The Literature

2007-07-20T20:58:00.001+07:00

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The function of masquerade in The Last Seduction (1993) by Alastair James John Atkinson

2007-07-20T12:14:00.001+07:00

Feminist involvement in film/ has for many years provided a great wealth both for the opportunities for women to investigate women and for researchers to investigate the role of women within cinema. This paper is interested in analyzing The Last Seduction (1993) because, while it may be classified as a ‘traditional’ Hollywood film/ it appears to allow a feminist reading. An analysis of The Last Seduction (1993) by adopting the feminist theory of masquerade/ thus seems an appropriate strategy to utilize.

To achieve this, the paper will firstly outline the concept of spectatorship as a foundation of a feminist approach to the cinema. Secondly, it will illustrate the text / spectator dichotomy as viewed by Mulvey (1975), and introduce the theory of masquerade, as articulated by Doane (1982). Upon this foundation, it will expand Doane’s original theory of masquerade by transposing the theories, provided by both Mulvey and Freud, of transexism and ‘activity and passivity’/ in order to create model of masquerade which may be seen to provide a feminist reading of a text. An applied textual analysis of ‘The Last Seduction (1993) will qualify the contention that the function of masquerade - located within feminist criticism - is able to provide a valid female voice within traditional Hollywood cinema. [1]

It would not be unreasonable to suggest that the medium of cinema offers an indication of societal attitudes/ therefore proposing a clear and unappropriated place for examination of women within society. Smith (1972) notes that ‘women in any fully human form have almost been left out of film,’ and that ‘despite the enormous emphasis placed upon women as spectacle in the cinema, women as women is largely absent.’[2] That is to say, women appear in cinema as objects of the masculine gaze or as patriarchally defined stereotypes.

This statement poses numerous questions; can feminist productions break through into a Hollywood system thus exposing existing stereotypical barriers and contributing to a redefinition of feminism? If such a position is possible, are existing definitions, as outlined by ‘academics such as Mulvey et al, still valid in an analysis of modern cinema, or are these definitions in need of a revision. It may be argued that on one hand that the film The Last Seduction (1993) maintains a progressive element of feminism allowing a positive voice for women, however, an alternative reading may be that it perpetuates a patriarchal status quo through the recuperation, and possible reconstitution of the films within the women’s movement.

It may be judicious to create a foundation upon which the rest of the paper can be placed; notably that of feminism and its approach to cinema. Taking into account the enormity of the subject of feminism, a global analysis does not seem to suffice, therefore this paper will be analyzing The Last Seduction (1993) by using a psychoanalytic framework, as outlined by Mulvey; that is, the cinematic apparatus being responsible for, or contributory to, the subordination of women. Erens (1990) expands this by noting it is men who both ‘consciously and unconsciously control the production and the reception of film’;[3] that is, men create images that will satisfy their own needs.

Having noted that a global definition of feminism does not provide a satisfactory definition, it may be prudent to define what this paper considers as an overriding position for feminism. That is by creating what can be considered to be its antithesis. To comprehend a reading of feminism and feminist texts, one must firstly understand a way in which the term woman[4] can be defined. If feminism is a fight to ‘challenge representations of women’[5], it is essential one understands the concept of woman. According to Bailey (1994) women are ‘at best creatures fundamentally different from, and naturally inferior to, men, whose identity is determined by a relationship of subordinated complementarity with men. At worst... ...inferior or abnormal men, and in order to maintain ‘quality control’[6] [Patriarchy] seeks to ‘fix as many of the defects as possible and annihilate the rest’.[7]

This daunting patriarchal definition, deems women to represent a mere object, the subordinate male other, or as a defective male, who, like a machine, is able to be reconditioned or repaired to function effectively in the subservient routine of patriarchy. Little wonder then Elshtain (1981) sees the role of feminism as to ‘liberate women from patriarchy by challenging man’s power over women.’[8]

This concept of woman only provides an analysis from a biological perspective, that is, in terms only of the sexual difference between man and woman. The alternative to this simple biological difference is eminently more positive. The incorporation of the social, combined with a biological factor, now provides an opportunity for an investigation which not only concerns biological elements such as women’s health, sex, rape and maternity, et cetera, but also the inclusion of the socialised elements of the identity of women.

De-emphasising ‘sexual identity’ as a simple biological construct allows a continued investigation which, unlike the construct of a biological identity, can be taken as neither natural nor unchangeable. The justification patriarchy holds to restrict women from areas of possible opportunity previously reserved for men, now begins to fall apart and the equalisation of women within society is able to develop.

The impetus behind feminist reasoning remains constant; to perpetuate an investigation into opportunities for women, and to fight against patriarchal subordination. The feminist text must, therefore, be one which de-emphasises the dominance of patriarchy and allow the voice of women to be as loud as, if not louder than, the rest. Within The Last Seduction (1993) there are a number elements which concur with this notion, for example, the film is seen to consciously rejecting a patriarchal discourse by dismissing the institution of marriage. Indeed, the opening sequence shows Brigit Gregory [9] deserting her husband, removing her wedding ring and throwing it into the ashtray of her car; symbolically, her removal from a patriarchal discourse.

The Framework of masquerade is posited within the theoretical construct of spectatorship. A foundation of spectatorship should therefore, now be formed, upon which the theory of masquerade can be constructed.

The impulse behind feminist involvement in spectatorship may arguable concern the creation of an understanding of the processes by which women are subordinated as spectator/s; attempting an understanding of this conception, and perhaps creating a theoretical evolution, of a process in which women may be authentically portrayed. The portrayal of women may be seen to play an important element in the feminist involvement in theories of spectatorship. Illustrated earlier, Smith’s noted that women as women were largely absent from the cinema; if taken literally, it may be argued that not only is a female voice absent from filmic discourse, but also absent is a female spectoral reading of a filmic discourse. Spectators within classical narrative cinema may thus be male, or at least able to become male for the duration of the film. Problematically, in order to become male is to subscribe to and perpetuate a subordination of the female as spectator. Cinema, by its male domination of the cinematic apparatus can only alienate women.

Classical narrative cinema is seen to represent a patriarchal ideology. Mayne (1990) argues that the ‘visions of women, that appear on the screen, may be largely the projection of patriarchal fantasies.’[10] Cinema may be seen to become both the site for the objectification of the female body and also for creating theories of female friendship. These elements may simultaneously be exploited by patriarchy and female self-representation. Within a filmic narrative neither patriarchy nor women’s discourses allow the female spectator a vantage point from which to ‘speak, represent or imagine themselves.’[11]

A psychoanalytic perspective may thus provide a relevant reading of the theories of spectatorship. One is able to generate the notion of male spectoral pleasure engendering the overwhelming presence of the fetishised women on the screen, to be representative of ‘the Oedipus phase of male plenitude’[12] as articulated by Modleski (1990). The pleasure of the male spectator can conceivably be argued as the result of their positioning by the cinematic mode of address. Stacey (1987) expands this argument by noting the ‘text / spectator relation forms a closed system determined completely by the articulation of visual and narrative means within gendered subjectives which only permits a dichotomous pleasure of voyeurism and identification, and disregards the ambiguities and tensions present in every text.’ [13]

It is within this closed system that gender is considered to be paramount in understanding the idiosyncrasy of spectatorship and pleasure. Taken to another conclusion, the spectoral pleasure may be derived at the expense of alternative considerations such as race and sexuality, class, culture and history.

Mulvey (1975) benchmark paper contends that the cinematic apparatus functions upon the relationship between women and men and the cinematic apparatus. As argued earlier, this relationship objectifies women by blanketing or disguising the female voice and perpetuating a patriarchal voice.[14]

According to Mulvey (1975), the subordination of women presents itself through the portrayal of the image of women, that the voice of femininity is thus clouded or discarded totally by two dominant elements. Firstly, the voice of the masculine discourse within the narrative structure of the text, and secondly, the scopophilic gaze of the dominant culture.[15]

Mulvey argues that the text / spectator relationship is governed by two elements, narcissism and scopophilia; ‘narcissistic in that it is the spectator that identifies with their own likeness’ and ‘scopophilic to the extent that the spectator’s look stands for the look of the camera.’[16] With in the scopophilic construct, identification of a screen image derives through the pleasure of using another person as an object of sexual stimulation. Mulvey notes that this active scopophilia, when transposed onto cinema, acts as the ‘function of the sexual instinct’, and concerns the ‘separation of erotic identity of the subject, from the object on screen.’[17] The construct of narcissism, while dealing with the sexual cravings of the ego, relies upon the fulfilment of the ego through the identification with an image portrayed upon the screen.

Both elements concern the pleasure of the individual. The nexus to the theory of a feminist approach to classical Hollywood cinema, is the construction of women as the object of the male gaze, not only within the text, by characters, but also by the spectator, as the producer of the gaze, and that this spectator gains gratification through the identification of his like on the screen.

Underpinning this theory is the Freudian oedipus complex.[18] The premise links castration anxiety within the awareness of an infant, gained through a process of looking at the mother figure, that anxiety develops through the realisation that the mother figure lacks a penis. It is through the realisation that the father figure possesses a penis that the threat of castration by the mother figure emerges. This threat of castration leads to the ultimate rejection of the mother figure. A general transposition of this anxiety focuses around the development of power relations within society; a patriarchal society.

Mulvey argues that the woman serve as the object of the look; the look being the look of the male spectator. Doane (1982) qualifies this by adding that ‘historically, there has always been a certain imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman.’[19] Doane contends that the relationship between women and the scopic dominion, is vastly different than its relationship to men. Women are seen to be ‘exempt from the dichotomy between scopophilia and narcissism’.[20] More precisely, women possess a different relationship to the image on the screen than that of men. The excessive presence of the female body may be the reason why women are unable to either combat the scopophilic or narcissistic gaze of the male spectator; more defensively, find a neutral space in which to distance the image of women, which is seen to represent both the ‘condition for voyeuristic pleasure.’[21] The control of the narrative allowing a proposal for an image ‘of women for women.’[22]

Lapsley, et al (1992) regard the female spectator to have two options available to them. They may firstly adopt an active masculine position or secondly, adopt a passive feminine position [23] through the identification with either the male or female characters. This becomes extremely limiting for the women as it provides no alternative, however, it does provide the genesis for a theory which allows women a variant. Doane (1982) proposes the theory of masquerade is able to combat the domination of the male gaze within the narrative of a text. The theory revolves around an exaggeration of femininity, in which the female is able to provide a forum for herself; a forum lacking the presence of the male gaze. It may arguably be ‘femininity itself which is constructed as the mask.’[24] The result of the mask is the creation of a space behind which women are able to ‘control, read and reproduce the female image.’[25]

While possessing many limitations, masquerade may represent a defence mechanism behind which the female spectator can take refuge as opposed to a method of confrontation with which the dominant male gaze can be dismissed. Mulvey contends that transvestism provides the possibility of a further generation to the original theory of masquerade. Mulvey (1981) illustrates the ability of a female audience to oscillate their perceptual identities from that of the feminine, to the masculine. This is arguably detrimental to femininity as ‘the female is unable to achieve a stable sexual identity’.[26]

The basis for the notion of oscillation derives from the construct of the female character within both text and audience to be able to accept and enjoy images produced through the dominant discourses of patriarchy. However, the approach of this paper is to generate a further evolution of masquerade and transpose the theory presented by Mulvey (1981) onto the original theory of masquerade provided by Doane (1982). The result of this transposition may be that the oscillation of sexual identities can no longer be seen from a negative perspective, as an inability to achieve a stable basis on which to establish a sexual identity, but more positively, to be seen as an ability to deconstruct the dominant ideology.

The female is now in a position to don not only the feminine mask, but in addition a masculine mask. The female may now be able to exaggerate not only its own feminine voice, but also able to replicate and exaggerate a masculine voice. The outcome within the narrative of a text is now the ability of the female character to exist within both a forum behind which she can hide, while also possessing an ability to adopt an authentic masculine voice; a voice able to confront and potentially subordinate male discourses present within the text.

The adoption of this mask is adequately illustrated during a sequence of The Last Seduction (1993) in which Brigit stalks an all male line of telephone sales representatives. She is the supervisor and thus in a ordinate position to the other characters within the sequence; in a position to dominate all other discourses within the scene. The subordination of all other voices is created by the replacement of the normal female identity into a masculine identity. Brigit’s character is now aggressive, if not hostile, toward the men in the office. Brigit is able to provide a monetary incentive for sales, the money symbolises possession of the phallus, controller of the power discourse; of her authority and ability to dominate others, she is not seen as a sexual object, but a person to be feared, who, if the need arises is able to provide rewards for good behaviour; able to verbally castrate all those who are not able to generate results. Brigit’s reprimand of a subordinate follows thus:

Brigit: "...two minutes fifty seconds, you expect these leads to grow on

fucking trees, [pause] you want me over your shoulder all day, eh! [pause] Ask for the sale four times every time, got it, Jesus..."

The language used within the sequence not only serves to reprimand the sales representative, but also warns others of the consequences of poor performance. The role reversal is typical of the character’s ability to subordinate the masculine discourse through an abuse of her dominant station and the ability to alternate between a masculine and feminine position. The reinforcement of anxiety within the workforce, stems from her abusive and dominant language. Her purposeful use of the term eunuch once more reaffirms her as possessor of the phallus and thus provides a sub-text of the threat of castration. For example :

Brigit: "...come on you eunuchs, he’s closed six sales more than the

rest of you bastards, with the same fucking leads. Who wants to spend their whole weekend here..."

Brigit’s dominance is reinforced by undermining the masculine identity within the workforce; using phrases that imply castration imply she is the castrator. The workforce is fearful of her potential threat not only to castrate but also remove their leisure time. All voices are thus subordinate to hers. As Freudian theory demonstrates, the position of castrator of man, provides a forum for the creation of anxiety within the masculine complex, the castrated male is the male removed from the power discourse, and thus poses no threat to the female discourse.[27]

The domination of patriarchy at the beginning of the film therefore does not so much provide a firm foundation on which it can develop, it fundamentally promotes a theoretical location for the female spectator.

A deconstruction of the masculine ideology evolves through an infiltration of the masculine ideology by the female narrative agent. The exaggeration of the masculine identity dominates the mainstream narrative from a position within that narrative. The exaggeration of masculinity ultimately overpowers all other voices from within. From this position within a patriarchal construct, the female voice obtains dominance by creating an alternative masculine voice which leads to ultimate sublimation of the masculine identity; adopting the masculine, exaggerating the traits of the masculine construct, overpowering existing voices within it.

For example, Brigit adopts a masculine identity and dismisses all attempts to court her:

Brigit: "Could you leave. Please !"

Mike: "Well, I haven’t finished charming you yet.."

Brigit: "...you haven’t even started !"

Mike: "Give me a chance ?"

Brigit: "Look, go find yourself a nice little cow-girl,

make nice little cow-babies, and leave me alone,

now fuck off."

By adopting the masculine identity Brigit provide herself with a voice unchallenged by the existing male voice; the female character develops a voice able to subordinate all others.

Viewing the theory of masquerade as a conscious process of the female narrative agent, the ability to vary between socio-sexual identities, and thus deconstruct the dominant voice within the narrative flow of the text is arguably now achievable.

The theory arguably lacks in a number of areas, most notably the fluctuation of behaviour during the periods of manufactured exaggeration of socio-sexual identity, and secondly, by the omission of the element of neutrality within the construct of the character’s behaviour.

Taking these points into consideration this paper can now transpose a further Freudian theory onto the foundation previously outlined; that is the theory of ‘Activity and Passivity’.[28] Figure 1. presents a graphic presentation of masquerade when applied to the model of activity and passivity:

Masculine

Active

Active

Passive

Passive

Feminine

Normal

Female

Identity

Figure 1.

The inclusion of an active and passive mode allows the scope for both an active-exaggeration and passive-exaggeration of a gendered identity. This not only allows the potential to subordinate a dominant ideology, but also the possibility to accentuate the domination. Figure 1. demonstrates the oscillation between masculine and feminine identities/ while also providing the allowance of a neutral or normal female identity. It is within this normal location that the true female voice is allowed the freedom to exist without the threat of any other dominant voice attempting domination.

Noted earlier was the contention that the female identity consciously opts ofr either masculine or feminine identities. However, if the model remains at this point, it appears flawed. The exaggerated feminine voice, through its rigidity, remains under threat from a stronger discourse. The inclusion of the active / passive dichotomy allows a stepping point by which an identity can be considered to be actively-exaggerated or passively-exaggerated.

Laplanche et al (1988) note that ‘every position is inseparable from its opposite.’[29] Masquerade can now be seen to function in two ways, firstly, to dominate a patriarchal voice by the use of an exaggerated identity stemming from the female identity. This domination is achieved through the movement between exaggerated forms of masculine and feminine identities as well as between the active and passive variants within each identity. Secondly, this complex of masquerade provides a shelter zone in which the female voice is able to exist without fear of subordination. The neutral space provides an essential variant for the feminist text. Recalling the original construct of a feminist text, that is to fight against oppression and allow for an investigation into the opportunities for women, it is seen that the feminist text must provide a place where the female voice has the opportunity to air its own identity.

Masquerade is no Longer to be seen as to process of simple exaggeration of the feminine identity to provide a space behind which the real female identity, can hide, but, a tool for the generation of power, deconstruction, and ultimate domination of a cultural ideology. For example, within one sequence of The Last Seduction (1993) events build into a rape / sex sequence; during which Brigit’s identity can be seen to constantly oscillate between not only masculine and feminine identities, but also its passive and active variants. This oscillation functions in two ways. Firstly, to maintain control of the situation being incited: the rape. Secondly, to provide a physical account of a rape for the police recording on the telephone, required by Brigit as evidence to implicate Mike for Clay’s murder.

Representing the voice of patriarchy, Mike is automatically compromised by Brigit’s transference from the passive masculine to the active masculine modes of gendered identity. Further subordination of the masculine voice comes when Brigit undermines Mike’s sexuality. The subordination takes on two forms. Firstly, within the mise en scene, that is, the Brigit choice of wearing men’s underwear, thus reinforcing Mike’s subconscious homosexual belief of himself. Secondly, Brigit’s dialogue reinforces Mike lack of manhood and masculinity. Brigit states:

Brigit: "Rape me !"

"Trish wasn’t really coming to Beston, Mike !"[30]

[Brigit purposefully unzips her trousers. A short flashback providing Mike’s image of Trish during the moment they met. The scene cuts back to Brigit and Mike.]

Brigit: "You shouldn’t have told me you had never slept with a

man before, must have been some wild night..."

[Brigit slowly pulls her trousers down to reveal old fashioned men’s underwear. A flashback of Mike holding his head in his hands. The scene cuts back to Brigit and Mike.]

Brigit: "He had to keep the goods hidden for two whole days. What did you think the thing

bobbling at the back of your throat was, a clitoris! You married a man you farm Faggot!

I’m Trish. Rape me..."

This sequence serves to incite Mike’s subconscious desire to demonstrate his masculine dominance over Brigit and thus over women, in which attempts to regain his manhood by complying with Brigit’s request and carries out what he considers to be her rape. The adoption of active masculine identity becomes too strong for Mike’s weak patriarchal voice. Brigit is in total command of the situation, even though the images are of her rape. The aura of homosexuality that shrouds Mike reinforces Brigit’s dominance. This ultimately leads to Mike’s confusion, excessive anxiety, hysteria[31] and the ultimate destruction of a patriarchal discourse.

The element of active masculine masquerade in overpowering the masculine voice arguably leaves no space for the patriarchal discourse to exist. The sexualisation of the female narrative agent, when viewed under the banner of masquerade, allows dominance over the existing patriarchal discourses within the narrative.

Having reached an ending point, this paper may answer it’s initial thesis, that is, does mainstream narrative cinema perpetuate a patriarchal discourse? One conclusion may be that the theoretical construct of masquerade allows the possibility of the subordination the subordinator; that is, the provision of a louder feminine voice than that of the dominant masculine voice. However, it is also recognised that masquerade is simply a tool applied like a blanket to a narrative, which, in turn, stems from the creation of the script and the producers of the film; all of which may be posited firmly within a patriarchal discourse. Masquerade therefore appears limited in its usefulness. More positively however, there is evidence suggesting the theory’s capability of subordinating a dominant masculine discourse within a given narrative such as The Last Seducation (1993). A feminine voice is not only created but also able to dominate the text. Remaining now is the proposal that the eroticisation of women within a cinematic text may lead not to the subordination of femininity, but to the subordination of the masculine voice within that text. The validity of this argument may be put into question when analysed under differing theoretical approaches, however, when viewed through the construct of this paper, the findings are positive for women.

In feminist film theory, a basic working assumptions is that within classical narrative cinema there is parity between the hierarchies of masculinity and femininity on the one hand and activity and passivity on the other. The Last Seduction (1993) arguably disrupts, disturbs, and deconstructs this parity; it may indeed represent an important functional text for feminism. If there is a possibility for the existence of a valid female voice within mainstream narrative cinema, the theoretical underpinning of masquerade may indeed provide the possibility for a cinematic language that is non-patriarchal; while the language may also be classified as non-feminist, the significance for feminism would indeed be considerable. It may be argued that subordination, while deemed to exist, is not automatic within every text. The Last Seduction (1993) which may be viewed by traditional theorists as Mulvey (1975), to perpetuate the subordination of women, through the allowance of a male gaze by providing graphic scenes of sexual activity may be seen to allow not the subordination of women but, the subordination of a patriarchal discourse. In subordinating patriarchy masquerade may arguably perpetuate feminism. [32]

The Last Seduction (1993) adheres to what Heath terms as a cinema which breaks with ‘received notions of femininity and depict women truthfully… …such a cinema would create a discourse, a voice, a place for [women] as subject.’[33] If the sexualisation of women is seen to satisfy only a masculine voice, femininity can be seen as nothing more than a tool of patriarchy. If patriarchy is dominated by sex being used as a tool - one among many tools of masquerade - then the use of sexual behaviour may no longer perpetuate the subordination of women, more contribute to the construct of feminism and provide a voice for women; a place for discourse. Progressive sexuality can indeed be seen to create a new definition of femininity; definitions which may counter the dominance of the silver screens of Hollywood and beyond.

ENDNOTES

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[1] To provide an account of the film within the text serves nothing more than a waste of valuable space. It is therefore appropriate that a brief resume of the film should be provided within the endnote. The summary is thus:

Clay gains seven hundred thousand dollars from an illegal drug deal. Brigit has masterminded this deal while Clay has executed it. Brigit steals the money and leaves Clay with no money, and a ‘shark’ finance company demanding money. Brigit arrives at a small town called Beston. She meets Mike and, after gaining some advice from her corrupt lawyer, obtains employment and decides to ensnare Mike into a plot to Murder Clay, a plot which, unbeknown to Mike, he is to be arrested and tried for.

Mike is a small town boy wanting to make it to the big city. His only venture to the ‘big city’ resulted in his unwitting marriage to transsexual. Brigit’s plan centres upon murdering the husbands who are unfaithful to their wives. Mike’s role as a claims adjuster allows him access to financial records which provide a possible list of candidates of unfaithful husbands; a list is made of possible clients. Mike objects to the killings on moral grounds.

Clay hires a private detective to find Brigit. The detective succeeds in finding her and attempts to obtain the stolen money. During one scene, Brigit bates the detective about the size of his penis and notes that “if you’ll show me yours, I’ll show you mine.” In an attempt to appease Brigit, the detective removes his penis from his trousers. Brigit takes the opportunity she has manufactured and crashes the car, killing the detective.

Brigit now begins to pull her plan together by saying that she has murdered someone, from the list, for cash which will enable Mike and her to live together. In return he must now kill a “son of a bitch who just cheats and beats on his wife.” The person Brigit has in mind is Clay. Mike is persuaded to commit the murder. During the final scene Mike is unable to carry out the task; Where Mike fails Brigit succeeds and murders Clay. Mike cannot comprehend what is going on and becomes enraged when Brigit revels to him the fact that she is wearing men’s underwear. She tells him that he is homosexual for marrying a man, by mistake. Mike becomes enraged as he listens to Brigit bate him: “Rape me, come on you farm faggot, rape me, you fucker, like you did it with Trish.” During the sequence Brigit calmly dials 911 and the police record an enraged Mike apparently ‘raping’ Brigit while also confessing to the murder of Clay.

Mike is tried and convicted of the rape of Brigit and murder of Clay. Brigit however is seen in every sense as the victim - rape victim and widow. In reality however she escapes from the events unscathed and more importantly to her, wealthy. The final scene has Brigit disposing of the last piece of evidence and being chauffeur driven into the distance.

[2] Smith, S. - ‘The image of women in film; Some suggestions for future research’;

Women and Film; No. 1; 1972; p.13

[3] Erens, P. - Issues in Feminist Film Criticism; Indiana University Press; Bloomington; 1990;

p.xix

[4] When using the term women, this essay refers to women as defined from the point of view of a western culture.

[5] Barrs, P. - Beginning Theory; an introduction to littery and cultural theory; Manchester

University Press; Manchester; 1995; p.134

[6] Bailey, M.E. - cited in Ramazanoglu (ed); Up Against Foucault: Explorations of some tensions

between Foucault and Feminism; Routledge; London; 1994; p.99

[7] Elshtain, J. - Public Man, Private Woman; Women in social and political thought: Princeton

University Press; Princeton, USA; 1981 ;p.15

[8] Bailey, M.E. - op. cit.

[9] See filmography for character list and credits.

[10] Mayne, J. - The woman at the keyhole: Indiana University Press; Bloomington; 1990; p. 117

[11] Mayne, J. - Ibid

[12] Modleski, T. - ‘Hitchcock, Feminism, and the patriarchal unconscious’ cited in Erens, P. (ed);

Issues in Feminist Film Criticism; Indiana University Press; Bloomington; 1990;

pp.41-58

[13] Stacey, J. - ‘Desperately seeking difference’; Cited in Erens, P.; Issues in Feminist Film

Criticism: Indiana University Press; Bloomington; 1990

[14] The following section of this paper refers to the terms male / female and feminine / masculine. It should be emphasised that female and feminine and male and masculine are differing concepts. The notion is proposed that the term feminine and masculine are societally defined traits of the female and male sex, respectively. It is recognised that the term feminine or masculine are not the pejorative of gendered expressions. The terms are therefore ‘carefully’ used within these contexts.

[15] Mulvey, L. - ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’; Screen: Vol.16 / No.3; Autumn; 1975

[16] Kuhn, A. - Women’s Pictures Feminism and Cinema: Verso; London; 1994; p.59

[17] Mulvey, L. - op. cit.

[18] This lack is described by Freud as the Oedipus complex. Its central theme concerns the lack of a penis, symbolising the mother figure as inferior to that of the father figure; the domination representing power at this stage within the development of sexuality. It is through this identification with and the ultimate rejection of the mother figure, through her lack of a penis that the child sees the mother figure to represent the threat of castration and thus a threat to the availability of a power discourse within the dominant social forum.

When viewed simultaneously with a construct of the cinema, it can be seen that the allowance of the female voice, is the allowance of a Loss of power, by the observer. The pleasure derived by the masculine spectator thus stems from both the knowledge that this threat is admonished and secondly, as Mulvey herself notes, it is the alienated subject, torn in his imaginary memory by a sense of loss, by the terror of potential lack in phantasy that comes near to finding a glimpse of satisfaction.

While inscribing boundaries by which the concept of narcissism and scopophilia within the masculine construct, the theory is not able to illustrate how the female construct oscillates between male and female identities. The two aspects do however, seem remarkably similar. Both male and female infant progress through the Oedipus complex, however, the complex is different within each sex. Within the male, the separation from the mother figure comes through the realisation of a mothers lack of penis, due to the possession of a penis by the male child, the mother figure is automatically seen to possess both, a threat of castration, while also being inferior to the male. The female child also holds the mother figure as a primary love object, the distinction here being that the infant and the mother figure are the same sex. In order to establish a normal heterosexual attachment, the female child must both continue to identify with the mother and shift her love to her father. Opposite to the male child, the change in the love object comes, not through the possession of a penis, but through the realisation of a lack of penis. The child then turns her attention to the father in an attempt to substitute the lack of penis, with the provision of a child.

However, it is this obsessive love for both the mother and father figures that instil an ability for the duality of identity to exist. This forced duality may represent the impetus behind Mulvey’s theoretical rubric which allows a feminine identity to oscillate between masculine and feminine personas. The implication is that in order to exist and function effectively, the feminine construct needs to be able to adopt the masculine construct.

[19] Doane, M.A. - ‘Film & The Masquerade: Theorising The Female Spectator’; Screen; Vol 23.

No.3 / 4; Sept / Oct; 1982

[20] Doane, M.A. - Ibid; p.76

[21] Lapsley, R. - Film Theory: An introduction; Manchester University Press; Manchester; 1992;

& Westlake, M. p.98

[22] Of women for women refers to the imaging of women for a spectator other than that of the scopophillic / narcissistic male gaze.

[23] LapsLey, R. - Ibid; p.98

& Westlake, M.

[24] Doane, M.A. - op. cit.; p.81

[25] Doane, M.A. - op. c it.; p.81

[26] Mulvey, L. - Afterthoughts on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" inspired by Duel in

the Sun (King Vidor,1946); Framework; No.15-16-17; 1981; p.70

[27] Refer to Endnote 18 for an outline of Oedipus complex.

[28] Defined by Freud as ‘one of the pairs of opposites which are fundamental to mental life’. Activity and Passivity are defining characteristics of specific types of instinctual aims. From the genetic point of view the active - passive dichotomy is prior to the subsequent opposition between phallic / castrated and masculine and feminine.

[29] Laplanche, J. - The Language of Psychoanalysis; Karnac Books; London; 1988; p.8

[30] Brigit sent Mike a letter, supposedly from Trish, stating that she was coming to Beston and wished to resume their relationship.

[31] Freud describes hysteria as to be found in the prevalence of a certain kind of identification… …which is often in emergence of the Oedipal conflict occurring mainly in the phallic and oral libidinal spheres. Freud terms conversion hysteria as the psychical conflict expressed symbolically in somatic symptoms of the most varied kinds, i.e., emotional crisis accompanied by theatricality.

Laplanche, J. - op. cit.; pp.194 -195

[32] This subordination is created by overpowering the male voice by the female voice. In subordinating the male voice, the feminist ideal may be seen to contribute to the creation of a forum in which women dominate men

[33] Heath, S. - ‘Anto Mo’; Screen; Vol.16 No.4; Winter; 1975 / 1976; p.53

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrew, D. Concepts in film theory; Oxford University Press; New

York; 1984

Bailey, M.E. cited in Ramazanoglu (ed); Up Against Foucault:

Exolorations of some tensions between Foucault and

Feminism: Routledge; London; 1994

Barrs, P. Beginning Theory: an introduction to Littery and cultural

theory: Manchester University Press; Manchester; 1995

De Lauretis, T Alice Doesn’t; Indiania University Press; Bloomington;

1984

De Lauretis, T ‘Guerrilla in the midst: women’s cinema in the 1980’s;

Screen: Vol.31; Spring; 1990

Doane, M.A. Re-Vision: Essays in feminist film criticism: University

et al (Eds) Publications of America, Inc; Los Angeles; 1984

Dyer, R. The Matter of Images: Essays on representation;

Routledge; London; 1993

Elshtain, J. Public Man. Private Woman: Women in social and

political thought: Princeton University Press; Princeton,

USA; 1981

Erens, P. Issues in Feminist Film Criticism: Indiana University

Press; Bloomington; 1990

Fiske, J . Television Culture: Routledge; London;1991

Freud, S. The Essentials of Psychoanalysis; Penguin Books;

London; 1986

Freud, S. Sigmund Freud. Volume 7 On Sexuality: Three essays

on the theory of Sexuality; Penguin Books; London;

1991

Gledhill, C. Stardom: Industry of Desire: Routledge; London; 1991

(ed)

Heath, S. ‘Anto Mo’; Screen; Vol.16 No.4; Winter; 1975 / 1976

Kaplan, E. A. Women in Film Noir; BFI; London; 1992

Kuhn/ A. Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema; Verso;

London; 1994

Laplanche, J. The Language of Psychoanalysis; Karnac Books;

London; 1988

Lapsley, R. Film Theory: An introduction; Manchester University

& Westlake, M. Press; Manchester; 1992

Mayne, J. The Woman at the Keyhole: Indiana University Press;

Indianapolis; 1990

Metcalf, A. The Sexuality of Men; Pluto Press; London; 1990

& Humpharies, M

Mulvey, L. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’; Screen; Vol.16,

No.3; Autumn; 1975

Mulvey, L. ‘Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

inspired by DueL in the Sun* (King Vidor, 1946);

Framework: No.15-16-17; 1981

Ramazanoglu, C. Up Against Foucault: Explorations of some tensions

between Foucault and Feminism: Routledge; London;

1994

Ryan, T. ‘Roots of Masculinity’; in Metcalf, A. & Humphries, M.:

The Sexuality of Men; Pluto Press; London; 1990

Smith, S. ‘The image of women in film: Some suggestions for

future research’; Women and Film; No.1; 1972

Stam, R. Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and

Film; The John Hopkins University Press; London; 1992

Stam, R. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics; Routledge;

London; 1993

Stanley, L. Feminist Praxis: Research, Theory and Epistemology in

feminist sociology; Routledge; London; 1991

Turner, G. Film as Social Practice; Routledge; London; 1993

FILMOGRAPHY

The Last Seduction

USA, 1993, Colour (CFI)

Directed by: John Dahl

Produced by: ITC Entertainment Certification: UK:18/USA:R

Language: English Genre: Film Noir

Run Time: USA: 110 Sound Mix: Ultra Stereo

CAST

Linda Fiorentino …Brigit Gregory

Bill Pullman …Clay Gregory

Michael Raysses …Phone Sales Rep

Zack Phifer …Gas Station Attendant

Peter Berg (I) …Mike Swale

Brien Varaday …Chris

Dean Norris …Shep

Donna Wilson …Stacy

Mike Scriba …Ray

J.T.Walsh …Frank Griffith

Erik - Anders Nilsson …Beston Passerby * 1

Patricia, R. Caprio …Beston Passerby * 2

Herb Mitchell …Bob Trotter

Bill Nunn …Marian

Renee Rogers …Receptionist

Bill Stevenson …Mail Boy

Walter Addison …Detective

Anna Flanagan …Nurse

Mike Lisenco …Bert

Serena …Trish Swale

Michelle Davison …911 Operator

Jack Shearer …Public Defender

CREW

Script - Steve Barancik

Cinematography - Jeff Jur

Music - Joseph Vitarelli

Production Design - Linda Pearl

Costume Design - Terry Dresbach

Film Editing - Eric, L. Beasan

Producer - Jonathon Shestack, Nancy Rae Stone (Co-Producer)

A Structural Analysis of Get Carter (1970) by Alastair James John Atkinson

2007-07-20T12:12:00.000+07:00

This paper will provide a structural analysis of the film Get Carter (1970). To fully comprehend this notion however it intends to review two principles of structural analysis of film and use the film to illustrate these points.

All structural analysis of texts, are able to illustrate the notion of an omnipresent narrative, that is the ever presence of a narrative. No matter how obvious this proposal seems, it must be comprehended that everything possesses a narrative, everything from a leaf or coloured wall, to the most intricate film or book. Each possess a narrative, each possess a different narrative, and the importance each narrative holds is in many ways representative of the importance placed upon it by the reader or enunciator of that narrative.

Kuhn (1994), in her book Women's Pictures; Feminism and Cinema, proposes the notion that the meaning of a text lies within the reception of that text. She notes that texts do not exist without a receiver. Meaning is arguably gained therefore at that point of reception and must lie with the enunciator of the reading. Anything that a receiver receives possesses meaning and thus a narrative, the essential nature of that narrative is another question.

The term narrative is essentially synonymous with the term story; a narrative essentially is a story, and it is the interpretation of this story that provides meaning. Structural analysis of narrative therefore is an analysis of the structures present within a narrative.

Having noted this, the flip side of the coin is that structural analysis presents nothing more than a mode of analysis; a tool which possesses specific elements, which when applied to a narrative are able to provide meaning.

The element of Structural analysis is as varied and as complex as most other means of analysis. This paper will concentrate upon an analysis of the film Get Carter (1970) by looking at the DISTRIBUTIONAL and INTEGRATIONAL functions within its narrative.

However, these ideas are illustrated the paper will firstly outline some fundamental elements of the concept of distributional and Integrational analysis of film.

FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS.

It is important to define what it is one is analyzing. Structural analysis within this filmic rubric is the analysis of the functional units of a text. It is logical therefore to argue that if this is the case, a text must be made up of units. The varying importance of these units illustrates the segments of the narrative which are either vital or secondary to the overall plot. BARTHES terms this as follows:

‘...a unit has been taken as any segment of the story, which can be seen as the term of a correlation. The essence of that function is, the seed that it sows in the narrative planting an element which will come into fruition later.’

Barthes defines this by noting that different functions within a text are important at differing levels. He classifies these levels to be DISTRIBUTIONAL and INTEGRATIONAL levels. Barthes notes that they ‘...correspond to what Propp refers to as functions’.

The importance of these distributional functions can be divided into two groups, CARDINAL or (NUCLEI) FUNCTIONS and CATALYTIC FUNCTIONS. The most important of these being the Cardinal functions; as the term suggests, the catalysers provide an important felicitator of the narrative; providing openings for cardinal functions to function. That is, a unit of the text that plays a vital role within the plot. For example, when Jack Carter finds a gun and cartridges on the top of a cupboard in his murdered brother’s house it is plausible that this gun will play a role within a future unit of the narrative; and indeed it does. However, the degree of importance this function serves within the narrative, at this primary stage, is not clear.

The establishing of the gun within the narrative may now be seen as an important element to the narrative. Supporting this CARDINAL FUNCTION is the CATALYSER which serves to provide a forum for the cardinal function to exist within the narrative unit.

Barthes notes that all catalysers imply the existence of cardinal functions; however, the existence of cardinal functions does not imply the existence of catalysers. That where there is one cardinal function, there must always be another to reciprocate the meaning; to give meaning to the original cardinal function.

This is illustrated within Get Carter (1970) when Jack forcefully enters the houses of both Cliff Brumby and Mr. Caneer. Both sequences play a role in the development of the narrative. Jack is seen to be forceful, willing and capable breaking the law and also known to the characters he meets.

It is now understood then that within a narrative there are present both CARDINAL and CATALYSER Functions. One can see that the catalysers are, as the term suggests, a developer for further units within the narrative. These CARDINAL and CATALYSER functions are DISTRIBUTIONAL functions.

The second principle Bathes concerned himself with were the INTEGRATIONAL functions of a unit within the narrative. These, also, play an equally important role as the distributional level functions, however, perhaps not as obvious. The INTEGRATIONAL units comprise of what Barthes terms as the INDICES and INFORMANTS. The INDICE concerns, not a complementary or consequential act, as within the distributional units, but:

‘...a more or less diffuse concept which is never the less necessary to the meaning of the story: Psychological Indices referring’ to the characters, date regarding their identity, notations of atmosphere...’

Within the film, some of these INTEGRATIONAL units are show within the title sequence.’

The INTEGRATIONAL level, as with the DISTRIBUTIONAL level, can also be split into two groups. Firstly, there is the INDICE, of which we are already aware, and secondly Barthes recognises the element termed as the INFORMANT. The primary distinction between INDICE and INFORMANTS is that the INDICE refers to the character of the narrative agent, in the case of Get Carter (1970) Michael Caine’s character, Jack Carter, the atmosphere or indeed a philosophy held by either the narrative or the narrative agent. For example, within the opening sequence of the film, we see Jack acting as a gangster, the sexual triangle between Jack, Anna Fletcher (Britt Ekland) and Gerald Fletcher (Terrence Rigby) and Jack’s decision and undertaking of his decision to take the train to Newcastle. In effect the sequence not simply indexes Jack and his desire to go to Newcastle, but also that Newcastle is a rough, grim place where only tough people can survive. The sequence continues to inform the viewer not only of Jack's taste in literature (the crime thriller that the film itself was loosely based upon, 'Farewell My Lovely', by Raymond Chandler), but also Jack's use and knowledge of Narcotics. The sequence automatically provides us with important information about the character of Jack; information which is played upon later within the film.

Informants, on the other hand, serve to identify or to locate the narrative or narrative agent in time and space. The Informant always serves to authenticate the reality of the referent; that is, the idea or thing that a word symbolises. An informant brings with itself, instant information about the narrative or narrative agent. For example, one is able to recognise Mr. Caneer as a rich and powerful man, through the presence of his bodyguards. The Bodyguards instantly bring to the narrative, the information that Mr. Caneer is someone who needs the use of bodyguards. In addition to this we see a Land Rover vehicle, repeatedly, at a distance. Jack notices this vehicle therefore the men in the land-rover show us that Jack is already being watched and perhaps pursued.

Barthes comments upon all four elements of distributional and Integrational analysis:

"...Nuclei (cardinal) and Catalyses, indice and informants (again the names are of little importance), these, it seems, are the initial classes into which the functional level units can be divided. This classification must be completed by two remarks. Firstly, a unit can at the same time belong to two different classes: to drink whisky (in an airport lounge is an action which can act as a catalyser to the cardinal notation of waiting, but is also, and simultaneously, the indice of a certain atmosphere (modernity, relaxation, reminiscence, etc.). In other words, certain units can be mixed, giving a play of possibilities in the narrative economy... ...and secondly, it should be noted that the four classes described can be distributed in a different way."

Within the final conclusion of the film we find out that Jack’s brother was indeed murdered, that he did not drink whisky and that during his murder he was forced to drink a complete bottle of whisky. We might now be able to see that the scene showing Jack finding the gun is not a cardinal function at all, but a catalyser to the final sequence in which jack uses the gun to force Eric Paice to drink a complete bottle of whisky, before killing, not by shooting, but by beating to death, the murderer of Jack's brother. The whisky too is a catalyser; contributing throughout the plot to the final sequence in which jack takes his pound of flesh only to have it taken away moments later when he himself is killed.

Problems.

1. ) Random sequences cannot illustrate a definite meaning of a text.

Individual sequences may provide a different meaning to that which a full screening will provide.

2. ) Meaning cannot be acquired, nor functions correctly identified, until after the total narrative has reached a conclusion.

Propp analysis is able to illustrate meaning of a text whereas meaning within this form of analysis still remains with the individual, and thus open to interpretation.

