who likens montage to links in a chain or bricks arranged to make a building. There is conflict in Eisenstein’s conception that is absent in Kuleshov’s.

“A Dialectic Approach to Film Form” – Here Eisenstein builds upon the collision idea he developed in the previous essay to write about how montage comes from untangling the inherent conflict in a single image. He writes that one image invites the next because of its composition, and that when done correctly, the collision of those images can be used not only to direct emotion, as happens in many films, but also to direct thought processes (more on this later).

“The Filmic Fourth Dimension” – Eisenstein expands upon the previous essays by writing about the “orthodox” montage style, which uses a key image, usually early in the montage sequence, to guide the way audiences think about the other images present in the montage. He offers that his newest film, Old and New, was assembled differently such that each image was given equal weight, no one image was dominant, which created a “complex” “summary” effect similar to over and undertones in symphonic music (66). These overtones, which he says will inspire a new sensory response not of “I see” or “I hear” but “I feel,” will not be findable in a single image just the way a moment of music won’t reveal the complex relationships between the sounds that develop over time. Only projected film that unfolds over time will reveal the overtonal nature of the montage.

“Methods of Montage” – In this essay Eisenstein categorizes the ways of assembling montage, from “metric” (adhering to strict mathematical formulas), to rhythmic (an evolution of the prior which adjusts its speeds according to the feeling present), to tonal (montage with an emphasis on the “general tone” of the piece (75)), to overtonal (as discussed in the previous essay, which is tonal (dominant idea) plus overtones (shading according to creator’s desires). The idea is that each successive type of montage grows from complicating the prior one by adding new ideas to it such that the overtonal montage builds to a level where it can create phsysiological reactions in the audience. He concludes the essay by positing that a fifth type of montage might be possible, one which would take the overtonal ideas an apply them not to emotions but ways of thinking. Through such a kind of montage, the audience might be directed to think differently.

“A Course in Treatment” – Eisenstein goes a long way into literary theory to eventually arrive at the idea that the modernists like James Joyce were invested in presenting inner thought via written language, but that cinema can achieve that goal better because only cinema can juxtapose those images in such a way that it recreates the thought process of Free Indirect Discourse. Maybe he had never read a comic?

“Film Language” – a lot of Russian lit that I’m not familiar with enough to really get a full picture of his ideas in this one, unfortunately. He ends it by exhorting his fellow filmmakers to not only become great storytellers but great masters of their chosen form as well, for how a story is told as important as the story itself. That’s all I got.

“Film Form: New Problems” – In this essay Eisenstein recognizes that film montage is dependent upon synecdoche (paging Perez!), which is a way of representing inner thought (this thing is part of this other thing, or this other thing has this as its part) and that such a technique is able to create “emotional sensual” effects (133). He concludes by noting film’s dialectical drives, one upwards on a path towards intellectual enlightenment, and one downwards towards the basest emotional responses. The idea, he says, is to get as far up the intellectual climb as you can while using those emotional response to compel the viewer.

“The Structure of the Film” – Here Eisenstein is concerned with how film can not only show events happening but impart a sense of the artist’s ideas about those events. This is the point of art, he claims. He also develops in this essay his other big idea, the sense of organic completeness that a film might achieve. He claims that if art can achieve this organic completeness (akin to the ideas of kabuki theater from an earlier essay where every element is related to each other and working towards expressing one main idea through emotion), it can create an ecstatic feeling in the audience member that will result in changing them profoundly. This is all wrapped up in some questionable “natural” rhetoric, but the idea is solid on its own I think.

“Achievement” – A return to two themes that run through the book: 1. Cinema is the highest art because it is a combination of the others but not bound by their limitations, and 2. The Soviets are better at it than everybody else. He calls cinema the first truly synthetic medium because it allows each form of art to exist independently within it, simultaneously coalescing into an “organic essence” (193).

“Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today” – This essay finds Eisenstein primarily concerned with looking to the so called “masters” of the past for traces of what he’s talked about in the other essays in order to define a pre-history of cinematic thought. From Dickens he sees a desire to observe and juxtapose (or collide) characters, images, and ideas to create new combinations without destroying the singularity of the original images. He claims that Griffith, the American filmmaker he thinks is best at montage, can only create basic relational chains between images, while the Soviets are already adept at not only linking images but also unifying them in the same organic completeness he wrote about earlier. So take that, Griffith. And you’re a racist, too.

