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Film Theory

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Film Theory
richard rushton

This chapter examines work published in the field of film theory in the year
2011 and is divided into five sections: 1. Introduction; 2. New Philosophies
of Film; 3. Pretty; 4. World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism; 5. Film and
Female Consciousness.

1. Introduction
This year has provided an impressive amount of material on film theory.
Some of this work has revisited classic theories of film; for example, Dudley
Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin’s glorious edited collection on André
Bazin, Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and its Afterlife (OUP [2011]), an
outcome of many events held during 2008, which can be accompanied by
Bert Cardullo’s collection of Bazin’s essays and reviews on Italian neorealism
in André Bazin and Italian Neorealism (Continuum [2011]). A collection of
André Gaudreault’s writings on early cinema, Film and Attraction: From
Kinematography to Cinema was translated and published (trans. T. Barnard
(UIllP [2011])). Also of note was David Martin-Jones’s Deleuze and World
Cinema (Continuum [2011]) which expands and extends Deleuze’s cinematic
categories into territories where Deleuze himself failed to venture.
Documentary has been well-served too: established scholars John Ellis (in
Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation (Routledge [2011])) and Elizabeth
Cowie (Recording Reality: Desiring the Real (UMinnP [2011])) made timely
contributions to debates in the field. There were also impressive books from
Tarja Laine (Feeling Cinema: Emotional Dynamics in Film Studies (Continuum
[2011])), Kristi McKim (Love in the Time of Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan
[2011])), Steven Peacock (Hollywood and Intimacy: Style, Moments,
Magnificence (Palgrave Macmillan [2011])) and Malcolm Turvey (The
Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s (MITP
[2011])). Major growth in the field occurred in the philosophy of film—
or ‘film-philosophy’—for this area appears to have moved into territories

The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 21 ß The English Association (2013)
All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected]
doi:10.1093/ywcct/mbt013
 Film Theory | 275

that were formerly occupied by ‘Theory’ per se. We might be witnessing the
development of a new a significant chapter in the history of film theory
where the ‘philosophy of film’ is now taking over the domain previously

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occupied by film theory.
Here I focus on four books: Robert Sinnerbrink’s New Philosophies of Film:
Thinking Images; Rosalind Galt’s Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image; Lúcia
Nagib’s World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism; and Lucy Bolton’s Film and
Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women. I chose these books
because they all make substantial original contributions to longstanding
debates in film theory in challenging and surprising ways. I begin with a
discussion of Sinnerbrink’s book, which offers the broadest overview of film
theoretical debates of the four books, and end with Bolton’s, for her book
offers what is the most focused assessment of the debates it confronts.

2. New Philosophies of Film

Sinnerbrink charts the rise and rise of philosophical approaches to film by
placing that rise within the context of the ‘post-Theory’ debates of the
1990s. He claims that, at some point during the 1980s or 1990s, film
theory’s terrain shifted from the larger questions of cinematic ontology,
language, subjectivity and apparatus, to questions focused on cultural
theory and identity politics. This shift from ‘ontology’ to ‘culturalism’ left
a void in theory that philosophers—or philosophically-inspired film scho-
lars—quickly moved in to. But this move also opened up a range of problems
and arguments which comprise the main substance of Sinnerbrink’s book.
A key point to emerge from the spread of philosophical approaches to
film is, for Sinnerbrink, that those approaches, for the most part, can be
divided between scholars inspired by an Anglo-American Analytic trad-
ition—for many, such as Noël Carroll, David Bordwell and Murray Smith,
the overarching framework of cognitivism has been most influential here—
and those indebted to the Continental tradition.1 Sinnerbrink makes the
distinction between these traditions in the following way, and it is a distinc-
tion that shapes his entire book: on the one hand via the Anglo-American
Analytic tradition are rationalist models of film philosophizing, and these
approaches ‘seek to provide explanatory models of various aspects of film
1
Significantly, the division is played out to some extent in the distinction between two major
collections published in 2011: The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (P. Livingston and
C. Plantinga, eds (Routledge [2011]); first published in 2009) and New Takes in Film-Philosophy
(H. Carel and G. Tuck (Palgrave Macmillan [2011])). Sinnerbrink has a contribution in the
latter collection.
276 | Film Theory

experience’ (p. 8). On the other hand via the Continental tradition are what
Sinnerbrink calls romanticist approaches. These ‘seek to reflect upon, inter-
pret, or extend the kind of aesthetic experience that film evokes’, so that