Propp analysis is able to illustrate meaning of a text as it is seen, whereas Distributional and Integrational analysis can provide a retrospective analysis. Any meaning taken during the flow of a text may have to be altered each time a new sequence is shown.

Afterthoughts on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" inspired by Duel in the Sun by Laura Mulvey

2007-07-20T12:11:00.000+07:00

Afterthoughts on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" inspired by Duel in the Sun

By Laura Mulvey

So many times over the years since my article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," was published in Screen, I have been asked why I only used the male third person singular to stand in for the spectator. At the time, I was interested in the relationship between the image of woman on the screen and the "masculinization" of the spectator position, regardless of the actual sex (or possible deviance) of any real live movie-goer. In-built patterns of pleasure and identification impose masculinity as "point of view," a point of view which is also manifest in the general use of the masculine third person. However, the persistent question "what about the women in the audience?" and my own love of Hollywood melodrama (equally shelved as an issue in "Visual Pleasure") combined to convince me that, however ironically it had been intended originally, the male third person closed off avenues of inquiry that should be followed up. Finally, Duel in the Sun and its heroine's crisis of sexual identity brought both areas together.

I still stand by my "Visual Pleasure" argument, but would now like to pursue the other two lines of thought. First (the "women in the audience" issue), whether the female spectator is carried along, as it were by the scruff of the text, or whether her pleasure can be more deep-rooted and complex. Second (the "melodrama" issue), how the text and its attendant identifications are affected by a female character occupying the center of the narrative arena. So far as the first issue is concerned, it is always possible that the female spectator may find herself so out of key with the pleasure on offer, with its "masculinization," that the spell of fascination is broken. On the other hand, she may not. She may find herself secretly, unconsciously almost, enjoying the freedom of action and control over the diegetic world that identification with a hero provides. It is this female spectator that I want to consider here. So far as the second issue is concerned, I want to limit the area under consideration in a similar manner. Rather than discussing melodrama in general, I am concentrating on films in which a woman central protagonist is shown to be unable to achieve a stable sexual identity, torn between the deep blue sea of passive femininity and the devil of regressive masculinity.

There is an overlap between the two areas, between the unacknowledged dilemma faced in the auditorium and the dramatic double-bind up there on the screen. Generally it is dangerous to elide these two separate worlds. In this case, the emotions of those women accepting "masculinization" while watching action movies with a male hero are illuminated by the emotions of a heroine of a melodrama whose resistance to a "correct" feminine position is the crucial issue at stake. Her oscillation, her inability to achieve stable sexual identity, is echoed by the woman spectator's masculine "point of view. * Both create a sense of the difficulty of sexual difference in cinema that is missing in the undifferentiated spectator of "Visual Pleasure." The unstable, oscillating difference is thrown" into relief by Freud's theory of femininity.

The female spectator's pleasure

Freud and femininity

For Freud, femininity is complicated by the fact that it emerges out of a crucial period of parallel development between the sexes; a period he sees as masculine, or phallic, for both boys and girls. The terms he uses to conceive of femininity are the same as those he has mapped out for the male, causing certain problems of language and boundaries to expression. These problems reflect, very accurately, the actual position of women in patriarchal society (suppressed, for instance, under the generalized male third person singular). One term gives rise to a second as its complementary opposite, the male to the female, in that order. Some quotations:

In females, too, the striving to be masculine is ego — syntonic at a certain period — namely in the phallic phase, before the development of femininity sets in. But it then succumbs to the momentous process of repression, as so often has been shown, that determines the fortunes of a woman's femininity.1

I will only emphasize here that the development of femininity remains exposed to disturbances by the residual phenomena of the early masculine period. Regressions to the pre-Oedipus phase very frequently occur; in the course of some women's lives there is a repeated alternation between periods in which femininity and masculinity gain the upper hand.2

"Femininity":

We have called the motive force of sexual life "the libido." Sexual life is dominated by the polarity of masculine-feminine; thus the notion suggests itself of considering the relation of the libido to this antithesis. It would not be surprising if it were to turn out that each sexuality had its own special libido appropriated to it, so that one sort of libido would pursue the aims of a masculine sexual life and another sort those of a feminine one. But nothing of the kind is true. There is only one libido, which serves both the masculine and the feminine functions. To it itself we cannot assign any sex; if, following the conventional equation of activity and masculinity, we are inclined to describe it as masculine, we must not forget that it also covers trends with a passive aim. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition "feminine libido" is without any justification. Furthermore, it is our impression that more constraint has been applied to the libido when it is pressed into the service of the feminine function, and that — to speak teleogically — Nature takes less careful account of its [that function's] demands than in the case of masculinity. And the reason for this may lie — thinking once again ideologically — in the fact that the accomplishment of the aim of biology has been entrusted to the aggressiveness of men and has been made to some extent independent of women's consent.'

One particular point of interest in this passage is Freud's shift from the use of active/masculine as metaphor for the function of libido to an invocation of Nature and biology that appears to leave the metaphoric usage behind. There are two problems here: Freud introduces the use of the word masculine as "conventional," apparently simply following an established social-linguistic practice (but which, once again, confirms the masculuv "point of view"); however, secondly, and constituting a greater intellectual stumbling block, the feminine cannot be conceptualized as different, but rather only as opposition (passivity) in an antinomic sense, or as similarity (the phallic phase). This is not to suggest that a hidden, as yet undiscovered femininity exists (as perhaps implied by Freud's use of the word "Nature") but that its structural relationship to masculinity under patriarchy cannot be defined or determined within the terms offered. This shifting process, this definition in terms of opposition or similarity, leaves women also shifting between the metaphoric opposition "active" and "passive." The correct load, femininity, leads to increasing repression of "the active" (the "phallic phase" in Freud's terms). In this sense Hollywood genre films structured around masculine pleasure, offering an identification with the active point of view, allow a woman spectator to rediscover that lost aspect of her sexual identity, the never fully repressed bed-rock of feminine neurosis.

Narrative grammar and trans-sex identification

The "convention" cited by Freud (active/masculine) structures most popular narratives, whether film, folk-tale or myth (as I argued in "Visual Pleasure"), where his metaphoric usage is acted out literally in the story. Andromeda stays tied to the rock, a victim, in danger, until Perseus slays the monster and saves her. It is not my aim, here, to debate on the rights and wrongs of this narrative division of labour or to demand positive heroines, but rather to point out that the "grammar" of the story places the reader, listener or spectator with the hero. The woman spectator in the cinema can make use of an age-old cultural tradition adapting her to this convention, which eases a transition out of her own sex into another. In "Visual Pleasure" my argument was axed around a desire to identify a pleasure that was specific to cinema, that is the eroticism and cultural conventions surrounding the look. Now, on the contrary, I would rather emphasize the way that popular cinema inherited traditions of story-telling that are common to other forms of folk and mass culture, with attendant fascinations other than those of the look.

Freud points out that "masculinity" is, at one stage, ego-syntonic for a woman. Leaving aside, for the moment, problems posed by his use of words, his general remarks on stories and day-dreams provide another angle of approach, this time giving a cultural rather than psychoanalytic insight into the dilemma. He emphasizes the relationship between the ego and the narrative concept of the hero:

It is the true heroic feeling, which one of our best writers has expressed in the inimitable phrase, "Nothing can happen to me!* It seems, however, that through this revealing characteristic of invulnerability we can immediately recognize His Majesty the Ego, the hero of every day-dream and every story.4

Although a boy might know quite well that it is most unlikely that he will go out into the world, make his fortune through prowess or the assistance of helpers, and marry a princess, the stories describe the male phantasy of ambition, reflecting something of an experience and expectation of dominance (the active). For a girl, on the other hand, the cultural and social overlap is more confusing. Freud's argument that a young girl's day-dreams concentrate on the erotic ignores his own position on her early masculinity and the active day-dreams necessarily associated with this phase. In fact, all too often, the erotic function of the woman is represented by the passive, the waiting (Andromeda again), acting above all as a formal closure to' the narrative structure. Three elements can thus be drawn together; Freud's concept of "masculinity? in women, the identification triggered by the logic of a narrative grammar, and the ego's desire to phantasize itself in a certain, active, manner. All three suggest that, as desire is given cultural materiality in a text, for women (from childhood onwards) trans-sex identification is a habit that very easily becomes second Nature. However, this Nature does not sit easily and shifts restlessly in its borrowed transvestite clothes.

A heroine causes a generic shift

The Western and Oedipal personifications

Using a concept of character function based on V. Propp's Morphology of the Folk-tale, I want to argue for a chain of links and shifts in narrative pattern, showing up the changing function of "woman." The Western (allowing, of course, for as many deviances as one cares to enumerate) bears a residual imprint of the primitive narrative structure analyzed by Vladimir Propp in folk-tales. Also, in the hero's traditional invulnerability, the Western ties in closely with Freud's remarks on day-dreaming. (As I am interested primarily in character function and narrative pattern, not in genre definition, many issues about the Western as such are being summarily side-stepped.) For present purposes, the Western genre provides a crucial node in a series of transformations that comment on the function of "woman" (as opposed to "man") as a narrative signifier and sexual difference as personification of "active" or "passive" elements in a story.

In the Proppian tale, an important aspect of narrative closure is "marriage," a function characterized by "princess" or equivalent. This is the only function that is sex-specific, and thus essentially relates to the sex of the hero and his marriageability. This function is very commonly reproduced in the Western, where, once again "marriage" makes a crucial contribution to narrative closure. However, in the Western the function's presence has also come to allow a complication in the form of its opposite, "not marriage." Thus, while the social integration' represented by marriage is an essential aspect of the folk-tale, in the Western it can be accepted... or not. A hero can gain in stature by refusing the princess and remaining alone (Randolph Scoct in the Ranown series of movies). As the resolution of the Proppian tale can bt seen to represent the resolution of the Oedipus complex (integration into the symbolic), the rejection of marriage personifies a nostalgic celebration of phallic, narcissistic omnipotence. Just as Freud's comments on the "phallic" phase in girls seemed to belong in limbo, without a place in the chronology of sexual development, so, too, does this male phenomenon seem to belong to a phase of play and phantasy difficult to integrate exactly into the Oedipal trajectory.

The tension between two points of attraction, the symbolic (social integration and marriage) and nostalgic narcissism, generates a common splitting of the Western hero into two, something unknown in the Proppian tale. Here two functions emerge, one celebrating integration into society through marriage, the other celebrating resistance to social demands and responsibilities, above all those of marriage and the family, the sphere represented by woman. A story such as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance juxtaposes these two points of attraction, and spectator phantasy can have its cake and eat it too. This particular tension between the doubled hero also brings out the underlying signficance of the drama, its relation to the symbolic, with unusual clarity. A folk-tale story revolves around conflict between hero and villain. The flashback narration in Liberty Valance seems to follow these lines at first. The narrative is generated by an act of villainy (Liberty rampages, dragon-like, around the countryside). However, the development of the story acquires a complication. The issue at stake is no longer how the villain will be defeated, but how the villain's defeat will be inscribed into history, whether the upholder of law as a symbolic system (Ranse) will be seen to be victorious or the personfication of law in a more primitive manifestation (Tom), closer to the good or the right. Liberty Valance, as it uses flashback structure, also brings out the poignancy of this tension. The "present-tense" story is precipitated by a funeral, so that the story is shot through with nostalgia and sense of loss. Ranse Stoddart mourns Tom Doniphon.

This narrative structure is based on an opposition between two irrecon-cilables. The two paths cannot cross. On one side there is an encapsulation of power, and phallic attributes, in an individual who has to bow himself out of the way of history. On the other, an individual impotence rewarded by political and financial power, which, in the long run, in fact becomes history. Here the function "marriage" is as crucial as it is in the folk-tale. It plays the same part in creating narrative resolution, but it is even more important in that "marriage is an integral attribute of the upholder of the law. In this sense Hallie's choice between the two men is pre-determined. Hallie equals princess equals Oedipal resolution rewarded, equals repression of narcissistic sexuality in marriage.

Woman as signifier of sexuality

In a Western working within these conventions, the function "marriage" sublimates the erotic into a final, closing, social ritual. This ritual is, of course, sex-specific, and the main rationale for any female presence in this strand of the genre. This neat narrative function restates the propensity for "woman" to signify "the erotic" already familiar from visual representation (as, for instance, argued in "Visual Pleasure"). Now I want to discuss the way in which introducing a woman as central to a story shifts its meanings, producing another kind of narrative discourse. Duel in the Sun provides the opportunity for this. While the film remains visibly a "Western," the generic space seems to shift. The landscape of action, although present, is not the dramatic core of the film's story, rather it is the interior drama of a girl caught between two conflicting desires. The conflicting desires, first of all, correspond closely with Freud's argument about female sexuality quoted above, that is: an oscillation between "passive" femininity and regressive "masculinity." Thus, the symbolic equation, woman equals sexuality, still persists, but now rather than being an image or a narrative function, the equation opens out a narrative area previously suppressed or

Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1947)

repressed. She is no longer the signifier of sexuality (function "marriage") in the "Western" type of story. Now the female presence as center allows the story to be actually, overtly, about sexuality: it becomes a melodrama. It is as though the narrational lens had zoomed in and opened up the neat function "marriage" ("and they lived happily . . .") to ask "what next?" and to focus on the figure of the princess, waiting in the wings for her one moment of importance, to ask "what does she want?" Here we find the generic terrain for melodrama, in its woman-oriented strand. The second question ("what does she want?") takes on greater significance when the hero function is split, as described above in the case of Liberty Valance, where the heroine's choice puts the seal of married grace on the upholder of the Law. Duel in the Sun opens up this question.

In Duel in the Sun the iconographical attributes of the two male (oppositional) characters, Lewt and Jesse, conform very closely to those of Ranse and Tom in Liberty Valance. But now the opposition between Ranse and Tom (which represents an abstract and allegorical conflict over Law and history) is given a completely different twist of meaning. As Pearl is at the center of the story, caught between the two men, their alternative attributes acquire meaning from her, and represent different sides of her desire and aspiration. They personify the split in Pearl, not a split in the concept of hero, as argued previously for Liberty Valance.

However, from a psychoanalytic point of view, a strikingly similar pattern emerges, Jesse (attributes: book, dark suit, legal skills, love of learning and culture, destined to be Governor of the State, money, and so on) signposts the "correct" path for Pearl, towards learning a passive sexuality, learning to "be a lady," above all sublimation into a concept of the feminine that is socially viable. Lewt (attributes: guns, horses, skill with horses, Western get-up, contempt for culture, destined to die an outlaw, personal strength and personal power) offers sexual passion, not based on maturity but on a regressive, boy/girl mixture of rivalry and play. With Lewt, Pearl can be a tomboy (riding, swimming, shooting). Thus the Oedipal dimension persists, but now illuminates the sexual ambivalence it represents for femininity.

In the last resort, there is no more room for Pearl in Lewt's world of misogynist machismo, than there is room for her desires as Jesse's potential fiancee. The film consists of a series of oscillations in her sexual identity, between alternative paths of development, between different desperations. Whereas the regressive phallic male hero (Tom in Liberty Valance) had a place (albeit a doomed one) that was stable and meaningful, Pearl is unable to settle or find a "femininity" in which she and the male world can meet. In this sense, although the male characters personify Pearl's dilemma, it is their terms that make and finally break her. Once again, however, the narrative drama dooms the phallic, regressive resistance to the symbolic. Lewt, Pearl's masculine side, drops out of the social order. Pearl's masculinity gives her the "wherewithal" to achieve heroism and kill the villain. The lovers shoot each other and die in each other's arms. Perhaps, in Duel, the erotic relationship between Pearl and Lewt also exposes a dyadic interdependence between hero and villain in the primitive tale, now threatened by the splitting of the hero with the coming of the Law.

In Duel in the Sun, Pearl's inability to become a "lady" is highlighted by the fact that the perfect lady appears, like a phantasmagoria of Pearl's failed aspiration, as Jesse's perfect future wife. Pearl recognizes her and her rights over Jesse, and sees that she represents the "correct" road. In an earlier film by King Vidor, Stella Dallas (1937), narrative and iconographic structures similar to those outlined above make the dramatic meaning of the film although it is not a Western. Stella, as central character, is flanked on each side by a male personification of her instability, her inability to accept correct, married "femininity" on the one hand, or find a place in a macho world on the other. Her husband, Stephen, demonstrates all the attributes associated with Jesse, with no problems of generic shift. Ed Munn, representing Stella's regressive "masculine" side, is considerably emasculated by the loss of Western accoutrements and its terrain of violence. (The fact that Stella is a mother, and that her relationship to her child constitutes the central drama, undermines a possible sexual relationship with Ed.) He does retain residual traces of Western iconography. His attributes are mapped through associations with horses and betting, the racing scene. However, more importantly, his relationship with Stella is regressive, based on "having fun," most explicitly in the episode in which they spread itching powder among the respectable occupants of a train carriage. In Stella Dallas, too, a perfect wife appears for Stephen, representing the "correct" femininity that Stella rejects (very similar to Helen, Jesse's fiancee in Duel in the Sun).

The Man who shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)

Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937)

I have been trying to suggest a series of transformations in narrative pattern that illuminate, but also show shifts in, Oedipal nostalgia. The "personifications" and their iconographical attributes do not relate to parental figures or reactivate an actual Oedipal moment. On the contrary, they represent an internal oscillation of desire, which lies dormant, waiting to be "pleasured" in stories of this kind. Perhaps the fascination of the classic Western, in particular, lies in its rather raw touching on this nerve. However, for the female spectator the situation is more complicated and goes beyond simple mourning for a lost phantasy of omnipotence. The masculine identification, in its phallic aspect, reactivates for her a phantasy of "action" that correct femininity demands should be repressed. The phantasy "action" finds expression through a metaphor of masculinity. Both in the language used by Freud and in the male personifications of desire flanking the female protagonist in the melodrama, this metaphor acts as a straitjacket, becoming itself an indicator, a litmus paper, of the problem inevitably activated by any attempt to represent the feminine in patriarchal society. The memory of the "masculine" phase has its own romantic attraction, a last-ditch resistance, in which the power of masculinity can be used as postponement against the power of patriarchy. Thus Freud's comments illuminate both the position of the female spectator and the image of oscillation represented by Pearl and Stella.

In the course of some women's lives there is a repeated alternation between periods in which femininity and masculinity gain the upper hand.

The phallic phase ... but it then succumbs to the momentous process of repression as has so often been shown, that determines the fortunes of women's femininity.

I have argued that Pearl's position in Duel in the Sun is similar to that of the female spectator as she temporarily accepts "masculinization" in memory of her "active" phase. Rather than dramatizing the success of masculine identification, Pearl brings out its sadness. Her "tomboy" pleasures, her sexuality, are not accepted by Lewt, except in death. So, too, is the female spectator's phantasy of masculinization at cross-purposes with itself, restless in its transvcstite clothes.

Notes

1. Sigmund Freud, Femininity\ vol. 22 of The Complete Psychological Works, Standard Edition (London, 1951).

2. Sigmund Freud, Analysis Terminable and Interminable, vol. 23 of The Complete Psychological Works, Standard Edition (London, 1951).

3. Sigmund Freud, Femininity, vol. 22 of The Complete Psychological Works.

4. Sigmund Freud, Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming, vol. 9 of The Complete Psychological Works, Standard Edition (London, 1951).

Visual pleasure and narrative cinema by Laura Mulvey

2007-07-20T12:10:00.000+07:00

Visual pleasure and narrative cinema by Laura Mulvey

I. Introduction

A. A political use of psychoanalysis

This paper intends to use psychoanalysis to discover where and how the fascination of film is reinforced by pre-existing patterns of fascination already at work within the individual subject and the social formations that have moulded him. It takes as starting point the way film reflects, reveals and even plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle. It is helpful to understand what the cinema has been, how its magic has worked in the past, while attempting a theory and a practice which will challenge this cinema of the past. Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.

The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of woman stands as lynch pin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies. Recent writing in Screen about psychoanalysis and the cinema has not sufficiently brought out the importance of the representation of the female form in a symbolic order in which, in the last resort, it speaks castration and nothing else. To summarise briefly: the function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is twofold, she first symbolises the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved, her meaning in the process is at an end, it does not last into the world of law and language except as a memory, which oscillates between memory of maternal plenitude and memory of lack. Both are posited on nature (or on anatomy in Freud's famous phrase). Woman's desire is subjected to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound, she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it. She turns her child into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis (the condition, she imagines, of entry into the symbolic). Either she must gracefully give way to the word, the Name of the Father and the Law, or else struggle to keep her child down with her in the half-light of the imaginary. Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.

There is an obvious interest in this analysis for feminists, a beauty in its exact rendering of the frustration experienced under the phallocentric order. It gets us nearer to the roots of our oppression, it brings an articulation of the problem closer, it faces us with the ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like a language (formed critically at the moment of arrival of language) while still caught within the language of the patriarchy. There is no way in which we can produce an alternative out of the blue, but we can begin to make a break by examining patriarchy with the tools it provides, of which psychoanalysis is not the only but an important one. We are still separated by a great gap from important issues for the female unconscious which are scarcely relevant to phallocentric theory: the sexing of the female infant and her relationship to the symbolic, the sexually mature woman as non-mother, maternity outside the signification of the phallus, the vagina. But, at this point, psychoanalytic theory as it now stands can at least advance our understanding of the status quo, of the patriarchal order in which we are caught.

B. Destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon

As an advanced representation system, the cinema poses questions of the ways the unconscious (formed by the dominant order) structures ways of seeing and pleasure in looking. Cinema has changed over the last few decades. It is no longer the monolithic system based on large capital investment exemplified at its best by Hollywood in the 1930's, 1940's and 1950's. Technological advances (16mm, etc.) have changed the economic conditions of cinematic production, which can now be arti-sanal as well as capitalist. Thus it has been possible for an alternative cinema to develop. However self-conscious and ironic Hollywood managed to be, it always restricted itself to a formal mise-en-scene reflecting the dominant ideological concept of the cinema. The alternative cinema provides a space for a cinema to be born which is radical in both a political and an aesthetic sense and challenges the basic assumptions of the mainstream film. This is not to reject the latter moralisti-cally, but to highlight the ways in which its formal preoccupations reflect the psychical obsessions of the society which produced it, and, further, to stress that the alternative cinema must start specifically by reacting against these obsessions and assumptions. A politically and aesthetically avant-garde cinema is now possible, but it can still only exist as a counterpoint.

The magic of the Hollywood style at its best (and of all the cinema which fell within its sphere of influence) arose, not exclusively, but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order. In the highly developed Hollywood cinema it was only through these codes that the alienated subject, torn in his imaginary memory by a sense of loss, by the terror of potential lack in phantasy, came near to finding a glimpse of satisfaction: through its formal beauty and its play on his own formative obsessions. This article will discuss the interweaving of that erotic pleasure in film, its meaning, and in particular the central place of the image of woman. It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article. The satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high point of film history hitherto must be attacked. Not in favour of a reconstructed new pleasure, which cannot exist in the abstract, nor of intellectualised unpleasure, but to make way for a total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film. The alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, or daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire.

II. Pleasure in looking/fascination with the human form

A. The cinema offers a number of possible pleasures. One is scopophilia. There are circumstances in which looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as, in the reverse formation, there is pleasure in being looked at. Originally, in his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud isolated scopophilia as one of the component instincts of sexuality which exist as drives quite independently of the erotogenic zones. At this point he associated scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze. His particular examples centre around the voyeuristic activities of children, their desire to see and make sure of the private and the forbidden (curiosity about other people's genital and bodily functions, about the presence or absence of the penis and, retrospectively, about the primal scene). In this analysis scopophilia is essentially active. (Later, in Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, Freud developed his theory of scopophilia further, attaching it initially to pre-genital autoeroticism, after which the pleasure of the look is transferred to others by analogy. There is a close working here of the relationship between the active instinct and its further development in a narcissistic form.) Although the instinct is modified by other factors, in particular the constitution of the ego, it continues to exist as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object. At the extreme, it can become fixated into a perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other.

At first glance, the cinema would seem to be remote from the undercover world of the surreptitious observation of an unknowing and unwilling victim. What is seen on the screen is so manifestly shown. But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic phantasy. Moreover, the extreme contrast between the darkness in the auditorium (which also isolates the spectators from one another) and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation. Although the film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking in on a private world. Among other things, the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire onto the performer.

B. The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect. The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form. Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic. Here, curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world. Jacques Lacan has described how the moment when a child recognises its own image in the mirror is crucial for the constitution of the ego. Several aspects of this analysis are relevant here. The mirror phase occurs at a time when the child's physical ambitions outstrip his motor capacity, with the result that his recognition of himself is joyous in that he imagines his mirror image to be more complete, more perfect than he experiences his own body. Recognition is thus overlaid with misrecognition: the image recognised is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the alienated subject, which, re-introjected as an ego ideal, gives rise to the future generation of identification with others. This mirror moment predates language for the child.

Important for this article is the fact that it is an image that constitutes the matrix of the imaginary, of recognition/misrecognition and identification, and hence of the first articulation of the I, of subjectivity. This is a moment when an older fascination with looking (at the mother's face, for an obvious example) collides with the initial inklings of self-awareness. Hence it is the birth of the long love affair/despair between image and self-image which has found such intensity of expression in film and such joyous recognition in the cinema audience. Quite apart from the extraneous similarities between screen and mirror (the framing of the human form in its surroundings, for instance), the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego. The sense of forgetting the world as the ego has subsequently come to perceive it (I forgot who 1 am and where I was) is nostalgically reminiscent of that pre-subjective moment of image recognition. At the same time the cinema has distinguished itself in the production of ego ideals as expressed in particular in the star system, the stars centring both screen presence and screen story as they act out a complex process of likeness and difference (the glamorous impersonates the ordinary).

C. Sections II. A and B have set out two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional cinematic situation. The first, scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image seen. Thus, in film terms, one implies a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen (active scopophilia), the other demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator's fascination with and recognition of his like. The first is a function of the sexual instincts, the second of ego libido. This dichotomy was crucial for Freud. Although he saw the two as interacting and overlaying each other, the tension between instinctual drives and self-preservation continues to be a dramatic polarisation in terms of pleasure. Both are formative structures, mechanisms not meaning. In themselves they have no signification, they have to be attached to an idealisation. Both pursue aims in indifference to perceptual reality, creating the imagised, eroticised concept of the world that forms the perception of the subject and makes a mockery of empirical objectivity.

During its history, the cinema seems to have evolved a particular illusion of reality in which this contradiction between libido and ego has found a beautifully complementary phantasy world. In reality the phantasy world of the screen is subject to the law which produces it. Sexual instincts and identification processes have a meaning within the symbolic order which articulates desire. Desire, born with language, allows the possibility of transcending the instinctual and the imaginary, but its point of reference continually returns to the traumatic moment of its birth: the castration complex. Hence the look, pleasurable in form, can be threatening in content, and it is woman as representation/image that crystallises this paradox.

III. Woman as image, man as bearer of the look

A. In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to stripe-tease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combined spectacle and narrative. (Note, however, how in the musical song-and-dance numbers break the flow of the diegesis.) The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative. As Budd Boetticher has put it:

What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.

(A recent tendency in narrative film has been to dispense with this problem altogether; hence the development of what Molly Haskell has called the 'buddy movie', in which the active homosexual eroticism of the central male figures can carry the story without distraction.) Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen. For instance, the device of the showgirl allows the two looks to be unified technically without any apparent break in the diegesis. A woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude. For a moment the sexual impact of the performing woman takes the film into a no-man's-land outside its own time and space. Thus Marilyn Monroe's first appearance in The River of No Return and Lauren Bacall's songs in To Have and Have Not. Similarly, conventional close-ups of legs (Dietrich, for instance) or a face (Garbo) integrate into the narrative a different mode of eroticism. One part of a fragmented body destroys the Renaissance space, the illusion of depth demanded by the narrative, it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon rather than verisimilitude to the screen.

B. An active/passive heterosexual division of labour has similarly controlled narrative structure. According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectifi-cation. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man's role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen. The man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralise the extradiegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle. This is made possible through the processes set in motion by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify. As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look onto that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. A male movie star's glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror. The character in the story can make things happen and control events better than the subject/spectator, just as the image in the mirror was more in control of motor coordination. In contrast to woman as icon, the active male figure (the ego ideal of the identification process) demands a three-dimensional space corresponding to that of the mirror recognition, in which the alienated subject internalised his own representation of this imaginary existence. He is a figure in a landscape. Here the function of film is to reproduce as accurately as possible the so-called natural conditions of human perception. Camera technology (as exemplified by deep focus in particular) and camera movements (determined by the action of the protagonist), combined with invisible editing (demanded by realism), all tend to blur the limits of screen space. The male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action.

C. 1. Sections III. A and B have set out a tension between a mode of representation of woman in film and conventions surrounding the diegesis. Each is associated with a look: that of the spectator in direct scopophilic contact with the female form displayed for his enjoyment (connoting male phantasy) and that of the spectator fascinated with the image of his like set in an illusion of natural space, and through him gaining control and possession of the woman within the diegesis. (This tension and the shift from one pole to the other can structure a single text. Thus both in Only Angels Have Wings and in To Have and Have Not, the film opens with the woman as object of the combined gaze of spectator and all the male protagonists in the film. She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised. But as the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalised sexuality, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too.)

But in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper problem. She also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure. Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the absence of the penis as visually ascer-tainable, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for the organisation of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father. Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified. The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of the film noir); or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence over-valuation, the cult of the female star). This second avenue, fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself. The first avenue, voyeurism, on the contrary, has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness. This sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/ defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end. Fetishistic scopophilia, on the other hand, can exist outside linear time as the erotic instinct is focussed on the look alone. These contradictions and ambiguities can be illustrated more simply by using works by Hitchcock and Sternberg, both of whom take the look almost as the content or subject matter of many of their films. Hitchcock is the more complex, as he uses both mechanisms. Sternberg's work, on the other hand, provides many pure examples of fetishistic scopophilia.

C.2. It is well known that Sternberg once said he would welcome his films being projected upside down so that story and character involvement would not interfere with the spectator's undiluted appreciation of the screen image. This statement is revealing but ingenuous. Ingenuous in that his films do demand that the figure of the woman (Dietrich, in the cycle of films with her, as the ultimate example) should be identifiable. But revealing in that it emphasises the fact that for him the pictorial space enclosed by the frame is paramount rather than narrative or identification processes. While Hitchcock goes into the investigative side of voyeurism, Sternberg produces the ultimate fetish, taking it to the point where the powerful look of the male protagonist (characteristic of traditional narrative film) is broken in favour of the image in direct erotic rapport with the spectator. The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator's look. Sternberg plays down the illusion of screen depth; his screen tends to be one-dimensional, as light and shade, lace, steam, foliage, net, streamers, etc, reduce the visual field. There is little or no mediation of the look through the eyes of the main male protagonist. On the contrary, shadowy presences like La Bessiere in Morocco act as surrogates for the director, detached as they are from audience identification. Despite Sternberg's insistence that his stories are irrelevant, it is significant that they are concerned with situation, not suspense, and cyclical rather than linear time, while plot complications revolve around misunderstanding rather than conflict. The most important absence is that of the controlling male gaze within the screen scene. The high point of emotional drama in the most typical Dietrich films, her supreme moments of erotic meaning, take place in the absence of the man she loves in the fiction. There are other witnesses, other spectators watching her on the screen, their gaze is one with, not standing in for, that of the audience. At the end of Morocco, Tom Brown has already disappeared into the desert when Amy Jolly kicks off her gold sandals and walks after him. At the end of Dishonoured, Kranau is indifferent to the fate of Magda. In both cases, the erotic impact, sanctified by death, is displayed as a spectacle for the audience. The male hero misunderstands and, above all, does not see.

In Hitchcock, by contrast, the male hero does see precisely what the audience sees. However, in the films I shall discuss here, he takes fascination with an image through scopophilic eroticism as the subject of the film. Moreover, in these cases the hero portrays the contradictions and tensions experienced by the spectator. In Vertigo in particular, but also in Mamie and Rear Window, the look is central to the plot, oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination. As a twist, a further manipulation of the normal viewing process, which in some sense reveals it, Hitchcock uses the process of identification normally associated with ideological correctness and the recognition of established morality and shows up its perverted side. Hitchcock has never concealed his interest in voyeurism, cinematic and non-cinematic. His heroes are exemplary of the symbolic order and the law - a policeman (Vertigo), a dominant male possessing money and power (Mamie) - but their erotic drives lead them into compromised situations. The power to subject another person to the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned onto the woman as the object of both. Power is backed by a certainty of legal right and the established guilt of the woman (evoking castration, psychoanalytically speaking). True perversion is barely concealed under a shallow mask of ideological correctness - the man is on the right side of the law, the woman on the wrong. Hitchcock's skilful use of identification processes and liberal use of subjective camera from the point of view of the male protagonist draw the spectators deeply into his position, making them share his uneasy gaze. The audience is absorbed into a voyeuristic situation within the screen scene and diegesis which parodies his own in the cinema. In his analysis of Rear Window, Douchet takes the film as a metaphor for the cinema. Jeffries is the audience, the events in the apartment block opposite correspond to the screen. As he watches, an erotic dimension is added to his look, a central image to the drama. His girlfriend Lisa had been of little sexual interest to him, more or less a drag, so long as she remained on the spectator side. When she crosses the barrier between his room and the block opposite, their relationship is re-born erotically. He does not merely watch her through his lens, as a distant meaningful image, he also sees her as a guilty intruder exposed by a dangerous man threatening her with punishment, and thus finally saves her. Lisa's exhibitionism has already been established by her obsessive interest in dress and style, in being a passive image of visual perfection; Jeffries's voyeurism and activity have also been established through his work as a photo-journalist, a maker of stories and captor of images. However, his enforced inactivity, binding him to his seat as a spectator, puts him squarely in the phantasy position of the cinema audience.

In Vertigo, subjective camera predominates. Apart from one flash-back from Judy's point of view, the narrative is woven around what Scottie sees or fails to see. The audience follows the growth of his erotic obsession and subsequent despair precisely from his point of view. Scottie's voyeurism is blatant: he falls in love with a woman he follows and spies on without speaking to. Its sadistic side is equally blatant: he has chosen (and freely chosen, for he had been a successful lawyer) to be a policeman, with all the attendant possibilities of pursuit and investigation. As a result, he follows, watches and falls in love with a perfect image of female beauty and mystery. Once he actually confronts her, his erotic drive is to break her down and force her to tell by persistent cross-questioning. Then, in the second part of the film, he re-enacts his obsessive involvement with the image he loved to watch secretly. He reconstructs Judy as Madeleine, forces her to conform in every detail to the actual physical appearance of his fetish. Her exhibitionism, her masochism, make her an ideal passive counterpart to Scottie's active sadistic voyeurism. She knows her part is to perform, and only by playing it through and then replaying it can she keep Scottie's erotic interest. But in the repetition he does break her down and succeeds in exposing her guilt. His curiosity wins through and she is punished. In Vertigo, erotic involvement with the look is disorientating: the spectator's fascination is turned against him as the narrative carries him through and entwines him with the processes that he is himself exercising. The Hitchcock hero here is firmly placed within the symbolic order, in narrative terms. He has all the attributes of the patriarchal superego. Hence the spectator, lulled into a false sense of security by the apparent legality of his surrogate, sees through his look and finds himself exposed as complicit, caught in the moral ambiguity of looking. Far from being simply an aside on the perversion of the police, Vertigo focuses on the implications of the active/looking, passive/looked-at split in terms of sexual difference and the power of the male symbolic encapsulated in the hero. Marnie, too, performs for Mark Rutland's gaze and masquerades as the perfect to-be-looked-at image. He, too, is on the side of the law until, drawn in by obsession with her guilt, her secret, he longs to see her in the act of committing a crime, make her confess and thus save her. So he, too, becomes complicit as he acts out the implications of his power. He controls money and words, he can have his cake and eat it.

IV. Summary

The psychoanalytic background that has been discussed in this article is relevant to the pleasure and unpleasure offered by traditional narrative film. The scopophilic instinct (pleasure in looking at another person as an erotic object), and, in contradistinction, ego libido (forming identification processes) act as formations, mechanisms, which this cinema has played on. The image of woman as (passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man takes the argument a step further into the structure of representation, adding a further layer demanded by the ideology of the patriarchal order as it is worked out in its favourite cinematic form - illusionistic narrative film. The argument returns again to the psychoanalytic background in that woman as representation signifies castration, inducing voyeuristic or fetishistic mechanisms to circumvent her threat. None of these interacting layers is intrinsic to film, but it is only in the film form that they can reach a perfect and beautiful contradiction, thanks to the possibility in the cinema of shifting the emphasis of the look. It is the place of the look that defines cinema, the possibility of varying it and exposing it. This is what makes cinema quite different in its voyeuristic potential from, say, strip-tease, theatre, shows, etc. Going far beyond highlighting a woman's to-be-looked-at-ness, cinema builds the way she is to be looked at into the spectacle itself. Playing on the tension between film as controlling the dimension of time (editing, narrative) and film as controlling the dimension of space (changes in distance, editing), cinematic codes create a gaze, a world, and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire. It is these cinematic codes and their relationship to formative external structures that must be broken down before mainstream film and the pleasure it provides can be challenged.

To begin with (as an ending), the voyeuristic-scopophilic look that is a crucial part of traditional filmic pleasure can itself be broken down. There are three different looks associated with cinema: that of the camera as it records the profilmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion. The conventions of narrative film deny the first two and subordinate them to the third, the conscious aim being always to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in the audience. Without these two absences (the material existence of the recording process, the critical reading of the spectator), fictional drama cannot achieve reality, obviousness and truth. Nevertheless, as this article has argued, the structure of looking in narrative fiction film contains a contradiction in its own premises: the female image as a castration threat constantly endangers the unity of the diegesis and bursts through the world of illusion as an intrusive, static, one-dimensional fetish. Thus the two looks materially present in time and space are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego. The camera becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion of Renaissance space, flowing movements compatible with the human eye, an ideology of representation that revolves around the perception of the subject: the camera's look is disavowed in order to create a convincing world in which the spectator's surrogate can perform with verisimilitude. Simultaneously, the look of the audience is denied an intrinsic force: as soon as fetishistic representation of the female image threatens to break the spell of illusion, and the erotic image on the screen appears directly (without mediation) to the spectator, the fact of fetishisation, concealing as it does castration fear, freezes the look, fixates the spectator and prevents him from achieving any distance from the image in front of him.

This complex interaction of looks is specific to film. The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conventions (already undertaken by radical film-makers) is to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment. There is no doubt that this destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of the 'invisible guest', and highlights how film has depended on voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms. Women, whose image has continually been stolen and used for this end, cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with anything much more than sentimental regret.

Psychoanalysis (More Detailed)

2007-07-20T12:09:00.000+07:00

The application of psychoanalysis to cinema is by no means new. In particular, the productions of Hollywood (the 'dream factory") were amenable to psychoanalytic interpretation, displaying, as they did, the familiar repertoire of Freudian motifs. Such readings, however, tended towards reductionism in that the ostensible meaning of the film (comparable to the manifest content of the dream) was displaced by the hidden, Freudian meaning (equivalent to the dream's latent content), which tended towards a certain sameness. The loss of particularity and difference effectively discredited psychoanalysis as a critical method. However, its reintroduction into film studies was on die very different grounds of the need for a theory of the relations of the subject to discourse, which is exactly what Jacques Lacan's reworking of Freud appeared to offer. Although we shall show at the end of this chapter that a reading of Lacan as making good a deficiency in Marxism and semiotics was more problematic than was assumed, we shall for the moment simply sketch those aspects of his work that were taken up during the 1970s, most notably his account of the development of the subject.

The child is born into the experience of lack, what Lacan terms the manque a etre (the ‘want to be'); and the subject's subsequent history consists of a series of attempts to figure and overcome this lack, a project that is doomed to failure. Though the form and experience of lack may alter, the basic reality of its persists and defies representation. In retrospect - and for Lacan this history, like all histories of the subject, his own theory included, can only be retrospective - the child interprets the prior union with the mother as anterior to lack, a condition where it was everything and lacked nothing.

Throughout its life the child will attempt to recapture this imagined entirety in a search for that which will overcome the lack, the missing component Lacan terms I'objet petit a and whose most obvious prototype is the breast. This stands as a representation, no more than that, of what is ultimately unrepresentable, in that the object that could overcome the lack is non-existent. As compensation for the continual failure to re-establish unity, the child will console itself with imaginary solutions, notably in idealised images of itself as complete.

In Lacan's account of the child's development there are three determining moments: the mirror phase (the acquisition of a sense of self), the fort-da game (the accession to language), and the Oedipus complex (the submission to the laws of society). We shall summarise each of these in turn.

The mirror phase occurs between the ages of six and eighteen months and is the child's primary means of establishing the difference between itself and the world. On seeing itself in a mirror, or more complexly through identification with the body of another, usually the mother, the child responds jubilantly to this image whose completeness and unity contrast with its own experienced disunity and lack of motor control, and assumes 'that's me'.

In certain respects the child gains from the assumption. It facilitates an awareness of the body as localised and separate from the environment, which is a prerequisite for coordinated physical activity; and on the basis of this newly acquired awareness of boundaries the child is then able to develop a sense of its own separate identity, without which there can be no social interaction. However, these gains are offset by losses, in essence those of misrecognition, alienation and division. Because the self-image represents a state of maturation not yet achieved and a degree of completeness and perfection never to be attained, the image is a narcissistic self-idealisation or, as Lacan puts it, 'a mirage', designed to parry die lack in being and 'to preserve the subject's precarious pleasure from an impossible and non-compliant real'.1 As well as misrecognition the identification involves alienation, in that it is typically sanctioned from another, from elsewhere. The announcement 'That's me' (though not yet in so many words) is verified by an adult, again, usually the mother, holding the child up before the mirror. The child thus identifies with her perception of it (or more accurately what it imagines she wants it to be). In saying 'That's me' it is saying 'I am another5. As Juliet Mitchell points out, Lacan considers that the subject 'can only conceptualise itself when it is mirrored back to itself from the position of another's desire'.2 That is, the child is divided from the moment it forms a self-conception. In finding compensation for the manque a etre in the fictive unity offered by the mirror, % encounters yet further division, which overlays and complicates the original lack, an irreducible gap between the reality of the child's being and the idealised image it assumes as its own.

