Introduction
Film and Physics
People are incorrect to compare a director to an author. If he’s a creator, he’s more like an architect. And an architect conceives his plans according to precise circumstances.
John Ford
The moviegoer watches the images on the screen in a dreamlike state. So he can be supposed to apprehend physical reality in its concreteness.
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film
The Havana where I grew up was a great town for going to the movies. It was Havana in the fifties, under the dictator Batista, so it was not the best of times. But it was a good time and place for a kid to become a moviegoer. On the screens of my city movies from all over the world unfolded: we got all the movies from Hollywood and we also got, not just a few for the presumed cognoscenti, but a good many movies from Italy and France and Russia, Mexico and Spain and South America, Japan and India and Scandinavia. My favorite movie theater, the Capri, regularly featured an international mix, so that in one program I might see together II Bidone and The Killing, or Gold of Naples and An American in Paris, or Madame de… and The Criminal Life ofArchibaldo de la Cruz. With negligibly few exceptions, the movies were all foreign, which is to say that none of them were: they all took place in the spellbinding elsewhere of the screen. Thankfully, movies were not dubbed for Cuban audiences but always shown in the original language; at an early age I got used to subtitles, which for me became part of the language of cinema. Moreover, I grew up in a time when movies were as often done in black and white as in color, which led to my having no color prejudice before the images on the screen. My movie upbringing was very liberal. Although naturally I liked some movies better than others, and naturally I noted differences in subject and style, temper and approach, I was raised not to discriminate on account of language or color or national origin.1
“If it has subtitles, it’s art,” says, only partly in jest, a friend whose persuasion is literary and whose formative moviegoing dates from the New York of the forties. For me, whose formative moviegoing normally entailed subtitles, the movies have always been a medium of art—no different from literature or painting in their small yield of good art among the middling and the bad. I first went to the movies with my father, and all through my childhood and adolescence he was my abiding moviegoing companion. The author of a book called Nuestro Siglo (Our Century), my father was a doctor with an avid interest in literature and the arts, and he imparted to me an ungainsayable sense that the movies belong in their company. “We generally become interested in movies because we enjoy them,” wrote Pauline Kael, “and what we enjoy them for has little to do with what we think of as art.”2 The first part of her statement certainly fits me, but not the second. I grew up with the movies as art and with art not as something stuffy and affected but as something vital, like the movies.
The first criticism of the arts that seriously engaged me, even before my teens, was the movie criticism that was appearing in Carteles. The weekly Carteles was rather like a Cuban Collier’s or Saturday Evening Post; the movie column was simply called “Cine,” and for a while it didn’t carry a byline. Yet it carried a distinctive critical voice. Subsequently that voice gained the name G. Cain, a pseudonym, it transpired, for the Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who later won acclaim with his splendid novel of nighttime Havana, Tres tristes tigres (a tongue-twisting title rendered in English as Three Trapped Tigers). To Cabrera Infante I owe my first attentive appreciation of what makes a movie move, what goes into the art of putting it together, my excited first awareness of the ways of the camera in shaping our view of the world pictured on the screen. His movie reviews gave me an education in seeing and in thinking with my eyes. Under the name G. Cain they were collected into a book, Un oficio del siglo XX, published in 1963 by Ediciones Revolución in Havana; in 1965 Cabrera Infante left Cuba. With few changes and no additions—nothing to update it—the book came out in English three decades later as A Twentieth Century Job.3
Of Antonioni’s Le Amiche, for example, a reticently amazing film made in 1955 and all but unknown in this country even after its director became famous in the sixties, Cabrera Infante wrote a review perceptive of the film’s accomplishment and responsive to its promise. Like Clement Greenberg’s early reviews of Jackson Pollock, this was criticism whose awareness of the present put it in touch with the future, criticism with eyes to see both what was there in the work and what the work had in store, both what Antonioni had succeeded in doing with quiet originality and where he was tending to lead the practice of his art.
Film in the fifties seemed to many an art in decline if not downright fall. Classic Hollywood was dying, French cinema had mostly succumbed to academicism, and the neorealism that had vitalized Italian cinema in the postwar years was passing away too. Yet despite the apparent impoverishment, the fifties were actually a time of riches in the art of film. Cabrera Infante was among the few who recognized the cinematic achievement of the time: of Antonioni and Fellini in Italy, filmmakers who came out of neorealism and wielded the mirror it held up to nature in their own newly reflective ways; of Becker and Bresson in France, the one gripping the tangible with passion, the other reaching with precision for the unrepresentable; of Bunuel in Mexico, where the old surrealist, commercially employed, yet made some of his most incisive and arresting films; of the serenely eerie Mizoguchi and the restlessly sturdy Kurosawa in Japan and the corporeal and contemplative Satyajit Ray in India; of Hitchcock and Hawks and Minnelli in Hollywood and of such American mavericks as the expatriate Orson Welles and the young (later expatriate) Stanley Kubrick. And—unlike James Agee in the United States, for example, a film critic who mainly yearned for past glories—Cabrera Infante was a film critic animated by a sense of expectation and possibility, a spirited looking forward to the coming attractions of an art in the making.
My own posture today is similar to Agee’s: as he looked back to the movies of his teens and twenties and in the cinema of Griffith and Chaplin, Eisenstein and Dovzhenko, saw the art’s great era, so I look back to the movies of my teens and twenties and see an efflorescence of the art that peaked in the sixties and has not been matched since. Is such a posture- uncommon neither in Agee’s time nor in mine—merely subjective, merely a matter of our being most impressed when at our most impressionable? Subjectivity necessarily informs our response to art, but that does not necessarily render our judgment devoid of objectivity. Surely it is significant, in any case—not just subjectively but aesthetically significant—that we should respond to the movies of our youth with something like the feelings of first love. Cabrera Infante’s collected reviews take me back to the time of my first falling in love with the art of film.
Soon after I came to this country in the early sixties I found that matters already familiar to me from Cabrera Infante’s reviews, which kept up with foreign criticism and partook of the spirit of the yellow-covered Cahiers du cinema of the fifties, were for American film critics a hot new topic of controversy they called the auteur theory. The auteur theory has meant different things to different people If it is taken to mean that film is the director’s art—that the shaping hand specific to film and governing most of the best films is the director’s—then it is a notion as old as the proposition that film is an art.
Orson Welles, a director with an immediately recognizable style if there ever was one, gallantly stands up for the actor in his interviews, conducted two decades ago when the auteur theory was at the height of its fashion, with auteur proponent and would-be auteur Peter Bogdanovich.4 Most people go to the movies for the actors; most of the pleasure I get from movies these days comes from the actors; certainly the actors are a much better reason for going to the movies than anything most movie reviewers have to say. Opponents of the auteur theory have shown a literary partiality, however, and rather than the actor they have tended to promote the writer in their demotion of the director—unless they rest content with the assertion that movies are made by many hands. Many hands are sometimes viewed approvingly (as in the selfless group artistry of a medieval cathedral) but more often disapprovingly (as in the soulless fabrication on an assembly line). When the auteur theory fell into disfavor, not so much among film critics as among the growing ranks of film academics, it was not an appreciation of the actor or the writer that gained ascendancy but a repudiation of all individuality as a false consciousness inculcated by bourgeois ideology.
Late in 1913 D. W. Griffith, breaking with the Biograph Company, took out a full-page ad in the New York Dramatic Mirror declaring his authorship of the films he had been making since 1908 in Biograph’s employ. Movie companies in that early period, and Biograph more doggedly than the others, kept the names of players and filmmakers unknown to the public; movies were to be seen as company products. Against this policy of company impersonality Griffith was asserting his authorship and his artistry. His work at Biograph had been momentously innovative. Rather than the company, his ad proclaimed, it was he who was responsible for “revolutionizing Motion Picture drama and founding the modern technique of the art.”5
Long before the auteur theory was proposed, film critics and historians endorsed Griffith’s claim to authorship. For several years now, however— years in which the study of film has established itself academically—dominant thinking in the field of film studies has in effect come down on the side of Biograph. The auteur theory, imported from France in the early sixties, has long been out of fashion; a newer bit of imported French theory has pronounced the author dead. The view of art as the creation or expression of individual genius is out of favor. Instead, thinking corporately, we are to admire the “genius of the system”6 or, on the other side of the same coin, we are to decry the manipulations of a system that, it is believed, serves the purposes of an oppressive ideology and allows little room for deviation either in the making or in the viewing of a film.
