Andrew Film Studies

The Core and the Flow of Film Studies

Dudley Andrew

1. Film: Living Object, Field of Research, DisciplineDecades ago, when the galaxy of film was gradually swirling into exis-

tence and becoming visible within the university, it wasn’t at all clear thatacademic oversight was pertinent or wholesome. From the perspective ofthe academy, movies could have the effect of devaluing the humanities,while from that of cinephiles the university might very well tamper withthe organic rapport of audiences with movies, stunting or unnaturallytwisting the development of both. Such a debate over the very propriety ofits study seems primordial enough to distinguish film from English or anyother longstanding field. You may believe the decision to have long sincebeen rendered in favor of the academy; after all, the article you are readingwas commissioned by Critical Inquiry for this issue devoted to the state ofthe disciplines.

But suspend judgment, if you can, and imagine there to be a force incinema still capable of tossing scholars from the saddle while they try torein films into disciplinary paddocks. This contest involving a once youth-ful subject and a set of self-confident methodologies is chronicled andcelebrated in a fine new anthology, Inventing Film Studies.1 Its final threeessays stage a quiet debate that neatly exemplifies distinct perspectives onfilm (by any other name). D. N. Rodowick concludes the book on a san-guine note when he declares that the eclipse of film by new media both inthe entertainment world and in the minds of the coming cohort of scholarsneed not trouble us. For historically the interest in films quickly led to filmtheory and that impressive array of concepts has grown strong enough to

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.1. See Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham, N.C., 2008).

Critical Inquiry 35 (Summer 2009)

© 2009 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/09/3504-0002$10.00. All rights reserved.

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direct and focus scholarship on audio-visual culture in all its manifesta-tions long into the future. Film may be at the point of being unrecogniza-bly transformed as a medium, Rodowick asserts, “yet the basic set ofconcepts has remained remarkably constant. Moreover, the real accom-plishment of cinema studies . . . is to have forged more than any otherrelated discipline the methodological and philosophical bases for address-ing the most urgent and interesting questions, both aesthetic and cultural,of modernity and visual culture,” including especially the changes takingplace in electronic and digital media.2 But Mark Betz is not ready to relin-quish film for “modernity and visual culture,” even if film theory is re-tained as a privileged discourse. In his contribution to the anthology, titled“Little Books,” Betz traces the history of our field’s book publishing to seehow films have been treated. He honors the effervescent period after 1965when enterprising editors supported scores of fledgling film scholars, un-ashamed of being “amateurs,” who inflated their short monographs with“grandeur.” These studies of directors, genres, and periods provided aglowing backlight against which cinema as a whole stood out afresh andthe larger culture with it. However, after two decades such essays would bediscounted by an increasingly bureaucratic educational and publishingestablishment that gave priority to far weightier tomes; professors soughtacademic credibility by anchoring their scholarship to tables, statistics,bibliographies, and appendices. Betz rues “the migration of several formsof film study to a kind of final resting home: the American academy,” butthen he immediately takes solace in “the current resurgence of little books[such as the BFI Film Classics] . . . that are helping film studies . . . recon-nect with the impulses and the pleasures, the enthusiasm and the excite-ment, that were functional in breathing life into it in the first place. . . . Weare writing not in a dying field but rather in one too in thrall with scholarlyrules. . . . It is time again for a little grandeur.”3

The enthusiasm Betz ascribes to an earlier, more natural phase of writ-

2. D. N. Rodowick, “Dr. Strange Media, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love FilmTheory,” in Inventing Film Studies, p. 394.

3. Mark Betz, “Little Books,” in Inventing Film Studies, pp. 340, 341. Betz undoubtedlyenjoys the irony that his own essay is replete with footnotes, statistics, and even an appendix.

D U D L E Y A N D R E W is R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and ComparativeLiterature at Yale University. Most recently, he is the coauthor, with CaroleCavanaugh, of Sansho dayu (2000) and, with Steven Ungar, of Popular FrontParis and the Poetics of Culture (2005). He is also the editor of The Image inDispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography (1997).

880 Dudley Andrew / Core and Flow of Film Studies

ing about films may return thanks to the very technologies that are said tohave marginalized it. So argues Alison Trope, who heralds “Home Enter-tainment as Home Education” (the subtitle of her piece), whereby accessto information packed into DVD supplements and available on the Inter-net Movie Database (IMDb) has triggered rampant autodidacticism.4

Enumerating the values of high-end DVDs like the Criterion Collection,Trope reverses Rodowick’s formulation; rather than film bequeathing tothe university the serious concepts required to address what is nolonger— or only incidentally—film, she points to the persistence and vi-tality of the movies in spaces far removed from the university and its rigidcodes and agendas. Several recent books go farther than Trope to identifythe emergence of electronic journals and personal blogs where film enthu-siasts are reshaping cinephilia and creating a vibrant form of film studiesoutside the academy in a thriving, if virtual, cine-club milieu.5

Where is film studies, then, now that we have heard about its inventionand reinvention? What exactly do people with such training work on?Trope evidently toils in the field of cinema, which comprises phenomenasurrounding films that give them their significance. Rodowick’s fieldwould seem to be that of the university and its discourses. My interest—tolay out my own allegiance— has steadfastly remained with the herds offilms that graze or frolic in those fields. Of course, all three orientations—whether toward films, or toward the cinematic field, or toward the proto-cols of pertinent discourse—must operate interdependently in film studieswhether or not we take this to be a legitimate discipline.6

Dynamism flows from this interdependence. Discipline in the abstractmay characterize an attitude, a spiritual exercise, or an institutional pos-ture, but any concrete discipline should also evoke the recalcitrant phe-nomenon it aims to bring to order. The phenomenon of cinema has beenrambunctious enough, however, to keep from being entirely corralled.With its subject matter continuing to overrun all names and borders, whatused to be simply film has bled into well-constituted academic disciplines

4. See Alison Trope, “Footstool Film School: Home Entertainment as Home Education,” inInventing Film Studies, pp. 353–73. Trope explicitly recognizes that the bottom-up, viewer-controlled learning and exploration promised by DVDs is part of a top-down commercialenterprise. Viewers may have escaped the classroom situation, but their freedom is that of ahighly regulated marketplace.

5. See Cinephilia: Movies, Love, and Memory, ed. Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener(Amsterdam, 2005); Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia, ed. JonathanRosenbaum and Adrian Martin (London, 2003); and Cinephilia in the Age of DigitalReproduction: Film, Pleasure, and Digital Culture, ed. Scott Balcerzak and Jason Sperb (London,2008).

6. For the record, in their respective essays in Inventing Film Studies, Rodowick explicitlydenies, while Betz accords, film studies the status of a discipline.

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(English, art history, sociology, and so on) while it also challenges the newprograms that universities have designed to house it. Never labeled toeveryone’s satisfaction, the subject that was initially discussed by univer-sities as film is now maturing under such rubrics as Cinema and MovingImage Study (Concordia University), Modern Culture and Media (BrownUniversity), Screen Studies (Clark University), Cinema and ComparativeLiterature (University of Iowa). Often the result of intense internal debate,these names seem to designate a field. More importantly, they also implymethods of studying and teaching what is in that field. Field and methodare, of course, dialectically related, as particular subjects seem to call fortailored approaches, while the latter always seek additional opportunities(an expanded field) over which to exercise the power of their techniques.

This dialectic may not be as easy to recognize in a disciplinary imposterlike film as in a putatively stable example like English—which was imme-diately considered a likely model for film. At first blush, English certainlynames a field, one usually taken to be expanding outward from a core ofanglophone literary classics, toward official or personal documents, andthen toward zones of popular and folk expressions, including oral culture.But English, perhaps more usefully, refers as well to a set of reading prac-tices, a kind of schooled attention that distinguishes itself whenever facultyfrom around the university happen to get together to discuss some com-mon topic. On these occasions the English professor can be counted on toaddress the complexities of representation and expression that constituteor relate to the topic. Deliberately or automatically, she or he would belikely to deploy some form of rhetorical analysis, be it formal, deconstruc-tive, philological, generic, or what have you, often making a point throughelaborate figures of speech, allusions to literary works, and ornate diction.The MLA houses language and literature scholars who think and talk thisway, including not just those in English but in the fields of Spanish, Slavic,Japanese, and so on who share (or debate) this array of approaches andattitudes that are meant to make sense of, and put into play, similar typesof subject matter.

Now what about film? Emeritus faculty in English and in language andliterature departments may recall how classic and modernist feature filmswedged their way into their territory in the 1950s and 1960s. It was onlythen that inklings of a new discipline were felt in America, even if movieshad been taken up by individual scholars long before that. Things didn’tstart to coalesce until a critical mass was reached that was weighty enoughfor those involved to lobby for a place in the curriculum and to form theSociety of Cinematologists in 1959. Social scientists could be found amongits members, but most were literature teachers (and occasionally art his-


torians) who offered film appreciation, analysis, and history as variants oftheir literature courses. After all, the field of film seemed generally congru-ent with the literary field, though smaller: a core of cinematic masterpiecesspreading out to popular genres, then to documentary material, includinggovernmental and amateur films, then to animation, television, and a va-riety of media artifacts. Over the years this expansion once again attractedthe intermittent attention of other disciplines that had been glancing atfilm from the outset, recognizing new caches of material to mine: sociol-ogy, anthropology, history, psychology, and economics. Were it a well-formed field, film might profit from the way such poaching by these socialsciences can fortify the literary and art-historical methods most film schol-ars practice. However, the field was never properly walked, as farmers say,and most traces of its original perimeter have been obliterated, such that itshorizon line now extends as far as “audio-visual culture.” No single set ofmethods could possibly assert priority when the subject has lost definitionin this way. And so, with agreement neither about the shape and size of itsterritory nor about pertinent work that should be undertaken there, thepromise of a discipline, no matter what we name it, has become ratherfanciful, the rhetoric of academicians.

That promise was tendered as a battle cry in film’s initial struggle forrespect within the university; in those days the word discipline served as arationale for the autonomy film studies sought from the units in which itgrew up. More recently, it is played as a trump card in the high-stakes gameamong leaders in a now-recognized, albeit undefined, field. For today, filmstudies unquestionably stands as a legitimate member of the humanities,often commanding full voting rights. Those who teach and research in thisfield exude that impression. The Society for Cinema and Media Studies(SCMS) boasts twenty-four hundred members, with fourteen hundredattending its 2008 convention to listen to nearly eight hundred papersgiven under the rubric of three hundred panels. The topics of those panels,like the arguments of the papers, may be subject to debate, but nearlyeveryone recognizes that the debate itself takes place within a legitimatelyconstituted disciplinary field. Whether it is currently emergent or residual,to use the terms of this inquest, is up for dispute, though there is noquestion that in the 1960s and for some time thereafter film studies grewrapidly across whatever terrain it found at all hospitable. To sustain thatgrowth, its identity and constituency has never ceased to expand. First itdropped its pretentious name, Society of Cinematologists, shorteningthings to SCS in 1966; to increase membership and authority, it took on anincreasing number of topics until adding the M in 2002. Its website nowannounces that members of “this scholarly organization are involved in


various fields of study, including (but not limited to): Film Studies, Cin-ema Studies, Television Studies, Media Studies, Visual Arts, Cultural Stud-ies, Film and Media History, and Moving Image Studies.”7 Today mediastudies stands as the society’s umbrella term, with film studies its chiefsubset, but one that may be ceding ground, at least in many quarters,before the wildfires known as new media that race across the university.

