5

FILMTHEORY:
FORM
AND
FUNCTION
FILM THEORY:
FORM AND FUNCTION

The Critic

In Mel Brooks’s 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! It’s born. Whatever it is, it’s born.… Look out! Too late. It’s dead
already.… Vot’s dis? Usher! Dis is cute! Dis is cute. Dis is nice. Vot da hell is
it? Oh. I know vot it is. It’s gobbage. Dat’s 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:
Yes. It’s two … two things dat, dat, dat—they 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 Brooks’s old codger begins to lose interest:
Vot is dis? Dots! Could be an eye. Could be anything! It mus’ be some
symbolism. I t’ink … it’s symbolic of … junk! Uh-oh! It’s 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 psych’analysis, but I’d say dis is a doity pictcha!
 The Critic 389

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 what’s “symbolic of junk”? There are others
in the audience with Mel Brooks’s 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 under-
standing of the phenomenon of film. In general, theory is the abstraction; criti-
cism is the practice. At the lowest end of the scale, we find the kind of criticism a
reviewer practices: more reportage than analysis. The reviewer’s 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 doesn’t necessarily have much relation to the real
world. Between these two extremes there is much room for useful and interest-
ing 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 “descrip-
tive” 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 pre-
scribe are naturally concerned about evaluation; having 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 prac-
tice 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, how-
ever, 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 cin-
ema 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.
390 FILM THEORY: FORM AND FUNCTION

This is a major change in the way Hollywood does business. Indeed, the Holly-
wood 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 Hol-
lywood 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 don’t have to be a wild-eyed romantic to believe that it’s the renegades who
break the rules who make the most intriguing art. Formal training ensures a cer-
tain 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.

Much of this sort of after-the-fact cogitation was the result of film’s own inferi-
ority complex as the youngest of the arts. Christian Metz suggests that the func-
tion of such criticism, psychoanalytically, is to rescue film from its “bad-object”
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.*
Because of this desire for respectability many of the earliest works of film the-
ory were prescriptive—often quite pretentiously so, but sometimes intriguingly
elaborate. Continuing the psychoanalytic metaphor, we can think of this as the
ascendancy of film’s “superego”—its sense of the artistic community’s standards of

* Yes, I know we seem to be arguing both sides of the case: we want film to be
accepted in the university but we don’t want filmmakers studying too much. As
elsewhere in American life during the seventies and eighties, the pendulum
swung too far. Many of the truths we discovered in the sixties were dangerously
distorted when they were institutionalized. It’s the reason we build blank walls
around our highways.
 The Poet and the Philosopher: Lindsay and Münsterberg 391

behavior and respectability—as it struggled to be treated as an equal, and mas-

tered its natural libidinous impulses. “Standards” were necessary, and film theo-
rists 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 sophisti-
cated 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 relation-
ships 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 termi-
nology 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 ele-
ments.” Film semiotics and other theories that attempt to treat the “language” of
film, for example, are close-up approaches.
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 (func-
tion)? 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 Münsterberg

The first film theorists, as we have noted, were mainly interested—some more
consciously than others—in 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, naïve,
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:
392 FILM THEORY: FORM AND FUNCTION

“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 values—
and still are.
Working intuitively from his lively passion for the movies, Lindsay then fur-
ther 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 stage—the “photoplays.”
Yet Lindsay understood very early on—after 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 seem-
ingly parallel arts contrasted. This became the dominant theme as film theorists
tried to establish a separate identity for the adolescent art.
Lindsay’s 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.
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 theory—semiotics.
Quite an achievement in 1915 for an antiacademic poet enamored of the “bar-
baric 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 discus-
sion 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 Lindsay’s most idiosyn-
cratic theories—always dismissed by later theorists and critics—bears 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
 The Poet and the Philosopher: Lindsay and Münsterberg 393

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 Lindsay’s paean to movies first appeared, it was joined by another
major contribution—directly opposed in style, approach, and tone, but just as
valuable: Hugo Münsterberg’s seminal The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916).
Münsterberg, 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, Münsterberg 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.
His intellectual analysis of the phenomenon not only provided a much-needed
cachet but also remains even today one of the more balanced and objective out-
lines of film theory. Münsterberg 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 redis-
covered by film theorists and students in 1969.
Like Lindsay, Münsterberg 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 under-
stood 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 dis-
cussion 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.
Münsterberg’s 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. Münsterberg, 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. Thirty years
later, this active process became known as the Phi phenomenon. Münsterberg
had described it (without labeling it) in 1916.
394 FILM THEORY: FORM AND FUNCTION

