5

The Critic

FILM THEORY:
FORM AND FUNCTION

The Critic

Chapter
Intro

In Mel Brookss and Ernest Pintoff s funny and insightful short film The Critic
(1963), we watch abstract animated shapes perform on the screen as we hear
the voice of Brooks, an old man, puzzle his way happily through the significance of this art:
Vot da hell is dis?!
Mus be a cahtoon.
Op. Mus be boith. Dis looks like boith. I remembeh when I was a boy in
Russia biology.
Op! Its born. Whatever it is, its born. Look out! Too late. Its dead already.
Vots dis? Usher! Dis is cute! Dis is cute. Dis is nice. Vot da hell is it? Oh. I know
vot it is. Its gobbage. Dats vot it is! Two dollas I pay for a French movie, a foreign movie, and now I gotta see dis junk!
The first shape is joined by a second, and Brooks interprets:

The Critic

Yes. Its two two things dat, dat, datthey like each other. Sure. Lookit da
sparks. Two things in love! Ya see how it got more like?it envied the other
thing so much. Could dis be the sex life of two things?
The scene changes again and Brookss old codger begins to lose interest:

The Critic
Vot is dis? Dots! Could be an eye. Could be anything! It mus be some symbolism. I tink its symbolic of junk! Uh-oh! Its a cock-a-roach! Good luck to
you vit ya cock-a-roach, mister!
As the artistic short comes to a close, the critic passes final judgment:
I dunno much about psychanalysis, but Id say dis is a doity pictcha!
The Critic is humorous partly because Brooks manages, in the short space of
his three-minute monologue, to touch on a number of vital truths about criticism. Two dollas we pay for a movie; what do we get for it? How do we determine cinematic value? How do we know whats symbolic of junk? There are
others in the audience with Mel Brookss critic who seem to be enjoying the
film. Are values, then, entirely relative? Are there any true universal rules for
film art? What does film do? What are its limits?
Questions like these are the province of film theory and criticism, two related
but not identical activities that have as their common end an increased understanding of the phenomenon of film. In general, theory is the abstraction; criticism is the practice. At the lowest end of the scale, we find the kind of criticism a reviewer practices: more reportage than analysis. The reviewers function
is to describe the film and evaluate it, two relatively simple tasks. At the upper
end of the scale is the kind of film theory that has little or nothing to do with
the actual practice of film: an intellectual activity that exists primarily for its
own sake, and often has its own rewards, but doesnt necessarily have much
relation to the real world. Between these two extremes there is much room for
useful and interesting work.
A number of important dichotomies govern the work of film theory. The
first, the contrast between the practical and the ideal, is suggested by the difference between criticism (practical) and theory (ideal).
Closely associated with this is the contrast between prescriptive and
descriptive theory and criticism. The prescriptive theorist is concerned with
what film should be, the descriptive theorist only with what film is. Prescriptive
theory is inductive: that is, the theorist decides on a system of values first, then
measures actual films against his system. Descriptive theory, in contrast, is
deductive: the theorist examines the entire range of film activity and then, and
only then, draws tentative conclusions about the real nature of film. Theorists
and critics who prescribe are naturally concerned about evaluation; having

The Critic
strong systems of values, they logically measure real films against their requirements and judge them.
The third and most important governing dichotomy is that between theory
and practice. The fact is, no filmmaker needs to study the theory in order to
practice the art. Indeed, until recently, very few filmmakers had any interest in
theory. They knew (or did not know) instinctively what had to be done. Gradually, however, as film art became more sophisticated, a bridge between theory
and practice was established. Many contemporary filmmakers, unlike their predecessors, now proceed from strong theoretical bases. Even Hollywood offices
are now full of cinema studies Ph.D.s; since the generation of Coppola, Scorsese, and Lucas (film school students all) took charge, advanced degrees have
provided an important entree in the studio system.
This is a major change in the way Hollywood does business. Indeed, the
Hollywood style, which to a great extent still dominates film history, never produced a codified body of theory. On the face of it, the Hollywood film of the
thirties and forties depended on a complex and powerful esthetic system, yet
there is no Hollywood theory as such. No art needs theory; no artist needs an
advanced degree. When academic study becomes a requirement for employment, the very nature of the art changes: it becomes self-conscious and it probably becomes less exciting. You dont have to be a wild-eyed romantic to believe
that its the renegades who break the rules who make the most intriguing art.
Formal training ensures a certain level of journeyman competence, but it tends
to suppress creativity. We trade off the excitement of genius for the assurance of
branded quality. This may explain what has happened to American film since
the early seventies.
The old masters, of course, played it by ear. The best that D. W. Griffith
(who inspired so many theorists) could come up with was a rather dizzy idea
that the human pulse beat was the secret metronome of effective filmmaking.
In Pace in the Movies (Liberty magazine, 1926), he wrote:
The American school makes an effort to keep the tempo of the picture in
tune with the average human heartbeat, which, of course, increases in rapidity
under such influences as excitement, and may almost stop in moments of pregnant suspense.

The Critic

Griffiths
Pace in the
Movies

Luxembourg
Conference

Eisensteins
A Closeup
View

Much of this sort of after-the-fact cogitation was the result of films own inferiority complex as the youngest of the arts. Christian Metz suggests that the
function of such criticism, psychoanalytically, is to rescue film from its badobject status. More simply, the thinking went: if film can support a weighty
system of theory, then it must be just as respectable as any of the other, older
arts. This may seem a rather childish motive for film theory, but it was not so
long ago that film was commonly regarded by educated people as not to be
taken seriously. In the U.S., for example, film did not become a generally
accepted subject for study in colleges and universities until about 1970. So the
impetus for much of early film theory was to gain a degree of respectability.*33
Because of this desire for respectability many of the earliest works of film theory were prescriptiveoften quite pretentiously so, but sometimes intriguingly
elaborate. Continuing the psychoanalytic metaphor, we can think of this as the
ascendancy of films superegoits sense of the artistic communitys standards
of behavior and respectabilityas it struggled to be treated as an equal, and
mastered its natural libidinous impulses. Standards were necessary, and film
theorists provided them. Now that film theory has matured, it is much less
likely to insist on rules and regulations often derived from outside the domain
of film itself and instead concentrates on developing its own more flexible and
more sophisticated values.
Within any specific film theory, there are a number of oppositions at work. Is
the theory mainly esthetic or mainly philosophical? Does it deal with the relationships of parts of cinema to each other, or the parts of a specific film to each
other? Or does it concern itself with the relationships between film and culture,
film and the individual, film and society?
Sergei Eisenstein, still the most fecund of film theorists, used cinematic terminology to describe the difference between various approaches to film study.
In his 1945 essay A Close-up View he described long-shot film theory as
that which deals with film in context, which judges its political and social
implications. Medium-shot film criticism, meanwhile, focuses on the human
scale of the film, which is what most reviewers concern themselves with.
Close-up theory, however, breaks down the film into its parts and
resolves the film into its elements. Film semiotics and other theories that
attempt to treat the language of film, for example, are close-up approaches.

The Poet and the Philosopher: Lindsay and Mnsterberg

The essential concept here is the classic opposition between form and function. Are we more interested in what a film is (form) or in how it acts upon us
(function)? As we shall see, it was quite a while before film theory turned from
a focus on the form of the art to the more difficult and meaningful analysis of
its function. Gradually, prescription has yielded to more scientific methods of
investigation as film theory has become less demanding and more inquisitive.

The Poet and the Philosopher: Lindsay and Mnsterberg

The first film theorists, as we have noted, were mainly interestedsome more
consciously than othersin providing a respectable artistic cachet for the
young art. In 1915, just as the feature film was rising to prominence, Vachel
Lindsay, at that time a well-known poet, published The Art of the Moving Picture, a lively, nave, often simplistic, but nevertheless insightful paean to the
wild, youthful popular art.
The very title of his book was an argumentative proposition: he challenged
his readers to consider this sideshow entertainment as a real art. Working on
the model of the established narrative and visual arts, he identified three basic
types of photoplays, as movies with pretensions to artistic station were then
called: The Photoplay of Action, The Intimate Photoplay, and The
Motion Picture of Splendor, three categories that serve well to triangulate the
Hollywood cinema of the next eighty years. In each case, Lindsay had noticed
and formulated elements of narrative in which film could not only rival but
often surpass the other arts: Action, Intimacy, and Splendor were all strong
(sometimes crude), direct valuesand still are.
Working intuitively from his lively passion for the movies, Lindsay then further compared the potential of film with the accomplishments of the older arts,
discussing film as, in turn, sculpture-in-motion, painting-in-motion, and
architecture-in-motion. He concluded his basic outline of the esthetics of
film with two chapters, each in its own way surprisingly prescient. At the time
he wrote, those few films taken seriously by the cultural Establishment were the
ones that mimicked the stagethe photoplays.

