"Lights, Camera, Action. Marxism, Semiotics, Narratology."

Ebert has several quotes and to me they represent the worst tendencies of the article: broadness, anti-intellectualism.

But I'm really interested to hear what some of you think. Particularly you, T.H.

(x-post)

See now Slutksy that ("oh no another complaint about the left-wing hegemony in cultural studies") was what I thought initially, but I think the article intimates some interesting things before moving on to something resembling character assassination.

(x-x-post)

Science & Engineering: What? I'm busy.

That said, I think the article is a pretty fair accounting. It celebrates Penley's life and gives a decent layman's intro to semiotics even as it questions the extremeness of the politics and the impenetrabilities of the language.

Also remember, this article is from the Los Angeles Times. Many of its readers are industry professionals and I think it's a valid question as to whether film theory has anything to do with the production of film. I'm not sure that Metz or Mulvey would have recommended their texts to be used in an almost trade-school like setting, which some of the best film production schools clearly are. UC Berkeley's school is more obvious in that there's barely any production instruction at all, and it's used mainly to illustrate theoretical points. In fact, the entire film department there has been absorbed into Rhetoric.

First off, is the UCSB program structured poorly? Do students who expect an education in film production end up being forced to take loads of theory courses? Or was this author's daughter under a misapprehension?

Is a film curriculum that includes significant amounts of production, theory, *and* history desirable? Should students be forced to encounter some element of all three? Should these three things even be so readily distinguishable? (I think my answer to that last question is probably what I should be writing.)

Second, I think this article (and Ebert, whose odious quotes are really a slap in the face to people he's cited approvingly in the past, like David Bordwell) is confusing "film theory" with "film theory as it's practiced by a number of American academics in the present day." Thus he fails to distinguish (fails to even try) between a lot of good work being done in the field and the no-doubt-fearsome amount of doggerel being produced.

What bothers me is that these articles mostly serve to reinforce the prejudices of people who would label *all* theory, all academic study of film, a waste of time or worse. I know Millar is smarter than this, but his post still seems exemplary of this phenomenon.

i want to talk about truss rods and load coefficients with the big boys

exactly

"You don't learn through theory. You learn through absorbing your contemporaries and precursors, and you learn through doing (or failing)."

The great authors, artists, directors, musicians and such are in a dialogue with each other. Therefore, it would make far more sense to continue to absorb and see what theory and sense of style comes out of your own head and your own experiences and engagements, not someone else's ideas that you attempt to comprehend then attempt to appropriate.

What I most object to, and I'm certain I won't be able to communicate this as clearly as I desire, is this common sense that film theory is something we take to immunize us against film's power, to protect us against its use as a vehicle for ideology. The often-complacent insistence that Hollywood film, or all film, is somehow a function and reinforcer of certain social-political facts (whose identification is indeed tied to a kind of Marcusian post-Marxism) and little else.

Much theory is aware of this problem but fails to address it in a consistent way. I think that certain reactions to this tendency (say Bordwell and Thompson) sometimes seem frightened of politics at all, which is unfortunate.

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G.S. I'm not sure how your post relates to this article.

Tracer I think the author confuses the "politicization"...

Unfortunately, Girolamo ignores the long history of productions which directly engage theory.

is it either? (if yr struggling to see how it cd be ii., try "no [whoever], no tarantino")

it's ppl talking at other ppl: sometimes it sparks, sometimes it doesn't

Obviously claims about the workings of film aren't typically as "proveable" as scientific claims but that doesn't mean all is sophistry. There are proximate meanings arrived at through research and engagement which can be more valid than those dreamed up on a coffee break.

