identification

Concepts in Film Theory by Dudley Andrew

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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)

Feminist Film Studies by Janet McCabe

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McCabe, Janet. 2004. Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman into Cinema. Short Cuts 23. New York: Wallflower 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, Janet McCabe uses some broad themes and modes of thinking as ways of temporalizing the history of feminist film theory. Since, as she notes in her conclusion, each new way of practicing feminist film theory tended to criticize the way that came before it for its biggest failures, there is little (that I know of) left out, except for developments that have happened since the book’s publication in 2004 (one area that I know of being the further expansion of theorization surrounding gender with trans and non-binary identities becoming an increasingly popular area of study recently).

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?

McCabe proposes very little in way of new theory or even a point of view on the scholars and ideas she writes about here. Only her conclusion has a real thesis to it, one which emphasizes the need to study feminist film theory as a discourse to fully understand what is going on with it both in its past and present configurations. This fits with how she structures the book, putting different authors in conversation with each other via either explicit or thematic connections between their works, with a roughly continuous temporal development.

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 McCabe moves from one method of performing feminist film theory to the next, she begins each chapter with a brief summary of what will be covered and how changing analytical and cultural trends influenced the direction of the writing done in that time period. Sometimes that change might be the introduction of a new kind of criticism (the introduction of cultural studies, for example) or a group of writers insisting that attention must also be paid to them and their representation/ways of seeing (black women, lesbians). This grounds McCabe’s historical project in material realities and creates a context for what will come in the chapter. Then each chapter proceeds by laying out the ground level theory (often originally written by men like Metz or, god help us, Freud) before showing how feminist film theorists used that theory to write about women, who were often ignored by the men who wrote the high theory. Finally, she concludes each chapter by recapping what major changes happened during the time period covered and looking a little bit at what was missing, to be filled in by scholars in the next chapter.

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

Here I’ll just list out the large thematic shifts and some representative scholars that McCabe capsulizes in each chapter.

1973-79 – Structuring a language of theory: In this period, feminist film theorists adopted theoretical approaches (psychoanalysis and semiotics, mostly) to talk about how women were conceived of as a symbol, specifically a symbol of lack such that they really only existed to be looked at on film. Prominent scholars: Laura Mulvey, Claire Johnston

1985-1997 – Textual Negotiations: Female Spectatorship and Cultural Studies: In this period, feminist film theorists looked to cultural studies to see how real audiences engaged film in specific times and places. This allowed for a greater understanding of the various negotiations that happened between author, text, and audience as well as a pathway towards understanding how the makeup of an audience will influence how that audience responds to different texts. Feminist film theory here becomes more focused on context, history, and lived experience rather than the generalizing tendency of psychoanalysis. Prominent scholars: Christine Gledhill, Tania Modleski, Annette Kuhn, Jackie Stacey, bell hooks

1991-2000 – Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonialism/Modernism. In this period, which overlaps significantly with the previous period, scholars began to correct feminist film theory away from its singular focus on white female existence towards trying to understand what happens when gender isn’t the only way a character, creator, or audience member is othered from the dominant cis-white-het norm. Using Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalytic theory of race as a jumping off point, scholars of this era theorized that black women were doubly absent, doubly sexualized, doubly lacking on film. Some scholars also looked at the way colonialism created a gaze towards black and brown women that was wrapped up in an imperialist (as well as misogynist and racist) mindset. Finally, scholars and creators of this era also used ways of creating and documenting the previously overlooked history of people like them. Daughters of the Dust is the primary example here. Prominent scholars: Jane Gaines, Mary Anne Doane, Lola Young, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Tania Modleski

1987 – 2000 – Conceiving Subjectivity, Sexual Difference and Fantasy Differently: Psychoanalysis Revisited and Queering Theory: In this period, scholars returned to psychoanalysis to rethink female sexuality and how women might desire differently through film. Taking as their primary concern the ideas of desire and fantasy, scholars of this era tried to dig deeper into pscyhoanalysis through Freud’s ideas on female sexuality and masturbatory practices to understand what connection spectators had to the spectacle of women on film. Additionally, lesbian/gay and queer theorists questioned why we were even paying attention to Freud in the first place, positing instead an attention to how queer audiences opened a doorway to alternative spectator positions not theorizable in a film theory dominated by heterosexual norms. Prominent scholars: Mary Anne Doane, Elizabeth Cowie, Linda Williams, Carol Clover, Kaja Silverman, Judith Mayne, Judith Butler

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 is most useful in to me in the above form, as a kind of overview of the different methodologies and conversations that have happened with regards to feminist film theory. I’m not sure much of the theorists individual ideas will stick with me for very long after reading them in this format, as there’s not enough to really grasp here. But it is useful as something to go back to when I need a refresher or a quick recap before diving into some related readings.