Opponents of the auteur theory have charged it with being ahistorical, and the charge has some justice. “If directors and other artists cannot be wrenched from their historical environments,” wrote Andrew Sarris in the early days of his influential advocacy of the auteur theory, “aesthetics is reduced to a subordinate branch of ethnography.”7 “What does he think it is?” retorted Pauline Kael.8 And Christopher Faulkner takes a stand “for ethnography” in the introduction to his Social Cinema of Jean Renoir, where he maintains as others have that the auteur theory with its emphasis on individual creation and its tendency to play down historical circumstance is but a form of bourgeois ideology.9 That may be, but it must also be recognized that, no less than an emphasis on individual creation, an emphasis on historical circumstance is a bourgeois way of thinking. Faulkner appears to believe that the idea of wrenching the artist from history has reigned unbrokenly since the Renaissance, but Sarris (following the American New Critics in this respect) was reacting against a historicism that had long been a dominant critical approach. Faulkner’s charge of ahistoricism is itself ahistorical.
The trend of postmodern thinking has been against ideas of unity and wholeness. These are taken to be bourgeois fabrications, constructs of the ruling ideology, though they have a much longer history and, even as we call them into question, our thinking seems to require them. We think in terms of parts and wholes even if our parts don’t exactly fit into our wholes. Faulkner’s study of Renoir calls into question the unity of Renoir’s authorship over the years but assumes the unity of determinant historical situations that produced one Renoir in the thirties and another Renoir in the fifties. The unity traditionally valued in a work of art, or in an artist’s body of work, is currently discounted as a false consciousness promoting that other supposed figment of bourgeois ideology, the unity of the self. The perceived unity of an object is thought to endorse one’s sense of one’s own unity as a perceiving subject. My impression of The Battleship Potemkin (1925) as a unified work presumably fosters in me the idea that I am a unified self. But Potemkin encourages a different sense of unity in the spectator, a sense not of individuality but of class consciousness, of collective solidarity, a kind of unity at odds with the individualism of bourgeois ideology. What about Eisenstein as an auteur, the unity of his body of work? Supposedly my seeing Potemkin and Ivan the Terrible (1944-46) as works of the same individual, rather than as products of different historical circumstances, confirms me in my sense of my own individuality. But surely the question of Eisenstein’s individuality in relation to his historical circumstances, and of my own in relation to mine, ought not to be decided in the abstract but examined in the concrete, for not all individuals, and not all historical circumstances, are the same. Wrenching the individual from historical circumstance may be ideological, but no more so than positing the individual as a figment of ideology and a puppet of history. Even if it were true that the self in our postmodern times is irreparably fragmented, that any notion of its unity merely clings to an illusion, surely this doesn’t entitle us to decide that the same is true of all other times and places.
From the auteur theory, which brought the romantic cult of the artist into the upstart art of film, the winds of our fashions have blown to a view of the artist as the pawn of history and culture and society. Allegedly unpolitical yet originally a politique— a politics championing the author as the individual spirit resisting the conformities of the system—the auteur theory aggrandized the author but it better allowed for a dialectic between the author and the system, between the individual and his or her situation, than does a theory that aggrandizes the system into a virtually absolute rule. To be sure, the filmmaker is, even if not in the employ of a studio, under the sway of the social and political order, the culture and circumstance in which he or she works; but that will not in every way determine, though it will in many ways affect, the film he or she will make or the response a spectator will have to it. There is a margin of freedom when making a film and when viewing one, a margin for making the kind of film that invites the viewers freedom of response; and that edge of freedom may make all the difference.
Academics who criticize bourgeois individualism think they are bucking the establishment. They seem not to recognize that the individualist model of capitalism has mostly given way to a corporate model and that a critique of individualism suits the corporate capitalism now reigning. The director as auteur certainly does not suit corporate Hollywood. The individual auteur never suited the Hollywood studio system, it may be argued, and that’s the problem with the auteur theory in the first place: it doesn’t fit the facts of movie production. But this argument shifts the ground from the ideology of individualism to the conditions of the movie industry: it is one thing to say that the individual artist is a figment of bourgeois ideology and quite another to say that the working conditions of Hollywood are inimical to the individual artist. The auteur theory values individual artistry and claims that it exists in the movies: it is one thing to argue that it doesn’t exist in Hollywood and quite another to maintain that it doesn’t exist anywhere and that only a false consciousness can lead us to value it. The auteur theory is the application to film of the genius theory of art. The genius theory may be all wrong, wrong about Beethoven and Michelangelo as about Vincente Minnelli and Frank Borzage; or it may be wrong in its application to film, or wrong in its application to Hollywood film. It should be kept straight where its wrongness is supposed to lie.
The main area of contention in the auteur controversy of the sixties was not whether film is the director’s art but which directors are to be considered artists. Nobody disputed the individual artistry of Eisenstein or Renoir. Hollywood directors were the ones particularly in dispute. Where the auteur policy at Cahiers du cinema broke new ground was in putting forward the artistry and the authorship of directors working in a commercial entertainment industry deemed inhospitable to personal artistic expression. Howard Hawks is a case in point, a director whose considerable achievement received scant critical attention before the French took him up. Alfred Hitchcock is an interesting case, a director whose authorship was singularly well publicized (“the master of suspense”) while his artistry nonetheless remained insufficiently recognized until the French saw him as a true master.
Hitchcock himself devised the publicity through which his directorial signature (and his spryly deployed obese figure with its trademark intrusions into the world of his films) got to be known everywhere. He sold himself as director and sold his films as his creation. In Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation, a study not of Hitchcock’s films but of how they have been regarded, Robert E. Kapsis traces the lifelong promotion Hitchcock conducted in behalf of the director as a film’s maker—the actors he characterized as “cattle”—and of himself as a stellar director.10 Back in England in 1927 Hitchcock had his first hit, The Lodger, where he made his first cameo appearance in his own work. Already that year he started circulating the profile self-caricature that became another trademark. And in a London newspaper that year he said that “film directors live with their pictures while they are being made. They are their babies just as much as an author’s novel is the offspring of his imagination. And that seems to make it all the more certain that when moving pictures are really artistic they will be created entirely by one man.”11 Asking whether Hitchcock’s self-promotion had more to do with commerce or with art misses the intertwinement of the two in a director’s career. Just as surely as he wanted to make money, Hitchcock required money in order to make art.
Hitchcock in the fifties showed his tamest commercial side and he also showed remarkable artistry and audacity. The first Hitchcock film I saw seemed to me entertaining but unimpressive: the glossy and shallow To Catch a Thief (1955) was decidedly on the commercial side. But then there was the breathtaking Vertigo (1958): no film in those years made more of an impression on me. All the moviegoing kids I knew in Havana loved it too, and Cabrera Infante hailed it as a masterpiece. Opinion ran otherwise in the United States, I was surprised to find, and keepers of the common wisdom would shake their heads and discountenance a liking for Vertigo as an inexplicable aberration of esoteric French taste. “Alfred Hitchcock, who produced and directed the thing,” wrote John McCarten in his review of the film in the New Yorker (7 June 1958), “has never before indulged in such farfetched nonsense.” Opinion has certainly changed. Most observers today would concur that Vertigo is a masterpiece, though they may not call it by that currently unfashionable term. Hitchcock’s reputation rose with the auteur theory but did not decline with it. The feminist theory that next took hold in film studies privileged Hitchcock no less—and made Vertigo no less central in the canon.
Vertigo tells the story of a man (Jimmy Stewart, whose persona of the boyish regular guy here acquires a shading of disorder) in the grip of love beyond grasp. A figure of identification for the movie spectator—and especially for the spectator I was as an adolescent boy—this protagonist becomes enthralled by a woman (Kim Novak) as beautiful and as ghostly as the image of a movie star shimmering up close on the screen yet impossibly far away. Driven like the protagonist in his pursuit of this potent apparition of a woman, Cabrera Infante went to see the film “on three successive, obsessive nights” under the pull of “its complete immersion in the sea of magic” and pronounced it “the first romantic work of the twentieth century.”12 My sentiments exactly, at the time. Not, by and large, the way the film is regarded now. According to Kapsis, whose book is not about what he thinks but about what others think and thus presumably expresses the consensus of opinion, Vertigo is an “uncompromising indictment of romantic love.”13 Immersion in the sea of magic is not good for you. The first wave of feminist film theory saw the romanticism of Vertigo as enemy territory, a mesmerizing epitome of male desire and the male gaze; but those unable to let go either of Vertigo or of the theory that posits and reprehends the male gaze have endeavored to “save the film for feminism” by construing it as a condemnation of romanticism.