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But there's always the decoding to be done, and this particular person goes for a lot of tricks that make it seem more like the Ugly-Me routine: when your "look at this abstract drivel" quoting involves pretending synecdoche is some sort of impenetrable jargon, you're clearly talking smack. (And while I've never studied anything remotely having to do with film, I know what "diegenic" means, and it seems like a very simple and useful concept to me.) This always seems to be the biggest decoding clue: when people repeatedly just look at theoretical texts and then quote the words as if completely bewildered, something is deeply wrong. (Who complains that they're paying for their kids to learn words they don't already know? Who looks at linguistics textbooks and says "What the hell is clausal syntax? This is what I'm paying tuition for?") And if all that doesn't do enough to mark out the writer as some one not at all in a position to make rational and fair-minded decisions about whether film theory has gone bad places, the incredibly stupid cult-like caricature of the classroom at the end certainly seals it.

Also Am, I disagree that theory is merely an apparatus. Fun theory texts are those which function as entertaining truth revealers, sometimes only missing an obvious narrative arc to distinguish them from novels.

"theory" is admittedly an unfortunate choice of words for what theory really is. It's dancing with the object of its scrutiny. It's not proscriptive, it's descriptive, and when approached in that way, it's loads of fun for some of us. Articles like the above-linked are so reactionary and anti-fun: "Nobody really reads this stuff! It has no bearing on reality!" & I'm like, "Fuck you, I enjoy reading it, if you don't, don't read it"

(not meaning the "fuck you" to land on anybody in this thread btw)

take a look at that new ewan mcgregor movie to see how far we've fallen

the last thing we need is more screenwriters and directors &tc who do things "correctly", we're choking with them

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NA: I had a very ultra-orthodox film studies teacher...

MB: Like how?

NA: Well, to begin with, she was very snobbish. And she ragged on how cinematic codes and rules are being broken, and the usual blah-blah-blah given to film students. She also praised "Citizen Kane" day and night and said the usual stuff about it being the greatest movie of all time, etc. And how the movies have lost their true purpose, become too commercial. You know, all the stuff taught to film students here in New England.

MB: What you need to tell her from a very big director is that there are no rules in film. And any film teacher that teaches rules is wrong. "Citizen Kane," when it came out, it was very mocked film. People did not like it. It was very unrespected. It was thought of at the time as very uncool. But he wasn't the inventor of all that stuff. All that stuff had been done in other movies. through silent movies, through musicals, yadda-yadda-yadda. But it was the first movie to really put all those things together into a movie. If she would've taught Orsen Wells, he would've laughed at her.

We ride together, we die together. Bad boys for life.

L to R: Lacan, Deleuze

i think the problem is mainly the scripts, actually, and in basic directing skills like where the actors move during dialogue scenes; other things, like cinematography and action choreography, have never been better in the history of cinema. "correct" screenwriting says that EVERY LINE has to move both i) the character and ii) the story forward, which requires a LOT of imagination to pull off in a thrilling way, it's quite a high bar. how come every indian wanna be the chief? so i guess i'm saying if you can't come correct, try something else, get crazy, nobody will care if you do it with some panache, and reading a bunch of theory just might open you up to a whole type of thing you never knew how to look for

i think we've gone beyond the time when making a "normal" film well is even possible any more

actually in the "good old days" the director WASN'T in charge of everything, he got a job lot of artisans who did what they did, and he kind of made it all happen together, and the result was a serendipitous chemical reaction of look and moves and whatever, which no ONE person cd ever have pre-imagined

now with everything required to spring from the head of the mighty auteur, a lot of stuff ends up seeming mediocre: it stops being a combo of collective and unlike imaginations, each with their own agenda/aesthetic perspective

(this is v.badly explained)

Apart from that I just can't believe that people in Hollywood pour $150 million dollars into a movie without having an airtight script. It really does boggle the mind. However, mediocrity is a constant source of inspiration to do things better...

mark - did he write a "book"?

mainly he talks abt actors, so i tht you might be interested

ps did you get my email

i did get yr email, thankx yew!! it has been sent off, tho i still haven't got conf. from THEM so i didn't want to say anything yet to you *ends post on a mysterious note*

I've thought long and hard about the implications of this for the quality of mainstream filmmaking and I can't come to any easy answers.