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what is at stake for such approaches is ‘to question and understand the
significance of film experience’ (ibid.).
Throughout New Philosophies of Film, there is little doubt where
Sinnerbrink’s sympathies lie: he is a romanticist through and through.
Much of the book, therefore, focuses on fleshing out the arguments of
rationalist models of film-philosophizing only to then offer criticisms of
those approaches in favour of the romanticist tendency. If this sounds like
a rather too simplistic reduction of the book’s arguments, then I would
suggest that readers should not be too easily dismissive of simplicity, for
what is most impressive about Sinnerbrink’s arguments is that he does make
them: he offers the first fully-reasoned and consistently argued set of re-
sponses to the cognitive-analytic line that has so shaken up film studies by
way of its post-Theory intervention. And Sinnerbrink’s criticisms are not
merely one-way dismissals. Rather, he is measured enough to praise some of
the rationalist model’s substantial contributions to the theorization of film, so
that, for example, early in the book he examines ‘post-Theory’s’ critique of
exemplarity, claiming that these researchers sought to replace hermeneutic
theories with explanatory ones (see p. 24)—I shall return to this point
below. And Sinnerbrink has no qualms about giving credit where it is
due, for in his chapter on narrative (Chapter 3) he comfortably accepts
the fine contributions made by cognitivists and poeticists to the analysis
and appreciation of cinematic narrative over the last twenty years or more.
Issues get somewhat more delicate when Sinnerbrink comes to discuss the
very notion of ‘film and philosophy’. The questions he asks are perplexing: is
it a matter of film as philosophy, or philosophy through film, or philosophy
illuminated and illustrated by film? Or might the real question be something
else altogether? I have to confess some discomfort at these debates, for they
are ones which seem to tax philosophers rather more than they disturb film
scholars (names such as Gregory Currie, Paisley Livingston, Thomas
Wartenburg and John Mullarkey emerge here). The question of whether
films can do philosophy or not is surely a debate that is impossible to resolve:
a film might indeed make an independent contribution to philosophy or it
might offer ways of thinking through longstanding philosophical debates. If a
film does these things, then these are the kinds of things films do; we can or
cannot call them philosophy, but the films themselves will still be doing them
whether we choose to call it philosophy or not. At any rate, Sinnerbrink lays
out the boundaries of the debates with admirable clarity and dexterity.
 Film Theory | 277

Sinnerbrink does his best to defend the position—call it romantic—that

films can do philosophy, and he reserves the final section of his book for a
discussion of three films that exemplify that position: David Lynch’s Inland

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Empire (2006), Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), and Terence Malick’s The
New World (2005). Immediately evident here is an ‘art film’ focus, and
Sinnerbrink feels this point too. He suggests that by choosing these specific
films he opens himself up to the criticism that it is only films like these—a
special type of film—that can be philosophical. Sinnerbrink does not feel this
to be a problem, however; for him, only certain films can be philosophical,
and it is difficult to concede, he argues that ‘film in general can be philo-
sophical’ (p. 138). His defence here is to assert that the films he has chosen
‘are among the most challenging and rewarding instances of ‘‘philosophical
cinema’’’ (ibid.). Sinnerbrink thus implies that there is indeed a scale of
philosophical virtue that pertains to film’s relation to philosophy—clearly
some films do philosophy well, while others must do it poorly, if at all. To
me, these are urgent questions and problems that defenders of the ‘film as
philosophy’ position need to confront, and I am not entirely persuaded that
Sinnerbrink confronts these issues as directly as I might wish. ‘[T]here is no
reason,’ he writes, ‘to assume that the ‘‘film as philosophy’’ thesis must be
made a fully general claim’ (ibid.). He then goes on to argue that, at best,
examples of films-as-philosophy might be very thin on the ground indeed.
Sinnerbrink does potentially find a way out of this problem, and it is a
problem, I believe, that takes us back to the debate on exemplarity; that is,
that the discussion or interpretation of a single film might be fortuitously
amplified to a general rule. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll were especially
critical of this issue in their 1995 volume on Post-Theory, with Bordwell
drawing attention to what he criticized as the ‘top-down’ tendency of film
theory. ‘When theory projects downward to the datum,’ he wrote, ‘the
latter becomes an illustrative example’ (‘Contemporary Film Studies and
the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory’ in D. Bordwell and N. Carroll, eds, Post-
Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (UWiscP [1995] p. 19)). Carroll forwarded
a similar complaint: ‘Many film scholars imagine that they are producing film
theory when they are actually merely contriving interpretations of individual
films’ (‘Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment’ in D. Bordwell
and N. Carroll, eds, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (UWiscP [1995] p.
42)). To criticisms like these, surely Sinnerbrink can only plead guilty, and he
admits that his examples offer ‘philosophical cinema’ (meaning that his
approach must be in some sense ‘top-down’), and also that they ‘invit[e]
the viewer to think, to feel, and to question’ (p. 138), which is to say these
278 | Film Theory

are things which these particular films do, but certainly not all films; it is film
interpretation rather than film theory on Carroll’s terms.
Is this a problem? For a scholar like Carroll it certainly is. For him: ‘Film

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theory tracks the regularity and the norm, while film interpretation’—of the
kind with which Sinnerbrink engages, we can surmise—‘finds its natural
calling in dealing with the deviation, with what violates the norm or with
what exceeds it or what re-imagines it’ (Carroll [1995] p. 43). One can only
conclude that Sinnerbrink is pursuing a film-philosophy that is at odds with
what Carroll prescribes for film theory and the entire ‘rationalist’ approach to
film theory that Sinnerbrink counters in challenging ways in New Philosophies of
Film. His romanticist approach aims at a rather different set of criteria. For
him, what makes a film philosophical is precisely its ability to dislodge the
norm, that such films ‘disclose novel aspects of experience’, that they ‘ques-
tion given elements of our normative framework’ so as to ‘challenge estab-
lished ways of seeing’ and ‘open up new paths for thinking’ (p. 141).
Sinnerbrink has done a great service to film studies for having so clearly
elaborated the parameters of this debate between rationalist and romanticist
approaches and his book poses some challenges for future research.