The organization’s 1959 birthdate has obscured earlier efforts at coor-dinate film education. Dana Polan lays these out in Scenes of Instruction:The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film, bringing to light and paying trib-ute to individual scholars and the initiatives of particular universities. Po-lan nicely summarizes the attributes that turn a common interest or topic(the study of film) into an academic discipline (film studies) “with lin-eages, legacies, commonly shared assumptions, and regularized proce-dures.”8 He suggests that curricula, conferences, canon formation,graduate students, journals, peer reviews, and other protocols of academicfields are disciplinary in order to realize what is most essential, an idea ofprogress and continuity. A discipline needs to see current work in relationto the momentum of prior study, just as it needs to look forward to theadvancements that graduate students will make when they take up thereins. It is here above all that the early scholars Polan celebrates—some asprophetic, some as merely maverick— belong as a topic in film studiesmore than as part of its root system. Polan resurrects the earliest glimmersof academic interest in this popular entertainment around 1915 and tracesa series of independent projects and lines of thought up to the formation ofthe first curricula (1937) that looked forward to, but did not really generate,the programs and departments committed to the all-out study of cinemathat started to coalesce in the late 1950s.

With Polan’s prehistory as background, why not simply detail thegrowth and vicissitudes of this academic entity over the past fifty years?That chronicle, however, requires an immediate detour out of the U.S.,where Polan’s study confines itself. For American film studies becamebeholden to movements in England in the 1960s that were themselvesproduced through contact with Paris. This crucial decade saw the transi-tion “From Cinephilia to Film Studies,” the title of the endearing andhighly informative dialogue between Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen inInventing Film Studies.9 Given its more concentrated arena (London and

7. www.cmstudies.org/index.php?option�com_content&task�view&id�798&Itemid�1688. Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film (Berkeley,

2007), p. 19.9. See Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, “From Cinephilia to Film Studies,” in Inventing

Film Studies, pp. 217–32.


Oxford), the presence of the powerful British Film Institute with its jour-nals Sight and Sound and Screen, and its proximity to continental Europe,the UK registered the development of film studies in a far more dramaticway than what occurred in the U.S. In any case, thanks to the avalanche ofthe “little books” in the English language already mentioned (followed bythe heavy tomes), a single field (not unified, but identifiable nonetheless)emerged on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1960s that was situated differ-ently within each nation’s academic network.

This single field, however, presupposes film studies to be effectivelyanglophone. This is what one might conclude from Inventing Film Studies,which, smart as it is, unapologetically fixes on England and North Americawithout even a hint that the field may be larger than the institutions thathave come to rule in these places. Of course, we understand that scholarswrite elsewhere in other languages, but how much do we credit their con-tribution to a common field? And do we expect them to keep up with whatcomes out in English? While its international scope should be a hallmark ofany mature discipline, many of us, even those who analyze films madearound the globe and are in dialogue with colleagues from Latin America,Asia, Europe, and Africa, have become excessively concerned with theinstitutional situations in the places where we operate.10 Can we expandthe purview without changing the subject?

Of course we can expand. What does it mean, for example, that filmstudies has never achieved as much institutional visibility in Japan as else-where, when it is a country whose film life over the last one hundred yearshas arguably been second only to that of the U.S.? There has always beenfeverish activity among private historian-archivists (collectors of books,magazines, interviews, and ephemera) and critics (certain newspapers ranpowerful columns for decades, journals sprouted from the 1920s on). Asfor large-scale studies of the medium, written by professors or public in-tellectuals, the Japanese bibliography between 1913 and 1943 may be largerthan its English language counterpart. In the postwar era, perhaps thename most Western film scholars might recognize is that of the prolificTadao Sato, as some of his work has appeared in English and French. Yetonly late in his career did this autodidact offer university courses. Theresimply was not much opportunity. With the exception of Nihon Univer-sity, which claims to have introduced the subject in 1927, one does not findfilm studies taught within the university system until the 1960s when it wasintroduced within Nihon University’s art department and Waseda’s liter-

10. To be fair, the SCMS held its 2004 conference in London so as to attract European filmscholars and the 2009 conference has just taken place in Tokyo.


ature program. Waseda boasts a tremendous theater program and library,making it a natural place for the study of cinema to mature. In 1974, aimingto broaden their reach beyond their respective campuses, these universi-ties, joined by a few others (the number has grown to thirty), formedNihon Eizo-gakkai (the Japanese Society of Image Arts and Sciences[JASIAS]), an umbrella organization fostering research in film, photogra-phy, and television. Their annual conference (where Christian Metz gavethe keynote in 1981) and publication, Eizo-gaku, make it similar to SCMS.In the late 1980s they added Iconics as a second publishing venture, withnine issues thus far featuring articles in Western languages, many by lead-ing Western scholars. Still, some universities that offer film remain un-connected to JASIAS, whose conferences still only attract about 250participants. The fabled rivalry among Japanese institutions, a conse-quence of the lifetime allegiance one owes to one’s school, may keep asingle national organization from dominating. Since each university situ-ation is different, film studies may have emerged anywhere on these cam-puses, depending on the force of a given professor. At Meiji Gakuin, forexample, where the energetic Inuhiko Yomota holds a professorship in theliterature department, film studies thrives without affiliating with JASIAS.In 1986, when Japan’s most influential critic, Shigehiko Hasumi, was de-termined to finally bring film studies to the University of Tokyo (Japan’smost prestigious institution of higher education and one where he wouldsoon reign as president), he lodged it in a new unit for the InterdisciplinaryStudy of Culture and Representation, specifically bypassing the standardparadigm exemplified by JASIAS and aligning it with philosophical cri-tique. His ambitious plan placed film into a constellation of “pictorialphenomena from drawing through computer graphics” and invites notjust the usual panoply of Western approaches (linguistics, psychoanalysis,deconstruction, gender theory) but a new “scientific scholarship” specificto the image.11 REPRE, an association that spun out of this program, hasrun an annual conference since 2005 that seeks to foster this sort of re-search and attract scholars from other top universities, including MeijiGakuin, Kyoto, and Waseda. Thus film studies in Japan follows severalpaths, depending on which institution or professor one is affiliated with.Such factionalism need not be fatal and indeed may produce a wider vari-ety of approaches and with greater intensity than we in the West are ac-customed to. Meanwhile, as might be expected from an overheatedelectronic society that encourages what we might call passionate pastimes,more film blogs are kept up in Japanese than in any other language with the

11. repre.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp/


possible exception of Mandarin. Given all this activity on so many levels, itwould be naıve to patronize the Japanese rapport with cinema as under-developed.12

In France, film scholarship has been looked at suspiciously as well,though less by university snobs than by sophisticated cinephiles who writefor the numerous French film journals. Many of them worry that the sav-age power of the movies, their unpredictability, will be disciplined by ac-ademic study, that is, brought into line and tamed. Inevitably, thisanarchist cry has become muffled over the years as the success of these veryjournals has helped bring cinema into the mainstream of French life, in-cluding its educational structure. So much is this the case that a film hasbeen included on the national baccalaureate exam every year since 1987. Toprepare thousands of high school students for this exam, academics haveturned out primers of film analysis and history, clarifying the findings ofresearch that now goes on in most French universities. In short, whilecinephilia and its particular forms of ecriture (let’s just call it criticism)remain robust in France, the fact is that a coordinated field has been laidout by scholars there, most of whom belong to AFECCAV (AssociationFrancaise des Enseignants et Chercheurs en Cinema et AudioVisuel).

This dialogue between the amateur and professional discourses encirclingcinema can be vibrant or sluggish, depending on when and where it occurs.Take the case of Turkey, an especially lively site of interchange at the moment.In the past twenty years the number of universities in Turkey has nearly trebledto around 120, at least 30 of which have been careful to include some form ofcinema studies in the curriculum. Surely this responds to the increasing visi-bility of their national cinema in Europe and its popularity at home, both ofwhich have been amplified by enthusiastic local critics. A growing number ofthese critics participate in a network of Turkish film scholars that has metannually for nearly a decade to debate topics, set standards, coordinate peda-gogical initiatives, lobby the government on such issues as censorship, tech-nology, and funding, and plan the next year’s meeting, inevitably larger inscale. And yet Turkey’s most dynamic film monthly, Azlatyi, comes out ofBogazici University, considered Turkey’s finest, an institution that has nevercountenanced any sort of organized film curriculum or program. Instead, asmall but attractive film center sits in the middle of campus, attracting stu-dents and professors from all fields for 35mm film screenings, visits by film-makers, group discussions, and so on. Their basic library of books and videos

12. I owe much of this summary of the Japanese situation to conversations with AaronGerow at Yale University and especially with Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano of Carleton University,Canada.


serves the campus and supports the work of those who volunteer to edit thejournal—which, by the way, prints more copies than our comparable FilmQuarterly. Cameras and editing equipment can be checked out by anyone witha funded project (several Bogazici University shorts have screened at Euro-pean festivals), and the film center has recently helped produce a feature—providing infrastructure, though no financing. Altogether, the center aims toconcentrate and channel the creativity and enthusiasm characteristic of cine-philia, yet it maintains a healthy rapport with scholars and students comingfrom other Turkish universities where disciplinary programs of film studiesare firmly in place. Sustained discussion of cinema being relatively recent inTurkey, this current equilibrium of approaches may fall away as audio-visuallife there continues to expand and (post)modernize. My point is that even ifTurkish film culture is slightly out of phase with that of Europe it exhibits theselfsame tension (seemingly productive in this case) between the cinephilicand the disciplinary.