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 process—a strongly mental activity—in 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 atten-
tion away from the passive phenomenon of persistence of vision and toward the
active mental process of the Phi phenomenon, Münsterberg 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 Münsterberg’s understanding of the
medium as at least potentially interactive would eventually be redeemed.
Curiously, Lindsay’s and Münsterberg’s 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 practical—concerned with concrete criticism rather than abstract
theory. Ideally, it is not a less valuable tradition because of this practical orienta-
tion, 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 (Cinéma et cie, 1919; Photogénie, 1920), is best
remembered as a practicing daily film critic, filmmaker, and founder of the ciné-
club movement. Together with Léon 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, 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

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,” “Meth-
ods and Techniques,” “Forms and Shapes,” and “Purpose and Value.” We can fur-
 Expressionism and Realism: Arnheim and Kracauer 395

ther simplify the categories if we realize that the two central ones—“Methods and
Techniques” and “Forms and Shapes”—are 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 prin-
ciples. 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 filmmaker’s
expression of the raw materials than with the filmed reality itself.
These two basic attitudes have dominated the history of film theory and prac-
tice ever since the Lumière brothers (who seemed to be obsessed with capturing
raw reality on film) and Méliès (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 Aristotle’s 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 film-
maker to the reality of the raw materials on the other side.
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. Münsterberg’s work (and even Lindsay’s) had
foreshadowed this shift of emphasis. Moreover, we should remember that all
three of these interrelated elements were evident during the practical develop-
ment 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!’” Griffith’s purpose was to suggest that American cinema in the twen-
ties 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 Griffith’s 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 specta-
tors’ emotions:

For a quick, keen estimate of a motion picture give me a boy of ten and a
girl of fifteen—the boy for action, the girl for romance. Few things have
happened in their lives to affect their natural reactions.
396 FILM THEORY: FORM AND FUNCTION

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 didn’t 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, every one of the other, older
arts was moving toward greater abstraction, less verisimilitude—“less matter with
more art.” Why shouldn’t 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 manipula-
tive power of the filmmaker, served this function nicely.
More important, perhaps, is the second reason theories of Expressionism dom-
inated 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 con-
sumer 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 suc-
cess 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 attraction—
rides on roller coasters through chambers of horror and tunnels of love—and
Realism is totally beside the point.
The two standard, most succinct, and colorful texts describing the contrasting
Expressionist and Realist positions are Rudolf Arnheim’s Film as Art (published
first in German in 1933 as Film als Kunst and translated into English almost imme-
diately) and Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality
(first published in 1960). Both books are strongly—almost belligerently—pre-
scriptive. Both present “revealed truths” as if film theory were a matter of pro-
nouncements rather than investigations. Yet both remain memorable and have
become classics of the literature of film, not only because they each neatly sum-
marize the positions of their respective schools, but also in no small part because
 Expressionism and Realism: Arnheim and Kracauer 397

they are so sententious: more complex, less determinist theories of film are obvi-
ously 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 dis-
cover that the basic tenets of Film as Art are psychological. But unlike his predeces-
sor Münsterberg, he is more concerned with how film is made than with how it is
perceived. The thrust of his small volume can be 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 summa-
rizes his position in his preface to the 1957 edition:
I undertook to show in detail how the very properties that make photog-
raphy 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 forth—that do push the limits further out are not to be wel-
comed. 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 differences—these limita-
tions—yields 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 cer-
tainly problematic:
❏ that art equals effect, or expression; that the magnitude of a work of
art is directly related to the degree of the artist’s manipulation of ma-
terials; 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 Arnheim’s theory of limitations is that he focuses
all too narrowly on the production of film and doesn’t take into account the liber-
ating and complicating factor of its perception. Many of the limitations he lists
398 FILM THEORY: FORM AND FUNCTION

(aside from the technological)—the framing of the image, film’s two-dimension-

ality, the breakup of the space-time continuum by editing—are 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 pre-
scription 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 filmmak-
ers discovered the possibilities of new variables.