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

psychoanalysis, spectator, desire, fantasy, race, ethnicity, cultural studies, historical materialism, queer theory, feminist film theory, discourse, postcolonialism, postmodernism

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

Studying the field of knowledge known as feminist film studies allows us to read it as a set of statements about the institution of cinema and cultural production, about representational categories and gendered subjectivity, about identification and spectatorship practices, about cultural authority and historical (in)visibility, about desire and fantasy, and about the interaction between these areas. (1-2)

I suggest we may in fact have reached a point when it might be more important to gain knowledge about the features of feminist writings on film and cinema; for in understanding what feminist film theory wants us to know exposes the workings of a discourse as well as the difficulties that still remain in articulating it. (113)

I identify feminist film theory as a discourse; that is, a discursive formation made up from a series of statements within which, and by which, debates related to gendered representation, female subjectivity and spectatorship can be known. […] By analyzing the statements that constitute the making of a field of knowledge, we can see how the speakers and listeners, writers and readers come to know who they are within the social world. (118)

The more feminist film theory gains respectability within the academy, the more its methodological differences/difficulties are revealed as problems of legitimacy and credibility and speaking from inside the discipline. It is discourse about (rather than in) crisis, in which the female subject – as film protagonist, cinema spectator and academic scholar – continues to trouble. (120)

The Eloquent Screen by Gilberto Perez

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Perez, Gilberto. 2019. The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 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?

Perez examines how film makes its imprint on its audiences via a wide-ranging study of different filmic techniques and their effects. He does this in order to counter some prior theories of film’s effects (particularly Lacanian and apparatus theory) and posit an alternate study of the “way construction elicits response” (xix). Perez explicitly places rhetoric between studies of poetics and reception to more thoroughly examine the relationship between the two.

Though Perez focuses mostly on American film, it is clear that his desire is to build a way of looking at film that will work across boundaries of time, space, and different groups of audiences (even if that last part is more implicit than explicit). In other words, Perez occasionally runs into the problems of creating a universal spectator, undifferentiated and unexamined, which feminist, race, and queer theorists have problematized.

Perez does rescue some films from previous interpretations that have portrayed the films (such as Ford’s The Sun Shines Bright and Young Mister Lincoln in the opening section) as one-dimensional by the likes of the folks at Cahiers du Cinema. The penultimate section, on melodrama, similarly reexamines some films that have been dismissed by the genre(?) affiliation, as well as some movies (horror in particular) that have been, by some, pushed outside of that genre’s boundaries.

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?

I’ve already addressed who this work is responding to and why, so here I’ll tackle its intervention in a bit more detail. I’ve read (and studied with) some rhetorical narrative theorist here at OSU, and I am intrigued and convinced by it as a theory of literature. I had thought of some ways it might apply to film, but hoped that a book like this would come along on my reading list to make some of the arguments and connections for me. Perez succeeds on this account, using genre, metaphor/synecdoche, and identification theories to think about how movies make their meanings and how audiences understand those meaning-making devices.

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

Split into four sections, Perez (usually) starts by developing a general idea of what is going on with the area of rhetoric that he’s examining in that section then spins out from there, looking at interesting little examples and strands to explore the boundaries of the way of thinking he’s proposing. The first and last sections are a little different, with the first being an extended study of John Ford’s films to explain why rhetoric is an interesting way of studying movies and the last being a short coda looking at how identification (with characters or situations) differs from the apparatus theorists who posit an unfailing suturing into the film (identifying most with the camera) whereas Perez shows (through talking about horror) that the audience more frequently shifts their identification between different characters, situations, and camera positions throughout the film depending upon the film’s construction and their own thoughts and feelings.

In the second, and first big section, Perez discusses the idea of cinematic tropes, particularly metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche. Following structural linguist Roman Jakobson, Perez theorizes that these aren’t just tropes but “ways of making the connections of meaning,” with metaphor acting as a “way of similarity” and metonymy as a “way of contiguity” (57) Metaphor, in other words, says, look, this is like that, while metonymy says, look, this comes from that. Perez continues to develop this theory by diving into synecdoche, which takes metonymy one step further to say, look, this is part of that. He calls film a “thoroghly synecdochic medium” because every shot refers to the larger whole of the film, and therefore the study of the relationship between details (at whatever level, mise-en-scene, shot, scene, sequence) and the whole will help us understand the intended effects developed by the implied author of the film (63). I find this to be very convincing. Perez uses this understanding of how film works to walk through how political and social messages are created and transmitted through film, how characters come to stand in for ideas and how camera movements or editing can be representative of different ways of thinking.