2. 1945–75: The French Take the FieldIt makes both political and common sense to keep one’s home institu-

tions in clearest focus,13 yet to keep perspective, and to tell the larger story,let’s look elsewhere. This elsewhere, for me, has always been France be-cause that country has maintained the most intensely public relation withcinema. It is also a nation that credits disciplinarity to the limit. That is whyit should not surprise anyone that film studies found early and rigorousexpression there. As was true in the U.S., academics tried to bring cinemaonto campus during the silent era, first in relation to the Film d’Art move-ment around 1910 and then in relation to the avant-garde appropriation ofcinema in the 1920s.14 But it wasn’t until just after the war that film studiesmade its way inside the university in a manner that is recognizable today.It wasn’t called film studies, but filmologie, and almost from the outset itemanated from a genuine and well-funded institute at the Sorbonne. In-deed, the outrageous ambition of its founders, particularly Gilbert Cohen-

13. See Dudley Andrew, “The ‘Three Ages’ of Cinema Studies and the Age to Come,”PMLA 115 (2000): 341–51.

14. Film d’Art was a production company dedicated to upgrading cinematic productionthrough the use of serious threatrical scripts, actors from La Comedie Francaise, and music bycomposers like Camille Saint-Saens. Their inaugural production, L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise,was held at the Opera and was discussed in all the major cultural journals. Professors andstudents took note. Cinema here was appended to theater. As for the 1920s, it was fine arts thatdrew cinema into its space, as museums and galleries attracted patrons with screenings of filmsby artists like Fernand Leger, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray. An esthetician of the stature ofElie Faure wrote a treatise on cinema in 1923. Whatever gains cinema may have had a chance ofmaking in the academy, however, were immediately lost with the coming of sound.


Seat, went far beyond anything dreamt of by America’s Society ofCinematologists, which a decade later seems to have adapted a name, if notan entire program, from the filmologists.

Cohen-Seat arrived on the postwar scene with an ambitious idea, ex-pressed in a remarkably self-confident book, Essais sur les principes d’unephilosophie du cinema.15 Taking cinema to be civilization’s ideal mix ofqualitative experience (a sum of the arts) and quantitative impact (a globaland mass phenomenon of unprecedented proportions), he called for asuperdiscipline to study it, combining aesthetics with sociology. He wentin search of scholars who could climb aboard a program he seems to havelaid out during the occupation. In a legendary maneuver, and with noacademic degree himself, he managed to successfully lobby the Sorbonneto serve as an umbrella for his fledgling research group and the journal theyhad inaugurated in 1948, La Revue internationale de filmologie. From themoment of its official license, late in 1950, until the very end of the decade,the institute benefited from significant support, visibly affecting the strato-sphere of French education in the process. The ancient amphitheater of theCollege de France was, for example, equipped for projection. Laboratorieswere established for psychoperceptual and cognitive experiments. In ad-dition to research, regular courses and lectures were offered, and a coupleof full-blown conferences took place.

The lectures and conferences had actually begun even before the insti-tute’s investiture. In the late 1940s such luminaries as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Lefebvre, and Jean Hyppolite had appeared before the group.Cohen-Seat’s inspired strategy was to set cinema up as a magnet to attracthigh-profile intellectuals from a spectrum of disciplines, principally thehuman sciences. He laid before them a vision of how their methods couldbe renewed by— or could develop through contact with—a vibrant phe-nomenon like cinema. He handed them a means to demonstrate to thepublic and, more importantly, to university and governmental commis-sions the contemporary relevance of their academic pursuits. Cohen-Seatheld cinema to be broader than any discipline and yet to be something thatvarious disciplines could use as a ripe example. While pursuing one oranother hypothesis (concerning color and movement, the attraction of thehuman face, collective behavior among adolescents, and so on), each re-searcher believed he was contributing to the progressive illumination of anungainly but supremely influential phenomenon. Many of those who tookpart confessed to having little prior experience with the movies, yetCohen-Seat convinced them to join a growing coterie of esteemed col-

15. See Gilbert Cohen-Seat, Essais sur les principes d’une philosophie du cinema (Paris, 1946).


leagues making up his enterprise. Once inside the Sorbonne, he could offerprospective members the opportunity to finance experiments, lectures,and graduate students. Filmologie grew, as did Cohen-Seat’s internationalprofile. Spin-offs were planned throughout Europe and as far away asMoscow and Buenos Aires.16 International in its ambition and purview, asevery discipline must be, filmologie thrived mainly in France, where it hadfound space and financing.

The accomplishments of this group in the 1950s have been detailed byEdward Lowry in his fine study.17 Its subsequent meltdown (for clandes-tine, cold war reasons) have just been brought to light through MartinLefebvre’s tenacious historical research.18 Although it managed to reappearin Milan in the 1960s—its journal rebaptised IKON—filmologie recededfrom prominence. It is remembered, if at all, as an academic epiphenom-enon of cinema’s general cultural ascendency during the 1950s. An emer-gent filmologie foundered after a single decade because it was linked to thechanging profile of higher education and research rather than to that of itssubject; cinema’s value ballooned worldwide, and especially in France, inthe 1950s, yet filmologie took little note of this and did not try to abet it.Aiming to analyze the everyday experience of film, not contribute to itsadvancement, filmologie set itself at a distance from such growing culturalmanifestations as international film festivals, federations of cine-clubs,upstart journals, and repertory movie theaters that brought an art formout of the circus of mass entertainment and into the high life of discrimi-nating culture. As cinema attained its majority, its place in the universityseemed reserved in advance.19 And so it happened; cinema infiltrated theuniversities of France, as well as the U.S., Britain, and elsewhere. However,student interest in this newly available academic subject came not fromfilmologie but was incubated in the (chiefly French) cine-club movementand the journals that fed cinephilia, especially Cahiers du cinema. These in

16. John MacKay confirms that Grigorii Boltianskii petitioned the Soviet ministry to set upa film center in Moscow starting in the late 1940s and continuing into the early 1950s. Thecenter would be established only later, however, and not on the filmologie model.

17. See Edward Lowry, The Filmology Movement and Film Study in France (Ann Arbor,Mich., 1985).

18. See Martin Lefebvre, “L’Aventure filmologique: Documents et jalons d’une histoireinstitutionnelle,” forthcoming in a special issue of CiNeMAS devoted to filmologie.

19. Jean Vidal employed this metaphor of maturation: “After the artists and writers, nowit’s time for professors to discover [cinema] in their turn” (Jean Vidal, “FilmologuesDistingues,” Ecran Francaise 119 [Oct. 1947]: 11). Vidal notes the irony that this firstInternational Congress of Filmologie took place simultaneously with the Cannes festival, whereall the critics had gone. An additional irony came from the journal’s compositor, who placedVidal’s article above a report on activities of several cine-clubs, graphically opposing two waysof approaching the same phenomenon.


turn were tied to the growth of cinema as an art. In the 1950s this meant theincreasingly ambitious work of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, andMichelangelo Antonioni, as well as the mature films of Alfred Hitchcock,Howard Hawks, and John Ford, all leading to the French New Wave. In theissues of Cahiers du cinema from the summer and fall of 1959 one could stillfeel the echoes of the May Cannes festival that had crowned Francois Truf-faut’s 400 Blows and where Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour hadproduced the shock of the modern. You could read about Jean-Luc Go-dard’s Breathless and Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, which were in produc-tion then on the streets of Paris. On the other hand, La Revue internationalede filmologie’s issue of the same months took on “Current Problems ofCinema and Visual Information: Psychological Problems and Mecha-nisms,” while mentioning not a single film title in its eighty-eight pages,only a moment from an unidentified Chaplin short; such was its level ofabstraction.

This opposition between these Parisian groups is even more startlingbecause they followed a remarkably parallel timeline. Just as filmologieappeared in 1946 but didn’t achieve its institutional stability till 1950, so thecine-club movement, dormant since 1930 and the coming of sound, sud-denly mushroomed just after the war, with Cahiers du cinema consolidat-ing its gains when launched in 1951. Similarly just as filmologie completelychanged course at the end of the 1950s,20 Cahiers du cinema experienced thefirst of its own mutations, when its founder, Andre Bazin, passed away, andits key critics (Truffaut, Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, ClaudeChabrol) took up cameras. Yet the two groups were dedicated to com-pletely different enterprises and so had no reason to intersect. Cahiers ducinema saw itself at odds with several of the many film periodicals of thatdecade (its acrimonious relation with Positif is legendary), but La Revueinternationale de filmologie was hardly one of these.

A unique occasion allows us to compare their opposed politiques. In justits fifth issue, September 1951, and less than a year after filmologie’s acces-sion to the Sorbonne (that is, as both groups lobbied to gain footholds inParis), an article appeared in Cahiers du cinema sarcastically titled “Intro-duction a une filmologie de la filmologie,” under the name of FlorentKirsch. Only his closest friends understood this to be Bazin’s occasionalpseudonym (an amalgam of his wife’s maiden name and the first name oftheir son they had just brought into the world). Florent Kirsch received

20. The Sorbonne completely dissociated itself from the Institut de Filmologie in 1962, butby the end of 1959 the writing was on the wall; the institute had but seven French students andits journal moved to Milan. See Lefebvre, “L’Aventure filmologique.”


credit for about a dozen of Bazin’s twenty-six hundred articles. In this casetheir ruse seems to have freed his normally genteel pen so he could slashaway at his target.21 Bazin cattily reports on Cohen-Seat’s astounding suc-cess in convincing the crusty professors and crustier deans of the Sorbonneto take up mere movies as an investment in the future of research andteaching. Professors of dead languages, Kirsch states with the sarcasm ofthe confirmed cinephile, have been watching in disbelief as their childrenand their concierges line up week after week for spectacles that they them-selves scarcely comprehend. It finally occurred to someone that the timehad come to train their formidable analytic and philological skills on thisnew, living language called cinema, to put it through the rigors of fullanalysis (physiology, psychology, and sociology). Bazin may have beenespecially jealous of Cohen-Seat’s welcome at the Sorbonne, as his ownfirst “institutional” affiliation with cinema was adjacent to the Sorbonne’sMaison de Culture, where he founded a cine-club during the occupation.In 1941, he had washed out of his final oral examination at the Ecole Nor-male Superieure (ENS) on account of an endemic stutter, and he took upthis cine-club as a refuge that kept him active in Paris and in the world ofideas during those dark years. This little club drew a hardcore left-bankaudience (Jean-Paul Sartre was known to come from time to time), but itsrapport with the Sorbonne was nominal, not even extracurricular. Still,Bazin must have been proud to have kindled the flame of cinephilia amonga generation of academics. Lighting up a dark room for them, projectingimages that could sustain the imagination, including leftist political aspi-rations, gave Bazin special satisfaction given his club’s setting on the edgeof France’s most renowned university.