3. Pretty
If Sinnerbrink’s romanticist approach in New Philosophies of Film searches for
departures from the norm and the conventional, then so does Rosalind Galt’s
ambitious treatise on the discursive category of the ‘pretty’ in film and
cultural criticism. Significantly for Galt, what is pretty is neither that
which is conventionally praised for its aesthetic grandeur—that is the beau-
tiful—but nor is it that which is conventionally dismissed as aesthetically
unpleasant or bad—that would be ugly. Rather, the pretty exposes an in-
between category of instances that appear to have some aesthetic merit—
things that do enough to make them pretty—while at the same time the
pretty, for critics and historians, designates something that is also altogether
too trite, simple, decorative or ornamental to be a legitimately aesthetic
triumph. In this way, to call an artwork, object or film ‘pretty’ is more or
less to dismiss it as potentially agreeable but ultimately unimportant.
Galt therefore aims to grant the pretty a positive critical function, for the
category of the pretty might just be one that undermines the dominant
preconceptions and classifications with which film theory—as much as art
history or cultural theory—operates. Galt immediately foregrounds the
gender conflicts at stake in Pretty: to call a women pretty—and pretty is
indeed a term reserved for the so-called ‘fairer sex’—is to designate such a
 Film Theory | 279

woman as certainly something pleasant and likeable, but it also connotes

unimportance, superficiality and a predominance of appearance over depth,
for (‘as everyone knows’), a woman cannot both be pretty and intelligent.

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Galt wishes to undo all such common knowledge: to be pretty might just be
to undermine everything that common wisdom assures us should be intel-
ligent and serious; the pretty presents a threat that has the capacity to disrupt
the norms and conventions of aesthetic judgment.
Pretty is an enormously ambitious book; rarely have I come across a book
that is so crammed with secondary sources and arguments: the book’s
breadth is simply astounding. The book’s major shortcoming lies in trying
to define just what the ‘pretty’ is beyond the confines of what Galt or you or
I might think is pretty. In other words, Pretty wants for some objective
criteria by means of which a thing can be regarded as pretty or not, for
there were many times while reading this book that Galt referred to some-
thing as pretty, and I had to wonder precisely how she had reached such a
conclusion. (Such a problem is not helped by the constant uses of ‘we’, ‘our’
and ‘us’, for I was often uncertain whether I was part of the ‘we’ or not.)
If this lack might be considered a problem, Galt certainly does her best
to navigate her way beyond it, for Pretty takes aim at several of the most
prominent theoretical positions that have framed the field over the last few
decades. For reasons of space, I deal most closely with only two of those
positions here: a Marxist one and a feminist one. First of all, then, Galt
argues against ‘a recurrent Marxist rhetoric of the image as libidinous excess
of sensuality’ (p. 191). She therefore takes issue with what many would call
political modernist criticism in film theory (see D.N. Rodowick, The Crisis of
Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (2nd edn
(UIllP [1994])), of the kind that insists on the Brechtian seriousness of
aesthetic production and which demands furthermore that anything exciting,
seductive or enjoyable—that is, somehow pretty—can only ever have nega-
tive consequences. Perhaps more than anything what Galt proposes here is an
argument against formalism and in favour of a conception that is much more
fluid, more fun, energetic, kinky and quirky.
A mark of how Galt proceeds on this score emerges in her comments on
the persistent criticisms of prettiness in film scholarship. For the writers she
admonishes, the pretty can only ever be relevant if prettiness is turned
against itself. In other words, if a film shows us something that is pretty,
it must also turn that prettiness against itself and denounce it—only then
will it be demonstrating the political destiny of the pretty. Thus, Philip Strick
will reject Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point for failing to present its surfaces re-
flexively with the consequence that Antonioni falls prey to a superficial
280 | Film Theory

aesthetic—‘his artistry leaving his Marxism behind’ (P. Strick, ‘Zabriskie

Point’ (Monthly Film Bulletin 37:346[1970] 102); quoted in Galt [2011]
p. 197)—or Bertolucci’s The Conformist can only gain its value by offering

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a ‘critique of prettiness’ (p. 201); or the glamour of Fassbinder’s key works
can only have relevance by undermining and critiquing their aesthetic gloss
(pp. 202–3). These are extraordinary arguments that promise to overturn
certain strains of film theory that have been dominant for some forty or fifty
years. And yet, the category of the pretty is still a difficult one to pin down:
‘The pretty composition is not sublime or edgy; it, unlike underground film,
does not offend good taste. As in the much maligned heritage film, the pretty
aesthetic ensures that not a thing is out of place’ (p. 203). I remain unsure
what do to with such statements or what their precise function is.
The second key argument at which Galt takes aim are longstanding claims
relating the feminism and cinema:
Gender is a defining quality of prettiness, and making visible its
political nature is a strategy that recurs throughout this book: from
the feminizing rhetoric of colour and cosmetics to the secondary
nature of the decorative and, indeed, the dangers of aesthetic se-
duction; making the pretty into a critical term is an unequivocally
feminist move. (p. 236)
For Galt—and her extraordinary research skills are evident here; a range of
art-historical theoretical edifices constructed from the eighteenth century to
the present are convincingly brought to bear—colour, make-up, decoration
and aesthetic seduction, categories that recur throughout Pretty, are terms
that have always been feminized, and, in being feminized, automatically
made secondary. Thus, line has been privileged over colour, the real or
authentic privileged over the artificiality of costume or cosmetics, formal
grandeur and structure have always trumped ornament and decoration,
while rational distanciation has been privileged over sensual or emotive
seduction. Galt wants to associate prettiness with each of the latter cate-
gories listed here and, in doing so, overturn a few centuries of dominant
aesthetic thought.
Much of Pretty is therefore devoted to arguments relating to feminism
and cinema. (In this respect, 2011 might represent something of a renais-
sance in feminist approaches to film; see my comments on Bolton [2011]
below, Hilary Radner’s Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks and
Consumer Culture (Routledge [2011]) as well as the collection by Radner
and Stringer (H. Radner and R. Stringer, eds, Feminism at the Movies: Under-
standing Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema (Routledge [2011]).) Laura
 Film Theory | 281

Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (in Visual and Other Pleasures
(Palgrave Macmillan [1989] pp. 14–26)) offers a starting point (as ever), and
Galt takes some of Mulvey’s insights in interesting directions. If we are

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prepared to accept that for dominant cinema Mulvey deems women to be
figures of the ‘pretty’—they are the to-be-looked-at, fetishized, styled ob-
jects of visual pleasure, after all—then this is a bad thing indeed for Mulvey.
Galt asks why this dismissal of prettiness must automatically be demanded,
bemoaning the fact that ‘post-Mulveyan feminist critique often takes as
axiomatic a rejection of spectacle per se’ (p. 250), and the rejection of
spectacle amounts, for Galt, to a rejection of prettiness. Woman conceived
as a decorative, ornamental aesthetic object of pleasure is still figured as a
problem for feminists, and Galt wants to insist that it need not be a problem.
If prettiness is a problem for cinematic feminists, then that problem is
merely reprising the shortcoming Galt had identified in political modernist
theorizing: a critique of the image as such. If the image-as-pretty only ever has
validity if it is used reflexively and turned against itself, then much the same
goes for the image of (the pretty) woman: she can only have subversive rele-
vance if her seductive image is ironized (as myriad analyses of films noirs or
Sirkian melodramas have claimed). Galt correctly points to the blinkeredness of
this approach (these might be the book’s finest lines): ‘We must be distanced
(not seduced) by the image, keep our distance, and distance ourselves. The
image in its imageness is the problem, a seductive surface that cannot be
trusted unless it can be made to speak against itself’ (p. 256). Getting
beyond this dead-end of image critique is central to Galt’s task in Pretty.
The work of the pretty might be precisely this work of going beyond
image critique, a working that takes images and surfaces seriously and en-
joyably, seductively. Pretty offers an appreciation of ‘the force of surfaces’,
and Galt acknowledges the influence of Rey Chow’s groundbreaking essay on
Zhang Yimou, ‘The Force of Surfaces: Defiance in Zhang Yimou’s Films’
(in Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese
Cinema (ColUP [1995] pp. 142–72)). This force of surfaces is evident in each
of Galt’s case studies: Chapter 2 on Derek Jarman; Chapter 4 on Luhrmann’s
Moulin Rouge! (2001); Chapter 6 on Mikhail Kalatozov’s I am Cuba (1964);
Chapter 8 on the films of Ulrike Ottinger. These analyses, in different ways
and in varying theoretical and historical contexts, try their hardest to flesh
out what Galt means by ‘pretty’. When discussing Ottinger’s Johanna d’Arc of
Mongolia (1989), Galt refers approvingly to Roswitha Mueller: ‘What comes
across immediately is the brilliance of the surfaces in the film. Ottinger
embraces the notion of surface’ (R. Mueller, ‘The Mirror and the Vamp’,
New German Critique 34[1985] 176–93 at 191; quoted in Galt 2011, p. 283).
282 | Film Theory

Galt then adds that ‘Surface is a key quality of prettiness’ (Galt [2011] p.
283). Galt engages with many readings and critics of Ottinger’s works to the
point where she ends up coding the surface sense of the pretty with a

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combination of gender, sexuality and the geopolitical. For Galt, this com-
bination offers an elaboration of the queer as pointing a way beyond trad-
itional binaries—male/female, depth/surface, line/colour, etc., an aspect of
Galt’s argument that is foregrounded in the chapters on Jarman and
Ottinger, while it is perhaps more implicit in those on Luhrmann and I
am Cuba. The queer offers an acceptance of surfaces, drag and masquerade;
a ‘queer space’, claims Galt, ‘that counters the enchantment of beauty with
the perversity of the pretty’ (p. 268).
Ultimately this might be where the pretty finds itself in Galt’s book: the
pretty occurs in surfaces and spectacles as elaborations of zones of exclusion. If
this is the case, then perhaps Galt overplays her sense of having gotten
beyond traditional binaries—there is the sense that if Galt has managed to
go beyond traditional binaries, then she has merely erected another set of
binaries to take their place: for Galt’s prettiness, surface transcends depth;
appearance triumphs over essence; colour trounces line; the image over-
comes realism; decoration and ornament put paid to form; while zones of
exclusion and otherness challenge the conventional and the norm. And if this
is the case, then we are not so far from modernist criticism after all; in much
the same manner as Sinnerbrink’s New Philosophies of Film, Galt gives value to
those images and cinematic procedures whose aim it is to overturn the
conventional and the norm, to foreground ‘otherness’—here denoted by
‘prettiness’, queerness and ‘zones of exclusion’—as a mode of experience to
be valorized above all other experiences.
One of the more puzzling effects of Pretty is that it is terribly hard to get a
sense of the films here. They tend to disappear beneath a mass of secondary
references, arguments, contextualizations, claims and counterclaims. The
several mentions of King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937) are a case in point.
Drawing on key essays by Linda Williams (‘Something Else Besides a Mother:
Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama’ in C. Gledhill, ed., Home is
Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (BFI [1987]
pp. 299–325)) and E. Ann Kaplan (‘The Case of the Missing Mother:
Maternal Issues in Vidor’s Stella Dallas’ in P. Ehrens, ed., Issues in Feminist
Film Criticism (IndUP [1990] pp. 126–36)), Galt argues that Stella is rejected
from high society because she tries to be too pretty. That is, Stella’s over-the-
top attempt to impress offers a prime example of excessive ornamental
prettiness (the kind of excess evident in Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!). Stella
is punished by conventional, patriarchal, formal, heterosexual society, and
 Film Theory | 283