To the initial objection of many but to the subsequent admiration of most, in Vertigo Hitchcock goes against the rules of the well-made mystery and reveals the solution halfway through, when he unexpectedly shifts the point of view away from the entranced protagonist who so far has been the film’s center of consciousness. By this bold move the film demystifies its romanticism. The protagonist’s inamorata has been an imposture, not merely an idealized but a sheerly fictitious woman, we now learn from the woman herself who impersonated the figment that is the man’s romantic obsession. We watch with a kind of horror as the unknowing protagonist singlemindedly presses her and she misgivingly consents to play again the part of his romantic dream. And yet, even though we know better, something in us irresistibly responds all the same to the vision of beauty that eventually materializes before his eyes. Cabrera Infante’s view is more nearly right than Kapsis’s consensus. Vertigo demystifies its romanticism but it does not defuse it. In this it is like another great romantic film, Max Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), whose protagonist is not a man but a woman in love with an illusion that no reality can dispel.
Does Hitchcock deserve his reputation? He deserves high praise, and among those reluctant to recognize the art of film he still needs championing. Within film circles, however, the answer to this question must be no, for he would have to be incomparably the greatest of all filmmakers to merit the amount of critical and academic attention bestowed on him, well in excess of any other director’s share and giving no signs of diminution after many years and reams of articles and books. The best work is the best measure of an artist, and at his best Hitchcock is a great artist. His draftsmanship with the movie camera—what the French like to call Venture, writing in the language of film—is extraordinary. But the no less extraordinary cinematic dexterity of Frank Capra, for example, has received far less attention. “Capra has a touch of genius with a camera: his screen always seems twice as big as other people’s, and he cuts as brilliantly as Eisenstein,” wrote Graham Greene (who didn’t much like Hitchcock) in one of his movie reviews of the thirties.14 The attention Capra gets today goes mainly to the blend of sentiment and humor that has made viewing It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) on television a national Christmas ritual. “No one else can balance the ups and downs of wistful sentiment and corny humor the way Capra can,” wrote Pauline Kael, “but if anyone else should learn to, kill him.”15 The “Capracorn” that many warm to puts others off. “Enormous skill,” said Orson Welles when Bogdanovich asked him about Capra, “but always that sweet Saturday Evening Post thing about him.”16
If Hitchcock is a consummate camera draftsman, Capra is a master of texture and light, of texture as the play of light projected on the screen. Applying to film the duality proposed by Heinrich Wölfflin in art history, one may call Hitchcock linear, a leader of the eye along the exactly determined line of his camera angles and movements, and Capra painterly, a colorist in black-and-white film with a palette of luster and sparkle, glimmer and glow, light subdued and diffused and resplendent. The distinctive look and light of a Capra film owe much to the work of Joseph Walker, Capra’s cameraman all through the thirties. In a perceptive appreciation of It Happened One Night, the 1934 sleeper that was Capra’s first big hit—a memorable screwball comedy and a Depression romance of enduring enchantment, with Claudette Colbert as the fugitive heiress and Clark Gable as the newspaperman—James Harvey wrote: “Joseph Walker’s photography gives the world of the film a consistent refulgent, glowing-from-within quality—especially the night world, from the rain on the auto camp windows, to the rushing, glittering stream Gable carries Colbert across, to the overarching haystacks, moonstruck and sagging, that the couple find themselves sleeping under after they leave the bus.”17
In the rainy night Colbert and Gable spend together in the auto camp, separated by the blanket he hangs between their two beds and calls the “walls of Jericho,” there is a moment of eloquent glimmer that Harvey aptly singles out, a dark close-up of Colbert in which, as she shifts a little in her bed, the camera briefly catches a moist reflection of light in her eyes: “a gleam slight but clear” that distills the “atmosphere of yearning” suffusing the whole movie.18 And Capra crowns this with a cut that resonantly rhymes the inside and the outside: from the gleam in the close-up of the heroine to a long shot in which, through two cabin windows like eyes moist with the world’s yearning, the rain falling outside gleams.
Capra’s It Happened One Night, Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937), and Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1940) seem to me the three best screwball comedies, or comedies of remarriage as Stanley Cavell calls them,19 the three best instances of a genre that represents classical old Hollywood at its best. Joseph Walker photographed all three. He was one of the world’s great cinematographers. He has generally not gotten the recognition he deserves, and the failure of Capra himself to give him that recognition seems especially unjust. Like Hitchcock, Capra boosted his own authorship. It was fine that he asserted it in the face of an industry that would treat the director as mere hired help, but he also asserted it by minimizing the work of his collaborators. Beginning with It Happened One Night, which swept the Academy Awards for 1934, Capra won three Oscars for best director within five years; in 1938 he made the cover of Time. His was to be “the name above the title,” as he called the autobiography he published in 1971—during the vogue of the auteur theory—a book that won him back some of the fame he had lost in years of decline and inactivity.20 Telling the story of the poor Sicilian immigrant who rises to success in the movies, the book is informed by a cheery self-aggrandizement that plays down what anybody else did to assist the rise or contribute to the success. Capra does not properly acknowledge his debt to Walker’s camera or to Robert Riskin’s scripts for several of his films, including all three that won him directing Oscars.
In Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, an unauthorized biography that reads like a lengthy rebuttal of the untrustworthy autobiography, Joseph McBride takes to task not just Capra’s account but more generally the story of self-made success in the land of opportunity.21 McBride begrudges Capra his success and gloats over his decline (even over his failure as a farmer), but he has a point: what Capra did depended on what others did; a Capra film was certainly not made by one man. Without Joseph Walker, without the work of other collaborators, without the artistic and historical circumstance in which he found himself, Capra would not have been Capra. But this doesn’t mean that Capra was nothing. It Happened One Night, The Awful Truth, and His Girl Friday may be regarded as Joseph Walker films, or as films made at Columbia Pictures, or as instances of a genre of comedy, or as expressions of a time and place, a culture and society. But they may also be regarded as the work of their directors: we may not be interested in the personalities of Capra, McCarey, and Hawks as the auteur theory prescribes, but their art is on the screen.
Capra’s politics is another issue McBride raises. Usually associated with the New Deal, Capra actually voted Republican, which leads McBride to charge him with political hypocrisy. But recognizing that Capra’s films were not made by him alone ought to keep us from confusing the man’s personal politics with the politics of his films. The scriptwriter who worked with Capra on Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) was Sidney Buchman, who later was among those blacklisted in Hollywood for their leftist affiliation, and the “sweet Saturday Evening Post thing” combines in this film with a bitter indictment of the corruption of power in the American political system: Mr. Smith (Jimmy Stewart) may win in the end, but he wins at the very last minute by a kind of miracle, and the film makes painfully manifest that such an idealist would have been crushed in reality by the entrenched political machinery Mr. Smith was up against. In the seventies, at a talk Capra was giving on a tour of college campuses after his autobiography came out, I asked him why he had pushed Mr. Smith so far into the depths of defeat before rescuing him in an improbable happy ending. Surely, if he had wanted, he could easily have made the happy ending more probable? Capra took my question as hostile—which was not my intention—and then said something about Christ on the cross and victory won in defeat.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington followed Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and was followed by Meet John Doe (1941) and It’s a Wonderful Life: a series of Capra films enacting what Richard Griffith called a “fantasy of goodwill” and characterized as “a blend of realistic problem and imaginary solution epitomizing] the dilemma of the middle-class mind in the New Deal period.” Compared with Riskin’s script for Mr. Deeds, Buchman’s script for Mr. Smith treats the problem more realistically, which makes the solution a more evident fantasy: “Individual idealism is no solution for any practical problem,” commented Griffith, “but it is the totem people worship when every other way out cuts across their thinking habits.”22 In Meet John Doe, however, which Riskin again scripted, the problem grows realistic to the point of not admitting a satisfactory solution, not even in fantasy. In It’s a Wonderful Life, with a script by many hands (including such uncredited ones as Clifford Odets, Dorothy Parker, and Dalton Trumbo), the solution, built into the story from the beginning, becomes the ultimate fantasy of an angel from heaven.
Capra—I speak not of the man himself but of what comes across in the films, with all the factors and collaborators that went into their making—was an idealist who would not falsify reality to suit his ideas and so was led to have his fantasies literally take wing. He was not the populist he is often taken to be. His portrayal of the “little people” he purportedly loves tends to sentimentality and condescension. His politics are no sort of New Deal populism but a kind of middle-class noblesse oblige. George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) in It’s a Wonderful Life is not a figure of the common man but of the superior one, idealistically devoted to the common good and individually responsible, as the nightmare vision of what his hometown would have been like without him demonstrates, for fending off capitalist greed. And he is a figure that fails, that in reality would have been dead at the bottom of that river: Capra was an idealist who believed enough in his ideals not to take as their measure the world as it exists.