And so when Cohen-Seat was able to waltz straight up to the adminis-tration of the Sorbonne and come away with its full support for a programthat would finally elevate cinema to an object of genuine study, Bazin’sresentment seeped onto the page. As leader of a band of “cinemaniacs,”each of whom claimed to watch over five hundred films a year, he wasespecially irked at filmologie’s calculated disinterest in its object of study.To understand a phenomenon, they evidently felt that one must standback from it like a medical professor before a cadaver. It did not help to seetoo many films or to mention titles, directors, or (God forbid!) actorswhen writing up one’s findings. These distractions diverted the scholar’sattention both from the specific workings of any-film-whatever and from

21. Actually Bazin would intervene briefly in a filmologie congress in 1955, his remarksappearing in La Revue internationale de filmologie, nos. 20–24 (1955): 95–97. In the followingyear, he promoted a lecture by Jean Wahl at the Institut de Filmologie in Cahiers du cinema, no.57 (Feb. 1956): 34.


the general function of the cinematic spectacle as seen by the philosophicalimagination. “Did Pavlov need to be a dog-lover?” Bazin asked, to draw theline with finality.22

At Cahiers du cinema they were, if nothing else, film lovers— cine-philes.23 They took it as their obligation—their profession—to locate, fromthe hundreds of films made each year, the most valuable ones, the ones thatattracted and sustained profound reflection and critical elaboration. Ba-zin, who gave himself to amateur and scientific shorts, to compilations andcartoons, as well as to features of all sorts, nevertheless insisted that intenseaesthetic engagement (close viewing) was a prerequisite for understandingwhat cinema is and how it functions. His more elitist colleagues at Cahiersdu cinema promoted an auteur policy that effectively excluded all but fea-ture films and that filtered from this corpus the expressions of a limitednumber of directors who were carefully ranked. They were flower arrang-ers; he was a botanist or ecologist.

Without trying any further to distinguish Bazin from his disciples, orCahiers du cinema from other Parisian film groups, or even French filmculture from that of other nations, in Florent Kirsch’s characterization offilmologie we can recognize the two nearly irreconcilable attitudes towardcinema and its study that have remained in tension in the academy. A fewindividuals have managed to bridge this opposition. Bazin should havebeen one of them, given his ENS education and his evident training indisciplines like geology, geography, entomology, botany, philosophy,rhetoric, theology, and psychology. Yet cinephilia won out in him, orrather films themselves won out as centers of attraction whose existenceand value it was the duty and pleasure of the “disciplined” critic to artic-ulate. Other polymaths who could bridge these approaches were JeanMitry and Edgar Morin, both of whom were more closely allied to univer-sity life while always having been avid filmgoers, indeed occasional film-makers. Mitry had assisted Abel Gance and had run cine-clubs in the 1920sand 1930s. He is listed as one of the founders of the Cinematheque Fran-caise in 1935. After the war he taught at the brand new state-sponsored filmschool, Institut des hautes etudes cinematographiques (IDHEC), largelybecause he had modest experience in production as an editor and assistantdirector. Later he would manage to teach classes in a university setting.Most tellingly, his massive publications (the two-volume Esthetique et psy-chologie du cinema and the five-volume Histoire du cinema) were published

22. Florent Kirsch [Andre Bazin], “Introduction a une filmologie de la filmologie,” Cahiersdu cinema, no. 5 (Sept. 1951): 38.

23. For an overview of this phenomenon, see Antoine de Baecque, La Cinephilie: Inventiond’un regard, histoire d’une culture, 1944–1968 (Paris, 2003).


in the 1960s by Presses Universitaires de Paris, just as Cohen-Seat’s bookhad been. Mitry felt himself a legitimate rival of filmologie, and superior forhaving lived an entire life in the midst of the medium.24 The tables ofcontents to his theoretical volumes presume the comprehensive and pro-gressive exploration of a genuine discipline, as does the immense bibliog-raphy that draws on every sort of science.25

Morin makes an even more interesting case because he was at one timea prominent member of the filmologie group. In 1952, he was taken into thesociology section of the prestigious Centre Nationale du Recherche Scien-tifique (CNRS).26 A prolific scholar from very early in his career, he claimsto have also grown up a film addict, differentiating himself from his fellowfilmologists. Indeed, his books show him to be a connoisseur; in Les Stars(1957), he wades right into the thick of popular experience, cataloguing thenames and qualities of scores of actors and actresses in a way that Bazinwould have approved.27 In fact, Bazin did approve, for he reviewed LesStars as well as Morin’s earlier and far more consequential Le Cinema oul’homme imaginaire (1956). He wrote that he “generally subscribed” toMorin’s far-reaching, even daring anthropological concepts.28 He praisedMorin for refusing what must have been a tempting claim, namely, thatcinema has altered the constitution of human beings by introducing brandnew processes of projection-identification. A sober Morin argues insteadthat this medium merely exercises and exploits processes that have alwaysbeen part of everyday life. Bazin also cheers Morin for avoiding the kind ofoccultism that might have made his book a bestseller. Cinema is unques-tionably tied to spiritualism, particularly in its earliest phase, but Morindemonstrates how a supple cinematic language has progressively evolvedfrom the magma of magic. Without losing its unconscious appeal, indeedwhile banking on it, filmmakers have learned to control cinema’s uncon-scious effects, as in, for example, the evolution of the superimpositionfrom an eerie image-effect to a commonly used grammatical technique ofnarration: the lap dissolve. Indeed, Bazin wishes Morin had introduced

24. Mitry does cite with approval a few (but quite few) remarks by Cohen-Seat and studiesby filmologists doing perceptual psychology. See Jean Mitry, Aesthetics and Psychology of theCinema, trans. Christopher King (Bloomington, Ind., 1990), esp. pp. 161– 63.

25. For more information, see Brian Lewis, “Jean Mitry,” in The Routledge Companion toPhilosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (London, 2009), pp. 397–407.Unfortunately this volume does not contain an entry either on Bazin or on filmologie.

26. These remarks on Morin are taken from Andrew, “Edgar Morin,” in The RoutledgeCompanion to Philosophy and Film, pp. 408–21.

27. See Edgar Morin, Les Stars (Paris, 1957); trans. Richard Howard under the title The Stars(1960; Minneapolis, 2005).

28. Andre Bazin, “L’Homme imaginaire et la fonction magique du cinema,” Franceobservateur 331 (Sept. 1956): 17.


even more of a refined discussion of cinema-specific techniques based onconscious play rather than on unconscious participation. He suggests thatto Morin’s anthropology of magic be added an anthropology of play andgame (he surely had Roger Caillois in mind). Whereas le jeu can be said tounderwrite theater and even television, la magie is foundational for cin-ema. Yet, Bazin reminds us, audiences cross from one form of spectacle tothe other, as do many techniques, not to mention actors, writers, anddirectors. A comprehensive treatment of “imaginary man” in the twenti-eth century would require that cinema be put in dialogue with the otherarts and media.

Morin would go on to do just this in L’Esprit du temps: Essai sur laculture de masse.29 Increasingly concerned with large-scale issues at a timewhen TV loomed as the format of the future, Morin wrote this book as acomprehensive theory of mass communication. Yet he could hardlydownplay cinema since he had just codirected with Jean Rouch the inesti-mably important Chronicle of a Summer (he was thus part of the New Waveand its cinephilia, like it or not). And so in his new book cinema still playsthe major heuristic role as the century’s model cultural artifact, a spiritual-material entity containing undeniable financial and aesthetic (imaginary)value. However, Morin doesn’t subject cinema’s specific techniques andproperties to analysis. Working at a high level of generality, and with com-munications as the umbrella term, he took on the kind of purview andethos that one could also see Marshall McLuhan testing out at the samemoment. Morin gladly joined the new journal bearing the title Communi-cations, which was inaugurated in 1960 at the Ecole Pratique en SciencesSociales. Alongside him on its editorial board was Roland Barthes. As forfilmologie, Morin had let it go even before it got into trouble and migratedacross the Alps.

From the outset Communications treated cinema as but one star in ahuge constellation of processes and artifacts. And it was determined totreat cinema in a disciplined manner, as an alternative to the proliferating“amateur” film journals of the New Wave era. At the same time Commu-nications wanted to avoid merely applying traditional academic disciplinesto popular culture in the manner of the filmologie group, and it certainlywanted to replace the latter’s positivist profile with something startlinglynew. Indeed, it hoped to score the same kind of revolution within theacademy as the New Wave had scored in the real world of film productionand distribution. The very first issue featured Barthes’s “The PhotographicMessage,” an article that would become fundamental for film studies and

29. See Morin, L’Esprit du temps: Essai sur la culture de masse (Paris, 1962).


for its author’s later book Camera Lucida. Morin’s contribution was called“The Culture Industry”; he also introduced a dossier on the current phe-nomenon of the New Wave. The veering of this journal and of Morin awayfrom postwar aesthetics and sociology became unmistakable in the fourthissue, titled “Recherches semiologiques” (1967). Promoting undisguiseddisciplinary determination we find Claude Bremond and a very youngTzvetan Todorov writing on literary systems, while Christian Metz debutswith one of his most far-reaching essays, “Cinema: Langue ou langage.”Barthes appears twice, first with the famous “Rhetoric of the Image” andthen with the complete text of “Elements of Semiology.”30

I have always dated the advent of academic film studies at the momentwhen Metz leapfrogged over Mitry as he reviewed the latter’s Esthetique etpsychologie du cinema, the first installment of which came out in Critique in1965.31 Mitry, we have seen, grew up in the old school, with roots in the1920s and an eclectic if vast erudition. Like many before him (LeonMoussinac, Jean Epstein, and Bazin) he cobbled together his “system” ofcinema by collecting observations and opinions expressed by filmmakersand critics over the life of the medium. Mitry was a genuine encyclopedist.His magnum opus organized just about everything significant that hadbeen written about cinema into categories and positions that he then ad-judicated according to his own comprehensive and overarching argument.Metz’s ascension came on the back of his seventy-five-page critique ofMitry’s huge tomes. Trained in linguistics under A. J. Greimas, Metz wroteas a human scientist, that is, he wrote as someone based in the heart of theuniversity, not like Mitry, who was a highly interesting guest occasionallyinvited into the university from the real world.32 Metz systematically un-dercut his elder’s humanism with a new structuralist vocabulary andmethod.

Metz, we have come to learn, forms a substantial link between filmologieand mainstream French film theory. The first essay in his first book, “Apropos de l’impression de realite au cinema,” takes off from Le Cinema oul’homme imaginaire, which he calls “one of the richest works yet conse-

30. See Communications 4 (1964).31. See Christian Metz, “Une Etape dans la reflexion sur le cinema,” Critique 21 (Mar.

1965): 227–48 and “Problemes actuels de theorie du cinema,” Revue d’esthetique 20 (Apr.–Sept.1967): 180–221; rpt. under the general heading “Sur la theorie classique du cinema: A propos destravaux de Jean Mitry,” Metz, Essais sur la signification au cinema, 2 vols. (Paris, 1968 –72), 2:9 –86.