thus comes across, for Galt, as a pretty champion of otherness and exclusion,
a cinematic presence who points to a practice of ‘searching for value outside
or in opposition to hegemonies’ (p. 238).

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These points stick. And yet, is there not a whole range of conflicts at play
in Stella Dallas that Galt effectively magics out of existence, as though the
film is reducible to an argumentative point—that prettiness opposes hege-
monies—but in which the sense of the film as a layered, conflicting, complex
object fades away? Stella certainly achieves upward social mobility by at first
making herself pretty for Stephen Dallas (whom she marries), and at several
points throughout the film she demonstrates her command over costume and
cosmetic adornment—she knows about conventional, triumphant prettiness.
In Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, Stanley
Cavell insists on these points in discussing Stella Dallas, so that by the time
Stella makes her over-the-top display at the holiday resort, she knows she
wants, and intends, to go well beyond the bounds of the pretty so as to enter
a zone far more garish and outrageous (‘Stella’s Taste: Reading Stella
Dallas’(UChicP [1996] pp. 197–222)). At the end of the film, she walks
away from the world of the pretty—she is now dull, shabby and poor, utterly
anti-pretty—while delivering her daughter to the world of well-to-do pret-
tiness. If Stella is excluded at the end of Stella Dallas, then this exclusion is
not one whose basis is prettiness. On the contrary, prettiness names a zone
from which Stella is only too keen to escape. These elements of the film are
ones that Galt utterly fails to discern.
Where can such an observation lead? Might it be that the pretty can also
name the most conventional, standardized concessions to the norm, particu-
larly in its heterosexual mode? Search in Pretty for a reference to Pretty Woman
(directed by Garry Marshall, 1990) and you will not find one. Galt acknow-
ledges early on that it is easy to find a prettiness that ‘guarantees capitalist
inclusion’ (p. 11)—and capitalist inclusion is a bad thing (obviously . . . )—
whereas her challenge in this book is to instead find modes of prettiness that
‘articulate aesthetic or political exclusion’ (ibid.). It seems to me that her
own exclusion of conventional modes of prettiness erects a substantial im-
pediment to the effectiveness of Pretty’s arguments.

4. World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism

Galt’s Pretty tries to shake up arguments in film theory and visual culture that
have been dominant for many years now; Lúcia Nagib’s World Cinema and the
Ethics of Realism promises a similar shake up. Where arguments in film theory
have been typically divided between advocates of modernist, avant-garde
284 | Film Theory

reflexivity—call this political modernism—and non-interventionist, direct,

indexical realism—as championed by Bazin and Kracauer—then Nagib de-
fends forms of filmmaking that fuse these two positions rather than seeing

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them as diametrically opposed. This might be called ‘reflexive realism’
(though Nagib does not use this term). If this is a realism that is also
reflexive, then it might also be called a ‘dialectical’ realism, and this is
indeed the direction in which Nagib takes her theorizing. The realism she
celebrates in various examples of ‘world cinema’ is a realism that tries to
undo what is typically or too easily coded as ‘real’, so that these films
celebrate new discoveries and definitions of the real.
Nagib crosses a range of remarkable works; there is no question she has
identified something quite special here. What she has discovered is that a
range of fairly experimental, reflexive works are nevertheless underpinned
by the indexical, material traces they have recorded. Therefore, Oshima’s In
the Realm of the Senses (1976) is defiantly modernist, confronting and daring,
yet those qualities are underpinned by real bodies in real spaces—an ‘utter
realism’, no less (p. 205). For Oshima, reflexivity and realism work hand-in-
hand. So too for a range of other works Nagib discusses, from Truffaut’s The
400 Blows (1959), through Rocha’s Black God, White Devil (1964), Atarnajuat:
The Fast Runner (2001), Delicate Crime (directed by Beto Brant, 2005) and a
brilliant analysis of I am Cuba’s methodological combination of Eisensteinian
and Bazinian tendencies.
The examples of world cinema Nagib highlights are also, for her, in-
stances of an ethics of realism. What is meant by ethics here? Indebted to
Alain Badiou as well as Mary Ann Doane (The Emergence of Cinematic Time:
Modernity, Contingency, and the Archive (HarvardUP [2002]), Nagib argues that
the combination of realism and reflexivity produces an ethics of contingency,
of the encounter that is uncertain, unexpected and ephemeral. In other
words, Nagib’s notion of ethics is indebted to the production of new
senses of reality, forms of the real that mark a difference and which
depart from the expected, the same, and the normal.
And yet, what is ‘normal’ here? Nagib’s articulation of reflexive realism
is indeed powerful and convincing, but there seems to be a missing link.
What was Bazinian realism an alternative to if not the classical Hollywood
style (so effectively spelled out in ‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema’
(A. Bazin, What is Cinema? trans H. Gray (UCalP [1967] pp. 23–40))? And
what were modernist reflexivists critical of if not the Hollywood style and its
‘illusion of reality’? And so, by mixing these two strands of critique, that is,
by placing the realist critique of Hollywood alongside the modernist critique
of Hollywood, Nagib likewise finds a comfortable scapegoat in the
 Film Theory | 285