The two biggest takeaways are:

  1. Montage is about collisions of images which create entirely new ideas and feelings in the audience’s head.
  2. The highest ideal of montage is to create an entire film that marshals all of the elements (characters, plot, montage, shots, sound) to an “organically complete” whole which will change an audience member’s way of thinking about a particular thing.

Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Eisenstein occasionally clashes with other Soviet theorists (Kuleshov, as mentioned above), but that’s about it on the debating front. So early in film theory’s history, his place was to stake out a position rather than to converse too much with others, because there weren’t that many others writing at this time. Of course, his career as a filmmaker influences his writing as well, and he thinks highly of himself in that regard. It is also important to consider that some of these were or started as speeches, which involve different kinds of rhetorical engagement than an essay does. And obviously his legacy lives on as somebody with whom many theorists today still converse with in their writing about film form.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Eisenstein seems to have set out in each essay to get one main idea across, he’ll usually introduce the main idea before delving into specifics and then concluding with a final statement (that often either points towards a new way of thinking or filmmaking) to solidify his thesis. Most of his essays take his own films as examples, though he occasionally looks elsewhere (Japan, Griffith) as well.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Eisenstein writes (or is transcribed) in a way that attempts to capture the passion he obviously has for the theory and ideas he’s presenting in these essays. Italics, short paragraphs, photo stills and graphics enhance his persuasive attempts. He’ll also build upon what he’s said before, often referencing the prior essay in the book explicitly. This creates a sense of a life’s work that is in constant development. He’ll readily denigrate ideas and styles of filmmaking (and montage specifically) that he thinks are out of touch or outmoded.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

I probably won’t look to Eisenstein first for most of my own writing and idea formation, but it’s great to have a stronger sense of his ideas as I dive into later theorists who reference him a lot. I also bristle at the easy and un(der)developed appeal to nature that he pulls several times in this book, even if I am drawn to his explanation of an organically complete work that is entirely devoted to getting one idea across.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

nature, organic, complete, montage, overtonal, pathos, synecdoche, collision, dialectical, internal thought, film form

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

The shot, considered as material for the purpose of composition, is more resistant than granite. This resistance is specific to it. The shot’s tendency toward complete factual immutability is rooted in its nature. This resistance has largely determined the richness and variety of montage forms and styles – for montage becomes the mightiest means for a really important creative remolding of nature. Thus the cinema is able, more than any other art, to disclose the process that goes on microscopically in all other arts. The minimum “distortable” fragment of nature is the shot; ingenuity in its combinations is montage. (5)

By what, then, is montage characterized and, consequently, it’s cell – the shot? By collision. By the conflict of two pieces in opposition to each other. By conflict. By collision. (37)

In distinction from orthodox montage according to particular dominance, Old and New was edited differently. In place of an “aristocracy” of individualistic dominance we brought a method of “democratic” equality of rights for all provocations, or stimuli, regarding them as a summary, as a complex. (66)

What takes place in acoustics, and particularly in the case of instrumental music, fully corresponds with this. There, along with the vibration of a basic dominant tone, comes a whole series of similar vibrations, which are called overtones and undertones. Their impacts against each other, their impacts with the basic tone, and so on, envelop the basic tone and a whole host of secondary vibrations. If in acoustics these collateral vibrations become merely “disturbing” elements, these same vibrations and music – in composition, become one of the most significant means for affect by the experimental composers of our century, such as Debussy and Scriabin. (66)

The dialectic of works of art is built upon a most curious “dual-unity.” The effectiveness of a work of art is built upon the fact that there takes place in it a dual process: an impetuous progressive rise along the lines of the highest explicit steps of consciousness and a simultaneous penetration by means of the structure of the form into the layers of our profoundest sensual thinking. The polar separation of these two lines of flow creates that remarkable tension of unity of form and content characteristic of true art-works. Apart from this there are no true art-works. (144-5)