In a brilliant essay on Capra entitled “American Madness” after one of his films, William S. Pechter argued that Capra was aware, maybe not consciously but at some intuitive level, of the imaginary nature of his solutions, the unlikelihood of his happy endings.23 The happy endings of comedy are often ironic endings, frankly contrived and intended to evoke a smile of disbelief. “Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro ends with the kind of improbability which we are to recognize as such and take ironically,” wrote Eric Bentley in the course of drawing a contrast with another vein of comedy: “In Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, as in Twelfth Night, love and happiness have their reality in art, while the question of their reality in life is left in uncynical abeyance.”24 Love and happiness in It Happened One Night have their reality in just that way, the way of romantic comedy. But Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life are not exactly romantic comedies (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town comes closer). They reach their happy endings through the kind of improbability that could have easily been smoothed over but is instead—as when that angel must intervene in It’s a Wonderful Life to save the hero from suicide—made difficult for us not to recognize as such. But these happy endings are not exactly ironic either. Things would not happen this way in real life, we know, and yet we smile in tense and wishful suspension of disbelief.
The career of Frank Capra offers a good refutation of the auteur theory. If he was a genius, the genius was all gone after It’s a Wonderful Life, so dependent was it on the talents of others, on the factors and the themes, the energies and the conditions of a time and place. Yet for several years something like genius was there, not the genius of an individual if by that is meant a self-sufficient individual, not the genius of the system if by that is meant the studio system—it was Capra that made Columbia a major studio, not Columbia that made Capra a major director—but a genius of some kind that brought it all together and put it on the screen. The pieces he may have owed to others, but the ensemble, the way a Capra film hangs together on the screen, is unmistakably his. More like an architect than an author, as John Ford said of the job of a film director.
I came to the United States after high school, and I thought I was coming to study engineering. I went to M.I.T. There I started writing movie reviews for the campus newspaper. By the time I was a senior I wrote a regular column for The Tech. It was not a widely liked column—the humor magazine twice parodied it and ridiculed its pretensions—but it was widely read. Everybody on campus knew who I was; I had a taste of fame. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was on the path that has led to this book.
I didn’t last long in engineering; in my sophomore year I switched my major to something less practical that I found more attractive—physics. Others may have thought of physics as the study of galaxies and subatomic particles, the outer realms of our experience, but what attracted me to physics was its ability to explain the world around me. It was thrilling to learn why it is that, thanks to the law of conservation of angular momentum and the stability it confers on rotating bodies, a moving bicycle doesn’t tip over. It was exciting to take in Newton’s explanation of the tides and to grasp how it comes about that the moon, though much smaller, has a larger effect on them than the sun. Some of my classmates would make fun of the nerd who talks physics rather than romance in the moonlight by the waterside with a girl, but for me the beauty of the ocean was enhanced rather than diminished by a knowledge of its physics. Around this time I had a dream that, while I was dreaming it, seemed irrefutably to prove the existence of God. The sun and the moon are celestial bodies of vastly different sizes, this dream proof went, and yet from the earth looking up at the sky they appear to be exactly the same size: hence God exists. Until I woke up I was quite convinced I had found the proof the philosophers had sought.
Physicists divide themselves into two camps, theoretical and experimental. The theoreticians tend to look down on the experimenters. Modern physics, since Galileo refuted Aristotle by dropping weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa and seeing how they fall, has been based on empirical observation; but theoretical physics, in some kind of holdover from scholastic thinking, still enjoys greater prestige. I was a theoretical physicist, like Einstein, like Maxwell, like Heisenberg. A scientist friend from England, more aware of matters of class, would call me a “gentleman mathematician” who didn’t want to get his hands dirty. I protested; a mathematician, to the Cuban middle class I was born to, was someone who taught school, assuredly lesser than an engineer; but my friend was not wrong to discern something snobbish in my theoretician’s posture. I nearly failed the doctoral general examination because I did so badly in the experimental questions; I didn’t bother to prepare for questions I didn’t think belonged on the exam. The examiners passed me but demanded that, in penance, I do an experiment over the summer; I carried out the experiment successfully but in the course of it I accidentally broke an expensive piece of equipment that took weeks to replace. I was not cut out for empirical science. And yet the theory that attracted me was not a pure abstraction removed from concrete reality but the theory that explained to me why a bicycle doesn’t tip over.
Film theory is to film criticism as theoretical physics is to experimental physics. A quarter-century ago—a quarter of the century it has been in existence—film began to be studied as an academic discipline. Film studies wanted theory. The theory academically fashionable in the humanities at that time and for years after was structuralist and poststructuralist theory. That’s what’s known as “theory” in film studies; that is the kind of theory that has shaped the field in the years of its academic existence. It is a theory largely detached from criticism and often disdainful of it, a theory presuming to know the answers (“always already” knowing the answers, to use one of its favorite phrases) and averse to getting its hands dirty with the evidence—the theoretician’s snobbery augmented, as snobbery commonly is, by the insecurity of the parvenu, the newcomer to the academy anxious to gain status. It is decidedly an idealist theory—idealist in the sense that it gives primacy to ideas and expects reality to behave accordingly—but it considers itself materialist and thinks that it is exposing the idealism, the ideology, of others.
I am drawn to film theory as I was drawn to theoretical physics; I believe that film criticism and experimental physics—whether they know it or not, and better if they know it—alike depend on theory to guide and make sense of their practice, theory with the focus and structure it provides, the scheme of assumptions it constructs about what to look for and what to make of it. But I also believe that theory that applies to experience in its turn rests on experience; it must not take off into a realm of its own but must instead construct its schemes in vital give and take with concrete reality. I cannot go along with a film theory that eschews such a give and take with criticism, a theory that will not negotiate but just wants to dictate terms. This is a book of film criticism consistently drawn to theory but as consistently skeptical of what these days is called “theory.”
Structuralist theory followed the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and attempted to extend it beyond language proper to other forms of communication. Christian Metz made the most sustained effort to apply it to film. He concluded that film is not a language in any strict sense.25 But the linguistic bent of film theory has persisted. One of its consequences is that, though the ordinary moviegoer naturally remains interested in the actors and other dramatic aspects of the medium, the film scholar seldom invokes theater any longer and instead considers film a form of narration. The distinction between narrative and drama goes back to Aristotle: narrative is told, recounted in the words of a storyteller; drama is enacted, performed by actors on a stage. Film may look like a medium of enactment, with actors and props and scenery, but the language-minded theoretician looks upon it as a narrative medium that tells stories much in the manner of words on a page. John Ellis, for example, maintains that films are told in a “historic mode of narration” that dissembles the mediation of a storyteller and conveys a “sense of reality narrating itself.”26 Entrenched within the linguistic model of cinema, Ellis seems unaware that what he is describing, and characterizing as a delusive endeavor to pass off fiction as reality, is the normal operation of drama, where indeed no storyteller figures but no one fails to recognize the proceedings as a fiction performed for an audience. My own theory of film narrative, set forth in chapter 2 of this book, takes film to be a medium poised between drama and narrative, between enactment and mediation.
The linguistic sign, for Saussure, consists of two parts joined together, a signifier and a signified. The signifier is a word, the word tree, for example, and the signified is a concept, the picture of a tree the word evokes in the mind. Saussure reversed the old model in which abstract words would refer to concrete things: the word, the signifier, is for him the sensory part of the sign, the more material part, while the signified, the picture the word evokes, is the more abstract part.27 In Saussure’s scheme words are what make an impression on the senses, pictures are conjured up in the mind. This was fine for a linguist—words were his material—but transferred to the study of visual images it gets things wrong.28 Jacques Lacan, who worked over Freudian psychoanalysis on the model of Saussurean linguistics, put images in the province of the imaginary, which for him means the illusory plenitude of primary narcissism when the child seemed to possess the mother and the self seemed to possess the world. Metz, who turned to Lacanian psychoanalysis after his attempt at a more direct linguistic approach to film theory, pronounced the film image “the imaginary signifier.”29 What can an “imaginary signifier” be? Metz impossibly joined Saussure’s term for the sensory part of the sign with Saussure’s allocation of pictures to the realm of the mind. A signified can be imaginary, but a signifier cannot, for the signifier is precisely the part of the sign present to the senses, there to be registered; but for Metz the cinematic signifier is absent. What he means is that the film image, in his view, seems to show us a plenitude such as Lacan ascribes to the imaginary but actually it brings nothing before us, nothing but a shadow. The illusion of plenitude, the fact of absence: watching a film, the Lacanian supposes, one moment we feel in possession of the world and the next moment we feel the whole world lost to us. One problem with this theory, as Noel Carroll has observed, is that it assumes that we want the representation on the screen to be reality.30 This is a mistake. The pleasure we take in film is the pleasure of representation.