The mirror phase is usually conceived as emblematic, or indeed the founding moment, of the so-called imaginary, one of the three constitutive orders of subjectivity, of which the other two are the symbolic and the real. Our reading of Lacan, however, would draw all three into the domain of the mirror phase, as indeed into the other formative phases of the subject. The imaginary comprises the repertoire of images that the subject invokes to annul the originary gap, and is present in the mirror phase as the image of the other with which the child identifies and which masks its division. The symbolic, it will be recalled, comprises the Other of laws, rules, codes and prohibitions, to which the child must submit in order to enter society, and is present in the mirror phase because the identity available to the child comes from elsewhere, from another subject — in the above example, the mother - whose desire is always already conditioned by it. The Other is present here as it is everywhere, assigning the child a place even before it is born. Finally, the real is defined negatively as that which the imaginary seeks to image and the symbolic seeks to symbolise. But it necessarily eludes all such attempts, remaining outside imagination and symbolisation, while retaining an effectivity. An example given by Lacan is the trauma of the separation from the mother, which is present in the mirror phase both as the manque a etre prompting the narcissistic idealisation of self and as the gap between this idealised image and the subject. The interpenetration of the three orders is worth stressing because they have sometimes been thought of as separable, a misunderstanding that has had adverse consequences for die attempt to theorise the relation between film and spectator.

Like the mirror phase, the fort-da game brings the child both gains and losses. It was originally named and described by Freud in 1915, having watched his grandson Ernst throw a cotton reel out of sight then retrieve it by means of an attached thread, while accompanying the two actions with the sounds 'o' and 'a' respectively. Freud hypothesised that the reel symbolised the child's mother and that the game was a way of coming to terms with her absence. In throwing the reel away the child moved from a state of helplessness (I am abandoned by my mother) to one of agency or even mastery (I abandon my mother). Lacan's subsequent reading of the game de-emphasised the supposed bid for mastery and instead proposed that it represented the child's accession to language. The emphasis came to be placed on the child's invocation of a symbol to stand in for what was missing and through which the mother's comings and goings could be represented. It was her absence that prompted the adoption of the reel as signifier, which stood in a metaphoric relation to mother and child, present only by virtue of the absence of what it represented. Like Hegel, Lacan conceived of the word as the murderer of the thing: no representation is ever adequate to what it claims to represent. As we shall see, this is crucially the case with the subject's self-representation. The fort-da game is a language system in microcosm, in that the signifiers 'fort’ and 'da' are defined relationally, each by what it is not. The subject, therefore, is caught up in a pre-existing language whose terms are organised diacritically and not by any relation to the real.

The gains for the child are those of entry into society, with all the concomitant possibilities for cooperation and communication. But these gains exact a toll of yet further division and experience of lack. For instance, although the child can now articulate its needs as demands, like calling for 'juice' to assuage its thirst, there is always a surplus in demand that amounts to a request to the Other, here usually the mother, to make good the manque a etre. Typically figured as the demand for unconditional love, it is bound to remain unsatisfied because no such love exists - hence Lacan's comment that loving is giving what one does not have. The discrepancy between the satisfaction of the need and the unsatisfied demand for love is the condition for desire, the unfulfillable search for the eternally lost object (objet petit a). The entry into language and the discovery of lack in the Other therefore precipitates the child into the constitutionally unsatisfiable state of desire.

In a further Sense, too, the entry into language is the birth of desire. Because the laws of society are inscribed within language, entry into the symbolic order entails that the child submits to its pre-given place and role, while that which is not consonant with such a social identity is consigned to the unconscious. When the child accepts this identity, as it must, its desires and the terms in which they are figured are determined by the Other, by the laws of society. Desire is always destined to pass through 'the defile of the signifier’; that is, 'man's desire is the desire of the Other’.3 Henceforth the subject's relationships are, at their simplest, triangular: not subject and object, but subject, Other and object (where the terms of both subject and object are given by the Other). 'Everything emerges from the structure of the signifier’.4

The relationship of subject, Other and object is perhaps best approached from the side of the subject, and since this aspect of Lacan's theory has been a major focus of attention by film theorists we shall look at it in some detail. As will have become apparent already, Lacan's subject is nothing except by and through language. The subject is such only by virtue of a self-conception, but this necessarily involves misrecognition. The subject's self-representation occurs either by a name or by the first person singular pronoun, in both cases by a signifier taking its meaning from other signifiers. As with the mirror phase, this necessarily involves alienation and division, because here too there is an acceptance of an identity determined elsewhere, in this case from within the Other, the symbolic order, language. That is, the subject can only appear if represented in the Other, while simultaneously and consequently all that is repressed as heterogeneous to the identity given through any signifier means that representation is always inadequate to the subject's being. As Stephen Heath put it, the subject is at once 'represented and excluded, becoming some one by its constitution as less-than-one'.5 The unconscious is the field of exclusion entailed by representation. Therefore in representing itself by a signifier the subject appears only to disappear. Because of the inescapable coexistence of the unconscious with language, the subject is as inescapably destined to division in its attempts at self-representation.

The necessary division of the subject can be articulated as the difference between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enounced. The T who speaks is always in excess of the T who is spoken of. In other words, the first person singular pronoun 'designates the-subject of the enunciation, but it does not signify it'.6 That is, by virtue of the unconscious and the fact of being in process, the subject eludes all attempts to pin it down in language: When the subject appears somewhere as meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as "fading", as disappearance'.7

Lacan proposed that the 'no win' situation of the subject could be explicated by the so-called 'vel’ of alienation'. He likened the ‘or’ to that offered by the highwayman to his victim in the phrase Tour money or your life': choose money and you lose both, choose life and you lose your money, ending up with a life deprived of something. Lacan's version of a Venn diagram similarly offers a choice between meaning and being.

Non –

Meaning

Being

(Subject)

Meaning

(Other)

Choose being, and the subject disappears into non-meaning; choose meaning and 'meaning is only left curtailed of the part of the non-meaning which is, strictly speaking, what constitutes, in the realisation of the subject, the unconscious'.8 The general implication is that there is no way you are going to keep everything, and the attempt to do so will result in your losing both. Better, as Roger Thornhill was advised by his mother in North by Northwest, to 'just pay the two dollars'.

Thus the subject comes into being at the cost of division, only to experience a renewed sense of lack, of manque a etre; this it seeks to fend off with an idealised self-image as a unity, which however is always subverted by the process of the subject in the symbolic, by the challenge of the unconscious to any identity.

The third major constitutive moment of infancy is in the Oedipus complex, when the child encounters sexual difference. As we have seen, the human infant is entirely helpless and dependent on the mother, a potentially terrifying state. To ameliorate its condition the child takes refuge in the fiction that it is as indispensable to the mother as she is to it. The child imagines itself to be what she lacks, and therefore desires: what Lacan terms the phallus. 'The phallus signifies what the mother on her own has not got. It indicates lack . . . [and] at the same time it stands for what makes up that lack.'9 It is precisely and only a signifier, not an existing object, which represents the necessarily absent object of desire. Lacan insisted that it was not to be equated with the penis (for neither men nor women possess it). Through identification with the phallus the child imagines it will complete the mother and be itself completed, recovering the lost unity it has come to believe preceded its own lack and which, if regained, will annul it. Such a state of union with the mother is figured as an Edenic condition of plenitude and the absence of all lack. However, the child's solution to its problem is exposed as illusory when it discovers that it is not and cannot be the phallus. For there is a third person, the father, whom the mother desires and who the child presumes possesses the phallus. The Oedipal scenario turns on this intervention of the father, the moment of castration when the Law of the Father (‘Thou shalt not desire what was my desire') places an interdiction on the child's desire to be what the mother desires.

The father, then, is the third term, breaking the mother-child dyad and rupturing its imaginary wholeness. Henceforth the child must exchange its earlier identification with the phallus for the identity assigned by the Name of the Father, and the phallus now figures the fact of sexual difference, with the father perceived as having it and the mother as lacking it. Given this sexual division between those representing lack and those having what would seemingly make it up, the child has to come down on one side or the other: it cannot be both, it cannot be neither, and it has no choice which one it is.

Confronted by this divide the boy assumes the masculine identity assigned to him by the symbolic. But as we have seen in our discussion of the accession to language, entry into the symbolic always produces a renewed sense of lack, recapitulating the original manque a etre. In an attempt to compensate for this the boy indentifies with an idealised figure, namely the father as the supposed possessor of the phallus. This move, though, is ultimately doomed to failure, as in taking his place within the symbolic the boy comes to understand 'that there is desire, or lack, in the place of the Other, that there is no ultimate certainty or truth, and that the status of the phallus is a fraud.'10 Thus castration is the moment when the Other (O) is recognised as the barred Other (Ǿ). Whereas in the mother-child dyad the Other had been fantasised as the place where demands are met, it is now revealed that there is nowhere demand can be fulfilled and desire satisfied. Rather than a secure destination the child has reached only a precarious sexual identity, one always liable to challenge from the unconscious, constantly fading, decentred and divided.

The girl's Oedipal trajectory is harder to specify, its difficulty compounded by what Jane Gallop has referred to as 'the contagion…from subject matter to theoretical description.11 Freud's own problems here are well known, with his talk of 'the dark continent of female sexuality" and the notable absences in his account of its development. His basic conception was that the girl's trajectory is the same as the boy's until the discovery of the mother's castration, when she is faced by three options: either to give up on sexuality altogether because she cannot compete, or to seek to acquire the phallus herself, or to take her father as love object. Only through the last of these options does she enter the female Oedipus. Though the father apparently has the phallus, under the pressure of social taboos the girl must renounce him and seek substitute love objects who also appear to have the phallus, at the same time as identifying with her mother who has not got it. However, this identification with the supposedly castrated mother has proved difficult to explain. The Lacanian psychoanalyst Catherine Millot has put the problem thus: for the girl 'there is no ideal feminine identification possible other than the phallic woman; but this is precisely a pre-Oedipal identification.'12 Hence, 'the recognition of castration. . . leaves no possibility. . . of a straightforward post-Oedipal identification with the woman.'13

Nor are matters any easier in Lacan's version. The broad outline of his account, at least as expounded by Jacqueline Rose in her introduction to Feminine Sexuality, is clear. The subjectivity of women, like that of men, is constituted within language and the symbolic; their sexual identity is enjoined on them by the law, is therefore not pre-given but legislated; this identity, as for men, is taken up with reference to the phallus, in this case a matter of not possessing it. It is also clear that the woman's relation to this assigned identity is even more troubled than is the man's to his assigned identity in that she is constituted as a subject within a symbolic order where women are treated as objects. Not the least aspect of this objectification is the role women play in the fantasies of men who, divided in the symbolic, use them to represent their own problems in relation to desire, to object petit a. Women figure both as the representation of lack, in that the 'lack inherent in being human. . . is projected onto women', and as that which can make good the lack, as the woman (though of course, as Lacan insists, the woman does not exist).14 On the one hand she is constituted as what men are not, as lacking, as 'not-all', and on the other as the terminus to desire, the site Jouisance, the everything.

Lacan argued that the woman's difficulties in the symbolic are such that she is excluded, which has been on occasion interpreted as meaning that women lack a voice. For example, Ann Rosalind Jones has written: 'Lacanian theory reserves the "I" position for men. Women…occupy a negative position in language.'15 But such readings have been contested. Thus Millot reiterates Lacan's argument that there is nothing missing in the real. It is not a question of women being denied access to the symbolic, of being deprived of speech, but of a lack arising from the symbolic itself, of which they are a part. Jacqueline Rose too stresses that women's exclusion is by not from language. The 'not1 of the 'not-all' derives from women being defined against men, as the exception to the phallic rule. What is unclear in either interpretation is why women take up their assigned identities and the consequences this process has for their sexuality. The absence within psychoanalysis of a satisfactory explanation of feminine sexuality was, as we shall see, severely to restrict its value in understanding the exchange between film and women spectators.

The critical question emerging from this selective account of the construction of the subject is how the relations of the subject to his or her discourse are to be conceived. The particular problem Lacan faced was how to represent the situation of a subject that is at once constituted and constituting. Lacan wished to say both that the signifier is anterior to the subject (or that the subject is an effect of language) and that the subject is anterior to the signifier (so that language represents the subject). The problem lay in overcoming the explicit contradiction of maintaining both. The answer was the graphe complet, Lacan's figuration of the subject in process.16

For our purposes a full explication of the graph is unnecessary, it being sufficient to note that it is organised around two vectors: the vector of speech, which is the subject's signifying chain; and the vector of the drive, which is the search for satisfaction. Both of them pass through the Other (the symbolic), and the graph illustrates the effect of that passage on the constitution of the subject.

The vector of speech, the lower of the two left-to-right arrows, is a different version of the graph already discussed in the previous chapter. The vector passes through the Other (A/l'Autre), language's synchronic dimension, the place where every signifier is stored and where the subject is constituted. But for there to be meaning, the signifying chain must be punctuated by the barred subject $ (barred because the subject is never fully represented in speech, i.e., there is always the unconscious), who is thereby constitutive as well as constituted. The subject calls a momentary halt to the slide of the signifiers at the punctuation point s(A). Belonging to the diachronic not to the synchronic, this is the moment when meaning emerges in the retroactive contextualising of signifiers and the anticipatory construction of those to come. In this moment something of what the subject desires is at once expressed and repressed. The barred subject $ is represented at the point s(A.), but only inadequately. The subject's appearance in the field of the Other occurs only through a stand-in, a representative, and therefore at the cost of division. The subject is thus 'constituted only by subtracting himself, because by punctuating his or her discourse to give it sense s/he can only appear after the fact, by which time s/he is in the process of becoming something else.17 The appropriate tense for this situation is 'the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming'.18 This fading of the subject at s(A) prompts him or her to seek compensation in an idealised image, i(a), which will fend off the lack. Such a specular image, whose prototype is the image in the mirror, produces a misrecognition of the self, m, the moi, thereby effecting the junction of the imaginary and the symbolic, otherwise known as suture.

The upper part of the graph duplicates the lower, with the arrow here representing the vector of the drive. In seeking satisfaction, the drive addresses a demand to the Other, one that is made at the site ($ ◊ D), which like A below it is also a place. It is where the subject seeks to overcome the lack in being by demanding unconditional love, and because in so doing s/he discovers the impossibility of what s/he demands it is therefore the site of castration. The various symbols of the formula expand as follows. $, again, is the barred subject, eclipsed and fading, and D is the demand. The lozenge, ◊, has two meanings, each dependent on an interpretation of its graphemic origins. If read as the conjunction of the mathematical symbols < (less than) and > (greater than), it signifies the impossibility of the demand being granted. If, on the other hand, it is taken as the symbol used by silversmiths to guarantee authenticity, then it stands for the uniqueness of each particular individual's demand. The correspondence between upper and lower parts of the graph continues with S(Λ), which like s(A) is a moment, not a place. It occurs when the subject enters the symbolic and discovers that the Other is lacking. Finally, castration gives rises to desire, d, on the upper right of the graph, which loops over the top in the direction of fantasy, ($ ◊ a), where $ is the barred subject, a is the objet petit a, and ◊ is the screen onto which the subject projects his or her own uniquely fantasised objet petit a..

Broadly speaking, two phases may be distinguished in the use made of psychoanalysis, each of which emphasised one aspect of the Lacan-ian model. In the first, structuralist, phase, centred on the work of Baudry, Metz and Mulvey, the emphasis was on the constitution of the ego in the mirror stage (on graphe complet, the portion

m i(a)).

In the second, post-structuralist, phase, associated for instance with the work of Cowie and Rose, the emphasis was on desire and fantasy on the graph

($ ◊ a d).

Another way of distinguishing the two phases would be to say that the first was concerned with sameness and the second with difference.

In her article 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Laura Mulvey concentrated on the more classically Freudian features of Lacan's theory, notably identification, voyeurism and fetishism. In view of its impact, especially among feminist writers on cinema, we shall follow her argument through in some detail.

The argument opens with the suggestion that the pleasure offered by mainstream Hollywood-type cinema, its 'fascination', depends on pre-existing psychological patterns at work within the spectator. Such pleasure is indissociable from dominant cinema's capacity to articulate patriarchal ideology around sexual difference, or more precisely, its capacity to negotiate the contradictions inherent in this ideology. By offering a kind of satisfaction to the alienated subject of patriarchy, cinema ensures its own commercial success. Principal among pleasures offered are those of identification, where the spectator narcissistically identifies with an idealised figure on screen, typically a male hero whose actions determine the narrative, in a process that recapitulates the discovery of the image of oneself in the mirror phase; and scopophilia, or pleasure in looking, through which the spectator indulges in a more socially acceptable form of peeping tom-ism whereby the other, typically a woman, is turned into an object of fantasy, so giving the voyeur a position of control and mastery. In respect of this latter pleasure, however, the security and mastery of the spectator seated in the solitary intimacy of darkness is in fact deeply problematic. For the image of the woman also brings with it what the spectator's look would disavow, the fact of sexual difference itself and the concomitant threat of castration. In order to allay the anxiety so engendered, the Hollywood film tends to respond with two basic strategies. One of these is to deepen the already present voyeuristic aspect of cinema, coupling it with sadism, so that the difference figured by women is investigated by the constant re-enactment of the discovery of the lack. Such texts, of which films noirs are outstanding examples, attempt to master the anxiety both through their typical investigation of the woman and by their narrative punishment of her. The other strategy is to turn the woman into a fetish object, thereby containing the threat of difference through disavowal. Instead of lacking, women are represented as being complete and perfect. Here, parts or the whole of the female body are endowed with a value that compensates for the lack elsewhere, typified by the overinvestment in Monroe's breasts, Grable's legs, Hayworth's shoulders. Though this fetishisation is found throughout Hollywood, and is indeed an integral part of the star system, it finds its apotheosis in the films of von Sternberg, where the female body is no longer relayed through the looks of the male characters in the fiction but is offered directly to the spectator as a highly stylised and fragmented perfect product.

The avowed purpose of Mulvey's analysis was destruction. By examining dominant cinema's pleasures and exposing their phallo-centrism she hoped to create the space for an alternative cinema speaking 'a new language of desire', involving a totally different regime of spectating.19 There is, towards the end of the article, a shift in approach that brings it close to the Althusserian orthodoxy of interpellation. Implicit in her discussion of voyeurism and fetishism, the conception of the spectator being positioned by the text in such a way as to be blind to other perspectives becomes explicit around the organisation of looks within cinema. (Since we shall return to this topic in chapter 5, we shall do no more here than note its presence in Mulvey's article.) Interpellation, in providing an identity and a perspective on reality, bears on that aspect of the graphe complet which involves the identifications of the mirror phase. And this aspect, as we shall see, proved to be central to the theories of the apparatus associated with Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz.

In developing their ideas the theorists of the apparatus were indebted to earlier studies of perspective in Renaissance and post-Renaissance painting. Such studies, for the most part from within a Marxist framework, had emphasised the importance of form over content in determining the ideological effectivity of art. It was not simply that the paintings of the Renaissance began to speak the language of bourgeois ideology through their adoption of greater realism, more secular subject matter and an increasingly marked individualism of style, but also, and more importantly, the system of perspective based on a convergence towards a vanishing point in the picture indicated that there was a single, unique point in the imaginary space outside it from which its content was perceived. In other words, perspective gave the spectator an omniscient unitary place from which to view what was depicted, thus reinforcing the bourgeois notion of the subject as a free unique individual.

Jean-Louis Baudry's article 'Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographical Apparatus' was an early attempt to think through the implications of perspective for cinema. Because the camera lens is modelled on the same optical principles that underlie the perspectival system of Renaissance painting, cinema ensures that the spectator is established as the active centre and producer of meaning. The events, people, landscapes and objects of the film, its fictional reality, are always and necessarily seen from a fixed point in its imaginary space, one that is occupied by the spectator. Thus visually positioned, the spectator is blinded to the work of the film, its frame-by-frame construction of what passes for reality. And just as the succession of those frames is effaced in favour of a continuous vision, so too is the film's ideological operation. Far from disrupting the unitary, perspectivally-defined position of the spectator's vision, thereby revealing both their and the spectator's contingency, the succession of images in fact augments the spectator's imaginary dominance. The movements of the camera, the refraining of the shots, the cuts from one image to another are indeed comparable to the operations of an eye 'no longer fettered by the body, by the laws of matter and time' and are not, as might have been expected, a threat to that transcendental supremacy.20 The movability of the camera, with the resulting multiplicity of perspectives, in fact provides the most favourable circumstances for 'the manifestation of the transcendental subject'.21 Further, the various cinematic devices of framing, movement and editing are perceived by the spectator as acts of synthesis and constitution, and hence serve as evidence for the existence of a synthesising, constitutive, that is, transcendental, subject. Those very textual operations that would appear to put in question the spectator's self-identification as transcendental actually work to confirm this misrecognition. Although the subject's (mis) recognitions and (mis) perceptions are in reality a function of the text, the textual strategies in play convince him or her of the opposite. In sum, Baudry argued, the spectator is constituted by the meanings of the text but believes him or herself to be their author. This is precisely an account of the process of interpellation, where the subject appears to be the source of the meanings of which he or she is an effect.

In a later article, The Apparatus' (1975), Baudry moved away from a reliance on the Lacan of the mirror phase towards a more classically Freudian model to explain the ideological effects of the cinematic apparatus and in particular the impression of reality it created. Once again he challenged the view that this was a consequence of cinema's uniquely mimetic power, arguing here that this was less significant than its capacity to institute a mode of subjectivity analogous to the state of dreaming. At once enabled by and enabling of sleep, the dream, according to Freud, involves a state of regression comparable to the beginning of psychic life, where perception and representation are not differentiated. Thoughts are transformed into images, word presentations are transposed into thing presentations, repressed desires find expression and satisfaction in hallucinated images. That is, the fantasies of the dream wish appear as reality, indeed as 'more that real', for unlike waking perceptions the representations of the dream impose themselves on and submerge the subject. The desire to recreate this state of regression is, Baudry maintained, 'inherent in our psychical structure' and has in the course of history given rise to a number of art forms, like painting and opera, although these are mere 'dry runs' for cinema, failed attempts to achieve its unique capacity to correspond to the dream state.22 Nowhere is this more effectively brought about than in the darkness of the auditorium with the spectator immobile and passive, gazing at moving images. The apparatus, projecting images onto a screen, mimes a form of archaic satisfaction, returning the spectator to a time when the separation between the subject's body and the world was ill-defined. It is this archaic identification rather than those secondary ones of the mirror phase that is fundamental to the desire for cinema and that explains the spectator's attachment to the images. The peculiar impression of reality engendered by cinema derives from the subjectivity constructed by it rather than the content or formal organisation of the film texts themselves. Only by acknowledging the force of the unconscious in the subject was it possible to account both for the desire for cinema and its reality effect.

Despite Baudry’s second thoughts it was the first of these articles that exercised the greater influence, not least on Christian Metz. In his seminal article 'The Imaginary Signifier', Metz returned the Lacanian concept of the mirror phase to the centre of the theoretical stage as he addressed the question of what, in the light of psychoanalysis, can be understood of cinema's specific characteristics in relation to the spectating subject. At the outset, he distinguished two 'machines' operating within the cinematic institution: one being cinema as industry, making commodities whose sale as tickets provides the return on the original investment; the other being the spectators' psyches, experiencing film as the pleasurable 'good object" and hence wanting more of the same. The economy of the former, the circulation of money, is interdependent with the economy of the latter, the circulation of pleasure. Metz's major theoretical concern was with the second of these two machines.

His analysis opens with a definition of the cinematic signifier as distinctively different from those of the other major art forms. In the first place, cinema operates over a much wider perceptual range than most other arts, bringing in sound, vision and the perception of movement in an ordered time sequence. And secondly, in comparison with those arts, such as theatre, opera and other spectacles, that do involve as rich a perceptual register, cinema does not offer perceptions belonging to the same time and space as the audience but images and recordings of what is absent. Instead of the presence of real players, sets and props, the screen presents its audience with a world that is physically absent, 'in effigy…in a primordial elsewhere'.23 Whether or not what is perceived is functional, the actual unfolding of it on screen is - which is why Metz can write, 'every film is a fiction film'. The distinctive feature of cinema, therefore, is this necessarily imaginary, absent quality, quite apart from whatever imaginary world it may happen to represent. The cinematic signifier is itself imaginary. Hence cinema uniquely involves its audience in a play of absence and presence, whose prototype is the imaginary completeness of the absent image of the child in the mirror. Screen images are 'made present in the mode of absence', and it is this combination of the presence of a rich perceptual field and the absence of what it conveys that essentially defines cinema.24

With this much established, the analysis then proceeds to enquire what modes of subjectivity are implied by the characteristic play of absence and presence. Paralleling Mulvey, but differing in certain crucial respects, Metz maintained that three basic processes were operating: identification, voyeurism, and the related phenomena of disavowal and fetishism. Of these three, his proposals around identification proved to be the most influential.

In order to function at all in social life, Metz argued, people must have a sense of identity; hence the process of identification must accompany all social practices. The question then is, ‘With what…does the spectator identify during the projection of the film?'25 Given that cinema has already been established as a technique of the imaginary and in so far as the screen bears a certain resemblance to a mirror, the obvious answer would be that the spectator identifies with an image of him or herself in a manner analogous to the mirror phase. This, however, is ruled out on two grounds. One is that the screen, unlike the mirror, does not image the spectator's body. And the other is that films only make sense to subjects who have passed through the mirror phase, entered language and accepted the laws of the symbolic. In other words, the imaginary of cinema presupposes the symbolic. (It is here, incidentally, that Metz claims he departs most markedly from Baudry.)26 An alternative answer to the question would be that the spectator identifies with a fictional character or with a star (the answer given by Laura Mulvey). While accepting that such identification does exist and provides one of the pleasures of cinema, Metz argued that it is in fact secondary, requiring an act of recognition by an already constituted identity for it to occur. If this is so, it is necessary to discover the source of this prior, primary identification that enables the spectator to recognise his like on screen.27

The answer to this further question is that 'the spectator identifies with himself, with himself as a pure act of perception'.28 The reasoning runs as follows: conscious always that he is in the cinema, in the presence of something only imaginary and hence, regardless of what happens on screen, unthreatening, the spectator is aware, firstly of himself as absent from the screen, placed outside it in a position of all-seeing mastery; and secondly, of the condition of films being perceived, namely that he exists there in the auditorium as the seeing, hearing subject without which the film would have no point or even existence. This dual knowledge on the part of the spectator permits him to identify with his own act of seeing and hearing, as a pure instance of perception, 'as a kind of transcendental subject anterior to every there is'.29 The point has been made by subsequent commentators in possibly more accessible terms. Thus, Stephen Heath writes that the apparatus of look and identification institutes the spectator in 'the totalising security of looking at looking3.30 And John Ellis states that identification with the cinematic apparatus 'involves the fantasy of self as a pure perceiving being.'31

Such identification is powerfully reinforced - and here Metz's debt to Baudry becomes more pronounced - through the spectator's concomitant identification with the camera, whose monocular perspectival regime inscribes the place from which vision acquires a godlike omniscience. The spectator is the camera at once actively training its gaze upon objects and passively receiving the imprint of its perceptions. The homology between apparatus and spectator extends to the cone of projection of light onto the screen, which parallels an ideology of vision as just such a searchlight beam illuminating the field of the subject's intentionality. So profound is the homology between apparatus and the activity of perception that the two are taken as identical and indissociable — on the side of activity: camera eye, the projector, the cone of visual intention; on the side of passivity: sensitised emulsion, screen, retina. Yet for all the omniscience and omni- vision deriving from the identification, indeed because of them, the subject is nonetheless caught up in alienation and misrecognition, both 'transcendental yet radically deluded'.32

In his discussion of voyeurism and fetishism Metz covered some of the same ground as Mulvey, but with a very different theoretical concern. Whereas Mulvey had seen them as the basis for understanding the relationship between the spectatorial gaze and representations of women, Metz was concerned to show that their structures duplicated the cinematic machine of spectating, and hence are deeply implicated in it. To oversimplify, one might say that Mulvey's concern was with the cinematic signified and Metz's was with the cinematic signifier.

The two sexual drives on which cinema relies are scopophilia, the desire to see, and what Lacan referred to as the invocatory drive, the desire to hear. What distinguishes these drives from others is their even greater dependence on lack, not only in that they foster a fruitless search for the lost object that can never be recaptured, but also in that they must maintain a necessary' distance from their respective objects. While the drives associated with orality and anality seek a degree of fusion between their source and their aim, those of vision and hearing require the maintenance of the gap between the body and the object. This holding at a distance is indeed a diagnostic feature of the major arts such as painting, sculpture, music, and theatre, but what further distinguishes cinema in respect of the scopic drive is not so much the distance as the absence of the object. In theatre and opera the co-presence of the spectator and performer ensures that there is a presumed complicity between the two, so that the spectator's voyeurism is matched by the performer's exhibitionism, making them 'the two protagonists of an authentic perverse couple'.33 In cinema, on the other hand, the performer is present when the spectator is not (during shooting) and the spectator is present when the performer is not (during projection). The reciprocating acknowledgement of the existence of the other is far less pronounced, even absent, as, for example, in the convention of the actor never looking directly at camera and so confronting the spectator with his own voyeuristic gaze. This shame-faced, unacknowledged, non-consensual looking of the cinema spectator at that which 'lets itself be seen without presenting itself to be seen' places cinema in a direct line of descent from the primal scene, the unwitnessed witnessing of the parents' copulation.34 Various features of the cinematic institution contribute to this affinity. The spectator sits in darkness before a lit screen, making for an 'inevitable keyhole effect'; then, though a member of an audience, he nonetheless remains essentially solitary; the actors necessarily remain in ignorance of the spectator; and finally, the film unfolds in a place that is simultaneously close and yet definitely inaccessible, all of which makes the experience of voyeurism in the cinema one of transgression.35

The pertinence of psychoanalytic concepts to the elucidation of the relation between subjectivity and the cinematic signifier is most marked, according to Metz, in disavowal and fetishism. Like the cinematic signifier itself, these turn on the play of absence and presence, and, while not going as far as to posit a simple equation between the cinematic situation and fetishism, Metz points to their shared features. The structure of disavowal can be conceived in terms of discrepant knowledge and belief. The child's discovery of sexual difference institutes an anxiety in the face of the threat emanating from the lack in the Other, figured as the absent maternal phallus. To ward off the threat the child disavows difference and the lack in the mother, resulting in the characteristic formula encompassing the contradiction: 'I know very well but all the same. . .' If, subsequently, some object is elected to mask the lack disavowed, an object that simultaneously denies that anything is absent but whose presence acknowledges that it is, then disavowal has taken the specific form of fetishism.

Metz argued that something very comparable to this takes place around the cinematic institution. The spectator knows very well that what he is watching is a fiction, but all the same he maintains the belief, indeed his pleasure is dependent on the belief, that it is not. Cinema is thus founded on a regime of spectating at once knowing one thing and believing its opposite, which, as we have seen, is precisely the structure of disavowal. Indeed, with its rich sensorial presence and objective absence, the cinematic image 're-plays the game of castration: "to be or not to be", death, anxiety'.3*' Like the fetish, which 'disavows a lack and in doing affirms it without wishing to'37 the cinematic apparatus itself is 'a kind of substitute for the penis'.38 Or rather, 'it is not exactly a substitute for the penis, but for the absence of the penis', both affirming the presence of what is absent and emphasising the fact of that absence.39 Cinema's technical achievement is to make what is absent so forcefully present that the spectator almost, but never completely, forgets that it is absent. Unless this awareness of absence is sustained there cannot be an appreciation of what is made present. The spectator's enchantment depends, as in classical fetishism, on a simultaneous awareness of what is present and what is absent. Just as the fetish completes the female body and disguises its lack, so the technical accomplishment of the cinematic apparatus perfects the imaginary signifier and masks the absence on which it turns. The fetishist gains pleasure from the object that stands both for the woman's lack and her lack of lack; the cinephile gains pleasure from the never-quite-closed gap between imaginary presence and real absence. So for Metz there are effectively two levels of fetishism: one where the apparatus is the fetish, the other where the image and its meaning (as for Mulvey) become the fetish.

Thus Metz answered his original questions: How does cinema perpetuate itself? How does cinema produce pleasure and the desire to return for more? Cinema is the imaginary signifier, that is, it involves a process of signification turning on an absence that it seeks to fill but never finally does. In the gap between presence and absence a lack constantly reappears, and it is this lack that renews desire, so guaranteeing the perpetuation of cinema as institution. Although his solutions were not received without some dissent - John Ellis, for example doubted the transgressive quality of film spectating pointing to the authorisation conferred on voyeurism by the present of others in the cinema — and despite an undeniable current of phallocentrism running through his analyses (to which we shall return), Metz's work had a tremendous impact on film studies.

Central to the thinking of both Baudry and Metz was the theme of the misrecognition devolving on cinematic signification, a theme that was taken up again in the debate around suture. This very complex concept refers both to the relation of the subject to his or her discourse, and to the junction of the imaginary and symbolic thereby entailed. In speaking, or in enunciating a text, the subject is divided, but defends itself against this division by a pseudo-identification in which it imagines itself a unity. As a concomitant of every act of signification, suture in some form or other accompanies all linguistic and social practices. However, when the concept was taken up by film theory it was considerably simplified. With film theory's early emphasis on cinema as a discourse organised around absence and lack, subsequently inflected through an Althusserian terminology, the moment of pseudo-identification was understood as an instance of misrecognition. Suture, therefore, was held to be an effect only of certain texts, or rather of certain textual practices, which (along the lines of the post-1968 typology around political functioning) were those that alienated and deceived. It was only in the latter stages of the debate that the complexities of the concept were duly acknowledged.

The first important theorist of suture was Jean Pierre Oudart, who advanced a description of its operation within cinema in a series of articles in Cahiers. He proposed that Lacan's notion of the subject suturing the lack opened up by enunciation with an imaginary entirety fitted the logic of cinema spectating well. His argument ran as follows. The spectator's initial response to the cinematic image is one of jubilation, not unlike that of the child in front of the mirror. The image offers an imaginary plenitude, 'a pure expanse of jouissance’, in which the spectator is caught up in a fascination with the unreal.40 Such dyadic bliss is ill-founded and short-lived, for in the cinema, as elsewhere, there is no imaginary without the symbolic. The first intimation of crisis is the discovery of the frame, the terminus of the image that reveals the absent space out of frame and induces anxious questions in the spectator's mind. The image is no longer innocently there; it is there for someone. From this certain questions arise (Who is this missing spectator whose point of view this is? And who is ordering and framing the image?), questions that threaten to expose film as signifying practice, as a constructed and enunciated operation. What annuls the threat is the system of shot/reverse shot, by which a second shot shows the first to have been the field of vision of a character within the fiction. In this way the Absent One turns out to be a particular character whose point of view is disclosed, and the threatening absence is reappropriated within the film. By introducing a character to take the place of the Absent One, the system of shot/ reverse shot sutures the rupture in the initial relation of image to spectator and envelops cinematic discourse within the imaginary.

As conceived by Oudart, suture is the tragedy inherent in cinematic discourse, entailing as it does the loss of the totality of the image and hence of spectatorial pleasure. Such a conception is oriented towards an evaluation of films according to whether they expose the specifically tragic nature of cinematic language, with Oudart citing The Trial of Joan of Arc as an example of a film that does do so and Au Hasard, Balthazar as an example of one that does not. In the case of films that do expose their discursive processes, that do move from the imaginary towards the symbolic, the spectator is no longer positioned in an illusory relation to the text but is actively involved in a process of reading that reveals the film's textuality. In this way the truth of cinema is allowed to unfold and reveal itself.

With Daniel Dayan, the emphasis shifted from suture as the tragedy inherent in cinematic discourse to the ideological operation of a particular mode of discourse.41 In taking up the concept from an Althusserian standpoint he represented the play of absence and presence in ideological terms, as a particular mode of interpellation or filmic address constituting the individual as subject. Along with other post-1968 theorists, he held that a film's ideological functioning was less a partisan depiction of the world than a mode of enunciation that masked the ideological origin of its discourse. Like Baudry and Oudart, Dayan understood the cinematic image as the equivalent of classical painting organised by perspective, with the spectator constituted as a subject in a position of imaginary dominance by the specular effect of the image's spatial organisation. Unaware of the codes positioning him or her, the thus-constituted subject is denied the knowledge that the representations of the film are the product of a semiotic system. What is threatened by the potential exposure of this, through framing and so on, is the film's successful ideological operation. In order to sustain it, various strategies have been developed, primarily the shot/reverse shot system, which, by locating the origin of the image in the diegesis rather than in the process of representation, is able to render the working of the film's codes invisible. Consequently 'the spectator…absorbs an ideological effect without being aware of it.42

Dayan's account of suture has been criticised on various grounds. Barry Salt, whose exhaustive analyses of the textual procedures of classic cinema have overturned many received ideas, has demonstrated that shot/reverse shot comprises only some thirty to forty per cent of the total cuts in Hollywood narrative from the 1930s onwards.43 Contra Dayan, who maintained that other forms of shot were unusual, Salt pointed out that for most films the majority of shots were not within the shot/reverse shot format, and moreover that films such as Birth of a Nation, in which only three out of over 2000 cuts employ the reverse angle, work powerfully on their audiences. And if the device was so effective why, Salt demanded, was it not pushed to extremes (say, seventy percent or more of the cuts) in all commercial films rather than just a few.

William Rothman questioned the dominance of the two-shot sequence (shot/reverse shot) and suggested instead that for Hollywood the norm is a three-shot sequence: first the character looking, then what is seen, then the character again.44 For example in the Bodega Bay scene of The Birds an initial shot of Melanie looking prompts the question, what is she looking at? This is answered by shot two, showing what she is looking at, namely, the Brenner house. Then follows shot three, showing Melanie's reaction to what she has seen. The significant point of this is that the Absent One has no role here at all: the question 'Whose point of view is this?' simply does not arise. Spectators know a point of view shot when they see one, and indeed know that all shots are produced by the cinematic apparatus. The capacity to read a film and to pass judgement on the veracity of the representations is not therefore determined by the suppression of codes at all - if it were, cinema would be an ahistorical institution endowed with the power to deceive in all conjunctures. Hence the process as described by Dayan, functioning on behalf of ideology, is itself a fiction.

A further contribution to the debate was made by Stephen Heath, who, while accepting many of the criticisms made by Salt and Rothman, still held the concept of suture to be important for an understanding of cinema as discourse producing a subject address. In contrast to linguistic utterances, film images bear few, if any, of the marks of their enunciation, instanced by the relative difficulty of contradicting them. Images make it much harder to quarrel with the ideological representations they offer. The concept of suture is therefore valuable in its emphasis on the cinematic image as an utterance and in making it clear that the apparent completeness of the image is only illusory, that it requires for its completion a subject of enunciation. But at the same time that subject is never finally and fully represented there, because the subject is always fading. This play of incompleteness and completeness is what suture can help to specify: meaning and subjectivity come into being together in the endless process that is the subject's emergence into the symbolic.

But in arguing for the concept's pertinence Heath was not uncritical of his predecessors in the debate. He took issue with the emphasis on shot/reverse shot, pointing out that, as the juncture between the imaginary and the symbolic, suture is present in every enunciation: all texts suture, though they do so differently. In Chantal Akerman's film News from Home there is no instance of shot/reverse shot, so according to the Oudart and Dayan conception it should therefore be unsutured, but the spectator is nevertheless 'included and moved…in a structure and a rhythm of lack and absence'.45 More generally he criticised Oudart and Dayan for their transformation of a purely descriptive concept into a means of evaluation, hence into the basis for a typology of films. Their mistake was to suppose that certain films were less implicated in the imaginary than others — for Oudart, the work of Godard and Bresson, for example. Since the imaginary and the symbolic are always co-present, this shift blocks thinking about the relation of spectator to film. Dayan's linkage of suture with interpellation also came in for criticism. As with all Althusserian readings, Heath said, there was a tendency to emphasise the imaginary at the expense of the symbolic and unity at the expense of division. Moreover, whereas interpellation conceives of the subject as produced, psychoanalysis makes it at once production and product: film does not position the subject but performs it, just as there is a 'permanent performance of the subject in language itself 46

The most important theoretical work of the 1970s deriving from Lacan centred on what Metz termed 'the social regulation of the spectator's metapsychology’.47 In conceiving of cinema as an institution with both technological and psychological components, the theory offered explanations of how, variously, the subject acquired an imaginary unity, an impression of reality was created, and the institution reproduced itself in promoting the desire to return for more. The strength of the 'hegemonic and totalising model' of the cinematic apparatus developed by Baudry and by Metz was, however, also a source of potential weakness, as two main lines of criticism made apparent.48

In the first place, because the substantive features of cinema discussed by Baudry and Metz are found, if not in every film, at least in certain broad categories, the variability of spectator response remains unaccounted for. The fact that different cinema goers react differently to the same film implies that some essential determinants of a film's reception are being neglected by the theory. Secondly, the theory in effect foreclosed on the possibility of transforming cinema, as was argued by Constance Penley. She pointed out that if the effects of the apparatus were total and irresistible then there could be no form of cinema that could subvert its power.49 Since such forms of oppositional cinema were held by many theorists, notably by feminist critics and filmmakers, to be not only desirable but possible, then there must be some places where the control of the cinematic institution was not total. Both lines of criticism were to lead towards the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy.

It is, of course, something of a commonplace that a parallel may be drawn between the condition of the spectator in watching a film and the condition of the dreamer, daydreamer or fantasist. As John Ellis puts it, 'Images and sounds are received in a state where the normal judging functions of the ego are suspended to some degree (near to sleep), so that what is seen is not subject to the usual expectations of plausibility that we apply to everyday life.'50 There is, moreover, similarity between filmic form and content and fantasy itself, so much so that, for instance, Laplanche and Pontalis can describe fantasy in terms of a cinematic metaphor when they write-off it as 'the mise-en-scene of desire.'51 After all, what is Hollywood, with its stars, its happy endings, its interminable elaboration of Eros and Thanatos, but fantasy? However, with this acknowledged, there is the risk of simply repeating the reductionist interpretations offered by the earliest application of psychoanalysis to cinema, the invariably successful hunt for sexual symbolism in apparently innocent texts. The reintroduction of the notion of fantasy might, in other words, turn out to be a limited and regressive move.