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 relation-
ship 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 Kracauer’s magnum opus, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical
Reality, coming twenty-seven years after Arnheim’s 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-defin-
ing, 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 Arnheim’s essay, it chooses a single central fact of the film experience as cru-
cial, 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 Expression-
ism 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
documentary—an area of film activity about which Kracauer has very little to say.
While Kracauer has the reputation of being the foremost theorist of film Real-
ism, he was actually only one among many. André Bazin, for instance, is also gen-
erally considered a “Realist,” yet although he offered a much richer investigation
 Expressionism and Realism: Arnheim and Kracauer 399

of the phenomenon during the fifteen years preceding Kracauer’s book, his work
was never so clearly codified as Kracauer’s and therefore hasn’t until recently had
the direct impact of his successor’s.
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 Arnheim’s theory had been the limitations of the technology
and the form of film art. The kernel of Kracauer’s theory is the photographic “call-
ing” of film art. Simply because photography and film do come so close to repro-
ducing reality, they must emphasize this ability in their esthetics. This premise is
diametrically opposed to Arnheim’s. “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 devel-
ops 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’ films—films, 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
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
doesn’t fit the definition of art, then the definition of art must be changed.
Having celebrated film’s 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 pro-
pose (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 real-
ity 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 atten-
400 FILM THEORY: FORM AND FUNCTION

tion 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 whole—which
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 form—so long as it serves the purpose of content. And here we
get to the heart of Kracauer’s true contribution to film theory: film serves a pur-
pose. It does not exist simply for itself, as a pure esthetic object; it exists in the con-
text of the world around it. Since it stems from reality it must also return to it—
hence the subtitle of Kracauer’s 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 Lenin’s prophecy, which Jean-Luc Godard was fond of quoting, 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, Balázs, 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 cul-
tural history: Expressionism was the major force in German culture—in theater
and painting as well as film—during the 1920s, just as, during the same period,
Formalism marked the burgeoning cultural life—both literary and cinematic—in
the Soviet Union. Essentially, the difference between the two movements
depends on a slight but significant shift of focus. Expressionism is a more general-
ized, romantic conception of film as an expressive force. Formalism is more spe-
cific, 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.
 Montage: Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Balázs, and Formalism 401

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 period—before 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 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 Béla Balázs was pursuing a line of Formalist thinking that,
although it is less well known than those of Pudovkin and Eisenstein, neverthe-
less deserves to be ranked with theirs.
Unlike Arnheim and Kracauer, Pudovkin, Eisenstein, and Balázs were practic-
ing 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.

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 vary-
ing times and places. The composite was a unified piece of film narrative. Kule-
shov called this “creative geography.” In probably their most famous experiment,
the Kuleshov group took three identical shots of the well-known prerevolution-
ary 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 Moszhukin’s 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 var-
ied 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 identi-
fied five separate and distinct types of montage: contrast, parallelism, symbolism,
simultaneity, and leitmotif (reiteration of theme).
402 FILM THEORY: FORM AND FUNCTION

Here we have the basic premise of film Formalism: Pudovkin discovered cate-
gories of form and analyzed them. Moreover, he was greatly concerned with the
importance of the shot—of mise-en-scène—and therefore displayed an attitude
that we have come to regard as essentially Realist. He saw montage as the com-
plex, pumping heart of film, but he also felt that its purpose was to support narra-
tive rather than to alter it.

Eisenstein set up his own theory of montage—as collision rather than linkage—in
direct opposition to Pudovkin’s 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.*
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 dif-
ferent 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 For-
malists, he conceived of the elements of a film being “decomposed” or “neutral-
ized” 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 repre-
sented.
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 shot—which he
called its “attractions”—could interrelate to produce new meanings. Attractions as
he defined them included

every aggressive moment … every element … that brings to light in the

spectator those senses or that psychology that influence his experience—
every element that can be verified and mathematically calculated to pro-
duce certain emotional shocks in a proper order within the totality …
[Film Sense, p. 231].
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
event’s logical action, we advance to a new plane—free montage of arbitrarily
selected, independent … attractions.…” [p. 232]. This was an entirely new basis
for montage, different in kind from Pudovkin’s 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

* These essays are collected in The Film Sense and Film Form and in a number of
other volumes.
 Montage: Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Balázs, and Formalism 403

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
Eisenstein’s thought—a good sign that his theory of film was organic, open, and
healthily incomplete.
Possibly the most important ramification of Eisenstein’s 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 narra-
tive. 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 photo-
graphed reality ceased to be itself and became instead simply a stock of raw mate-
rial—attractions, or “shocks”—for 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 artist’s 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 expression—Eisenstein’s own Potemkin (1925), for instance—might
engage its audience in a dialectical process instead of overpowering them with a
calculated emotional experience.
Eisenstein’s basic conception of the film experience was, like his theories,
open-ended. The process of film (like the process of theory) was far more impor-
tant than its end, and the filmmaker and observer were engaged in it dynamically.
Likewise, the elements of the film experience that was the channel of communi-
cation between creator and observer were also connected logically with each
other. Eisenstein’s 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.