So badly do we want reality on the screen, according to the Lacanian, that we deny to ourselves the evident fact that it is not there: instead of a willing suspension of disbelief, this theory proposes a clinging to illusion for fear of castration. Castration? The absence of the penis, Freud thought, terrifies the child who catches sight of the female genitals, and the fetish, usually an object seen just before—underwear the woman takes off, pubic hair that becomes velvet or fur, a foot or shoe if the child peers up the woman’s legs—serves as a substitute for the missing penis that enables the fetishist to deny its absence. For the Lacanian we are all fetishists at the movies who fasten on the image to deny the absence of reality. I Lost It at the Movies was the title of Pauline Kael’s first book. For the Lacanian we all lost it—we are all forever kept from the object of desire by the law of the father, all irreparably cut off from the world’s body by the castrating intervention of language—and the movies are the fetish by which we fool ourselves that we have it.
Medusa’s head was for Freud a symbol of the terrifying female genitals. Athena warned Perseus never to look at Medusa directly, but only at her reflection, and gave him a polished shield that would enable him to face the monster. “Of all the existing media the cinema alone holds up a mirror to nature,” wrote Siegfried Kracauer in his Theory of Film. “The film screen is Athena’s polished shield.”31 For Kracauer as for the Lacanian the screen is a mirror: for Kracauer a reproduction, a mirror that enables us to see the face of reality as normally we would not; for the Lacanian an illusion, a reenactment of the primal mirror Lacan posits where the child misperceives the self and the world. Neither Kracauer nor the Lacanian takes proper cognizance of the screen as a space of representation. The images on the screen are neither a reproduction of reality nor an illusion of it: rather they are a construction, derived from reality but distinct from it, a parallel realm that may look recognizably like reality but that nobody can mistake for it. Their picture of reality may be convincing, but in the way fiction is convincing; we respond to the picture not as we would to reality but as we respond to the constructs of representation. The images on the screen are a representation of reality—an imitation or mimesis in the Aristotelian sense—as a novel or a play or a painting is a representation.32
Nobody understands Lacan very well. It may be that he is difficult to understand because he is profound—he is so obscure that it’s hard to tell— but it seems to have been his intention to make himself difficult to understand. In his youth he was associated with the surrealists and all his life he seems to have kept up the surrealist program of bafflement on purpose.33 He may have been an important thinker or he may have been a charlatan and it’s indeed surreal that it should be hard to tell; he was probably a bit of both. His vogue among American academics he no doubt enjoyed as part of the surrealist joke. The purpose of academics in making themselves difficult to understand is to stake out a field of specialized expertise to which outsiders will defer. They set up a jargon impenetrable to outsiders that they themselves may not understand very well, and after a while they may not even know that they don’t know whereof they speak because they speak what has become the idiom of their field, the language in which they talk to one another by common consent.
Lacan had great influence on the academic film theory that emerged in the seventies but his influence came mostly from just one of his papers, the 1949 essay on the mirror stage. And his influence was amalgamated with that of his analysand Louis Althusser, who endeavored to recast Marxism on the linguistic model Lacan used on psychoanalysis. Like Lacan’s, Althusser’s influence came mostly from just one essay, the one on ideology and state apparatuses. Lacan on the imaginary and Althusser on ideology were the theory’s two founding texts: no knowledge of film was necessary, those two essays and the requisite vocabulary were enough to set up shop as a film theoretician. The Lacanian imaginary got conflated with the Althusserian notion of ideology; the mirror stage and the movie screen theorized as its adult replication were construed as apparatuses of ideology, bourgeois, patriarchal, whatever was deemed to be the ruling ideology. What Lacan may have thought of this is not known. While academic film theory was laboring over the relation between the Lacanian imaginary and the Lacanian symbolic, Lacan himself, worried perhaps that he was being too easily (even if wrongly) understood, moved on to a still more obscure notion, the Lacanian real.34
The time of Lacanian-Althusserian theory is past. But its legacy still lingers. Its feminist legacy, for one thing: the feminist film theory of the seventies and eighties was cast largely in Lacanian-Althusserian terms. Those were the terms current at the time and they served their purpose, but they are not the necessary terms of feminism. The main thrust of Laura Mulvey’s landmark essay of 1975, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” was not to advance a film theory but to call for a film practice that would contest the joint dominance of Hollywood and patriarchy.35 But it is mainly as theory that Mulvey’s essay has been taken, and moreover theory taken as proven, Lacanian-Althusserian theory positing the film image, no matter what its content, no matter what its point of view, as the medium of a visual pleasure that only the male can enjoy, a pleasure made to the measure of the male gaze. The evidence, however, is that ever since the nickelodeon replaced the saloon as the chief entertainment of the people, women have been going to the movies as much as men and enjoying them as much as men, though they may not have always enjoyed the same movies. It is the task of a newer feminism to sort out the valid from the unwarranted in this Lacanian-Althusserian phase, secure the insights gained into our situation, and move on to a better understanding of it.
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” has been more cited and argued over than any other essay on film, but the disputes concerning it have for the most part been in the vein of argumentations within shared doctrine rather than critical examinations of the theory and the evidence. Hardly anyone has called into question the founding premise, skimpily argued in Mulvey’s essay yet taken for granted since, that the film spectator is always in the position of a voyeur. The voyeur’s pleasure comes from furtively watching something he (or she—except that the voyeur is theorized as male) is not supposed to be watching, a sight he is not invited to see; but what is on the screen is surely something we are being invited to watch, a sight meant for us to see. In certain cases it may be part of the fiction of a film that we are to assume the furtive position of a voyeur, but surely most of the time films don’t take place in bedrooms or peep into sights normally concealed from view. And even if one grants the voyeur premise, there is the further largely unquestioned assumption that the voyeur position belongs solely to the male. In Babel and Babylon, her study of spectatorship in American silent film, Miriam Hansen brings up the interesting case of the film made in 1897 of the heavyweight championship bout between James Corbett and Robert Fitzsimmons: although prizefighting was a male preserve, the film of the prizefight was attended not only by men but also, in large numbers, by women.36
Unexpected at the time and unaccountable by current feminist film theory, this female turnout must have had something to do with women taking pleasure in the sight of male bodies exhibited on the screen. The visual pleasure women take no doubt differs from men’s; this doesn’t mean that they take none.
Not only Lacanian-Althusserian film theory, but postmodern theory more generally, proceeds on the assumption that there is something fundamentally wrong with film, wrong across the board with the practice and the enjoyment of art, and takes as the principal concern of theory what is wrong with art as purveyor of illusion, handmaiden of the patriarchy and the bourgeoisie, instrument of the ruling order. It is ironic that since film began to be taught in the academy, which would seem to have announced that the art of film was starting to be institutionally recognized, the study of film has been governed largely by an emphasis on what is wrong with art. Neither the theory nor the criticism of art should be confined to praising its beauties. But if all that interested me about art, about film, were what is wrong with it, 1 would not be spending much time with film or with art. It is because I like film—not all of it, of course, but enough of it to make it worth my while to spend so much of my life with it—that I have written this book. And I have mostly written about films that I like.
Post-Theory is the title of a collection of essays edited by David Bordwell and Noel Carroll with the declared intention of “reconstructing film studies” after the deconstructions of Lacanian-Althusserian and other postmodern theory.37 I concur with several of Bordwell and Carroll’s criticisms of the theory they are anxious to leave behind; I especially concur with their objection to the theory’s disdain for empirical evidence, to its haughty undertaking to render itself unassailable by dismissing as “empiricism” any attempt to put its propositions to the test of experience. But the “cognitivism” that Bordwell and Carroll would promote as a better theory, a more fruitful approach to the study of film, suffers, if not from empiricism, from what may be called “commonsensism,” an unchallenged rule of the commonsensical that would have kept Galileo from ever discovering that all bodies, feathers as well as lead, fall to the earth at the same rate. To Judith Mayne’s comment that Bordwell and Carroll’s cognitivism takes no account of the unconscious and would leave psychoanalysis out of consideration, Carroll replies that cognitivism covers everything normal, explains everything explicable, and that psychoanalysis is only called for when the normal unaccountably breaks down, only applies when all else fails.381 tend to be skeptical of psychoanalysis, whether Freudian or Lacanian, but I am more skeptical of commonsensical explanations that would lay claim to everything. Psychoanalysis may have gone too far in its inroads into the psychopathology of everyday life, but Carroll’s commonsensism would confine it to the ghetto of the otherwise inexplicable.