That such was not the case may be attributed to two significant differences between its more recent and its earlier application. The first of these was that fantasy was conceived not as originating in the mind of the director but as operating in the exchange between the film and the spectator. The concept, then, was not intended to replace the imbrication of text and spectator with a content analysis, but was a means, precisely a means, of elaborating the relationship between text and spectator. In enunciating a fantasy that drew support from the text, the spectator was at once constituting and constituted.

The second major difference was that instead of fantasy being considered as straightforward wish-fulfilment, it was acknowledged to be a more complex compromise formation in which the repressed ideas were given expression, but only in a distorted form, dictated by the repressing agency. As with the classic symptom, then, enunciated fantasy contained both the unconscious wish and the defence against it. As defined by Laplanche and Pontalis, fantasy is an 'imaginary scene in which the subject is a protagonist, representing the fulfilment of a wish (in the last analysis, an unconscious wish) in a manner that is distorted to a greater or lesser extent by defensive processes'.52 Fantasy never articulates desire alone but always desire and the law. And even more complexly, it may express conflicting desire and the law in a single ensemble.

An example of fantasy as compromise formation in the analysis of a film is Elizabeth Cowie's reading of Now Voyager. In it the fantasy played out is that of the phallic mother. Having displaced her own mother, Charlotte becomes a surrogate mother to her lover's child by taking her in and caring for her, while at the same time denying herself sexual relations with him and leaving his unhappy marriage intact. In this way her initial transgressions, her enactment of homosexual and aggressive impulses, are indirectly punished and thereby legitimated by the film. By not marrying her lover and yet retaining a part of him in his daughter she at once becomes the phallic mother and abides by patriarchal law. Desire and its prohibition are thereby both articulated through the film. Cowie's analysis is not that of Charlotte as analysand, which would merely have a sophisticated yet still reductive content analysis, but is instead one of the film itself. The fantasy is the film's, not Charlotte's; it is an effect of its narration and therefore available to the spectator alone, the 'place in which all the terms of the fantasy come to rest'.53

Thus the concept of fantasy at once continued and developed the earlier application of psychoanalysis to film. The continuation lay in the attention to the spectator as the subject of the enunciation, the development in the greater complexity accorded to this subject. For in fantasy the spectator engages in multiple identifications and in its filmic scenarios may identify with several figures simultaneously, women and men, winners and losers, heroes and villains, the active and the passive, This conception of the subject as occupying contradictory positions and thus articulating conflict within the psyche, is distinctly different both from traditional notions of identification with the star of the same gender and from the Althusserian model in which the spectator is fixed in position by an assumption of a unified self-image.

The psychoanalytic text most frequently referred to here is Freud's paper 'A child is being beaten', concerning a masturbatory fantasy reported by some of his patients. The fantasy had three phases, which differed according to the gender of the patient. In the first phase, the child being beaten was not the patient and the beater was an adult of indeterminate identity. Freud interpreted this adult as being the father and surmised that the fantasy demonstrated the father's wished-for love by having him beat a rival sibling. In the second phase it is the fantasist who is being beaten by the father. For the female patient this represents a compromise between her desire for the father and her guilt about that desire, the sadism of the first phase thus being transformed into masochism. For the male it represents both a masochistic attitude towards the father and an identification with the feminine position, thereby expressing a wish to take the father as love object. The third phase, though resembling the first, continues to act as the agency of the second phase, that of the passive desire for the father. But the male represses his homosexual desire by identifying with the beating adult not the beaten child, so adopting the active masculine position; and simultaneously he adopts a passive position towards the desired phallic mother through the variation 'I am being beaten by my mother'.54 The female also seeks to avoid incestuous attachment to the father in this phase, but does so by replacing the father with some other adult such as a teacher and by adopting the position of an onlooker, 'a spectator of the event which takes the place of the sexual act’.55

Freud's analysis clearly demonstrates that fantasy entails multiple points of identification and places of enunciation. An example of the way such complexity can bear on filmic reading is given by Laura Mulvey's study of the Western, where, she proposes, narrative closure typically takes one of two forms, either a marriage, resolving the Oedipus complex and integrating the hero into the symbolic order, or non-marriage, 'a nostalgic celebration of phallic, narcissistic omnipotence'.56 The tension implicit in this alternative often results in there being two heroes, as in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in which Tom (John Wayne) embodies primitive phallic power, but whose defeat of Vallance goes unrecognised and who loses the woman, and in which Ranse (James Stewart), 'the upholder of the law as a symbolic system', is misrecognised as the victor and marries the woman.57 With this fantasy scenario the spectator is able to identify simultaneously with Tom and Ranse, with Ranse mourning Tom, and with the woman marrying Ranse but loving Tom. Thus the spectator's desire in all its complexity is given expression and becomes 'pleasured'. But the pleasure so gained is not to be conceived in terms of the traditional wish-fulfilment model.

This last point was something particularly stressed by those most influenced by Lacan, for whom fantasies involve not satisfiable needs but unsatisfiable desires. Because, for Lacan, desire is in pursuit of an eternally lost object, it is more accurate to say that fantasy sustains rather than satisfies desire, that it is the staging or mise en scene of desire rather than its fulfilment. As Lacan put it, 'the fantasy is the support of desire, it is not the object that is the support of the desire';58 and Cowie, 'the fantasy depends not on particular objects, but on their setting out; and the pleasure of fantasy lies in the setting out, not in the having of the objects'.59 Desire is therefore perpetuated through ever more elaborate signifying ensembles, one of which is of course narrative, where the spectator both desires and does not desire resolution. When resolution occurs the lost object figured by the narrative will be achieved only to fall once again into loss by the very fact of that achievement. So long as the narrative delays the desired moment, leaving open the question of how and when it will occur, while leading inexorably up to it, then pleasure is the outcome.

An example given by Elizabeth Cowie is the film Reckless Moment in which the central characters Lucia and Donnelly circulate through a number of positions.60 Lucia is variously Donnelly's lover and mother and, in the absence of her husband, father of the household; Donnelly, for his part, is variously lover, son, father and mother. At the end of the film the tensions produced by this sliding between positions are not resolved, only halted; in any case what matters is not so much any would-be resolution, but the succession of figures, equivalences and exchanges put into play by the narrative. Similarly Elisabeth Lyon's analysis of India Song as fantasy establishes that the spectator is variously and simultaneously 'the 'I/ego of the camera -the beggarwoman - Ann-Marie Stretter - the Vice-consul - death'.61 Taking up Lacan's formula $ ◊ a (where $ is the barred subject, a the objet petit a), she describes fantasy as the relationship of the subject to the non-existent object of desire, figured in the film by the key image of the naked breast of Ann-Marie Stretter. The lozenge in the formula stands for the third element, the Other, which always separates subject and object, and here represents the interchangeabil-ity of positions inside and outside the fantasy, the positions of participant and observer. As in Reckless Moment there is a circulation that never reaches a resolution: fantasy as the staging of desire can never provide an answer to the question of desire, but can only re-pose it.

More generally, the formula $ ◊ a. conveniently summarises the several ways in which the concept of fantasy has reoriented the application of psychoanalysis to film. The emphasis is now on objet petit a, desire and the symbolic rather than on the imaginary, concomitantly acknowledging that for the subject there is nowhere outside the symbolic order and no Other of the Other. Whereas, then, the earlier metapsychologists argued for the sameness of the effects of the apparatus on spectators, the concept of fantasy entails difference, not simply pertaining to a male/female dichotomy, but in recognition of the uniquely determined complexity of the psychic economy of each spectator. Fantasy means diversity of response to the same film, with each spectator enunciating their own economy of desire through it. Finally, if among the earlier theorists there was a tendency to invoke the unconscious only to ignore it, fantasy insists on it. Fantasy's subject is barred, mobile, fading, present only 'in a de-subjectivised form ... in the very syntax of the sequence in question'.62

Psychoanalysis was introduced into film theory as a supplement to historical materialism and semiotics. The fact that it has not only remained but has moved to a position of centrality might perhaps seern surprising given the problems attendant on it. However, as we have already shown, psychoanalysis in its Lacanian mode proved to be remarkably consonant with post-structuralism, whose underlying precepts came to dominate film theory after the mid-1970s. Nevertheless, despite this alliance, there were a number of outstanding unresolved problems, which we shall discuss in the remainder of this chapter.

The first of these concerned the specific ways in which psychoanalysis had been applied to the study of film. The objection that the use of psychoanalysis in film studies ran counter both to the classic theory and to the more recent Lacanian reworking of it was not simply a matter of defending doctrinal purity. Rather, it intended to signal that any improper use of psychoanalysis would inevitably store up problems for whatever theoretical project it was informing.

Metz's proposition that cinema, more than any other art, involves its audience in the imaginary was challenged along such lines by a number of critics, including most notably Jacqueline Rose and Constance Penley. His claim that the cinematic image places it within the register of the imaginary is, they pointed out, fundamentally at odds with Lacan's thought, for no image has meaning in itself, given directly through vision, but only acquires it within a particular cultural order. Just as for the child the idealised self-image of the mirror phase is given by the mother's look, that is, by the Other, so too is the imaginary always informed by the symbolic. This failure to acknowledge the importance of the Other has significant repercussions for Metz's central thesis, that of the spectator's identification with his own act of perception, leading to a delusory omniscience. According to Constance Penley, Metz's line of argument that the apparatus always installs the spectator as an all-perceiving subject, confuses its aim with its effects, which is particularly apparent when one considers the subject in relation to vision and desire. For in looking, as in speaking, the subject is divided: 'vision always takes place in the field of the Other's vision and desire'.63 In treating the imaginary as a state of plenitude antecedent to accession to the symbolic, a state to which the spectator as an effect of the cinematic image regresses, Metz misses the workings of desire in the exchange between spectator and film. What is necessarily a triangular relationship is misconceived as dual. A number of consequences accrue to Penley's avowedly Lacanian respecification of these scopic relations. In the first place, the subject of vision is itself an object of representation, because what determines the subject is a look that is outside - for Lacan, in the field of the visible: 'I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture'.64 Secondly, there is no such thing as a purely perceptual look, it is always a matter of it being conditioned by the desire of the Other. Because of the structure of desire there can be no question of the look achieving the satisfaction of seeing what it wants to see, but only perpetual deferral down the metonymies of narrative. Finally, the place the subject occupies, more seen than seeing, is itself, by virtue of its implication with the unconscious, unstable and dispersed. All in all, these consequences conspire to thwart the apparatus's aim of constructing a transcendental and secure subject identifying with itself in an act of pure perception. Faced with these criticisms Metz had no defence but to confess 'I am not a Lacanian'.65

The second problem, that of the supposed ahistoricality of psychoanalysis, may be dealt with quite briefly. Lovell's objection that psychoanalysis is an 'a-historical theory of the constitution of the subject and its entry into language and culture' can hardly be sustained when one considers that each individual is formed within a unique family configuration that is itself an effect of a wider historical matrix.66 Psychoanalysis does not, and does not need to, offer a theory of social and familial change; its concern is to chart their effects through the oral histories recounted on the couch. Where Lovell, however, does have a point is that it has proved difficult to theorise the two together, to find a means of integrating psychoanalysis and theories of social change, whether Marxist or otherwise. These difficulties emerged in concrete form, as we have seen already in chapter 2, when attempts to theorise the historicality of the subject in relation to reading texts remained largely unsuccessful.

The third problem, that of feminine sexuality, is by far the most pressing of psychoanalysis's lacunae. Freud's difficulties here are well known, not just in relation to his contentious privileging of the penis in the concept of penis envy, for his failure satisfactorily to theorise the female Oedipus leaves us with no overall explanation of the construction of female subjectivity. While modern feminist advocates of psychoanalysis have tended to turn to Lacanian theory as the place of resolution of these difficulties, it is still far from settled that Lacan has made any significant advance on Freud. At its simplest, the problem is that if in patriarchal culture women are seen as lacking why should anyone assume a feminine identity.

For some feminists any problems here are outweighed by Lacan's central emphasis on the symbolic in the construction of subjectivity, which disposes equally of reductionist notions of biological determinism and of mystical notions of feminine essence. For such as Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, and Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Lacan's theories offer an explanation both for the construction of subjectivity under patriarchy and resistance to it. Their value lies in their 'exposure of the inevitable alliance between "feminine essence" and the natural, the given, or precisely what is outside the range of political action and thus not amenable to change'. 67 The insistence that the 'subject is not constructed from sexuality, [but] sexuality is constructed in, the history of the subject’ marks therefore a complete break with any idea that anatomy has to be destiny.68

Or does it? Is there not one almost axiomatic concept through which anatomy, despite all protestations to the contrary, returns? The phallus, according to Lacan, is not the penis. Possessed by neither men nor women, belonging to the symbolic order and not nature, taking its value like all signifiers from its relation to other signifiers, the phallus signifies the lack indissociable from entry into culture. As such, it permits sexuality to be conceived 'as an arbitrary identity that is imposed on the subject, as a law. . . legislated rather than autonomously assumed', hence provisional, often inappropriate, and potentially open to change.69 Not everyone, though, is convinced of the phallus's radically non-biological status. For example, Jane Gallop, in many respects sympathetic to Lacan, has detected in his and his followers' work an 'endless repetition of failed efforts to distinguish phallus and penis clearly3.70 Whatever else it means, the phallus also always stands for the penis, a confusion that is symptomatic of the impossibility of conceiving a non-phallic masculinity at this historical moment. This problem, along with the more general one around the construction of female subjectivity, was reflected in the uneven development of psychoanalytically informed film theory. Although by the end of the 1970s psychoanalysis had contributed to a persuasive account of the exchange between a film and the male spectator, no comparable account existed for the female spectator. According to Laura Mulvey's widely accepted analysis of the voyeuristic and fetishistic structures organising the male gaze, the woman was what was looked at, not the one who looked. The place of enunciation, the place of the look was for the majority of films that of the male. As Mary Ann Doane has noted, 'historically there has always been a certain imbrication of the cinematic image and the representation of the woman'71 and cinema has 'articulated its stories through a conflation of its central axis of seeing/being seen with the opposition male/female'.72 Debarred, except as objects, from the characteristically masculine scopic regime of voyeurism and fetishism, women have a very different relation to the image from that of men. The reason for this difference, Doane proposed, is 'the overwhelming presence to itself of the female body3, a theme of self-proximity that has been elaborated by Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixious and Michele Mon-trelay.73 As a consequence woman are unable to establish the distance from the image that is the condition for voyeuristic pleasure and control, narrativising the Other as female image, and instead remain in a relation to it of identificatory narcissism. Women are similarly barred from fetishistic structures. As Doane has written elsewhere, what can fetishism 'have to do with the female spectator for whom castration cannot pose a threat since she has nothing to lose?'74 In its place the woman's relation to the image is one of'over-identification', one that is founded on the absence of a distance between seeing and knowing. Such a position is finally untenable precisely because it fails to confer on the spectator the distance needed to read the image adequately.

It follows from the above that female spectators have two principal options: either the assumption of a masculine position; or the assumption of a passive or masochistic position through identification with a female character. We shall consider each of these in turn.

The principal theorist of the masculinisation of the female gaze has been Laura Mulvey, who returned to and expanded on her earlier position in response to criticisms. According to D. N. Rodowick the only place in Mulvey's scenario for the female subject was as a negativity defining castration.75 Linda Williams similarly objected that the concentration on the male look at the woman left no place for women's own pleasure in looking.76 Mulvey responded by arguing that Hollywood masculinised its female spectators in offering them male points of view and male identifications. Indeed, there was nothing specific to cinema in this, for across a whole range of folk and mass culture the grammar of narrative 'places the reader, listener or spectator with the hero'.77 Through such identifications women can enjoy the freedom and control typically given to the hero by narratives. The hypothesis could be supported by Freud's own later writings on women, which propose that, because feminity is gained through repressing the masculine tendencies of the phallic phase, netjrosis in women is often to be explained in terms of the irruption of this repressed material. What Hollywood offers the female spectator is a socially sanctioned access route to her repressed masculinity. And there is a reinforcement of this process of masculinisation through the parallel, already noted by Freud, between the ego and the hero of any narrative. The phrase 'Nothing can happen to me', so succinctly expressive of the ego's sense of superiority and invulnerability, finds its narrative correlate in the typical hero's passage through the text. In identifying with such a figure and confirming the ego's fantasies, the female spectator is habituated to transsexual identifications. Though the gain is that of the reactivation of the fantasy of 'action', which a proper femininity represses, it is at the cost of a certain uneasiness at violating patriarchal precepts.

Mulvey's version of the female spectator, however, commanded less widespread assent than her theorisation of the male spectator. One alternative version was that provided by Mary Ann Doane, at least over the scopic field sustained by so-called women's films. In analysing a corpus of films addressed to women (e.g. Rebecca., Suspicion, Gaslight, The Two Mrs Carrolls, Caught, Possessed, Secret Beyond the Door — tides that in themselves are revealing), she found that the spectatorial options were not limited to either a narcissistic identification with the woman as spectacle or a transsexual identification with the male hero. Instead, these films summoned up an interactive process between the text and the spectator that could be best comprehended in terms of the third stage of the fantasy ‘A child is being beaten', where the woman/girl no longer figures as a participant in the scenario but as a spectator. Such films turn on 'masochistic fantasy instead instead of sexuality’. 78 In them women are de-eroticised, functioning not as spectacle to be looked at but as protagonists in masochistic scenarios.

Of the two forms these tend to take, one has the woman as the agent of the gaze investigating a secret whose solution entails an act of aggression against her (paradigmatically, the locked room where her husband is planning to murder her), as if 'the woman's exercise of an active investigating gaze can only be simultaneous with her own victimisation'.79 In the other the woman is afflicted by an illness, the object of the medical rather than the erotic gaze, and constituted within a medical discourse that seeks to tell her story through interpretation of her symptoms. Often blind or mute, she must wait for a man to disclose her truth through medical or psychological discourse. In both kinds of scenario the effect is to desexualise the woman's body, and concomitantly to address the female spectator in such a way that she 'loses not only her sexual identity in the context of the scenario but her very access to sexuality3, so recapitulating the de-eroticised, specular stage of the female version of 'A child is being beaten'.80

These considerations, however, were part of a larger debate around the work of the theorists of the apparatus, notably Baudry and Metz. While it was generally agreed that they had performed a valuable service in shifting the emphasis from the reproduction of objects to the production of subjects, serious doubts existed about the implication of their work for the female spectator. So inseparable was the machinery of image reproduction and projection from the psycho-perceptual machinery of scopophilia, identification and fetishism, that the place of women in such a system must be deeply problematic. In their account there were two levels of exclusion: from representation and from spectating. Both of these conspired to make 'the very idea of a feminist filmmaking practice seem an impossibility" because 'the simple gesture of directing a camera towards a woman has become the equivalent to a terrorist act'.81 Given this situation, one strategy, exemplified by the films of Peter Gidal, has been systematically to exclude all images of woman on the grounds that they could only partake of the dominant system of meanings. Yet the very fact that this strategy compounds the exclusion of women makes all the more evident the impasse film theory had reached.

In consequence women theorists became increasingly critical of the concept of the cinematic machine. Drawing on Freud's remark that all complicated machinery and apparatus occurring in dreams stands for the male genitals, Constance Penley suggested that the apparatus as conceived by Baudry and Metz was a 'bachelor machine' with a characteristic 'bacheloresque emphasis on homogeneity and closure'.82 Their very mode of theorising effectively closed off questions of sexual difference. For Joan Copjec, the apparatus thus conceived was a machine to defend against the alienation and division experienced in the symbolic and hence was a denial of the sexual difference inscribed in the symbolic. Any conception of the apparatus that meets the spectator's demand and fixes him in a secure and unified identity runs counter to the whole drift of Lacan's thinking, and therefore represses those aspects of it most important for women. The only role for women, given the existing theories, was to adopt strategies of subversion: Mary Ann Doane proposed one such strategy at the level of representation: the masquerade. In flaunting herself, in producing herself as an excess of femininity, the woman can reveal that 'it is femininity itself which is constructed as a mask - as the decorative layer which conceals a non-identity1, thus challenging the iconographic patterns that function as a support for the male gaze.83 At the same time, by opening up a distance from the female image the masquerade allows it to become controllable, readable, producible by the woman.

More promising, by and large, than subversion was the prospect of finding an alternative theory of the institution of cinema. What was needed was a mode of theorising that would retain the radical implications of Lacan's notion of the complex constitution of both subject and object through discourse, but would avoid the phallocen-trisrr implicit in Lacan's thinking. Just such an ideologically acceptable, de-phallicised recasting of the relation of subjectivity and discourse was to be found in the work of Foucault.

By adopting Foucault's conception of power, whereby discourses produce domains of objects and modes of subjection, Copjec and Doane advanced a theory of femininity as constructed within discursive practices. Thus, Doane writes: 'Femininity is produced very precisely as a position within a network of power relations.'84 And Copjec: 'Patriarchy can only be an effect of a particular arrangement of competing discourse, not an expressive totality which guarantees its own self-interest.'85 For Doane, referring back to her discussion of fetishism and voyeurism, the distinctive closeness and 'presence-to-itself of femininity is not, as some have supposed, an expression of some essence but is rather the outcome of the place women are culturally assigned. And for Copjec the consequent need was for an analysis of how the multiformity of sexual difference and subject position is related to particular discursive formations and practices.

The work of Foucault was also to provide support for those who believed that psychoanalysis, despite various attempts to feminise it, was indissociably complicit with phallocentrism. Like any other discourse, Foucault said, psychoanalysis was grounded in nothing beyond historical contingency, and therefore could not be judged in terms of any supposed truth, but must stand or fall on the basis of its effects. Its theory and practice amounted to a discourse on sex that was necessarily implicated in power relations. As to whether it had done anything to question or redefine power, his conclusion was that it had not. But there were possibilities for resistance to the subjecting alliance of discourse and power, and in his less guarded moments he suggested that any theorisation of this must start from the body. The suggestion was taken up by feminist film theorists, who sought to re-theorise the relation of the body and discourse in such a way as to do justice to feminine specificity while avoiding essentialism. A conception of the body was necessary, said Doane, 'in order to formulate the woman's different relation to speech, to language'.

One aspect of this reassertion of the feminine body, indeed of the reintroduction of a concept of the body into psychoanalysis, was the adoption by Doane and Copjec of the notion of anaclisis. This term had been used by Freud to designate the way the infant's sexual drives trench on its ego or self-preservation instincts, an obvious example being provided by the oral phase, when the erotic pleasure of sucking the breast is associated with satisfaction of the need for nourishment. Only later does the detachment of sexuality from the bodily function occur, after the child has come to want the secondary pleasure independently of the original somatic need. Taking up this idea, Copjec suggested that the deviation of the drive from the instinct was caused by the introjection of 'a scene of satisfaction into the subject5.87 Although the body is not the cause of the psyche it nonetheless has a role in structuring it. Likewise Doane argued for the irreducibility of sexuality to bodily function, but also for the latter acting as a support for the former.

Copjec and Doane also both referred to ideas elaborated by women working within or proximate to a Lacanian framework that had been treated with suspicion by the anti-essentialists. Julia Kristeva's linking of discourse with its pre-linquistic somatic precursors (this and other aspects of Kristeva's work are discussed in chapter 7) and, of greater immediate relevance, Luce Irigaray’s respecification of the feminine were called on by Doane in support of her position. For Irigaray, because of the phallomorphic tendencies of all existing theories of subjectivity, there was the need for a break with them, but in a non-essentialist direction. Starting from the specificity of the female body, in particular the multiplicity of its erotogenic zones and the nature of female genitals, whose lips constitute a constant and unforbiddable source of mutual embrace and self-touch, Irigaray proposed that female sexuality was plural, non-unifiable and could not 'be subsumed under the concept of subject’.88 And mirroring this sexuality was an equally non-masculine relation to language, at once polyvalent, plural and free of the restrictive insistence on identity of patriarchal law.

While many feminists considered Irigaray to have lapsed into the very essentialism she sought to avoid, Doane maintained this was altogether too dismissive. It was possible, she held, by using the notion of the body as a support or 'prop', to rethink the relationship between the female body and signifying processes in such a way as 'to define or construct a feminine specificity (not essence)' and 'to provide the woman with an autonomous symbolic representation'.89 There could be no question of some natural feminine body directly finding expression in a transparent medium. For one thing, the ideological complicity of 'the natural' was such as to rule it out; for another, the body was always written, coded, a function of discourse, with its sexuality implicated in language. Through these qualifications to Irigarays position the hope was that a middle course could be steered, avoiding equally a reductive essentialism and an anti-essen-tialism where the body either vanished or was simply a derivative of discourse.

Doubts about this strategy were expressed by Constance Penley. It was, she felt, bound to reproduce the difficulties associated with the essentialist position, where identity and difference are established before they can be adequately questioned. In particular she doubted the value of the concept of anaclisis for these purposes, in that any attempt, however indirect, to derive gendered sexuality from the body endangered the uncompromising insistence of psychoanalysis that sexuality is an arbitrary identity imposed by convention. The law of sexual division requires that everyone take up a position in relation to the phallus, a non-biological entity. Hence, the concept of anaclisis effaced 'the difficulty of femininity as a sexual position or category in relation to the symbolic'.90 A far more effective counter to the maleness of the cinematic apparatus than the reintroduction of the female body was through the concept of fantasy, which offered a way of preserving and accounting for sexual difference without predetermining what any given individual's sexual identity should be. How any one spectator relates to a filmic narrative depends on their unique pattern of desire, with the only fixity coming from the formal masculine and feminine positions as defined by the fantasy. By giving an explanation variously of the spectator's desire of the image, the fantasmatic relation to that image, including a belief in its reality, and his or her multiple and changing identifications, the theory of fantasy could retain a notion of the cinematic institution while 'constructively dismantling the bachelor machines of film theory’.91

There is, finally, the most fundamental problem of all: the fact that psychoanalysis is founded on the discovery of the unconscious. Since the implications of this are so far-reaching we shall leave discussion of it until our concluding remarks, when its significance for the entire film theoretical project will be easier to gauge.

Psychoanalysis (Short)

2007-07-20T12:07:00.000+07:00

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is an approach to the cinema which really came to the fore in the 1970s, in particular with Laura Mulvey's article 'Visual Pleasure And Narrative Cinema' (1975), perhaps one of the most significant pieces of film theory from the last thirty years. Psychoanalytic theory builds upon the ideas of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), and his followers, such as Carl Jung (1875-1961), Ernest Jones (1879-1958), Melanie Klein (1882-1960), Joan Riviere (1883-1962) and, most importantly, Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). It can be used to analyse the characters within the film as if they are real people or case studies, to analyse the personality of the director (although this puts rather too much weight upon the director's personality at the expense of the rest of the crew) and to examine the mechanisms of cinema itself. This is clearly too much material to deal with here, so I will focus on Freud, Lacan and Mulvey, and will return to some of these ideas in the chapter on feminism.

The theory is not without its critics, of course, most notably from those of the left who argue that it is the impact of society on the individual that matters in determining behaviour, rather than inner psychic conflicts. Freud's analysis of human sexuality can be considered sexist and homophobic, although that has not stopped feminist critics from drawing on his ideas. Further, it often seems to be contradicted by the last century of scientific examination of the brain and personal experience - and the influence of middle-class patriarchal Vienna upon Freud's thinking should not be underestimated. After all, how accurate can a theory of human behaviour be if it is based upon the actions of those who are identified as mentally ill or sick? Nevertheless, psychoanalytic structures do seem to describe a surprising number of films.

The Return of the Repressed

For Freud (for most of his career), all human behaviour came down to the need for gratification - this is the Pleasure Principle, with desires arising from the unconscious mind. The unconscious is part of the mind that determines what we do and feel, although we have no direct access to it -otherwise it wouldn't be unconscious. If we acted upon every unconscious desire then anarchy would result: no work would get done, no food would be grown or produced, rape would be endemic and, well, we'd all be exhausted. The pressures of society therefore frown upon such sexual excess and so the individual represses desires - this is the Reality Principle.

Simply because a desire is repressed, however, doesn't mean that it goes away. Think of the desire as a flow of water, and the repression as a dam built across it. The water doesn't stop flowing: pressure builds up, and so the water will find a way round, over or eventually through the blockage. Therefore there needs to be some kind of sluice to regulate the pressure. Repressed desires will emerge in the forms of dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue (parapraxes), hallucinations and even physical symptoms. This becomes evident in Fight Club (1999). In moments when the narrator loses control of his body and it is apparently beyond his control, he beats himself up.

The return of the repressed is central to the understanding of much horror film, in particular variants on the slasher movie such as Halloween (1978), A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984) and / Know What You Did Last Summer (1997). In these films a crime has happened in the past, and has been forgotten about by the community; many years later someone comes back to seek revenge, usually on nubile young teenagers. Anyone who has had extramarital sex is marked out for death - at the end of the movie a plucky female virgin faces down the villain alone. A society's fear - about sexuality in general, about female and child sexuality, about race and about class - is projected onto a villainous other, who proceeds to attempt to destroy that society. There is more about the slasher film in the chapter on genre.

The Oedipus Complex

Freud argues that the child goes through different sexualities before settling down as an adult. Initially there is the oral phase, where pleasure derives from suckling at the breast; arguably there is a distinction between child and parent barely being maintained at this point. Next, the anal phase enables the child to explore its bodily boundaries; the control of the flow of faeces and urine causes degrees of pleasure and displeasure, in particular with the delayed discharge of faeces. Then the child discovers that pleasure can be obtained from playing with their sexual organs. Parents, on the whole, try to put a stop to such behaviour. After this point there is a latent period before so-called proper genital sexuality can commence.

In the meantime, the child is desirous of the mother, as primary source of pleasure, but is threatened with castration either directly by the father, threatened by the mother on his behalf ("wait until your father gets home") or otherwise, perhaps, just feels threatened. The male child has to disengage from the relationship with the mother and, having perhaps squared off with the father, can only hope to find power and happiness by finding a woman to replace his mother. This process is all part of the -Oedipus complex, which Freud draws from the Greek myth of the man who married his mother and killed his father.

The position of the female is much more controversial - Freud quickly abandoned ah Electra Complex which attempted to reverse the sexes but never quite settled on a final explanation. The female child is still in this relationship with the mother and is threatened with castration. Ah, but as the female lacks a penis she is either castrated or - having a clitoris -comparatively underendowed. The female then will perhaps attempt to seduce the father, to gain access to his penis (or, rather, because we're as much talking about notions of power as of anatomy, his phallus). The incest taboo prevents the father-daughter relationship from developing sexually, and so she has to turn to other men, perhaps in hope of gaining a phallus through having a child of her own.

(I have to note that I've always found that men are anxious about castration, whereas women deny their penis envy. Clearly they are repressing it.)

The successful negotiation of the Oedipus complex results in a healthy heterosexual identity - its failure might result in bisexuality, homosexuality or other medical conditions. Neither the narrator nor Tyler Durden in Fight Club seem particularly well adjusted, and both of them have had problematic relationships with their fathers. They have both been raised by their mothers, and therefore may not have successfully negotiated the complex. Both have trouble with authority figures, resulting in violent actions on their parts.

Id, Ego and Superego

In the 1920s Freud began to write of a three-part structure to the mind, although it had at least five parts. There was the conscious Perception System, the Preconscious consisting of things forgotten, the Ego (part preconscious, part unconscious), the entirely unconscious Id, and 'between' the last two, the Superego.

The Id is formed from the desires of the individual and perhaps can be seen in the untrammelled behaviour of Tyler Durden - who steals, screws and hurts what he wants. When he has a desire he acts upon it, even if this causes pain or inconvenience to others. This should be contrasted with the Ego as represented by the unnamed narrator, who noticeably fails to take advantage of Maria when he is examining her breasts for cancer, who has to be cajoled into hitting Tyler and who has a reasonably comfortable lifestyle courtesy of the IKEA catalogue. Between the two of them, presumably, is the real Tyler Durden, who has been traumatised by some event into having a split personality - one half entirely Ego, the other Id.

This leaves the Superego to account for, which is formed out of the wreckage of the Oedipus complex and is in a sense formed by introjecting patriarchal power into the psyche. The Superego is the regulator of pleasure - it will censor the Id, but it will also license it. In Fight Club the Superego occurs in a number of forms; initially the self-help groups (which allow him some sleep), then the fight clubs (which allow acts of aggression) and Project Mayhem. The Superego may also be identified with the police, who i enter the narrative at various moments of crisis.

Fetishism, Voyeurism and Scopophilia

And thus to another controversial point: castration and the fetish. At some point the male child realises that his mother, and women in general, are castrated. Okay, clearly on anything other than a symbolic level women aren't, but I'm not saying the child is correct. The woman's castration is a constant reminder to the male child of the possibility of castration which is, to say the least, disturbing. In some situations, the male will latch onto some item to act as a substitute phallus, which simultaneously will disavow the possibility of castration, and act as a reminder that it might happen.

The object might be a part of somebody else's body (breast, legs, even a shiny nose), a piece of clothing (often shoes, underwear, less commonly gloves) or even objects. If the narrator of Fight Club is a fetishist, then it's for his material lifestyle, his yin and yang table and so forth. He overcomes his fetish by destroying these objects only to plunge into a deeper split of personality.

Presumably given that women in Freud's theories are already castrated, they cannot become fetishists - something that feminist critics of the 1990s disputed. If this structure is too followed, then cinema, built up from shots which fetishize the human body, is gendered masculine. This is something I will return to later in my discussion of Laura Mulvey.

The act of looking can itself be perverse - as voyeurism or scopophilia. If all that is looked at is the genitals (and note the flashframes of genitals that Tyler smuggles into films), if looking is part of overcoming nausea or if it replaces intercourse as a source of pleasure then this looking should be considered as perverse. Voyeurism is thus a kind of sexuality derived from looking at things or people, but scopophilia takes it a stage further and takes in sadism. Scopophilia treats the people being looked at as objects, ideally under our control, and it is even better for the person looking at them if they are suffering. In Fight Club there is at least one moment when the narrator shifts into scopophilia, for example when he attacks the blonde boy in the basement and takes pleasure in seeing him hurt. His connection to the act stops it from being scopophilia but if we've begun to identify with him then we are the voyeurs.

Cinema, after all, is obsessed with cinema and many hundreds of films draw attention to the act of looking. Fight Club with its moment of the narrator talking directly to the camera and pointing out the cigarette burns which mark a reel changeover is no exception. The classic study of scopophilia (or scoptophilia as it calls it) is the Michael Powell film Peeping Tom (1960), complete with a scopophile who gets his kicks from watching the footage of himself murdering women. Because it is a substitute for the sexual act, it can never be enough to satisfy him and he is driven to repeat his crimes.

Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst who felt that Freud had been misinterpreted by his followers. In his return to Freud he was to be influenced by the ideas of structuralism, partly the anthropology of Levi-Strauss and the signifier/signified split. It is traditional to point out that Lacan is difficult and that some of the translations of his work are poor but in the transcriptions of his seminars he also emerges as a witty person.

Lacan solves one criticism that can be aimed at Freud's versions of the Oedipus complex: what about single parent families or same sex families who seem to be able to produce well-adjusted individuals? The father is here replaced by the phallus - also a signifier for our patriarchal society -and the Name of the Father, which functions with the threat of castration. Anyone - an uncle, a stepfather, a woman, even perhaps the mother - can function as the phallus.

The child desires to be desired by the mother but the mother desires the phallus. The child therefore attempts to become a phallus for the mother and to become the centre of her world. The child fails and the result differs according to sex. The male is reassured that even if he's failed now, one day all this will be his, he may yet become the phallus. In the meantime, he has the compensation of language, which Lacan calls the symbolic order. The female cannot fully access the symbolic order (which is patriarchal) and can only console herself with thoughts of a time before she was castrated.... But this, perhaps, is to get ahead of ourselves.

The Mirror Phase and the Imaginary

For Lacan, we are born too soon. We can't walk, we can't see very well, we certainly can't talk. We begin as broken people. At some point, however, we encounter an image of ourselves in a mirror and begin to identify ourselves as a distinct person in the world, separate from others. The image of us seems better than us and is external to ourselves, so this identification is problematic in itself. This process is the Mirror Phase and it allows us to enter into the realm of the Imaginary - with the emphasis being on the idea of the image.

This Mirror Phase can act as a metaphor for what we do in the cinema -and this is an idea developed by Christian Metz. We sit in the dark, quietly (Metz clearly doesn't go to your average multiplex) and don't move, whilst watching an image of a person who is much bigger, stronger, intelligent, braver and more resourceful than ourselves. The mirror of the cinema screen doesn't reflect us back but shows whom we'd like to be. I'm no Brad Pitt, but I wouldn't mind being him (well, aside from in Meet Joe Black (1998)).

The Symbolic Order and the Real

As part of the Mirror Phase the individual becomes anchored in language - he or she is spoken to or spoken of, and is located in time, space and language. This language is to be understood in terms of Saussure's network of signifiers and signifieds, as explored in the last chapter. Signifiers can be exchanged for other signifiers in an endless chain of signification. (To understand this try looking a word up in the dictionary - any word will do. The definition will offer you more words, which need to be defined, and so on. Either you will get stuck in a loop of definitions, or end up chasing meanings through the whole dictionary.)

After the child has gone through the Mirror Phase, the Oedipus complex follows and the child faces the signifier of the phallus or Name of the Father. The male child emerges from this and can enter the Symbolic Order - one day he will be associated with the phallus but in the meantime he must make do with the system of exchange that includes the patriarchal social system. In contrast, the female child can only console herself with the (fake) memory of the time before she was castrated, when she was associated with the phallus, and cannot fully enter into the Symbolic Order.

Clearly this is as problematic as Freud's analysis, from a feminist point of view, but some feminists such as Julia Kristeva have argued that women must find their own, non-patriarchal order or language of babble, which she calls the semiotic. Most films follow a masculine structure, a linear narrative with begins with a disruption to the social order, and then various attempts to successfully reinstate it. A feminine structure might be different

- see for example the works of Sally Potter and Jane Campion, or perhaps even Derek Jarman, where episode outweighs the entire story.

Aside from the Imaginary and the Symbolic, Lacan posits the dimension of the Real, which is that which exists before and beyond language, and cannot be symbolised. The Real might occur during sex, or after death, or before birth. The Real is perhaps the moment when Tyler Durden is a unified whole, before his breakdown, or the flashframes which intervene in the first half of the film, or the moment when you appear to see the edges of the film.

Laura Mulvey and the Gaze

Lacan's ideas are important to film studies in part because they inform much feminist thought, but also because Laura Mulvey's influential essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' draws upon them. Mulvey takes the idea of the member of the audience watching a film, and argues that what begins as an identificatory gaze slides into something more sadistic. Yes, we identify with Brad Pitt in the fight club but we also want to see him being beaten up by the gangster boss. In order for there to be a narrative -and most of us want a narrative in our movies - people must suffer, including the hero. Durden must suffer, the narrator must suffer.

At the same time there is a sense of discomfort at looking at the woman on screen - in this case Maria, as played by Helena Bonham Carter. Woman is castrated and so looking at woman reminds the viewer of the possibility of being castrated. Maria's attendance at a testicular cancer support group, her constant smoking, put her as being beyond the control of Norton's character, and his life is disrupted by her until he finds something to substitute for the therapy groups. Somehow the hero's dealings with the castrated female are meant to allay the viewer's fears.

Mulvey argues that there are three kinds of look associated with the cinema: a diegetic one between the characters, an extradiegetic one of the audience watching the film, and then the look of the crew filming the events played out before the camera. All three kinds of gaze are predominantly masculine, or associated with the male, something which did not seem to be problematic to Mulvey in 1975. Since then she has written an after word which notes this gendering of cinema but in my opinion she doesn't get much beyond the idea of a male gaze. A female gaze should, of course, be possible.

Genre Theory and Criticism by Peter Hutchings

2007-07-20T12:06:00.000+07:00

Genre theory and criticism
by Peter Hutchings

Genre first becomes a focus for significant theoretical and critical activity in film studies in the late 1960s and then on into the 1970s. Much of this work dealt with Hollywood cinema and, initially at least, placed itself in relation to the auteurist debates which had been so important in film criticism since the 1950s. For some genre critics, the study of particular genres provided the opportunity to situate the auteur more systematically (and perhaps more credibly) within the Hollywood set-up. For others who wanted to question the notions of creativity embodied by the figure of the auteur, the stress on genre represented, in Anthony Easthope's words, 'a tactical attempt to think beyond auteurism'.1

While this proliferation of critical activity around genre did not mark an unequivocal break with the past, it did enable new ways of thinking about film in general, and Hollywood cinema in particular, to emerge. However, an overall survey of the various articles and books associated with 1970s genre study gives one a sense of unrealized or thwarted potential, of perceptive and insightful work which eventually fades away into nothing. It has been suggested by Paul Willemen that the virtual disappearance of genre from film criticism's agenda was caused by the dominance of Screen theory, with its rather more generalizing concerns, from the mid-1970s onwards.2 Certainly there is some truth to this claim. But it can also be argued that the particular critical questions and issues which genre critics identified as being important proved in the end incapable of being sustained, and perhaps even blocked any substantial and long-lived enquiry into the subject.

This chapter will record the positive achievements of 1970s genre study (which included contributions from, among others, Tom Ryall, Ed Buscombe, Colin McArthur, Douglas Pye, Steve Neale and Will Wright) and also identify some of the reasons why it foundered when it did. Also discussed will be the influential early work on film genres produced by Andre Bazin, Robert Warshow and Lawrence Alloway. It will be shown that while the insights of these pioneers of genre study often anticipated developments in the 1970s, certain other lines of enquiry opened up by their work were largely ignored by these later critics, arguably much to the detriment of their work. Finally, the chapter will look briefly at some important studies of specific genres (for example, 1970s and 1980s work on film noir and melodrama). It will be argued that accounts like these, which generally lacked the specific theoretical ambitions of much of the work mentioned above, often have a clearer sense of the historical and/or national specificity of genres, and offer an alternative way of thinking about genre to that offered by the 1970s theorists.