Anyway I agree that producers making minute artistic decisions can be disastrous (not always: see Val Lewton)--I'm always struck, while watching Greenlight, how despite making all kinds of consequential decisions, Moore doesn't seem at all engaged with the material; he doesn't seem the slightest bit interested in the overall shape of the material. Ben Affleck, of all people, seemed most interested in discussing such things (albeit in a clumsy, high school-drama-program way) and it seemed almost quaint. After his input the conversation snapped back into this mercenary tone set by Moore.

and the chair quote was also fine and if anything rilly fairly simple. which points to a problem -- you find somebody saying something simple and use it to prove that ppl AREN'T learning anything, then find somebody saying something complex, and use it to prove that ppl. are learning USELESS things -- this article maintains it is the purpose of the university to tell us things we already know, like that characters who feel things are nice.

so this whole UCSB is brainwashing yr. kid into being a COMMIE thing is just... weird!

or rather to inscribe on young blank slates the proper received wisdom.

One problem with this article is it seems to allow quotes (some of them injudicious) to do its arguing, which allows it a kind of escape clause. The long quotes from UCSB students toward the end of the article, taken together, seem to suggest a kind of film study wherein students are made to be skeptical, wary of the power of movies--viewing them as vehicles for exploitation or political propoganda. The first quote ("I love theory...") is a clumsy albeit heartfelt defense of this attitude, from the standpoint of someone who (on the basis of this quote) isn't going into production. The second quote is from someone who is now in the industry, and expresses remorse over this same state of affairs.

So the author seems to be trying to establish two POVS--one of the brass-tacks industry professional who looks upon film theory with a sense of lost possibility or plain contempt, and the other a wide-eyed student who appreciates it but whose defense assumes a pretty orthodox Marxist outlook. I suspect these quotes were chosen to (a) make these positions appear irreconcilable and (b) make the latter position look more foolish.

One problem, hinted at above, is that these two people are looking for two different things really. A question is whether the same program can or should try to serve both of their needs. How might a program be conceived so that theory and practice didn't seem so divorced?

Hal Hartley's syllabi for his Harvard classes, which I wish was up on the WWW, is a good example of a course that tries to tie some theory (not heavy and jargon-laden; and to the extent that this article is criticizing inundating survey courses with such writing I agree w/it) into the actual making of films. I'll try to recall some of my friend's descriptions of it....

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Spencer I don't think that's what it is calling for! Or rather, I think it's a bit confused about whether it wants to be critical of the politics of film studies or the dominant methodology. A good question--and I will work on phrasing this better, more clearly, I promise--is how those things are interrelated.

Oh, well then. Sorry we ever sent you to school.

I don't know about Mark's theory that Kane ruined everything. You might as well say the Beatles ruined pop music. It's certainly possible to make the argument, but it seems a bit silly. More productive to say surely - they were both mutations in the cultural DNA, making new things possible just as much as they distracted from the productive old way of doing things.

(My part-serious answer = Hitchcock ruined everything. Or the adoption of Hitchcock as the paradigm of auteurism through nouvelle vague into the early 70s new Hollywood.)

(Re: Studio interference - interesting article on Harvey and Quentin in the Guardian today, here: http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,12589,999614,00.html )

Initial reactions to the argument are annoyed by its tone, not so annoyed by some of its conclusions. Certainly the C student stuff is funny. The essay question, whilst dense, is basically asking HAVE YOU DONE YOUR READING. And so we come down to the teaching philosophy/theory divide. Do we teach philosophy, or do we teach how to do philosphy? (Ans.mainly the former.)

The biggest problem I see in cultural studies, and especially a lot of film theory is that a heirachy of knowledge has been built up ina similar way to one in science (we add to the previous knowledge). A Chemistry student these days could not be allowed to invent the periodic table, its already there. But in film theory we aren't standing on the shoulders of giants, we are standing on the shoulders of people of indiscriminate size - and whatever we add has the potential problem of being based on absolute rubbish.