Hollywood style. If World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism discovers a cine-
matic world of difference, then it is the Hollywood cinema that bears the
brunt of all that is normal or the same. Nagib does not point this out

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directly, but it is a point that emerges via a number of oppositions she
makes throughout the book. Much like Galt’s Pretty, Nagib’s World Cinema
is structured by way of a range of oppositions: ethics as unpredictable and
contingent is contrasted with notions of normality and sameness (and which
must be unethical, one might surmise); a notion of realism as presentation is
opposed to Hollywood’s representations of the real; the materiality of the
realism Nagib highlights (and its self-reflexive exhibitionism) is differentiated
from the voyeuristic simulations of Hollywood; while the reality produced
by these films is utterly opposed to the ‘illusion of reality’ or ‘impression of
reality’ endemic in Hollywood films.
Nagib’s approach here perhaps highlights nothing other than film theory’s
(or should that be film Theory’s?) ongoing—and seemingly unending—op-
position to Hollywood filmmaking and anything that smacks of conventions
or the ‘norm’. If Noël Carroll declared that the central task of film theory
should be that which ‘tracks the regularity and the norm’, then each of the
books I have so far examined refuses this task. Instead, the stakes of
Sinnerbrink’s New Philosophies of Film, and Galt’s Pretty, as well as Nagib’s
World Cinema are to track all things that refuse regularity and disrupt the
norm. Is this therefore the task film theory has set itself after the post-
Theory wars? Theory might now take it as more less assumed that the
majority of Hollywood films are capable only of peddling norms and con-
ventions—illusions that crush difference and establish zones of exclusion—
so that the task of Theory must be to discover the excluded others that break
free from the confines of all that Hollywood does and stands for. I tend to
believe that these are pretty much the same kinds of arguments that got film
theory started—under the influence of Althusserian political theory—some
40 or 50 years ago, and I find it disconcerting that many of the conceptions
of Hollywood’s so-called ‘illusion of reality’ or its conservative convention-
alism still tend to be taken as Law. That Law might be something like nothing
good can be a product of the classical Hollywood style. Articulating the good in
film theory, in new philosophies of film, in the ‘pretty’, in ‘world cinema’ or
‘realism’ can only ever be carried out if that good is opposed to the con-
ventions of Hollywood.2

2
I take up some of these issues in The Reality of Film: Theories of Filmic Reality (ManUP
[2011]).
286 | Film Theory

5. Film and Female Consciousness

Lucy Bolton’s Film and Female Consciousness has a clear and precise goal: if

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classical cinema—especially in its Hollywood varieties—tended to objectify
women à la Mulvey’s account of the passivity of women, then this book
examines some recent films that do not do this. Rather than make women
into objects, the films examined here explore the subjectivity of their female
characters with great depth and subtlety. Here we have women who are
living beings with flesh, intricate senses of consciousness, desires and pas-
sions. The films that do this are In the Cut (directed by Jane Campion, 2003),
Lost in Translation (directed by Sofia Coppola, 2003) and Morvern Callar (dir-
ected by Lynne Ramsay, 2002). It is no coincidence that these films are
directed by women (Bolton elaborates some of the consequences of this
point in Chapter 6).
Like the other books examined in this review, Bolton’s also sets up an
argument that offers ways to ‘challenge conventional modes of viewing’ (p.
14). In other words, she too is trying to deliver the conditions of film that
deviate from the conventional Hollywood models. By doing this, she hopes
to trace the contours of a potentially feminine cinema, drawing from
Annette Kuhn’s claim (made in 1994) that: ‘A feminine text would [. . .]
constitute a subversion of and challenge to a ‘‘mainstream’’ text’), (Women’s
Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (revised edn, Verso [1994] p. 12) quoted in
Bolton [2011] p. 26). Bolton is thus revisiting some classic arguments invol-
ving feminism and its relation to cinema, but she does so in ways that are
genuinely innovative and illuminating. The key forward step she takes is to
rechart the cinema–spectator relation by way of French philosopher Luce
Irigaray’s theorization of the speculum, rather than by way of the more ac-
cepted notion, Lacanian in origin, of the cinema screen as mirror. If the
mirror relation has always been conceived in terms of lack, and if that mirror
lack has always been mapped onto the notion of woman as lack—and
thereby, in short, delivering a version of the cinema apparatus as a gendered
machine of lack—then Bolton offers us a potentially new model that literally
bends the mirror model out of shape: the speculum. Rather than a flat
mirror that merely reflects, Bolton offers us the possibility of the screen
as speculum, a surface that expands and refracts what it exposes, one that
promises an exposure of the inside of things, especially, for Bolton, the inside
of female consciousness.
Film and Female Consciousness finds other angles by means of which to
analyse its films: there is a great deal of reflection of the writings on
Irigaray, as well as the forwarding of a theory of generic mimicry, alongside
 Film Theory | 287

phenomenological conceptions of ‘haptic vision’ (indebted to the works of

Vivian Sobachack and Laura Marks), while finally there is also a concentra-
tion on the sexual pleasures of women that is brought out by these films.