It is worth mentioning at this point that genre as a subject for discussion has always transcended the traditional boundaries of film studies (in much the same way as issues relating to stars have done). While in the history of film studies genre theory comes after auteurism, it is also true to say that as far as the film industry and its audiences are concerned genres preceded any notions of highlighting the director/author as a meaningful way of ordering and classifying the cinematic experience. While the auteur seemed to exist in spite of the structures of the industry and his or her presence was only detected (or perhaps constructed) by critics after the event, genres have always existed because of the nature of the industry. They offer a means by which the industry can seek to repeat and capitalize upon previous box-office successes. This connects with the way in which genres also provide audiences with particular sorts of knowledge which they can use to organize their own viewing (although the terms of this relationship are not at all clear). Of course, this is a rather basic way of putting it, but, nevertheless, underpinning much academic writing is the sense that, when it comes to genre, the industry and the audience need to be held together in the same equation. (Compare this with the more classical forms of auteurism where the industry tended to be that which had to be transcended and the audience was usually absent.) In fact, part of the appeal of studying genre is that it offers the opportunity to deal with cinema, and Hollywood cinema in particular, as both an industrial and a popular medium. What needs to be done now is to explore the various ways in which critics set about this task, beginning with some of the earlier forays into the field. As will become clear, certain problems quickly became apparent which would preoccupy genre studies for years to follow.

Genre's pioneers

The three distinguished critics to be discussed here are Andre Bazin, Robert Warshow and Lawrence Alloway. All shared the belief that genres carried an intrinsic meaning or significance, but each adopted a different way of thinking about this.

Andre Bazin is perhaps the best known of the three. Closely associated with the French journal Cahiers du Cinema and the auteurist school of criticism, his writings on genre - notably 'The Western, or the American Film par excellence' and 'The Evolution of the Western' -need to be located within this context. (Indeed, in the latter piece, Bazin identifies authors/auteurs as a key factor in the evolution of the western genre.)3 For Bazin, one of the key things that needed to be explained about the western, the American film par excellence in his own words, was its international popularity (an appropriate task, perhaps, for a non-American critic).

What can there possibly be to interest Arabs, Hindus, Latins, Germans, or Anglo-Saxons, among whom the western has had an uninterrupted success, about evocations of the birth of the United States of America, the struggle between Buffalo Bill and the Indians, the laying down of the railroad, or the Civil War!4

For Bazin, the answer to this question did not lie in the western's formal qualities, which Bazin identifies as specific settings, objects and scenarios: 'the western must be something else again than its form. Galloping horses, fights, strong and brave men in a wildly austere landscape could not add up to a definition of the genre nor encompass its charms.'5 Rather, the western's formal attributes 'are simply signs or symbols of its profound reality, namely the myth.'6 Myth, as Bazin understands it, is universal and timeless, and manifests itself in the western through the portrayal of Manichaean struggles between the forces of evil and 'the knights of the true cause'. This mythic quality, according to Bazin, stands in a dialectical relationship with the western's very specific historical settings, and because of this conjunction the genre takes on further epic and tragic qualities (both of which Bazin defines vaguely).

In 'The Western', the article in which these ideas are featured, Bazin is obviously painting in rather broad strokes and many of his general ideas about the western are, to say the least, questionable (although his recognition of the international dispersal of the genre is important). In 'The Evolution of the Western', however, he is much more specific about what he sees as the historical development of the western form. He argues that the western had attained a 'classical' perfection in the late 1930s, and that subsequent westerns, while not necessarily inferior, were, variously, 'baroque', 'novelistic' or 'superwesterns', 'a western that would be ashamed to be just itself, and looks for some additional interest to justify its existence'.7

For our purposes, two particular points of interest can be isolated in Bazin's writing on genre. First, there is the focus on the western (also apparent in the near-contemporaneous work of Warshow), a genre which would also preoccupy 1970s genre critics. In Bazin's case, his remarks refer to the western only; there is no attempt to relate these films back either to the conditions of their production or to a more general theory of genre. However, in the case of the 1970s work, the western (and, to a lesser extent, the gangster film) was often used as an exemplar of genres in general. As will be shown, this caused rather more problems than it solved, as did the concentration on identifying the formal components of the western, a task dismissed by Bazin as an unsatisfactory way of defining the genre.

Second, there is a clear awareness running beneath Bazin's periodiz-ing 'classical' and 'baroque' terminology of the fact that specific genres do actually change as time passes, with these changes most apparent in the formal organization of the genre in question. A rather banal point perhaps, but later accounts of genre often shied away from a historical awareness of generic forms.

As Tom Ryall has noted, Robert Warshow's writings on the western and the gangster film offer a more ideological analysis than that offered by Bazin.8 What one takes from Warshow's work is a sense of the cultural and historical specificity of these groups of films (which immediately sets his approach apart from Bazin's universalizing tendency), the way in which they provide answers to, and seek to resolve in imaginary terms, particular needs and contradictions within American society. For example, Warshow argues that the fascination with the film gangster entails an ambivalence about certain dominant American values: 'the gangster is the "no" to that great American "yes" which is stamped so big over our official culture and yet has so little to do with the way we really feel about our lives'.9

At the same time, Warshow does not see genres merely as mirroring a pre-existing social reality. Again and again, he stresses, like Bazin, the aesthetic significance of genres but, unlike Bazin, links this with the organization of the film industry and with audience expectations:

the gangster film is simply one example of the movies' constant tendency to create fixed dramatic patterns that can be repeated indefinitely with a reasonable expectation of profit ... One goes to any individual example of the type with very definite expectations, and originality is to be welcomed only in the degree that it intensifies the expected experience without fundamentally altering it ... It is only in an ultimate sense that the type appeals to its audience's experience of reality; much more immediately, it appeals to previous experience of the type itself: it creates its own field of reference.10

Finally, Lawrence Alloway, writing in the 1960s and early 1970s (and thereby overlapping with but considerably different in his approach from other 1970s genre critics), placed far more emphasis than either Bazin or Warshow on an understanding of the audience's experience of movies. 'The proper point of departure for a film critic who is going to write about the movies is membership in the large audience for whom they are intended."1 Importantly, Alloway was also one of the first critics to use the term 'iconography' as a means of analysing generic identity. Borrowing the term, and the critical practice it suggests, from art history (in particular, the work of Erwin Panofsky), Alloway sought to apply this concept to movies by identifying recurrent character types and situations which would become familiar to the audience through repetition and could be used by film-makers as a kind of shorthand.12 For Alloway, genres could be considered as preliminary iconographical groupings:

In this way we can indicate typical patterns of recurrence and change in popular films which can be traced better in terms of iconography than in terms of individual creativity. Indeed, the personal contribution of many directors can only be seen fully after typical iconographical elements have been identified.13

As with Bazin and Warshow, there is a reliance here on traditional notions of authorship, but elsewhere Alloway is far more interested in notions of collective authorship within the Hollywood studio set-up. For this reason, he does not try to identify any genre as a coherent whole but instead prefers to present a more fragmented picture of 'sets' and 'cycles' of films. One might argue here that Warshow's ideas about the 1930s gangster cycle of films could be framed within such an approach, as indeed could Bazin's periodization of the western when shorn of its evaluative rhetoric.

What one takes generally from these three critics is a sense of some of the possibilities of looking at American film in terms of genre. (The notable absence of European cinema from these and many later discussions of genre arguably derives from the highly questionable approach which associates Europe with art and America with commerce.)14 In particular, these early genre critics provide us with ideas about how genres might be dealt with critically, and with discussions of icono-graphy and generic themes which were especially pertinent to what was to follow in the field. Equally important, although it is rather more difficult to pin down, is an awareness in all three writers of what might be termed here the 'liveliness' and changeability of genres, with this awareness taking the form of a sense of genres' historical mutability, their geographical dispersion or their cultural specificity. As will become apparent, these latter insights were not always taken up in subsequent work.

Looking for Factor X: genre studies in the 1970s

'To say a film is a Western is immediately to say that it shares some indefinable 'X' with other films we call 'Westerns'

Andrew Tudor, Theories of Film15

One of the more striking things about 1970s work on genre is how much of it is British in origin. It is likely that the development of genre theory and criticism throughout this period was influenced by concurrent attempts to establish film studies as a recognizable discipline within the British educational establishment (not least because of the fact that much of this work was published by Screen and Screen Education and/or generated within the British Film Institute, all of which had a clear educational brief). Hence there were numerous methodological discussions of the problems involved in defining and analysing film genres, with these surely functioning in part to locate the insights of Bazin and Warshow within the particular academic institutions and discourses of the period. At the same time, however, one also finds the now familiar belief that auteurism is a critical imposition on Hollywood in a way that genre studies is not, and that the turn to genre was a means of engaging with cinema as a popular medium. For example, Ed Buscombe, writing in 1970, notes that 'anyone who is at all concerned with education must be worried at the distance between much of the criticism now written and the way the average audience reacts to a film. For them it is not a new Hawks or Ford or a new Peckinpah; it is a new western."6

In the 1975 article entitled 'Teaching through Genre', Tom Ryall sets out what he sees as the parameters of genre study.

When we suggest that a certain film is a Western we are really positing that a particular range of meanings will be available in the film, and not others. We are defining the limits of its significance. The master image for genre criticism is a triangle composed of artist/film/audience. Genres may be defined as patterns/forms/styles/structures which transcend individual films, and which supervise both their construction by the film maker, and their reading by an audience."

Ryall's article was later to be criticised by Steve Neale for, among other things, the vagueness of its notion of a supervisory relationship between genres, film-makers and audiences." But the point I want to address derives from Ryall's insistence that genre studies takes the form, in his words, of 'defining the limits' of a genre's significance. The identification of a genre (or genres generally) as a legitimate object of study here involves authorizing particular readings of the genre and, as a necessary by-product of this, marginalizing or ignoring others. What this meant in effect at this time, not only in Ryall's article but in most of the other 1970s genre work, was that the 'meaning' of a genre tended to be read out from the films which comprised that genre - this was where the 'truth' of the genre was seen to lie. This was often accompanied by an acknowledgement of the active role of the film-maker in relation to this, but rarely by any clear sense of what audiences - the third element of Ryall's triangle - were supposed to be doing in this generic relationship. Clearly audiences were important - their presence in part served to legitimize genre studies, and distinguished it from an elitist auteurism - but did they bring anything to genres other than a particular knowledge and competence (to do with familiarity with generic conventions) which enabled them to interpret genre films 'correctly'? (This is certainly how the audience is figured in Ryall's article, which concludes with an authoritative analysis of The Searchers, an analysis punctuated by references which imply that this reading is available to an audience if they have the appropriate knowledge.) One consequence of this film-centred approach is that the role of the audience within these critical discourses is often to serve as a rhetorical guarantor of the 'rightness' of the analysis offered by the critic. Real audiences (rather than Ed Bus-combe's 'average audience') sometimes seem a million miles away.

Bearing all this in mind, it is perhaps not surprising that so much of 1970s genre work was concerned with defining particular genres, and the methodological problems involved in this process. One of the key problems was identified by, among others, Andrew Tudor:

To take a genre such as a 'Western', analyse it and list its principle [sic] characteristics, is to beg the question that we must first isolate the body of films which are 'Westerns'. But they can only be isolated on the basis of the 'principal characteristics' which can only be discovered from the films themselves after they have been isolated. That is, we are caught in a circle which first requires that the films are isolated, for which purpose a criterion is necessary, but the criterion is, in turn, meant to emerge from the empirically established common characteristics of the films."

There seems to be a consensus at this time that Bazin and Warshow's tactic of using 'classic' genre films to provide a baseline for genre definition was impressionistic and generally unsatisfactory (although I have already suggested that Bazin and Warshow's writings do involve an awareness of the historical development of genres, an aspect of their work largely ignored in the 1970s). Tudor himself proposed two solutions to what he called the 'empiricist dilemma'. The first, rather arbitrary option was to classify films 'according to a priori chosen criteria'. The second option was 'to lean on a common cultural consensus as to what constitutes a "Western" and then go on to analyse it in detail.'20 In other words, ''Genre is what we collectively believe it to be.'21 In a sense, the latter dissolves the empiricist dilemma by pointing out that the western (or other genres) is defined already via a shared set of beliefs and expectations, and, to a certain extent, places the critic in an Allowayesque position amid the audience (although, significantly, later in his argument Tudor insists that such an approach in itself is an unsatisfactory basis for a genre theory). At the same time, however, it merely replaces one problem with another, namely how does one identify the 'common cultural consensus' which 'defines' a genre?

Douglas Pye offers a rather more sceptical account of the whole business of genre definition in his 1975 article, 'Genre and Movies':

In fact terms like 'definition' and 'classification', which seem almost unavoidable in genre criticism, are probably misleading: they suggest a greater precision of method than is in fact possible, and also tend to imply that genre criticism exists to establish territorial boundaries. It seems more likely that the outlines of any genre will remain indistinct and impossible to chart and that genre criticism should concern itself with identifying tendencies within generic traditions and placing individual works in relation to these.22

Like Alloway, Pye sees genres as offering resistance to any unitary or essentialist definition of their nature. However, unlike Alloway, his remarks are made within the context of a revisionary auteurism where an understanding of genre enables the critic to place the film-maker more successfully in relation to (in Pye's words) 'the immense fertility of convention in the American cinema',23 and which also bestows upon the audience, rather less excitingly, 'the necessary experience to enter into the conventional relationship'.24

In general, and despite widespread discussion of the problem of 'definition', most critics accepted - for pragmatic reasons if no other -that there were readily identifiable entities such as 'the western' and 'the gangster film' and proceeded to elaborate on those elements which they saw as binding together the respective genres. An important influence on this activity was the work of literary theorists Rene Wellek and Austin Warren who in their book Theory of Literature argued that literary genres 'should be conceived ... as a grouping of literary works based, theoretically, upon both outer form (specific metre or structure) and also upon inner form (attitude, tone, purpose - more crudely, subject and audience)'.25 Clearly literary genres are not the same as film genres, but Wellek and Warren's distinction between outer and inner form was quickly translated by critics into filmic terms so that a film genre's outer form was its iconography and its inner form its thematic identity.

One of the first to develop this idea (after Alloway of course) was Colin McArthur who in an unpublished article, 'Genre and Iconography', suggested that an iconographic study of genre would aid a semi-ological understanding of cinema. Focusing on the gangster film, he offered the following as a means of grasping the iconographic identity of that genre:

The recurrent patterns of imagery can be usefully divided into three categories: those surrounding the physical presence, attributes and dress of the actors and the characters they play; those emanating from the milieux within which the characters operate; and those connected with the technology at the characters' disposal.26

Ed Buscombe was also influenced by Wellek and Warren's ideas. In 'The Idea of Genre in The American Cinema' he stresses the importance of an iconographic approach, and argues: 'Since we are dealing with a visual medium we ought surely to look for our defining criteria at what we actually see on the screen.'27 However, he is less concerned than McArthur to schematize the distribution of iconographic elements across films. Instead he lists what he sees as the constitutive iconic elements of the western (which include settings, props, costumes, etc.) and suggests that 'these things operate as formal elements. That is to say, the films are not "about" them any more than a sonnet is about fourteen lines in a certain metre.'28 He then goes on to argue that these formal elements will predispose a genre towards certain themes: 'a start can be made by saying that because of the physical setting a Western is likely to deal successfully with stories about the opposition between man and nature, and the establishment of civilisation'.29

Much of this iconographic work can and has been criticized for its unquestioning acceptance of a form/content distinction (something that is clearly apparent in the quotations above). However, inasmuch as it focuses on the ways in which films can be meaningful without the presence of an auteur figure, there are many useful insights to be gleaned from this material. That most of these accounts eventually turn back to a form of auteurism and away from some of the other avenues they have opened up - most notably, the ways in which audiences might relate to this site of meaning - should not detract unduly from their significance.

If for 1970s critics iconography provided the outer form of a genre, the underlying thematic preoccupations constituted its inner form. One important example of thematic genre analysis is provided in Horizons West, Jim Kitses's book on the western. Kitses argues that the idea of the West within American culture is 'an ambiguous, mercurial concept' which held together a number of ambivalent feelings and ideas about the progress of white American civilization. In order to illustrate this 'philosophical dialectic', Kitses sets out in tabular form a series of opposed values and ideas which, for him, identify the essential focus of thematic concerns for the western.30

THE WILDERNESS CIVILIZATION

The Individual The Community

Freedom restriction

honour institutions

self-knowledge illusion

integrity compromise

self-interest social responsibility

solipsism democracy

Nature Culture

Purity corruption

experience knowledge

empiricism legalism

pragmatism idealism

brutalization refinement

savagery humanity

The West The East

America Europe

the frontier America

equality class

agrarianism industrialism

tradition change

the past the future

The deliberate looseness of Kitses's defining thematic parameters enables him to describe the western as 'a loose, shifting and variegated genre with many roots and branches' and to chastise those critics who 'have ever tried to freeze the genre once and for all in a definitive model of the "classical" Western' (although in Kitses's reading of the genre, most of this variety and vitality is seen to be provided by auteurs such as John Ford, Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah).31 Of course, whether a comparable table of polarities could be drawn up for other genres is another matter entirely, and this problem in turn raises the question of the applicability of Kitses's approach to genre definition in general.

Unlike Kitses, Will Wright's Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western will have no truck with auteurs, but, as with Kitses, one is left wondering about the effectiveness of the proposed methodology outside the relatively limited confines of the western. In his account, and in a manner strikingly reminiscent of Andre Bazin's account of different types of western, Wright seeks to identify particular structural formats and types within the historical progression of the western form and then attempts to relate these to broader shifts in American society. Wright argues that the western is a myth (although his notion of myth, which draws heavily upon the work of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, is very different from that proposed by Bazin) or rather a set of myths which bind the viewer/audience to a particular social order: 'the structure of the myth corresponds to the conceptual needs of social and self-understanding required by the dominant social institutions of that period; the historical changes in the structure of the myth correspond to the changes in the structure of those dominant institutions'.32 Wright's four principal western types - the classical plot, the vengeance variation, the transition theme and the professional plot - are identified through a listing of narrative functions which, according to Wright, each film of a particular type must by definition share.

Wright's book is certainly detailed (and, in parts, dense to the point of laboriousness) and probably represents the most ambitious attempt to define once and for all a particular genre. Despite its exhaustiveness, however, this account of the western often feels rather sketchy, as if, even with all the details given here, further variants and more functions are required. In many ways, Wright's approach lives up to Tom Ryall's claim, discussed above, that genre studies should be about the defining of limits. However, it seems that in reality such an ambitious project finds it very difficult, if not impossible, to incorporate all the variations available within a particular genre into anything more than a provisional critical model. It is the combination of this approach with his mechanistic notion of how cultural production relates to dominant social institutions that finally makes Will Wright's Sixguns and Society an intriguing, but decidedly problematic, intervention in the field of genre criticism.

Some of the difficulties that dogged 1970s genre studies in its attempts to pin down the identity and meaning of genres can also be seen to have derived from an overinvestment in the western, which to a certain extent was figured at this time as the 'typical' genre, an understanding of which would eventually lead to an understanding of all genres. With its very specific historical and geographical setting (which in turn delimited the iconographic and thematic resources available to film-makers), the western offered an apparently hospitable terrain for 1970s genre critics to start their work. However, as it turned out, even with the western the whole business of definition was not at all straightforward; and this was even more the case with genres which did not figure prominently in this debate. For example, both horror and melodrama lacked the visual and iconographic unity of the western. It might be argued that many of the ideas and models developed within genre criticism at this time really only worked for the western (and then only to a limited extent), and when it came to constructing a broader understanding of other genres and genre in general, genre studies as it stood was relatively ill-equipped for the task.

Linked with these problems, and implicit in the very notion that genre studies was or should be about defining and analysing particular individual genres, was a tendency to see genres as being more or less discrete entities. There was little awareness of how they might relate either to each other or to the structures and conventions of Hollywood cinema generally. Douglas Pye (along with Kitses) was one of the few critics of this period to point out that 'What is needed is a sense that all these films belong to the traditions of the American narrative film, a fact that is on the whole treated as unproblematical.'33 Unfortunately, this question did not occupy critics to any great extent throughout the first part of the 1970s and genre studies itself, when it came to the moment when it needed to move away from the western and address some of the broader issues, more or less faded away.

In 1980 Steve Neale reassessed the subject of genre, although he did so from a very different perspective to that adopted by earlier critics. Instead of beginning with and lingering over discussions of individual genres, Neale's book, Genre, outlined a much more wide-ranging theory of genre in terms of its particular function within classical narrative cinema. Influenced by Screen theory (to which Neale himself had been a contributor), Neale's approach involved seeing genres not 'as forms of textual codifications, but as systems of orientations, expectations and conventions that circulate between industry, text and subject'.34 For Neale, Hollywood cinema demanded the production of films which were, to a limited extent, different from each other, and genres provided a means of regulating this: 'they [genres] can function to provide, simultaneously, both regulation and variety'.35 Neale also relates these ideas to an understanding of Hollywood as an institution which seeks to position the spectator in such a way that his or her experience of cinema will be characterized by feelings of mastery and fullness. This is never achieved once and for all but is rather a process, one which involves a constant moving back and forth between moments of equilibrium and control and moments of flux and instability. For Neale, genre provides one of the means by which this process can be managed: 'genres function to move the subject from text to text and from text to narrative system, binding these instances together into a constant coherence, the coherence of the cinematic institution'.36

This is not the place to consider the theoretical issues raised by this model of cinema. As far as genre theory and criticism is concerned, Neale's account successfully identifies the need to think about genres in terms of the role they play within Hollywood cinema. At the same time, however, this account operates on a very abstract level, and generally seems incapable of incorporating any sense of the ways in which individual genres - or even the genre system itself - might change and develop through time. This is arguably because of the inherent idealism of the theory of cinema upon which the book depends for many of its founding assumptions. As a result, while some of the inadequacies of previous accounts of genre are usefully addressed by Neale, some of the strengths of earlier work - in particular, the close attention paid to the ways in which particular films are meaningful - are also lost.

One area of Neale's work which perpetuates one of the difficulties of 1970s genre theory is its conceptualization of the audience. Characteristically for an approach deriving from 1970s Screen theory - which, in Jim McGuigan's words, left 'virtually no conceptual space for the audience as a social rather than textual construct'37 - Neale's account tended to see the genre audience(s) as, to all intents and purposes, an effect of textual and institutional processes. As already noted, earlier critics had constantly acknowledged the importance of the audience but had generally seemed unwilling to think about that audience (or audiences) in any systematic way, preferring as they did to focus on the relationship between film-maker and genre. This omission was all the more striking inasmuch as one of the key issues in 1970s genre studies - namely, the problem of definition - was mainly an issue for critics alone, not for the audiences for whom the genre films were intended. It could have followed from this - but did not in the period under discussion here - that audiences, and what Ed Buscombe referred to rather grudgingly as 'the aesthetic criteria of the man in the street', were rather more important in the 'meaningfulness' of genres than critics had supposed. Indeed, the problem of genre criticism was, at least in part, that the search for the identity and meaning of genre - the elusive Factor X - was being conducted in the wrong place.

Other accounts

In contrast to these approaches to genre, there are numerous studies of particular genres which largely take the existence of the genre in question (and genres in general) for granted and proceed to analyse them in terms of their relation to a socio-historical context, their ideological and political significance, or their development from their origins to the present day. Examples include work on the American horror film and feminist-orientated studies of film noir and melodrama.38 These accounts usually incorporate discussions of what horror/film noir/melodrama as genres actually do and are about, but there is little or no discussion of the issues which so preoccupied the critics and theorists discussed elsewhere in this chapter, issues such as definition and other theoretical and methodological problems associated with thinking about film in terms of genre.

In her article '"Cinema/Ideology/Criticism" Revisited: The Progressive Genre', Barbara Klinger points out some of the dangers courted by such approaches, particularly those which seek to identify any genre as being in itself 'progressive', that is to say disruptive of Hollywood's norms.39 As both Neale and Klinger have argued, disruption is in a sense built into the Hollywood system (with genre a means of regulating this), and any account which misses this point risks overvaluing or misreading the genre with which it is dealing (although some of the accounts criticized by Klinger are - very explicitly - rereadings of genres which seek to place the genre in relation to a particular political or cultural agenda rather than attempts simply to identify what the films are 'really' about).

Despite these dangers, however, this work has been very beneficial to an understanding of particular genres. In part, this contribution is to do with the ways in which empirical material has been amassed which has clarified the historical development of genres.40 In part, it has taken the form of very detailed analyses of how genre films have addressed issues deriving from the context within which they were produced. Generally, we have a clearer view of the contours of genres and what goes on in them than we would have had without this work.

In a 1990 article entitled 'Questions of Genre' Steve Neale was rather more sympathetic to the notion of genres having particular histories and, importantly, also addressed the need to think about the often fluid boundaries between genres and the generic regime in which they are located.41 He was also willing to pay far more attention to elements which had been seen as extraneous to the business of genre study in the past, namely the journalistic and trade discourses which surrounded the films in question.

This move away from an exclusive focus on the films is helpful, but it could be taken further. As Neale himself acknowledges, genres exist not only in American cinema but also in other national cinemas and for non-American audiences. The more one considers this geographical dispersal, the more genres seem to become rather fragmented entities. For example, as far as the horror genre is concerned, it arguably makes more sense to interpret British/Italian/Spanish horror films in relation to those institutions and practices which characterize the local cinematic regime rather than to lump them all together into a unified whole (with much the same to be said for other 'international' genres - melodramas, thrillers and, to a certain extent, even the western).42 Similarly, it is unlikely that the response of American audiences to, say, the western is going to be identical with the response of European audiences, and any study of the western should take this into account. This is particularly so given that recent work both on fan culture and on European popular cinema has alerted us to some of the ways in which specific audiences can produce readings and interpretations that are not immediately available through a traditionally academic textual analysis.43 At the very least, it is worth considering what role such readings might have in the constitution of genres.

What this would mean for genre studies in effect is a certain amount of disruption. In particular, the triangular (and in retrospect rather hermetic) relationship between film-maker, film and audience drawn by 1970s genre theory would have to be pulled apart so that other issues -to do with national cinemas and the role of audiences - could be addressed. This does not mean that broader patterns or relationships could not be drawn, but they would need to be built upon a sense of the proliferation of genres across different contexts and institutions. It is arguably only through an awareness of the 'liveliness' of genres - or their resistance to the fixed and exclusive definitions which proved so troublesome for 1970s writing on genre - that an understanding of this important area of film can be further developed.

Notes:

1 Antony Easthope, 'Notes on Genre', Screen Education, 32/33, autumn-winter, (1979-80), p. 39.

2 Paul Willemen, 'Presentation' in Steve Neale, Genre, London: British Film Institute, 1980, pp. 1-4.

3 Andre Bazin's What is Cinema: Volume 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971) includes both 'The Western, or the American Film par excellence" and 'The Evolution of the Western' (both of which were originally published in the 1950s).

4 'The Western, or the American Film par excellence', p. 141.

5 Ibid., p. 142.

6 Ibid.

1 'The Evolution of the Western', pp. 150-1.

8 See Robert Warshow, The Immediate Experience, New York: Atheneum, 1971, which contains both 'The Gangster as Tragic Hero' (originally published in 1948) and 'Movie Chronicle: The Westerner' (originally published in 1954).

9 'Movie Chronicle: The Westerner', p. 136.

10 'The Gangster as Tragic Hero', pp. 129-30.

11 Lawrence Alloway, Violent America: The Movies 1946-1964, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971, p. 19.

12 Lawrence Alloway, 'Iconography and the Movies', Movie, no. 7, (Feb—March 1963), pp. 4—6. Also see Erwin Panofsky's essay, 'Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art', in his book, Meaning in the Visual Arts, New York: Overlook Press, 1974 (originally published in 1955), pp. 26-54.

13 Alloway, Violent America, p. 41.

14 Andrew Tudor discusses European art cinema as a genre in Theories of Film, London: Seeker and Warburg, 1973, pp. 145-7: also see Steve Neale, 'Art Cinema as Institution', Screen, vol. 22, no. 1 (1981), pp. ll^tO.

15 Tudor, Theories of Film, p. 132.

16 Ed Buscombe, 'The Idea of Genre in the American Cinema', Screen, vol. 11, no. 2 (March-April 1970), p. 43.

17 Tom Ryall, 'Teaching Through Genre', Screen Education, no. 17 (1975), pp. 27-28.

18 See Steve Neale, Genre, pp. 7-17 for a discussion of 1970s genre theory.

19 Tudor, Theories of Film, p. 135-8.

20 Ibid., p. 138.

21 Ibid., p. 139.

22 Douglas Pye, 'Genre and Movies', Movie, no. 20 (1975), p. 29.

23 Ibid., p. 30.

24 Ibid.

25 Quoted in Buscombe, p. 36.

26 Colin McArthur, 'Genre and Iconography', British Film Institute seminar paper, p. 2. Some of the ideas included here were incorporated into McArthur's book, Underworld USA, London: Seeker and Warburg/British Film Institute, 1972. For a critique of McArthur, see Neale, pp. 11-13.

27 Buscombe, p. 36.

28 Ibid., p. 38.

29 Ibid.

30 Jim Kitses, Horizons West, London: Thames and Hudson/British Film Institute, 1969, p. 11.

31 Ibid., p. 17.

32 Will Wright, Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975, p. 14.

33 Pye, p. 31.

34 Neale, Genre p. 19.

35 Ibid., p. 51.

36 Ibid., p. 49.

37 Jim McGuigan, Cultural Populism, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 62.

38 Andrew Britton, et a/., eds., The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, Toronto: Festival of Festivals, 1979; E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Women and Film Noir, London: British Film Institute, 1978; Christine Gledhill, ed., Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film, London: British Film Institute, 1987.

39 Barbara Klinger, '"Cinema/Ideology/Criticism" Revisited: The Progressive Genre' in Barry K. Grant, ed., Film Genre Reader, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986, pp. 74-90.

40 For example, see David J. Skal, Hollywood Gothic, London: Andre Deutsch, 1992, for an invaluable historical account of the passage of Dracula from novel to screen.

41 Stephen Neale, 'Questions of Genre', Screen, vol. 31, no. 1, (spring 1990), pp. 45-66.

42 On European horror - still an under-researched area - see Peter Hutchings, Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993; Leon Hunt, 'A (Sadistic) Night at the Opera: Notes on the Italian Horror Film', Velvet Light Trap, no. 30 (fall 1992), pp. 65-75; Kirn Newman, 'Thirty Years in Another Town: The History of Italian Exploitation Part I', Monthly Film Bulletin, no. 624 (January 1986), pp. 20-4; David Pirie, A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema 1946-72, London: Gordon Fraser, 1973; on Italian westerns see Christopher Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns, London: Routledge, 1981.

43 For a discussion of fans, see Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers, London: Routledge, 1992; and Lisa Lewis, ed., The Adoring Audience, London: Rout-ledge, 1992. For discussions of European genre cinema, see Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau, eds, Popular European Cinema, London: Rout-ledge, 1992.

Historical Poetics of Cinema by David Bordwell

2007-07-20T12:04:00.000+07:00

Historical Poetics of Cinema
by David Bordwell

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From The Cinematic Text: Methods and Approaches, ed. R. Barton Palmer (New York: AMS Press, 1989), pp. 369-398.

1. Introduction

The volume you hold in your hands belongs to a genre that came into currency during the postwar boom in college literary criticism. In the late 1940s, two major works, Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature and Stanley Edgar Hyman's The Armed Vision, set forth the premise that literary studies played host to distinct "methods." Intrinsic/ extrinsic; textual/ contextual; sociological/ psychological/Marxist/psychoanalytic/archetypal/formalist/ deconstructionist/ reader-responsiveness: as such categories have accumulated over the last forty years, the literary institution has believed itself moving beyond the doctrines of New Criticism. While the field was being carved up methodically, the "anthology of approaches" moved into the library and the classroom. The genre became a going concern in the 1950s and 1960s, and it continues to flourish. This volume reminds us that film studies has, as part of its entry into the academy, come to subscribe to critical Methodism--an affiliation testified to by the title of one of the most popular anthologies, Movies and Methods. A recent collection of approaches to television criticism may signal the legitimation of tv studies under the same auspices.

There would be much to remark on in this process, not least the extent to which film and television studies may seek to establish their seriousness by asserting that, whatever the intrinsic importance of the object of study, a set of up-to-date approaches constitutes adequate credentials. But I sketch this institutional background for another reason: to establish that historical poetics does not grow organically out of this history, and this for a very good reason. What I shall be discussing is not a method at all.

In film studies, as in its literary counterpart, "method" has been largely synonymous with "interpretive school." An interpretive school, I take it, consists chiefly of: (a) a semantic field with which particular theoretical concepts are associated; (b) a set of inferential procedures that render certain features of films salient and significant on a priori grounds; (c) one or more conceptual maps of textual progression across which salient features enact a transformation of the semantic field; (d) a set of characteristic rhetorical tactics for setting forth the writer's argument. For example, the psychoanalytic critic posits a semantic field (eg, male/ female, or self/ other, or sadism/ masochism) with associated concepts (eg, the deployment of power around sexual difference); concentrates on textual cues that can bear the weight of the semantic differentiae (eg, narrative roles, the act of looking); traces a drama of semantic transformation (eg, through condensation and displacement the subject finds identity in the Symbolic); and deploys a rhetoric that seeks to gain the reader's assent to the interpretation's conclusions (e.g., a rhetoric of demystification). Every recognized "method"--phenomenological, feminist, Marxist, or whatever- can be described along these lines. They all aim to produce interpretations--that is, the ascription of implicit or symptomatic meanings to texts.

A historical poetics of cinema does not fit this description. It does not constitute a distinct critical school; it has no privileged semantic field, no core of procedures for identifying or interpreting textual features, no map of the flow of meaning, and no unique rhetorical tactics. It does not seek to produce interpretations. What, then, does it do?

2. Poetics and Historical Poetics

Aristotle's fragmentary lecture notes, the Poetics, addressed what we nowadays recognize as drama and literature. Since his day we have had Stravinsksy's Poetics of Music, Todorov's Poetics of Prose, a study of the poetics of architecture, and of course the Russian Formalists' Poetics of the Cinema. Such extensions of the concept are plausible, since it need not be restricted to any particular medium. "Poetics" derives from the Greek word poiesis, or active making. The poetics of any medium studies the finished work as the result of a process of construction--a process which includes a craft component (e.g., rules of thumb), the more general principles according to which the work is composed, and its functions, effects, and uses. Any inquiry into the fundamental principles by which a work in any representational medium is constructed can fall within the domain of poetics.

By adding the predicate "historical" I mean to narrow the field somewhat. Poetics of literature has long been the province of sterile taxonomies and dogmatic prescriptions. In the twentieth century, German-language art studies and Slavic literary theory laid the groundwork for a historical poetics. Heinrich Wolfflin, Alois Riegl, Erwin Panofsky, and later E. H. Gombrich showed how one could systematically describe forms and styles in painting and go on to explain their changes causally. The Russian Formalists--most notably Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Boris Eikhenbaum, and Roman Jakobson--and the Prague Structuralists--e.g., Jan Mukarovsky and (again) Jakobson--proposed both concrete analyses of literary works and larger explanations for how they functioned in historical contexts. This tradition has been alive in film studies as well, crossing periods and doctrinal schools and recently emerging as a significant force in academic work.

A historical poetics of cinema produces knowledge in answer to two broad questions:

1. What are the principles according to which films are constructed and by means of which they achieve particular effects?

2. How and why have these principles arisen and changed in particular empirical circumstances?

Historical poetics is thus characterized by the phenomena it studies--films' constructional principles and effects--and the questions it asks about those phenomena--their constitution, functions, consequences, and historical manifestations. Poetics does not put at the forefront of its activities phenomena such as the economic patterns of film distribution, the growth of the teenage audience, or the ideology of private property. The poetician may need to investigate such matters, and indeed many others, but they become relevant only in the light of more properly poetic issues. Underlying this hierarchy of significance is the assumption that, while in our world everything is connected to everything else, one can produce novel and precise knowledge only by making distinctions among core questions, peripheral questions, and irrelevant questions.

Andre Bazin's "Evolution of the Language of the Cinema" can illustrate how a project within historical poetics works. The essay relies upon some fundamental conceptual distinctions, such as inter-shot effects vs. intra-shot effects, types of montage, distortion vs. fidelity, spatiotemporal unity vs. discontinuity, shallow space vs. depth. Bazin holds these to be principles determining the stylistic construction of any film whatsoever. They yield categories which permit the analyst to correlate devices with particular effects--eg, a linearization of meaning with "visible" montage versus a more natural conveyance of meaning through Welles' or Wyler's depth of field. Furthermore, Bazin offers a historical account which employs these categories to trace the development of Western cinema from primitive filmmaking to Neorealism. Bazin argues for a dialectical movement whereby the struggle between a realistic style and a more distorted style reached a compromise in the Hollywood decoupage of the 1930s, and then was transcended by a new synthesis in the deep-focus style.

While Bazin's remains the most influential history of film style currently available, I am not here concerned with the persuasiveness of his argument; the point is to show how the essay exemplifies the possibilities of a poetics. For one thing, it self-consciously constructs its analytical categories while also referring to a range of data by which the arguments can be assessed. Bazin supplies concrete historical evidence that subjects his claims to revision or rejection. This appeal to empirical evidence, or "facts," does not make poetics an "empiricism," at least, in any interesting sense of that term. A poetics can be rationalist or empiricist, Kantian or phenomenological, deductivist or inductivist, idealist (as Bazin probably was) or positivist (as Barry Salt seems to be). Insofar as a poetics seeks to explain historically existing works, whatever its ontology or epistemology or discovery procedures, it requires an appeal to intersubjectively accepted data which are in principle amenable to alternative explanation. Just as in the philosophy of language, a Chomskyan nativist must confront the fact that people seem to acquire significant aspects of language through experience, so even the post-Structuralist film theorist must recognize the existence of apparent motion or characterization or editing. Every enterprise within film study necessarily draws upon facts in this sense. Whether such facts are "socially constructed" is an open question. (Indeed, it is partly an empirical question.)

Bazin's "Evolution" essay also illustrates the extent to which a poetics takes as its object a body of conventions. Conventions, in film as in other domains, lie at the intersection of logical distinctions and social customs. Admittedly, Bazin's realist aesthetic leads him to range stylistic devices along a continuum whereby some are less "conventional" than others. Nevertheless, he is studying constructive choices which have collectively recognized functions within definable contexts; editing and deep-focus, he argues, constitute reciprocal choices in the history of Western cinema. These conventions can be regarded as leading to preferred choices--that is, norms or rules, two more concepts valuable for a poetics.

Bazin's essay exemplifies still other aspects of a cinematic poetics. He refuses a division of labor among theory, history, and criticism; the essay is all three at once. It mixes intensive scrutiny with extensive viewing. Bazin considers both "texts" and "contexts" (technology, genre). He offers descriptions, analyses, and explanations: he seeks to establish what happened, how it happened, and why it happened. Finally, Bazin presupposes that the phenomena he studies are the results of filmmakers' choices. (Welles could have cut Citizen Kane as if it were It Happened One Night.) A historical poetics will thus often be concerned to reconstruct the options facing a filmmaker at a given historical juncture, assuming that the filmmaker chooses an option in order to achieve some end.

My initial questions and my exposition of Bazin should raise several questions. What, for example, is the status of the "principles" studied by poetics? At what level of generality are they pitched? Are they conceived as "specific" to cinema in some sense? My replies here must be brief. I would argue that the principles should be conceived as underlying concepts, constitutive and/or regulative, governing the sorts of material that can be used in a film and the possible ways in which it can be formed. The degree of generality will depend upon the questions asked and the phenomena to be studied. If you want to know what makes Hollywood narratives cohere, "personalized causality" may suffice as one constructive principle; if you want to know what distinguishes the Western from the musical, that principle will not do the job. For some poeticians, some principles are held to be "laws" on the model of covering laws in physical science; but one need not push this far. One could assert that a concept or category--eg, intra-shot/ inter-shot relations--is conceptually stable but that the constructive principles that utilize it are so historically variable that they constitute empirical generalizations or tendencies.

On the matter of specificity, suffice it to say that although certain poeticians have assumed a distinction between the cinematic and the non-cinematic, this is by no means constitutive of poetics as such. One could assume that any film could be studied by poetics, with no film lying any closer to the essence of the medium than others. One could, however, argue that the distinction is not a substantive but a functional one, to be filled out in different periods with different content. Or one could use the cinematic/ non-cinematic distinction in an explanation by seeking to show that in particular circumstances this pair of concepts entered into the norms of filmmaking practice.

Since poetics is often assumed to be merely a descriptive or classificatory enterprise, the range of explanations it offers also requires some elaboration. There is no need to assume any one model of causation and change. Bazin argues for a suprapersonal dialectic through which cinema evolves toward an ever more faithful capturing of phenomenal reality. This is a teleological explanation. One could also propose an intentionalistic model that centers on more localized acts of choice and avoidance. Two collaborators and I have argued for a functionalist model of explanation, whereby the institutional dynamics of filmmaking set up constraints and preferred options that fulfill overall systemic norms.

Nor need poetics confine itself to "immanent" explanations that refuse to leave the field of cinema or art or signifying practice. Nothing prevents the poetician from arguing that economics, ideology, the class struggle, or inherent social or psychological dispositions operate as causes of constructional devices or effects. There is likewise no need to cast poetics as offering "scientific" explanations (although, again, some poeticians have done so). Poetics has the explanatory value of any empirical discipline, which always involves a degree of tentativeness about conclusions. On the other hand, one should not discard "scientific" pretensions too quickly, since there are many sorts of science, such as geography and meteorology, which are low in predictive power but high in ex post facto explanatory power. Poetics can, in short, be considered either as a science offering knowledge in some strict sense, or as a discipline that aims at Verstehen, or "understanding."

Finally, explanation in poetics does not confine itself to issues of what films mean. Of course, meaning in one (very general) sense comprises a big part of what poetics describes, analyzes, and explains; but meaning in the more specific sense that is the product of film interpretation ("readings") can be considered only one domain of inquiry. Films produce many effects, ranging from perceptual ones (eg, the phenomenon of apparent motion, the perception of color or shape) to conceptual ones (eg, how we we know that X is the protagonist) that film interpretation never seeks to explain. Historical poetics offers explanations, not explications. In the modern critical institution, of course, explications need explaining.

3. Domains and Tendencies

The core questions of poetics have led to the formulation of distinct domains and tendencies within the field. Traditional poetics distinguishes among three objects of study.