One cannot base a theory on the normal because one must already have a theory in order to decide what the normal is. Taking issue with Bordwell and Carroll on the matter of the norm, psychoanalysis as the abnormal and cognitivism as the norm, Judith Mayne writes that psychoanalysis puts radically into question the very notion of a norm. One could say also that it is through the exceptional, the extreme case, that psychoanalysis reads the norm, from the assumption that it is only in so-called deviance that anything resembling the “norm”—which is a concept that is meaningless without deviance—is readable. For the insight central to the most radical forms of psychoanalysis is that any notion of the norm is fragile indeed.39
One need not agree that psychoanalysis is the best way to call our ruling beliefs into question to see that a theory erecting our beliefs as the norm is no way to call them into question, that such a theory can only ratify the way things are. Neither psychoanalytic nor cognitivist, my own approach to the study of film often focuses on works in deviance from the norm not only because these are often the most interesting films but because they are often the ones that reveal the most about the workings of film, the properties and possibilities of the medium.
Film offers us representations that we mistake for perceptions of reality, says the Lacanian-Althusserian, who sees no need to attend to particulars, for in that general illusion of reality all the deceptions of ideology are supposed to lie.401 disagree: film offers us representations of perceptions, representations that may be convincing but convincing as fiction, as representations of reality, not as reality perceived firsthand. And we do need to attend to particulars not only for their intrinsic interest but for what they may have to tell us about the general. Bordwell and Carroll rightly contest the overweening generalizations of Lacanian-Althusserian theory, but they too seem to believe that theory has not much business with particulars. According to Carroll,
“Film theory speaks of the general case, whereas film interpretation deals with problematic or puzzling cases, or with the highly distinctive cases of cinematic masterworks. Film theory tracks the regularity and the norm, while film interpretation finds its natural calling in dealing with the deviation, with what violates the norm or with what exceeds it or what re-imagines it”.41
What Carroll calls film interpretation is what I have been calling film criticism. I don’t believe that theory should be divided from criticism or interpretation in this or any other way. Problematic or puzzling cases, highly distinctive works, are precisely what lead to the questioning of old theory and the formulation of new. The deviation, what violates the norm or exceeds it or reimagines it, is just what this book, in its combination of criticism and theory, often deals with.
Representation depends on convention. Convention is a problematic but necessary term for an often problematic but always necessary practice. A convention is something accepted, agreed upon, established. The term conventional as Raymond Williams has discussed, has been used unfavorably since the romantics emphasized the artist’s right to break the established rules of art. But an artist, as Williams wrote, “only leaves one convention to follow or create another.”42 For a convention in art is not just an established rule—that red at a traffic light means stop, for example—but an agreement on the part of the audience, a consent to what the work is doing, to a way of doing things the work proposes. Whether this is a well- established way or a bold new departure, it must gain an audience’s agreement—it must be accepted as a convention—if the work is to get across to that audience. Even the most “conventional” work cannot just assume that its conventions have already been settled but must once again make them function for its audience; even the most innovative work cannot just disregard convention but must negotiate its audience’s acceptance of its innovations—even if it is an unsure acceptance, an acceptance forever renegotiated. Theories that would have the spectator stepping into a prearranged position inscribed in the film neglect the fact that the spectator need not go along with the film, may even walk out of the film—that the film proposes a transaction to which it must win the spectator’s consent.
Saussure said that the linguistic sign is arbitrary. “I say it is not arbitrary but conventional,” answered Raymond Williams, “and that the convention is the result of a social process.”43 But all convention, even when socially or humanly motivated, was for Saussure essentially arbitrary, fixed by rule; and language was for him the most characteristic, the ideal system of expression because he saw it as totally arbitrary.44 The arbitrariness of the sign, the view of all convention and expression as a matter of “codes” fixed by rule, has been an article of faith with structuralists and poststructuralists. Any attempt to bring forward the sign’s motivation—the fact that a visual image, for example, is a sign motivated by resemblance to the object it represents— they look upon as a dissembling of its arbitrariness. The recognition of arbitrariness will supposedly lead to the realization that things can be changed. But changed toward what? Not changed for the better, for there can be nothing better, only more arbitrariness, if all our conventions and systems of expression, all our human transactions, can only be arbitrary.
The romantics revolted against convention in the name of nature. A classical thinker such as Aristotle saw no opposition between nature and culture and nothing wrong with convention, which was for him a natural because a human thing. The romantics opposed nature and culture but they saw the individual, and the artist above all, as a bridge between the two, a bringer of nature into culture. The structuralists and poststructuralists take over with a vengeance the romantic opposition between nature and culture and the romantic view of convention as arbitrary. But they see no bridge, no remedy, no alternative. They extend the arbitrariness to all human things. Certainly they do not see the individual as a carrier of nature, and the artist least of all: rather they see him or her as wholly the product of a wholly arbitrary culture.
To contest the arbitrariness of the sign it is important to distinguish between code and convention. A code is a rule to be followed, a convention is an agreement to be secured; a code is always a convention but a convention is not always a code. Art’s conventions are sometimes codes—the halo designating sainthood in religious painting, the dark mustache designating villainy in old-fashioned melodrama—but more often they are not. Carroll fails to make this distinction; a critic of the structuralists and poststructuralists, he nonetheless shares their view of convention as something wholly arbitrary. Linear perspective is not a convention, he maintains, because a convention is something adopted in the context where there are alternative ways of achieving the same effect and it is a matter of indifference as to which of these alternatives is adopted, such as driving on the left or right hand side of the road. But if perspective is more accurate spatially, then it is not the case that it is one among numerous, indifferent alternatives for depicting the appearance of spatial layouts.45
A soliloquy in the theater is plainly a convention. But it is not arbitrary: it is motivated by its resemblance to the way someone we know might take us aside in life to confide his or her thoughts. And it is not a matter of indifference whether Hamlet’s thoughts are expressed in the soliloquy Shakespeare gives him or written in Morse code at the back of the stage. Similarly, perspective is not arbitrary: it is motivated by its resemblance to the way we perceive things in life from the particular position in space we occupy at each moment. But this does not mean that perspective is not a convention. A soliloquy is easier to recognize as a convention because it is no longer current. Perspective was devised in the Renaissance but remains in force as a convention, and so seems natural, to this day.
The rule that we are to stop at a red light, or drive on the right side of the road, is enforced by the police. But art has no police to enforce its rules: it asks us to accept them as conventions, and it motivates them so as to win our acceptance. A picture done according to the rules of perspective asks the viewer to accept a representation of things from the perspective of a single point in space. Why should acceptance be required? Isn’t that just the way things look in life? But a picture is not life. In life we may be limited to the view from where we stand but a picture can represent things in many other ways: a picture chooses to limit itself to an individual’s perception and it must win our acceptance of that choice. Perspective won acceptance in the Renaissance because it expressed the outlook of a confident humanism: from a single viewing point the picture would offer a commanding view of the scene, conveying a sense of the world being revealed, yielding its meaning, to an individual human gaze. Later uses of perspective have stressed the sense of a limitation, a partial view. Either way the use of perspective seeks our agreement to look at nothing else but what an individual eye would see. Whether perspective is a pictorial convention or an accurate rendering of what we see has been much debated; such personages as Erwin Panofsky and E. H. Gombrich have taken opposite sides in this debate. Both sides are right: perspective is accurate—not a perfect rendering of what we see but a close enough approximation—and it is a convention. Its very accuracy in representing an individual’s point of view—rather than some other way of viewing things—bespeaks the slant that makes it a convention.