Like Eisenstein, Béla Balázs 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
 EISENSTEIN’S POTEMKIN : THE ODESSA STEPS SEQUENCE

Figure 5-1. As the people of Odessa gather to hail the rebellious soldiers on the battleship
Potemkin in the harbor, soldiers appear. The crowd runs down the steps in horror as the sol-
diers fire. A young boy is hit and killed. His mother picks him up in her arms and turns to face
the soldiers at the top of the steps.…

Figure 5-2. … As she advances, pleading with them, they prepare to fire. The officer lowers
his saber and a volley is fired, cutting down the mother and child. The crowd runs down the
steps, trampling those who have fallen.…
 EISENSTEIN’S POTEMKIN : THE ODESSA STEPS SEQUENCE

Figure 5-3. … As they reach the pathway at the bottom, they are attacked by mounted Cos-
sacks. The people are caught in the pincers between the rank of soldiers relentlessly advancing
down the steps, and the Cossacks who whip and trample them. Eisenstein cuts between shots
of the victims and shots of the oppressors. A woman with a baby carriage is hit near the top of
the steps. As she falls, she nudges the carriage over the first step.…

Figure 5-4. … It careens down the steps over corpses, as people watch in terror, until it
reaches the bottom step and overturns. (All stills l’Avant-Scène. Frame enlargements.)
406 FILM THEORY: FORM AND FUNCTION

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, Balázs 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 emo-
tions 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, Balázs 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 versatility and
reach. Balázs’s 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-Scène: Neorealism, Bazin, and Godard

Like Eisenstein, André 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 (Qu’est-ce que le
cinéma?) 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 Bazin’s collected essays reveals
 Mise-en-Scène: Neorealism, Bazin, and Godard 407

Figure 5-5. Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938): the Battle on the Ice. The Russian army is
in position to defend against the German invaders. Battle scenes, with their strong visual
oppositions, were among Eisenstein’s most striking sequences. (l’Avant-Scène. Frame
enlargement.)

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, Bazin’s theories
are clearly Realist in organization, but once again the focus has shifted. If Formal-
ism 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 signifi-
cance 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 asymp-
tote 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 prac-
tice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor in their cre-
ation.” The arts arose, he contends, because “other forms of insurance were …
sought.” That primal memory of embalming lives on in photography and cinema,
408 FILM THEORY: FORM AND FUNCTION

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 resem-
blance, or, if you will, of realism.

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 II—a cinematic era for which Bazin felt a great affin-
ity. “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-scène is the crux of the Realist film. By
mise-en-scène he means specifically deep focus photography and the sequence-
shot; these techniques allow the spectator to participate more fully in the experi-
ence 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 contribu-
tion 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.” Eisenstein’s
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.
Closely associated with this concept of the value of ambiguity are the twin con-
cepts 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 cinema—the 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.
 Mise-en-Scène: Neorealism, Bazin, and Godard 409

The implications for cinema are that, since there is no irreducible reality of
presence, “there is nothing to prevent us from identifying ourselves in imagina-
tion 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-scène, 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
Eisenstein’s (but as Arnheim’s and Kracauer’s 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 Cinéma, 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 dur-
ing the fifties and early sixties for François 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 com-
prised the first generation of cinéastes whose work was thoroughly grounded in
film history and theory; their films—especially those of Godard—were 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 caméra-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 narra-
tive, to become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written lan-
guage.”* Many earlier theorists had spoken of film’s “language”; the concept of
the caméra-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 Eisenstein’s dialectical montage depended
thoroughly on concrete images—we might call it a dialectic of objective correla-
tives. Astruc wanted something more. In an offhand reference to Eisenstein, he
noted:

* The New Wave, edited by Peter Graham, contains two essays of note: “The Birth of
a New Avant Garde: La Caméra-Stylo,” by Alexandre Astruc; and “La Politique
des auteurs,” by André Bazin; both quoted in this section.
410 FILM THEORY: FORM AND FUNCTION

the cinema is now moving towards a form which is making it such a pre-
cise 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.
Astruc’s caméra-stylo was a doctrine of function rather than form. It was a fit-
ting complement to the developing practice of Neorealism that so influenced
Bazin.
It would be more than ten years before Astruc’s 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 Cinéma.
Always the existentialist, André Bazin was working to develop a theory of film
that was deductive—based in practice. Much of this work proceeded through
identification and critical examination of genres. “Cinema’s 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.
François Truffaut best expressed the major theoretical principle that came to
identify Cahiers du Cinéma in the fifties. In his landmark article “Une certaine ten-
dance du cinéma français” (Cahiers du Cinéma, January 1954), Truffaut developed
the “Politique des auteurs,” which became the rallying cry for the young French
critics. Usually translated as “auteur theory,” it wasn’t 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:
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.
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 Astruc’s caméra-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 author’s “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 Truffaut’s Politique, though much less influential at the
time, was Jean-Luc Godard’s theory of montage, developed in a series of essays in
the middle fifties and best expressed in “Montage, mon beau souci” (Cahiers du
Cinéma 65; December, 1956). Building on Bazin’s theory of the basic opposition
between mise-en-scène and montage, Godard created a dialectical synthesis of
 Mise-en-Scène: Neorealism, Bazin, and Godard 411

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-scène can be seen as different aspects of the same cinematic
activity.
“Montage is above all an integral part of mise-en-scène,” 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-scène 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-en-scène. As the actor turns
to look at an object the editing immediately shows it to us. In this kind of con-
struction, known as “découpage classique,” the length of a shot depends on its
function and the relationship between shots is controlled by the material within
the shot—its mise-en-scène.
Godard’s synthesis of the classic opposition is elegantly simple. It has two
important corollaries: first, that mise-en-scène 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-scène, 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 filmmaker’s con-
crete relationship with his raw materials) nor on psychological reality (the film-
maker’s manipulative relationship with the audience), but on intellectual reality
(the filmmaker’s dialectical, or conversational, relationship with the audience).
Techniques like mise-en-scène 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 manipula-
tion? 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; it’s much more important now. The
growth of special-effects technology in the eighties and the introduction of digiti-
zation in the nineties gave filmmakers powerful new tools for constructing
“manipulation machines,” and they are using them. As we’ll see in Chapter 7,
ethical questions now take on added significance.)
Godard redefined montage as part of mise-en-scène. So to do montage is to do
mise-en-scène. This presages the semiotic approach that was to develop in the six-
ties. 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.
THE SIGN FORCES US TO SEE AN OBJECT THROUGH ITS SIGNIFICANCE.

Figure 5-6. Philosopher Brice

Parain chats with Anna
Karina about freedom and
communication in Godard’s
My Life to Live (1962).

Figure 5-7.
MISE-EN-SCENE AS VIEW.
Godard in “Camera-Eye” (Far
from Vietnam, 1967).
(Frame enlargement.)

Figure 5-8. “Rosy” and

“Raoul,” consumer collages,
in Les Carabiniers (1963).
 THE SIGN FORCES US TO SEE AN OBJECT THROUGH ITS SIGNIFICANCE.

Figure 5-9. Le Gai Savoir

(1968). Juliet Berto and
Jean-Pierre Léaud in the mid-
dle of the dark television stu-
dio engage in discussions
that aren’t broadcast.
(Frame enlargement.)

Figure 5-10. Juliet Berto, in

Weekend (1968), is caught
between the two unruly forces
of the film, sex and energy, a
bra ad and the Esso tiger.
(Frame enlargement.)

Figure 5-11. Recalling the

long tracking shot in Week-
end (see Figure 3-65) past the
endless line of stalled autos,
this opening sequence from
British Sounds (1969) objec-
tively follows the construction
of a car on the assembly line.
The soundtrack is a screech of
machinery, as the workers are
seen only as parts of the larger
machine. The fabrication of
the car is as painful as traffic
accidents. In both the Week-
end and British Sounds track-
ing shots, mise-en-scène
becomes an ideological tool: it
is experienced and thus felt,
whereas montage is analytical:
because it summarizes for us,
it does not encourage us to
work out our own logic. Mon-
tage draws conclusions; mise-
en-scène asks questions.
(Frame enlargement.)
THE SIGN FORCES US TO SEE AN OBJECT THROUGH ITS SIGNIFICANCE.

Figure 5-12. In Vladimir and Rosa

(1971), Godard (left) and his col-
laborator Jean-Pierre Gorin (right)
set up the “dialectic of the tennis
court.” The elements of the dialec-
tic are, variously: Vladimir (Lenin)
and Rosa (Luxemburg), Jean-Luc
(Godard) and Jean-Pierre (Gorin),
sound and image, American expe-
rience and French practice, film-
makers (here) and filmwatchers
(also here by implication). (Frame
enlargement.)

Figure 5-13. An essay on the trial

of the Chicago 8, Vladimir and
Rosa paid close attention to the
function of the media. “Bobby X”
(Godard/Gorin’s character for the
real-life Bobby Seale) is gagged
and bound in the courtroom (as he
was in real life). To demonstrate the
absence of Bobby X for the media,
the group of revolutionaries in the
movie set up a press conference
for him. But he can’t appear. He
speaks from a tape recorder set up
on a red chair. Looking for a dra-
matic story, the television cameras
are forced to cover a less exciting
idea: the struggle between sound
and image. In this shot, sound
finally gets its own image! (Frame
enlargement.)

Figure 5-14. The tracking shot in

the supermarket at the end of Tout
va bien is equally as long (and as
exhilarating) as the earlier shot in
Weekend. Godard’s cameras
moves inexorably past a huge rank
of twenty-four cash registers, most
of them clanging away, as the
group of young gauchistes stages
a political event in the market: pro-
duction versus consumption—of
images as well as products.
(Frame enlargement.)
 Mise-en-Scène: Neorealism, Bazin, and Godard 415

Plastic or material Realism deals only with what is signified. Godard’s more
advanced intellectual or perceptual Realism includes the signifier. Godard was also
in the habit of quoting Brecht’s dictum that “Realism doesn’t consist in reproduc-
ing reality, but in showing how things really are.” Both of these statements con-
centrate the Realist argument on matters of perception. Christian Metz later elab-
orated 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.…”
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 films—The Married Woman (1964), Alphaville (1965),
Masculine-Feminine (1966), Two or Three Things that I Know about Her (1966), for
example—dealt 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 representa-
tional. 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 “semioclasm”—the revivifying destruction of
signs—we 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 d’est (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
416 FILM THEORY: FORM AND FUNCTION

given only the most perfunctory attention to the element of the soundtrack.
Godard hoped the imbalance could be redressed.
Tout va bien and Letter to Jane (both 1972) are probably the most important of
Godard’s 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 con-
crete 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-scène in economic terms, seeing cinema not as a system of
esthetics but as an economic, perceptual, and political structure in which the “rap-
ports de production”—the relationships between producer and consumer—deter-
mine 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. Film’s ethics and politics therefore determine its nature.
This was not a particularly new idea; Balázs 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 Benjamin’s 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 practice—politics.” Benjamin, however, was speaking of an
ideal. Godard had to show how commercial cinema had usurped what Benjamin
had termed film’s 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 signifi-
cation of the esthetic elements of the photo. The angle, design, and relationships
between components, Godard showed, have delicate but real ideological signifi-
cance. 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 417

Film Speaks and Acts: Metz and Contemporary Theory

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 cinéma (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 Metz’s
thesis have already been discussed in Chapter 3. It will suffice here simply to out-
line 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 Lévi-Strauss in
the fifties and early sixties. This “structuralism” quickly became accepted as a gen-
eral 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 syn-
onymous 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 Mallarmé, pursued in Saussure, Wittgenstein,
and Joyce, defeated in Beckett and Borges, and is scattered now into a
host of helpless sects: what Mallarmé 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.
Metz’s 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, semiotics
depends heavily on the practical detailed analysis of specific films—and 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 the-
ory. Moreover, semioticians—Metz especially—are noted for being elegant stylists
in their own right. Much of the pleasure of reading semiotic studies has to do with
418 FILM THEORY: FORM AND FUNCTION

P A R A D I G M A T I C skirt
A X I S ......
shorts
......
knickers
......
shoes...........socks............ ..pants............sweater............scarf............hat
SYNTAGMATIC ......
AXIS
kilt
......
culottes
......
tights

Diagram L. Syntagmatic and paradigmatic structures of clothing.