The Poet and the Philosopher: Lindsay and Mnsterberg

Lindsays The
Art of the
Moving
Picture

Yet Lindsay understood very early onafter The Birth of a Nation (1915)
but before Intolerance (1916)that the real strength of film might lie in precisely the opposite direction. In Thirty Differences Between Photoplays and
the Stage he outlined an argument that was to become a major concern of film
theorists throughout the twenties and into the thirties as he explained how the
two seemingly parallel arts contrasted. This became the dominant theme as
film theorists tried to establish a separate identity for the adolescent art.
Lindsays last chapter on esthetics, Hieroglyphics, is even more insightful.
With profound insight, he wrote:
The invention of the photoplay is as great a step as was the beginning of picture-writing in the stone age.

Lindsay
Poems

He then goes on to treat film as a language and, although his analysis may be,
as he suggests, a fanciful flight rather than a sober argument, it nevertheless
points directly to the most recent stage of development in film theorysemiotics. Quite an achievement in 1915 for an antiacademic poet enamored of the
barbaric yawp and untrained in the scholarly disciplines!
Nor does Lindsay stop with the internal esthetics of film. The third section
of his book is devoted to the extrinsic effects of the photoplay. Again, the discussion is not so important for its concrete contributions to our understanding
of the medium as it is as an early historical marker, yet one of Lindsays most
idiosyncratic theoriesalways dismissed by later theorists and criticsbears
further examination.
Lindsay suggests that the audience should engage in conversation during a
(silent) film rather than listen to music. No one took his suggestion seriously; if
they had, we might have developed a cinema that was communal and interactive much earlier than we did. Many Third World films (as well as those of
Godard) were designed, despite their soundtracks, as first statements in conversation between filmmaker and observer. In short, Vachel Lindsay as poet and
passionate lover of film intuited a number of truths that more academic theorists, limited by their rigid systematic thinking, never could have understood.
A year after Lindsays paean to movies first appeared, it was joined by another
major contributiondirectly opposed in style, approach, and tone, but just as
valuable: Hugo Mnsterbergs seminal The Photoplay: A Psychological Study

The Poet and the Philosopher: Lindsay and Mnsterberg

(1916). Mnsterberg, of German origin, was a professor of philosophy at Harvard and, like his sponsor William James, one of the founders of modern psychology. Unlike Lindsay, the populist poet, Mnsterberg brought an academic
reputation to his work. He was not a movie fan but rather a disinterested academician who only a year before his book was published had little or no experience of the rowdy popular art.

Mnsterbergs
The Photoplay

His intellectual analysis of the phenomenon not only provided a muchneeded cachet but also remains even today one of the more balanced and objective outlines of film theory. Mnsterberg was committed to bridging the gap
between professional theory and popular understanding. Intellectually the
world has been divided into two classes, he wrote, the highbrows and the
lowbrows. He hoped that his analysis of the psychology of film would bring
these two brows together. Sadly, his book was ignored for many years and was
only rediscovered by film theorists and students in 1969.
Like Lindsay, Mnsterberg quickly understood that film had its own special
genius and that its esthetic future did not lie in replicating the kind of work
that was better done on stage or in the novel. Like the poet, the professor also
understood that film theory must take into account not only implicit esthetics
but also explicit social and psychological effects. He calls these two facets the
Inner and the Outer developments of motion pictures, and he begins his
study with a discussion of them.
His most valuable contribution, however, predictably lies in his application
of psychological principles to the film phenomenon. Freudian dream psychology was a useful tool for many popular theories of cinema from the twenties
on. Mnsterbergs approach, however, is pre-Freudian (which is one good reason why it was ignored for so long); at the same time he is an important precursor of Gestalt psychology, which makes his approach seem surprisingly contemporary. Freudian film psychology emphasizes the unconscious, dreamlike
nature of the experience and therefore concentrates on the passive attitude
toward the medium. Mnsterberg, in contrast, develops a conception of the
relationship between film and observer as interactive.
He begins by describing how our perception of movement in moving pictures depends not so much on the static phenomenon of persistence of vision
as on our active mental processes of interpretation of this series of still images.

The Poet and the Philosopher: Lindsay and Mnsterberg

Venice
festival

Thirty years later, this active process became known as the Phi phenomenon.
Mnsterberg had described it (without labeling it) in 1916.
In chapters titled Attention, Memory and Imagination, and Emotions,
he then develops a sophisticated theory of film psychology that conceives of
film as an active processa strongly mental activityin which the observer is
a partner with the filmmaker. In a second section, titled The Esthetics of the
Photoplay, he investigates some of the ramifications of this view of the process. In shifting attention away from the passive phenomenon of persistence of
vision and toward the active mental process of the Phi phenomenon, Mnsterberg established a vital logical basis for theories of film as an active process. At
the time, this theory was prescriptive rather than descriptive. During the first
thirty or forty years of film theory, the concept of the medium as essentially
passive and manipulative was dominant, as it is in film practice. Yet Mnsterbergs understanding of the medium as at least potentially interactive would
eventually be redeemed.
Curiously, Lindsays and Mnsterbergs books were the last really significant
works of film theory produced in the U.S. until quite recently. It seemed as if
film theory was beside the point once Hollywood began to dominate film practice. By the early twenties, the focal point of film theory had shifted to Europe
and was for fifty years dominated by French, German, and Eastern European
thinkers.
Like the British tradition, the American line of development of theory/criticism has been mainly practicalconcerned with concrete criticism rather than
abstract theory. Ideally, it is not a less valuable tradition because of this practical
orientation, but because it is diffuse it is not so easy to describe or to study.
Concentrated single volumes of abstract theory lend themselves to analysis
much more readily, a fact that should be remembered, since it tends to distort
our conception of the shape of developing film theory.
Paradoxically, one of the first signs of the growing vitality of film theory in
Europe in the twenties was found in the work of Louis Delluc, who, although
he produced several volumes of theory (Cinma et cie, 1919; Photognie, 1920),
is best remembered as a practicing daily film critic, filmmaker, and founder of
the cin-club movement. Together with Lon Moussinac, he established film
reviewing as a serious undertaking, in direct contrast to the reportage and puff
publicity then common. Delluc died in 1924, before his thirty-fifth birthday,

Expressionism and Realism: Arnheim and Kracauer

but by that time the European tradition of the art film (and the film of art) was
solidly established.

Expressionism and Realism: Arnheim and Kracauer

Andrew on
Phenomenology

In his useful introduction to the subject, The Major Film Theories (1976), J.
Dudley Andrew adopted categories derived from Aristotle to analyze the structure of film theory. He approached various theories by four avenues: Raw
Material, Methods and Techniques, Forms and Shapes, and Purpose and
Value. We can further simplify the categories if we realize that the two central
onesMethods and Techniques and Forms and Shapesare simply opposite facets of the same phenomenon, the first practical, the second theoretical.
Each of these categories focuses on a different aspect of the film process, the
chain connecting material, filmmaker, and observer. The way in which a theory
arranges these relationships to a large extent determines its aim, and is a direct
function of its underlying principles. Those theories that celebrate the raw
material are essentially Realist. Those that focus first on the power of the filmmaker to modify or manipulate reality are, at base, Expressionist: that is, they
are more concerned with the filmmakers expression of the raw materials than
with the filmed reality itself.
These two basic attitudes have dominated the history of film theory and
practice ever since the Lumire brothers (who seemed to be obsessed with capturing raw reality on film) and Mlis (who obviously was more interested by
what he could do to his raw materials). It is only recently that the third facet of
the process, the relationship between film and observer (in Aristotles terms
Purpose and Value), has begun to dominate film theory, although it was
always implicit in both Realist and Expressionist arguments. The semiotics of
film and the politics of film both begin with the observer and work back
through the art of the filmmaker to the reality of the raw materials on the other
side.