32. Mitry often taught at IDHEC, the French film school, and occasionally gave courses atthe University of Paris. In the 1960s he was invited to teach at the University of Montreal andalso spent a term in 1973 at the University of Iowa.


crated to the seventh art.”33 And it has long been known that filmologiefurnished Metz with such categories as the filmic fact and cinematic fact.34

But the surest connection is one that Martin Lefebvre has unearthed:Metz’s initial proposal for research submitted to the CNRS in 1962—andthus undoubtedly vetted by Morin— explicitly suggests the propitiousconnection between filmologie and linguistics that will eventuate in Lan-gage et cinema.35 Published in 1971, this doctoral thesis underwrites filmsemiotics and everything that gravitated to it. “Everything” would sooncome to mean psychoanalysis and (Althusserian) Marxism, the former ofwhich Metz was deeply schooled in. As for Louis Althusser, his star ruledthe post-1968 academic avant-garde. Once Foucault’s growing influence isadded to the recipe, Theory—as it would come to be known (and, bymany, ridiculed as Grand Theory)—appeared as a powerful concatenationof disciplines, the convergence of the human sciences.

Looking back in 1978, Morin sheepishly declared his own film theory tobe presemiotic. He was, after all, a mere amateur when it came to thesophisticated semiotics and narratology practiced by Metz, Barthes, andtheir illustrious students at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, where hewould frequently run into them. Morin’s comprehensive understandingof the medium twenty years earlier, based on an anthropological-sociological model, had clearly been superseded by a younger generation.In the late 1970s, from his Olympian post atop the social sciences, he couldobserve how the emergent discipline of structural semiotics had spreadthroughout French universities, then quickly to the UK (especially viaScreen) and the U.S., where comparative literature journals like Diacritics,MLN, Boundary 2, and New Literary History proclaimed a new day forcinema studies. That day dawned more brightly in Britain thanks to Wol-len, who turned his position in a linguistics department toward cinemasemiotics. Nothing comparable occurred in American linguistics pro-grams, most of which, I recall, scoffed at the attention that we comparativeliterature scholars accorded Ferdinand de Saussure, Emile Beneveniste,

33. Metz, “A propos de l’impression de realite au cinema,” Cahiers du cinema, nos. 166– 67(May–June 1965): 75– 82; rpt. in Essais sur la signification du cinema, 1:13–24, a book dedicated toGeorges Blin of the College de France, an important literary critic of the day and an academicthrough and through; trans. Michael Taylor under the title “On the Impression of Reality in theCinema,” Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York, 1974), p. 4.

34. Cohen-Seat proposed this distinction in his Essais sur les principes d’une philosophie ducinema, which Metz elaborated on at the outset of Langage et cinema (Paris, 1971). Briefly, thefilmic fact refers to the text and its internal system as experienced and comprehended, while thecinematic fact refers to the system that makes the text possible, including the industry,technology, stars, film culture, and so on.

35. See Lefebvre, “L’Aventure filmologique.”


and Louis Hjelmslev, not to mention Vladimir Propp and the Italians(Umberto Eco, Emilio Garroni), all of whom were considered passe ornaıve in the era of Noam Chomsky and generative grammar.

Structuralism was hardly passe in Paris, where film theory gave it abrightly lit stage. The charismatic and tireless Metz presided over a wholegeneration of graduate students, quite a few coming from abroad. Punc-tilious, he professed that only some of what film scholars needed to learnwas cinema specific. Codes related to cinematography, editing (his famouslist of eight syntagms),36 punctuation (fades, dissolves), and so forth re-quired schooling in close analysis and film history.37 But much of the pro-cess of signification in cinema derives from codes that apply to other arts(theater, prose fiction, painting, cartoons, photography) or from generalcultural codes that films seem to transmit with little interference. Theorymight be viewed as a superdiscipline capable of orchestrating the investi-gation of the various determinants that go into cinema’s undeniable psy-chosocial effects. A great many budding film scholars in the francophoneand anglophone academies (along with colleagues in Latin America, Ja-pan, and Eastern Europe) set themselves the goal of mastering everythingthat might be specific to the medium while at the same time balancingenough psychoanalysis, Marxism, and (Foucauldian) historiography to beable to account for the importance of an exemplary film, genre, auteur, ornational cinematic movement.

Cine-semiotics was taken up by young film scholars in the U.S. and theUK with the elevated expectations and fervor of a full-blown program.Adherents wanted their students to understand both the textual systemthat comprises any film and the larger systems that make up the cinema,regulating its function within economies of the psyche and of society. Thismight seem close to Cohen-Seat’s program, for he had alerted academicadministrators and government officials that cinema’s untold conse-quences on human behavior needed to be investigated and calculated.38

However, in practice most filmologists had been content to pursue their

36. See Metz, “La Grande Syntamatique du film narratif,” Communications 8 (1966): 120–24.

37. The second part of Metz’s review of Mitry was translated by Diana Matias under thetitle “Current Problems of Film Theory: Christian Metz on Jean Mitry’s L’Esthetique etpsychologie du cinema, Vol. II,” Screen 14 (Spring–Summer 1973): 40– 87. Metz, Film Language: ASemiotics of Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (Oxford, 1974) is a translation of only volume one ofEssais sur la signification du cinema.

38. Already in 1948, filmologie was identified as the most abstract level of moral andpedagogical film research. See Andre Lang, Le Tableau blanc (Paris, 1948). Lang makes it clearthat Cohen-Seat’s abstruse formulations are befuddling in the absence of specific practicalexamples, which the latter had promised to be forthcoming.


private research projects under its beneficent conditions, so much in factthat filmologie could be deemed more an institution than a method. Cine-semiotics, on the other hand, considered itself part of a dominant struc-turalist movement that wagered on the interlinked nature of thedisciplines making up the human sciences. Related to linguistics, semioticswas taken to be a foundational human science, one that every film studentneeded to master. Its basic elements were shown at work in example afterexample of intricate readings of films, readings that didn’t shy away fromoutrageously broad claims about the psychoanalytic or ideological conse-quences of the atomic structures of signification that were inevitably dis-covered to be operative. Stephen Heath’s seventy-page reading of OrsonWelles’s Touch of Evil, symptomatically titled “Film and System: Terms ofAnalysis,” remains a thrillingly ingenious, if intimidating, exercise in thismode. Published in Screen in two installments during 1975, it owed muchto Metz and to Raymond Bellour, whose series of analyses of the molecularstructure of classical Hollywood movies— especially Hitchcock’s—ledfilm scholars to believe that every film could be parsed into a web of over-lapping codes, each of which could be cracked and whose overall structure(the textual system), furthermore, could be related to larger systems work-ing above the level of narrative.39

One of the first and most influential examples of a structuralist readingis the collective text that the editors of Cahiers du cinema devoted to JohnFord’s Young Mr. Lincoln in 1970 (translated in Screen in 1972).40 Scarcely adecade after Bazin’s death, the journal he founded had turned against himand embraced the structuralist paradigm that was in the avant-garde ofParisian university culture. Between 1965 and 1972, Metz published fivesemiotic pieces in Cahiers; but it was the next, psychoanalytic phase of hiscareer (culminating in The Imaginary Signifier [1975]) that worked in con-cert with the newly politicized version of Bazin’s famous journal, whoseeditors were intent on leaving Bazin behind and adopting a more scientificstance. Science in those days was understood of course in Althusser’s sense.

In such a charged atmosphere Bazin was reviled as a mystified andmystifying idealist responsible for the excessive adulation of films andauteurs that continued to pour from the pens of mere critics. And yet, ashas become increasingly apparent, his penchant for developing abstrac-tions and for elaborating far-reaching metaphors, based on details mined

39. See Raymond Bellour, L’Analyse du film (Paris, 1979); trans. Constance Penley underthe title The Analysis of Film (Bloomington, Ind., 2000).

40. See Editorial Collective, “Young Mr. Lincoln de John Ford,” Cahiers du cinema, no. 223(Aug.–Sept. 1970): 29–47; trans. Helen Lackner and Matias under the title “John Ford’s YoungMr. Lincoln,” Screen 13 (Autumn 1972): 5– 44.


in close analysis, has remained a hallmark of French film studies. As itscollective text on Ford’s film demonstrates, Cahiers du cinema might haverepudiated Bazin, Rohmer, and Truffaut after 1968, but it remained a placewhere rich films were identified and then subjected to concomitantly richsymptomatic readings. The difference of the 1970s was that of discipline.Bazin’s Qu’est-ce que le cinema? gives the appearance of a programmaticanalysis of the medium, something both Rohmer and Roger Leenhardtunderlined at the time.41 The fact is, however, that he did not work me-thodically through the question posed by the title of his book. He was apracticing critic, and the book anthologized just fifty-two of his twenty-sixhundred pieces, most of which had been dashed off as daily or weeklyreviews for the general public. He may have remained remarkably consis-tent, suggesting a fully digested understanding of cinema, but he honed hisrhetoric to prepare a public for many different kinds of films, not to estab-lish an academic field or even to map out a course of study. On the otherhand, Metz and the generation of structuralist-materialists that looked tohim addressed not a public but a subject, one they described as a systemthat they were determined to explain systematically. And they did sowithin a university structure, building their articles and books in seminarspopulated by graduate students who aimed in their own theses to add tothe progress they sensed was being made semester after semester by theirillustrious professors.42

3. Our Turn: The Explosion of American Film Studies in the1980sIt was largely thanks to continental critical theory—that jerry-rigged

edifice of semiotics, narratology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism—thatAmerican film studies rose to prominence in the humanities, quickly be-coming a hot spot in the second half of the seventies. Screen theory, as itwas sometimes called (because so much of it came through Screen), solid-ified into a near orthodoxy that galvanized or intimidated just about ev-eryone who taught film. This mainly included those several hundredmembers of SCS who had gotten into the field by teaching art films along-side literary texts or who had championed some beloved auteur or who didtheir best to cover the history of cinema and ideas about it. While many

41. See Eric Rohmer, “La Somme d’Andre Bazin,” Cahiers du cinema, no. 91 (Jan. 1959):36–45.

42. Despite the visibility of film within the French academic institutions of the time, itwouldn’t be until 1986 that advanced degrees in cinema would be officially conferred. Lefebvrebelieves this delay was caused by the bad taste that filmologie had left at the Sorbonne in theearly 1960s.


were shocked by the tone and method of cine-semiotics, others, especiallythose working out of romance language and comparative literature de-partments, found themselves joining a mission grander than any film,grander than the cinema itself, a mission designated Theory.