In his Theory of the Film Bela Balazs wrote about the “silent soliloquy” enacted on the screen by the human face in close-up:
The modern stage no longer uses the spoken soliloquy, although without it the characters are silenced just when they are the most sincere… when they are alone. The public of today will not tolerate the spoken soliloquy, allegedly because it is “unnatural.” Now the film has brought us the silent soliloquy, in which a face can speak with the subtlest shades of meaning without appearing unnatural and arousing the distaste of the spectators. In this silent monologue the solitary human soul can find a tongue more candid and uninhibited than in any spoken soliloquy, for it speaks instinctively, subconsciously.46
No less than the stage soliloquy, the movie close-up is a convention. A close- up may imitate the way we look at the face of someone in life who draws our attention. But in life we focus our attention, and in a movie the camera focuses it for us: the camera looks at the face and we agree to look where the camera is looking. Moreover, in a movie the camera can come as close as it wants for as long as it wants: we agree to look in the way the camera looks, which is not the same as life.
The close-up is a special case of what may be called the convention of the shot. Theater asks its audience to accept the stage as the world: that is its basic convention. D. W. Griffith broke away from the staginess of early movies in which a whole scene would unfold before a camera fixed in its position like a spectator at the theater. Griffith—he wasn’t the only one but he was the boldest and most systematic—broke a movie down into shots, now here and now there, now far and now near. As film historians have often said, he made the shot rather than the scene the basic unit of film construction. His basic innovation was the convention of the shot: if the theater asks its audience to take the stage as a whole world, the movies after Griffith have asked their audience to agree, for as long as each shot lasts on the screen, to look at just the piece of the world framed within that shot.
The convention of the shot entails our agreement not only to look at what is being shown on the screen but also not to look at what is not being shown. Moreover, it entails our agreement about what it is that is not being shown. If we see a long shot of Rio de Janeiro, for example, followed by a closer view of Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant—I’m thinking of Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946)—we are to agree that Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant are in a Rio de Janeiro that is not being shown. The Rio de Janeiro in Notorious is a fictional Rio de Janeiro even if it includes some views of the real city. Notorious was shot mostly in the studio; Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant weren’t really in Rio de Janeiro. But even if they had been, even in a movie shot entirely on location, the relation between the actors and the setting, between what we see on the screen and the unseen surrounding space that each shot implies, is a fiction put together in the arrangement of the shots. The piece of the world we agree to look at in each shot on the screen is not a piece of our world—though it may look very much like one—but a piece of the fictional world the movie proposes for our acceptance.
Cinematic representation depends on our acceptance of absence: the absence of Rio de Janeiro when we see Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, the absence of most of the world from each image on the screen. It is curious that Lacanian film theory should have supposed that we “misrecognize” the Image as a plenitude when the film image since Griffith has been something we are to accept as a fragment. On the model of the baby before the mirror, the Lacanian postulates a movie spectator who hasn’t learned the first thing about watching movies, which is the convention of the shot: we are to accept the fragment we are seeing on the screen as just what we should be seeing at the moment, and to accept the absence of the implied rest of the world as something we don’t need to see for now. That what we are seeing on the screen is not Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant but merely their shadow is a condition of our seeing Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant at all, a condition of cinematic representation just as it is a condition of painterly representation that we’re not seeing God creating Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel but only paint applied on a surface. Except perhaps for babies, nobody watching a movie believes reality to be present on the screen or feels deprived by its absence. The play of presence and absence is central to the movies, but presence and absence in the realm of representation. Whereas a painting or a theater stage represents a whole, a bounded space containing all that can be seen, a movie represents only a piece at a time and implies an indefinitely larger space extending unseen beyond the boundaries of the image. Presence is not an illusion in the movies, nor absence a fact: presence and absence are conventions of cinematic representation.
Still photography too depends on our acceptance of the fragment. But not the fragment for now, the fragment forever: the art of still photography consists in making the fragment—the piece of space, the moment in time- stand on its own as all that can be seen. Like any fragment, a still photograph implies a larger whole that is not there; but it can only suggest that larger whole, it cannot construct it as a movie can, it cannot make it into a fullblown fiction. What lies beyond the image in the space out of frame is a suggestion in still photography that the movies make into a convention.
No one grasped better than Andre Bazin the extension of cinematic space beyond the boundaries of the image. “The screen is a mask,” he wrote, “whose function is no less to hide reality than it is to reveal it. The significance of what the camera discloses is relative to what it leaves hidden.”47 But Bazin took cinematic space to be essentially the same as the space of reality, which always extends beyond what we can see. He did not recognize that the space off screen is a convention, a fiction, as much a construction as a stage setting and as amenable to different kinds of construction.
Whether the reproduction of reality or the imitation of dreams, the imaginary signifier or the realism of space, most theorists have attempted to define the nature of film as something given, something essential and unchanging; this book treats it as something variable and amenable to different kinds of construction, something to be defined through the concrete work of filmmaking and the conventions it develops in transaction with the audience. This book is a study, historical, critical, and theoretical, of the film medium not in the abstract but as it has been variously defined in the concrete; it focuses on several notable films and filmmakers whose expressive constructions of their medium have brought forward its properties and possibilities in significantly different ways.
Kracauer and Bazin were theorists who saw film as an extension of photography and saw photography as a record of reality. Kracauer was a purist; like Clement Greenberg, he believed that a medium should be confined to what defines it, what it alone can do; and as flatness defined painting for Greenberg, so for Kracauer photographic realism defined the film medium. Bazin had a more complex sense of the medium and even called for an impure cinema, but a cinema nonetheless governed and informed by its peculiar closeness to reality. To this emphasis on reality the structuralists and poststructuralists opposed their emphasis on the sign; they thought the likes of Kracauer and Bazin naive to take the image for reality; but it was they who were naive to suppose that anyone would take for reality the light and shadows projected on the screen. The question is what kind of image the screen holds, what kind of representation of reality.
It is, Bazin said, an image that partakes of the reality it represents, an image that receives a “transference of reality” from the thing it pictures.48 A painting is a handmade image and it carries in it something of the hand that made it, the hand of the painter. A photographic image is made by light and it carries in it something of the light that made it, the light the camera received from the reality before its open shutter. If a Gothic cathedral enshrines a metaphysics of light, light as a spiritual, transcendent element, the camera employs a physics of light, light as a material element of representation; and if the paint that goes into a painting is a material that belongs to the painter, the light that goes into a photograph is a material that belongs to the thing represented. Something of the thing itself comes through in its photographic representation.
The laws of physics are not indifferent to scale: a world twice as large would not be the same world twice as large but qualitatively a different world. In art too scale makes a difference. Still photographs are smaller than life; the movie screen is bigger than life. It is fitting that photographs are small, for they are small traces of life, residual little bits captured from life by means of optics and chemistry. It is fitting that the movie screen is big, for it proposes to take over from life and put in its place a world of the movie. The tendency to enlargement in certain recent photography reflects a changed conception of the photograph no longer as the record of anything real but as something made up. The tendency to watch movies on the small screen of television makes for a changed experience of the movie no longer as a world that takes us over but one we peer into and catch glimpses of.
Perhaps the most interesting chapter of Kracauers Theory of Film is the one on the spectator, which combines his emphasis on photographic realism, the lifelike nature of the film image, with what might seem a contrary emphasis on the dreamlike nature of the spectators experience, the “trancelike condition in which we find ourselves when looking at the screen.”49 Films, for Kracauer, present reality as a dream that makes us see reality as we would not otherwise see it, a dream that reclaims reality for us who have lost touch with it in our normal waking state. The more lifelike the film image is, the more dreamlike it looks:
Perhaps films look most like dreams when they overwhelm us with the crude and unnegotiated presence of natural objects—as if the camera had just now extricated them from the womb of physical existence and as if the umbilical cord between image and actuality had not yet been severed. There is something in the abrupt immediacy and shocking veracity of such pictures that justifies their identification as dream images.50
Bazin said something similar when he wrote that photography is a “privileged technique of surrealist creation” because the image it produces is a “hallucination that is true.”51 The images of still photography, however, may be true, but they don’t convey the feeling of hallucinations. The film image is the true hallucination, the material ghost.
If Einstein taught us that light falls like any other body, Bazin taught us that light leaves a track like any other body, an imprint the camera makes into an image. But the camera is not the only machine that makes the film image. The projector, the magic lantern, animates the track of light with its own light, brings the imprint of life to new life on the screen. The images on the screen carry in them something of the world itself, something material, and yet something transposed, transformed into another world: the material ghost. Hence both the peculiar closeness to reality and the no less peculiar suspension from reality, the juncture of world and otherworldliness distinctive of the film image.