Expressionism and Realism: Arnheim and Kracauer

The center of interest has shifted from generative to receptive theories. We
are now no longer so concerned with how a film is made as with how it is perceived and what effect it has in our lives. Mnsterbergs work (and even Lindsays) had foreshadowed this shift of emphasis. Moreover, we should remember
that all three of these interrelated elements were evident during the practical
development of film, even if theory at various points tended to emphasize one
to the exclusion of the others.
Expressionism dominated film theory throughout the twenties and thirties.
D. W. Griffith described two major schools of film practice, the American
and the German. The American School, he told his audience, says to you:
Come and have a great experience! Whereas the German school says: Come
and see a great experience! Griffiths purpose was to suggest that American
cinema in the twenties was more active and energetic than German cinema, as
indeed it was. Yet although we speak of German Expressionism in the twenties and seldom use the word in an American context, nevertheless both of
Griffiths schools focus on the essentially Expressionist aim of the great experience. As Griffith describes his theory of pacing in the movies, it is a tool for
the manipulation of the spectators emotions:
For a quick, keen estimate of a motion picture give me a boy of ten and a girl of
fifteenthe boy for action, the girl for romance. Few things have happened in
their lives to affect their natural reactions.
What Griffith and Hollywood wanted were pure reactions to their stimuli; the
art of film, accordingly, lies almost entirely in the design of effective stimuli.
There is little or no sense of the observer actively involved in the process.
Realism was a common, if subordinate, strain in film practice throughout the
first four decades of film history; it didnt come into its own theoretically until
the late thirties (in the practical work of the British documentarists led by John
Grierson) and the forties (with Italian Neorealism). There were good reasons
for this late blooming: first, since Realist theory naturally implied that film
itself was of lesser importance (that reality was more important than art), this
led both filmmakers and theorists toward Expressionist positions. Expressionism not only made the filmmaker more important in the general scheme of
things, it was also a natural outgrowth of the early efforts to achieve for film
art a certain degree of respectability. During the early twentieth century,

Expressionism and Realism: Arnheim and Kracauer

Arnheims
Film
and Reality

every one of the other, older arts was moving toward greater abstraction, less
verisimilitudeless matter with more art. Why shouldnt the adolescent
upstart, film, move in this direction as well? Moreover, if film was in fact to be
considered a mature art, it was necessary to show that the activity of the art of
film was just as complex and demanding as, say, the activity of painting.
Expressionism, by placing emphasis on the manipulative power of the filmmaker, served this function nicely.
More important, perhaps, is the second reason theories of Expressionism
dominated the first fifty years of film theory: there was very little room for private or personal art in film. Because it was so expensive, cinema had to be a
very popular form. Theories of Realism demand that we see the observer as a
participant in the process. If film is strictly a commodity, how could we justify
making the consumer work for his entertainment? As a product, film had to
be manipulative: the more effect the film had, the better value for the money
the consumer had spent. In fact, most popular film is still judged by this simple
rule: witness the success of such mind-blowers as The Exorcist (1973), Jaws
(1975), Alien (1979), and Terminator 2 (1991). In this economic sense, movies
are still a carnival attractionrides on roller coasters through chambers of horror and tunnels of loveand Realism is totally beside the point.
The two standard, most succinct, and colorful texts describing the contrasting Expressionist and Realist positions are Rudolf Arnheims Film as Art (published first in German in 1933 as Film als Kunst and translated into English
almost immediately) and Siegfried Kracauers Theory of Film: The Redemption of
Physical Reality (first published in 1960). Both books are stronglyalmost belligerentlyprescriptive. Both present revealed truths as if film theory were a
matter of pronouncements rather than investigations. Yet both remain memorable and have become classics of the literature of film, not only because they
each neatly summarize the positions of their respective schools, but also in no
small part because they are so sententious: more complex, less determinist theories of film are obviously not so easily remembered.
Arnheim had a distinguished career as a psychologist (he was the author of
Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, 1954), so it is no surprise to discover that the basic tenets of Film as Art are psychological. But
unlike his predecessor Mnsterberg, he is more concerned with how film is
made than with how it is perceived. The thrust of his small volume can be

Expressionism and Realism: Arnheim and Kracauer

described quite succinctly: he proceeds from the basic premise that the art of
film depends on its limitations, that its physical limitations are precisely its
esthetic virtues. As he himself summarizes his position in his preface to the
1957 edition:
I undertook to show in detail how the very properties that make photography
and film fall short of perfect reproduction can act as the necessary molds of an
artistic medium.
It is a curious proposition, yet in a sense correct, since logically each art must
be formed by its limitations. The problem is that Arnheim suggests that it
should not exceed those limitations and that technological developments
sound, color, widescreen, and so forththat do push the limits further out are
not to be welcomed. He finds film at its height artistically in the late silent
period, a position that, although understandable enough in 1933, he continued to maintain in the 1957 edition.
After listing a number of ways in which film representation differs from reality, Arnheim proceeds to enumerate how each of these differencesthese limitationsyields artistic content and form. The gist of his argument is that the
closer film comes to reproducing reality, the less room there is in which the artist can create his effects. The success of this theory rests on two assumptions
that are certainly problematic:
that art equals effect, or expression; that the magnitude of a work of art is directly related to the degree of the artists manipulation of materials; and
that the limitations of an art form only generate its esthetics and do not restrict them.
The temptation to increase the size of the screen, he writes, for example,
goes with the desire for colored, stereoscopic, and sound film. It is the wish of
people who do not know that artistic effect is bound up with the limitations of
the medium. Yet as those new dimensions were added to the repertoire of
film art, filmmakers discovered more freedom, not less, and the range of possible artistic effects expanded considerably.
Basically, the difficulty with Arnheims theory of limitations is that he focuses
all too narrowly on the production of film and doesnt take into account the
liberating and complicating factor of its perception. Many of the limitations he

Expressionism and Realism: Arnheim and Kracauer

lists (aside from the technological)the framing of the image, films twodimensionality, the breakup of the space-time continuum by editingare far
less important in terms of how we perceive a film than in terms of how we construct one. By ignoring the total scope of the film process, Arnheim produces a
strictly ideal prescription for film art that has less to do with the actual phenomenon of practical film than it might at first appear. In any event, his pure,
limited conception of film was quickly overtaken by events as technology
developed and practical filmmakers discovered the possibilities of new variables.

Kracauers
Theory

The conflict between Realism and Expressionism that colors nearly all film theory is not so direct, explicit, and nicely balanced as it might at first seem. The
relationship is more dialectical than dichotomous, so that Realist theory grows
out of Expressionist theory just as Expressionist theory had, in its turn, grown
out of the urge to build an artistic reputation for film.
Siegfried Kracauers magnum opus, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, coming twenty-seven years after Arnheims elegant, lean prescription, is in contrast a sprawling, sometimes blunt, often difficult investigation
into wide-ranging theories of Realism that had been developing slowly over a
period of more than twenty years. Expressionism, because it is self-limiting and
self-defining, is relatively easy to outline. Realism, on the other hand, is a
vague, inclusive term that means many things to many people. All students of
literature have run into the problem of Realism before. Is Jane Austen, who
wrote precisely about a very narrow segment of society, a Realist? Or is breadth
as important as depth to the Realist sensibility? Is Naturalism, rather easily
defined as an artistic form based on Determinist philosophy, a kind of Realism,
an offshoot from it, or in direct opposition to it? In film, too, Realism is a
slippery term. The Rossellini of Rome, Open City (1945) is a Realist, but
what about the Rossellini of The Rise to Power of Louis XIV? Or Fellini? Are politics necessary to Realism? What about acting? Are documentaries always more
realistic than fiction films? Or is it possible to be a Realist and still be a story
teller? The catalogue of questions about the nature of film Realism is endless.
Kracauer covers many of them, but his book is by no means a complete survey of the quirky definitions of the word. It is a theory of film, not the theory of
film. Like Arnheims essay, it chooses a single central fact of the film experience

Expressionism and Realism: Arnheim and Kracauer

as crucial, then builds a prescription that leads to a specific conclusion. Like
Arnheim, too, Kracauer was writing mainly after the fact. If the great age of
film Expressionism was the twenties, then the central period of film Realism
was the forties and fifties. The most important Realist trend of the sixties, for
instance, occurred in documentaryan area of film activity about which Kracauer has very little to say.
While Kracauer has the reputation of being the foremost theorist of film
Realism, he was actually only one among many. Andr Bazin, for instance, is
also generally considered a Realist, yet although he offered a much richer
investigation of the phenomenon during the fifteen years preceding Kracauers
book, his work was never so clearly codified as Kracauers and therefore hasnt
until recently had the direct impact of his successors.
Throughout most of film history, Realism has been of more interest to practical filmmakers than theoretical critics. Dziga Vertov in the Soviet Union in
the 1920s, Jean Vigo in France, and John Grierson in England in the 1930s,
Roberto Rossellini, Cesare Zavattini, and the Neorealists in Italy in the 1940s,
all developed Realist positions in opposition to Expressionist theories. It was as
if the filmmakers reacted against the potential abuse of power of their medium,
instead searching for a more moral position in Realism.
At the center of Arnheims theory had been the limitations of the technology
and the form of film art. The kernel of Kracauers theory is the photographic
calling of film art. Simply because photography and film do come so close to
reproducing reality, they must emphasize this ability in their esthetics. This
premise is diametrically opposed to Arnheims. Film, Kracauer wrote, is
uniquely equipped to record and reveal physical reality and, hence, gravitates
toward it. Therefore, he suggests, content must take precedence over form. He
then develops what he calls a material esthetic rather than an esthetic of form.
Because theories of art depend so heavily on formalism, then, film becomes
for Kracauer a kind of antiart. Due to its fixed meaning, he concludes, the
concept of art does not, and cannot, cover truly cinematic filmsfilms, that
is, which incorporate aspects of physical reality with a view to making us experience them. And yet it is they, not the films reminiscent of traditional art
works, which are valid esthetically.
This is the third stage of the psychological development of film as art. After
having established itself as respectable in its adolescence, then having joined the