I have very little theory background, and I rather like doing theory - in as much as I like theorising. The fact that there are other theories out there which I can then use to compare and contrast are useful - but as mentioned above it is all a dialogue. I am taught by Laura Mulvey, and that is the way she viewsa it (as posited above) to the extent that she massively disagrees with herself on plenty of occasions.

Problem is what use is it for academia to go back to the flood - to try to start anew? A lot of the same ideas will reoccur (though perhaps be written better). There is no tragedy in cinema (except 28 Days Later).

I actually think his summary of these modes is surprisingly fair given the contempt exhibited for them by many of the people quoted in the article, and given that they are punctuated by protestations on the order of "my brain hurts."

Insofar as it seems like a critique of theory ca. 1965, well, at that point in time much of this was new--hence the term New Criticism--and by now it is entrenched to the point where it can dominate an entire film or English department. It's that dominance, I think, that the article objects to as much as the content of the criticism itself, so it seems reasonably relevant to 2003. In 1965 it wouldn't have made sense to rail against the hegemony of what was then a kind of insurgency!

(x-post)

Yes Sterling the article does gloss over the differences between film theorists--its citation of Thompson and Bordwell as being emblematic of a postmodernist trend in film study is the first major gaffe--but I still that all the theorists you mention, at least as far as their impact on film studies is concerned, share some common traits (even if they are only superficial ones, like using dense language, frequent neologisms, and importing concepts shakily across disciplines) and it is those commonalities to which I think the article is tacitly addressing itself.

The Reds thing I agree is out of date, and can partly be chalked up to Kevin Brownlow (who supplies the quote) being an old guy who is probably still fighting certain Cold War-era battles in his head. But even if it's no longer orthodox Marxism or even Marcuse-informed post-Marxism or whathaveyou, there is an undeniable political slant to much of contemporary criticism. Me, personally, I don't object to the *fact* of a politicized discourse but the particular nature of much of this particular politicized discourse. The author of the article in question is being a little ambiguous on that subject--it's unclear whether he shares the opinions of some of the people quoted.

what i came to was that there are two ways of looking at art and by extension film is that their are two ways of looking- extending on millars analogy-there are those who move arround every day, who are glad that it gets them from home to work to entertainments but never really think about what the implications of their choose of transportation.

then their is someone who loves this mode of transport (this can take many forms--ie the mechanic, or the city planner who loves trains, or the train spotter, or those who fret about aesthics.)

the two dont often meet, and the two dont often talk--(las an industry town but the same way detroit was, they make the movies, they dont really think about it and film theory is for those who trainspot or urban plan or like to tinker on cars)

also i hate auter theory.

Anyway looking back I see you critiquing the article and defending it from other critiques but I still don't know what yr. trying to SALVAGE from it -- unf. it seems that even if film theory is ripe for an overhaul the article doesn't suggest any particular mechanism for one.

The model of film studies with which I'm most sympathetic is probably neoformalism--a better term for which would be "historical poetics," which is informed by a theory of how films function but is also grounded in very close analysis of the materials of a film's construction as well as the historical/cultural context in which films are made. This mode has its own limitations to be sure, which other people are probably more sensitive to than myself.

As stated above, Sterling, my big problem with this article is it confuses "film theory" with "film theory as it is practied by a number of American scholars today, including some at UCSB" and doesn't seem to allow for any middle ground between an "appreciation" approach and something more theory-laden, nor does it hint at the fruitful overlap between these two things.

I thought this was kind of funny, but the significance of it didn't hit home until I was taking theory classes in my own major -- journalism -- and, again, loving them and completely getting off on the whole media&society thing, and some of my classmates, people I worked on the college paper with, raised their hands and said the exact same thing: "You know, I really just want to be a reporter..." And it completely pissed me off. It just struck me like, you want to go out and be part of this thing, this whole complicated system, which is powerful and interesting but also potentially dangerous, but you don't understand how it works or what it does and you don't even want to understand it? It seemed irresponsible to me.

I mean, of course theoretical language can get dense and lose itself in the woods. And of course there's bullshit and personal agendas and fusty politics(the kid talking about communist revolution isn't alarming, but he is kind of embarassing). But if critical thinking were better taught and encouraged in schools, society, etc., it would be easier for everyone to tell the bullshit from the insight. As noted above, we teach philosophy but we don't teach how to do it, passive reception rather than inquiry. I think the article is well intended and even raises some valid issues, but it's too easy for this kind of thing to turn into blanket condemnation of the whole idea of intellectual inquiry.

amateurist, you lost me with the last post. "Vague chauvanism" and "orthodox auteurism," two shortcomings of classic film criticism and instruction that you mention, are in fact very precisely (TOO precisely?) addressed by a whole smorgasbord of post-structuralist critiques. So you really have something to turn to, there. What I'd like to hear is what you think these pomo freak-a-doodles can get out of turning to a Bazinian/humanist tradition of film thought (must confess I don't exactly know what this means!)

re auteurism: egomaniacal control freaks WILL be auteurs, whether their comrades-in-art want it or not. For "egomaniacal control freaks" I was going to list examples, starting with Kubrick, but that's a gimme. I was going to say Cassavetes, too, since he's often held up as a lone visionary rebel, famous for roughing up Peter Falk just to get him "in the mood". He may have been a visionary, a classic example of someone who created a new and instantly recognizable genre for himself. But it wasn't just for himself, it was for others who wanted it, if they wanted it, because his style was built on a certain kind of process, not on whatever daydreams he felt like hammering into perpetuity a la Kubrick (or Matthew Barney). What kind of process?

I differ from the working method advocated by Stanislavski and followed by the Actors Studio, which involves group discussion of the characters. For me each role must be an individual's conception as well as an individual creation. If each role is the result of communal study by director and ensemble, everything will dovetail; it will all be nice and neat and smooth; but the conflict of the characters won't be truthful. The actors don't discuss their interpretations sitting around in a group. The general theme of the work, of course, must be studied by the whole group, so that we share the same overall conception; but each actor must come at his own interpretation of his role, without the sort of group study and mutual criticism which one associates with Method work.

Dogme also famously has a process. It's a different process than Cassavetes's, with different results, but if Dogme movies are recognizable as Dogme movies (and many of them are) it's not because of a stylistic unity amongst themselves but for the particular kind of buzz generated by the machinery that produced them.

of course you may not be interested in a cinema for and of human beings, Kubrick and Spielberg to thread, please!!

-- Blue Velvet is a David Lynch movie and Night on Earth is a Jim Jarmusch movie

--Blue Velvet and Night on Earth are both Frederic Elmes movies

But are they equally true? You might argue yes. I might argue no.

Lynch and Jarmusch do both tend to play with types rather than characters, but that's because they're interested in what those types mean and represent -- semiotics (oh god, no!). On the other hand, Lynch got a fucking amazing performance from Naomi Watt, and I don't think that was by accident. And Johnny Depp in Dead Man is one of my favorite pieces of acting, even if it's not conventional character development. Oh, and christ, The Straight Story is all about the actor, and it's a nice piece of work.

I'm a "liberal arts" major so anything printed on paper is basically a big pain in the ass for me. Does anybody offer a gradute program in Lego Spacecraft?

they said they'd come back for the second wave but they never did :(

Theory is fine. I had to go through it. But people who talk in theoretic circles are often the ones who are trying to figure out what I'm doing by instinct, and explain it back to me in a way that I don't care about.

second: semoitics has a funny adjunct in that it creates itself. if there weren't phallic symbols before freud, there sure are now! i.e. the popularization of "decoding" of film & c. has made possible the ENTRENCHMENT of the symbol systems ostensibly "decoded".

"Suture is the name given to the procedures by means of which cinematic texts confer subjectivity upon their viewers."

http://www.autographworld.com/catalog/newimages/lovelace1.jpg

Are you a Lacanian, or a Lacanican't?

and...someone gave a lecture on this very topic last week. and...i failed to attend.