My own case is symptomatic. In the early 1970s, wanting to instill rigorin what appeared an “undiscipline” of largely belletristic commentary andvague speculation, I developed lectures that became the book The MajorFilm Theories. A decade later, things were very different. At best, thosemajor theorists now served as a preamble to a far more coordinated field ofstudy ruled by continental criticism whose Concepts in Film Theory I tookstock of in a 1984 book by that name. Yet I hadn’t registered that this GrandFilm Theory, though scarcely a decade old, was already on the wane, hav-ing squandered its vigor in parochial feuds (structuralism underminedfrom within by poststructuralism) or in the redundant, if ingenious, reas-sertion of its doctrines, case after case. In Post-Theory: Reconstructing FilmStudies, whose title set an agenda in the mid-1990s, David Bordwell andNoel Carroll claimed to have toppled this hegemony,43 doing it from thetop of the hill, for after 1980 straightforward American film scholarshiphad begun to depose foreign intellectuals, with their obtuse, often untrans-lated, vocabularies. A sociologist of knowledge might find that Grand FilmTheory simply did not leave enough room for the greatly expanded corpsof researchers streaming out of American graduate schools who needed tocome up with additional objects of study and new ways of studying them.Historical and cultural topics provided endless opportunities, and this isthe direction film studies took in the U.S.

I resisted this wholesale abandonment of theory. The two final conceptsof my book, figuration and interpretation, registered a definite need forfresh air but without throwing over the momentum of continental criticalthought. I wanted to open what seemed like a hermetic structuralism ontothe new and the unpredictable, letting films take the lead in our dialoguewith them rather than serve as symptoms to be analyzed. Both figurationand interpretation bear a European pedigree. The first, graced by Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Discours, figure (1971), could be felt in that author’senigmatic article “Acinema” (1978) and in the inimitable, recalcitrant writ-ings of Jean-Louis Schefer. As for interpretation, it had been proclaimed byPaul Ricoeur as the defining practice of humanistic inquiry. Why notopenly base a vigorous and consequential film studies on protocols of

43. See David Bordwell and Noel Carroll, introduction to Post-Theory: Reconstructing FilmStudies, ed. Bordwell and Carroll (Madison, Wisc., 1996), pp. xiii–xvii.


interpretation in history, criticism, and theory? What I didn’t realize wasthat interpretation itself was caught in a crossfire in the 1980s.

Today it is clear that during the 1980s, amid the cacophony of smallarms fire, two big guns would dominate the field: The Classical HollywoodCinema, wheeled out in 1984 by Bordwell, Kristen Thompson, and JanetStaiger; and Gilles Deleuze’s double-barreled cinema books, L’Image-Mouvement and L’Image-Temps, which boomed in 1983 and 1985 respec-tively and were translated into English in 1986 and 1989.44 Nothing else inthe 1980s was nearly as prominent as those explosive projects that recon-figured the field of battle; their aftershocks still echo across film studiestoday, setting off allegiances and allergies even in the era of new media.Each mowed down the excesses of both interpretation and cultural studies,yet they are anything but allies. The Classical Hollywood Cinema woulddispense with lofty theory altogether, building a historical poetics based ona notion of image processing that Bordwell would soon ground in theuniversals of cognitive psychology. Deleuze, on the other hand, was reso-lutely antihistorical. What he and Bordwell shared in the 1980s was anattention to the specific and systematic character of the medium. Bothdenigrate interpretation, for it takes flight from films into airy speculationsthat deploy humanist concepts and vocabularies available elsewhere. Andcultural studies spreads horizontally away from the field of cinema likespores blown by the winds of fad or by social agendas. Bordwell, who at theend of the decade explicitly demanded a research program that dispensedwith interpretation, built The Classical Hollywood Cinema around a set offilms chosen not by taste and judgment but by an algorithm. This wasmeant to guarantee that the book’s description of the Hollywood systemwould itself be systematic and immune to bias and fashion.

Deleuze’s project may appear to be based on taste (the canon of Cahiersdu cinema, most reviewers agree) and on the reading of cinematic figures,but, in fact, his cinema books lay out a conceptual network where filmsfunction as nodes that connect lines of thought. As he would famouslyproclaim, these lines are not human thoughts traversing films but thethinking of the cinema machine itself. As for cultural studies, Deleuzefought every effort to territorialize social energy, even into something asprogressive as emergent cultures. His anarchist politics may have triggereda phrase like “the people are missing,”45 but this concept is less a descrip-

44. For a full account of Deleuze’s impact, see Andrew, “La Reception de Deleuze,” inDeleuze et les images, trans. Helene Frappat, ed. Francois Dosse and Jean-Michel Frodon (Paris,2008), pp. 145–59. This passage translates part of the opening of that essay.

45. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta(Minneapolis, 1989), p. 216.


tion of the Third World through Third Cinema than a concept markingthe location of a vortex around which subcultural and supracultural en-ergy whirls out of human control.

Deleuze, no less than Bordwell, lashed out at semiotics and psychoanal-ysis in part because they reduced the power of the films they tried to ex-plain. Both men effectively bracketed what passed for the film theory of theday and instead put themselves in dialogue with classical theory, especiallywith theorist-cineastes like Epstein and Sergei Eisenstein. It was once againlegitimate to give serious attention to the major theories—some of them atleast—and not simply as background to a professionally constituted fieldof theory. Returning to strong thinkers, like returning to strong films,always was Deleuze’s method, although he was nevertheless a philosopherwho prized creativity and the future above all. The stupendous number offilms Deleuze cites and from which he elaborates his concepts shows himto be a devotee of the cine-clubs that we know he fervently attended in thepostwar years.46 Indeed, the first effect of Deleuze’s cinema books was tobring largely canonical movies back to American film studies for seriousconsideration, after a decade devoted to audiences, to special-interestfilms, and to television. Deleuze, along with Serge Daney (onetime editorof Cahiers du cinema, small bits of whose writings made it into English),heartened those of us who felt the field to be malnourished when cut offfrom the kind of intellectually rambunctious film analysis that thrives inEurope. I was particularly gratified that both men reconnected with thefundament of the Cahiers du cinema approach, acknowledging Bazin as anindisputable wellspring and following his practice of writing expansivelyand creatively about a variety of films chosen with discernment. Deleuze’scinema books urged us to return to the movies and did so at the verymoment when this became possible, as university libraries had begun toacquire VHS and Betamax cassettes. What a pleasure it was to teach De-leuze in the late 1980s and early 1990s with this new resource. In my ownseminar, each participant was responsible for one of the twenty-two chap-ters of the cinema books, engaging Deleuze’s argument with the aid of clipsand stills taken from his plethora of examples. Chapter after chapter, thefilms were shown to nourish the concepts; but they also took on a life oftheir own, developing new concepts along the way. Deleuze would haveapplauded.

It is explicitly cinema’s contribution of new concepts that promptsRodowick, in another state-of-the-field article, to hitch both Deleuze andStanley Cavell to an enterprise within “philosophy” rather than within

46. See Dosse, Gilles Deleuze et Felix Guattari: Biographie croisee (Paris, 2007).


“theory,” whose energy he declares to be drained.47 For theory seems tooprogrammatic and imperious, whether driven by science in Althusser’ssense (Grand Theory) or by models taken from natural and cognitive sci-ence (posttheory). Defending the latter, in a rebuke to Rodowick, MalcolmTurvey proudly reminds us that once continental film studies had beenderacinated from the anglophone field, thanks largely to the relentlessanalyses of Noel Carroll, room was cleared for specific, targeted, and usefulwork. Turvey runs through a litany of recent and distinct gains in theoriesof emotion, editing, perception, imagination, pleasure, music, compre-hension, interpretation, character identification, narrative, and sus-pense.48 While those who write books and articles in these areas invariablydo so by turning to well-developed notions in the social sciences or phi-losophy, they do so, Turvey believes, from the strength of their own disci-pline. Here he connects to something I have been advocating all along;“most of us are not philosophers, sociologists, or economists but filmscholars. What this means is that, at the end of the day, we have to use ourexpertise— gained from watching large numbers of films, observing themand the response of viewers to them carefully, and learning about thecontexts in which they were made and exhibited—to evaluate the theorieswe take from other disciplines in terms of whether they successfully ex-plain (or not) film.”49

Posttheory evinces an attitude and an agenda that has, with some qual-ification and dispute, been termed positivist, though Turvey might preferto call it professional. Perhaps a new generation of film scholars has cometo the fore, adroit and modest, ready to address not major issues so muchas targeted and circumscribed questions that arise from solutions to pre-vious ones. This attitude has been fostered by an explosion of new archives,databases, and published or recorded interviews. So much material hasbeen uncovered that countless film scholars find themselves on well-groomed career paths. And, as Alison Trope notes, this ethos extends be-yond the university, visible in the often highly detailed entries buried in theIMDb, or in the extras on DVDs. While much of the newly uncoveredinformation and the many disseminated reports may be suspect, such anavalanche of information has unquestionably democratized film studies.The electronic network invites lay people, not just duly dubbed professors,to contribute to the enterprise.

But how shall all these shards of information be catalogued, organized,

47. Rodowick, “An Elegy for Theory,” October, no. 122 (Fall 2007): 92.48. See Malcolm Turvey, “Theory, Philosophy, and Film Studies: A Response to D. N.

Rodowick’s ‘An Elegy for Theory,’” October, no. 122 (Fall 2007): 110–20.49. Ibid., p. 120.


and merged into a larger enterprise? How shall information becomeknowledge and inquiry be disciplined? If the internet decenters research,the university remains staunchly hierarchical, committed at some level toselection, procedure, and evaluation. After all, its academic programs arebuilt on what we call the course that from some motivated beginningpromises to reach a plateau of understanding ten or fifteen weeks later.Student plans of study put courses in relation to one another, and we callthe sum of courses, including their progression and interrelation, a curric-ulum. Of all American film scholars, Bordwell has been most dedicated tothe film curriculum. His textbooks establish the bedrock information,concepts, and skills that enable more sophisticated inquiry into what hecalls the historical poetics of the medium. He argues for and from firstprinciples and believes students should progress to higher-level courses(and presumably can succeed in them) only after having mastered foun-dational material (a modicum of film history) and skills (close analysis,archive research, and so on). But rare is the department in the U.S. that hasimplemented such a program, at least at the undergraduate level. Few filmprofessors would refuse—for lack of prerequisites—smart, eager neo-phytes (English majors, say) who ask to join a senior seminar in feministfilm theory or in the globalization of film distribution. Except in its pro-duction track, film studies does not take itself to be analogous to chemistryor economics in this regard. Still, at the minimum film studies programsshould arrange things so that students can grow term by term in the depth,breadth, and subtlety of their film analyses and historical inquiries.

Such abrasive curricular issues quickly strip away the veneer that makesa term like discipline so attractive. As I have intimated throughout, theword is an alloy composed of method and institution. As an institutionwithin the humanities, a film studies program houses a large variety ofcourses that address or introduce films in some manner. A distributionrule, guaranteeing breadth, usually governs student choice over the spec-trum of courses on offer. But as a method film studies implies a sequencedand hierarchical set of experiences, usually including a baseline of filmhistory and two or more levels of theory and analysis. If methodical cinemastudies once seemed on the verge of emerging at many universities, thisimpulse largely dissolved once students and professors felt the attractionand the need to cover larger swaths of media. The territory broadened atthe expense of methodological depth. After the growth of cultural studies,the tent (no longer a house) may have been stretched to the point ofripping.