Expressionism and Realism: Arnheim and Kracauer

community of the arts in its young adulthood by showing how like them it
really was, it now moves into maturity, exerting its ego integrity by separating
itself from the community and establishing its own personal system of values.
If film doesnt fit the definition of art, then the definition of art must be
changed.
Having celebrated films uniqueness, Kracauer then makes a crucial logical
jump. Since it can reproduce reality so well, he suggests, it ought to. It is at this
point that his theory is most open to contradiction. It would be just as easy to
propose (as Arnheim does in a way) that, since film and reality have such a
close and intimate connection, film ought to exercise this mimetic power in the
opposite way: by contradicting, molding, forming, shaping reality rather than
reproducing it. Nevertheless, after these first significant pronouncements, Kracauer moves on into a more general and more objective study of the medium of
film. The logical end point of his primary contention about the close relationship of film and reality would be to elevate the film record, the nonfiction film,
and the documentary over the fictional film. Yet Kracauer, as we have noted,
pays relatively little attention to strict factual film and instead focuses on the
most common type of film: the narrative. He finds the ideal film form to be the
found story. Such films are fiction, but they are discovered rather than contrived. He continues, explaining the difference between this quasi-fictional
ideal form and the fully developed artwork:
Since the found story is part and parcel of the raw material in which it lies dormant, it cannot possibly develop into a self-contained wholewhich means
that it is almost the opposite of the theatrical story [p. 246].
As his theory develops and broadens, it becomes clear that Kracauer has no
great objections to formso long as it serves the purpose of content. And here
we get to the heart of Kracauers true contribution to film theory: film serves a
purpose. It does not exist simply for itself, as a pure esthetic object; it exists in
the context of the world around it. Since it stems from reality it must also
return to ithence the subtitle of Kracauers theory: The Redemption of Physical Reality.
If this sounds vaguely religious, the connotation is, I think, intended. For
Kracauer, film has a human, ethical nature. Ethics must replace esthetics,
thereby fulfilling Lenins prophecy, which Jean-Luc Godard was fond of quot-

Montage: Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Balzs, and Formalism

ing, that ethics are the esthetics of the future. Having been divorced from
physical reality by both scientific and esthetic abstraction, we need the redemption film offers: we need to be brought back into communication with the
physical world. Film can mediate reality for us. It can both corroborate and
debunk our impressions of reality.
This seems an admirable goal.

Montage: Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Balzs, and Formalism

The words Expressionism and Formalism are often used interchangeably in
film criticism to denote those tendencies generally opposed to Realism. Both
Expressionism and Formalism are also labels attached to specific periods of cultural history: Expressionism was the major force in German culturein theater and painting as well as filmduring the 1920s, just as, during the same
period, Formalism marked the burgeoning cultural lifeboth literary and cinematicin the Soviet Union. Essentially, the difference between the two
movements depends on a slight but significant shift of focus. Expressionism is a
more generalized, romantic conception of film as an expressive force. Formalism is more specific, more scientific, and more concerned with the elements,
the details that go to make up this force. It is more analytic and less synthetic,
and it also carries with it a strong sense of the importance of function as well as
form in art.

Sergei
Eisenstein

V. I.
Pudovkin

During the 1920s, the period immediately following the Russian Revolution, the Soviet cinema was among the most exciting in the world, not only
practically but theoretically. There is no doubt that the Soviet filmmaker-theorists wanted not only to capture reality but also to change it. Realism, at least
esthetically, is not particularly revolutionary: as we have noted, it tends to deny
the power of the filmmaker and therefore makes film seem to be less powerful
as a tool to effect social change. During this periodbefore Stalin imposed the
doctrine of Socialist Realism (which is neither Realist nor especially Socialist)two filmmakers, V. I. Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein, produced not only

Montage: Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Balzs, and Formalism

a number of exceptional films but also an amorphous body of Formalist theory
that had a profound impact on the course of development of film theory. At
the same time, the Hungarian writer, critic, and filmmaker Bla Balzs was
pursuing a line of Formalist thinking that, although it is less well known than
those of Pudovkin and Eisenstein, nevertheless deserves to be ranked with
theirs.
Unlike Arnheim and Kracauer, Pudovkin, Eisenstein, and Balzs were practicing filmmakers who wanted to describe their art rather than prescribe for it.
Their theoretical work was not compressed into single volumes, but rather
spread out in individual essays over many years. It was organic, developing, and
ongoing rather than closed, complete, and final. It is thus much less easy to
summarize quickly; it is also much more useful and insightful.

Pudovkins
theory of
montage

Very soon after the revolution of 1917, a filmmaker named Lev Kuleshov was
put in charge of a workshop. Pudovkin was one of his students as was, briefly,
Eisenstein. Unable to find enough filmstock to fuel their projects, they turned
to reediting films already made, and in the process discovered a number of
truths about the technique of film montage.
In one experiment, Kuleshov linked together a number of shots made at
varying times and places. The composite was a unified piece of film narrative.
Kuleshov called this creative geography. In probably their most famous
experiment, the Kuleshov group took three identical shots of the well-known
prerevolutionary actor Moszhukin and intercut them with shots of a plate of
soup, a woman in a coffin, and a little girl. According to Pudovkin, who later
described the results of the experiment, audiences exclaimed at Moszhukins
subtle and affective ability to convey such varied emotions: hunger, sadness,
affection.
In his two major works, Film Technique (1926) and Film Acting (1935),
Pudovkin developed from the basic root of his experiments with Kuleshov a
varied theory of cinema centered on what he called relational editing. For
Pudovkin, montage was the method which controls the psychological guidance of the spectator. In this respect, his theory was simply Expressionist
that is, mainly concerned with how the filmmaker can affect the observer. But
he identified five separate and distinct types of montage: contrast, parallelism,
symbolism, simultaneity, and leitmotif (reiteration of theme).

Montage: Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Balzs, and Formalism

Here we have the basic premise of film Formalism: Pudovkin discovered categories of form and analyzed them. Moreover, he was greatly concerned with
the importance of the shotof mise-en-scneand therefore displayed an
attitude that we have come to regard as essentially Realist. He saw montage as
the complex, pumping heart of film, but he also felt that its purpose was to
support narrative rather than to alter it.

Eisensteins
theory of
montage

Eisenstein set up his own theory of montageas collision rather than linkagein direct opposition to Pudovkins theory. In a series of essays beginning
in the early twenties and continuing throughout most of his life, he worked
and reworked a number of basic concepts as he struggled with the shape and
nature of cinema.*34 For Eisenstein, montage has as its aim the creation of
ideas, of a new reality, rather than the support of narrative, the old reality of
experience. As a student, he had been fascinated by Oriental ideograms that
combined elements of widely different meaning in order to create entirely new
meanings, and he regarded the ideogram as a model of cinematic montage.
Taking an idea from the literary Formalists, he conceived of the elements of a
film being decomposed or neutralized so that they could serve as fresh
material for dialectic montage. Even actors were to be cast not for their individual qualities but for the types they represented.
Eisenstein extended this concept of dialectics even to the shot itself. As shots
related to each other dialectically, so the basic elements of a single shotwhich
he called its attractionscould interrelate to produce new meanings. Attractions as he defined them included

Battleship
Potemkin
stills

every aggressive moment every element that brings to light in the spectator those senses or that psychology that influence his experienceevery element that can be verified and mathematically calculated to produce certain
emotional shocks in a proper order within the totality [Film Sense, p. 231].

Battleship
Potemkin
clip

Because attractions existed within the framework of that totality, a further

extension of montage was suggested: a montage of attractions. Instead of a
static reflection of an event with all possibilities for activity within the limits
of the events logical action, we advance to a new planefree montage of arbi-

Montage: Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Balzs, and Formalism

Alexander
Nevsky

trarily selected, independent attractions. [p. 232]. This was an entirely

new basis for montage, different in kind from Pudovkins five categories.
Later, Eisenstein developed a more elaborate view of the system of attractions
in which one was always dominant while others were subsidiary. The problem
here was that the idea of the dominant seemed to conflict with the concept of
neutralization, which supposedly prepared all the elements to be used with
equal ease by the filmmaker. There are a number of such seeming contradictions in Eisensteins thoughta good sign that his theory of film was organic,
open, and healthily incomplete.
Possibly the most important ramification of Eisensteins system of attractions, dominants, and dialectic collisional montage lies in its implications for
the observer of film. Whereas Pudovkin had seen the techniques of montage as
an aid to narrative, Eisenstein reconstructed montage in opposition to straight
narrative. If shot A and shot B were to form an entirely new idea, C, then the
audience had to become directly involved. It was necessary that they work to
understand the inherent meaning of the montage. Pudovkin, whose ideas seem
closer in spirit to the tenets of Realism, had paradoxically proposed a type of
narrative style that controlled the psychological guidance of the audience.
Eisenstein, meanwhile, in suggesting an extreme Formalism in which photographed reality ceased to be itself and became instead simply a stock of raw
materialattractions, or shocksfor the filmmaker to rearrange as he saw
fit, was also paradoxically describing a system in which the observer was a necessary and equal participant.
The simplistic dichotomy between Expressionism and Realism thus no
longer holds. For Eisenstein it was necessary to destroy Realism in order to
approach reality. The real key to the system of film is not the artists relationship with his raw materials but rather his relationship with his audience. A
hypothetical film that might show the greatest respect for photographed reality
might at the same time show little or no respect for its audience. Conversely, a
highly Formalist, abstract film expressionEisensteins own Potemkin (1925),
for instancemight engage its audience in a dialectical process instead of overpowering them with a calculated emotional experience.
Eisensteins basic conception of the film experience was, like his theories,
open-ended. The process of film (like the process of theory) was far more
important than its end, and the filmmaker and observer were engaged in it

Montage: Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Balzs, and Formalism

dynamically. Likewise, the elements of the film experience that was the channel
of communication between creator and observer were also connected logically
with each other. Eisensteins wide-ranging theories of film thus foreshadow the
two most recent developments of cinematic theory, since he is concerned
throughout not only with the language of film but also with how that language
can be used by both filmmakers and observers.