1. Thematics considers subject matter and theme as components of the constructive process. Not every study of such matters automatically qualifies as a contribution to poetics, since many such studies are unconcerned with films' constructive principles; the film may be ransacked for discrete items of "content" (eg, the representation of social stereotypes) which are then used to answer questions about, say, the film industry or cultural values. Thematics would study motifs, iconography, and themes as materials, as constructive principles, or as effects of constructive principles. For example, several scholars have revealed how genres present recurring imagery, myths, and themes, while other writers, inspired by art-historical research, have shown the importance of iconography in popular cinema.

2. Constructional form. We lack a term for those trans-media architectonic principles that govern the shape and dynamics of a film. The most prominent research domain here is the theory and analysis of narrative, which is a fundamental constructive principle in films. Current interest in this subject should not, however, lead to a neglect of other compositional principles, such as argumentative form, categorical form, associational form, and abstract form.

3. Stylistics deals with the materials and patterning of the film medium as components of the constructive process. Bazin's "Evolution" essay is a model of stylistic history.

We could carve up the domain of historical poetics in still other ways. Following R. S. Crane, we could distinguish studies of precompositional factors (sources, influences, cliches, received forms) from compositional ones (normalized principles of combination and transformation within works) and from postcompositional ones (effects, reception, varying responses in different contexts). For example, Noel Burch's To the Distant Observer treats Japanese cinema as the legatee of stylistic practices from earlier centuries, while Vance Kepley's In the Service of the State, using a different precompositional focus, traces more proximate influences on Dovzhenko's films. The work of Charles Musser, Tom Gunning, and Andre Gaudreault has demonstrated that pre-1915 films obey coherent compositional norms. And recent work in reception by Janet Staiger has revealed how audiences' varying construals of the same film presuppose historically variable viewing conventions. In my own studies of Dreyer and Ozu, I have tried to relate the three domains by suggesting historically determinate gaps among them. In the works of Ozu, for instance, source material and contemporary conventions are transformed by specific compositional procedures, but the results have been appropriated differently by various audiences.

Recognizing that linguistic analogies are notoriously shaky in film studies, I will risk one more mapping of the field. Like linguistics, film poetics has its "semantics," the study of how meaning is produced. It has its "syntactics," the study of rules for selecting and combining units (with respect to style, Raymond Bellour's micro-analyses; with respect to compositional form, Thierry Kuntzel's study of openings, Peter Wollen's applications of Propp, or Rick Altman's "dual-focus" narrative). And poetics has its "pragmatics," the study of how relations between viewer and text develop in the process of the film's unfolding (e.g., accounts of narration or of filmic "enunciation"). Meaning, structure, and process--these three aspects of any representational system are also central to poetics.

These equable mappings of the terrain conceal, of course, how much territory is in dispute. I have already suggested several issues about which poeticians wrangle; two more divergences seem to me worth brief discussion.

Across history, poetics has had to steer a course between strictly "immanent" accounts and strictly "subsumptive" ones. Few poeticians have been willing to accept the consequences of an utterly intrinsic account of constructional processes; even Wolfflin, mistakenly treated as the model of the pure formalist, explained changes in artistic styles partly by changes in a culture's visual habits. On the other side, very few poeticians have sought to account for every phenomenon by appeal to processes in other social domains; even the Zhdanovite recognizes some special quality in art. For most poeticians, the constructional principles studied are not self-sealed, but they are also not in every respect subsumable to other principles.

Assuming that the escape hatch of "relative autonomy" is of no help, we can distinguish two tendencies within poetics. One tendency hypothesizes that the phenomenon we study has a considerable degree of self-regulated coherence. The early Shklvosky seems to hold this view; he seeks to explain the laws of fairy tale composition by purely poetic principles like repetition, retardation, and so forth. He gives theoretical priority to such factors. In film poetics, perhaps Burch's Theory of Film Practice approaches this position. The second tendency, articulated by the later Russian Formalists and the Prague Structuralists, gives immanent factors only a methodological priority. For example, as Tynianov and Jakobson point out, even if the immanent evolution of literature can explain the direction of change, it cannot explain timing, which must be governed by extraliterary causes. A comparable position is taken by Staiger, Thompson, and myself in studying the history of the classical Hollywood cinema. Here the analyst looks first to the "immanent" factors that might be the most proximate and pertinent causal factors but also assumes that virtually every explanatory task will require moving to those mediations that lie in "adjacent" domains.

To continue the geographical metaphor, poetics is less a field with distinct boundaries than a kind of Alsace-Lorraine constantly being claimed by interested neighbors. On one side is Aesthetics, which, in the eighteenth century, replaced the study of poetic praxis with a concern for the philosophical problems involved in the creation and appreciation of beauty. On another side lies Semiotics, which seeks to subsume poetics into a general theory of the production of meaning. Interestingly, poeticians have been drafted into both camps. Aristotle, the Russian Formalists, and the Prague Structuralists can play roles in the history of aesthetics, as in Beardsley's survey history, or they can be promoted to the rank of proto-semioticians, as Peter Steiner does.

In my view, the tension between semiotics and aesthetics has been immensely fruitful. There remains, however, a core of questions and issues that cannot be wholly absorbed into the adjacent areas. It is useful to differentiate between the practical theory of an art and the philosophy of it. The "practical theory" of music or poetry, for instance rests upon a posteriori questions, involving empirical generalizations about conventions and practices in these arts. From this perspective, film poetics is a systematizing of theoretical inquiry into cinematic practices as they have existed. The philosophy of an art, on the other hand, inquires into the a priori aspects of it; it involves conceptual analysis of its logical nature and functions. On the whole, aesthetics concentrates upon such matters. As for semiotics, it concentrates on matters of meaning, which is only part of the effects for which a poetics seeks to account; on the other hand, if semiotics seeks to explain "the life of signs in society," it encompasses far more than any poetics can. Yet one should not discourage border crossings; if Barthes' S/Z offers a semiotics and Goodman's Languages of Art offers an aesthetics, both are splendid contributions to poetics.<

4. Neoformalism

One trend within the domain of historical poetics has been dubbed by Kristin Thompson "neoformalism." It is associated with research she and I have done over the past dozen years or so. The trend derives principally from Slavic poetics, particular the Russian and Czech thinkers, but it is also influenced by the more or less oblique "return to Slavic theory" one finds in Todorov, Genette, the 1966-1970 Barthes, and contemporary Israeli poeticians like Meir Sternberg. It draws heavily upon the writings of Bazin, the Soviet filmmakers, and Burch, without being committed to a "phenomenological" or "materialist" or "serialist" theory of film. In fact, neoformalism is not a theory of film at all, if we take that to consist of a set of propositions explaining the fundamental nature and function of all cinematic phenomena.

Neoformalism has even less in common with what has been called "Grand Theory," that development in the humanities that has embraced ever more wide-ranging intellectual programs. Under these auspices, the study of film has become "only a part" of the theory of ideology or of sexual difference or, most abstractly, of "the human subject." The principal issue here is not whether there is something "inherently filmic" that must be addressed, for, as mentioned above, the specificity of cinema may be conceived as more social and functional than substantive. The point is that concepts constructed at this level of generality and abstraction are not well suited to answering questions pitched at lower levels. Neoformalism, which addresses the latter sort of questions, is thus not a general theory of film, let alone a Grand one.

Nor is it, once again, a method. It is a set of assumptions, an angle of heuristic approach, and a way of asking questions. It is frankly empirical and places great emphasis on the discovery of facts about films. Since recent film theory usually claps the word "fact" within sneer-quotes, my claim is apt to seem a recourse to naive empiricism; but this conclusion, already jumped to by one writer, is itself naive. As I indicated above, any poetics---indeed, any descriptive or explanatory project--is committed to some grounding in intersubjective data. Furthermore, one can consider a fact to be an accepted claim about what there is in the world, including theoretical or unobservable entities--something that positivism rules out. Moreover, there is no question of letting the facts speak for themselves. Neoformalism presumes that one cannot discover factual answers to questions about films' construction without carefully devising analytical concepts appropriate to these questions. But it also assumes that not all concepts are equally precise, coherent, or pertinent, and so we may evaluate competing conceptual schemes; it also assumes that not all concepts explain the data with equal clarity, richness, and economy; and, crucially, it assumes that we are not complete prisoners of our conceptual schemes, that we may so construct them that anomalous and exceptional phenomena are not invisible but actually leap to our notice. In sum, neoformalist poetics makes theoretically-defined, open-ended, corrigible, and falsifiable claims.

This is a direct result of its not being a general theory of film. If I am bent on substantiating the belief that every film constructs an ongoing process of "subject positioning" for the spectator, nothing I find in a film will disconfirm it. Given the roomy interpretive procedures of film criticism, I can treat every cut or camera movement, every line of dialogue or piece of character behavior, as a reinforcement of subject positioning. The theory thus becomes vacuous, since any theory that explains every phenomenon by the same mechanism explains nothing. On the other hand, I can ask how Hollywood films secure unity among successive scenes, and answer with something more concrete--say, that one scene often ends with an unresolved causal sub-chain that is soon resolved in the following scene. Here I have said something that is informative: it is not self-evident, it is not discoverable by deduction from a set of premises, and it is fruitful, leading to further questions. (Does this suggest some hypotheses about the nature of narrational norms in Hollywood? Do films in other filmmaking traditions utilize more self-contained episodes?) Most important, the answer I supply is empirically disconfirmable. If it is disconfirmed, I need to rethink the data and indeed, the question itself. Shklovsky's counsel of skepticism should be our guide: "If the facts destroy the theory--so much the better for the theory. It is created by us, not entrusted to us for safekeeping." Neoformalism's hypotheses are grounded in a theoretical activity rather than a fixed theory. This theorizing moves across various levels of generality and deploys various concepts and categories. It does not presume global propositions to which the researcher pledges unswerving allegiance and which automatically block our noticing recalcitrant data.

In being question-centered and focused on particular phenomena, neoformalism does resemble the practices of science as many theorists are coming to understand them. Stephen Jay Gould writes:

Progress in science, paradoxically by the layman's criterion, often demands that we back away from cosmic questions of greatest scope (anyone with half a brain can formulate 'big' questions in his armchair, so why heap kudos on such a pleasant and pedestrian activity?). Great scientists have an instinct for the fruitful and the doable, particularly for smaller questions that lead on and eventually transform the grand issues from speculation to action....Great theories must sink a huge anchor in details.

This is not to grant neoformalism the status of a science, only to suggest that as compared with Grand Theory, its approach and spirit are closer to certain scientific practices. It is in this frame of reference we can best understand Boris Eikhenbaum's defense of the Russian Formalist group:

In our studies we value a theory only as a working hypothesis to help us discover and interpret facts; that is, we determine the validity of the facts and use them as the material of our research. We are not concerned with definitions, for which the late-comers thirst; nor do we build general theories, which so delight eclectics. We posit specific principles and adhere to them insofar as the material justifies them. If the material demands their refinement or change, we change or refine them.

With no set point of arrival, committed to no a priori conclusions, seeking to answer precisely posed question with concepts that will be refined through encounter with data, neoformalism deploys "hollow" categories. While the "Oedipal trajectory" or "looking equals power" carry interpretable meaning whenever they appear, other concepts mark out fundamental constructive principles that have effects but not a priori meanings. An instance of such a "hollow" principle that of norms. The neoformalist assumes that every film may be placed in relation to sets of transtextual norms. These operate at various levels of generality and possess various degrees of coherence. For instance, in most studio-made narrative films, the credits sequence characteristically occurs before the first scene, but it may also, as a lesser option, occur after a "pre-credits sequence." Such norms, while "codified," are not reducible to codes in the semiotic sense, since there is no fixed meaning attached to one choice rather than the other. And no particular meaning automatically proceeds from Godard's decision, in Detective, to salt the credits throughout the first several scenes.

A great deal of theorizing about norms remains to be done. (Are there, for instance, fruitful distinctions among convention, norm, and rule?) But even at this stage neoformalist poetics has put forward fairly detailed and comprehensive accounts of norms of narration and style in Hollywood cinema, "art cinema," Soviet montage cinema, and other modes. These are not definitive analyses; they are attempts to chart the range of constructional options open to filmmakers at various historical conjunctures, and the results are always open to revision. At this point, however, several analytical concepts seem well-founded. For example, Neoformalist poetics has established the usefulness of distinguishing between stylistic or narrative devices (e.g., the cut or the motif) and systems (e.g., spatial continuity or narrative causality) within which they achieve various functions. Establishing a unified locale is a function which different devices and different systems have fulfilled in various ways across history. But even this function is not historically invariant. (Some norms do not make unity of locale a salient feature.) In practical research terms, neoformalism's emphasis on historically changing norms, devices, systems, and functions requires that the analyst complement the scrutiny of single films by studying a wide range of films.

An orientation toward transtextual norms allows the analyst to be sensitive to the abnormal. Neoformalist poetics has been especially interested in how, against a background of conventions, a film or a director's work stands out. Kristin Thompson has been concerned to demonstrate how the works of Eisenstein, Ozu, Tati, Godard, Renoir, and others provide not wayward deviations from norms but rather systematic innovations in thematic, stylistic, and narrative construction. Neoformalism balances a concern for revealing the tacit conventions governing the ordinary film with a keen interest in the bizarre film that, subtly or flagrantly, challenges them. Accordingly, new concepts will often have to be forged. To account for Ozu's editing, Thompson and myself had to propose the concept of the "graphic match" and to spell out how Ozu's across-the-line shot/ reverse-shots do not sporadically transgress rules but rather achieve perceptual functions within a larger, idiosyncratic system of 360-degree space.

The construction of concepts in accord with empirical data leads to historical explanations for the phenomena in question. Neoformalist poetics has relied upon three explanatory schemes, adjusted to cases at hand: a rational-agent model, an institutional model, and a perceptual cognitive model. The first follows from the concept of the filmmaker's choosing among constructional options. Here the task becomes that of reconstructing, on the basis of whatever historical data one can find, the choice situation which the filmmaker confronts. This is not to say, however, that the filmmaker becomes the sole source of the film's construction and effects.

The institutional dimension--most proximately, the social and economic system of filmmaking, involving tacit aesthetic assumptions, the division of labor, and technological procedures--forms the horizon of what is permitted or encouraged at particular moments. It is not just that the filmmaker's choices are constrained; they are actively constituted in large part by socially structured factors. In the Hollywood studio system of the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, the continuity script not only became a way to rationalize production but also encouraged workers to think of a film as assemblage out of discrete bits (shots, scenes), and the individual filmmaker found choices and opportunities structured accordingly. By the same token, an institution centered conception would seem the most promising basis for the study of how spectators use appropriate films in different historical contexts (though I would argue that the "microfoundations" of such a study would have to include some rational-agent assumptions).

Most recently, a perceptual-cognitive model has been used to describe and explain the effects of various constructional tactics. I have proposed that a Constructivist theory of psychological activity yields the most discriminating and detailed explanation of such narrational principles as syuzhet/fabula construction and such stylistic processes as continuity editing. In a work in progress, I consider how the routine practices of film interpretation can be partly explained through principles of inference and problem-solving set forth by cognitive theory. In all cases, the models are not absolute; the neoformalist poetician does not treat individual phenomena as instantiating laws but rather as demanding an inferential argument "to the best explanation," which always remains in principle corrigible.

Some discussions of Godard's Sauve qui peut (la vie) provide a convenient occasion to exemplify the richness of the neoformalist approach. For example, in his review of the film Colin MacCabe followed the conventional journalistic format: teaser (description of the notorious "sex machine" scene), one-paragraph plot synopsis, background on Godard's career (over a page), mention of themes (town vs. country, prostitution, masculine vs. feminine), discussion of "form" (the image track dominates the soundtrack), reflections on the author as person (Godard's dissatisfaction with the familiar "economic and aesthetic constraints," as confided to MacCabe), and a final, unexplained invocation of "the exhilaration of actually watching the movie." As in his contemporaneous book on Godard, MacCabe's discussion relies upon a straightforward thematics (Godard's fetishization of woman) and an "empty" formalism (e.g., the celebration, in all contexts, of moments when sound dominates image).

Or, to take a more substantial example, consider the articles on Sauve qui peut (la vie) gathered in Camera Obscura. Although more detailed than MacCabe's, they are plagued by errors of description; several also make some questionable assumptions (e.g., that the protagonist Paul Godard stands for the director, or that all cuts "cannot be seen"). One essay, by perhaps the most influential textual analyst, describes the film's editing this way:

The images seem to hit each other, musically, pictorially, striking each other admirably and thus making impossible any continuity of movement which would produce, the moment it is a question of bodies and of the sexes, an imaginary ideality that has simply ceased to exist.

It must be recalled that 1970s film theory never tired of attacking exactly such writing as "impressionistic."

In its commitment to explaining difficult films precisely, neoformalist poetics offers signal advantages. Kristin Thompson's lengthy analysis of Sauve qui peut (la vie) sets out to answer some specific questions: what makes the film so complex, and how and why have critics made it seem far simpler than it is? She situates the film within its institutional context, that of the promotion of a new, apolitical, "accessible" Godard. She goes on to show how the recurrence of characteristic themes (e.g., prostitution) and attitudes (e.g., misogyny) lent the film an easy recognition along the lines that MacCabe in fact took. She argues that Godard deliberately solicits art-cinema comprehension strategies, of exactly the kind that the Camera Obscura writers employ (without displaying any awareness of those as normalized strategies). Thompson goes on to reveal how gaps and dislocations in the syuzhet prompt such thematizing. In place of MacCabe's hackneyed country/ city opposition, Thompson shows that the film employs a continuum of settings: a city, a town, a village, a farm, and the countryside. Instead of a plot synopsis, Thompson offers a segmentation that points up the temporal construction of the syuzhet. Rather than positing a form and a content, Thompson argues that the film transforms its thematic material by means of an overall organization of parallel parts which compare different characters. Having established all these macrostructural factors, Thompson is able to explain functionally what most critics ignore or interpret atomistically: the stop-motion sequences that interrupt the film and (contra MacCabe) the insistent and ambiguous organization of sounds. It is not just that Thompson's analysis of narrative, narration, and style has a finesse not approached by any other discussion. The real point is the range and depth of the conceptual scheme she employs. Neoformalist poetics, while concentrating on historical context, narrative form, and cinematic style, does not exclude thematic interpretations. It absorbs them into a dynamic system--here, one that reveals why discrete meanings can be the bait at which critics will snap, and how a clever filmmaker has set the trap for them. Historical poetics, in its concern for constructional effects, thereby comes to include the study of the conventions of film criticism itself.

5. Grand Theory, SLAB Theory, and Poetics

Although Grand Theory and historical poetics operate at different levels of generality, they invite comparison, if only because most people studying film have been influenced by one particular version of the former. This version treats cinema study as an instance of the study of the "human subject," employing tenets based upon Saussurean semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusserian Marxism, and Barthesian textual theory. I shall therefore call this version, acronymically and a little acrimoniously, SLAB theory. SLAB theory is most clearly identified with the main current of work in Cahiers du cinema during the early 1970s and Screen later in the decade. It is handily codified in Rosalind Coward and John Ellis' Language and Materialism. Most subsequent survey texts, such as Dudley Andrew's Concepts of Film Theory and Kaja Silverman's Subject of Semiotics, treat this trend as central to contemporary film studies. Although SLAB theory is subject to internal revision, and although it now seems close to a skirmish on its left flank with the burgeoning area called "cultural studies," I shall treat it as the mainstream position within film theory at present. I am not here concerned with laying out conceptual problems in SLAB theory as such, only with contrasting its intellectual modus operandi--its methods, if you like--with the aims of a historical poetics.

1. Whereas poetics is problem- and question-centered, SLAB theory is doctrine-centered.

SLAB theorists assume that they possess a general theory of social and psychic life which can subsume cinematic phenomena under broader laws. But this theory constitutes an ad hoc assemblage of pieces from various thinkers' works: some chunks of Lacan, a little of Althusser, etc. Hence Jonathan Rée's description--the nouveau melange. The effect is most clearly seen in those syntheses or textbooks that cut up pieces of doctrine and then provide an exposition that patches them together.

Likewise, SLAB theory changes by adding on new pieces of doctrine. The fact that one bit of any thinker's work can always be linked, somehow, with a bit of any other's underwrites the project of theory as bricolage. The absorption of a few terms from the Christian, anti-Freudian, and neo-Kantian Mikhail Bakhtin into psychoanalytic, feminist, culturalist, and orthodox lit-crit "methods" is only the most recent example. Even a single word can trigger the bricolage impulse. Teresa de Lauretis finds that both the physiologist Colin Blakemore and the semiotician Umberto Eco use the term "mapping." She concludes from this that both theorists' works support the idea that "perception and signification are neither direct or simple reproduction (copy, mimesis, reflection) nor inevitably predetermined by biology, anatomy, or destiny; though they are socially determined and overdetermined." This is an unwarranted inference from Blakemore's discussion, which stresses physiological invariants and evolutionary adaptation; a commitment to the social overdetermination of perception is hard to square with Blakemore's assertion: "Human perception depends ultimately on activity within the nerve centers of the brain." De Lauretis might reply that even if Blakemore does not believe in the social construction of perception, his evidence supports it. But then one could counter that he has marshalled the bulk of his evidence, which she does not examine, to demonstrate exactly the opposite position, which she denounces but does not attempt to refute.

It is thus not surprising that challenges to SLAB theory are typically cast in the form "My Continental thinker can lick yours": Deleuze against Lacan, Benjamin against Althusser, Frankfort versus Paris. Since doctrines age faster than ideas, there emerges an urge to stay on the cutting edge. How the SLAB theorist does so is, again, most clearly seen in the summarizing texts. Here the author functions as a tipster, assuming that having the most recent word in a debate means having the last word on the subject. In a review of Language and Materialism, Rée describes many kindred efforts:

In fact most of Coward and Ellis' fallacies are of a slightly different kind: they involve not so much referring to a particular authority, as watching the ways in which the currents of opinion are flowing: a kind of punting on what future authorities will say, based on ideas of what can be "seen" and seen "only now."

In its grim determination to keep abreast, SLAB theory reveals its only open-ended side: almost anything may become grist for the doctrinal mill.

2. Poetics, in its contemporary form, conducts systematic research; SLAB theory does not.

Systematic research consists of posing questions, reflecting on the historical factors that lead to the questions' becoming salient, broaching alternative answers, and weighing them in the light of evidence; it also presents arguments that seek to demonstrate that some answers are better than others. By these canons, SLAB theory does not constitute systematic research.

As a rule, SLAB theory does not ask particular questions and reason out possible answers, rejecting and refining them and weighing the comparative advantages of competing explanatory frameworks. The writer instead starts with a doctrinal abstraction and draws on cinematic phenomena as illustrative examples. Thus Silverman's Subject of Semiotics employs filmic and literary texts as audio-visual aids in laying out claims about the Oedipus complex or condensation and displacement; she does not, by and large, cite evidence that would establish the claims as holding good about general human phenomena of the sort that the theory aspires to explain. Nor does she consider how the same cinematic processes might be explained by rival theories. Nor does she consider counterexamples that might challenge her premises or inferences. The point is important because any belief, including astrology and a trust in dowsing rods, can be illustrated by particular phenomena. Marshall Edelson calls this "enumerative inductivism," the notion that adducing instances of a hypothesis will support it; in fact, such a notion is vacuous because any number of hypotheses can be supported by a set of instances. The real test involves "eliminative inductivism": "No conjecture about the world is in and of itself confirmed by evidence. It is always evaluated relative to some rival. The degree of its acceptance is simply the extent to which at any particular time it is considered better than its comparable rivals."

The focus upon doctrine can blind one to the most obvious counterinstances. Instead of asking what the everyday ideology of vision might be, John Ellis starts from the premise that the cinematic institution necessarily imitates a phenomenological model. So he informs us that projection in a movie theatre "exactly parallels" our ideology of vision, "one that thinks of the eyes as projecting a beam of light, like a torch-beam, that illuminates what we look at, making it visible and perceptible." Ellis' commitment to SLAB theory has apparently made him oblivious to people's habit of switching on the lights when they enter a darkened room.

If SLAB theory is largely uninterested in posing questions and examining a range of evidence, it is no more keen on doing homework in the history of its concepts. Its canonical texts arrive untainted by any larger context (save perhaps that of "1920s Soviet culture" or "Paris after 1968"). Freud is not situated within the history of psychology, nor Saussure in the history of linguistics; Lacan's ties to Surrealism are passed over, as is Althusser's complicated relation to the French Communist Party. In the endless exposition of these texts, the writer has license to remake history. One can skip from a schematic account of Descartes' conception of the "subject" to an account of Freud's, as if everyone in the intervening centuries, including minor thinkers like Hume, Kant, and Hegel, were blundering about in rationalist darkness. To read SLAB theory, one would never know that such books as Sebastiano Timpanaro's Freudian Slip or B. A. Farrell's Standing of Psychoanalysis or G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence exist.

Such provincialism cripples SLAB theory as an intellectual endeavor. Any theorist who really wanted to pose questions about language would grapple with the work of Locke, Humboldt, Sapir, Whorf, Wittgenstein, Quine, Chomsky, Montague, Grice, Putnam, Kripke, Davidson, Dummett, Searle, Katz, and Sperber. Any theorist claiming an interest in psychology would certainly need to consider the contending ideas of Piaget, the Russian reflexologists, Vygotsky, Bruner, Fodor, et al. Any theorist seeking the sociopolitical functions of cinema cannot ignore Weber, Durkheim, Mauss, Parsons, Elster, and Giddens. A theorist who pronounces upon whether semiotics or psychoanalysis is a science ought to be familiar with the history and philosophy of the sciences. Yet inspection of current "theoretical" texts in our field reveals an embarrassing ignorance on all these scores. As it stands, SLAB theory constitutes a convenient way of not knowing a lot of things. Paradoxically, a movement that makes novelty its chief appeal seems unaware of recent developments in the fields to which it lays claim. SLAB theory wants to be new without being current.

The rhetoric of SLAB theory can be seen as a strategic concealment of the conceptual problems I have noted. Despite its persistent use of the phrase "X argues," SLAB theory does not characteristically offer arguments. Argument presupposes a dialectical confrontation with potential or actual opponents. Assuming that s/he writes for a skeptical reader, the writer anticipates objections, refutes antagonists, and advances her/ his thesis as the most plausible candidate. SLAB theory is instead largely expository, summarizing and synthesizing claims made by previous theorists. There was a short flurry of pseudoscientific rigor in the early 1970s, but this, which enraged so many opponents, now emerges as a momentary vogue. Once Barthes rejected his pre S/Z work as tainted by "scientificity," he ratified a movement back to the intuitive belletrism we have already seen in the Sauve qui peut (la vie) discussions and which comes virtually second nature to people of literary training.

SLAB theory has found its most comfortable rhetorical mode in a form of commentary whose components include the following: exegesis through quotation and paraphrase, the rectification of this or that point in the light of recent developments (Rée's "only now can we see" syndrome), the extrapolation of other points on the basis of conceptual or terminological association (e.g., de Lauretis on "mapping"), the interpretation of illustrative examples from films, and above all the striking of a stance that means business. The essay, chapter, or book is likely to end with some tough talk, when the writer invokes something new and dangerous: a recently translated book demanding to be assimilated, a just-finished film to be interpreted, or a new mode of filmmaking.

What the exposition-rumination-illustrations format blocks, of course, are the massive critiques that have been launched at SLAB theory and its cinematic adherents. Reading SLAB work, one could not learn that there are standard arguments against Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, and Barthes, for no SLAB theorist bothers to defend these thinkers' ideas in any engaged way. One would scarcely know that many writers have pointed out conceptual difficulties in SLAB arguments about film. Unlike Shklovksy, SLAB expositors usually regard theory as entrusted to them for long-term safekeeping. Still, if one holds some power, as SLAB theory does, ignoring all opponents, however complacent it may seem, is the safest rhetorical recourse.

3. Whereas poetics uses concepts to construct explanatory propositions, SLAB theory uses concepts to construct interpretive narratives.

If SLAB theorists are uninterested in debating their views within wider contexts, it is for the very practical reason that theorizing seldom lies at the center of their concerns. Theory becomes not explanation but a guide for explication. As applied to cinema, SLAB theory tells stories. Or rather, a story with few variants--the tale of stable personal identity, lost and (perhaps) found (but differently). This is a perennially popular tale among humanist academics, and SLAB theory draws upon psychoanalysis (that trove of great stories) in order to deck it out in different costumes. By means of traditional interpretive tactics, such as analogy and personification, any aspect of a film (setting, camera position, editing) can be assigned a meaning within this drama of subjectivity. SLAB theory yields a scheme for interpreting films that is close enough to traditional semantic fields (order/ disorder, identity/ loss of identity, self/ other, male/ female) to seem comfortable but also new enough in its particular working out to rejuvenate thematic criticism (as when the Mirror Stage underwrites critics' penchant for looking for reflections and doublings). SLAB theory as theory can escape scrutiny because it is made to be used, to let the critic come to the desired conclusions about this text's conventionality or that text's transgressiveness.

Historical poetics needs no such stories to guide its work. It offers explanations, not the recasting of films into the form of a master narrative; and insofar as metacriticism is part of its purview, it may take as part of its business the study of how SLAB theory has become geared toward interpretation.

As SLAB theory has incorporated many diverse ideas into its bricolage, so has it included historical poetics. Characteristically, however, the evidence mobilized by the Soviet filmmakers, the Russian Formalists, Arnheim, Bazin, and more recent poeticians have become, in the hands of SLAB theorists, yet more illustrations of the same received doctrines. True, the theorist often gets it wrong--shot/ reverse shot and point-of-view editing seem surprisingly difficult to grasp- but even in the muddles, there is a recognition that if SLAB doctrine is to be mapped onto cinema, it needs at least the vocabulary and concepts provided by some poetics.

In light of these points, I conclude that contemporary film studies, thought to be dominated by abstract theory, is actually quite untheoretical--if theory is understood not as the routine exposition of cryptic doctrines but as an active, open-ended enterprise that poses clearly-defined questions, seeks empirical evidence that will help decide them, analyzes alternative explanations of that evidence, and systematically argues for the best answer. Film theory, I take it, demands wide reading, constant reflection, intimate acquaintance with the history of the problems posed, and a degree of skepticism that compells the researcher to seek out difficult challenges, either in the data or in the form of opposing arguments. But these qualities are not characteristic of SLAB theory. Its doctrinaire quality has led to dogmatism; its inadequate research has made it blinkered; and its streamlined schematism has rendered it simply another method for interpreting films. Unfortunately, this modus operandi is encouraged by several institutional factors, most recently those publication ventures which reward academics for dashing off homogenized summaries of Grand Theory aimed at student consumption. This might be called the Methuenization of the humanities.

SLAB theorists commonly counterpose "theory" to "history," as if historical research could not also be theoretical. I propose a more informative opposition. SLAB theory and its offshoots, in their deepest assumptions and their concrete practices, have consolidated a new scholasticism, a ceaseless commentary on authoritative sources. Poetics, on the other hand, frankly offers scholarship--an open-ended, corrigible inquiry that respects the reciprocal claims of conceptual coherence and empirical adequacy. Lacking a substantive doctrine, it does not have the answers ready before anyone has asked the questions.

To commit oneself to scholarship is, at this point in history, openly to commit oneself to academic institutions. Although SLAB theorists have been reluctant to acknowledge it, their theory depends crucially upon the university; indeed, Saussure, Lacan et al. produced most of their work in academic circumstances which were, by contemporary American or English standards, leisurely. Historical poetics can succeed only if colleges, universities, and archives give the researcher the resources to work steadily on questions that cannot be answered from the depths of the armchair.

I am certainly not recommending that we embrace a cozy professionalism. What matters now is that we exploit the academicization of film study for scholarly ends. If we recall that Bazin and the Formalists produced brilliant insights within academic conditions we would consider materially barren, we can appreciate the enormous opportunity which most Grand Theorists of film neglect. We can, for the first time in history, study cinema according to the stringent demands of scholarly inquiry. We have the time to fight with each other about ideas and enthusiastically pursue answers to truly demanding questions. We can do this best, I think, by transcending that Methodist division of labor initiated in Hyman's and Wellek and Warren's time. In this respect, historical poetics becomes not one method but a model of basic research into cinema. It offers the best current hope for setting high intellectual standards for film study.

Semiotics

2007-07-20T12:02:00.000+07:00

SEMIOTICS

Of the several components of post-1968 film studies, it was semiotics, or what was presumed to be semiotics, that most provoked the film criticism establishment. Semiotics and semioticians were denounced in the pages of quality dailies and weeklies: semiotics was 'a procrustean enterprise', comparable to 'painting by numbers', at once 'unwittingly absurd' and 'insidiously political', practised by 'possessed sectarians', 'pod-people', and 'overdressed ladies bedecked in bangles and baubles', whose general demeanour had 'the poised vigilance of a lobotomised ferret1.' The outcry seems inappropriate to Saussure's original proposal for a theory of signs:

A science that studies the life of signs within society is therefore conceivable. . . I shall call it semiology (from the Greek semeion, sign). Semiology would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them. Since the science does not yet exist, no one can say what it would be; but it has a right to existence, a place staked out in advance.2

Thus stated, semiology, or semiotics, as it became more generally called, is hardly very threatening. What rattled the critics were the claims made on behalf of a semiotics of cinema, which amounted, if they were to be believed, to a notice of redundancy for those engaged in conventional criticism.

A semiotics so conceived heralded the end of all traditional aesthetics. Ideas of art as organic unity, as revelation, as the communication of inspired vision, were discarded and replaced by the supposition that all meanings and aesthetic effects were explicable in terms of determining structures and mechanisms. Art, in a word, was open to scientific analysis. In providing 'a scientific basis for aesthetic judgements in the cinema', semiotics, it was argued, would mark the end of critical impressionism.3 No longer would notes jotted down during a single screening, worked up in a literary style and larded with cultural references, suffice as criticism. Moreover, it was believed that the semiotic project would contribute to the political cause of demystification, of denaturalising representations and exposing them as constructed precisely of signs. The very fact of trying to forge a scientific semiotics would, Metz proposed, 'bring with it a great capacity for demystification, an irreversible break with impressionistic and idealist discourses and all claims for the ineffable'.4 Although there is no reason to suppose that Saussure himself had anything so radical in mind, his proposal for a science of signs could manifestly be given such an interpretation, and to this extent the rancour of the critical establishment was not misdirected.

Despite his call for a semiotics, Saussure's actual achievement pertained to the more limited field of natural language, the science of which — linguistics — he is commonly held to be the founder. Even so, he committed none of his discoveries to paper, leaving it to his students to reconstruct his theories from lecture notes after his death. Such, however, has been the impact of his thought, it can be said 'we are all Saussureans now’.5

In view of the many admirable summaries of Saussure's work we shall limit our account to the broadest of outlines. The first important point to make is that Saussure broke with previous approaches to the study of language in asking hot how it developed but how it works. Philology had been content to trace the evolution of a word or sound over the centuries; Saussure sought to explain how that word, that sound produced meaning. The essence of the explanation he gave - and this is the second crucial point - is that meaning exists only within a system. In contrast to the naive view that language acquires its meaning by reference to a world of things anterior to, or independent of, signification, Saussure argued that meaning derives solely from the system within which particular utterances are articulated. The system, known as langue, and actual or potential utterances, parole, may be compared to the rule system of chess and to the set of moves that may be actually or potentially played. Langue defines both what are permissible or impermissible utterances (as do the rules of chess in relation to moves) and what their significance is (again, as in chess).

In explicating the functioning of language as a system Saussure distinguished between the signifier and the signified, which together comprise the linguistic sign (typically a word). The signifier is the actual sound (or if written, the appearance) of the word; the signified is the concept or meaning attached to it. The relationship between the two is arbitrary, since there is nothing in the nature of things to dictate that a signified should have a particular signifier - the same signified has different signifiers in different languages. But more than that, Saussure claimed, the value of a signifier is given not by its relation to a pre-given signified but by its relation to other signifiers, a concept perhaps best explained once again by analogy with chess. If the meaning of a signifier is analogous to the value of a piece on a chessboard, then it becomes evident that meaning will change according to context in the same way that the value of, say, a pawn will depend on what stage of the game has been reached, where it is in relation to other pawns, how many pieces are left on the board, and so on. In other words meaning is produced by a system of differences. Such differences may be specified in relation to two basic axes, the paradigmatic (or axis of selection) and the syntagmatic (or axis of combination). The former pertains to potential substitutes for any element in the signifying chain: the substitution of 'h' for 'c' in the word 'cat5, or the substitution of 'television' for 'mat1 in the sentence 'the cat sat on the mat'5. The latter axis, the syntagmatic, runs as it were horizontally from one signifying element to the next, and pertains to the way meaning is established by the combination of any given element with other elements in the signifying chain. The meaning of an element is therefore determined by its relation both to the present set of elements it is in combination with and to the absent set of elements that could be substituted for it. The essential point is, as Saussure put it, 'in language there are only differences'.6 This so-called 'diacritical' theory of meaning was to prove the single most influential idea operative within film semiotics.

Other approaches to semiotics in addition to Saussure's were taken up as being of possibly greater relevance to film studies, the principal among which was that developed by the American philosopher C. S. Peirce around the turn of the century. It was his philosophical rather than linguistic investigations that took him in the direction of what he called 'semiotic', specifically through a concern with symbols, which he saw as the woof and warp' of all thought and scientific research.

The Peircean sign points in two directions: on the one hand towards the person to whom it is addressed and in whose mind it creates an idea or secondary sign, called the interpretant, and on the other towards that which it stands for, called the object. A sign thus mediates between object and interpretant, entities that would otherwise be unrelated. Very roughly the object is equivalent to what another discourse terms the referent, the thing in the real world that the sign stands for, except that in Peirce, as has been pointed out by Silverman, the status of the real is unclear.7 Though at times Peirce maintains that there is direct experience of reality, elsewhere he argues that it can be known only through representations, so that objects are simply representations whose validity is consensually established. This latter position tends towards a Nietzschean perspectivism, as when Peirce writes 'My language is the sum total of myself; for the man is the thought.'8 In any case, the interpretant is the idea produced in the mind of the interpreter by the sign, and is not dissimilar to Saussure's signified. Yet for Peirce this too is a sign, with its own interpretant, which in turn is a sign with its interpretant, and so on - opening up a prospect of what post-structuralists would call unlimited semiosis.

Depending on whether they are considered from the standpoint of the mediating sign, or that of the object, or that of the interpretant, signs can be classified into different trichotomies, only the second of which has been taken up by film theory and therefore need concern us here. The relevant classification, then, based on the relationship of signs to their object, is that of icon, index and symbol.

For a sign to be an icon it must have some physical quality or configuration of qualities that it shares with the object. As Peirce puts it, 'Anything whatever, be it a quality, existent individual or law, is an icon of anything, insofar as it is like that thing and is used as a sign of it5.9 Resemblance, then, is the basis of iconicity. Examples of icons would be representational paintings, diagrams, statues, photographs and onomatopoeic words. Next, an index is a sign that becomes so 'by virtue of a character which it could not have if its object did not exist5, irrespective of whether it is interpreted as a sign.10 Another way of putting it is to say there is necessarily a causal relationship between object and index, so the sign is the effect of the object. Just about any calibrated instrument, such as a barometer, thermometer, speedometer or ammeter, functions as an index of what it is measuring; as also does smoke of fire, a weathercock of wind direction, a knock on the door of a visitor or pain of physical damage. Indeed, it is through a continual reading off of indexical meanings that one is able to make sense of the world at all. Lastly, a symbol is arbitrarily linked to its object 'by means of an association of ideas or habitual connection'.11 With neither resemblance nor causal relation between sign and object, the basis for signification must be convention, and therefore most natural language and languages parasitic on it, like Morse code, as well as the codes of gesture (to some extent) and dress, consist of symbols. It should also be noted that a sign may fall into more than one category. The photograph, for instance, as was pointed out by Peirce, is both icon, in that it is similar to its object, and index, in that it is an effect on photographic emulsion of light interacting with the object.

At various times during the last two decades Peirce's ideas have been taken up by film theorists, though they have never been as influential as Saussure's. The best known adoption of Peirce was by Peter Wollen in his widely read and cited Signs and Meanings in the Cinema, in which he pointed out that cinema operates with all three categories of sign: index (by virtue of being the effect of the photographed real), icon (through sound and image) and symbol (in that it uses speech and writing). He berated other theorists, for example Metz, for having concentrated on only one of these dimensions to the exclusion of the others. More recently, Kaja Silverman has shown that Peirce enables distinctions to be made that are unavailable to Saussure, notably that whereas the relation of linguistic signifiers to their signifieds is preponderantly symbolic, the specific components of film, such as photography, editing, lighting and so on, are weighted equally towards the iconic and the indexical.'2 Because of cinema's typically greater involvement with these latter, it has been argued elsewhere, there is less of an apparent gap between the sign and its object than there is with symbols, which explains cinema's capacity to naturalise the most blatant stereotypes.13 Peirce's ideas have also recently been taken up by Gilles Deleuze and Teresa de Lauretis, and in view of this renewed interest they may play a more prominent role for film studies in the future.14

By and large, however, the film semiotics of the late 1960s and early 1970s was derived from Saussure. One reason for this dominance is almost certainly to be found in the line from film theory's political underpinning to the thesis that stressed language's status as cultural production and thence to any position, such as Saussure's, in which language was dependent on societal convention. Such a position was at least consistent with the claim - requirement, even - that language did not mirror but constructed the work, and was therefore inevitably complicit with ideology. Both the notion that meaning is produced within a signifying system and that the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary could be squared with the idea of a language as social product. This conception of language as a cultural system interposed between human beings and the real world was to receive further powerful support from the work of Lacan.

Two aspects of Lacan's thinking on language were to be crucial for film theory. The first of these was a Nietzschean conception of language as constitutive: 'the world of words. . . creates the world of things';15 'things only signify within the symbolic order"; 'nothing makes sense until you put a sign on it'.16 The idea that neither words nor images transmitted neutrally a pre-given reality, but offered a perspective through which reality was constituted, is readily traceable to Nietzsche. According to Nietzsche, language coerces us into thinking in particular ways through categories that remain largely unconscious. Language, as he famously expressed it, secretes a mythology. By substituting 'ideology3 for 'mythology1 one gets exactly what film theorists took up from Lacan's reading of Saussure; that film is a language appearing to render the real transparently but actually secreting an ideology. The task therefore was to create a new language, enabling men and women to think what had previously been unthinkable.