In the third, and second big section, Perez looks at melodrama as a genre/mode that draws on the pathos part of the rhetorical triangle. He interestingly theorizes that melodrama isn’t the exact opposite of realism, as we might expect, but that they both operate as related reactions to classicism, which presents only what it needs, through excess: melodrama as an excess of emotion and subjectivity, realism as an excess of detail and objectivity. For me, this is a great way of thinking about how to classify different movies based on what they’re focused on and remove from the discussion of realism and melodrama (a pet interest of mine) some of the value judgements that have haunted them in the past. Perez spends the rest of the section teasing out how a film will create that excess of emotion through film techniques and what implications those emotional excesses have on audiences.

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’d call this one very useful. I am very interested in merging rhetorical narrative theory with film poetics to discover why and how films make us feel and think what they do. Perez nicely explains several (though certainly not all) ways that this happens and opens some interesting doors that I’ll keep exploring as I read theory and watch films. Indeed, the area that might be most interesting to me is the one that gets the least attention from Perez, identification, so I’ll keep puzzling through what he claims here and thinking of ways of expanding upon it.

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

As covered above, rhetoric, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, melodrama, identification.

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

We may think of identification as personal affinity, putting ourselves in another’s place, as when we identify with a character in a movie. But we never simply identify with a character; we identify with an action, a situation, an emotion, a motive, an interest, a point of view, something the character represents. Our identification with a character usually works together with other identifications that precede it, accompany it, modify it, complicate it. (13)

The part for the whole, the general in the particular: synecdoche is too important a figure to be subsumed under metonymy. Particulars, which are all the camera knows, are synecdochic inasmuch as they have a meaning, which is always something general. Film is a medium of particulars invested with meaning as parts of a whole. Each image on the screen shows something in particular, but something that has a place in a construction of the general. Out of the bits and pieces the camera renders, a film puts together an inclusive picture. Synecdoche is the figure of inclusion. (60)

Nothing is more important to the rhetoric of a work, to the way it affects its audience, than our sense of the author’s attitude toward the characters. (158)

Truth and beauty are goals of art as well as life, ends to be sought. But they are also means of persuasion. The best way to tell a lie is to envelop it in truth, with truth used as a means to make the lie more persuasive. That’s just what a movie does when it enacts a fiction in actual locations; the ambient reality makes the fiction more convincing. Beauty, too, serves to win us over. Usually the hero or heroine we are to side with is beautiful. Tropes gain much of their effect through the persuasion of beauty; a metaphor expresses something more forcefully because more beautifully. Often truth and beauty are looked up to as ultimate things and rhetoric is looked down on as mere deceit, but as Kiarostomi knows, truth and beauty are regular instruments of rhetoric. (196-7)

Realism is often opposed to melodrama, but both realism and melodrama are modern forms that emerged in opposition to classicism. Classicism is art that exhibits just what is necessary, the right measure of information and emotion, the perfect fit of form and meaning. Realism feels real because it exhibits more than seems necessary in the way of concrete observation, because it imparts the sense that the world exceeds our assumptions of meaning, that there are more things out there than we can account for. Both realism and melodrama are excessive relative to the norms of classicism. Realism is excessive objectively, in its representation of fact; melodrama is excessive subjectively, in its expression of emotion. Melodrama is to the inner world as realism is to the outer world. Like the inner and the outer, the subjective and the objective, melodrama and realism may be opposed but are better looked upon as complementary. (203)

A cut at once interrupts and connects, breaks off something and links it to something else, thereby having it both ways: the break that links, the fragments of modern life pieced together on the screen. Conjunctive cross-cutting, which began with Griffith’s last-minute rescues and is still going strong, takes the form of a rupture anxiously looking forward to its mending. Film is able to combine the fragmentation of a modern art with the completion of a classical art. (296)

In identifying with the camera, however, we identify not only with the visual perspective in each image but with the governing intelligence we sense behind the arrangement of images. We identify, that is, with the image maker, the implied author, which to some extent we must do in order to follow a film, just as we must identify with another person in order to engage in conversation. Our identification with characters is always part of a larger play of identification. (349)