Yet film studies persists, proving for some that theory is but one of itsaspects, on par with the rest. If we still insist on its depth, theory today no


longer stands in the middle of the field like a tentpole but rather spreadsitself into every inquiry across the field that submits itself to sustained andcoherent reflection (as historiography is the theory of historical practice,for example). This change may be most apparent in the shift from theapparatus theory of the 1970s to today’s media archeology. The former wasitself an apparatus, an instrument to explain the development of cinema’stechnologies, including their basic ideological effects. Dependent on a fewhistorical postulates (most centrally, that the camera lens reproduces theconditions of vision established at the birth of capitalism with Renaissanceperspective), it was built out of passages from Plato, Freud, Lacan, andMarx. Media archeology inverts this research agenda; in each of its manyexcavations, historians probe aspects of film or other audiovisual phenom-ena on the irregular rock face of cultural history. The theories of historiansof art and science (Jonathan Crary and Friedrich Kittler have been crucialto those who dig into the nineteenth century) guide or fill out such re-search. This dramatic shift is visible in the near disappearance of Althusserfrom the works-cited lists of film scholars after 1985 and the nearly oblig-atory presence there of Walter Benjamin, whose fragmentary style is itselfan amalgam of archival digging and philosophical speculation.

Benjamin’s name forces us to recognize the belated but unmistakablearrival of Frankfurt school critical theory in the 1990s. This came at a timewhen, except for a coterie of Deleuzeans, the Anglo-American victory overFrench film theory seemed complete; on one side stood a politicized cul-tural studies and, on the other, the more formalist cognitive film theory(including historical poetics). While the former profits from sliding awayfrom the medium to examine whatever it finds of interest around it, thelatter resolutely holds onto the specificity of film. Critical theory, thanks toits Marxist tenor, manages to be attentive to the formal, historical, andpolitical dimensions of the media simultaneously, thereby proposing adisciplined alternative.

We should have been paying more attention. Thomas Elsaesser, shut-tling frequently across the Atlantic from the late 1970s on and current withdevelopments in French, German, and English, had been pointing to theplace that critical theory, and especially the Frankfurt school, should oc-cupy in any full-dimensional film studies. During the 1980s his perspectiveteamed up with an avalanche of research on early cinema that had beenongoing since the famous Brighton conference of 1978. Elsaesser staged aconference in England in 1983 on various aspects of early cinema and even-tually published a carefully wrought anthology through the British FilmInstitute in 1990, where Benjamin’s name shows up in the first paragraphto underwrite a “new archeology of the artwork, because of the fundamen-


tal change film had brought to the notion of time, space and materialculture.”50 After helping Noel Burch, Andre Gaudreault, Yuri Tzivian,Charles Musser, Tom Gunning, and others blow apart the dominance ofthe feature film, Elsaesser aimed to reassemble film studies by bringing totraditional questions of form and narrative the integral dimension of socialexperience that critical theory always turns forefront. SimultaneouslyMiriam Hansen published Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in AmericanSilent Film, contributing in a more concentrated way to the massive redis-covery of silent (and presilent) cinema through a sophisticated under-standing of experience.51 Of course, attention to viewing and viewers hadalso been central for Morin, Metz, and Baudry. But, in her clarifying in-troduction, Hansen rejected the hubris of French psychoanalytic theorythat had made spectators slaves to the apparatus. She remained even moreskeptical of American approaches, including both empirical research intoaudience demography and the emerging cognitive paradigm that reachesfor universal, if specific, laws governing how narratives or individualgenres (for example, horror) are processed by the mind. Hansen promoteda dialectic between films taken as historically inflected products and view-ers taken as historically situated publics.

It was from Jurgen Habermas that she developed the notion that audi-ences in particular times and places could constitute a kind of publicsphere, with all the political weight that term connotes. Habermas’s work,along with that of his followers Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, had infact been available in English for nearly twenty years, mainly through NewGerman Critique, which had featured them in its inaugural year. But be-yond that important journal and occasional invocations in dissertationsand articles they have had little impact on anglophone film studies, despiteKluge’s powerful productions in film and TV. Unlike the French thinkerswho, for better or worse, seem able to reach the four corners of film studies,key German thinkers have not often cropped up outside of discussions ofGerman cinema or beyond the gates of German and comparative literaturedepartments—that is, with the exception of Benjamin, whose ties to Pari-sian culture (including surrealism and the College de Sociologie) makehim perhaps less a completely German figure than, say, Theodor Adorno.

Now, Benjamin’s work had been available in English since 1969, whenIlluminations first appeared. But for film studies, aside from “The Work ofArt in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he really arrived in 1985 when

50. Thomas Elsaesser, “Early Cinema: From Linear History to Mass Media Archaeology,”in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Elsaesser (London, 1990), p. 1.

51. See Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film(Cambridge, Mass., 1991).


New German Critique devoted an entire issue to his relation to cinema,followed by one on Weimar Film Theory. Then came Susan Buck-Morss totrumpet the arcades project in her 1989 The Dialectics of Seeing.52 Benjaminwas suddenly indispensible to the way much film history, especially earlycinema, was conceived and written in the U.S. As a measure, the 1995collection Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life finds him invoked innine of its fourteen selections and cited on forty of its four hundred pages.53

For the past ten years, Harvard University Press has been bringing out ahuge quantity of Benjamin’s writings and correspondence, including lastyear’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” andOther Writings on Media.54 Benjamin was unquestionably the greatest me-dia theorist before the Second World War, writing brilliantly on photog-raphy and radio.

Benjamin’s friend Siegfried Kracauer had a better chance to bringFrankfurt-style critical theory to America, since From Caligari to Hitler(1947) and Theory of Film (1960) were published here. The former could becalled a study of a cinematic public sphere, though a decidedly dysfunc-tional one, while the latter (introduced in its latest edition by Hansen)ranks as the most ambitious treatise on the cinema written by anyone fromthis school of thought. Yet Theory of Film has until recently been largelyignored. I contributed to this neglect in The Major Film Theories, beingrelatively ignorant at the time of Kracauer’s journalism of the 1920s. And,indeed, Kracauer’s Theory of Film did seem like an orphan, in dialoguewith no active discourse community—Frankfurt school or otherwise—especially in comparison to Bazin, whose works, collected around the sametime, were written within an unbroken and vibrant French tradition ofcriticism. Kracauer came off badly in the inevitable comparison with Bazinat a time when realist theory as a whole, and Bazin’s star in particular, haddimmed considerably. Kracauer was thus doubly cursed, at least until the1990s when he benefited from Benjamin’s fame and from the fine biblio-graphic recovery effort of Tom Levin, whose translation of The Mass Or-nament appeared in 1995.55 These essays, more than Kracauer’s book-length works, encouraged the kind of detailed and imaginative historical

52. See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project(Cambridge, Mass., 1989).

53. See Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz(Berkeley, 1995).

54. See “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” and Other Writingson Media, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al., ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. (Cambridge, Mass.,2008).

55. See Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y.Levin (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).


research that Anglo-American film scholars had been pursuing, especiallyin the area of early cinema and the culture it grew out of. Think of Gun-ning’s wide-ranging array of essays; one could say that he writes, con-sciously or not, in the Frankfurt school manner. Critical theory put film inits place, so to speak, and interrogated it from that place. Perhaps its im-pact could only be felt when American film studies began to realize thatmedia was integral to a discipline no longer bounded by dates or by specifictechnologies.

Thus theory may have floundered as a metadiscourse, but numeroustheoretically sophisticated research fields have kept film scholars alive tofar-ranging consequences of the medium: early cinema research, the studyof documentary (its criteria, genres, technology, social consequences), oreven the history of film theory (as distinct from theory itself). This last-mentioned area is currently very active, as international endeavors havecoalesced into a research group whose goal is to unearth, contextualize,and eventually make available discourses from eras and places that havenot been heard from before: an anthology of Czech writings before theSecond World War,56 a 1913 Japanese treatise (recently reported on at aprofessional meeting),57African ideas of art and design,58 and so on.

Notice that the endeavors just mentioned are all international in scopeand in practice. For fifteen years the internet has put scholars and projectsin touch with one another, providing an alternative to national traditionsof scholarship. Even before the internet, a surge in historical research hadstarted to emerge in France from underneath the loftier discussion of aes-thetics that has dominated the field there. This turn can be credited in partto the prestige of French historiography (several key members of the An-nales school have now worked with film material). More important hasbeen the general access to documentation that formerly belonged to thefew. The establishment of the friendly and convenient Bibliotheque duFilm in 1990 has changed the way young scholars go about their work. Inaddition, they now have more to work with, as stunning collections havebeen added to the already rich French archives through donations andaccessions. If one took a census of top professors in France, the aestheti-cians would still outnumber the historians, but parity is being reached, and

56. See Cinema All the Time: An Anthology of Czech Film Theory and Criticism, 1908 –1939,trans. Kevin B. Johnson, ed. Jaroslav Andel and Petr Szczepanik (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2008).

57. A “permanent seminar on history of film theory” was established in 2007, housed bythe Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin, Italy. See museonazionaledelcinema.it/filmtheories/.Aaron Gerow and Markus Nornes reported on early Japanese film theory at this seminar’sinaugural meeting in Udine, Italy, March 2008.

58. This was the subject of “Imagine,” Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, 2–4 March 2009.


the distinction has become less relevant. The optimists among us applaudthe way that, around the world, history is being theorized while theory ishistoricized. At the same time, it is edifying to look to Paris, where renownedintellectuals like Jacques Ranciere, Marie-Jose Mondzain, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Jean-Luc Nancy speculate on cinema or deploy ferociouslycomplex film analyses to address far larger questions.

4. The State of Things: Convergence and Its GapsThe tether to the vertical pole of theory having loosened in the 1980s,

film studies spread out from its traditional center. Deleuze’s and Bord-well’s books may stand out from that era because their ideas took shape inand around a longstanding corpus—the art film and classical Holly-wood— but that corpus was on the verge of exploding under the pressureof cultural studies. For anglophone film studies in that decade dovestraight into this rising river, trying not to drown in the process. Not onlywere new modes and genres dredged up for discussion, films themselveswere increasingly set aside in favor of other objects of study (audiences,television, advertising).59 As for cinema studies, it has lost much of thevague definition it had, yet as an institution, a “society,” it swelled with newtypes of scholars, many of whom found movies and related phenomena tobe a fine— even an exceptional—site to monitor social processes.