The second aspect was Lacan's conception of meaning as produced in the exchange between subject and a set of signifiers. Here Lacan modified Saussure's idea of the linguistic sign by giving primacy to the signifier and by introducing a bar between signifier and signified (thus, S/s , where S is the signifier and s the signified), implying that there is a continual sliding of signifieds under signifiers as these enter into new relationships. In other words, meaning is not at all the stable relationship between signifier and signified presumed by Saussure. What stops the slide and momentarily fixes meaning is the punctuation of the signifying chain by the action of the subject, expressed by Lacan in the graph below.17 In this illustration the vector SS' represents the signifying chain and the vector $ represents the retroactive construction of meaning by the subject. Meaning is always

S’

S

$

provisional and changes as new elements are added to the signifying chain, with each successive element setting up expectations as to what will follow and retroactively changing the meaning of what precedes it. Thus meaning is produced by the subject in this process of punctuation; but, equally, the subject is produced by the meanings available in the signifying chain, for the subject is such by virtue of a self-conception that is only available within discourse. The desire of the subject engenders varying interpretations of the unfolding text; the text offers in return the condition of subjectivity. For Lacan there is, therefore, an unceasing dialectic of the subject and meaning, an idea that would recur in various guises within film theory.

The overriding question for any semiotics of cinema was first and foremost, is cinema a language? It was generally agreed that the answer to this hinged on whether cinema directly imitated, or was analogous to, or was, in a Bazinian sense, an extension of reality; or whether it was a form of writing, dependent on an arbitrary and conventional sign system.

The question was answered by the pioneering film semiotician Christian Metz with an equivocal 'yes and no'. Yes, it was a language, but no, it was a language without a tongue, where tongue is understood in a Saussurean sense as 'a system of signs intended for intercommunication'.18 Like Saussure in relation to natural language, Metz wanted to achieve an understanding of how films are understood, but he recognised fundamental differences between language and cinema that prevented the wholesale importation of Saussure's concepts. The concept of tongue was inapplicable to cinema for three basic reasons. The first of these was that cinema is not available for inter-communication; if it is communication at all (rather than expression), it is one-way communication. Next, the filmic image is quite unlike the Saussurean sign, with its arbitrary relation between signifier and signified, and instead, in its reproduction of the conditions of perception, can be termed 'a block of reality3: The cinema has as its primary material a body of fragments of the real world, mediated through their mechanical duplication.'19 Whereas a verbal signifier acquires its significance from its place within a system, that of an image derives from what it duplicates. Moreover, as well as resemblance there is a material link between the image and its object, making it index as well as icon, and therefore motivated. However, there were qualifications even in Metz's early work, as when he acknowledged that an image necessarily involves distortion and deformation. Later, this idea was developed through the identification of codes at work in the image. Despite such qualifications, the general tenor of the argument was that cinema duplicated rather than articulated reality.

The third reason for refusing cinema the status of langue was that it lacks the double articulation that, according to Andre Martinet and other linguisticians, is the hallmark of natural language. The characteristic economy of language, through which an infinity of utterances can be generated by means of a very small number of basic units, is achieved through this double articulation. At the level of the first articulation a limited number of words (more properly morphemes, the lexicon of any language) are combined in different orders to provide a limitless number of utterances. But a still greater economy is permitted through a second articulation, by which morphemes are made up of a very much smaller number of phonemes, these being the smallest distinctive units of a language. These are without meaning in themselves, but systematised on the basis of phonological properties to produce consequential differences - in English that, say, between T and V. Cinema lacks this second articulation; it has nothing corresponding to phonemes. The most obvious candidate would be the shot, except that, unlike the phoneme, which by itself is without meaning, the shot possesses a meaning. But nor, contended Metz, is the shot the equivalent of the single word. A number of reasons are offered for this contention: shots, like statements but unlike words, are infinite in number; they do not pre-exist in a lexicon, but are to an extent the invention of the filmmaker (as statements are of the speaker). Moreover, the shot is a unit of discourse (The image of a house does not signify "House" but "Here is a house".') and its meaning is not given by a system of paradigmatic contrasts, i.e., it is not determined by the absent units that could take its place.20 Metz concluded that the shot is more like a statement than a word, but even here the resemblance is limited in that a statement is reducible to discrete elements, the morphemes and phonemes, in a way that the shot is not.

If cinema is not langue, it is nonetheless language, at least 'to the extent that it orders signifying elements within ordered arrangements different from those of spoken idioms - and to the extent that these elements are not traced on the perceptual configuration of reality itself (which does not tell stories)'.21 Cinema transforms the world into discourse, and is not therefore simple duplication. But a semiotics of the cinema cannot work at the level of the image, since each image is unique, novel and analogous to reality, with its meaning produced not by its place within a system but by what it duplicates. There is no process of selection from a lexicon of images in cinema as there is from the verbal lexicon of a natural language.

It was because of this paradigmatic poverty that Metz was led to explore the semiotics of cinema in terms of syntagmatic relations. Combination, not selection, was to be the key to its understanding. While the image might not be coded the narrative certainly was, and since cinema consisted predominantly of narrative, and indeed, since its historical development had produced a number of recognisable narrative forms and structures, it was appropriate that a semiotics of cinema should concentrate on the spatio-temporal logic of narrative. Metz's so-called grande syntagmatique was an attempt to provide an exhaustive classification of the segmentation of cinematic narratives.22 Arranged in a hierarchy from the autonomous shot, the smallest segment, to the sequence, the largest segment, the system of classification would permit any film's narrative syntax to be formalised. The decisive element of the classification is the so-called autonomous segment, of which the most obvious example would be the temporally continuous scene. Thus hierarchisation in terms of length and complexity is what constitutes the classification. In all there are eight levels within the hierarchy, and Metz approached their arrangement through a series of either/or disjunctions. For instance: did the segment consist of one or more than one shot? If more than one, was the segment chronological or achronological? If chronological, was it simultaneous or sequential? - and so on. The resultant hierarchy of autonomous segments runs as follows:

1) the autonomous shot, which is of two kinds, either the sequence shot, where a whole scene is contained within a single shot, or the insert, for instance a subjective image within a larger segment

2) the parallel syntagm, as occurs when two motifs are interwoven in a montage in which their temporal or spatial relationship is unspecified

3) the bracketing syntagm, a montage of brief shots representative of, say, a situation or way of life

4) the descriptive syntagm, in which a series of shots comprise a composite description of a single moment

5) the alternating syntagm, which runs together two sequences in alternate shots, each with its own temporal development yet as a whole implying simultaneity, as in just about any chase sequence with shots of pursuers and pursued

6) the scene, in which a succession of shots implies temporal continuity ,

7) the episodic sequence, where there is an organised discontinuity of shots

8) the ordinary sequence, where the discontinuity is simply the omission of moments judged unimportant.

By way of illustration of its categories and to show the application of the method Metz proceeded to analyse the film Adieu Philippine, which remains the locus classicus of the grande syntagmatique.23

While the rigour of the grande syntagmatique still commands respect - David Bordwell having recently termed it 'the outstanding achievement5 in the study of cinematic narrative structure - film theorists by and large have found little application for it.24 One case study that did make use of it was John Ellis's analysis of Ealing, in which he showed that some two thirds of Passport to Pimlico consists of segments respecting a unity of time and place (scenes, ordinary sequences, and autonomous shots), a syntactic arrangement that contributed to the film's realism. Even Elk's, however, found there were inadequacies in Metz's classificatory scheme, a feeling that was echoed by other commentators. It was found, for example, that certain of the categories, such as that of the autonomous shot, were so broad as to include such a diversity of cinematic forms that they were of little demarcatory use. Another difficulty was deciding in which particular category any given segment should be located - a scene and an ordinary sequence are often hard to distinguish. There was also the more general question as to what is to count as an autonomous segment, something that in practice can often only be settled on the basis of a reading of the film, thereby introducing a semantic element into what was conceived as a purely syntactic exercise. It was further found that many films, especially those out of the run of the mainstream, contained passages that did not fit neatly into any of Metz's categories. Consequently there was a tendency among theorists when analysing films to segment them in terms other than those given through grande syntagmatique, viz. the textual readings performed by Heath and by Bellour. Even without these various difficulties there existed a still more serious charge against the grande syntagmatique, namely, that it pointed towards an arid formalism that could neither account for film's specific production of meaning nor satisfy the political demand that its mechanisms for the reproduction of ideology be exposed.

Metz's revised semiotics was at once more complex and more flexible than this early model.25 While retaining the concept of cinema as a language he abandoned the attempt to locate a specific set of rules underlying the articulation of each cinematic text. Instead he came to treat cinema and the cinematic text as fields of signification in which a heterogeneity of codes, some specific to the cinema and others not, interacted with one another in ways that were specific, systematic and determinate at certain specified levels of cinematic discourse (individual films, particular genres) and hence at certain specified levels of analysis. Among specifically cinematic codes he distinguished codes of editing and framing, of lighting, of colour versus black and white, of the articulation of sound and movement, of composition, and so on. Non-cinematic codes included costume, gesture, dialogue, characterisation and facial expression. A further important distinction was made between cinematic codes and cinematic sub-codes, where the former organise elements potentially or actually common to all films, say lighting, and the latter refer to specific choices made within a particular code, say that of low-key in preference to high-key lighting. Codes, therefore, do not conflict, whereas sub-codes do, it being a matter of one choice rather than another. Different codes and their sub-codes are in a syntagmatic relation of combination; sub-codes from the same code are in a paradigmatic relation of substitution. The codes of genre and authorship are additive, as in the Westerns of Ford or the comedies of Hawks; but the sub-codes Ford and Hawks within the code of authorship, and the sub-codes Western and comedy within the code of genre, are (generally speaking) only commutable. A cinematic code is often defined predominantly by the meanings of its sub-codes, a weighting that contrasts with the codic stability of natural language. Cinematic codes may be seen as consisting of signifiers awaiting the signifieds that come from their mobilisation in sub-codes. For example, the general significance of the code of authorship cannot be grasped outside of the specific operation of the sub-codes Ford, Hawks and the rest.

The film semiotics propounded by the novelist and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini was utterly different in inspiration and conception from that of Metz, being the theoretical corollary of the uncompromisingly anti-bourgeois realism of his films. While he agreed with Metz that cinema has no langue, it was for a very different reason. For Pasolini 'the cinema is a language which expresses reality with reality. So the question is: what is the difference between the cinema and reality? Practically none.' In addition to this, he stated: When I make a film . . . there is no symbolic or conventional filter between me and reality, as there is in literature.'26

Where Pasolini parted company with Metz was in his contention that cinema is a language with a double articulation, albeit one quite distinct from that of natural language. Cinema's smallest units, corresponding to phonemes, are, according to Pasolini, objects, actions or events that are unaltered by being reproduced on film. Termed 'cinemes', these possess their own meaning, one that is natural rather than conventional, and are combined into larger units - shots - that are the basic significant units of cinema and correspond to morphemes in natural language. It is through this second articulation, the selection and combination of objects and events from the real world (the so-called 'profilmic - that which is in front of the camera), that the cinema is able to articulate reality. As distinct from phonemes, however, cinemes are both infinite, or at least countess, and have the feature that they are, as it were, compulsory: 'we cannot but choose from among the cinemes that are there, that is to say, the objects, forms and events of reality which we can grasp with our senses'.27

Yet another approach to cine-semiotics was offered by Umberto Eco, who was critical of both Pasolini and Metz. Pasolini came in for criticism on a number of grounds, among them his conception of reality and his thesis that the objects and events of the real world, quite outside any cultural code, provide the primary constituents of cinematic discourse. Far from being presented with reality in the cinema, Eco argued, we are presented with signifiers subject to cultural codes through which they are read as signifieds. Where Pasolini perceived nature, Eco detected culture. Events, actions, objects, forms of human interaction such as gesture, far from having the supposed extra-cultural rawness Pasolini imagined, are inextricably imbricated with convention, code, system and, by extension, ideology. Pasolini's error was in effect to conflate signifier, signified and referent under the rubric of reality. A second criticism was that the analogy between cinemes and phonemes did not stand up, because phonemes only have meaning in combination, not in themselves, whereas cinemes, in being recognisable objects, do have meaning in themselves. And the further supposed equivalence between the shot and the morpheme was also open to question. Like Metz, Eco suggested that the shot was much closer to an utterance than to a single word. A shot of Sylvester Stallone naked to the waist firing a rocket launcher does not signify 'Rambo', but rather 'Here is Rambo', or more probably 'Here is Rambo single-handedly defeating the Evil Empire'.

Eco also criticised Metz along similar lines. He, too, had failed to appreciate the extent to which images were not mere simulacra or duplicates of reality, and therefore non-arbitrary and motivated, but were indeed the habitat of codes. Metz's assumption of this irreducible primacy of the image, analogous to reality, had supported his conception of cinema as a language without a langue and had led to a concentration on how images are combined in syntagmatic structures. Eco contended that, far from inhabiting a domain below the level of codic organisation, images owe their very existence to the workings of cultural codes, of which no fewer than ten are potentially operative in the communication of the image: codes of perception, codes of transmission, codes of recognition, tonal codes, iconic codes, iconographic codes, codes of taste and sensibility, rhetorical codes, stylistic codes and codes of the unconscious.

Eco's contention can be illustrated by considering just one theme, that of the cultural training necessary in order to perceive a similarity between a physical object and an iconic representation of it. Because the physical properties of the two are very different, and therefore give rise to different perceptual experiences, similarity can only be perceived as a result of a cultural background that both includes a knowledge of the conventions of, say, painting and has specified what should be regarded as pertinent in determining similarity. For instance, a single line image of a horse's profile relies on a cultural decision that it shall count as an image and as such requires a trained eye to see it as a horse's profile. In other words, 'similitude is produced and must be learned'.28 Indeed, the history of the visual arts abounds with examples of works that to us seem self-evidently realistic but confounded their contemporaries because they transgressed the conventions of the time. Even (and from the standpoint of a cine-semiotics, especially) the photographic image, seemingly so analogous to reality, requires training to be recognised.

From the above it will have become apparent that Eco's principal quarrel with both Pasolini and Metz was their too narrow delimitation of the bounds of the cultural. In fact Eco's declared aim was to explain every case of signification 'in terms of underlying systems of elements mutually correlated by one or more codes'.29 His stress on the importance of convention and culture is taken over into his conception of the sign, which he defines as everything that, on the grounds of a previously established social convention, can be taken as something standing for something else. Convention, therefore, is the necessary condition for signification. Such conventionality, as we have seen, extends even to iconic signs, which seem at first sight to elude it. Their apparent indubitable motivation yields to an appreciation of the codes that make them possible as signs. On the other hand, Eco does allow that iconic signs are not completely arbitrary and that they reproduce some but only some of the conditions of normal perception of an object. Those features that are held in common between image and object, for example the stripes on a drawing of a zebra, are still subject to the normal perceptual code through which we perceive the object, in this case, as striped.

In developing his argument apropos cinema, Eco registered his disagreement with both Metz's contention that it had a single articulation and Pasolini's that it had a double articulation, and claimed for it instead a triple articulation. At the first level of articulation the total image can be broken down into meaningful units, recognisable in themselves, known as 'semes'. For example, 'man in bizarre blue outfit with cape' and 'New York skyline' are semes that combine to form a shot of Superman flying over New York. Semes can in turn be analysed into smaller iconic signs, such as 'clenched fist" or 'determined jawline', which are only recognisable in the context of the seme since they are part of a graphic continuum and appear as non-discrete. This is the second articulation. Then, finally, iconic signs can be analysed as comprising a third articulation of the conditions of perception, that is things such as angles, curves, textures, effects of light and shade, and so on. These in themselves have no meaning, and in this respect are analogous to phonemes, being defined simply in differential and oppositional terms. But they are essential to the construction of meaning in that their progressive alteration will at a certain point articulate a different iconic sign. The overall effect of this unique triple articulation of the cinematic code is to permit a far greater degree of realism than any other form of representation. 'Confronted with a conventionalisation so much richer, and hence a formalisation so much subtler than anything else, we are shocked into believing we stand before a language which restores reality to us'.30

Like Metz, Eco was to subject his early thinking to an auto-critique and to move away from what became seen as a static conception towards one with a greater degree of flexibility. Instead of thinking of signs in terms of elementary units with fixed values (the basis of the triple articulation), which was rejected as emphasising structure at the expense of process, Eco now argued that signs are better thought of as sign-functions correlating a unit of expression with a unit of content in a temporary encoding: 'Signs are the provisional result of coding rules which establish transitory correlations of elements, each of these elements being entitled to enter - under given coded circumstances - into another correlation and thus form a new sign.'31 It is context that determines what is and what is not to count as an element of a sign. Signs are therefore sensitive to context.

As a consequence of this new emphasis, semiotic analysis is no longer a matter of identifying a fixed number of articulations in fixed interrelationships because, depending on context and point of view, 'an element of first articulation can become an element of second articulation and vice versa'.32 As de Lauretis puts it:

Even if in a given iconic continuum, an image, one can isolate pertinent discrete units or figurae, as soon as they are detected, they seem to dissolve again. In other words, these 'pseudo-features' cannot be organised into a system of rigid differences, and their positional as well as semantic values vary according to the coding rules instituted each time by the context.33

Signs, or rather sign functions, are to be seen as texts whose elementary units can be identified only within a signifying process. The various codes then become purely temporal devices posited in order to explain a certain message rather than a secure ground to meaning.

Under such a conception, 'the classical notion of "sign" dissolves itself into a highly complex network of changing relationships' and meaning becomes an effect of a continual process of codic readjustment without any final referent or closure.34 Eco's revised semiotics can be seen as consistent with post-structuralism and its denial of all fixity of meaning, something we shall come to later in this chapter.

The effect of semiotics, or more particularly its central thesis that meaning is produced by a system of differences, was to call into question existing modes of thinking about cinema. The insistence that cinema is production ran against its innocent reception 'as natural, as life, as beauty' unfolding before the spectator.35 More particularly, it challenged conventional modes of thinking, dependent as they were on such notions as 'source', 'origin', 'centre', 'expression', 'representation', 'full subject5 and so on. If meaning was produced through, and only through, signification, it could not have a source or origin elsewhere that needed merely to be expressed in language or film. Similarly, there was no longer any question of signification representing that which already existed. For anything to exist as an object it had to be encoded as such, and therefore it was a matter of one sign for, or against, another. Such a refusal of pre-significant or extra-discursive objects extended to the human subject, who was also denied the satisfaction of apparent self-sufficiency outside of language. For if the subject's self-conception (an essential constituent of its being) could be formed only in signification it could no longer be the 'full subject" of humanist ideology.

According to Stephen Heath there were two traditions in thinking about the relationship of language and cinema prior to semiotics. The first of these was a cinematic purism that saw in language, 'that dangerous supplement', with its power to misrepresent as well as represent, something that clouded the direct truth of the image.36 The aesthetic correlative to this epistemological apartheid between word and image was realism. The second tradition held that cinema was, precisely, a language, and it was because of this that it was en-tided to claim parity with the other arts. With resources as extensive or more so than those of literature or painting, film could become the means of expression of the artist's vision. The camera was not merely the mechanical device for recording pre-existing reality but the pen, the brush, of the creative cineaste. Here, in other words, was an aesthetic of authorship.

Since authorship and realism are considered at length in chapters 4 and 6, here we shall simply signal the effect semiotics was to have on thinking about each of them. As far as realism was concerned, the central challenge was to its assumption of transparency. Far from being a window on the world, which for some theorists was it. unique capacity and true vocation, cinema is, according to the semioticians, a work of construction, always within signification. The seeming reality it constructs is only accepted as such because it coheres with the prevailing ideology's version of reality. The reality effect is no more than a set of codes subservient to ideology. Film is not reproduction and representation of a pre-existent reality but the production and construction of an imaginary one. Semiotics similarly intervened against traditional ideas of the author as the origin of the meaning of the text. Because meanings do not pre-exist the text, there can be no question of expression of authorial intent or communication of meaning. Any ascription of authorship can only be in terms of a construction from the codes functioning within a text or corpus of texts. Whatever the intentions, conscious or unconscious, of a John Ford, the distinctive Fordian structure is to be found in the films he directed and not elsewhere. For both realism and authorship, then, the impact of semiotics was to render the conventional position untenable.

It was indeed the work of Stephen Heath that was to give the decisive orientation to the study of semiotics in film. In relation to the debates among the previously mentioned film semioticians, Heath sided with Eco against the early Metz and Pasolini, who, he maintained, in supposing that the image duplicated reality, ignored the specific activity of cinema. Underlying the apparent naturalness of the image, there are, as Eco had shown, processes of codification and conventionalisation. Nevertheless, for Heath it was Metz who had to be the focus of attention, since in his revised semiotics he succeeded in bringing out the social basis of cinema through codes and conventions that were normally invisible. Heath's concern with the relation between spectator and film was, more than anything else, what moved film semiotics in a new direction. Here he parted company with Eco, who had turned away from any such project, and instead followed Julia Kristeva in her call for a theory of the speaking subject constituted within language. This would entail, she said, leaving behind the study of formalised meaning systems as the instrument of transcendental subjects, and entering a phase under the sign of psychoanalysis in which signification was seen as involved in the construction of subjectivity.37 Heath's deliberations on the implications of this shift from the structures of the text to the process of reading marked him out as considerably more than an astute commentator on continental semiotics.

The development of these ideas occurred in two distinct phases, with Althusser and Lacan respectively as the predominant influences. In the remainder of this chapter we shall be concerned with detailed elaboration of each phase and with some of the debates to which they gave rise.

In the first phase the institution of cinema was held to constitute individuals as subjects, in a manner analogous to ideological state apparatuses. Addressed by the text, the spectator accepts the identity assigned and is thereby fixed in a position where a particular mode of perception and consciousness appears natural. He or she is locked into a structure of misrecognition, into an imaginary relationship to the real conditions of his or her social existence. The ideological perspective imposed by the text makes it, according to this conception, seem like a window on reality. During this phase, therefore, there was an attempt to relate the materiality of ideology to that of signification, where ideology was understood not as a system of ideas but as a practice of representation producing 'the subject as the place where a specific meaning is realised'.38 In a word, the reader was interpellated by the text, the spectator by the film.

One inflection of the theory was towards a typology of texts and drew upon the work of Emile Benveniste. His central contention was that linguistics, and in particular the analysis of discourse, could no longer afford to ignore the role of the subject within signification, for the very good reason that language is so deeply marked by subjectivity. One aspect of this is the role played by personal pronouns, which, unlike common nouns with their relatively fixed meanings and referents, signify entirely according to context. Pronouns and other so-called shifters like 'here', 'now5 and 'this' lack a stable, continuous significance, but are nonetheless integral and indispensable to language. Without the possibility of each speaker being established as a subject through the use of shifters, notably the first person pronoun, language might even cease to function at all. Because of the entrenchment of subjectivity in language, Benveniste urged linguis-ticians to turn their attention from the abstract system of langue to the operation of discourse within specific social contexts.

To this end he proposed a distinction to supplement that between langue and parole, namely, between enunciation (enonciation), the act of speaking, and the enounced (enonce), what is spoken. This then allows a further distinction between the subject of the enunciation, the subject who speaks, and the subject of the enounced, who is represented within the utterance. In most social exchanges there is no need to distinguish between the two subjects and they are taken as coinciding. But there are evidently occasions when the two do appear as distinct, as when a speaker utters a self-referring lie, a pointed instance of which is the liar paradox, the statement 'I am lying5. If the subject of the enunciation is telling the truth then the subject of the enounced is lying, and vice versa; they cannot both be telling the truth, therefore they are necessarily distinguished.

Benveniste's distinction between the two subjects and his example of the liar paradox were taken up by Lacan as support for his contention that personal identity necessarily involves an element of mis-recognition. For Lacan, the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enounced were disjunct not only in such special cases but were so in principle. Whenever the subject utters the word T and identifies with the T so represented there is always a discrepancy between the two, because what is and must be absent is that which alone could close the gap, namely, the unconscious.

The idea that the representation in discourse of the subject was thereby a misrepresentation was, according to the film theorists who adopted it, exactly applicable to what happened in certain forms of cinema. The argument ran as follows. Though all discourse has a subject of enunciation who produces meaning, this subject is not, as might be supposed, necessarily the author of the text. It is rather the individual who occupies the place of the subject of enunciation in what Benveniste terms 'the unceasing present of enunciation'.39 While this position may be occupied by the author writing or director directing the text, it is also occupied by each reader or spectator in making sense of the text. With certain texts the so-constituted subject of the enunciation misrecognises his or her situation because, though both text and positioning by it are produced, the text does not permit an awareness of such production on the part of the spectator. Unlike other texts, which avow their origins in contingency and acknowledge their viewpoint as perspectival, texts of this kind do not appear to have been produced by an act of enunciation at all. Rather, they present themselves as unenounced, as writing themselves, and so the spectator, unaware of his or her positioning, accepts their representations as reality.

Such thinking issued in the crucial distinction between those texts that effaced the marks of their own production and of their construction of spectators and those, usually self-reflexive avant-garde texts, in which this did not happen. The categorisation rested on two further opposed terms borrowed from Benveniste: histoire, a mode of enunciation where the pronouns 'I' and 'you' only occur in reported speech and all marks of subjectivity are suppressed; and discours, in which such shifters are present, and which exhibits 'the imprint of the process of enunciation in the utterance'.40 Impersonal and atemporal in address, histoire is the typical mode of enunciation of written history and of novels adopting this historical form, with events narrated in an indefinite past tense by an absent narrator. It would include a novelist such as Balzac, a passage from whom Benveniste cited as an example, in which 'no one speaks here; the events seem to narrate themselves'.41 Discours, on the other hand, is typified by conversation, letters, speeches and those forms of writing in which the narrator is in the foreground addressing the reader, such as the epistolary novel.

A large proportion of all narrative films falls within the category of histoire, and indeed it could be put forward as the defining feature of traditional cinema that it effaces all traces of its enunciation, presenting stories 'from nowhere, told by nobody, but received by someone (without which it would not exist)'.42 What that someone cannot do is recognise that in occupying the position of invisible enunciator he or she is constituted by the film. Instead the spectator experiences him or herself as a pure subject, empty and absent, a pure capacity for seeing what appears to be simply there. All 'content^ is seemingly on the side of the film, elsewhere, anywhere but inscribed as subjectivity. Of course discours is not entirely absent from narrative cinema. It exists both as characters' dialogue and as characters' point of view shots, but such explicit instances of enunciation are contained within a supervening narrative that specifies who is speaking and looking, and also establishes that their words and vision are partial. The narrative itself, locating the enunciations of the characters, is always at pains to present itself not as discours but as histoire, unfolding before the spectator as completed, comprehended, resolved and impartial. The representations on screen appear not as one point of view but as reality itself. The narrative doses around a world as it would appear to the all-seeing eye of God - a privileged position that the spectatorial ‘I’ is only too pleased to occupy.

To sum up this first phase of thinking about the relation between text and subject, the central emphasis throughout was on the text's power to determine the subject's response. Watching a film necessarily entailed adopting the spectator position that was inscribed in the text; to comprehend was to be positioned. In the second phase a far more complex and sophisticated theory was elaborated, once again pioneered by Stephen Heath, who revised his earlier opinions as he came to appreciate the limitations of Althusser's theory of ideology.

In appropriating Lacan to help explain how ideology functions, Althusser had concentrated on the mirror phase, in which the child perceives and identifies with an idealised self-image, and from this had derived his notion of interpellation, in which the individual is called to an image of him or herself, is caught up in a structure of misrecognition and thereby becomes constituted as a subject within ideology. For Althusser, Heath wrote, 'the subject is thus the individual always held in the identity - the identification - of interpellation'.43 This entails, first of all, that people are fixed in positions of subjection through their self-conceptions operating within a system of representation; and secondly, that they are locked into illusion. Determined and deluded, they 'go all by themselves, like so many automata'.44

There were in this account, Heath argued, insurmountable problems that went beyond those recognised by Hirst in his critique. Hirst's perception that interpellation involved a pre-given subject pointed to a fundamental incompatibility between Althusser's and Lacan's views on subjectivity. Because of Lacan's emphasis on the primacy of the signifier there can be no individual prior to the processes of language to become the support for the identification. But further, not only is the subject not pre-given, it is always necessarily in process, being constituted through the process that is language. These criticisms were given expression in an influential article in the Edinburgh Magazine of 1976, where Heath wrote:

There is no subject outside of a social formation, outside of social processes which include and define positions of meaning, which specify ideological places.

There is a concrete history of the construction of the individual as subject and that history is also the social construction of the subject; it is not in other words that there is first of all the construction of a subject for social / ideological formations and then the placing of that constructed subject-support in those formations, it is mat the two processes are one in a kind of necessary simultaneity - like the recto and verso of a piece of paper. The individual is always entering, emerging, as subject in language.45

In underlining the importance of process Heath drew attention to two related aspects of the constitution of the subject. The first was that the subject is as much constituting as constituted because, according to Lacan, the subject halts the slide of the signifier, thereby becoming the producer as well as the product of meaning. There was therefore, Heath said, a 'dialectic of the subject',46 in which language is not the sole determination but is rather 'an area of determinations. . . the condition-and-effect of social practice'.47 Although the subject is always implicated in discursive practices, this is not to say that the effects of meaning and subjectivity are produced by the organisation of discourse alone. Signifying practices should rather be thought of as 'subject productions', a phrase which implies productions both by and of the subject.48 Meaning and subjectivity come into being together, each engendering the other in a process of endless dialectic.

This complex idea of the dialectic of the subject, which will recur frequently in the course of this book, is perhaps best explained by reference to concrete examples. In each case there is an exchange between the subject and the other - whether that other be an aspect of the world, a person, or a film - involving an act of interpretation. For instance, different people confronted by the same stretch of open moorland will respond differently: for the walker it is an enticing prospect for vigorous exercise, for the agoraphobic a terror-inducing void. In each case the subject is constitutive in that the interpretation is not inherent in the object - the landowner interprets it differently again; but at the same time the subject is constituted by the object, in that, according to the interpretation, he or she is to a lesser or greater extent transformed by it. The subject is at once the producer and the product of the meaning. Two further examples would be the condition of the lover in the erotic relation and that of the analysand in the analytic situation. In the former instance, the lover constitutes the beloved as the idealised object of desire, while being constituted in the condition of infatuation by this interpretation of the independently existing object. Similarly, in the analytic situation, the (mistaken) presumption that the analyst is the one who knows the meaning of the analysand's discourse engenders a mode of subjectivity in which the analysand can discover something of what he or she wants. When applied to the relations between spectator and film this conception entails that both make their contribution, what Heath called 'give-and-take'.49 Without this, the subject can only be thought of as either inescapably determined by the text or as voluntaristically creating meanings (which, though politically more hopeful than immobility, leaves little or nothing to be achieved in the realm of the textual). In each case political intervention becomes a redundancy, in the one because meanings are unalterably fixed, in the other because they are already fluid. Instead the relation of subject and text is a movement of exchange: 'the subject makes the meanings the film makes for it, is the turn of the film as discourse'.50

The other aspect of the stress on process was that the subject's constitution within language is a moment of division. Entry into language is the condition for subjectivity and identity, but also for the unconscious, which functions to invalidate any attempt to capture the subject's reality. Not unity but division, not identity but non-identity, these are the terms for the constitution of the subject. Nothing of this, however, pervades Althusser's account of subjectivity. For him the pre-given individual is constituted as a subject by a pre-given representation; the self-image presented through interpellation is the subject's identity. What vanishes in this is the distinction between subject and representation, for they are one and the same. Psychoanalysis, by contrast, insists on the interminable elusiveness of the subject, the impossibility of ever fully defining it, by virtue of the unbridgeable gulf between the subject of the enunciation, who speaks, and the subject of the enounced, who is spoken of. Thus the subject is never completely positioned or captured by its representations. Although existing in society and in ideological formations, the subject always exceeds any representations of such formations, and the attempt to limit and unify it belongs to the fictive realm of the imaginary. Since the individual is not one but is process, heterogeneity, multiplicity and unfinished, there is no possibility of ideological apparatuses simply constructing subjectivity. Therefore the cinema as institution does not position but contains. Its attempt to achieve a complete closure that will hold the subject in position never absolutely succeeds. Its representations can never fully represent, its bids to fix in place must finally fail. So although a film may adopt and construct forms of interpellation the notion of interpellation is inadequate as an account of the relations of film and spectator. Instead, these should be thought of as 'signifying practice, as so many relations of subjectivity, relations which are not the simple "property" of the film nor that of the individual-spectator but which are those of a subject production in which film and individual have their specific historical and social reality as such'.51

Heath's intervention concluded with a call to shift the analysis away from text as system towards text as process, away from 'the object cinema' towards 'the operation cinema'. In its fixation on the formal attributes of texts, semiotics risked blocking the understanding of how cinema is related to other practices as well as the more general relations among signification, ideology and history. Semiotics was in danger of becoming an obstacle rather than the royal road to the analysis of the text's political functioning. To circumvent this danger Heath elaborated a conception of film (proposed originally by Jean-Louis Comolli) as a 'specific signifying practice'. Each term in the formulation was explicated as follows: 'Signifying indicates the recognition of film as system or series of systems of meaning, film as articulation'; 'specific is the necessity for analysis to understand film in the particularity of the work it engages, the differences it sustains with other signifying practices', which requires a semiotic analysis that attends to the heterogeneity present in particular textual systems and to the range of codes at work.52 Practice, the crucial term, was conceived in Althusserian terms as the processes of transformation of a determinate, given raw material into a determinate product. The term 'practice' entailed that film was not some neutral medium transmitting a pre-given ideology, but was the active production of meaning, with its own materiality and effectivity. As such, it broke with reductionist accounts that conceived films as mere reflections of pre-existing social forces or as having political effectivity only in so far as they communicated explicitly political messages. The term also carried the further implication that since film is the work of production of meanings, the question of the positioning of the spectator enters into the analysis of film. In this way the classical, and by now obscurantist, opposition between form and content could be bypassed in favour of the operations of film and the relations of subjectivity so entailed. As specific signifying practice film was to be studied in terms not of langue and parole but of discourse, thereby implicating a subject (to be theorised by psychoanalysis). Under such a conception cinema is one of a number of 'machines' generating ideology, specifically in that through its mechanism 'the spectator is moved, and related as subject in the process and images of that movement'.53 Or in the words of Teresa de Lauretis, cinema is 'a work of semiosis: a work that produces effects of meaning and perception, self-images and subject positions for all those involved, makers and viewers.'54 The work of Lacan was to figure centrally in thinking through the complexities of this second phase. Although Heath was not entirely uncritical of Lacan (his occlusion of history being one cause for concern), he was on the whole confident that Lacanian psychoanalysis could overcome any difficulties. Others, however, as we shall see, were somewhat less confident.

In the mid-1980s the semiotics concerned with formal systems (as opposed to semiotics relating to the subject) survives within film theory only in the form of specific detailed studies around narrative, point of view, editing and so on. Although such work is admirably rigorous it no longer occupies the position of centrality that semiotics briefly enjoyed in the aftermath of 1968, when its apparent scientific status threatened to displace all other filmic discourses and to become the necessary precondition for advance in any area of film study.

Of the various reasons for the eclipse of semiotics, the most important for film theory was the failure to integrate it with historical materialism. Initially it had seemed a relatively straightforward matter to bring together Althusser's notion of the materiality of ideology with Saussure's of the materiality of signification. After all, each could only apparently gain from the other: historical materialism lacked an adequate theory of signification (this lack was especially felt with the growing emphasis on ideology and its existence as representations), and semiotics lacked the theoretical means of relating signification to its social context. Semiotics would fill the lack in historical materialism, and vice versa. Furthermore, the rigour of semiotics chimed nicely with the Althusserian promise of scientificity. The outline of such an integrated theory would at once figure how a text produced an ideological representation of the world and how it constituted the individual as subject for that representation.

But as the enterprise proceeded it became evident that relating the signifying process to history and the social formation was more difficult than had been anticipated. It became apparent that Saussure's theory of meaning was less of a foundation stone than a stumbling block, the problem being that the logic of the model was at odds with the intention behind its deployment. Instead of allowing the exchange between spectator and text to be related to history, the model had the effect of evacuating history from that exchange. The exit to social reality was blocked both via the text and via the subject: if meaning was produced by a system of differences then the process of signification became autonomous and therefore difficult to relate to other social practices; the spectator as constituted by the text was difficult to relate to the subject as constituted elsewhere. It was these issues that underlay two important debates in the late 1970s: between Ros Coward and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS); and between Paul Willemen and Colin MacCabe.55

The broad project of CCCS was not dissimilar to Screen's, in that they were using Marxist theories of ideology, pre-eminently Althusser’s theory of relative autonomy and ideological state apparatuses, to analyse various cultural phenomena such as the press and television. Coward's basic contention was that in studying representation they disregarded Saussure, in that they took representations to be both expressive of pre-given meanings and determined by the class interests of their source. What this omitted was firstly that signification produces meaning rather than simply expresses pre-given meaning, and secondly that it has its own specificity and is irreducible to any other practice. Coward did not argue that signifying processes are fully autonomous, and indeed insisted that they are not. It was rather that although the means of representation has its conditions of existence, these are not expressed or represented by it. Institutions like cinema or television are clearly shaped by social forces, but because of the determining action of the means of representation such institutions do not necessarily represent the economic interests in which they are constructed. Nor is there any easy way to relate signification to such forces.

In reply, CCCS denied that their position was as reductionist as Coward had suggested, giving various reasons to show they respected the relative autonomy of signifying practice. Coward's position, they said, despite her gestural attempts to reconcile specific signifying practice and the social formation, effectively gave complete autonomy to signification. The question then arose as to whether she was still working in any sense within a Marxist framework; for their part they would continue the immensely difficult task of relating culture to the class society in which it existed, a task that required the development of a general social theory based on the work of Gramsci and Althusser. Coward, for her part, remained unphased by the suggestion that she had ceased to be a Marxist since, like Hindess and Hirst, she saw Marxism as having unduly privileged certain concepts that blocked the way towards necessary political analyses, not least among them those pertaining to the oppression of women. Rather than continue to rely on the incoherent concept of relative autonomy, the new politics was better served by thinking of the social formation in terms of conditions of existence rather than determination (especially determination by the economic in the last instance) and by concentrating on the specificity of signification. In women's struggles, for instance, a prime concern must be to combat and transform existing systems of representation. The role of theory was therefore not to provide tantalisations of society but to intervene in particular struggles as a tactical instrument. As usual in such debates matters were not finally resolved, but of the two positions it was Coward's that was to be the more influential. For our purpose the importance of the debate was in the indication it gave of the unravelling of the theoretical fabric holding together Althusser, Saussure and Lacan, further evidence of which was apparent in the debate between Willemen and MacCabe.

The debate turned on the vexed question of subject position, a concept we have already seen developed through two phases, one based on interpellation, the other on the dialectic of the subject. Willemen perceived that for all the sophistication of the second phase, there was a major problem with it in that if the subject was already in place, produced by other social practices and able to work on the text, it became impossible to specify a text's effectivity on the basis of its structure. Because of this problem there was a tendency to fall back on the earlier phase, whereby the text unilaterally determined the spectator's reading. Here, though, the spectator was a mere function of the text, locked into position by the unalterable chain of signifiers. It was this formalism, with its implications of 'subjugation. . . not to say terrorism', that Willemen wanted to challenge.56 His immediate target was a paper by Edward Branigan contrasting two films by Fellini and Oshima. It exemplified that formalist criticism which identified and described the structural codes present in films, such as point of view, spatial organisation and editing, which were in themselves supposedly of determinate effect on spectators. Analyses of this kind, Willemen argued, became immanent, hypostatising the text and hence the reader, with both frozen into immobility. Their effect was to evacuate ideology, the social formation and history, and to block 'the theorisation of the construction of subjectivity in social practices'.57 Because the text inscribes a reader, irrespective of his or her social and historical placement, in an inevitable fixity, there is no room for the workings of ideology except through this monolithic determination. Formalism ignored the outside of the text, 'an outside consisting of discourses in struggle, discursive formations cohering into conjunctures of ideologies'.58 In other words, it ignored the multiplicity of social forces and practices at play, at work, in the reading of any text. Against formalism's hypostatisation, Willemen contended that texts were open to a multiplicity of readings. Meaning is a product not simply of the text, but of historically and socially constructed subjects engaging with the text. Whereas for the formalists the text is a unified structure with determinate effects, for Willemen it is unstable, offering only provisional coherences that vary according to context and reader. Any code functions within an ideological configuration that not only gives it meaning but also specifies its place within ideological practice. Instead of being determined once and for all by the codes of the text, the political effectivity of the text is a function of the mode of reading. Under the pressure of diverse and variable readings, texts may be transposed into more or less any ideological space, may be commandeered for even quite contradictory critical ends. The best any purely textual analysis can do is open up problematic areas of that ideological space by activating the repressions, contradictions and latencies within it. In making these claims for the real plurality of readers and readings Willemen's views coincided to a large extent with those of Umberto Eco mentioned earlier.

Like Eco, Willemen saw the formalist identification of the textually constructed reader with the real reader as being of no value in the analysis of the text's political functioning. No such analysis was possible unless it took the historically formed subject into account as well. Not only are the textually constructed reader and the real reader radically divergent, but the constructed reader is itself a multiplicity formed through the various subject positions offered by the text -as too is the historically formed real subject. Thinking through the relations between them was, Willemen appreciated, a formidable task, but he was confident that relative autonomy provided the framework with which to do so. Ultimately the organisation of the ideological and discursive formations in which the subject was situated was a function of 'the real', and this in turn was to be identified with the relations of production. It is the place occupied within the relations of production that determines which institutions and discursive regimes will be encountered. Each individual reads texts in terms of his or her 'concrete experience', that is, in terms of the ideologies and discourses he or she has encountered.

Willemen was concerned that this traditional, even commonsensical, viewpoint should neither fall back into a mechanistic determinism nor detract from the effectivity and productivity of signifying practice. He insisted that both the subject and reality are constituted in discourse. The relations among the real (which is logically prior to discourse), reality (which exists for a subject), subject and discourse are to be thought of in terms of a dialectic, whereby the real determines the encounter with discourses, which produce reality and affect the subject's passage through the real. Subjects work both on and in discourses: their positionality in the real and in reality must be distinguished yet 'thought together in a dialectical movement of mutual determination'.59

This analysis led him to the conclusion that ideological struggle would involve two simultaneous components. One, by challenging and displacing existing discourses, would alter the balance of forces within institutions; the other, in parallel, would replace the existing discourses with new ones, so providing alternative subject positions within ideology. Analysis and politics, theory and practice, were inextricably bound together.