Balzs on
language

Like Eisenstein, Bla Balzs worked out his description of the structure of cinema over a period of many years. Hungarian by birth, he left his native country
after the Commune was overthrown in 1919 and spent time thereafter in Germany, the Soviet Union, and other East European countries. His major work,
Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art (1948), summarizes and
comments on a lifetime of theorizing. Because he had practical experience in
the art and because he developed his theory over a number of years, Theory of
the Film remains one of the most balanced volumes of its kind.
Sharing many of the basic Formalist principles of Eisenstein and Soviet literary critics of the twenties, Balzs manages to integrate these concepts with certain Realist principles. He was fascinated by the secret power of the closeup
to reveal details of fact and emotion and developed a theory of the true province of film as micro-dramatics, the subtle shifts of meaning and the quiet
interplay of emotions that the closeup is so well equipped to convey. His earliest book on film had been entitled The Visible Man, or Film Culture (1924). It
made this essentially Realist point strongly and probably influenced Pudovkin.
But while he celebrated the reality of the closeup, Balzs also situated film
squarely in the economic sphere of influence. He realized that the economic
foundation of film is the prime determinant of film esthetics, and he was one of
the earliest film theorists to understand and explain how our approach to any
film is molded and formed by the cultural values we share. Predating Marshall
McLuhan by many years, he anticipated the development of a new visual culture that would resurrect certain powers of perception that, he said, had lain
dormant. The discovery of printing, he wrote, gradually rendered illegible
the faces of men. So much could be read from paper that the method of conveying meaning by facial expression fell into desuetude. That is changing now
that we have a developing, reproducible visual culture that can match print in

Mise-en-Scne: Neorealism, Bazin, and Godard

versatility and reach. Balzss sense of film as a cultural entity subject to the
same pressure and forces as any other element of culture may seem obvious
today, but he was one of the first to recognize this all-important aspect of film.

Mise-en-Scne: Neorealism, Bazin, and Godard

Andr Bazin

Bazins
Ontology

Like Eisenstein, Andr Bazin was engaged in a continual process of revision

and reevaluation as his short career progressed from the mid-1940s to his early
death in 1958 at the age of thirty-nine. Unlike nearly all other authors of major
film theories, Bazin was a working critic who wrote regularly about individual
films. His theory is expressed mainly in four volumes of collected essays
(Quest-ce que le cinma?) published in the years immediately succeeding his
death (selected and translated in two volumes: What Is Cinema?). It is deeply
imbued with his practical, deductive experience. With Bazin, for the first time,
film theory becomes not a matter of pronouncement and prescription but a
fully mature intellectual activity, well aware of its own limitations. The very
title of Bazins collected essays reveals the modesty of this approach. For Bazin,
the questions are more important than the answers.
With roots in his background as a student of phenomenology, Bazins theories are clearly Realist in organization, but once again the focus has shifted. If
Formalism is the more sophisticated, less pretentious cousin of Expressionism,
perhaps what Bazin is after should be called Functionalism rather than simply Realism, for running throughout his argument is the important idea that
film has significance not for what it is but for what it does.
For Bazin, Realism is more a matter of psychology than of esthetics. He does
not make a simple equation between film and reality, as does Kracauer, but
rather describes a more subtle relationship between the two in which film is the
asymptote to reality, the imaginary line that the geometric curve approaches
but never touches. He began one of his earliest essays, The Ontology of the
Photographic Image, by suggesting: If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor in their creation. The arts arose, he contends, because other forms

Mise-en-Scne: Neorealism, Bazin, and Godard

of insurance were sought. That primal memory of embalming lives on in
photography and cinema, which embalm time, rescuing it simply from its
proper corruption. This leads to an elegantly simple conclusion:
If the history of the plastic arts is less a matter of their aesthetic than of their psychology then it will be seen to be essentially the story of resemblance, or, if you
will, of realism.

Bazins
Language

If the genesis of the photographic arts is essentially a matter of psychology,

then so is their effect. In The Evolution of the Language of Cinema, Bazin
traces the roots of film Realism back to Murnau and Stroheim in the silent cinema, and quickly and elegantly describes how a series of technological innovations pushed film ever closer, asymptotically, to reality. But while technology
was the source of this particular power, it was used for psychological, ethical,
and political effects. This tendency blossomed in the movement of Italian Neorealism just at the end of and directly after World War IIa cinematic era for
which Bazin felt a great affinity. Is not Neorealism primarily a kind of humanism, he concludes, and only secondarily a style of filmmaking? The real revolution, he thinks, took place more on the level of subject matter than of style.
Just as the Formalists had found montage to be the heart of the cinematic
enterprise, so Bazin claims that mise-en-scne is the crux of the Realist film. By
mise-en-scne he means specifically deep focus photography and the sequenceshot; these techniques allow the spectator to participate more fully in the experience of film. Thus, Bazin finds the development of deep focus to be not just
another filmic device, but rather a dialectical step forward in the history of
film language.
He outlines why this is so: depth of focus brings the spectator in closer relation with the image than he is with reality. This implies consequently both a
more active mental attitude on the part of the observer and a more positive
contribution on his part to the action in progress. No more the psychological
guidance of Pudovkin. From the attention and the will of the spectator, the
meaning of the image derives. Moreover, there is a metaphysical consequence
of deep focus: montage by its very nature rules out ambiguity of expression.
Eisensteins attractions are what they are: they are strongly denotative. Neorealism, on the other hand, tends to give back to the cinema a sense of the ambiguity of reality. Free to choose, we are free to interpret.

Mise-en-Scne: Neorealism, Bazin, and Godard

Astruc: La
camrastylo

Closely associated with this concept of the value of ambiguity are the twin
concepts of the presence and reality of space. Bazin, in a later essay, suggests
that the essential difference between theater and cinema lies in this area. There
is only one reality that cannot be denied in cinemathe reality of space. Contrariwise, on the stage space can easily be illusory; the one reality that cannot be
denied there is the presence of the actor and the spectator. These two reductions are the foundations of their respective arts.
The implications for cinema are that, since there is no irreducible reality of
presence, there is nothing to prevent us from identifying ourselves in imagination with the moving world before us, which becomes the world. Identification then becomes a key word in the vocabulary of cinematic esthetics. Moreover, the one irreducible reality is that of space. Therefore, film form is
intimately involved with spatial relationships: mise-en-scne, in other words.
Bazin did not live long enough to formulate these theories more precisely,
but his work nevertheless had a profound effect on a generation of filmmakers,
as did Eisensteins (but as Arnheims and Kracauers prescriptions did not).
Bazin laid the groundwork for the semiotic and ethical theories that were to
follow. More immediately, he inspired a number of his colleagues on Cahiers du
Cinma, the magazine he founded with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Lo Duca
in 1951. The most influential film journal in history, Cahiers provided an intellectual home during the fifties and early sixties for Franois Truffaut, Jean-Luc
Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette, among others. As
critics, these men contributed significantly to the development of theory; as
filmmakers, they comprised the first generation of cinastes whose work was
thoroughly grounded in film history and theory; their filmsespecially those
of Godardwere not only practical examples of theory but often themselves
theoretical essays.
For the first time, film theory was being written in film rather than print.
This fact itself was evidence that the vision of critic and filmmaker Alexandre
Astruc was being realized. In 1948, Astruc had called for a new age of cinema,
which he identified as the age of camra-stylo (camera-pen). He predicted that
cinema would gradually break free from the tyranny of what is visual, from
the image for its own sake, from the immediate and concrete demands of the
narrative, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written
language.*35 Many earlier theorists had spoken of films language; the con-

Mise-en-Scne: Neorealism, Bazin, and Godard

cept of the camra-stylo was significantly more elaborate. Astruc not only
wanted film to develop its own idiom, he also wanted that idiom to be capable
of expressing the most subtle ideas. Except for Eisenstein, no previous film theorist had conceived of film as an intellectual medium in which abstract concepts could be expressed.
Nearly all theorists naturally assumed that the proper province of the recording medium of film was the concrete. Even Eisensteins dialectical montage
depended thoroughly on concrete imageswe might call it a dialectic of objective correlatives. Astruc wanted something more. In an offhand reference to
Eisenstein, he noted:
the cinema is now moving towards a form which is making it such a precise language that it will soon be possible to write ideas directly on film without even
having to resort to those heavy associations of images that were the delight of
silent cinema.