Evidently, whatever may be the kind of organic-ness in it, the work has a completely individual affect on its perceivers, not only because it is raised to the level of natural phenomena, but also because the laws of its construction are simultaneously the laws governing those who perceive the work, inasmuch as this audience is also part of organic nature. Each spectator feels himself organically related, fused, united with a work of such a type, just as he senses himself united and fused with organic nature around him. (161)

Only when the work becomes organic, only when it can enter the conditions of a higher organic-ness – into the field of pathos as we understand it, when the theme and content and idea of the work become an organically continuous unity with the ideas, the feelings, with the very breath of the author. Only when organic-ness itself takes on the strictest forms of constructing a work, only when the artistry of a master’s perceptions reach the last gleam of formal perfection. Then and only then will occur a genuine organic-ness of a work, which enters the circle of natural and social phenomena as a fellow member with equal rights, as an independent phenomenon. (174)

Only in cinema can real events, preserving all the richness of material and sensual fullness, be simultaneously – epic, in the revelation of their content, dramatic, in the treatment of their subject, and lyrical to that degree of perfection from which is echoed the most delicate nuance of the author’s experience of the theme – possible only in such an exquisite model of form as the system of audiovisual images of the cinema. When a film-work, or any part of one achieves this triple dramatic synthesis, its impressive power is particularly great. (190)

For here – in cinema – for the first time we have achieved a genuinely synthetic art – an art of organic synthesis in its very essence, not a concert of co-existent, contiguous, “linked,” but actually independent arts. (193-4)

For us montage became a means of achieving a unity of higher order – a means through the montage image of achieving an organic embodiment of a single idea conception, embracing all elements, parts, details of the film work. And thus understood, it seems considerably broader than an understanding of narrowly cinematographic montage; thus understood, it carries much to fertilize and enrich our understanding of art methods in general. And in conformity with this principle of our montage, unity and diversity are both sounded as principles. Montage removes its last contradictions by abolishing dualist contradictions and mechanical parallelism between the realms of sound and sight and what we understand as audio-visual (“vertical”) montage. (254)

White by Richard Dyer

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Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner

Dyer, Richard. 2017. White. 20th Anniversary Edition. New York City: Routledge.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Richard Dyer’s purpose in White is to examine what had previously gone relatively unexamined in the realm of cultural criticism and identity-based investigations into the meanings and constructions of race, specifically whiteness. He conceives of whiteness as a cultural void, a non-identity which allows other aspects of identity (sexuality, gender, religion, (dis)ability, etc.) to come to the fore. Whiteness is seen as the norm, but a norm which has no real form such that anybody who falls outside of it is automatically and unrecoverably marked by their inability to meet its basic criteria. Whites are the basic humans, at least in the realm of visual representation that Dyer focuses on (and which he argues forms much of the basis for how we think about the world). That is, to be white is to be afforded a basic humanity while every other skin color must argue, fight, and try to retain their humanity via strategies that often depend upon them changing themselves to seem more white (either in skin tone or action).

Dyer doesn’t leave it at that, though, as he works in theories of embodiment, which allow him to show how whiteness is connected to religion (via Christianity’s concept of a body/spirit connection that transfers to whiteness), science (via biological and genealogical conceptions of race that have been used to create hierarchies of bodies), and enterprise/imperialism (via ideas about what kinds of bodies can perform the actions of empire because they are perceived as being more able to work and persevere). Dyer also notably describes whiteness as instable, because it must contain paradoxes of “a need to always be everything and nothing, literally overwhelmingly present and yet apparently absent, both alive and dead,” an instability which allows it to have great strength as an enticement (you too can be white if you conform to these ideals) and a promise of flexibility (if you’re on the lower levels of whiteness you can move up just by making these changes) (39).

Dyer next turns to three senses of the word “white” to examine how white as a hue, skin color, and symbol form three distinct meanings and ways of thinking about whiteness but between which slippages occur such that white, which is conceived of as the lack of color (the hue meaning) melds with the symbolic meaning of purity and transcendence to imbue white skin, and particularly the unblemished white woman’s skin, as the ultimate symbol of purity and goodness (and which must be used to reproduce, which brings heterosexuality into the picture as well). In the next section he looks at technologies of visual representation, from print (white blankness marked with black spots that create meaning) to painting, to photochemical technologies like film. Here whiteness is linked to translucency, especially from the magic lantern on, and that translucency is linked with the un/realness of the visual image. Whiteness is then both very real but also nothing much at all, as Dyer previously posited. This section contains the part of this book that I’ve read before, which looks at the way that film and lighting techniques for the cinema were developed to represent the white face first and foremost, with any deviance from that posing a “problem.”