Like many organisms, once a critical size had been reached, film studieseffectively split into separate interest groups. In the midst of the videotaperevolution, media came to serve as the common term to buffer culturalstudies and film studies. For media studies inevitably belongs to the formerwhile it includes the latter as one of its manifestations. If any discipline inthe humanities can claim to be emergent it would surely be media studies.Always taken as an institution rather than a method, media studies encom-passes— besides film, the first technological medium to win recognition inthe academy—television, radio, and sometimes journalism, even publicrelations. Most importantly, it features new media at its cutting edge. Me-dia studies effectively amounts to communications reborn in the post-modern era. A growing bibliography of media theory may satisfy skepticsabout its seriousness, yet media studies has a difficult time, more difficultthan film studies, proving itself to be methodical in any sustained manner.

By the time the SCS added media to its name in 2002, the transforma-

59. This shift was visible across the humanities. In an analogous case, my former colleagueGarrett Stewart claims to envy those of us in comparative literature for the fact that ourletterhead at least seems to identify our subject, whereas in English departments the subjectnow figures as just one among many topics up for grabs in the classroom and, indeed, inprofessional journals.


tion of the landscape had already occurred. One of the strongest new grad-uate programs to arise in the country, that of the University of Chicago,had baptized itself the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies. AtBrown University, prominent film scholars work within a departmentcalled Modern Culture and Media. And the six-hundred page The OxfordHandbook of Film and Media Studies, which the publisher describes as a“state-of-the-art survey of current thinking and research” in the field as itnow seems constituted, has now been published. Robert Kolker’s fine in-troduction puts in play every permutation of the book’s two key terms andthe objects they deal with.

Traditional film studies starts with the individual work, genre, or di-rector, and moves outward to larger issues of the ideologies of pro-duction and reception, to gender issues, to the effects of distributionon viewership, and increasingly to the ways globalization is affectingnational cinemas, always attempting to solidify its ground in theory.Media studies starts with larger textual entities, sometimes isolating amedia artifact—a genre of music, a television series, a social-networkingsite, a computer game—often analyzing these from the perspective ofsubcultural, audience-specific interaction. Perhaps film studies has neverquite removed itself from the aura of art, and perhaps media studies stillretains roots in methodologies of sociology and cultural history.60

Kolker, a former president of SCS, finds film studies to be hampered bybeing tied to a large yet circumscribed set of texts. It revolves aroundobjects whose density is great enough to keep a complex array of issues inorbit. Media studies, on the other hand, is not tied down by such gravity. Itfloats through a universe that contains artifacts of all sorts, not just thebeautiful Milky Way of films but other galaxies, gaseous clouds, spacejunk, and the solar winds that carry it along. Artifacts precipitate from theprocesses and forces that are media studies’ true concern. Once nearly theexclusive province of social science approaches, this field has emergedwithin the humanities as a type of cultural studies. The latter, while infil-trating and sometimes taking over numerous departments, seldom con-stitutes an academic unit since the topics it takes up are so vast, sovariegated, and so amorphous.61 By contrast, media studies is far moredefinable, yet indefinite, for its two central concepts, flow and remedia-

60. Robert Kolker, introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies, ed.Kolker (New York, 2008), p. 16.

61. See the disenchanted article by William B. Warner and Clifford Siskin, “StoppingCultural Studies,” Profession (2008): 94 –107.


tion, betray the instability and evanescence of its object. Media studiesthrives as a virtual discipline; it is the discipline of the virtual.

The first two contributions to The Oxford Handbook of Film and MediaStudies establish the potential rivalry of film and media in the entertain-ment world and, by implication, its academic study. Jay Bolter, coauthor ofthe seminal Remediation (1999), opens the volume by clearly drawing, thenintertwining, two lines that might distinguish film among the media.62

Film was the first in a series of technological media aiming for transpar-ency, whereby the spectator would feel copresent with what is displayed.An inevitable delay in its projection may thwart this dream of perceptualimmediacy, but narrative integration restores it on a different plane. By thetime of D. W. Griffith, spectators could feel themselves englobed by thefictional world on the screen, participating in it. Today, video games makegood on cinema’s promise, on both levels. Player interaction with thescreen functionally instantiates the present tense of the game’s display,while quasicinematic plots extend what is onscreen across an entire fic-tional world (Grand Theft Auto is Bolter’s example). He concludes on agenerous note, celebrating the diversity of available entertainment, fromauratic and authored narrative films to interactive internet games, whileindicating the many crossovers between these (such as interactive featureson the DVDs of some feature films).63 To study cinema today, he implies,one must become a media studies scholar.

The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies follows with BrianPrice’s “The Latest Laocoon: Medium Specificity and the History of Film The-ory,” whose very title intends to redraw the borders that Bolter has just erased.Price insists that in an environment of incessant flow and remediation noobject will command attention in and as itself and that the aura of any givenfilm, like that of cinema in toto, will evaporate.64 He worries that the conver-gence of all media into an indefinitely malleable electronic stream or reservoirwould seem to destabilize cinema studies if not cinema itself. Art history maysense itself in a parallel situation as objets d’art now share attention with in-numerable phenomena comprising the strategically undefined zone of visualculture. Presumably most of those scholars who now identify their field asvisual studies proudly rely on a disciplined background in art history thathoned the skills they wield in researching and analyzing all manner of things.The same should apply to those film scholars who have left the cinema-

62. See Jay David Bolter, “Digital Media and the Future of Filmic Narrative,” in The OxfordHandbook of Film and Media Studies, pp. 21–37.

63. See ibid., pp. 35–37.64. See Brian Price, “The Latest Laocoon: Medium Specificity and the History of Film

Theory,” in The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies, pp. 38–82.


dominant twentieth century for the unpoliced period of nineteenth-centuryaudiovisual entertainments or for a twenty-first century that holds out a futureof ever-newer media. Anyone who has learned to deal with artifacts as com-plex as films, whose textual systems they know how to analyze and whose placewithin socioeconomic systems they routinely trace, may feel confident whentraveling to meet other media phenomena.

I have always held that film studies grew unusually strong because filmsthemselves (especially powerful ones) have been able to stand up to thediscursive weight that cinephiles (critics) and academics (theorists) havebrought to bear on them. A field was constituted thanks to a fortuitousconjuncture of postwar cinematic modernism running up against a socialimperative in the 1960s and new paradigms in the humanities that precip-itated out of the events of 1968. Films became ideal objects of analysisbecause they are fabricated within corporate and semiotic systems, yet theyspeak back to those systems because they are collectively made and viewed.And they immediately showed themselves to be more than mere illustra-tions within scholarly debates; they fueled every discussion that engagedtheir scarcely manageable images and narratives. This multiplied thestakes and consequences—the excitement— of taking films seriously, ul-timately producing the lectures, courses, articles, and books whose debatesmake up a fertile field, if not a discipline.

The prospect of the decline of those debates in a media studies milieu ismore worrisome than the putative mutation of their topic. For our sea-soned ability to understand how the movies have functioned and to ques-tion how they came to function this way can guide the study of whateveraudio-visions attract our attention.65 The fact is that many of the bestminds in the humanities turned from literary, philosophical, sociocul-tural, or historical pursuits to account for the most imposing medium ofthe twentieth century. They produced often complex, ingenious, and pas-sionate arguments and positions. They produced a way of thinking andcultivated an instinct of looking and listening. Even if much of what hasbeen written could be discarded without real loss, this discourse—thisdrive to understand the workings of films—is precious. To have this sub-sumed by some larger notion of the history of audio-visions, to have itdissipate into the foggy field of cultural studies, for instance, or becomeone testing ground among others for communication studies would be tolose something whose value has always derived from the intensity and thefocus that films invite and often demand.

65. I elaborate on this view in Andrew, “A Film Aesthetic to Discover,” CiNeMAS 17(Autumn 2007): 47–71.


And so even as attention drifts to other objects (to TV, the internet,virtual reality, GPS) the peculiar nature of the film object urges the con-tinued growth of film studies. The film object should be treated as distinc-tive enough— hard enough—to withstand, at least provisionally, theprocesses of remediation that devalue any given text. The film object initself and as it funds analysis and interpretation ought not to recede in theacademy because its peculiar characteristics make it stand out as anoma-lous in the constellation of media artifacts.

Here is why. Technological media may generally strive for and promiseimmediacy,66 but cinema quickly became—and, at its most interesting,still remains—an object of gaps and absences. From the outset, cinema’sremarkable psychological and cultural voltage has been built on delay andslippage. What I have dubbed decalage lies at the heart of the medium andof each particular film, a gap between here and there as well as now andthen.67 This French term connotes discrepancy in space and deferral orjumps in time. At the most primary level, the film image leaps from presentto past, for what is edited and shown was filmed at least days, weeks, ormonths earlier. This slight stutter in its articulation then repeats itself inthe time and distance that separates filmmaker from spectator and spec-tators from each other when they see the same film on separate occasions.The gap in each of these relations constitutes cinema’s difference fromtelevision and new media. Films display traces of what is past and inacces-sible, whereas TV and certainly the internet are meant to feel and bepresent. We live with television as a continual part of our lives and ourhomes; sets are sold as furniture. Keeping up a twenty-four-hour chatteron scores of channels, TV is banal by definition. In contrast, we go out tothe movies, leaving home to cross into a different realm. Every genuinecinematic experience involves decalage, time-lag. After all, we are taken ona flight during and after which we are not quite ourselves.

The film object exists differently, or not at all, when kidnapped by con-sumers and sequestered on their computer desktops. Not only do individ-uals watch films on PCs at their leisure (stopping and starting at will,sampling chapters, and so on), they watch them on one window amongseveral that may be running simultaneously (including those that holdemail messages, the IMDb entry on the film, notes, a blog, and the currentweather). Cinema constitutes just one kind of software content available tothe powerful Windows operating system and the all-encompassing PC

66. Bolton makes this point as well as anyone.67. See Andrew, “Time Zones and Jetlag: The Flows and Phases of World Cinema,” in

World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, ed. Natasa Durovicova and Kathleen Newman(forthcoming).


hardware. Called up on demand or via YouTube, a movie appears on a flatpanel, where many windows are displayed—as many as the user chooses,then shuffles, moving them around like cards in a game of solitaire. Mon-itor and display seem more apt terms than screen to designate the visualexperience that computers deliver. The computer monitor of the twenty-first century, just like the cinematographe of the nineteenth, presents theviewer with the present, with immediate attractions, no matter what is ondisplay. Cinema, which ruled the twentieth century, pulls the viewer intoanother world and an encounter with something that has passed and is justout of reach.

Perhaps it took later media—and particularly the new media of videogames, the interactive internet, and virtual reality—to let us recognize thatcinema has never really been about immediacy. Its spontaneity and con-tingency—its neorealism— has always been the lure by which it offers anexperience that, properly speaking, is not immediate at all, but reflective,resonant, and voluminous. Films provide experiences in such number andvariety and to such powerful effect that they deserve and have receivedsustained study. They discipline us so that we can learn from them. This isa relationship we should not grow out of.


Andrew Film Studies

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