Cahiers
covers

Astrucs camra-stylo was a doctrine of function rather than form. It was a

fitting complement to the developing practice of Neorealism that so influenced
Bazin.
It would be more than ten years before Astrucs 1948 vision would be realized in the cinema of the New Wave. Meanwhile, Truffaut, Godard, and the
others set about developing a theory of critical practice in the pages of Cahiers
du Cinma. Always the existentialist, Andr Bazin was working to develop a
theory of film that was deductivebased in practice. Much of this work proceeded through identification and critical examination of genres. Cinemas
existence precedes its essence, he wrote in fine existential form. Whatever conclusions Bazin drew were the direct results of the experience of the concrete fact
of film.
Franois Truffaut best expressed the major theoretical principle that came to
identify Cahiers du Cinma in the fifties. In his landmark article Une certaine
tendance du cinma franais (Cahiers du Cinma, January 1954), Truffaut
developed the Politique des auteurs, which became the rallying cry for the
young French critics. Usually translated as auteur theory, it wasnt a theory at
all but a policy: a fairly arbitrary critical approach. As Bazin explained several
years later in an essay in which he tried to counter some of the excesses of the
policy:

Mise-en-Scne: Neorealism, Bazin, and Godard

The Politique des auteurs consists, in short, of choosing the personal factor in
artistic creation as a standard of reference, and then of assuming that it continues and even progresses from one film to the next.

Truffauts
Une
certaine
tendance...

Doinel

Godard on
montage:
English

Godard on
montage:
French

Godard on
Godard

This led to some rather absurd opinions on individual films, as Bazin points
out, but by its very egregiousness the Politique des auteurs helped to prepare
the way for a resurgence of the personal cinema of authors in the sixties who
could wield Astrucs camra-stylo with grace and intelligence. Cinema was
moving from theories of abstract design to theories of concrete communication. It was not material Realism or even psychological Realism that counted
now, but rather intellectual Realism. Once it was understood that a film was
the product of an author, once that authors voice was clear, then spectators
could approach the film not as if it were reality, or the dream of reality, but as a
statement by another individual.
More important than Truffauts Politique, though much less influential at the
time, was Jean-Luc Godards theory of montage, developed in a series of essays
in the middle fifties and best expressed in Montage, mon beau souci (Cahiers
du Cinma 65; December, 1956). Building on Bazins theory of the basic opposition between mise-en-scne and montage, Godard created a dialectical synthesis of these two theses that had governed film theory for so long. This is one
of the most important steps in film theory. Godard rethought the relationship
so that both montage and mise-en-scne can be seen as different aspects of the
same cinematic activity.
Montage is above all an integral part of mise-en-scne, he wrote. Only at
peril can one be separated from the other. One might just as well try to separate
the rhythm from a melody. What one seeks to foresee in space, the other
seeks in time. Moreover, for Godard, mise-en-scne automatically implies
montage. In the cinema of psychological reality that derived from Pudovkin
and influenced the best of Hollywood, cutting on a look is almost the definition of montage. Montage is therefore specifically determined by mise-enscne. As the actor turns to look at an object the editing immediately shows it
to us. In this kind of construction, known as dcoupage classique, the length
of a shot depends on its function and the relationship between shots is controlled by the material within the shotits mise-en-scne.

Mise-en-Scne: Neorealism, Bazin, and Godard

Weekend

Godards synthesis of the classic opposition is elegantly simple. It has two

important corollaries: first, that mise-en-scne can thus be every bit as untruthful as montage when a director uses it to distort reality; second, that montage is
not necessarily evidence of bad faith on the part of the filmmaker. No doubt,
simple plastic reality is better served by mise-en-scne, which in the strictest
Bazinian sense is still more honest than montage. But Godard has redefined the
limits of Realism so that we now no longer focus on plastic reality (the filmmakers concrete relationship with his raw materials) nor on psychological reality (the filmmakers manipulative relationship with the audience), but on intellectual reality (the filmmakers dialectical, or conversational, relationship with
the audience).
Techniques like mise-en-scne and montage then cease to be of main interest. We are more concerned with the voice of a film: Is the filmmaker operating in good faith? Is he speaking directly to us? Has he designed a machine of
manipulation? Or is the film an honest discourse?
(When the first edition of How To Read a Film appeared, in 1977, this question of honest discourse was simply a nice idea; its much more important
now. The growth of special-effects technology in the eighties and the introduction of digitization in the nineties gave filmmakers powerful new tools for constructing manipulation machines, and they are using them. As well see in
Chapter 7, ethical questions now take on added significance.)
Godard redefined montage as part of mise-en-scne. So to do montage is to
do mise-en-scne. This presages the semiotic approach that was to develop in
the sixties. Godard was fond of quoting the apothegm of one of his former
teachers, the philosopher Brice Parain:
THE SIGN FORCES US TO SEE AN OBJECT THROUGH ITS SIGNIFICANCE.

Brice Parain
with Anna
Karina

Plastic or material Realism deals only with what is signified. Godards more
advanced intellectual or perceptual Realism includes the signifier. Godard was
also in the habit of quoting Brechts dictum that Realism doesnt consist in
reproducing reality, but in showing how things really are. Both of these statements concentrate the Realist argument on matters of perception. Christian
Metz later elaborated this concept, making an important differentiation
between the reality of the substance of a film and the reality of the discourse in
which that substance is expressed. On the one hand, he wrote, there is the
impression of reality; on the other the perception of reality.

Mise-en-Scne: Neorealism, Bazin, and Godard

Godards
Camera
Eye

Godards
Les
Carabiniers

Les
Carabiniers

Le Gai Savoir

British
Sounds
track

British
Sounds
feminist
sequence

Godard continued his examination of these theoretical problems after he

became a filmmaker. By the mid-sixties, he had developed a form of filmed
essay in which the structure of ideas usually superseded the classic determinants
of plot and character. Most of these filmsThe Married Woman (1964),
Alphaville (1965), Masculine-Feminine (1966), Two or Three Things that I Know
about Her (1966), for exampledealt with general political and philosophical
questions: prostitution, marriage, rebellion, even architectural sociology. By the
late sixties, however, he was once more deeply involved in film theory, this time
the politics of film. In a series of difficult, tentative, experimental cinematic
essays, he further developed his theory of film perception to include the political relationship between film and observer.
The first of these, and the most intense, was Le Gai Savoir (1968), in which
Godard dealt with the acute problem of the language of film. He suggested that
it had become so debased by being used manipulatively that no film can accurately represent reality. It can only, because of the connotations of its language,
present a false mirror of reality. It must therefore be presentational rather than
representational. While it cannot reproduce reality honestly and truthfully, it
may be able to produce itself honestly. So that the language may regain some of
its force, Godard suggests, it will be necessary for filmmakers to break it down,
to engage in what literary critic Roland Barthes called semioclasmthe
revivifying destruction of signswe must return to zero so that we may
begin again.
During the following five years, before Godard turned his attention to video,
he completed a number of 16 mm films in which he attempted to return to
zero. In Pravda (1969) he investigated the ideological significance of certain
cinematic devices; in Vent dest (1969) he explored the ideological meaning of
film genres; in British Sounds (1969) and Vladimir and Rosa (1971) he examined, among other things, the relationship of sound and image. Sound, he
thought, suffers under the tyranny of image; there should be an equal relationship between the two. Eisenstein and Pudovkin had published a manifesto as
early as 1928 declaring that sound should be treated as an equal component of
the cinematic equation and allowed to be independent of image. But for forty
years film theorists had given only the most perfunctory attention to the element of the soundtrack. Godard hoped the imbalance could be redressed.