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 melio-
rate 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 stage—the early seventies—semiotics 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 ide-
ology became part of the semiotic equation.
The fourth stage—beginning in 1975—saw 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.
 Film Speaks and Acts: Metz and Contemporary Theory 419

DOMAIN OF CINEMA
Specific cinematic codes:
Montage, for example

Non-specific
Shared
cinematic
codes:
codes:
Mise en
Lighting,
scène,
narration,
for example
for example

DOMAIN
OF THEATER
DOMAIN OF
GENERAL
CULTURE

Diagram M. CODE SET THEORY : specific, nonspecific, and shared codes.

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 puz-
zled 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.
We now might want to add a fifth stage—especially 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 the-
ory. 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 discur-
sions. But lesser acolytes can get away with a lot here. Anyone intending to read
semiotics should be forewarned: just because you can’t understand it doesn’t
mean it means anything.
Much of Christian Metz’s earliest work was concerned with setting up the pre-
mises of a semiotics of film. It would seem that the fact of montage offers the eas-
420 FILM THEORY: FORM AND FUNCTION

iest 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 dis-
tinctly 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 didn’t
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 cine-
matic 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 syntag-
matic 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 choice—“what goes with what.”
Now Metz felt he had a system of logic that would permit the real analysis of
the film phenomenon. Montage and mise-en-scène had been thoroughly rede-
fined 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 sys-
tem of codes that govern cinematic meaning. Within the syntagmas and para-
digms 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 exam-
ple, 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 in Psycho is a good example of such a
shared code. We thus have our first series of overlapping sets.
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 421

DOMAIN OF CINEMA

Zane Grey's John Ford's

novels The Searchers

DOMAIN OF WESTERNS

Diagram N. CODE SET THEORY : Generality of codes.

Finally, codes—any codes—can be broken down into subcodes; there is a hier-

archy 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.

D O M AIN O F C IN EMA

Code: Montage Code: lighting

Subcode: Subcode: (Other Subcode:

flashback accelerated codes) back
montage lighting

Diagram O. CODE SET THEORY : codes and subcodes.

Along with other semioticians, Metz in the late seventies moved on to a discus-
sion 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
422 FILM THEORY: FORM AND FUNCTION

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 signifi-
cantly to the debate in cinema before his death in 1980. Raymond Bellour wrote
widely; his two extended studies of sequences from Hitchcock’s 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 “Ciné-structuralism.” Peter
Wollen’s 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 sev-
enties 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 doesn’t 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.
There are no younger critics now writing regularly who have yet established
critical personas as strong as Sarris’s, Kael’s, or even John Simon’s in the sixties
and seventies. Since the rise of television-show criticism in the early eighties,
thumbs have replaced theories. That’s not to say there aren’t a lot of intelligent
people writing about film today; there’s 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 politi-
cal 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
 Film Speaks and Acts: Metz and Contemporary Theory 423

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 Cinéma and Cinéthique 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 cinema”—Holly-
wood and its imitators—and the “second cinema”—the more personal style of the
New Wave or “author’s” cinema—would 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 somewhere—in Chile for a few years in
the early seventies, for example—but 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.
In the U.S. these various currents—semiotic, psychoanalytic, dialectical, and
politically prescriptive—each gained their adherents in the 1970s and 1980s as
film theory became attractive to academicians. Yet our own native strain of practi-
cal criticism continued to develop as well. It centered on a study of narrativity—
the 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 narra-
tive, 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 the-
oretically, this is now a clear necessity.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, film criticism—like 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, respec-
tively, 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
424 FILM THEORY: FORM AND FUNCTION

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.*
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 cul-
ture gradually fades into world culture, we find ourselves obsessed with the same
topic with which we began this thousand-year journey into literacy and intellec-
tual understanding. Today we call it sexual politics; in the eleventh century we
called it Romance. (We still don’t understand it. Isn’t it nice that it is still mysteri-
ous?)
But there may be something more going on here: from the Rice–Irwin 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 zoom to
the rhythmic pulse of montage, movies are sexual. They are not only about sexual
politics; they are sexual politics—subject and object united.
The present course of film theory is away from prescription, toward descrip-
tion. 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 earlier—with aplomb—by 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-en-scène, 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.

* I am grateful to Richard Allen for this succinct analysis.

 Film Speaks and Acts: Metz and Contemporary Theory 425

Figure 5-15. Truffaut asks a simple question in Day For Night: “Is film more important than life?”