Despite Willemen's insistence that he nowhere lost sight of the effectivity of signification or the dialectic of the subject, Colin MacCabe was unconvinced. For MacCabe detected what had troubled Coward in the work of CCCS, namely, the presumption that cinema stands in a representational relation to the ideological, the political and the economic. As a practice with its own specific effectivity, cinema can be neither the representation nor the expression of anything pre-given, but must be understood in terms of discourse and the production of subject positions. This does not lead back to formalism, because textual structures do not of themselves determine readings but are, as MacCabe put it, always imbricated with the ideological. This adherence to the notion of the dialectic of the subject entailed that the text neither preceded ideology, nor the reverse; the imbrication of the two meant that reading is a function both of the text's formal organisation and of ideology, which itself can only exist within a discursive formation. Willemen, said MacCabe, failed to think of the relation of text and ideology in terms of imbrication, but in maintaining a general theory of discourse and politics held fast to a belief in the separate fields of the textual and the extra-textual. The one comprised the formal articulation of the text, its codes and structures, operating to produce effects in the reader; the other was an historically given ideological and political space outside of cinema determining how any film would be read. The separation of these two, according to MacCabe, resulted in a siphoning-off of determinacy from the textual to the extra-textual, ultimately allowing no determining reality for the discursive as against 'the real'. Rather than thinking in terms of inside (cinema) and outside (ideology), the concept of discourse enabled one 'to think the operations by which cinema is constantly transforming the outside inside, and that inside a further element in the outside'.60 Classic narrative cinema is perpetually referring to an outside which is 'pulled into place, into space' in the film's address to the spectator, thereby becoming an inside that confirms the outside.61

As an illustration of this process MacCabe cited Nashville, a film that has as its theme the respective realities behind the country music scene and populist politicking. While the music of the performers, the speeches of the politicians and the diegetic television reportage of both tell little of, indeed conceal, what is really going on, the picture track renders this invisible visible for the spectator. Taken behind the rhetoric of pork-barrel politics, and the clichés and stereotypes of the television reporter, the spectator is offered a comprehensive and omniscient vision, a position of knowledge. Now although the address to the spectator comes from the articulation of shot and narrative, it is not solely the work of the codes scrutinised by formalist analyses, but rather relies on an audience already subscribing to a belief in the 'falsity and idiocy of Middle America'.62 Nashville thus pulls its public 'into the place that it already occupies'.63 The spectator is shown what she or he already believes, namely that all political activity is a futile charade incapable of changing social reality, and therefore succumbs to the political apathy that the film promotes as its ideological project. Truth and transformation are represented as mutually exclusive; showing it like it is to show that nothing can be done about it; knowledge is impotence.

MacCabe's article bears testimony to the increasing and finally insoluble difficulties facing the post-1968 project of determining the political effectivity of the text. In proposing such effectivity as a function, firstly, of subject position, and secondly and more sophisticatedly, of the constituted-constituting subject, the model had confronted many problems (some of which we have already discussed, others to be taken up later), but the one on which the enterprise foundered was that to which it had returned time and again, namely the subject. If the dialectic of the subject was a reality, if the subject was as much producer as produced, then the political effectivity of the text could not be determined by an analysis of the text alone. That is, immanent analyses of its structures, organisation, strategies and codes would not permit the final determination of the relations of subjectivity it would constitute. The exchange, therefore, between text and society, between discourse and history, became so complex as to preclude anything beyond the most provisional and gestural of generalities.

In coming to appreciate these difficulties MacCabe, in his most recent writings (Theoretical Essays), has in certain respects moved closer to Willermen's position, but more importantly towards one that could be called postmodernist (a topic we shall return to in chapter 7). With the possibility of the single revelatory analysis of the text foreclosed, there can only be readings for readers, different models of its modus operandi for different theoretical approaches adopted. Both text and reader take their form from 'a dizzyingly vast series of determinations'.64 There is no longer any question of ascertaining the unique meaning of the text, any more than there is of establishing the single subject position constituted by it or the sole political effect of its textual operations. The spectre of endless difference [can] not be dispelled theoretically (for every reader a different meaning, for every reading a different meaning).'65 In which case, it may be wondered, is all possibility of analysis thereby precluded? To this MacCabe answered no: though analysis could no longer claim to be final or unique, there was a more limited, provisional and modest option based on what he has called shared questions. In practice, MacCabe writes, we share questions about sexuality and power, education and the national language. In our professional, academic or other shared practices, such questions find their validity, as do, by implication, their answers.

On the strength of the debates outlined above, it became evident that the semiotic enterprise as originally conceived was in need of re-evaluation. While still available for admirably rigorous close textual reading, it could no longer be seen as the way forward in the understanding of the political functioning of cinema. Developments within post-structuralism powerfully reinforced this trend. We shall here limit our elucidation to certain pertinent aspects of the work of Jacques Derrida, leaving to one side both the bulk of his critique of Western metaphysics, and other post-structuralists (notably Foucault and Lyotard, who are treated elsewhere in this book).

Our starting point will be Derrida's when he writes: 'This is my starting point: no meaning can be determined out of context, but no context permits saturation.'66 It is fundamental to any signifier, word or text that it can be repeated; indeed signification precisely depends on this condition of repeatability, or iterability. But what determines the meaning is the context in which the signifier, word or text occurs; and since this is variable and boundless, the meaning of successive iterations are equally so. Just as no one person or institution can finally control the contexts in which a text will be situated, no one person or institution can specify the limits of meaning accruing to the text. Readers constantly relate any given text to others, so producing new meanings, new interpretations. The possibility of' the text overrun[ning] all the limits assigned to it' entails that meaning is always potentially both different and deferred (Derrida's term differance has this dual sense as well as designating that spatio-temporal difference is the condition of meaning).67 The absence of any fixed or final meaning, the constant entering into new textual relationships, which Derrida refers to as 'nonmasterable dissemination', is what decisively distinguishes Derrida's account of language from that of Saus-sure.68 In effect, Saussure had been blind to the radical implications of his conception of the sign, appreciating that signification is an effect of a system of differences but failing to conclude (in large measure because of his privileging of speech over writing, with the implication of a meaning-intending presence behind speech) that there could therefore be only endless difference.

Derrida also took issue with Lacan, who, while in principle recognising the implications of the primacy of the signifier, did not (said Derrida) do so in practice. The focus of Derrida's disagreement was Lacan's reading of a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter'. In the story, a letter (whose content is never revealed) has been sent to the Queen, who, in order that it may not be discovered by the King, hides it by pretending there is nothing to hide, laying it openly on the table when the King enters while she is reading it. The King sees nothing, but the Minister realises what is going on and steals it by gathering it up with his other papers, thereby gaining power over the Queen. The Minister in turn hides it by placing it where it can be seen in a card rack on his mantelpiece, a ploy that fools the secret police the Queen has ordered to retrieve it, but not, subsequently, the detective Dupin. Correctly identifying the crumpled piece of paper as the purloined letter, Dupin returns the following day, distracts the Minister's attention and takes the letter, substituting for it a facsimile on which he has inscribed a pointed quotation, thereby settling an old score with the Minister. For Lacan, the story functions almost as an allegory for a number of psychoanalytic truths, summed up by the formulation 'a letter always arrives at its destination'.69 While Lacan meant several things by this, among them that the subject is caught up in the compulsion to repeat, that the unconscious is never silent, and that the role of the analyst is to ensure that the messages sent by the analysand are delivered to their true addressee, for our purposes the important theme is the one discussed in this chapter, that of the role of the symbolic in the constitution of the subject. In the same way that the subject is not master of the signifier but is rather subjected by it, so are the characters in the story denned by their relation to the letter, changing as this relation changes. Thus in respect of the two triadic scenes of King, Queen, Minister and police, Minister, Dupin, the positions instituted by the letter are the same but are occupied by different characters - in the first scene the Minister is the robber, the Queen is the dispossessed, and the King notices nothing; in the second these positions are taken up by Dupin, the Minister and the police respectively. As their positions change, so do not only their actions but also their characteristics - when Dupin occupies the third place he becomes the aggressor, while the hitherto aggressive Minister takes on the feminised role previously enacted by the Queen. In short, then, the tale illustrates the centrality of the signifying chain in the constitution of subjectivity. It is, of course, this notion on which so much of 1970s film theory turned.

Although Derrida did not directly challenge Lacan's psychoanalytic theses, he did question this reading of Poe on the grounds that Lacan found in the text only what he wanted to find there. By treating the text as a mere representation of pre-given psychoanalytic truths Lacan was violating his own Saussurean precept that the signified continually slides beneath the signifier, a point that he made in the course of the analysis itself. Instead, however, of following the logic of his position and allowing that it is impossible to pronounce the final word on a text, Lacan did the reverse, deciphering the hidden meaning of the story. At one point in the analysis, for example, Lacan likened the letter to the phallus; but this, claimed Derrida, was a classic piece of Freudian reductionism, in which the phallus is accorded the status of a transcendental signified, a meaning given prior to signification. Rather than acknowledging the dissemination of meaning, Lacan sought to master the text using the phallus as the key. In so doing he failed to perceive the possibility that 'a letter can always not arrive at its destination' - though equally, of course, it may arrive.70 Meanings, in other words, can never be safeguarded against the vagaries of interpretation; they can always go astray.

Within film theory Derrida is perhaps best conceived of as a structuring absence. Although initially cited by the post-1968 theorists as support for the materiality of language, references to his work became subsequently less frequent. In the structuralist phase there was obviously a serious incompatibility between the requirement that texts determine readers' responses (through interpellation) and Derrida's project. Once it is allowed that the human subject has a degree of agency in the reading of a text (and in the last chapter we showed that it must be), then the notion of dissemination renders any positioning by the text untenable. For if interpellation can only operate through an act of interpretation on the part of the reader, then there is no guarantee that a text will always interpellate in the same way. After Derrida there can be no question of specifying the text's effectivity independently of the context of reception: readings differ; a letter does not always reach its destination. Structuralists, therefore, could only lose by co-opting him. For post-structuralists, on the other hand, committed as they were to a plurality of readings of texts, the grounds for maintaining a distance were less evident, but may be traced to a general preference for a Lacanian perspective.

Even when it entered its post-structuralist phase film theory was concerned above all else with the text's political effectivity, and was therefore disinclined to indulge in the flamboyant propagation of meanings associated with many Derrideans engaging with literature. For film theorists the important thing was that film, as Frank Lentricchia said of literature, 'makes something happen'.71 While accepting that there is no final meaning to the text, no limiting its meaning to the demands of any one institutional framework (of relevance, among other things, in challenging the established protocols of teaching texts), they were insistent that in any given, historically defined instance the text is read in a particular way and that this has an effect upon the reader. Just as the open stretch of moorland that induces terror in the agoraphobic has a very different meaning for and effect on the rambler, the landowner or the birdwatcher, so too with any text: openness of meaning, yet determinacy of effect. Derrida's concern was not with how meanings are produced, but rather with how they can miscarry; for film theorists, however, the dominant concern was to study the determinations at work in particular historical moments giving rise to particular meanings, and they needed therefore a model of signification that would take account of what Derrida termed 'external constraints'. This need was seemingly met by Lacan's conception of the dialectic of the subject: that in the act of enunciation subject and meaning come into being together.

To recall Lacan's graph reproduced earlier in this chapter, the signified slides beneath the signifying chain, which the subject punctuates retroactively to produce meaning. Thus, in so far as film theory was concerned with accounting for the effectivity of signification, it tended to look more to Lacan than Derrida. However, as we shall show in the following chapter, there were serious problems attaching to Lacan.

2 Semiotics

1 These phrases appeared in the polemics of Kevin Brownlow, John Col-eman, Nigel Andrews, and Clive James.

2 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1974), p. 16.

3 Colin McArthur, 'Analysing cinematic sign language', inDialectic! (London: Key Texts, 1982), p. 38.

4 Christian Metz, quoted by Jim Hillier, Movie 20, spring 1975, p. 25.

5 Geoffrey Sampson, Schools ofLinguistics: Competition and Evolution (London: Hutchinson, 1980), p. 48.

6 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 120.

7 Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 16-17.

8 C. S. Peirce, quoted in Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, p. 18.

9 C. S. Peirce, quoted in Robert Almeder, The Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 24.

10 Almeder, The Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce, p. 25.

11 Ibid., p. 25.

12 Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics, p. 22.

13 Doane, Mellencamp and Williams, Re-vision, p. 6.

14 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-image, trans. Hugh Tomlin-son and Barbara Habberjam (London: Althone Press, 1986); de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't.

15 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits:A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavis-tock Publications, 1977), p. 65.

16 Jacques Lacan, quoted in Juliet Flower MacCannell, figuring Lacan:

Criticism and the Cultural Unconscious (London: Croom Helm, 1986), p. 46.

17 The graph is reproduced from Lacan, Ecrits, p. 303.

18 Christian Metz, quoted in Stephen Heath, 'Film/cinetext/texf>, Screen Reader 2 (London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1981), p. 104.

19 Christian Metz, quoted in Heath, 'Film/cinetext/text', p. 106.

20 Christian Metz, Film Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 116.

21 Ibid., p. 105.

22 See Metz, Film Language, chapter 5.

23 The analysis can be found in Metz, Film Language.

24 David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Methuen, 1985), p. xii.

25 See Christian Metz, Language and Cinema, trans. D. J. Umiker-Sebeok (The Hague: Mouton, 1974).

26 Oswald Stack, Pasolini on Pasolini (London: Thames and Hudson in association with the British Film Institute, 1969), p. 29.

27 Pasolini, quoted in de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't, p. 42.

28 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 200.

29 Ibid., p. 3.

30 Umberto Eco, 'Articulations of the cinematic code', in Movies and Methods: An Anthology, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 604.

31 Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, p. 49.

32 Ibid., p. 235.'

33 de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't, p. 47.

34 Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, p. 49.

35 Heath, 'Film/cinetext/text', p. 100.

36 Ibid., p. 103.

37 See Julia Kristeva, The system and the speaking subject', The Times Literary Supplement, 12 October 1973, p. 1249.

38 Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Signifier (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 68.

39 Emile Benveniste, quoted in Antony Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 43.

40 Emile Benveniste, ibid., p. 41.

41 Emile Benveniste, ibid., p. 43.

42 Christian Metz, 'History/discourse: note on two voyeurisms', trans. Susan Bennett, Edinburgh Magazine 1976, p. 24.

43 Stephen Heath, The turn of the subject", Cine-tracts 7/8, summer/fall 1979, p. 33.

44 Ibid., p. 43.

45 Stephen Heath, 'Screen images, film memory', Edinburgh Magazine, 1976 p. 40.

46 Stephen Heath, 'Anato Mo', Screen 16, 4, winter 1975/76 p 50

47 Heath, The turn of the subject1, p. 41.

48 Ibid., p. 43.

49 Ibid., p. 43.

50 Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (London: Macmillan 1981} d 88. ' V'

51 Heath, 'The turn of the subject1, p. 44.

52 Stephen Heath, "'Jaws", ideology and film theory5 Film Reader 2 1977, p. 167.

53 Heath, Questions of Cinema, p. 62.

54 de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't, p. 37.

55 The principle articles in the former debate were Rosalind Coward, 'Class, "culture" and the social formation', Screen 18, 1, spring 1977; lain Chambers et al., 'Marxism and culture', Screen 18, 4, winter 1977/78; Rosalind Coward, 'Response', Screen 18, 4.

56 Paul Willemen, 'Notes on subjectivity - on reading "Subjectivity under siege5", Screen 19, 1, spring 1978, p. 45.

57 Ibid., p. 44.

58 Ibid., p. 43.

59 Ibid., p. 69.

60 Colin MacCabe, The discursive and the ideological in film - notes on the conditions of political intervention', Screen 19, 4, winter 1978/79, p. 35.

61 Ibid., p. 35.

62 Ibid., p. 38.

63 Ibid., p. 38.

64 Colin MacCabe, Theoretical Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 24.

65 Ibid., p. 24.

66 Jacques Derrida, 'Living on: borderlines', in Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey H. Hartman and J. Hillis Miller, Deamstruc-tion and Criticism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 81.

67 Ibid., p. 84.

68 Jacques Derrida, 'White mythology', in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), p. 248.

69 Jacques Lacan, 'Seminar on The Purloined Letter"', Tale French Studies 48, 1972, p. 72.

70 Jacques Derrida, The purveyor of truth', Tale French Studies 52, 1975, p. 65.

71 Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change, p. 105.

Some Cinematic Terms

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Auteur: the notion that a film's director can be considered as its author. By studying directors' output, particular themes and styles can be seen to run through most of their films

Composition: the way in which the contents of the shot relate to one another. For example, two people of equal status may be framed in such a way that they occupy an equal amount of space; if, however, one dominates the other, the shot may be composed so that one towers over the subordinate

Continuity editing: the conventional style of editing that strives not to be noticed. There are various rules, for example the 'axis of action' (the 180-degree line) must not be crossed so the cinematic space can be orientated toward the spectator. See also establishing shot

Diegesis: the narrative world created by the film. Everything that exists in the film's world is part of the diegesis; addons, such as credits and music that the characters cannot hear, are non-diegetic.

Dissolve: a type of edit - the transition between one shot and another - where the second shot fades in as the first fades out. They are both momentarily visible to the audience

Dominant ideology: the system of values and beliefs that dominate society at a particular time. For the past four hundred years, bourgeois ideology has held sway in the western world. These values and beliefs may seem natural, but they are a social construction

Establishing shot: this is often the first shot of a scene that allows spectators to see where everything and everybody is. This shot establishes the 'axis of action' (see continuity editing) that the camera must not cross

High Concept: the industry term given to films that can be described in twenty-five words or less. It is characterised by a postmodern self-consciousness in the use of style and stars. Most blockbuster movies are constructed as High Concept films

Hollywood: geographically in Los Angeles, however it often refers to a type of film that is characterised by conventional film form and style and that is primarily made in order to make money

Iconography: a term derived from art criticism. In film studies, it refers to objects associated with particular genres, for example, robots in science fiction

Mise-en-scene: this literally 'in the picture': how the elements within the frame interact in order to create meaning. In the opening sequence of Blade Runner, Leon often dominates Holden in the mise-en-scene, prefiguring the latter's fate

Montage: a collection of edits often used to quickly describe a journey (like the end of the original Blade Runner). In the terms of Soviet film maker and theorist, Sergei Eisenstein, it refers to a collection of shots that comment upon the action. In the first sense, the montage is usually diegetic (see above); Eisenstein's montage, however, can be a collection of non-diegetic material

Pan and scan: the technique used to display widescreen films for television's 4:3 dimensions. The frame is too wide to be encompassed, so the camera appears to 'slide' across the frame, allowing audiences to see what is obscured.

Star persona: how a star appears to the audience. A persona may or may not relate to the real person. Personas are understood primarily from films but also through interviews and articles. Stars tend to have quite similar personalities across their films

Shot/reverse-shot: a pair of shots in which the second mirrors the first. A dialogue is often filmed this way: the first person is shown at a particular angle, maybe over their shoulder; the following shot is of the second person from the same angle but from their side (their shoulder). This can be repeated a number of times

Genre Theory and Film Noir

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Introduction

'Whoever went to the movies with any regularity during 1946 was caught in the midst of Hollywood's profound post-war affection for morbid drama. From January through December deep shadows, clutching hands, exploding revolvers, sadistic villains and heroines tormented with deeply rooted diseases of the mind flashed across the screen in a panting display of psychoneuroses, unsublimated sex and murder most foul.'

This article from a 1947 Life magazine quoted in Hollywood Genres (Schatz, 1981, p. in) is revealing not only for the way in which, at a time when the genre was still young, it manages to touch on many of what were later to be seen as the essential elements of film noir, but also for the high moral tone it adopts towards 'panting', 'morbid drama'. At a time when few popular American films were taken seriously, concern about the explicitness of the sexuality and, curiously in the light of later work, the 'realism' of the violence of noir, amounted to moral panic. Critics' dislike was compounded by economic snobbery: the low budgets and 'B' film status of many film noirs was seen as a priori proof that the films were 'trash'. Within this framework the noir films by émigrés whose earlier work was considered 'art' were seen as particularly lamentable. As documented in Stephen Jenkins's book (1981), it became an English and American critical truism to decry Fritz Lang's decline into the production of what Gavin Lambert, for instance, saw as mere 'workmanlike commerce' (p. i).

The major period of noir production is usually taken to run from The Maltese falcon in 1941 to Touch of Evil in 1958. Even after this time, however, British and American critics failed to take film noir seriously. As Paul Schrader comments, 'For a long time film noir, with its emphasis on corruption and despair, was considered an aberration of the American character. The western, with its moral primitivism, and the gangster film, with its Horatio Alger values, were considered more American than the film noir.' Schrader goes on to suggest that the fundamental reason for the neglect of noir was the importance of visual style to the form: 'American critics have been traditionally more interested in theme than style: ' it was easier for the sociological critics to discuss the themes of the western and the gangster film apart from stylistic analysis than it was to do for the film noir' (Schrader 'Notes on film noir', 1972., p. 13).

In France the situation was very different. Initially, interest focused on the links between noir films and the writing of the 'hard-boiled' novelists such as Chandler, Hammett, Woolrich, Cain and McCoy, who all either wrote screenplays or source novels for noir films. The phrase film noir itself derives from the serie noire books - mainly translations of the above-named American writers. Interestingly, it seems that this examination of writers as one of the sources for film noir became, in Britain and America, a method of ascribing respectability - see, for example, Jenkins's comments on the overvaluation of the role of the literary Hammett in histories of film noir compared with the contribution of, for example, Woolrich (Jenkins, 'Dashiell Hammett and film noir', 1982., p. 276).

" Equally relevant to the French context was the rise of authorship theories known historically as the politique des auteurs. The re-evaluation of noir films by particular directors, especially Lang, Huston, Ray, Fuller and Aldrich, involved a new depth of investigation and, especially, a close examination of mise en scene. The basic aim of such studies was, however, the tracing of continuities across careers rather than the lateral investigation of work produced in particular periods and production contexts. The most interesting questions about noir do not concern the marks of directorial difference. Rather, the crucial issue, as phrased by Silver and Ward, is that of 'cohesiveness': the wide influence of noir across the work of different directors and genres. Silver and Ward take a random sample of seven film noirs and note that 'different directors and cinematographers, of great and small technical reputations, working at seven different studios, completed seven ostensibly unrelated motion pictures with one cohesive visual style' (Silver and Ward, 1981, p. 3).

Although it is generally accepted that crime and criminal acts provide the basis for the majority of noir films and the noir style (see Durgnat, 'The family tree of film noir', 1974) the influence of noir spreads beyond the gangster/thriller genres influencing melodramas, horror films, detectives, even (although this would not be universally agreed) westerns and musicals. Indeed, Schrader has suggested that noir can be seen as touching 'most every dramatic Hollywood film from 1941 to 53' (Schrader, 1972., p. 9).

Categories and definitions

Given the potential expansiveness of the term, noir demanded both a theoretical system which could pin down what it was that made noir noir, and criticism which examined its generic marks and investigated the structural, thematic and visual systems integral to the whole series of films. Before work on defining the crucial elements of noir and an examination of their workings could begin, however, preliminary attempts were made to categorise those films which seemed central to noir.

The first book-length study of noir (Borde and Chaumeton, 1955) began this work by mapping out various recurrent themes within noir (violence, crime, psychological emphasis) and relating these to particular films. This in turn provided the basis for Durgnat's eccentric and amorphous 'Family tree of film noir' (1974) which listed nearly 300 films under headings such as 'Psychopaths', 'Gangsters', and 'Middle-Class Murder'. The latter category was sub-divided into lists including 'Corruption of the Not-So Innocent Male' (e.g. Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice) ; 'Woman As Heroic Victim' (e.g. Rebecca, Gaslight) and 'Mirror Images' (e.g. Rebecca, The Woman in the 'Window). Durgnat's article, written in 1970, was influential in mapping the territory but it pointed up the need for more rigorous and specific definition - for many, his inclusion of films like 2001 was mere provocation.

Paul Schrader touches on what he sees ' as some of the recurring visual marks of noir - die majority of the scenes lit for night, rain-drenched streets, doom-laden narration, compositional tension rather than "action and a fondness for oblique lines and fractured light. Generally appreciative of Durgnat's categorisation, Schrader suggests that the family tree is structured around a halting of the upwardly mobile thrust of the 30’s. 'Frontierism has turned to paranoia and claustrophobia. The small-time gangster had made it big and sits in the mayor's chair. The private eye has quit the police in disgust and the young heroine, sick of going along for the ride is now taking others for a ride.’ Writing more historically than Durgnat, Schrader identifies an intensification of this downward movement as the noir period continues and categorises noir temporally by sub-dividing it into three main periods. These are: Wartime 1941-46 (characterised by 'the private eye and the lone wolf . . . studio sets and more talk than action', e.g. The Maltese Falcon, Gilda, Mildred Pierce), Post-War Realistic 1945-49 ('crime in the streets, political corruption and police routine' and 'less romantic heroes', e.g. The Killers, Brute Force) and finally Psychotic Action and Suicidal Impulse 1949—53 (‘the psychotic killer as active protagonist, despair and disintegration', e.g. Gun Crazy, D.O.A., Sunset Boulevard) (Schrader, 1972, pp. 11-12).

Both Durgnat and Schrader state that they do not see film noir as a genre. Instead, Schrader suggests that it should be seen as a period or movement similar to German Expressionism or Italian Neo-Realism. Critics of this use of the term claimed that unlike the quoted movements noir did not involve an overt, or even implicit, commitment to a political/ aesthetic programme and that to imply that it did misrepresented the divergent attitudes of noir film-makers and noir's precise industrial production context.

Janey Place (with Peterson, 'Some visual motifs of film noir', 1974; 'Women in film noir', 1978) also uses the term 'movement' and justifies her use of it in some depth.

She claims that 'unlike genres, defined by objects and subjects, but like other film movements, film noir is characterised by a remarkable homogeneous visual style with which it cuts across genres' (Place, 1978, p. 39). In the earlier article Place and Peterson attempt to identify the elements of this 'consistent thread'. They outline the difference between the dominant 'high-key lighting style' which eliminates 'unnatural' shadows on faces and gave 'what was considered to be an impression of reality' and noir's chiaroscuro 'low-key lighting' which eschews softening filters and gauzes and 'opposes light and darkness, hiding faces, rooms, urban landscapes - and by extension, motivations and true character — in shadow and darkness'. The night scenes integral to film noir would, in the 'blanc' style, have been shot 'day for night' with special filters. A central element of the noir look, however, was the high contrast image and jet black (rather than blanc grey-black) skies given by 'night for night' shooting. Place and Peterson go on to describe noir's rnise en scene 'designed to unsettle, jar, and disorient the viewer in correlation with the disorientation felt by the noir heroes'. Typically, they argue, noir is distinguished by the use of 'claustrophobic framing devices' which separate characters from each other, unbalanced compositions with shutters or banisters casting oblique shadows or placing grids over faces and furniture, 'obtrusive and disturbing' close-ups juxtaposed with extreme high-angle shots which make the protagonist look like 'a rat in a trap.' Overall, the visual style of noir as described by Place and Peterson amounts to a disorientating anti-realism which exists in opposition to the harmonious 'blanc' world of the realist film.

Place's insistence on the distinguishing character of the visual style of the noir is challenged in an article by James Damico ('Film noir: a modest proposal', 1978). Arguing against the view of noir as movement and for it as a genre, Damico claims that the visual style of noir is actually an iconography. He suggests that the common denominator of noir films is their narrative structure and proposes a model by which film noirs may be isolated, objectified and their examination facilitated.

'Either because he is fated to do so by chance, or because he has been hired for a job especially associated with her, a man whose experience of life has left him sanguine and often bitter meets a not-so-innocent woman of similar outlook to whom he is sexually and fatally attracted. Through this attraction, either because the woman induces him to it or because it is a natural result of their relationship, the man comes to cheat, attempt to murder, or actually murder a second man to whom the woman is unhappily or unwillingly attached (generally he is her husband or lover), an act which often leads to the woman's betrayal of the protagonist, but which in any event brings about the sometimes metaphoric, but usually literal destruction of the woman, the man to whom she is attached, and frequently the protagonist himself (Damico, 1978, p. 54).

While Place's and Damico's respective use of the terms 'movement' and 'genre' is closely argued in relation to their individual stress on either visual style or narrative structure, other writers have used them differently, or have opted instead for 'series', 'cycle' or 'sub-genre'. Subsequent authors have not automatically accepted Damico's contention that his schema provides an alternative reading of noir which is in opposition to accounts stressing visual style. For example, Paul Kerr's article on the industrial context of the 'B' film noir unproblematically includes both Place and Damico in a general introduction to the genre's characteristics (Kerr, 'Out of what past?', 1979/80, p. 49). Sylvia Harvey, meanwhile, offers a useful synthesis within a framework which accepts visual style as the most fundamental aspect of noir. The defining contour of genre, Harvey suggests, is dissonance: 'the sense of disorientation and unease' produced by 'that which is abnormal and dissonant' (Harvey, 'Woman's place: the absent family of film noir', 1978, p. 32.).

The historical specificity of film noir

Underlying all these different attempts at categorisation of noir lies the issue of its historical specificity. How did it become so dominant in Hollywood for more than twenty years, touching (one might almost say consuming) almost every genre whilst retaining a specific visual and narrative structure? What caused it to decline? And if, as this line of questioning suggests, there was a relationship between historical period and the stylistic and thematic elements of noir, how should this relationship be characterised?

Before dealing with how various theorists have answered these questions it is important to signal the debate about the delineation of the genre's historical period. Following Schrader, most critics have understood the major period of noir to fall between The Maltese Falcon in 1941 and Touch of Evil in 1958 (Schrader, 1972., p. 8), although the search for immediate precursors has been a popular academic occupation (e.g. Flinn, who claims in 'Three faces of film noir', 1972, that the 65-minute 'B' movie Stranger on the Third Floor is the earliest film noir). This strictly time-bound view is, however, implicitly challenged by some listings. Durgnat's family tree lists several titles made outside of the 1942-58 period, including several more usually seen as precursors, such as Warner Bros gangster films. A more complex challenge to Schrader's time limits comes from Silver and Ward (1981), whose book includes synopses of later films which were clearly influenced by noir, often to the point of intentional homage. The genesis of films like Klute, Hustle, Body Heat and Schrader's own American Gigolo was provocatively prefigured by his comment that 'as the current political mood hardens, filmgoers and film-makers will find the film noir of the late 405 increasingly attractive' (Schrader, 1972, p. 8). These later films may be better described as 'film après noir', as suggested by Larry Gross (Gross 'Film après noir', 1976), but this merely recasts, rather than eliminates, questions about the relationship between noir and its specific historical configuration.

Industry and aesthetics

Borde and Chaumeton comment briefly on the influence of German Expressionism, which they see as transmitted chiefly through the agency of émigré directors Lang and Siodmak, but then go on to say that noir is better understood as a 'synthesis' of 'the brutal and colourful gangster films' made by Warner Bros, the horror films associated with Universal and the 'detective fiction shared by Fox and MGM'. They also identify in the genre the 'inexhaustible sadism' of animation, the 'absurdity and casual cynicism' of American comedy and the influence of certain realist and/or social commentary films, notably LeRoy's / Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (Borde and Chaumeton, 'Sources of film noir', 1978, p. 63). Rather than helping to explain why a synthesis in the form of noir should have taken place during the 405 and 505, the diversity of their sources tends to obscure the issue. They do make it clear, however, that noir grew from within the American as well as European industries.

Schrader's account stresses the historical time limits of genre, but does little to explain the industrial context for the 'halting of 305 optimism' except to speculate that the end of the war and Depression freed the industry from the task of 'keeping people's spirits up' (Schrader, 1972, p. 9). His combination of a listing of sources (to which others have added Citizen Kane) linked to a vague statement of post-war gloom can be seen as the most dominant paradigm for understanding the industrial/aesthetic context for noir.

Paul Kerr challenges the generality of such accounts, suggesting a re-examination of the conjuncture between 'a primarily economically determined mode of production known as "B" film-making' and what were primarily ideologically defined modes of 'difference' known as the film noir (Kerr, 1979/80, p. 65). More specifically, Kerr argues that some of the stylistic features of noir such as night for night shooting, disorientating lighting and camera angles and the generation of tension through editing and short bursts of extreme violence, were direct results of economic factors such as the desire to thwart union restrictions and use stock footage. Furthermore, production took place in the context of the need to demonstrate a clear difference from the realism of 'A' films, with which the 'B' noirs were paired in double bills. Kerr's account goes on to examine the decline of noir, which he relates to various technical developments, such as Technicolor, which were the products of an ideological pressure for increased verisimilitude, and changes in the economic structure of the industry, particularly the anti-monopoly Bill of Divorcement which contributed to the end of the double bill (Kerr, 1979/80, pp. 56-65).

Genre and social context

Kerr's article is explicitly written as a counter-attack on the series of books and articles which have dealt with the wider social/economic/political configurations of the noir period. Again, Borde and Chaumeton (1978) offer a fairly typical account. They suggest the influence of 'vulgarised' psychoanalysis in America and the publicity given to crime. While both of these form recurring elements in noir narratives, Borde and Chaumeton's comments lack historical specificity. A more detailed and influential account of noir's social context can be found in Colin McArthur's Underworld USA (1972.). McArthur notes that 'it is useless to try to align the wholly fictitious events of the thriller with actual events', but then goes on to speculate on the reasons for the emergence of the thriller as film -noir. These 'speculations' include the aftermath of the Depression, the war and the Cold War and the 'general mood of fear and insecurity' produced by an uncertain future. 'It seems reasonable to suggest', he continues, 'that this uncertainty is paralleled in the general mood of malaise, the loneliness and angst and the lack of clarity about the characters' motives in the thriller'. McArthur also cites the misogyny associated with 'the heightened desirability and concomitant suspicion of women back home experienced by men at war' and the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, which he sees echoed in a shift from 305 gangsters overtly concerned with the social origins of crime to noir thrillers such as Dark Corner, 'a cry of loneliness and despair in a sick world' (McArthur, 1972, pp. 66-67).

These speculations are suggestive, but McArthur offers few clear suggestions as to how they are actually articulated in the texts. Furthermore, there is a paradox in his positing a relationship between the social / psychological formations of a particular period and angst, a term which is a-historical. Given the point in the development of critical theory at which the study was undertaken, it is perhaps inevitable that McArthur falls back on auteurist notions to explain the connection between these events and the texts. It was, he suggests, the 'sour and pessimistic sensibilities' of directors such as Lang, Siodmak, and Wilder, 'forged in the uncertainty of Weimar Germany and decaying Austria-Hungary', which provide the vital link between film noir and America in the 40’s and 50’s.

The connection between 'post-war gloom' and the 'meaninglessness', 'depression' and 'angst' of noir became almost de rigeur in critical analyses. Perhaps the most extreme examples linking an apparently angst-laden period and noir via the agency of auteurs comes in the articles about noir and Existentialism. Robert G. Porfirio ('No way out', 1976), for example, attempts to connect French existentialist philosophy to noir through 'hard-boiled' writers, especially, and dubiously (see Jenkins, 1982) Hammett and Hemingway. Writing about the Flitcraft parable, for instance, included in the novel The Maltese Falcon was taken from but omitted from the film, Porfirio claims it reveals that 'Spade is by nature an existentialist, with a strong conception of the random-ness of existence.' Porfirio's analysis implicitly depends upon making an unproblematic leap between the historical configurations within which Existentialism developed in France and the 'world' that exists within the noir texts.

Women in film noir

A very different approach to the historical context of noir can be seen in the feminist writing collected in Women in Film Noir (1978). Making a decisive attempt to shift discussion away from angst, these writers concentrate on the structuring role of patriarchal ideology within the texts. Their interest in noir comes from an understanding of the period of its growth as one of social and economic transition following the disruption of the war years, producing problems for male power and control, and a concern to analyse the genre's treatment of women. Kaplan, for instance, notes that:

'The film noir world is one in which women are central to the intrigue of the films, and are furthermore usually not placed safely in ... familiar roles . . . Defined by their sexuality, which is presented as desirable but dangerous, the women function as an obstacle to the male quest. The hero's success or not depends on the degree to which he can extricate himself from the women's manipulations. Although the man is sometimes simply destroyed because he cannot resist women's lures, often the world of the film is the attempted restoration of order through the exposure and then destruction of the sexual, manipulating woman' (Kaplan, 'Introduction', 1978, pp. 2-3).

In contrast to the seamless, unproblematic assimilation of Existentialism by the noir text assumed by Porfirio's article, these feminist analyses emphasise the text as a site of contradiction. Thus, rather than searching for symbolic truths residing statically within the text, many of the writers (e.g. Gledhill, Johnston and Cook) are concerned to discern structural relationships which they then rework through conceptual frameworks provided by Marxist and psychoanalytically influenced feminism. Gledhill, for instance, says that to understand the significance of film noir for women

'It would be necessary to analyse the conjecture of specific aesthetic, cultural and economic forces; on the one hand the on-going production of the private eye/ thriller ... on the other, the post-war drive to get women out of the workforce and return them to the domestic sphere; and finally the perennial myth of woman as threat to male control of the world and destroyer of male aspiration - forces, which in cinematic terms, interlock to form what we now think of as the aberrant style and world of film noir' (Gledhill, 'Klute i', 1978, p. 19).

Gledhill's analysis of film noir is based on examination of a series of structural elements which open up contradictions around the ambiguously placed noir women. Her 'five features' of noir are: the investigative structure of the narrative which 'probes the secrets of female sexuality within patterns of submission and dominance (p. 15); flashbacks and voice-overs which can sometimes open up a textual gap between a male narrator and the woman he is investigating, as in Gilda; a proliferation of points-of-view, with, typically, a struggle between men and women; unstable characterisation of the heroine, who is likely to be a treacherous femme fatale; and the sexualised filming of this heroine, who is also enmeshed in the contradictory visual style of noir.

This last point is expanded by Place ('Women in film noir', 1978). Working from the basis provided by her earlier work with L. S. Peterson (1974), Place examines the visual motifs through which two archetypal women - the spider woman and the nurturing woman - are articulated. Writing about the spider woman, Place comments that 'the sexual woman's dangerous power- is expressed visually' and details her iconography: long hair, cigarette smoke as a cue for immorality, a habitat of darkness and, perhaps most importantly, a domination of composition, camera movement and lighting which seems to pull 'the camera (and the hero's gaze with our own) irresistibly with them as they move' (Place, 1978, p. 45). Despite her apparent power, the femme fatale 'ultimately loses physical strength' and is actually or symbolically imprisoned (p. 45). For Place, however, this visual and narrative containment is not what is retained from noir. Instead, it is the power of the femme fatale that we remember, 'their strong, dangerous and above all exciting sexuality' (p. 37).

Place's analysis signals the importance in these analyses of the different emphases placed on the recuperative potential of noir - i.e. on the extent to which the text is able to contain and mask the social contradictions structured into its narrative and visual systems. Here is considerable divergence between theorists. Unlike Place, and Dyer ('Resistance through charisma', 1978), who argues for Gilda/ Rita Hayworth's 'resistance through charisma' to textual and ideological containment in Gilda, Pam Cook offers a reading of Mildred Pierce in which the film's textual organisation works to suppress the noir heroine's discourse 'in favour of that of the male', with Mildred finally designated guilty by the Law and returned to a safe, subordinate domestic situation (Cook, 'Duplicity in Mildred Pierce', 1978). Gledhill's examination of Klute, an example of what has been described as 'film après noir', discerns a similar final positioning for a different, but equally equivocal heroine - redefinition, yet again, as guilty (Gledhill, 'Klute z', 1978). These feminist analyses makes a provocative intervention into critical debates about film noir, which have generally been characterised by a masculine perspective on the part of critics and a concentration on the existential dilemmas of the noir hero.

References

Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, Panorame du Film Noir Americain, Paris, Les Editions de Minuit, 1955, reprinted in part as 'Sources of film noir', film Reader 3,1978.

Pam Cook, 'Duplicity in Mildred Pierce', in Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir, London, BFI, 1978.

James Damico, 'Film noir: a modest proposal', Film Reader 3,1978. Raymond Durgnat, 'The family tree of film noir', Cinema (UK), August 1970, reprinted in Film Comment vol. 10 no. 6, November/

December 1974.

Richard Dyer, 'Resistance through charisma: Rita Hayworth and Gilda', in Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir, cit. Tom Flinn, 'Three faces of film noir', The Velvet Light Trap no. 5, Summer 1972.. Christine Gledhill, 'Klute i: a contemporary film noir and feminist criticism', and 'Klute 2:

feminism and Klute', in Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir, cit.

Larry Gross, 'Film après noir', Film Comment vol. 12 no. 4, July/August 1976.

Sylvia Harvey, 'Woman's place: the absent family of film noir', in Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir, cit.

Stephen Jenkins, Fritz Lang: the image and the look, London, BFI, 1981.

Stephen Jenkins, 'Dashiell Hammett and filmnoir', Monthly Film Bulletin vol. 49 no. 586, November 1981.

Claire Johnston, 'Double Indemnity', in Kaplan (ed.), Women in film Noir', cit.

E. Ann Kaplan, 'Introduction', in Kaplan (ed.), Women in film Noir, cit.

Paul Kerr, 'Out of what past ? Notes on the 'B' film noir', Screen Education no. 31/33, Autumn/Winter 1979/80.

Colin McArthur, Underworld USA, London, BFI/Secker and Warburg, 1971.

J. A. Place and L. S. Peterson, 'Some visual motifs of film noir', Film Comment vol. 10 no. i, January/February 1974. \

J. A. Place, 'Women in film noir', in Kaplan (ed.), Women in film Noir, cit. Robert Porfirio, 'No way out', Sight and Sound vol. 45 no. 4, Autumn 1976. Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres, New York, Random House, 1981.

Paul Schrader, 'Notes on film noir', Film Comment vol. 8 no. i, Spring 1972. Alan Silver and Elizabeth Ward (eds.), Film Noir, London, Seeker and Warburg, 1981.