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The theory of mimicry Bolton pursues involves analysing each of her
key films alongside a classical example—In the Cut is compared with Klute
(directed by Alan J. Pakula, 1971); Lost in Translation with The Seven Year Itch
(directed by Billy Wilder, 1955); and Morvern Callar with Marnie (directed by
Alfred Hitchcock, 1964). The intention of this method is that the distinction
between the modern and classical evocations of the feminine will be brought
out more starkly, and for the most part this works in effective ways for
Bolton’s readings. If the classical films, from Bolton’s perspective, all come
to be about the taming and restricting of women’s actions and desires, then
the more recent films are about elaborating and giving voice to similar
actions and desires. Bolton’s perspective here also allows the recent films
to be considered cinematically as reflections or renderings of earlier cine-
matic traditions.
What stands out in Film and Female Consciousness, and what makes it
exceptional, is quite simply the care and attention given to the films them-
selves. Bolton brilliantly and intricately describes the plots, scenes and pro-
gressions of the films in ways that make them not mere illustrations of
theoretical markers (and, for me, the books by Galt and Nagib often do
just that), but which make the films come alive as delicate, complex, chal-
lenging, interesting—marvellous—works. This makes Film and Female
Consciousness very much a work of cinephilia in all of the best senses: it is
a book that loves the cinema (and it is a book that makes me want to love the
cinema too).
As a result of the close attention this book gives to its films, many of the
theoretical points it scores emerge in the long descriptions of aspects of the
films. This approach makes Bolton’s arguments very convincing indeed, as
though she is channelling what the films themselves are doing. Here, it is
much more the films themselves that do the work of theorizing than it is any
master thinker or theoretical edifice, even if Irigaray does figure heavily
throughout Film and Female Consciousness. Bolton’s elaboration of these
issues—call it the matter of ‘what films do’—is also central to her argu-
ments, for it is the ability of these films to articulate their feminine desires in
layered and complex ways that is the raison d’être both of the films and of
Bolton’s claims. Therefore, when she writes that: ‘It is my suggestion that
reading In the Cut from an Irigarayan perspective mobilizes a female-oriented
diegesis in which the film’s perspective of the world is that of the female
protagonist: the dominant psychological and emotional constructions in the
288 | Film Theory

film are female; they do not need to be unearthed’ (p. 74), then readers can
take this as being a definitive claim: these films really do take their women
seriously in ways that have not often occurred in cinema, and the fact that

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these films have done this is something worth writing and thinking about. ‘In
the Cut’s main concern [. . .] is with Frannie’s [Meg Ryan] subjectivity and
interiority,’ Bolton argues. ‘It is Frannie’s psychological journey,’ she con-
tinues, ‘that the film charts’ (p. 93). Such is the core of Bolton’s arguments:
films like In the Cut provide an in-depth view of female thoughts, desires and
feelings, and this is a good thing.
In the Cut charts, perhaps more than anything else (and these elements
are emphasized by Bolton), Frannie’s progression towards sexual enlighten-
ment. Her exploration of sexual pleasure is active and assertive, and it
becomes crucial to her defining a sense of self. Her sexual pleasure is not
a matter of affirming male power, for penetrative sex is rarely an issue in
In the Cut. The effect of the film’s sexual scenes is, Bolton writes, ‘to convey
Malloy’s [Mark Ruffalo] desire (and ability) to pleasure Frannie, rather than
to present an orgasmic spectacle’ (p. 89), the latter being, for Bolton, the
typical, patriarchal, mainstream version of screen sex. Bolton’s point is
therefore framed from a feminine perspective; it offers ‘a female discourse
in which a man learns from a woman’ (ibid.). In the Cut thus presents a
woman of depth, subtlety and passion; it offers a complex vision of female
consciousness and experience.
Lost in Translation takes up one of the key terms associated with feminist
film theory: masquerade. The film is concerned with Charlotte’s [Scarlett
Johansson] discovery of herself through masquerade. Bolton’s brief focus on
the karaoke singing sequence in which Charlotte dons a bright pink wig
brings conceptions of masquerade to the fore. Bolton works hard with
Irigaray’s conceptions of masquerade, claiming that masquerade entails enter-
ing into (quoting Irigaray) ‘a system of values’ (This Sex Which is Not One,
trans. C. Porter (CornUP [1985] p. 134); quoted Bolton [2011] p. 122) not
designed by or for women, and that, in many ways, (again quoting Irigaray)
‘far from being a cause for celebration, [masquerade] can be seen in many
cases as serving a compensatory mechanism for the lack of options open
to [women] in other areas of social life’ (L. Irigaray, Democracy Begins Between
Two, trans. K. Anderson (Athlone [2000] p. 197); quoted in Bolton [2011]
p. 123).
If this sounds like a critique of the ‘necessity’ for the masquerade of the
feminine, then what Lost in Translation brings to the fore is precisely that
critique, especially as it articulates that critique through Charlotte’s condem-
nations of the movie actress, Kelly (Anna Faris). Unlike Kelly, Charlotte
 Film Theory | 289

manages to turn masquerade against itself in order to escape from it. ‘The
resonance of the film’s ending lies in the fact Charlotte has a life of oppor-
tunity ahead of her,’ Bolton argues (p. 126). ‘The emphasis rests on what—

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and how—Charlotte can become’ (ibid.). Charlotte has pulled herself away
from the webs social systems have spun around her in order to see, feel and
live more clearly.
Of the films Bolton tackles, Morvern Callar is the most tactile and hap-
tically vibrant. She therefore foregrounds the haptic elements of the film in
her analysis. Much of this emphasis pertains to the question, raised by
Irigaray, of ‘How can we preserve the memory of touching?’ (Bolton
[2011] p. 148). Following the death of her boyfriend, Morvern Callar
(Samantha Morton) tries to come to terms with that loss by preserving
her memories of her boyfriend, while she also embarks on a personal jour-
ney towards discovering what life can be for her beyond that relationship and
beyond the known qualities of her life as it had been.
Bolton delivers a precise and delicate rendering of many aspects of
Morvern Callar’s plot and images; she makes the film—my memory of the
film—utterly vivid and compelling. Much of the persuasiveness of her ar-
guments comes from these brilliantly described aspects of the film. By the
end of the film, Morvern has invented a new sense of herself, in ways that
contrast starkly with the destiny of Marnie (Tippi Hedren) in Hitchcock’s
Marnie, the classical film with which Bolton contrasts the modern Morvern
Callar. ‘She [Morvern] has removed all the trappings of everyday life that
conventionally constitute a social identity—name, job, home, friends, con-
versation, routine—and immersed herself into a physical environment which
occupies her on a sensory level’ (p. 165). The ramifications of her new
identity (and non- or anti-identity) are very positive ones from Bolton’s
perspective: ‘Morvern [—unlike Marnie—] maximizes the proceeds of
her deceitful, aberrant behaviour and embraces the assumption of a rootless,
floating identity’ (p. 166).
What ends up being so interesting about Bolton’s analyses is that she
herself takes so seriously and examines so closely the natures and depths of
the female consciousnesses depicted in these films. I guess one way to put
this is to declare that the films take centre stage here, so that the theory
withdraws to the wings. And yet, at the same time, I always had the feeling
while reading Film and Female Consciousness that it was nothing less than the
films themselves that were putting forward these theories. Whether this is
actually what the films were or are doing—do we call this ‘film as philoso-
phy’?—or whether this is an outcome of Bolton’s precise and convincing
analyses, I cannot be certain. For me, at any rate, Bolton’s method and
290 | Film Theory

rhetoric point a positive way forward both for film theory in general and for
feminist film theory in particular.
Right near the end of Film and Female Consciousness, Bolton makes the

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following statement: ‘I have demonstrated how Irigaray’s analysis of the
status of women in patriarchy does not stop at critique: throughout her
writings, Irigaray offers a positive vision of possibility and activity in
which women might engage in order to create and preserve their individu-
ality’ (pp. 202–3). These lines cut to the core of what is most interesting in
Bolton’s Film and Female Consciousness: if Bolton is here focusing on some of
the ways that films can counter or break with the conventional and the norm,
then this is not their sole raison d’être—that is, unlike Galt or Nagib (and to a
certain extent Sinnerbrink), Bolton refrains from setting up a range of binary
oppositions. Instead, each of the films she analyses enters into an intricate
dialogue with a ‘classical’ film, so that the stakes of where Bolton’s analyses
are headed are not merely ones that counter and oppose the norms of
Hollywood. What Bolton seems to be heading towards is the establishment
of a new range of conventions or norms—the primary norm being one in
which women are no longer merely represented as superficial objects but
where they are depicted as deeply layered, complex characters whose con-
sciousness—interior—is at stake. (Bolton’s arguments might naturally open
up a conflict with the arguments put forward by Galt’s appeal to ‘the force of
surfaces’ in Pretty, and this might certainly be a conflict for feminist film
theory to grapple with in the near future.) It seems to me that if such things
become conventions and norms, then the films we go to see will be a lot
richer for it, whether they be Hollywood films, philosophical films or ‘world
cinema’.

Books Reviewed
Bolton, Lucy. Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking
Women. Palgrave Macmillan. [2011] pp. 233. hb £50/$90 ISBN 9 7802 3027 5690.
Galt, Rosalind. Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image. ColUP. [2011] pp. 390.
pb £18/$26. ISBN 9 7802 3115 3478.
Nagib, Lúcia. World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism. Continuum. [2011] pp. 293.
pb £16.99/$27.95 ISBN 9 7814 4116 5831.
Sinnerbrink, Robert. New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images. Continuum. [2011]
pp. 247. pb £17.99/$29.95 ISBN 9 7814 4115 3432.