Notes:
1. In his book about his career in cinematography, Néstor Almendros gives a similar account of a somewhat earlier period of Havana moviegoing:
My father had settled in Cuba. [Almendros’s father, Herminio Almendros, a republican in exile from fascist Spain, was a friend of my father’s and I would see him on occasion when I was a kid, but I only met his son once, and that was many years later in New York]. As soon as he was able he sent for us, those who had remained in Spain. In 1948 I took a ship for Havana. There I studied philosophy and letters at the university, more to please my family than myself, for cinema was what interested me. But in Havana there were no cine-clubs. There was nothing like those in Barcelona, and no magazines specializing in film either, outside of the fan magazines from North America. On the other hand, paradoxically, Cuba was at that moment « privileged place to see films. First, in Cuba, unlike Spain, dubbing was unknown: all the movies were shown in their original versions with subtitles. Second, since there was an open market, with hardly any state controls, the distributors bought all kinds of movies. There I was able to see all the American productions, even the B pictures, which did not readily get to other countries. I was also able to see all the Mexican cinema and a lot of the Spanish, Argentine, French, and Italian cinemas. Around six hundred films a year were being imported, including titles from the Soviet Union, Germany, Sweden, etc.
At that time, before the dictatorship of Batista, censorship, in comparison with Spain and even with the United States, was very tolerant. Keep in mind that Havana and not Copenhagen was the first city in the world where pornographic films were shown legally. Furthermore, in their double bills the commercial movie houses would run old films such as Dreyer’s Vampyr, which I came across in a neighborhood theater. Havana was the cinephile’s paradise, but a paradise without any critical perspective.
Néstor Almendros, Días de una cámara (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1982), 37-38, my translation. A rather different version of this passage may be found in the English translation of the book published as A Man with a Camera, trans. Rachel Phillips Belash (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984), 26-27.
2. Pauline Kael, “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” in Going Steady (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), 102.
3. G. Cabrera Infante, A Twentieth Century Job, trans. Kenneth Hall and G. Cabrera Infante (London: Faber & Faber, 1991). 418: Notes to Pages 4-11
4. Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, ed. Jonathan Rosenbaum (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
5. Griffith’s ad appeared in the New York Dramatic Mirror on 3 December 1913.
6. This is the title of a book by Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Pantheon, 1988). Schatz took his title from André Bazin: “The American cinema is a classical art, but why not then admire in it what is most admirable, i.e. not only the talent of this or that filmmaker, but the genius of the system, the richness of its ever-vigorous tradition, and its fertility when it comes into contact with new elements” (André Bazin, “La Politique des auteurs,” Cahiers du cinema, no. 70 [1957], reprinted in English in The New Wave, ed. Peter Graham [New York: Doubleday, 1968], 154). By “the genius of the system” Bazin did not exactly mean the Hollywood studio system, which is the subject of Schatz’s book, but something larger, the conjunction of a medium, its practitioners, and its public, the social, cultural, historical juncture that allowed Hollywood’s classical art to flourish. Schatz’s book is mainly about the Hollywood producer, whom he sees as a neglected creative figure and studies in useful detail. As patron saint of the kind of cinema he most admired Bazin nominated Erich von Stroheim, and it is a little ironic that his phrase should have been used as the title of a book whose patron saint is Irving Thalberg, the producer who took Stroheim’s Greed away from him and had it drastically cut.
7. Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962”, Film Culture, no. 27 (winter 1962-63), reprinted in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Praeger, 1970), 128.
8. Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies (New York: Bantam, 1966), 280.
9. Christopher Faulkner, The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 3-16.
10. Robert E. Kapsis, Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
11. Alfred Hitchcock, quoted in ibid., 20.
12. Cabrera Infante, A Twentieth Century Job, 278-79, 281.
13. Kapsis, Hitchcock, 149.
14. Graham Greene, review of You Can’t Take It With You, in Graham Greene on Film: Collected Film Criticism, 1935-1940, ed. John Russell Taylor (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 203-4.
15. Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1991), 383.
16. Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 137.
17. James Harvey, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, from Lubitsch to Sturges (New York: Knopf, 1987), 113.
18. Ibid., 112-13.
19. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).
20. Frank Capra, The Name above the Title: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1971). Notes to Pages 11-17: 419
21. Joseph McBride, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
22. Richard Griffith, “The Film Since Then”, in The Film till Now: A Survey of World Cinema, by Paul Rotha, with an additional section by Richard Griffith (London: Spring Books, 1967), 452-53.
23. William S. Pechter, “American Madness”, in Twenty-four Times a Second (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 123-32.
24. Eric Bentley, The Life of the Drama (New York: Atheneum, 1966), 314.
25. Christian Metz, “The Cinema: Language or Language System?” in Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 31-91.
26. John Ellis, Visible Fictions (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 59-61.
27. Both signifier and signified are for Saussure psychological rather than physical things, but the signifier is the more material of the two and the signified the more mental: “The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image. The latter is not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses. The sound-image is sensory, and if I happen to call it ‘material,’ it is only in that sense, and byway of opposing it to the other term of the association, the concept, which is generally more abstract” (Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye with Albert Riedlinger, trans. Wade Baskin [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966], 66).
28. Diane Stevenson discusses the inadequacy of the Saussurean model when it comes to images in her essay on Magritte and Foucault, “This Is Not a Pipe, Its a Pun” (unpublished).
29. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
30. Noël Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 42-43.
31. Sigfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, i960), 305.
32. In The World Viewed, enl. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), Stanley Cavell lays stress on the difference between the automatism of the photographic image and the human-made representations of painting and the theater. In view of that difference, he thinks we should consider film a “projection” of reality rather than a representation. I agree with Cavell on the importance of that difference but I would not express it by saying that a photographic image is something other than a representation. Cavell felt a need to justify the photographic image to the way of thinking (the modernism of Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried) that saw representation as something modern art had to forgo; but modern art (in Manet or Cezanne or Matisse or Picasso) did not forgo representation.
33. I owe to the psychologist David Lichtenstein the link between Lacan’s obscurity and his youthful surrealism and the notion that the obscurity was a calculated surrealist tactic.
420: Notes to Pages 18-21
34. In the Lacanian system the imaginary gives us plenitude but the symbolic— the realm of language, the realm of law and convention, the realm of meaning and also the realm of lack, of castration—takes it all away. And what does the real do? The real is defined as what resists symbolization, as a gap in the symbolic order, a blind spot. Lacan’s concept of the real seems to have derived, maybe not directly but through some route that must have included Peirce—Peirce because the real seems to be some kind of an index—from Kant’s notion of the thing in itself. Lacanian Althusserian theory concerned itself exclusively with the imaginary and the symbolic, but more recent Lacanian theory puts emphasis on the real and the relation between the symbolic and the real. A leading figure in this newer Lacanian wave is Slavoj Zizek, who has written several books; see, for example, his Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan In Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992).
35. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6-18.
36. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 1.
37. David Bordwell and Noel Carroll, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).
38. Noel Carroll, “Prospects for Film Theory”, ibid., 61-67.
39. Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 1993), 58.
40. In two essays on the cinematographic apparatus that have been central to Lacanian-Althusserian theory, Jean-Louis Baudry holds the apparatus itself, its machinery of illusion, generally responsible for the ideological effects of cinema. The ideological effects are allegedly built into the apparatus, no matter what one does with it. Baudry’s two essays, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” (1970) and “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema” (1975), are both reprinted in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 286-318. Judith Mayne writes:
Near the conclusion of the 1975 essay “The Apparatus”, Baudry makes one of many sweeping statements concerning the desires embodied in the cinema. A wish prepares, says Baudry, the “long history of cinema: the wish to construct a simulation machine capable of offering the subject perceptions which are really representations mistaken for perceptions.” If the cinematic apparatus holds its subject in a state of hypnotized fascination, of subjugated fantasy, then surely one of the most decisive markers of the power of the cinematic institution is precisely this confusion of perception and representation. This supposed equation points not only to a powerful system of representation, but to a spectator so caught up in the illusions of this system that all perceptual activity is, if not suspended, then at the very least subjugated to the regressive desires instigated by the machine. Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship, 55.
41. Carroll, “Prospects for Film Theory”, 42-43. Notes to Pages 21-38 : 421
42. Raymond Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 13.
43. Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London: NLB, 1979), 330.
44. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 68.
45. Carroll, Mystifying Movies, 248.
46. Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (New York: Dover, 1970), 62-63.
47. André Bazin, Jean Renoir, ed. Francois Truffaut, trans. W W Halsey II and William H. Simon (New York: Dell, 1974), 87.
48. André Bazin, What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 14.
49. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 163.
50. Ibid., 164.
51. Bazin, What Is Cinema? 16, translation somewhat modified. For the original see André Bazin, Qu’est-ce le cinéma? vol. 1, Ontologie et langage (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1958), 18.