Mise-en-Scne: Neorealism, Bazin, and Godard

Vladimir
and Rosa

Vladimir and
Rosa: the
image of
sound

Tout va bien:
tracking shot

Tout va bien:
mise-enscene as
montage

Discussing
Til Victory

Godards
notebooks

Mnch on
Benjamin

Tout va bien and Letter to Jane (both 1972) are probably the most important
of Godards theoretical works during this period. The former summarizes what
he had learned from his experiments; the latter is, in part, an autocritique of
the former.
Tout va bien involves a filmmaker and a reporter (husband and wife) in a
concrete political situation (a strike and the worker occupation of a factory)
and then studies their reaction to it. From this it builds to an analysis of the
entire filmic process of production and consumption. Godard reworked his
earlier synthesis of montage and mise-en-scne in economic terms, seeing cinema not as a system of esthetics but as an economic, perceptual, and political
structure in which the rapports de productionthe relationships between
producer and consumerdetermine the shape of the film experience. The
emphasis is not on how cinema relates to an ideal system (esthetics) but rather
on how it directly affects us as viewers. Films ethics and politics therefore
determine its nature.
This was not a particularly new idea; Balzs was aware of this dimension of
film. In the thirties and forties, the Frankfurt school of social criticism (Walter
Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, mainly) had examined
film in this context, most notably in Benjamins very important essay The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin had written:
For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the
work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. Instead of being based
on ritual, it begins to be based on another practicepolitics. Benjamin, however, was speaking of an ideal. Godard had to show how commercial cinema
had usurped what Benjamin had termed films unique ability to shatter tradition, tamed it, and made it serve the purposes of a repressive establishment. It
was this subliminally powerful idiom that Godard knew had to be broken
down.
Letter to Jane, a forty-five-minute essay about the ideological significance of a
photo of Jane Fonda (one of the stars of Tout va bien), carries out this process in
detail. Working with Jean-Pierre Gorin, Godard attempted to analyze the signification of the esthetic elements of the photo. The angle, design, and relationships between components, Godard showed, have delicate but real ideological
significance. By the time of Letter to Jane, Godard was by no means alone in
this dialectic, semiotic approach to film.

Film Speaks and Acts: Metz and Contemporary Theory

Film Speaks and Acts: Metz and Contemporary Theory

Letter to
Jane

Letter to
Jane

No
apologies
for all the
Godard

Barthes on
Pleasures of
the Text

Metz on
Language

While Godard was studying on film the consequences of the idea that the sign
forces us to see an object through its significance, Christian Metz and others
were studying in print the ramifications of that dictum. In two volumes of
Essais sur la signification au cinma (the first of which appeared in English translated as Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema), published in 1968 and
1972, and in his major work Language and Cinema (1971), Metz outlined a
view of film as a logical phenomenon that can be studied by scientific methods.
The main points of Metzs thesis have already been discussed in Chapter 3. It
will suffice here simply to outline the broad principles of what is the most elaborate, subtle, and complex theory of film yet developed.
Semiotics is a general term that covers many specific approaches to the study
of culture as language. With strong roots in the linguistic theories of Ferdinand
de Saussure, it uses language as a general model for a variety of phenomena.
The approach first took shape in the cultural anthropology of Claude LviStrauss in the fifties and early sixties. This structuralism quickly became
accepted as a general worldview. Michael Wood described the nature of this
intellectual fashion succinctly:
Structuralism is perhaps best understood as a tangled and possibly unnameable
strand in modern intellectual history. At times it seems synonymous with modernism itself. At times it seems to be simply one among several twentieth-century formalisms. And at times it seems to be the inheritor of that vast project
which was born with Rimbaud and Nietzsche, spelled out in Mallarm, pursued in Saussure, Wittgenstein, and Joyce, defeated in Beckett and Borges, and
is scattered now into a host of helpless sects: what Mallarm called the Orphic
explanation of the earth, the project of picturing the world not in language but
as language [New York Review of Books, March 4, 1976].
In short, structuralism, with its offspring, semiotics, is a generalized worldview that uses the idea of language as its basic tool.
Metzs approach to film (like all film semiotics) is at once the most abstract
and the most concrete of film theories. Because it intends to be a science, semi-

Film Speaks and Acts: Metz and Contemporary Theory

Ecos
Toward
a Logic of
Culture

otics depends heavily on the practical detailed analysis of specific filmsand

parts of films. In this respect, semiotic criticism is far more concrete and
intense than any other approach. Yet at the same time, semiotics is often
exquisitely philosophical. The semiotic description of the universe of cinema,
in a sense, exists for its own sake: it has its own attractions, and the emphasis is
often not on film but on theory. Moreover, semioticiansMetz especiallyare
noted for being elegant stylists in their own right. Much of the pleasure of reading semiotic studies has to do with the pure intellectual creativity and the subtlety of technique of its practitioners. Metz, for example, has a droll, eloquent
sense of humor that does much to meliorate his often florid theorizing.
Umberto Eco, next to Metz the most prominent of film semioticians, outlined four stages of the development of the science since the early sixties. The
first stage, which according to Eco lasted until the early seventies, was marked
by what he calls the overevaluation of the linguistic mode. As semiotics struggled to achieve legitimacy, it clung tightly to the accepted patterns of the study
of linguistics that had preceded it. (In the same way, the earliest stages of film
theory had mimicked that of the older arts.)
The second stage began when semioticians started to realize that their system
of analysis was not so simple and universal as they would have liked to believe
at first.
During the third stagethe early seventiessemiotics concentrated on the
study of one specific aspect of the universe of meaning in film: production. The
semiotics of the process, of the making of texts, was central here, and political
ideology became part of the semiotic equation.
The fourth stagebeginning in 1975saw attention shift from production
to consumption, from the making of texts to the perception of them. In this
stage, film semiotics was greatly influenced by the approach to Freudian psychology of the French sage Jacques Lacan.
Having begun with a quasi-scientific system that purported to quantify and
offered the prospect of complete and exact analysis of the phenomenon of film,
semiotics gradually worked its way backward to the basic question that has
puzzled all students of film: how do we know what we see? Along the way, by
rephrasing old questions in new ways, semiotics contributed significantly to the
common struggle to understand the nature of film.

Film Speaks and Acts: Metz and Contemporary Theory

We now might want to add a fifth stageespecially in England and the
United States: the academic establishment of semiotics. During the past few
years, this once elegant system of thought has produced little of real intellectual
value. At the same time, it has become a useful tool for academic careerists
interested more in publishing before they perish than in increasing our understanding of film theory. Because it is inherently, defiantly abstruse, semiotics is
especially dangerous in this regard. In the hands of elegant stylists like Metz,
Eco (who later moved on to write popular novels), or Roland Barthes (whose
books of essays were their own ends), the tools of semiotics can produce attractive and enlightening discursions. But lesser acolytes can get away with a lot
here. Anyone intending to read semiotics should be forewarned: just because
you cant understand it doesnt mean it means anything.
Much of Christian Metzs earliest work was concerned with setting up the
premises of a semiotics of film. It would seem that the fact of montage offers
the easiest comparison between film and language in general. The image is not
a word. The sequence is not a sentence. Yet film is like a language. What makes
film distinctly separate from other languages is its short-circuit sign, in which
signifier and signified are nearly the same. Normal languages exhibit the power
of double articulation: that is, in order to use a language one must be able to
understand its sounds and meanings, both its signifiers and its signifieds. But
this is not true of film. Signifier and signified are nearly the same: what you see
is what you get.
So Christian Metz quickly left behind the structures of linguistics that had
served as models for all the various semiotic studies of film, literature, and
other areas of culture. He turned to the analysis of specific problems. Although
he didnt agree that montage was the governing determinant of film language,
he felt that the use of narrative was central to the film experience. The motivation of cinematic signs, he felt, was important to define: the difference between
denotation and connotation in cinema is important. (See Chapter 3.)
The second important differentiation in narrative, he felt, was between syntagmatic and paradigmatic structures. Both of these are theoretical constructions rather than practical facts. The syntagma of a film or sequence shows its
linear narrative structure. It is concerned with what follows what. The paradigm of a film is vertical: it concerns choicewhat goes with what.

Film Speaks and Acts: Metz and Contemporary Theory

Diagram L. Syntagmatic and paradigmatic structures of clothing.

Now Metz felt he had a system of logic that would permit the real analysis of
the film phenomenon. Montage and mise-en-scne had been thoroughly redefined as the syntagmatic and paradigmatic categories. These Cartesian coordinates determined the field of film.
Metz next turned, in Language and Cinema, to a thorough exposition of the
system of codes that govern cinematic meaning. Within the syntagmas and
paradigms of film theory, what determines how we acquire meaning from a
film? Contemporary mathematical set theory plays an important part in his
elaborate structure of codes. Making the differentiation between film and
cinema that we noted earlier, Metz explained that the concept of codes transcends the limits of film. Many codes that operate in film come from other
areas of culture. These are nonspecific codes. Our understanding of the murder in Psycho (1960), for example, does not depend on specifically cinematic
codes. The way in which Hitchcock presents that murder, however, is an example of a specific cinematic code. Finally, there are those codes that cinema
borrows from or shares with other media. The lighting of the shower sequence

Film Speaks and Acts: Metz and Contemporary Theory

in Psycho is a good example of such a shared code. We thus have our first series
of overlapping sets.

Diagram M.
codes.