In the next two chapters (which I admittedly skimmed), Dyer puts the ideas he developed in the first three chapters of his book to work in analyzing first the set of films which feature heavily muscled white men (usually in foreign locations as agents (stated or implied) of empire), then a tv show which looks at the concepts of whiteness and empire through a more woman-oriented lens. In both cases, Dyer goes deep into analysis to show the multifaceted, sometimes surprising ways that whiteness operates in these kinds of visual representations.

Finally, Dyer concludes with a look at whiteness and death, two concepts which are linked in the figures of androids (Blade Runner and Alien), vampires, and zombies. He notes that horror and sci-fi are the places where white filmmakers can reckon with the problems and fears associated with whiteness, primarily the connection between paleness and death. He wraps up the book by positing the concepts of “ordinary” and “extreme” whiteness, the latter of which only exists in these horror spaces and a few real-world instances (he points to the midcentury fascists who operated on explicit white supremacy) and to which “ordinary” whiteness can point and say, see, I’m not that, that’s extreme, I’m just regular me. Extreme whiteness, then, becomes the enabling symbol for the insidious normalcy implied by whiteness as a whole.

Ridley Scott’s Alien

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Dyer doesn’t seem to be calling out any particular scholars but rather a way of thinking that inform(s)(ed) much of the writings on race and whiteness before this. He notes in his introduction that whiteness is not often discussed precisely because it is perceived as the norm, and so his attention to it is in part a call for others to pay attention to what might have been ignored in their own writing. Dyer pulls from a large pool of scholarly discussions, including sociology, history,  and film, art, and literary theory to make intriguing and wide-ranging points throughout his book. Dyer’s conclusions ask us to be more aware of the role that culture has to play in our conceptions of ourselves and the world around us, including things like the way that our culture influences our ideas about technology (as in the example of what became normal and what was therefore conceived of as a deviation from that norm in lighting for photography). As (sections of) this book is/are taught in college courses, it must remain highly influential, and therefore central to how we continue to think about whiteness and race 20+ years after its initial publication.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Dyer explicitly draws attention to the representative strategies developed by humans to picture (literally) themselves for much of their history. Dyer pays special attention to film as the dominant media of the 20th century, but he doesn’t hesitate to look elsewhere as well. To drive his analysis, Dyer largely operates by making a large claim before breaking it down into several subclaims, each of which he backs up by analyzing at least one textual example or common daily life example (looking at, for example, clichés and idioms that use white to mean good and clean). As I said above, the first three chapters explain how whiteness works, while the next two look at specific instances of that work happening, before a coda that investigates the concept of death as linked to whiteness.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

In his introduction, Dyer explains his personal history with the concept of whiteness to explain why he feels he has a somewhat special attunement towards observing and understanding how it works. He links it to his homosexuality, a category which sets him off as an outsider (albeit not as much of an outsider as a person with a different skin color) to whiteness’ ideal. Throughout the text, Dyer takes great pains to explain his terminology and walk readers through his thought process as he decided upon which words to use in which situation. This deliberativeness endows Dyer’s work with an extra sense of completeness, a belief develops that Dyer has put in the work to really consider every aspect of his work here.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

Dyer’s concept of whiteness as the default will be crucial to my work, as many of the movies I want to study are continuations of franchises that fall into this idea of whiteness. I didn’t really see any big problems with Dyer’s work here. It’s a well-developed and intriguing book.

Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

whiteness, white, non-white, representation, visual culture, cultural studies, normal, norms, paradox, transparent, translucent, instability, power, symbol, technology

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Moreover, the position of speaking as a white person is one that white people now almost never acknowledge and this is part of the condition and power of whiteness: white people claim and achieve authority for what they say not by admitting, indeed not realizing, that for much of the time they speak only for whiteness. The impulse behind this book is to come to see that position of white authority in order to help undermine it. (xxxiv)

The point of seeing the racing of whites is to dislodge them/us from the position of power, with all the iniquities, oppression, privileges and sufferings in its train, dislodging them/us by undercutting the authority with which they/we speak and act in and on the world. (2)

White people have power and believe that they think, feel and act like and for all people; white people, unable to see their particularity, cannot take account of other people’s; white people create the dominant images of the world and don’t quite see that they thus construct the world in their own image; white people set standards of humanity by which they are bound to succeed and others bound to fail. (9)

To be able to think at all of bodies containing different spiritual qualities, or of some having such qualities and others not having them (a trope of white racism), of bodies containing that which controls them and then extends beyond them to the control of others and the environment (a trope of enterprise and imperialism), all this requires the first conceptual leap represented by the bodies of Christ and Mary, the sacraments, observances and theologies that rework them and the distinctive European culture founded upon all of this. (18)

White identity is founded on compelling paradoxes: a vividly corporeal cosmology that most values transcendence of the body; a notion of being at once a sort of race and the human race, an individual and a universal subject; a commitment to heterosexuality that, for whiteness to be affirmed, entails men fighting against sexual desires and women having none; a stress on the display of spirit while maintaining a position of invisibility; in short, a need always to be everything and nothing, literally overwhelmingly present and yet apparently absent, both alive and dead. Paradoxes are fascinating, endlessly drawing us back to them, either in awe at their unfathomability or else out of a wish to fathom them. Paradoxes provide the instabilities that generate stories, millions of engrossing attempts to find resolution. The dynamism of white instability, especially in its claims to universality, is also what entices those outside to seek to cross its borders and those inside to aspire ever upwards within it. Thus it is that the paradoxes and instabilities of whiteness also constitute its flexibility and productivity, in short, its representational power. (39-40)

Thus, white as a hue is, like all others, not as determinate as we tend to think, and we are not always sure that it is a hue anyways. This way of conceptualizing white as a hue, apparently the most objective aspect of color, provides a habit of perception that informs how we think and feel about its other aspects. The slippage between white as a color and white as colorlessness forms part of a system of thought and affect whereby white people are both particular and nothing in particular, are both something and non-existent. (47)

In sum, white as a skin color is just as unstable, unbounded a category as white as a hue, and therein lies its strength. It enables whiteness to be presented as an apparently attainable, flexible, varied category, while setting up an always movable criterion of inclusion, the ascribed whiteness of your skin. (57)

Any simple mapping of hue, skin and symbol onto one another is clearly not accurate. White people are far from being always represented as good, for instance. Yet I am now persuaded that the slippage between the three is more pervasive than I thought at first, to the extent that it does probably underlie all representation of white people. For a white person who is bad is failing to be ‘white’, whereas a black person who is good is a surprise, and one who is bad merely fulfills expectations. (63)

The extreme image of whiteness acts as a distraction. An image of what whites are like is set up, but can also be held at a distance. Extreme whiteness is, precisely, extreme. If in certain periods of derangement – the empires at their height, the Fascist eras – white people have seen themselves in these images, they can take comfort from the fact that for most of the time they haven’t. Whites can thus believe that they are nothing in particular, because the white particularities on offer are so obviously not them. Extreme whiteness thus leaves a residue, a way of being that is not marked as white, in which white people can see themselves. This residue is non-particularity, the space of ordinariness. The combination of extreme whiteness with plain, unwhite whiteness means that white people can both lay claim to the spirit that aspires to the heights of humanity and yet supposedly speak and act disinterestedly as humanities most average and unremarkable representatives. (223)

Framing Blackness by Ed Guerrero

by

Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing

Guerrero, Ed. 1993. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Culture and the Moving Image. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

Ed Guerrero makes it his priority in his book to trace the history of representation of black characters on film, and, here and there, television. He does so by contextualizing the struggle for non-harmful representation on screen within the struggle for equality that black people were fighting for throughout the 20th century. He also contextualizes the struggle in the book within the overdetermining system of film production, particularly in Hollywood but eventually expanding into the independent boom of the late 80s and early 90s (when the book was written and published). He notes that Hollywood tended to ignore the demands of black folx until it becomes desperate for their audiences to bolster flagging profits at the box office. There is then, in the 70s with Blaxploitation and then in the indie boom mentioned above, a brief period of pandering to the black audience (which also attracts a white audience looking for something new) until the black films become less novel and Hollywood turns to the next fad. Writing as Guerrero does in the middle of the second boom of black filmmaking makes the last chapter of this book, focused on the output of that generation of filmmakers (Julie Dash, Spike Lee, and John Singleton getting the most play here), gives the book an extra sense of urgency. In the end of the last chapter, Guerrero looks ahead with cautious optimism, hoping for his moment to be a portent of a real change in the way Hollywood treats its black members (in front of and behind the camera), but also knowing that it is very possible, based on Hollywood’s profit motive, that it will soon turn away from the people who are currently making it money.

The history Guerrero traces from Birth of a Nation to Malcolm X is a familiar one to film scholars. It is similar to how Hollywood treats marginalized groups of most varieties. First, there’s actively harmful depictions wrapped up in narratives that perpetuate white supremacy, then as it faces backlash, Hollywood cedes as little ground as it possibly can to appease what Guerrero calls a conservative mass audience. Guerrero does point out how Hollywood’s history with blackness is different from other marginalized communities given the way chattel slavery has shaped the nation and has never really been dealt with. He notes that race, and specifically the tension between the U.S.’s black and white population, has become a central part of Hollywood’s storytelling, first in the open during the first half of the 20th century, then subsumed into allegory and metaphor in genre movies like Blade Runner, then back in the open again in fits and spurts as Hollywood cycles through right-ward and left-ward turns which influence the depiction of black characters on screen in either recuperative or (mildly) liberatory directions. He notes, for example, in the post-Blaxploitation moment, influenced by Reaganism and the turn towards blockbuster production, how Hollywood would allow one black character in a film, who would be surrounded by white characters and striving to protect or restore order to a white world. He notes in this period the revival of the black-white buddy film and how this type of film rarely gave much attention to the inner lives or even outer lives of the black characters. He notes, also, that the black star would often have to be comedic in nature (Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, and Whoopi Goldberg, for example) to make them palatable for a white audience who was ok with seeing an updated minstrel performance but not serious black characters in their giant blockbuster films.

In the final chapter of the book, Guerrero traces the two(!) modes of production available to black filmmakers in the early 90s. There’s the independent route where filmmakers might have to wrangle their own financing and are therefore freer to experiment with style and substance (Dash’s Daughters of the Dust being the primary example here, but with early Lee joints also in the mix), and then there’s the mainstream route where filmmakers follow the (white) Hollywood style playbook and must cater to mass audiences in ways that might compromise the filmmaker’s vision or desire to put non-harmful representation on screen, though with the considerable tradeoff of people actually seeing your film in great numbers (later Lee, from Do the Right Thing on, and John Singleton are the exemplars here, demonstrating once again Hollywood’s hesitancy to give women (and particularly women of color) the reins on big budget films). He is sure to point out that these are not the only two possibilities offered to black filmmakers, that they are more ends of a spectrum upon which there are many points and shades of gray to accommodate the realities of filmmaking in such an expansive moment. Though you can also sense Guerrero’s fondness for the former, more underground category of films/filmmakers, he saves his last analysis for Lee’s Malcolm X, a big budget epic that Guerrero sees as a triumph of both glossy filmmaking and a strong black voice behind (and in front of) the camera.

Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

Guerrero specifically calls out Althusser, from whom he takes the concept of overdetermination with its potential for subversion and liberation hidden amongst a knot of constraining influences, and Freud, from whom he takes Robin Wood’s variation on repression that leads to horror monsters and the concept of societal recuperation after periods of liberation. He also specifically mentions Houston Baker’s concepts of the “deformation of mastery” and the “mastery of form” to explain the indie vs. mainstream black filmmaking impulses in the final chapter.

I’m most interested, however, in the cultural moment Guerrero writes from. It’s clear that the book is driven by the enthusiasm he feels from the boom from within which he is writing, but that also leaves open grounds for further exploration and a more retrospective understanding that Guerrero can’t have. Noticeable in his final two chapters on the 80s and 90s respectively is a sense of excitement for films that have not stood the test of time, though he does hit on most of the movies that have lasted in the cultural lexicon. I don’t view this as a problem, just something to be aware of. I’m going to look up Guerrero’s later work to see if he ever revisits this era or writes about the same ideas in the following 30 years of films.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

Guerrero takes a historical materialist perspective, which analyzes the history of black representation on screen through the cultural and economic influences while choosing certain exemplar films to analyze in depth. This allows him to chart trends as well as perform some good, old-fashioned film analysis. This is the kind of writing I prefer to read because it doesn’t overlook the specificity of the individual film while providing a broader understanding of what’s going on and how the film in question fits in with what else was happening at the time.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

Guerrero definitely takes on a more argumentative angle than some other similar books I’ve read. He is not precious about sacred cows, and is happy to rip into, say, Do the Right Thing for its acquiescence to the dominant ideology both in style (which I don’t really agree with, but understand) and theme/message (which is persuasive to say the least) as he notes that the film discards the actual revolutionary politics of collective struggle for the white dominant norm of individual responsibility. I often latch on to the kind of aggressive re-writing of history that this project attempts to do because it makes for more compelling reading and usually opens a new perspective for me. This book is an excellent example of that clear-eyed revisionism.

Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

Guerrero’s book has been influential, and I’ve read his name in the bibliographies of other books/essays I’ve read throughout my graduate career. That makes this book slightly less revolutionary that it might have felt upon publication. However, I still really enjoyed reading it, and I think it will intersect with my own areas of interest in some really interesting ways. The process he writes about of Hollywood’s slow acquiescence to cultural pressures is one that will be at the core of my study of the legacyquel, and he even writes about Rocky and Star Wars at some length, so I can definitely cite him for an understanding of what the original films of those series were engaged in culturally. I’m excited to explore what I can make of his ideas.

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

“Overdetermined,” representation, cultural studies, recuperation, liberation, independent, mainstream, Blaxploitation, repression

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

Unfortunately, relations of power, greed, and racism being more stubborn than the visionary hopes of genius, the idealistic projections of these two cinema giants [Sergei Eisenstein and Charles Chaplin] were never to fully develop in proportion to the vast commercial and cultural domination of the film industry. Instead of efforts to construct a truly universal system of communication that builds egalitarian understandings between diverse groups and cultures, what we have seen arise in commercial cinema is a monopolistic, capital-intensive film business. And in spite of some narrative innovation, dissenting artistic exploration, and political countercurrents, the industry has been formula bound and conservative in its vision in order to deliver commodified visual entertainments to the broadest possible consumer market. Instead of inspiring aesthetic, cultural, and political masterworks aimed at liberating the human potential, Hollywood, for the most part, has tended to focus narrowly it’s increasingly shallow product on escapism, sentiment, glamor, romance, and, more recently, spectacular orgies of violence and sexplotation, all in the service of feeding the dulled cravings and fantasies of the dominant social order. What all this means, specifically, for African Americans (and extrapolated to a wide range of other minorities) is that in almost every instance, the representation of black people on the commercial screen has amounted to one grand, multifaceted illusion. For blacks have been subordinated, marginalized, positioned, and devalued in every possible manner to glorify and relentlessly hold in place the white dominated symbolic order and racial hierarchy of American society. (2)

Fortunately, though, for African Americans and this discussion of the way Hollywood has gone about framing blackness, the ideology of racial domination and difference can never be permanently fixed in place as a complete or static “thing.” Instead, it is a dynamic, shifting “relation” defined and conditioned by social struggle, the demands of the historical moment, and the material imperative of an industry that privileges economics and short-term profit before all other human, aesthetic, or philosophic possibilities or concerns. Because the cinematic representation of blackness is the site of perpetual contestation, struggle, and consequently change, Hollywood’s unceasing efforts to frame blackness are constantly challenged by the cultural and political self-definitions of African Americans, who as a people have been determined since the inception of commercial cinema to militate against this limiting system of representation. So this book is concerned with African Americans not as mere victims of Hollywood’s conjurings. That is, I examine the dialectical push of Hollywood’s cultural construction and domination of the black image and the pull of an insistent black social consciousness and political activism that has recently generated waves of black focused and independent films into commercial cinemas trajectory. (2-3)

What would be desirable in future cinematic inscriptions of slavery would be the production of black and other independent features that artfully historicize and politicize the issue in a way that not only reveals slavery’s past but at the same time, by allegory, illusion, or otherwise, communicates its relevance to all Americans today. (35)

Given the ample evidence of its varied expressions, we must expect the sedimented thematics of slavery to continue to surface in commercial cinema. Whether slavery is constructed as a unified subtext in the form of allegory or sustained parody or is displaced into other historical periods, fantastical worlds, and different genres, or whether it surfaces in fleeting images or moments, the dynamic of slavery’s repression and return is too much a part of popular cinema and its codes and images to disappear completely from American cinema. Insofar as popular cinema is an integral part of the commodity system itself, vulnerable to economic ups and downs and the twists of right and left cycles, we should also expect the intermittent recuperation of some of the cruder hegemonic manipulations and stereotypes depicted in the older films of the plantation genre. (56)

In the beginning of the 1980s and under the political impulse of Reaganism, blacks on the screen, in front of and behind the camera, found themselves confronted with the “recuperation” of many of the subordinations and inequalities they had struggled so hard to eradicate during the years of the civil rights movement and the emergence of black power consciousness that followed it. Thus the caricatures and stereotypes of Hollywood’s openly racist past proved to be resilient demons as they were subtly refashioned and resurfaced in a broad range of films. Concurrently, the 1980s saw a steady reduction of films with black narratives and leading roles as black actors found themselves increasingly pushed into the margins or background of the cinematic frame. (113-114)

Despite the shrinking of a broad political base of support, protests centered on specific films and issues continue to challenge Hollywood on its blatantly racist, sexist, and homophobic practices. And, if it did nothing else, the Blaxploitation bloom, so to speak, let the black audience out of the bag, by helping shape a politically self-conscious, critical black audience aware of its commercial power and hungry for new cinematic representations of a diverse range of African American subjects and issues on the big screen. Moreover, the “black independent cinema movement” inspired by the films of university-trained black filmmakers of the 1970s made a clear political, philosophical, and aesthetic foundation for an ongoing cinematic practice that challenges Hollywood’s hegemony over the black image. (137)

Following trends set in the 1980s, the commercial cinema system has continued to stock its productions with themes and formulas dealing with black issues and characters that are reassuring to the sensibilities and expectations of an uneasy white audience. These filmic images tend to mediate the dysfunctions and delusions of a society unable to deal honestly with its inequalities and racial conflicts, a society that operates in a profound state of racial denial on a daily basis. Thus images are polarized into celebrations of “Buppie” success and consumer-driven individualism that are consonant with a sense of black political quietism, tokenism, and accommodation, or condemnations of violent ghetto criminals, gangsters, and drug lords. (162)

If black independent filmmakers tend directly to resist or oppose cultural and political domination through their avant-garde languages, forms, socially urgent narratives, and insider depictions of the black world, then those black directors who work within the “mainstream” tend to be more concerned with learning and perfecting the conventions of dominant cinema language and addressing their projects to the colonized desires of the vast consumer audience encompassing blacks, other non-white minorities, and extend à la crossover marketing to whites. Most of the black directors who have had commercial successes argue that they work within the studio system in order to expand the definitions and possibilities of being black and to subvert the dominant norm by marketing a “black sensibility” to as broad an audience as possible. (180-181)

Only by weighing the many possible answers that arise in the riddle-like social transactions of “race” can black filmmakers create authentic humanized images and narratives of black life. Inevitably this decade will bring new spectacles and entertainments that celebrate black life and culture. The new insurgent cinema languages, films, and possibilities of the black movie boom are the primary means African Americans have to challenge the compromised, niggardly images designed to keep them in their media-constructed place. African Americans must continue to expand their influence over the production, distribution, and exhibition systems that make up the dominant cinema apparatus, while insisting that the emergent narratives of the black world’s be rendered from an honest, unco-oped, liberated perspective. (208)