CODE SET THEORY :

specific, nonspecific, and shared

The next differentiation of codes follows logically. If some codes are specific
to cinema and some are not, then of those specific codes, some are shared by all
films and some by only a few, while others are unique to certain individual
films. The diagram visualizes this logic:

Film Speaks and Acts: Metz and Contemporary Theory

Diagram N. CODE SET THEORY : Generality of codes.

Finally, codesany codescan be broken down into subcodes; there is a

hierarchy of codes. The system is elegantly simple: film is all the possible sets of
these codes; a specific film is a limited number of codes and sets of codes.
Genres, careers, studios, national characters, techniques, and every other element ever suggested by previous film theorists, critics, historians, and students
can be broken down into code systems.
Codes are the things we read in films.

Diagram O. CODE SET THEORY : codes and subcodes.

Film Speaks and Acts: Metz and Contemporary Theory

Heaths
Film
and System

Carrolls
Address to
the Heathen

Pasolinis
Unhappy
Youths

Horkheimer
& Adorno:
Dialectics of
Enlightenment

Agees
Letter

Along with other semioticians, Metz in the late seventies moved on to a discussion of the psychology of filmic perception, most successfully in his long
essay The Imaginary Signifier, which appeared simultaneously in both
French and English in 1975. Drawing on basic Freudian theory as rephrased by
Jacques Lacan, he psychoanalyzed not only the cinematic experience but also
cinema itself. Because of its great debt to Freud, whose theories are now much
less highly regarded in America than they once were, this trend in film semiotics elicited much less interest among English-speaking followers of semiotics
than among its French practitioners.
While Metz received the most attention, he was by no means alone in his
semiotic pursuits. The movement has been central to French intellectual life for
a long time. Roland Barthes, although mainly a literary critic, contributed significantly to the debate in cinema before his death in 1980. Raymond Bellour
wrote widely; his two extended studies of sequences from Hitchcocks The Birds
and North by Northwest are of special interest. In Italy, Umberto Eco and Gianfranco Bettetini made significant contributions, and Pier Paolo Pasolini,
although as he put it an amateur theorist, produced some interesting analyses
before his untimely death.
In England, semiotics found an early and receptive home in the journal
Screen and led to the establishment of the English school of Cin-structuralism. Peter Wollens Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, the major argument of
which is outlined in Chapter 3, was the most important English-language contribution to the broad outline of semiotic theory.
In the U.S., semiotics had little effect, except to serve as a tool for academics
involved in the growth of film scholarship in colleges and universities in the
seventies and eighties. Highly intellectualized, abstract theories of cinema have
never been popular in America.
The native tradition of the U.S. has been practical criticism, often with a
social if not exactly political orientation, stretching from Harry Alan Potamkin
and Otis Ferguson in the thirties through James Agee and Robert Warshow in
the forties to Dwight Macdonald, Manny Farber, and Pauline Kael in the sixties and seventies. Andrew Sarris, although he doesnt fit into this sociological
tradition, had a marked effect on the course of film criticism in the U.S. in the
sixties and seventies through his work in popularizing the auteur policy.

Film Speaks and Acts: Metz and Contemporary Theory

Sarris:
Happy
Birthday
JFK

Kael: A
Note
on the Title

Sarris:
Citizen
Kael

Kael: The
Movie
Lover

Haskell on
The Female
Star

Solanas on
Third
Cinema

There are no younger critics now writing regularly who have yet established
critical personas as strong as Sarriss, Kaels, or even John Simons in the sixties
and seventies. Since the rise of television-show criticism in the early eighties,
thumbs have replaced theories. Thats not to say there arent a lot of intelligent
people writing about film today; theres just no one with an interesting theoretical ax to grind.
The main tradition of American criticism has preferred to see films not so
much as products of specific authors but as evidence of social, cultural, and
political currents. Especially in the work of Kael, Molly Haskell, and others,
this strain of social criticism was modified to include an intensely personal
focus. Practically, American criticism is not so far removed from the French
theoretical tradition at the moment. Both are strongly concerned with the
problem of perception. The difference is that the Europeans, as has been their
wont, prefer to generalize and to develop elaborate theories, while the Americans, true to tradition, are more interested in the everyday experience of specific phenomena.
Concurrent with the growth of semiotics on the Continent was a revival of
Marxist criticism. The French journals Cahiers du Cinma and Cinthique managed to combine the semiotic and the dialectic traditions in the late seventies.
In England, too, semiotics often had a distinctly political cast. In America,
much of recent theory sees film as a political phenomenon, albeit abstractly
rather than practically.
During the seventies, the developing theory of film in the Third World was
also of interest. A major document here was Toward a Third Cinema, by
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino (Cineaste IV:3, 1970). More a manifesto
than a theory, the South American filmmakers essay suggested that the first
cinemaHollywood and its imitatorsand the second cinemathe more
personal style of the New Wave or authors cinemawould yield to the
third cinema, a cinema of liberation that would consist of films that the System cannot assimilate and which are foreign to its needs, or films that
directly and explicitly set out to fight the System. Perhaps that happened
somewherein Chile for a few years in the early seventies, for examplebut
with the benefit of hindsight we can discern a lot of wishful thinking in that
statement. The world was moving too fast, and the political models of the thirties were no longer viable.

Film Speaks and Acts: Metz and Contemporary Theory

Bundtzen:
Monstrous
Mothers

Thelwell:
The Harder
They Come

Schrader on
Transcendentalism

Althusser on
Reading
Capital

New
Historicism
Colloquium

Gledhill on
Feminist
Criticism

In the U.S. these various currentssemiotic, psychoanalytic, dialectical, and

politically prescriptiveeach gained their adherents in the 1970s and 1980s as
film theory became attractive to academicians. Yet our own native strain of
practical criticism continued to develop as well. It centered on a study of narrativitythe ways in which the stories of film are told. Such scholars as Frank
McConnell (Storytelling and Mythmaking in Film and Literature, 1979) pointed
the way to some fertile areas for inquiry.
The great value of such theories of narration is paradoxically that they deflect
attention from the specially cinematic qualities of film. If film is seen first as
narrative, then we almost immediately infer the corollary, that film is simply
one of several different modes of narrative. And that observation, in turn, leads
us to consider film in the context of the continuum of media. Both practically
and theoretically, this is now a clear necessity.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, film criticismlike its subject
reworked the postmodernist truths that had revealed themselves in the 1960s
and 1970s. As the French tides of Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian Freudian theory began to recede, the semiotic and dialectic discoveries of earlier years
gave rise, respectively, to two new variants: cognitive film theory and cultural
studies.
Extending the epistemological quest of semiotics, cognitive film theory has
sought to explain the way in which a spectator understands a film: how we read
films. Extending the dialectic sport of contextual analysis first pioneered by the
Frankfurt school, cultural studies seeks to understand the relationships between
the texts of popular culture and their audiences: how we use films.*36
Both recent trends have found fruitful material for analysis in feminist studies. Since the popular medium of film brightly reflects the general culture in
which it thrives, this is no surprise. At the end of the second millennium as
Western culture gradually fades into world culture, we find ourselves obsessed
with the same topic with which we began this thousand-year journey into literacy and intellectual understanding. Today we call it sexual politics; in the eleventh century we called it Romance. (We still dont understand it. Isnt it nice
that it is still mysterious?)
But there may be something more going on here: from the RiceIrwin Kiss
to the Playboy Channel, from the phallic lens to hot, round baby spotlights,
from the lovemaking of the tracking shot through the voyeuristic reward of the

Film Speaks and Acts: Metz and Contemporary Theory

Kirby: Male
Hysteria
and Early
Cinema

Bloom:
Map of
Misreading

Politics of
Film Study
Colloquium

Postmodern
Colloquium

zoom to the rhythmic pulse of montage, movies are sexual. They are not only
about sexual politics; they are sexual politicssubject and object united.
The present course of film theory is away from prescription, toward description. People who think about film are no longer interested to construct an ideal
system of esthetics or political and social values, nor do they see their main aim
as finding a language to describe the phenomenon of film. These critical tasks
were accomplished earlierwith aplombby the critics we have discussed in
this chapter.
The job of film theory now is truly dialectical. As a fully matured art, film is
no longer a separate enterprise but an integrated pattern in the warp and woof
of our culture. Cinema is an expansive and far-reaching set of interrelating
oppositions: between filmmaker and subject, film and observer, establishment
and avant garde, conservative purposes and progressive purposes, psychology
and politics, image and sound, dialogue and music, montage and mise-enscne, genre and auteur, literary sensibility and cinematic sensibility, signs and
meaning, culture and society, form and function, design and purpose, syntagmas and paradigms, image and event, Realism and Expressionism, language
and phenomenology, sex and violence, sense and nonsense, love and marriage
a never-ending set of codes and subcodes that raises fundamental questions
about the relationships of life to art, and reality to language.

Jurassic
technology?

Film more
important
than life?

2000 James Monaco. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited.