European Film Scholarship€¦ · Like Engels, Lukács adopted a categorical distinction between...

[16:05 2/1/2008 5088-Donald-Ch02.tex] Paper: a4 Job No: 5088 Donald: Film Studies (SAGE Handbook) Page: 25 25–53

2European Film Scholarship

I a n A i t k e n

The European experience of Film Studies andfilm scholarship is a particularly diverse one,and inherently difficult to encapsulate withina circumscribed review such as this. Givenso, the approach adopted here will be aimedat managing this difficulty through a partitionof that experience into six major categories:‘nineteenth century realist, naturalist and clas-sical Marxist’; ‘intuitionist realist’; ‘intuition-ist modernist’; ‘auteurist’; ‘Saussurian’ and‘postmodern post-structuralist/pragmatism’.Such a partition may be reductive in effect butany similar approach to such a subject would,necessarily, be forced into equivalent diminu-tions. It will be argued that the ancestries of theEuropean engagement with film scholarshipare to be found, not just in twentieth centuryschools of film theory, but also in much olderEuropean intellectual and cultural legacies,and that it is imperative to recognize theorigins of these historical traditions, and theirinfluence upon European film scholarship.Such an approach, inevitably, shapes theoverall orientation of this assessment. The firstfive sections of this study will be concernedlargely with film theory, rather than withscholarship in the broader sense, because theEuropean engagement with theory has been

so central to the evolving course of EuropeanFilm Studies. Scholarship, and, in particular,historical scholarship, will be addressed in thefinal section of the chapter, which explores thebroad spectrum withdrawal from high theorywhich occurred from the mid-1980s, to moreor less the present.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY REALIST,NATURALIST AND CLASSICALMARXIST TRADITION

One of the principal sources of early traditionsof film scholarship in Europe was nineteenthcentury realist and naturalist thought. Nat-uralism, in particular, exercised a consider-able influence upon early film scholarshipin France, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, andelsewhere. Although naturalism had lostmuch of its intellectual pre-eminence by thetime that the cinema came into being, thatappearance revived interest in the ideas offigures such as Emile Zola. It was the modern,technological and ‘scientific’ character of thecinematograph, in conjunction with the inher-ent potential which the machine possessed for

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26 THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF FILM STUDIES

generating photographic accounts of reality,which led scholars back to the naturalistpremises espoused by Zola in the forewordto Thérèse Raquin (1867). Examples ofsuch a sanction of cinematic naturalism canbe found in the writings of a number ofcritics active during the period, includingRicciotto Canudo, Louis Haugmard, AndréAntoine, Jean Epstein,André Sauvage, HubertRevol and others (Abel, 1988). Even though1920s French cinematic impressionist filmtheory, embodied in works such as LouisDelluc’s book Photogénie (1920) and LéonMoussinac’s theoretical manifesto Naissancedu cinéma (1925), arose, to some extent, inopposition to this naturalist legacy, aspects ofnaturalism still coursed powerfully throughcinematic impressionist discourse, and con-tinued to influence European film theorythroughout the silent period.

After 1930, this realist and naturalisttradition of film scholarship was challengedby the emergence of the sound film, anoccurrence which posed complications formodels of film theory which had beenfounded upon the primacy of the image.In response to such difficulties an array ofcritical debates and positions began to emergewithin Europe over how to respond to aconceptual environment which had now beenirretrievably transformed. French critics suchas René Clair, Marcel L’Herbier, Epsteinand Benjamin Fondane initially reacted withsuspicion and apprehension to the emergenceof the sound film, whilst others, such asMoussinac, were more positive in theirresponse. As Europe drew closer to war againin the late 1930s, and critical debate returnedto the questions of realism and nationalcinema which had first been aired aroundthe ideas of Zola in the 1902–14 period,leftist critics such as Moussinac and ClaudeVermorel began to argue once more for thedevelopment of a cinema which could buildon the combination of popular appeal, realisticdescription, and depiction of large-scale socialand political forces which characterized thenovels of Zola. Thus, Vermorel, argued fora version of L’Argent (1891) which woulddirectly refer to the Stavisky scandal, then

a matter of topical concern, and regrettedthe untimely death of Jean Vigo, who hadbeen planning a version of Germinal (1885)(Andrew, 1995: 199).

Between 1934 and 1939, the quest toconstruct an effective cinema of popularnational political impact, and one whichdrew upon the realist and naturalist legacy,became an important political objective forfilm scholars on the European left. In France,intellectual groupings such as the GroupeOctobre, an eclectic congregation of left-wing intellectuals founded in 1932 by thesurrealist poet Jacques Prévert, became activein attempting to cultivate film theories andstrategies informed by the legacy of Zola,nineteenth century realism, Marxism, andother sources. In addition to France, thesame line of attack was adopted amongstfilm scholars in other European countries.For example, in Italy, a version of nineteenthcentury naturalism, known as ‘verism’, which,like the later novels of Zola, combined apoetic humanist sensibility with a concern fordetailed empirical description of landscapeand community, was to influence the devel-opment of Italian neorealism, and critics suchas Cesare Zavattini drew explicitly upon thislegacy in his ‘Some Ideas on the Cinema:Neorealism’ (1953: 64–9). Naturalism pro-vided the foundation for the two increasinglyoppositional film journals which developedin fascist Italy during the late 1930s: Biancoe Nero, and Cinema; and also influenceddebate over film culture then taking placewithin the newly established national filmschool, the Centro Sperimentale. Elsewherein Europe during the 1930s, it was Marxism,rather than naturalism, which was to influencecritics such as Ivor Montagu in Britain,Joris Ivens in Holland, and Bertolt Brechtin Germany. However, as will be argued,the links between nineteenth century realismand naturalism and early twentieth centuryMarxist and communist thought are close andconvoluted.

After 1945, naturalism ceased to be debatedovermuch as a theoretical position withinEuropean film scholarship. In Italy, criticssuch as Guido Aristarco, and the journal


EUROPEAN FILM SCHOLARSHIP 27

Cinema nuovo, adopted a more ‘socialist real-ist’ position, and denounced the naturalism offilms such as Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio inItalia (Italy/France, 1953). Nevertheless, nat-uralism remained an important trope withinItalian cinema from the 1950s until morerecent times, in films such as MichelangeloAntonioni’s Il Grido (Italy/US, 1959) andFrancesco Rosi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli(France/Italy, 1979). A type of theoreticalnaturalism is also evident in the ideas ofPier Paolo Pasolini, and particularly in hisnotion of ‘mythic realism’, which combinesnaturalism with archaic symbolism. However,Pasolini’s notion of ‘technical sacracity’ wasto later evolve into a model of ‘semioticrealism’, in which he combined elements ofnaturalism with others derived from post-structuralist and Brechtian theory. In France,naturalism largely ceased to be discussed atthe theoretical level within film scholarship,although it could be argued that the influenceof the new history movement in the 1970s ledto the reintroduction of a naturalist sensibilityin films such as Lacombe Lucien (Louis Malle,France/West Germany/Italy, 1974), and inthe writings of critics and filmmakers suchas Louis Malle and Bertrand Tavernier. InSpain, after 1945, naturalism provided anoppositional vehicle for film theorists opposedto the fascist dictatorship. In 1955, the Spanishfilm journal Objectivo helped to organizea First National Film Congress, at whichItalian neorealism was extensively debated;and this eventually led to the appearance ofSpanish neorealist films such as Juan AntonioBardem’s Calle Mayor (Spain/France, 1956).As in France and Italy, no general theoreticalre-articulation of the naturalist legacy was toemerge in the 1950s, although naturalism isclearly evident in the work of filmmakers suchas Victor Erice, Carlos Saura, José Luis Borau,and Ricardo Franco. In Scandinavia, realistcinema drew heavily on the nineteenth centurynaturalist and realist traditions, particularlyas in the theatre of Henrik Ibsen and AugustStrindberg, and these influenced filmmakerssuch as Ingmar Bergman and Carl TheodorDreyer. Although, once more, no theoreticalre-articulation of naturalist theory emerged

within Scandinavian film culture, it is possibleto argue that the naturalist spirit remainspalpable in the semi-theorized notion of‘dogma’ cinema that emerged in the 1990swith the ‘Dogma 95’ manifesto and the filmsof Lars von Trier. Even here, a naturalistemphasis on improvisation and avoidance ofthe ‘artistic’ is mixed with a more ironic,postmodern sensibility which sets the Dogmamovement apart from the central currents ofthe naturalist tradition.

Although nineteenth century naturalismexercised a considerable influence upon someearly schools of European film scholarship,that influence was condemned as a reactionaryone by other parties, and particularly byfilm scholars influenced by classical Marxist-Leninist thought. The position on naturalismadopted within the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s onwards stemmed from a distinctionwhich Fredrich Engels had initially drawnbetween realism and naturalism in the 1880s.Engels had argued that, whereas naturalism(and also, as we will see, modernism)merely provided a fragmentary and superficialaccount of social reality, ‘realism’, as inthe work of Honoré de Balzac, afforded amore profound account, through connectingthe atomized particular to the unifyinggeneral. Following Engels’ distinction, thiselevation of Balzacian realism over Zolaesquenaturalism was adopted as official policywithin the Soviet Union, and, in 1934, evolvedunder Alexander Zhdanov, and in conjunctionwith other imperatives, into the more orless obligatory doctrine of Soviet socialistrealism.

It could be argued, however, that Sovietsocialist realism did not embody the morecritical spirit of Engels’ 1888 formula-tion. Whereas Engels had argued that real-ism should not be tendentious but shouldaspire towards the creation of an ‘impar-tial’, ‘chronicle-fashion’ interpretation of thesocial and historical environment (1977:270), Soviet socialist realism and its gid-dier offspring, revolutionary romanticism,demanded a much more affirmative andsteadfast approach to the portrayal of ‘correct’values than he had initially envisioned.



Nevertheless, even if Engels’ position is to bepreferred to that of Zhdanov, the interpretationof Zolaesque naturalism in both positionsremains incongruous. It is one of the strangerquirks of modern European cultural historythat a committed and principled democraticactivist such as Zola should be pilloriedby avowed socialists, whilst a right-wingmonarchist such as Balzac is held up for thehigher esteem.

The doctrine of Soviet socialist realism,a doctrine which relentlessly returned to thenineteenth century realist novels of Balzac,Leo Tolstoy and other such for legitimation,became entrenched within the Soviet Unionfrom the mid-1920s onwards, and, after 1945,within the Soviet Bloc countries of easternEurope. In these countries, film scholarsstrove diligently to develop ‘dialectical mate-rialist’ approaches to film form and analysiswhich were based on the nineteenth centuryrealist model. Much of this work was ofvariable quality, pedestrian and doctrinaire,and tended to discount the phenomenon ofmodernized ‘western Marxism’ in order tofocus as entirely as feasible upon the canonicaltexts of Engels, V.I. Lenin, Joseph Stalin,Zhdanov and, occasionally, Karl Marx. For allits limitations, this tradition did have one pre-eminent though highly controversial adherent:the Hungarian literary and political theoristGeorg Lukács.

Like Engels, Lukács adopted a categoricaldistinction between realism, on the one hand,and naturalism and modernism on the other;and, as with Engels, Lukács believed thatthe emergence of naturalism and modernismin the arts, and the attendant decline ofrealism, could be traced to a dishearteningepochal turn of events: the defeat of the ParisCommune in 1848. Following this defeat,the incremental entrenchment of a prevailingbourgeois consciousness ‘destroyed the sub-jective conditions which made a great realismpossible’ (Lukács, 1977: 282). As realismdeclined, and the undertaking to portray soci-ety as a whole became unsustainable againstthe context of accelerating class inequal-ity, modernism and naturalism emerged asunfortunate and despairing responses to the

unfolding historical catastrophe: responseswhich deposited the utopian ideals of theEnlightenment ever deeper within the stone-dead sarcophagus of modernity.

Although Lukács was a literary, rather thanfilm theorist, he did write on the cinema in theHungarian journal Filmkultúra in the 1950s,and devoted a chapter of his The Specificity ofthe Aesthetic (1965) to film. In addition to thisfairly limited contribution, Lukács’ writingson literary theory and history were influentialin both eastern and western European filmscholarship from the 1930s onwards. In theeast, Lukács’ ideas provided the foundationfor the development of an enlightened realistfilm aesthetic which aspired to distinguishitself from the doctrinaire orthodoxy of theofficial communist schools of thought. Thisbecame particularly important after 1950,when the theory and practice of Italianneorealism, which went on to inspire leftistfilmmakers and theorists around the worldbetween 1950 and 1980, was condemned asan expression of bourgeois naturalism by thecommissars of the Soviet bloc.

Such repudiation effectively left Lukácsiancritical realism as the only enlightenedalternative to Zhdanovist socialist realism.The model went on to influence both filmscholars and directors such as AndrzejWajda and Miklós Jancsó in Poland, SergeiBondarchuk, Andrei Konchalovsky, AndreiTarkovsky, and Mikhail Kalatozov in Russia.It also provided the intellectual underpinningfor courses of Film Studies established inLodz (1945), Budapest (1945), Belgrade(1946), Prague (1947), Bucharest (1950), andPotsdam (1954). Of course, Lukács was notthe only influence on the eastern Europeanand Soviet forms of moderate film scholarshipwhich appeared and disappeared periodicallybetween 1950 and 1989. Neorealism wasoften slipped surreptitiously back into theequation. Films such as Antonioni’s Il Grido,Pasolini’s Il Vangelo secondo Matteo andRosi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli – inheritorsof the seditious, naturalist lens of 1940sclassics such as Rossellini’s Germania annozero – were simply too compelling to beexcommunicated.



In general, one can characterize the filmscholarship of the Soviet bloc during thisperiod, in an admittedly simplified manner,as dividing into two tendencies. One wasthe dominant Zhdanovist school of socialistrealism. The other embraced a series ofattempts to stretch the permissible boundariesof the hegemonic formula through recourseto Lukács, neorealism, and the European artcinema of Bergman, Antonioni and others.Such attempts became more pronouncedduring the various de-Stalinization ‘thaw’periods during the 1950s in Czechoslovakia,Hungary, Poland and the Soviet Union (and, ofcourse, in the ‘Prague Spring’ period around1968), but continued to appear from time totime throughout the 1960–89 period. After thefall of the Soviet bloc in 1989 Zhdanovistsocialist realism almost entirely disappearedfrom eastern European film scholarship.One side effect of this welcome collapseof a doctrinaire aesthetic theory was therapid decline of a critical film scholarshipculture in eastern Europe, as previouslyState subsidized institutions came under thefull onslaught of a triumphal, globalizingHollywood machine.

Whilst in eastern Europe the influenceof Lukács waxed and waned over the1950–89 period, in western Europe Lukácsiancritical realism provided a less intermittent, ifsubsidiary, source of inspiration for leftist filmscholars and filmmakers. Such scholars wereparticularly influenced by Lukács’ distinctionbetween realism and naturalism as embodiedin his essay ‘Narrate or Describe’ (1970):an essay which became the standard Lukácstext to be delivered to students across thewestern European academic scene. Althoughsome Marxist film scholars were able to acceptLukács’ criticism of naturalism as set out in‘Narrate or Describe’ they were considerablyless inclined to accept his concomitantrepudiation of modernism. Eventually, evenLukács’ disciples in eastern Europe, such asAgnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, György Marcusand Mihály Vajda, abandoned him on thisissue (Heller, 1983: 130).

During the 1970–2000 period, Lukács’ideas on realism were increasingly rejected

in favour of Brechtian models of anti-realismand models of ideology and representationderived from post-structuralism, from thewritings on culture by Antonio Gramsci,and from the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.During the seventies and eighties, when anti-realist film theory dominated much of thecritical agenda, this anti-Lukácsian tendencywas extended to the entire nineteenth centuryrealist/classical Marxist tradition, which washabitually regarded with misgivings by thoseintent on the development of a progres-sive, critical film practice. And yet, behindblanket denunciations, there often lurked aprofound misunderstanding of the criticallegacy embedded within a nineteenth centuryrealist and naturalist tradition which had,in point of fact, emerged in opposition tobourgeois capitalist hegemony. Similarly, fewin the west who denounced Lukács during the1970s and 1980s, or who simply ignored hiswork, had read his writings on the cinema,or understood the extent to which he hadstruggled against Zdhanovism and Stalinismthroughout his career.

INTUITIONIST REALISM

In addition to this nineteenth centuryLukácsian, classical Marxist and realist tradi-tion, another important identifiable traditionof European realist film scholarship emergedfrom an arrangement of influences, includingthose of nineteenth century realism and natu-ralism, but encompassing romanticism, exis-tentialism, classical German philosophy andphenomenology. This tradition, which will bedescribed here as ‘intuitionist realist’, com-prises the work of John Grierson, SiegfriedKracauer and André Bazin, and is centrallyconcerned with the relationship between cin-ema and modernity. This intuitionist traditionis, therefore, characteristically ‘epochal’ inits anticipations for film theory, and seesfilm as offering a prospective cure for theproblems inherent in the edifice of modernity.Grierson, for example, believed that filmcould play a crucial role within contemporarysociety by providing an effective medium



of communication between the state and thepublic, and one which would stem the collapseof the institutional, democratic public sphere –a collapse which, during the 1930s, appearedgreatly probable. For Grierson, influencedby neo-Hegelian philosophy as he was, theexisting institutional structures of the Statewere the invaluable consequence of the his-torical evolution of human society across thecenturies, and the most important repositoryof the human aspiration towards that harmonyand unity which Grierson believed to beembodied within the Hegelian notion of theAbsolute. It was these institutions, and theircommitment to the common good over privateprofligacy (including, in particular, laissezfaire capitalist profligacy) that was one of thegreat altruistic achievements of mankind inits struggle over a base egocentrism set deepwithin human nature.

Under Grierson’s tutelage, therefore, filmwas to be a medium of altruistic socialengagement, placed at the service of thestate in opposing that individualism whichthreatened the progressing advancement ofsociety towards societal integrity, at onelevel, and the likeness of the Absolute atanother. Such a role could never by itsvery extravagant and amorphous nature besharply defined, and this, in conjunctionwith the level of abstraction implicit withinphilosophical idealism, provided Grierson’stheory of film with a necessarily intuition-ist, rather than rationalist character. Thisdisposition was reinforced by Grierson’sbelief, inherited fromAmerican ‘mass society’theory and scientific naturalism, that modernmass society had become so multifacetedthat traditional models of social communi-cation fashioned upon rationalist premiseswere no longer practicable, and that, asa consequence, film had no option but toinstil a general and intuitive, rather thanconceptual, understanding of things within thepublic psyche. This intuitionist perspectiveled Grierson to argue that film shouldattempt to symbolize the interdependenceand evolution of social relations through theapplication of all the formative potential at itsdisposal.

Although this formulation emphasizedmodernist, formative editing technique, theactuality content of the documentary imageremained an important factor for Grierson,as is made clear by a philosophical idealistdistinction which he drew between the ‘real’and the ‘actual’. Writing about his own filmDrifters (UK, 1929), for example, Griersonargued that the empirical content (the actual)of its documentary images was organizedso as to express general truths (the real)which existed at a level of abstractionbeyond the empirical, but which could onlybe portrayed through the empirical (Aitken,2001: 166). Such a formulation makes it clearthat Grierson’s early theory of intuitionistcinematic realism, like the other theoriesof intuitionist realism to be discussed here,placed great emphasis on the empiricalqualities of the medium, and the ability ofthose qualities to disclose more general truthsconcerning the nature of the human conditionwithin modernity.

Like Grierson, Kracauer’s theory of cine-matic realism was centrally concerned withthe relationship between film and modernity(Kracauer, 1974; 1995; 1997). Like Grierson,Kracauer was influenced by the classicalGerman philosophical critique of the Enlight-enment, and the impact of capitalism on socialstructures. Whereas for Grierson, though, itwas G.W.F. Hegel who was the pre-eminentinfluence, for Kracauer it was ImmanuelKant, and, in particular, Kant’s contentionthat, within modernity, the spheres of ethicsand aesthetics had become subordinatedto the dominion of technical reason. Thisnotion of the impoverishment of the humanexperience within modernity was reinforcedin Kracauer’s thinking by the influence ofMax Weber’s concepts of disenchantment andinstrumental rationality, and, in the 1920s,by the Frankfurt School’s approach to therise of German fascism and the instrumental,ideological impact of the culture industry. Allof this led Kracauer to a particularly negativeconception of the state of the human subjectwithin modernity.

This position led Kracauer to argue that thetrue value of film lay in its potential to redirect



the spectator’s attention to the texture of lifewhich had been lost beneath the abstract,ideological discourses which now regulatedexperience (1997: 298). In developing thisaspect of his thought, Kracauer was influencedby two particular concepts: Edmund Husserl’sconcept of the Lebenswelt (‘Lifeworld’), orthe phenomenological world of immediateexperience; and Kant’s idea of Naturschöne(‘natural beauty’). Kracauer believed that filmwas a privileged medium, generated by thecondition of modernity in order to ‘redeem’the Lebenswelt for the modern subject. Suchdeliverance would take place through theadoption of an orientation associated with thatof Naturschöne, where the eye gazes freelyacross the visual panoplies of the naturalworld (and human Lebenswelt) in order toformulate self-governing sense. Kracauer’stheory of cinematic realism is, then, bestdescribed as a form of phenomenological,idealist realism which, like the Kantianaesthetics and Husserlian phenomenologyfrom which it is derived, seeks a basisfor knowledge and representation throughclose observation of the material world.Again, as with Grierson, we see the sameintuitionist, materialist approach, directlylinked to the disclosure of more abstractrealities.

Like Kracauer and Grierson, Bazin’s theoryof cinematic realism was influenced by theidea that something had gone fundamentallywrong with the human condition withinmodernity. Bazin derived this convictionfrom forms of French Catholic existentialismespoused by figures such as Charles DuBos, Albert Béguin, Emmanuel Mounierand Marcel Legaut. Legaut, for example,was a Christian activist, committed to thereintroduction of religious values and debateinto the secular French educational system;and Bazin was particularly influenced byLegaut’s call for a revolution in conscious-ness, premised on the need to build anew spiritual community suffused by moraland social values. Similarly, Mounier wasassociated with the personalist movement,a Christian existentialist movement opposedto what its members considered to be the

widespread ‘depersonalisation’ of existencewithin contemporary society (Gray, 1972:2–4). Following these influences, and likeboth Grierson and Kracauer, Bazin arguedthat the modern world suffered from a lossof spirituality, and that the modern individualwas oppressed by dehumanizing, instrumentalsystems and by ideologies. Bazin’s theoryof cinematic realism was based on theneed to counter this dehumanization throughreturning greater autonomy to the spectator,and his theory of realist spectatorship isgrounded in the idea that, when the spec-tator gazes upon the realistic film image,they are able to achieve a degree of self-realization founded on free thought andaction.

None of the three theories of intuitionistrealism considered here can be regarded as‘naive realist’. These theories are ‘realist’ incontending that film corresponds to certainaspects of reality. But, such correspondence isa homological one, and not affected by naiverealist assumptions about film’s relationshipto perceptual reality. Nevertheless, cinema’srelationship, rather than correspondence, toperceptual, empirical reality is a crucialcomponent of all three theories. All thesetheories link intuitionist models of knowledgeto an empirical foundation able to disclosehigher, more abstract forms of knowledge.These forms of knowledge are also premisedon the overriding imperative of freedom. It isargued that the dense, empirical richness ofthe realistic image allows film to transcendideological indoctrination; and this, in turnmakes it clear that these theories of cinematicrealism emerged in response to what wasperceived to be an overarching context ofinstrumental socialisation and loss of indi-vidual freedom within the modern situation.Intuition is preferred to reason, as the foremostmeans of effecting emancipation and insightin all three of the theories of cinematic realismconsidered here, and this, in turn, reflectstheir origins both in idealist philosophy andphenomenology, and, in the historical contextfrom which they emerged.

That context, one of suspicion concerningthe darker uses to which reason had been



put, is summed up in Kracauer’s apocalypticnotion of the ‘go-for-broke game of history’(Hansen, 1997: xii). Kracauer argues thatthe gathering forces of modernity are fastapproaching the verge of a catastrophicimpasse, in which the innermost and mostnegative tendencies of modernity – thoseof fragmentation, disenchantment and alien-ation, would, if left to course freely, eventuallyreach such a point of critical mass that somecataclysmic implosion might occur. At thatpoint, modernity would either plunge furtherinto abstraction, or turn backwards, towardsmeaning and value (Frisby, 1986: 121). As hewas writing in the 1920s and 1930s, Kracauerbelieved this point of no-return was fastapproaching its conclusion, with the growthof Nazism, and the inevitable slide into world-wide conflagration. For him, the events ofthe larger 1914–45 period always amountedto much more than a struggle betweenright-wing totalitarianism and democracy,and were, he believed, associated with aneven more historically important strugglefor the existential condition of humanitywithin a modernity which would eitherbecome comprehensively inscribed with thespirit of instrumental rationality, or, moreoptimistically, the liberating energy of theLebenswelt (Hansen, 1997: xiii). The sameapproach to the historical context can befound in the ideas of Grierson and Bazin.Grierson developed his ideas in opposition tothe havoc wrought by unfettered capitalismin his native Scotland, and what he tookto be the impending collapse of democracyinto totalitarianism or unbridled capitalism;whilst Bazin inherited a humanist insistenceupon the imperative of individual freedomwhich arose in renunciation of the massslaughter of the 1914–18 and 1939–45periods. All of this makes it clear thatthis tradition of European film scholarshipis associated with a distinctively Europeanphilosophical critique of modernity, andwith particularly overwhelming historicalevents. As one critic has put it, this bodyof film theory developed in the face ofthe ‘full blast of modernity’ (Branston,2000: 29).

INTUITIONIST MODERNISM

In addition to these schools of nineteenthcentury/Lukácsian, classical Marxist andintuitionist realist film scholarship, anotherimportant area to be considered here is that ofintuitionist modernism. As the name suggests,intuitionist modernism shares similar influ-ences and themes with intuitionist realism.At the heart of intuitionist modernism is theconviction, shared by intuitionist realism, thatintuition, rather than reason should be thestructuring principle underlying a revitalizedfilm aesthetic. Once again, the main influenceshere are Kant’s theory of aesthetic experience,and Husserlian phenomenology. According toKant, during aesthetic experience the mindfreely seeks patterns of meaning in the objectof aesthetic contemplation, which shouldpossess the potential to generate a profusionof meaning in the mind of the perceiving spec-tator. This means that the aesthetic judgementis essentially intuitive and impressionistic incharacter. This Kantian model of the aestheticjudgement is reinforced, within intuitionistmodernism, by Husserl’s emphasis upon thedetailed exploration of phenomenal imme-diate experience. Both these influences canbe found expressed within film theory in theRussian formalist tradition, and particularlyin Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of ostranenie, orto ‘make strange’. The concept of ostranenieis motivated by the proposal that, in aninstrumental modern world, art should presentan ambivalent image to the spectator, andShklovsky’s idea finds its most importantmanifestation in Soviet montage cinemawithin the writings and filmmaking of DzigaVertov and Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein’s lateaesthetic, in particular, in its appropriationof nineteenth century romantic and symbolistforms, and twentieth century modernist forms,derived from the writings of James Joyce, andothers, displays this tendency. As we shallsee, Soviet montage theory also displayeda directive tendency which is at odds withsuch an insistence upon the ambivalentimage.

Outside the Soviet Union, intuitionistmodernist film theory founded on German



philosophical idealism and other influencescan be found within Weimar film theory.One characteristic of Weimar film the-ory, for example, was a belief that thesystematic structures which afflicted theindividual within modernity were deeplyinscribed within language, and that visualexperience constituted a domain of potentialfreedom from linguistic determination (Hake,1993: 131). The visual was regarded asembodying a primal and underlying modeof communication which pre-dated the riseof modernity and offered the possibility ofa return to a more valid form of humanexperience. This overarching concern with theredemptive powers of the visual influencedmany Weimar theorists at the time, includingKracauer, Rudolf Arnheim and Béla Balázs;and Balázs’ contention that gestural expres-sion could amount to a ‘spiritual experience’rendered visible amounted to a strikinglyvisual and non-cognitive aesthetic (1924: 40).In both Russia and Germany, though, theoristsattempted to link this intuitionist approach tothe kind of modernist formalism implicit in theidea of ostranenie, and in films such as ManWith a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, USSR,1929) and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (RobertWiene, Germany, 1920).

If an intuitionist modernist approach canbe associated with elements of the two mostimportant early film movements in Europeancinema, those of German expressionism andSoviet montage cinema, then it can also beassociated with the third most important,that of French cinematic impressionism.Here, intuitionist modernism is influenced bythree specifically French nineteenth centuryaesthetic traditions: those of symbolism,naturalism and impressionism. During the1910s, France experienced the growth of theworld’s first genuine alternative film culture.A key figure here was Delluc, who wasappointed editor of the journals Le Filmand Cinéma in 1917 and 1920 respectively,and who published one of the key worksof the impressionist movement, Photogénie,in 1920. An intellectual film culture soonbegan to grow in France, building on Delluc’scontributions. So, for instance, in 1919 the

journal Littérature, edited by André Breton,Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault, began topublish film criticism; whilst figures such asEpstein, Moussinac and Canudo contributedto this growth of French film scholarshipby publishing key books, including Epstein’sBonjour cinéma (1921), and Moussinac’sNaissance du cinéma. Like Weimar filmtheory, this school of film scholarship placedemphasis upon the evocation of subjectiveexperience, the foregrounding of film tech-nique, and the conveying of ‘multiple andcontradictory impressions’ (Germaine Dulac,quoted in Williams, 1992: 101). The keyconcept of French cinematic impressionism,photogénie, can be associated with the intu-itionist modernist concern with ambiguousand indeterminate representation, and therelated conviction that aesthetic experiencewas primarily non-rational in character. Thisis made evident, for example, in Delluc’sassertion that ‘Explanations here are out ofplace’ (quoted in Ray, 1998: 68) and inEpstein’s claim that ‘The cinema is essentiallysupernatural’ (quoted in Ray, 1998: 74).

In recent times, more emphasis tendsto have been placed on a study of theFrench surrealist and dada movements ofthe 1930s than on cinematic impressionism.Nevertheless, all three can be linked together,and placed alongside Weimar film theory andbranches of Russian formalism, as forming anoverall intuitionist modernist tradition. Thattradition, as we have seen, was influenced bya number of intellectual factors and also, likelater intuitionist realism, by the context ofhistory. Intuitionist modernism was informed,in the first place, by the critique of modernitystemming from Kant, Hegel, Weber, Husserland others. The modernist intuitionist filmscholarship which emerged from France andGermany during the 1920s and 1930s wasalso deeply affected by the impact of theFirst World War, and the ways in whichreason and rationality had been put to theservice of the creation of engines of massdestruction. Intuitionist modernism cultureturned to the irrational and intuitive as a wayof escaping from the dominion of such brutishinstrumental rationality.



Two principal tendencies can be identifiedas emerging from the influence of Husserland Russian formalism. One was the focus onthe ambivalence and impressionistic nature ofthe aesthetic experience, and it is this whichdeveloped into the tradition of intuitionistmodernism, in Russian, German and Frenchfilm scholarship, and is embodied in conceptssuch as ostranenie, photogénie and Kracauer’sidea of ‘distraction’. It was the other tendency,largely derived from Husserl and emphasizingthe search for deep structures of meaningand determination, that was to have thegreater influence upon a linguistically-based,or ‘language’-oriented, school of film theorywhich emerged during the 1920s. Insteadof the indeterminacy and autonomy ofNaturschöne, this school of theory sought toestablish the determinate, and determining,underlying units and principles of the filmmedium. This early formalist tradition of filmtheory is summed up in Eisenstein’s essay‘The Montage of Attractions’ ([1923] 1968);and in a movement such as constructivism,with its emphasis on the art work as arationally assembled artefact. Constructivismwas also the product of a revolutionaryconsciousness predicated upon the need tototally re-create art in the image of a newSoviet era which would abandon pre-existingbourgeois norms. This approach is summed upin Grigori Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg, SergeiYutkevich and Georgi Kryzhitsky’s article‘Eccentrism’ ([1922] 1988), with its rejectionof figurative art. Consequently, the engagedproductivist tendency within constructivismembraced the scientific approach fully, andrepudiated supposedly bourgeois aestheticconcepts such as genius, imagination, ‘art’or vision: concepts central to the intuitionistmodernist approach.

Despite the early eminence of construc-tivism, pre-revolutionary forms of aesthetictheory such as cubism and futurism remainedevident within the new society of the1920s, giving Russian formalism a diverseconfiguration. So, for example, whilst con-structivist artists such as Vladimir Tatlin,Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitsky soughtto develop a rationalized, directive approach,

others, such as Naum Gabo and KasimirMalevich, sought to develop constructivisttechniques for more aesthetic and symbolicends. The formalist and constructivist legacywhich was handed on to Soviet film theoryand scholarship during the 1920s consistedtherefore of an incongruous fusion. On theone hand there was an essentially reductivehunt to establish the deep structures, aestheticspecificity, and rationalized configurations ofthe medium in order to determine ‘objec-tively’predictable forms of representation andspectatorial interpretation. On the other handthere still remained a tendency towards thedefamiliarization of representation in order tocreate more ambivalent portrayals of reality.This dialectic is particularly present in thecareer of Eisenstein, which began with a‘constructivist’ model of film form but endedwith the adoption of an approach steepedin symbolist expressionism: an approachrepresented in his essay ‘Synchronisation ofSenses’ in his The Film Sense ([1943] 1968).A similar dialectic between rationalism andintuitionism can be found in the ideas ofa German ‘formative’ film theorist such asArnheim. Arnheim fully shared the Russianand Soviet formalist desire to establish thesubject-specificity of the film medium, andwent to great lengths to elaborate on how thefundamental aesthetic concepts of film shouldlead to a form of film practice in which the‘special attributes of the medium should beclearly and cleanly laid bare’ to the spectator(1933: 44–5).Arnheim, however, betrayed theinfluence of the intuitionist element of theformalist tradition in arguing that film shouldattempt to ‘capture something universallysignificant in the particular’ (1967: vi).

If the film theory ofArnheim and Eisensteinindicates the presence of a tension betweenthe two strands of the formalist traditionreferred to above, it also illustrates a dilemmawhich formalist film theory was forced toface over the question of realism. Whilststressing the point that film should fore-ground the properties of its medium, Arnheimwished to stop short of a radical formalistapproach which would lead to a pronouncedanti-realism. Thus, he insisted that, whilst



possessing a formative dimension, film mustmaintain a balance between representationand a display of the means of representation(1933: 46).Arnheim’s approach here reflecteda wider accommodation between modernismand realism which took place in bothGermany and the Soviet Union during the1930s. The concept of ostranenie elaboratedby Shklovsky, Boris Tomasevsky and OsipBrik during the 1920s, was increasinglyopposed by formalist theorists such as JanMukurovsky during the 1930s, because, suchtheorists argued, it encouraged excessiveformalism. One outcome of this disputewas the emergence of a more realist filmaesthetic in the Soviet Union during the1930s – also, of course, influenced by theofficial doctrine of Soviet socialist realism.At the same time, in Germany, the periodof neue sachlichkeit (new realism/objectivity)ushered in a new accommodation betweenmodernism and realism.

During the 1930s, European formalist filmtheorists and filmmakers felt impelled toreconcile four different imperatives. One wasa rationalized, purposive, even objectivistinclination, influenced both by a desire torender film scholarship more ‘scientific’, andby a felt requirement to provide the mediumof film with a more pronounced social andpolitical utility. A second imperative was aconverse desire to lay emphasis on the useof indeterminate representation in order tocounter the force of instrumental rationality,manipulation, and the deadening hand of autility that had become ubiquitous. The thirdimperative was a modernist penchant to fore-ground the means of aesthetic representation.And the fourth imperative was, as argued, anaspiration to accommodate the demands ofrealism. Despite the obvious importance offormalist and modernist concerns, Europeanfilm theorists remained committed to therealistic or documentary base of the filmmedium. So, for example, although Soviet,Weimar and French film scholars were clearlypreoccupied with the way that the empiricaltrace of external reality could be transformedby the techniques of the medium, that traceremained a vital one for theorists and scholars

as diverse as Eisenstein, Delluc, Vertov andBalázs.

There are a number of reasons why earlyEuropean film scholarship retained an unbro-ken interest in the question of realism. It waswidely held that the aesthetic specificity ofthe medium was based in visual realism. Theinfluence of Kant and Husserl led to a focus onthe importance of the empirical, which thenbecame translated into a support for docu-mentary realism. Suspicions concerning theinstrumental role of rationality and languageled to a desire to engage with visual realism.The influence of the nineteenth centuryrealist and naturalist tradition, as well asMarxism, fuelled the continuing engagementwith realism. The subversive potential of filmin bringing into the sphere of representationthat which had previously been excluded forpolitical reasons was a powerful influence onRussian formalism, Weimar film theory, theBritish documentary film movement, Frenchrealist and impressionist film theory, andthe Italian neorealist movement. And finally,during the inter-war period, a general realistaesthetic emerged across Europe, in responseto the deteriorating international situation, andthis led filmmakers such as Jean Renoir inFrance, Grierson in Britain, and G.W. Pabst inGermany to move from avant-garde to realistpositions.

AUTEURISM

After 1930, European cinematic modernismin both its intuitionist and rationalist mani-festations went into decline. As this occurred,intuitionist realism, and the ideas of Grierson,Bazin and Kracauer, became increasinglyinfluential. Alongside intuitionist realism,another tendency, that of auteurism, becamegradually more evident, particularly duringthe 1945–75 period. The auteurist tendencywas based on entirely different notions ofthe aesthetic distinctiveness of film to thosetaken up within intuitionist modernism andrealism. Whilst intuitionist modernism soughtto locate the aesthetic specificity of film informal aesthetic categories, and intuitionist



realism attempted to locate such specificity infilm’s ability to portray ‘reality’, the auteuristtradition drew on romantic conceptions ofart to affirm that the chief (as opposed tospecific) aesthetic value associated with themedium lay in the creative role played bythe film artist. Two key shifts of orientationare evident here: (a) from a focus on the artwork and the representation of reality to theworld-view and vision of the artist-filmmaker;and (b) from an emphasis on aestheticspecificity to an approach which focuseson the autonomous, manifold perspectivesapparent in the range of such world-views andvisions. Whilst auteurism retained the concernfor underlying structures of meaning apparentin the formalist tradition, therefore, it alsoimplied a degree of value pluralism which canbe distinguished from intuitionist modernism,and looks forward to later post-structuralistand postmodern positions. Auteurism, inaddition, implies a commitment to the inter-pretative role of the critic that distinguishesthis approach from the more rigorous, ortheoretical foundational orientations assumedwithin intuitionist modernism and realism.

The idea of film as an original work ofart created by a film-artist, who uses the filmas a vehicle through which both to expresstheir own vision and coterminously to portraytruths which exist in the world, has its sourcein cultural ideologies deeply entrenchedwithin Western society since at least theromantic period. Those cultural ideologiesemerged largely in relation to forms of artthat were the product of individual artistry,and this romantic position on authorshipdoes not apply particularly well to art whichis collaboratively produced, or which isfashioned within the legislative confines ofa school, studio, or craft workplace. Thiswould, in turn, suggest that attempts to applythe romantic conception of authorship toa collaborative, workplace-oriented mediumsuch as film would likewise experience suchdifficulties.

Even so, during the 1940s and 1950s suchattempts took place, and quickly came todominate European film scholarship. Thiswas the stance adopted by Roger Leenhardt

and Bazin writing in the journal Revuedu cinéma between 1946 and 1949. Thesame position was reiterated in AlexandreAstruc’s influential 1948 essay, ‘The birthof a new avant-garde: la camera stylo’, inwhich Astruc argues that ‘The filmmaker-author writes with his camera as a writerwrites with his pen’ (quoted in Bordwell,1994: 493). In 1951 the first issue of Cahiersdu Cinéma was devoted to an auteurist studyof the films of Rossellini and Robert Bresson,whilst, in 1954, François Truffaut’s Cahiersdu Cinéma essay, ‘Une certaine tendancedu cinéma Français’, further encapsulatedthe auteurist position. Thereafter, writersand critics such as Jacques Rivette, EricRohmer, Truffaut, Fereydoun Hoveyda, LucMollet and Claude Chabrol continued toadvance what the British critic Richard Roudsceptically referred to as the ‘French line’(1960: 167–71): a ‘line’ perhaps summedup in Rivette’s enthusiastic endorsement of‘The Genius of Howard Hawks’ in terms of‘a beauty which demonstrates existence bybreathing and movement and walking. Thatwhich is, is’ ([1953] 1985: 131). In Britain,critics such as Robin Wood, Ian Cameronand Victor Perkins carried out highly detailedauthorship studies of filmmakers such asMarcel Ophuls, Howard Hawks and AlfredHitchcock in the journal Movie. Wood’sanalysis of Ophuls’ Letter From an UnknownWoman (US, 1948), which concludes with theassertion that Ophuls is ‘one of the cinema’sgreat romantics’, is a particularly successfulexample of this approach (1976: 131). Theapproach adopted by critics writing in Movie,who tended to conceive of the film directoras a kind of facilitating catalyst, analogous tothe conductor of an orchestra, can nonethelessbe distinguished from the French position,which emphasized the primary importance ofthe director as the source of all significantmeaning in the film.

Although this romantic conception ofauthorship found its clearest articulation inthe ‘la politique des auteurs’ of Cahiersdu Cinéma it could be argued that thisposition did not succeed in becoming estab-lished as a major paradigm within European



film scholarship. Clearly, a considerableamount of European film scholarship hasfocused on authorship studies, particularlysince the emergence of an identifiable Euro-pean ‘art cinema’. Much of the work ofMovie falls into this category, but the Britishjournals Sequence and Sight and Soundalso played an important role in publishingauteurist studies of European filmmakers suchas Bergman, Federico Fellini and Antonioni.Such scholarship should be distinguishedfrom the auteur ‘theory’ of the Cahierscritics, which espouses a particularly extremeconception of auteurism in the cinema. Thatconception must, in the end, be rejected asphilosophically untenable, as the significantstructures of meaning in a film cannot all beattributed to the coherent vision of the filmdirector.

Having said this, a distinction has to bemade between the auteur theory and theauteur method, which consists of examininga corpus of films for an underlying groupingof coherent themes, and which has ledto some highly sophisticated film analysis.Such analysis has often been directed atHollywood, rather than European cinema, asin Wood’s Howard Hawks (1968) and Bazin’sOrsonWelles (1978), although Wood’s ClaudeChabrol (1970), Raymond Durgnat’s LuisBuñuel (1967), Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’sVisconti (1967) and Bazin’s Jean Renoir(1973) are studies of major European film-makers; whilst Bazin’s What is Cinema?Vol.1 (1967) and What is Cinema? Vol.2(1972) contains complex auteurist studiesof filmmakers such as Bresson, Rossellini,Vittorio De Sica, Dreyer and others. Even herethough, problems persist, as it is not alwaysclear why any given corpus of films should beautomatically related to a director, as opposedto scriptwriter, or even genre. Another majorbenefit of the auteur approach lay in the extentto which it became applied to popular, as wellas art house cinema, leading to a focus ofcritical attention on films previously regardedas unworthy of such attention. Finally, perhapsthe most significant role played by the auteurtheory in the development of European filmscholarship, although one which the original

French advocates of auteurism would, as wewill see, come to regard with a considerablesense of dégoût, was in providing a gatewayinto film scholarship for the fifth majorcategory of European film scholarship to bediscussed here: the Saussurian paradigm.

THE SAUSSURIAN PARADIGM

The Saussurian paradigm, which, for thepurposes of this chapter, is regarded asencompassing semiotics, structuralism andpost-structuralism, can be traced back initiallyto developments in the disciplines of linguis-tics, philosophy and symbolic logic duringthe 1880s (Johnson-Laird, 1989: 45). Withinlinguistics the key change, as far as laterfilm theorists were concerned, was from ahistorical and philological approach to thestudy of language, to one more concernedwith the structural relations which existedwithin contemporary language systems. Oneof the most influential works within thisdeveloping field was the Cours de linguistiquegénérale ([1916] 1922; 1959), which wasposthumously compiled from the notes ofthe Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure.Although the Cours would go on to providea model for the development of structural lin-guistics in Europe over the 1916–40 period, itis important to appreciate that Saussure was byno means the only European structural linguistof note during this period, and others, suchas Roman Jacobson, Vladimir Propp, NikolayTrubetskoy, Mukurovsky, and the importantPrague, Geneva and Saint Petersburg schools,also made substantial contributions. Nor wasSaussurian ‘semiology’ the only such modelto emerge during the 1920s. The ‘semiotic’theories of Charles Sanders Peirce, who wasmore or less contemporary with Saussure,would be another important influence onwriters such as Peter Wollen. Nevertheless,it was the work of Saussure which was tohave the predominant influence upon thedevelopment of European film scholarshipduring the period of what came to be called‘screen theory’.



Initially, the seemingly irresistible swayof Saussurian thought centred on Saussure’sdistinction between langue and parole –a distinction that informed the key premisethat film scholars would derive from Saussure.This was that generative ‘deep’structures ulti-mately determined the content of cultural arte-facts such as films, and that the chief objectiveof ‘structuralist’ analysis was to reveal thosestructures and show how they shaped the text.Like its formalist predecessors of the 1910–30period, structuralist analysis, when applied toFilm Studies, was often endowed with thevirtues of rigour and rationally applied modusoperandi, and sometimes led to the productionof detailed accounts of the structures ofmeaning thought to be present in films. JimKitses’ Horizons West (1969) and RaymondBellour’s L’Analyse du Film (1979) are casesin point here.As will be argued later, however,structuralist methodology was also pervadedby some doubtful characteristics.

Structuralist analysis first entered FilmStudies as a revision of ‘la politique desauteurs’, and under the sobriquet of ‘auteur-structuralism’: a position elaborated in thework of writers such as Wollen, Nowell-Smith, Jean-Pierre Oudart, Stephen Heath,Ben Brewster, Kitses, Alan Lovell and others.Here, structuralist ideas derived from RolandBarthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss were appliedin order to effect a crucial reconsideration ofthe conception of authorship stemming from‘la politique des auteurs’. That amendmentconsisted of an abandonment of the idea thatthe underlying structures within a film shouldbe considered as a manifestation of the visionof the film-author. Instead, those structureswere to be considered as, in the main,manifestations of more overarching socialand cultural ideologies. Thus, in his Signsand Meaning in the Cinema, Wollen arguedthat the central thematic oppositions withinJohn Ford’s The Searchers (US, 1956) werederived from cultural antinomies between‘garden’ and ‘wilderness’ long establishedwithin American cultural history (1969: 102).This revision effectively undermined theauteurist position which had been endorsed byTruffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, Hoveyda, Moullet,

Astruc and others during the 1950s; and wemove from ‘la politique des auteurs’ to theidea of the ‘death of the author’ developedby Barthes during the 1960s (1977: 208–13).Ironically, though, Bazin himself may haveunwittingly begun this process of radicaldisengagement from auteurism as early as1957, with his qualification of la politiqueas a problematic method which consisted ofselecting only ‘the personal factor in artisticcreation as a factor of reference’ (1981: 45).

As we have seen, Bazin’s position onauthorship, based as it was on a conception ofexistential realism, certainly differed from thesteadfast auteurism of a Rivette or Hoveyda.It must also be clearly distinguished fromthe positions held by Barthesian/Saussurianinfluenced writers such as Wollen, Oudart,Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Comolli, JeanNarboni, and Heath, the latter of whom,writing in Screen, in 1973, argued that ‘Theauthor is constituted only in language and alanguage is by definition social, beyond anyparticular individuality’ (Heath, 1981: 215).Here, though, we see one of the fundamentalproblems of the Saussurian paradigm as itcame to be applied within Film Studies:the inherent difficulties which the paradigmdisplays when confronting questions of indi-vidual agency. This was not acknowledgedas a difficulty by structuralist film theorists(as the quotation from Heath implies) whotended to regard such questions as the residueof a discredited ‘humanist’ discourse that wasto be consigned to history. This is the positionadopted, for example, in Rosalind Cowardand John Ellis’ Language and Materialism(1977).

Despite the value of its rigorous andsystematic approach, which brought realimprovements to a discourse of Film Stud-ies which, within the auteurist tradition atleast, was sometimes based upon subjectivejudgement, structuralism, both in general andas applied within film scholarship, was alsocharacterized by a number of methodologicalproblems. In prioritizing the description ofdeep structures over an exploration of theparticularities of surface content structuralistanalysis was often excessively reductivist.



Structuralist analysis was often premisedupon a deterministic conception of structure,where the deep structures involved werethought to shape all possibilities of expressionat the level of content. Structural analysis alsotended to bracket out consideration of contex-tual factors, because it was ill-equipped to dealwith such factors. Despite being empirical inmethodical inclination, structuralism tendedto subordinate the empirical to a priori semi-theorized models, drawn from theorists suchas Lévi-Strauss and Barthes, that were notin themselves sufficiently held up to criticalassessment. Many auxiliary troubles stemmedfrom this.

Although structuralism initially emergedin Europe, and achieved something of ahigh point in terms of Film Studies in thehighly scrupulous and painstaking characterof Metz’s Essais sur la signification au cinéma(1974), the empirical, objectivist orientationof structuralism, when combined with itsemployment of a relatively limited rangeof abstract theoretical categories, tended,at that time (and for whatever reason) toappeal more to north American rather thanEuropean theorists. Consequently, many moreapplications of structuralist methodology toparticular films were to appear in Americathan Europe, in the work of writers such asWill Wright, Patricia Erens and John Fell.In both Europe and America however, theinherent problems of structuralism led to itsdecline during the 1970s. This decline wasalso precipitated by the fact that some ofthe main advocates of the movement turnedtheir back on structuralism during this period.In his Structural Anthropology: Volume Two(1973), Lévi-Strauss forthrightly criticized theformalist essentialism in Vladimir Propp’sMorphology of the Folk Tale (1977), and,by implication, its structuralism per se.Under the influence of Jacques Lacan,Barthes and Jacques Derrida, Lévi-Straussthen went on to endorse the consequence ofwhat was to become that central tenet ofpost-structuralism: polysemy (Aitken, 2001:104–5). Following Lévi-Strauss, Metz toodenounced his own attempt to develop ageneral structuralist model of film form as

a mistake, and moved over to a ‘post-structuralist’ phase in his Psychoanalysis andCinema (1983). In addition to these individualcritical repudiations, one of the crucial reasonsfor the decline of structuralism was thefinding, by Metz, André Martinet, Ellis,Bellour and others, that ‘film language’ didnot really possess a distinct langue in the sensethat linguistic language did. The essentialismwhich had initially inspired structuralismproved to be its undoing when the basis ofthat presumed essentialism turned out to be adelusion.

Despite these problems, structuralism hadat least one overriding quality, alreadyreferred to: its systematic stance and relatedreliance upon often highly refined linguisticcategories.At its best, the structuralist methodcould be employed as a highly detailed formof measure, against which film texts couldbe understood in terms of their nuanceddepartures from that measure. The moreproblematic structuralist approaches from the1960s and 1970s evolved into the morerewarding French school of ‘post-semiotics’of the late eighties and nineties, in thework of writers such as Jacques Aumont,Michel Marie, André Gaudreault, FrançoisJost, Francis Vanoye, Marc Vernet and MichelChion. Perhaps the most important work here,because it attempts a reappraisal of a majorfigure within the Saussurian tradition, is Marieand Vernet’s Christian Metz et la théorie ducinéma (1990). Within much of this workprecise analyses of both image and narrativeled to subtle as well as highly detailed analysisof film texts. Even here though, the centralproblems of structuralism still remained, mostnotably a tendency towards a scrutiny ofthe internal dynamics of the text whichconferred a problematic degree of autonomyon the medium, and continued to bracketout context, as in Gaudreault and Jost’s LeRécit cinématographique (1990). Structural-ism, even of the post-semiotic variety, is a typeof formalism, and, although formalism maysometimes be an indispensable component oftextual analysis (though that is also debat-able), its inability to deal well with contextcreated problems for this body of work.



Structuralism evolved into post-structuralism in the late 1960s under theinfluence of French theorists such as Barthes,Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Louis Althusser,Derrida and Michel Foucault. Althoughpost-structuralism, as a movement, was farless coherent than structuralism had been, itemerged across a range of disciplines as partof a perceived need to oppose both dominantinstitutional and ideological structures ofpower and authority, and foundationalist,realist or humanist conceptions of theself, reason, intentionality and knowledge.Structuralism did not by any means evolveseamlessly into post-structuralism, and nordid post-structuralists move en masse fromessentialism into a philosophical positionfounded upon anti-essentialist premises.A further distinction must be drawn herebetween a post-structuralist position whichis largely indistinguishable from so-called‘postmodernism’, and a form of ‘modernist’post-structuralism which still encapsulatedwhat is often referred to as ‘screen theory’.The former position, derived from the ideasof Derrida and the later Barthes, was largelytaken up within the American deconstructionmovement during the 1970s and 1980s, andemphasized the need to subvert authoritarianand normative values through focusing on theutopian polysemic potential of communica-tion. The second position combined this sameimperative to subvert dominant ideology witha project to formulate and advance alternativeideological tropes that sought to elaboratean explanation of the world. Another morepivotal philosophical distinction can betraced between these two positions. In thelatter case, a modernist project based upon asynthesis of defamiliarization and analyticalrenovation is evident; whilst, in the formercase, a ‘postmodern’ position, based upondefamiliarization and the repudiation of suchrenovations, takes precedence. The first ofthese positions remained foundationalistto a degree, in positing the possibility ofa convergence between theory and reality,albeit one in which dominant ‘naturalized’convergences were rejected; whilst thesecond is fundamentally relativist, and

radically anti-foundationalist in its rejectionof the value of, or possibility of, seeking anysuch convergence.

As with structuralism, both of these posi-tions were founded upon forms of determin-ism premised upon the possibility, or in thiscase the dearth of possibility, for effectualagency. These forms of determinism werederived from Saussurian thought and werebased on a conviction that the modern subjectwas shaped by systemic, institutionalizedand language-based structures. For mod-ernist post-structuralists such as Althusserthe subject was inescapably ‘overdetermined’by such structures. For postmodern post-structuralists, the subject was not so muchseen as a potential agent at all in this sense.Instead, the postmodern subject was regardedas a complicit participant in a process ofdiscursive engagement taking place withina reflexive, intertextual system. Agencyhere comes to be defined not in terms ofautonomous will leading to accomplishment,as it is in most established philosophical def-initions of the notion, but in terms of an onlypartly-mindful involvement in a dialectic ofmeaning consumption and production.Aclearevolution can be traced, therefore, fromstructuralism (foundationalist, essentialistand determinist) to screen theory post-structuralism (partly-foundationalist, partly-relativist and determinist) to postmodernpost-structuralism (anti-foundationalist, anti-essentialist, relativist, and based on a depleted,and rather unconventional notion of agency).This was a portentous course for FilmStudies to take, one which commenced withdeterminist linguistic realism, but finishedup with a form of laissez faire utopianlinguistic relativism. As will be arguedbelow, Film Studies did not have to takethis anomalous philosophical route betweena determinist rock and a relativist hardplace.

The first development from structural-ism, that of post-structuralist screen the-ory, can, to some extent, be regarded asa Saussurian inspired variant of ‘westernMarxism’: a term which came to designatethe various schools of analysis which emerged



in western Europe from the 1920s onwards,and which sought to revise a classicalMarxism which had become disfigured byan unbending Stalinist and communist tenet.Western Marxism encompassed the work ofa range of scholars of the highest calibre,including that of Lukács, Brecht, Bourdieu,Lucien Goldmann, François Lefebvre, Jean-Paul Sartre, Raymond Williams, Gramsci,and members of the Frankfurt School. Themodel of Western Marxist thought whichwas to influence European film scholarshipthe most – that associated with the ideas ofAlthusser and Lacan – was probably the mostdeterminist to emerge from this body of work.European post-structuralist film scholarshipadopted this deterministic variant of westernMarxism because it was already committedto Saussurian thought, and, during the 1970s,Althusserian and Lacanian inspired ideasinfluenced French journals such as Positif, TelQuel, Cinétique, CinéAction, and Cahiers duCinéma; English journals such as Frameworkand Screen; and writers such as Heath, ColinMacCabe, Comolli, Oudart, Jacques-AlainMiller, Daniel Dayan, and Narboni. Thevarious attempts made by these journals andindividuals during the 1970s to establish analternative, post-structuralist counter-culturewithin film theory all eventually foundered onthe rock of problematic conceptualization andon an inadequate model of agency.

Western Marxist thought was premisedupon a belief in the need to refocus attentionupon the role of the ideological superstructurerather than economic base of society inreproducing dominant relations of powerwithin capitalism. This change of orientationfrom a more classical Marxist position wasinfluenced by a need to both understand whysocialism had failed to achieve hegemony inthe developed countries of western Europe –even though the overwrought condition of theeconomic base in those countries suggested(to Marxists) that such hegemony ought tooccur – as well as a desire to theorize amore positive role for agency and progres-sive intellectual venture in the face of themounting instrumentalization of intellectualenquiry within the Soviet bloc. Although the

Althusserian/Lacanian school was influencedby the first of these imperatives, it tendedto theorize the role of ideology in such away that notions of active, effectual agencywere conceived of mainly as the residue ofa false and disingenuous bourgeois humanistdiscourse which must be repudiated. So, justas Althusser argued that the subject was‘positioned’, and so ‘misrecognized’ what ittook to be its own ‘free’ self, Althusserian(and Lacanian) inspired film scholars suchas Jean-Louis Baudry, Comolli, Metz andNarboni argued, in papers such as ‘Cinéma,idéologie, critique’ (Comolli and Narboni,1969), that dominant cinema too participatedin a process of subject-positioning in relationto the interests of the dominant order. Yet, hadpost-structuralist film theory taken a differentcourse during this crucial period, say in orderto embrace some more salient blend of theideas of a Williams, Gramsci or Bourdieu,rather than of Althusser and Lacan, thingsmay have worked out quite differently for thedevelopment of the discipline.

It was in the pages of the journal Screen,in particular, that a systematic attempt wasmade, by critics such as Heath, MacCabe,Ellis, Laura Mulvey and others to developan overarching theory of modernist post-structuralist cinematic representation, basedon the influence of Althusser, Saussure andLacan, and on the ‘encounter of Marxism andpsychoanalysis on the terrain of semiotics’(Easthope, 1991: 35). What has becomeknown as ‘screen theory’was constituted froman amalgam of influences, including those ofFrench structuralism and post-structuralism,Western Marxism, Brecht, early formalism,Soviet montage cinema, feminism and otherinfluences. Screen theory was undoubtedlymotivated by high ideals. The objective was toutilize film and film theory in an effort to chal-lenge the dominant capitalist or patriarchalorder, and establish a ‘counter cinema’ withinan intellectual ‘counter-culture’. Although thecommitted idealism of screen theory cannotbe faulted, the conceptual foundations uponwhich it relied can.

The problems of screen theory have beenwell documented elsewhere, but can be



summarized for present purposes as follows:(a) The screen theory tradition contained animplicit commitment to determinism, andpreoccupation with the determining influenceof ‘deep’, or ‘innate’, or ‘self-regulating’internal structures. (b) This orientation ledto depleted conceptions of agency. (c) Theselesser conceptions of agency, whilst prob-lematic in themselves, also negated theoverall objectives of the screen theory project,because such an account of agency impliedthat the attempt to develop a counter-culturemust be predestined to fail. (d) The ideathat realism, in the shape of the ‘classicrealist text’ hypothesized by Colin MacCabe(MacCabe, 1974), was intrinsically politicallyreactionary at the level of form, led to acounter-productive rejection of an aestheticform consumed by spectators the worldover,. The advocacy of anti-realist filmmakingthus ensured that an effective oppositionalcinema would never become commonplace.(e) Screen theory often employed unhistori-cized accounts of subjectivity, determination,representation and agency. (f) Whilst screentheory (in structuralist mode) was often ableto describe representational relationships ingreat detail – because it was based on arelational theory of signification – it was oftenunable to explain what such representationsmeant in a more conceptual and wide-rangingsense.

Despite such objections, important workwas carried out within the parameters ofscreen theory. The critique of romanticconceptions of authorship was a major stepforward, as was work on feminist andgender theory by Mulvey, Claire Johnston,Elizabeth Cowie and others. Mulvey’s paper‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’(1975) has been particularly influential.Other achievements included the criticalreassessment of Brecht, political modernismand Soviet montage theory in works suchas the special Screen edition on Brechtwhich appeared in 1974, MacCabe’s Godard:Images, Sounds, Politics (1980), MartinWalsh’s The Brechtian Aspect of RadicalCinema (1981) and Sylvia Harvey’s May’68 and Film Culture (1980). The screen

theory concern with ideology and subjectivityalso led to the appearance of influentialwork by Heath, MacCabe and others. Heath’s‘Narrative Space’ (1976) was a significantintervention in this respect. Finally, work onnarrative by Heath, Bellour and others looksforward to later work on film narratology byDavid Bordwell, Edward Branigan and others.From the 1980s onwards, Screen abandonedthe attempt to establish a unified theoryof film, based on psychoanalytic, Marxistand semiotic/structuralist theory, and, instead,pioneered a number of influential debatesin areas such as postmodernism, gay andlesbian spectatorship, and postcolonial/post-national/alternative cinemas.

As previously argued, the modernist post-structuralist screen theory position can bedistinguished from a more ‘postmodern’post-structuralist philosophical orientation withinEuropean film scholarship. That latter ori-entation drew on the ideas of Foucaultand Derrida, as well as theorists moreevidently categorized as ‘postmodern’such asJean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard.Although there are differences between, say,Derrida and Lyotard, such dissimilarities arenot as great as the similarities that bind themtogether. In many respects, the term ‘post-structuralism’ actually seems more helpful inrepresenting a school of thought concernedwith a radical position on the relativityand plurality of meaning, than does theterm ‘postmodern’, given that the ‘modern’encompasses deconstructive tendencies, andthe sorts of philosophical positions on rel-ativity which are putatively the preserve ofthe postmodern. Modernist post-structuralismmarks one stage along the road towardsrelativism, whilst post-structuralism propermarks not just one further point along thatroute, but something approaching a full-blown relativist point of reference. Frankly,although it might be more helpful to refer toa distinction between ‘political modernism’and ‘post-structuralism’, to abandon the termpostmodern in favour of post-structuralistwould probably lead to confusion, giventhe current state of understanding of whatis meant by that term. In what follows,



therefore, and in order to maintain the earlierdistinction from modernist post-structuralism,the term ‘postmodern post-structuralism’ willbe substituted for both post-structuralism andpostmodernism.

POSTMODERN POST-STRUCTURALISM/PRAGMATISM

The problems engendered by screen theoryled to the emergence of the latest periodof European film theory and scholarship,which stretches from the 1980s to thepresent. Although the various movementsand schools of thought which make upthis period are quite disparate, many ofthem are related, to varying degrees, intheir shared refutation of the high-theoretical,totalizing ambitions of screen theory and mod-ernist post-structuralism (or high political-modernism), and, by implication, in theirsubsequent commitment to a more circum-scribed stance towards the theorization offilm in relation to particular aesthetic, social,cultural, and political questions. It is becauseof this loosely shared affiliation, and forthe sake of expediency, that this period infilm scholarship will be referred to hereas that of ‘postmodern post-structuralism/pragmatism’.

One school of European film scholarshipwhich developed during the 1980s carried onthe psychoanalytic tradition inherited fromLacan and Julia Kristeva. It is particularlydifficult to distinguish clearly between post-structuralist modernist and post-structuralistpostmodern psychoanalytic modalities here,and more appropriate to delineate a continuitywhich encompasses the work of thinkerssuch as Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, Baudrillardand Lyotard; and film scholars such asMulvey, Jacqueline Rose, Baudry, Metz,Oudart, Heath, Cowie and Juliet Mitchell.This work relies on an associated range of psy-choanalytic concepts, including those of the‘imaginary/symbolic/real’, ‘phallocentrism’,‘identification’, ‘the gaze’, ‘masochism’, the‘mirror stage’, and ‘scopophilia’; as well ason less specifically psychoanalytic notions,

such as those of ‘discourse’, ‘intertextuality’,‘deconstruction’, ‘pleasure’, ‘subjectivity’,‘patriarchy’, and the centrality of powerrelations. In fact, there is not much tochoose, in the end, between a post-structuralistscreen theory reading of Lacan from the mid-1970s, and Lyotard’s notions of the Dispositifand ‘libidinal’, or Baudrillard’s writing onseduction, masculinity and femininity inSeduction (1990). Such lack of distinctionapart, it should be pointed out that this area ofscholarship has been particularly influentialwithin the feminist theory of French writerssuch as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and oth-ers. Cixous, for example, advances a ‘counter-writing’strategy of feminist writing – écritureféminine, derived from Lacan and Derrida –whilst the same approach is evident inIrigaray’s notion of parler femme (Fuery,2000: 47). Although both these writers werelargely concerned with literature rather thanfilm, their ideas have been developed withinEuropean Film Studies by some of the filmscholars previously referred to, and in criticalstudies such as Contemporary Film Theory(Easthope, 1993), New Developments in FilmTheory (Fuery, 2000) and Film Theory: AnIntroduction (Lapsley and Westlake, 2006).

Outside of psychoanalysis, postmodernpost-structuralism also tends to reject ‘meta-discourse’, essentialism and ‘grand narra-tives’, in order to emphasize the pluralism andrelativity of discourse, the value of creativityand intertextuality, and the more definablepractical ‘micro’purposes (including, in somecases, political purposes) to which theoryshould be put. Definitions of postmodern filmvary, but, in general, such definitions tendto emphasize the prioritization of spectacleover narrative, the intertextuality of reference,the effacement of the difference betweenpast and present, the use of pastiche, visualand visceral excess, parody, the fluidity ofidentity, the fictionality of cause and effect,and the establishment of a sense of theperpetual present. Different views prevailconcerning the significance of such films.Critics such as Alan Williams take the viewthat ‘postmodern’ films such as Les Amantsdu Pont-Neuf (Léos Carax, France, 1991) both



reveal the ‘postmodern condition’ in terms ofa ‘profound nihilism’ and celebrate pluralismand difference (1992: 401). On the otherhand, other critics take the view that suchfilms merely reinforce the commodificationof culture which is unremittingly taking placewithin ‘late capitalism’. Fredric Jamesonargues for the latter in the case of the filmsof Brian de Palma, but attempts to steer amore discriminating line elsewhere in arguingthat, whilst some postmodern films (and post-modern aspects of other films) do reinforcethe commodification of culture within latecapitalism, a film such as Diva (Jean-JacquesBeineix, France, 1982) employs postmodernstylistics in order to critique aspects of thepostmodern condition (1992: 62).

Many writers on postmodernism andfilm, including Linda Hutcheon, Jameson,Laura Kipnis and others, tend to focus onHollywood films because of postmodernisttheory’s general orientation towards popularculture, although they often centre on atypicalHollywood films, such as David Lynch’s BlueVelvet (US, 1986). Some scholars, includingRobert Stam, Ella Shohat and Hal Foster turntowards forms of critical postmodern cinemaevident in Third World cinema. Others such asPhil Powrie and Susan Hayward engage withpostmodern European cinema, and followJameson’s endorsement of Diva, by similarlysanctioning the postmodern style employedwithin the cinéma du look of Beineix, LucBesson and Carax. Jim Collins argues forthe effective critical postmodernism of a filmsuch as Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Parsifal(France/West Germany, 1984), whilst KobenaMercer argues that the work of black Britishfilmmakers in the 1980s, as in a worksuch as Handsworth Songs (John Akomfrah/Black Audio Film Collective, UK, 1986),constitutes a kind of postmodern practiceof collage-like filmmaking, which reworksand deconstructs existing and dominantrepresentations of black Britain (1988: 11).Within a perspective of feminist theory,Annette Kuhn has argued that a collage-likepostmodern approach to filmmaking may beparticularly appropriate for a female spectatorwho may be simultaneously experiencing

a number of different and shifting identities(1994: 202).

Within postmodern film theory in general,both European and other, a division can befound between those who adhere more to theposition that a postmodern film culture shouldeschew analysis (grand narratives) altogether,and those who argue that some kind oftheoretical foundationalism must be retained,in the interests of realizing political or otherobjectives. Philosophically, at the centre of thepostmodern approach we find the contentionthat the aspiration to procurement of insightthrough analytic critique is to be given up infavour of a contrary aspiration to engendera free space of semantic manufacture andconsumption. Perhaps it does not particularlymatter, in the end, that these two approachesappear to be philosophically incompatible,so long as some provisional, ‘practical’incorporation of the two is able to intervene toeffect within specific areas of social/culturalcontest, as ‘cultural studies’ based scholarssuch as Stuart Hall have argued (see below).For such critics it is more important thattheory is able to effect change than beendowed with internal lucidity. On the otherhand, even if such conceptual incongruitydoes manage to deliver some dividends onthe ground as a consequence of activistcommitment, it might eventually lead to therefutation of the postmodern post-structuralistedifice within Film Studies. In addition, theadoption of a postmodern position based onextreme relativism is inevitably problematic.An approach, for example, based on a study ofthe film ‘text’ as vehicle of contradiction andaporia, such as that endorsed by the Frenchscholar Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier inher Le Texte divisé (1981), is clearly ofvalue in avoiding naive interpretations offilms – and, also, possibly, in avertingthe regressive positioning of the spectator(a prime objective of Ropars-Wuilleumier’smethod).At the level of epistemology, it has tobe questioned whether an approach premisedupon the need to avoid explanation per seis actually sustainable, and not ultimatelycounterproductive. Within a feminist perspec-tive, this is the question raised by scholars



such as Linda Nicholson and Nancy Fraserin their anthology Feminism/Postmodernism(1988: 34).

As with post-structuralism in both itsmodern and postmodern phases, the notionthat society was composed of dominant andsubordinate power and interest groups, andcompeting ideological discourses, influenceda school of English-language popular culturalstudies. Cultural studies drew on a wide rangeof intellectual frameworks, including variousstrands of Western Marxism, sociologicaltheory, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School,empirical methodology, communications the-ory, reception studies, policy studies, femi-nism, gender theory, classical Marxism, thepost-structuralist theory of Lacan, Althusserand Foucault, theories of colonialism, post-colonialism and postmodernism. Despite suchan array of theoretical positions, this schoolcan be collectively distinguished by twoprincipal features: first, a rejection of thedeterminism implicit within much Saussurianthought; and, second, a related sanction ofpopular cultural forms as valuable and authen-tic modes of social expression. Such endorse-ment has a particularly lengthy lineage withinBritish cultural studies, and includes workcarried out on working-class history andculture by E.P. Thompson, Richard Hoggartand Raymond Williams during the 1950s and1960s. Central to this body of work, in studiessuch as The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart, 1957),Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (Williams,1958), and The Making of the EnglishWorkingClass (Thompson, 1968), was a desire toexplore the means by which a culture of moralresistance could survive within working-classlife, against the background of a debilitatingand stifling capitalist hegemony.

The work of Thompson, Hoggart andWilliams generally conceived of popularcultural forms as valid expressions of suchresistance. However, during the period inwhich Althusserian-based screen theory wasdominant, this conception of popular culturetended to be replaced by one in which suchforms were seen as overdetermined by thedominant institutions of society. In reactionto this, later work within British cultural

studies, by Hall, Graeme Turner, MartinBarker, Tony Bennett, Dick Hebdige, JudithWilliamson and others, explored previouslyuncharted areas of popular culture, includingpopular cinema, in an attempt to illuminate thecomplex relationships which existed betweenpopular culture, a climate of resistance, andthe audience.

Study of the audience from a cultural stud-ies perspective became particularly influentialduring the 1980s. Much of the emphasishere tended to be on television rather thanfilm, though, amongst others, studies werecarried out by Janet Woollacott on the JamesBond films, and by Philip Corrigan on thedevelopment of the British film audience.Bennett, Woollacott, Tony Mercer and SusanBoyd-Bowman also co-edited the influentialPopular Television and Film in 1981. In somecases, the focus on the idea of popular cultureas a form of subcultural resistance within thisbody of work led to an undue valorization oftexts which might not necessarily always beas ‘authentic’or oppositional as proponents ofthe cultural studies approach imagined themto be. This point was made by Barker andAnne Beezer in Reading Into Cultural Studies(1992). Disproportionate attention paid totexts made it more likely that such textswould become estranged from their variouscontexts, and particularly from their historicalcontexts; a point made by Raymond Williamsin his The Politics of Modernism: Againstthe New Conformists (1989), when he calledupon cultural studies to relate such texts moreto both the social formations and aesthetichistory from which they had emerged. Thewide range of theoretical approaches broughtto bear within cultural studies meant that,although the discipline displayed a pluralist,postmodern sensibility, it possessed fewcohesive intellectual parameters, and was, asRaymond Williams himself put it, somethingof a ‘baggy monster’ (quoted in Barkerand Beezer, 1992: 9). Some cultural studiespractitioners did not necessarily see this as abad thing.

Another response to the exigencies ofgrand theory and the problems of screentheory, and one which emerged more or less



completely outside the Saussurian tradition,was the rise of empirically-based film his-toriography from the late 1970s onwards.Initially, such work emerged out of the historydepartments of universities and concentratedon the propaganda, newsreel and fiction filmas a form of documentation of historicalevents. Work in this category includes Politics,Propaganda and Film, 1918–1945 (Pronayand Spring, 1982) and Feature Films asHistory (Short, 1981). Although such workhad the advantage of bringing academichistoriographical method to bear upon thestudy of film, it usually failed to engagesufficiently well with existing and priorschools of film analysis, or with the aestheticqualities of the medium. One very positiveoutcome of this development, however, wasthe formation of the Historical Journal ofFilm, Radio and Television, which went on topublish high quality historical research intofilm throughout the 1980s and up until thepresent.

Outside of traditional university historydepartments, another body of historical workon film, influenced by the earlier traditionof cultural studies, attempted to base a newpopular film historiography upon premisesderived from Thompson and Williams, and,also, from western Marxist theoreticianssuch as Gramsci, Eric Hobsbawm, Lukács,Bourdieu, Walter Benjamin, the FrankfurtSchool and others. The work of Stuart Hood,Vincent Porter, Kuhn, Sue Harper, MichaelChanan, and others falls into this area, whosespirit is, to some extent, encapsulated inJames Curran and Vincent Porter’s editedanthology British Cinema History (1983).This theoretical turn proved difficult tosustain, given the problems of elaboratinga unified theoretical model of film historybased on Western Marxist and culturalstudies approaches. One exception here is,perhaps, feminist-inspired scholarship, in thework of Harper, Christine Gledhill, ChristineGeraghty, Cowie and others. Eventually,scholarship in this area became more directlyengaged in primary research into filmmakers,film genres, production, distribution andexhibition practices, and institutional issues;

under the conviction that an extensive terrainof materials urgently required attention.Although such work did not normally employparticularly rigorous theoretical models andwas as a consequence sometimes criticizedby proponents of the Saussurian paradigm, itwas informed by various theoretical positions,including those drawn from feminism andMarxism; and did result in some of the mostrigorous and productive scholarship to emergewithin European Film Studies. In Britain,Charles Barr, Harper, Andrew Higson, SarahStreet, TonyAldgate, Nicholas Pronay, JeffreyRichards, Robert Murphy, John Hill andothers carried out intensive studies of Britishfilm history; whilst Ian Aitken, Alan Burton,Harvey, Brian Winston and others wrote onthe British documentary film. A journal – theJournal of Popular British Cinema (now theJournal of British Cinema and Television) –was established, whilst the Encyclopediaof the Documentary Film (Aitken, 2006)contained extensive sections on British andEuropean documentary filmmaking, and TheEncyclopedia of British Film (McFarlane,2003) covered the area of British cinema ina comprehensive manner.

During the 1980s and 1990s, conceptssuch as national identity, national cinema,cultural identity, postcolonialism, regional-ism, hybridity and globalization becameincreasingly important within European filmscholarship, and a range of publicationsappeared dealing with such issues as theyaffected Europe as a whole. Examples herewould be Duncan Petrie’s Screening Europe(1992), Nowell-Smith and Stephen Ricci’sHollywood and Europe: Economics, Cultureand National Identity (1998), and NationalIdentity and European Cinema (Drummond etal., 1993). During the 1980s, the accelerationof globalization, privatization of public broad-casting, and development of a European-wide media policy supported by the EuropeanUnion, led to an increase in scholarshipwhich examined policy issues in relationto film. Work falling into this categoryincluded Richard Collins’ From Satelliteto Single Market (1998) and Media andIdentity in Contemporary Europe (2002); and



Albert Moran’s Film Policy (1996). Attentionalso tended to be paid here to the European‘co-production’as a creature of a European, asopposed to national, film market, as in AnneJackel’s European Film Industries (2003) andMette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie’s Cinemaand Nation (2000).

In addition to dealing with Europe as awhole, much work appearing during thisperiod dealt more directly with issues ofparticular national cinemas, and it is pos-sible to argue that this eventually becameestablished as one of the most importantbodies of historical film scholarship to beproduced during the 1990s and beyond.Writers on British cinema have already beenreferred to, but in addition to these, writerssuch as Ginette Vincendeau, Serge Daney,Aumont, Jill Forbes, Martin O’Shaugnessey,Antoine De Baerque, Guy Austin, CarrieTarr, Phil Powrie, Hayward, Michèle Lagny,Pierre Sorlin, Marie and others exploredvarious aspects of French cinema. Sorlin’sThe Film in History (1980) and EuropeanCinemas, European Societies (1991), Lagny’sSenso (1990) and Marie’s La Nouvelle Vague(2001) can all be cited as good examplesof such scholarship. The same phenomenawas evident in relation to the Italian cinema,where Roy Armes, Georgio Bertellini, PierreLeprohon. Mira Liehm, Gianni Volpi, JamesHay, Sorlin and others produced importantwork. An example here would be, onceagain, Sorlin and his Italian National Cinema(1996). Outside of France and Italy, writerssuch as Dina Iordinova, Yuri Tsivian, AnnaLawton, Graham Petrie, Lynne Attwood,David Gillespie, Paul Coates, Richard Taylor,Anikó Imre, and David Goulding wrote onRussian and central/eastern European cine-mas. Imre’s edited anthology, East EuropeanCinemas (2005), is a good example of suchscholarship, though Richard Taylor’s exten-sive research into and translation of Eisensteinand the Soviet film scholarship of the 1920sand 1930s, including his and Ian Christie’sedited collection The Film Factory: Russianand Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896–1939(1988) deserves special mention here. Petervon Bagh’s work on Finnish cinema, and

Tytti Soila’s Nordic National Cinemas (1998)and The Cinema of Scandinavia (2005), dealtwith issues of film and national identity innorthern Europe; whilst writers such as AntonKaes, Sabina Hake, Julian Knight, DavidClarke, Gertrud Koch, Erwin Leiser, TerriGinsberg, Patrice Petro, Eric Rentschler, MarcSilberman, Miriam Bratu Hansen, RichardTaylor, Eric Rentschler, Julian Petley, ThomasElsaesser and others wrote on the Germancinema (see, for example, Ginsberg andThompson, 1996). Rob Stone, Barry Jordan,Alberto Mira and Peter William Evans’work on Spanish and Portuguese nationalcinema deserves mention here, as does MariaStassininopoulou on Greek cinema, RuthBarton (2004) on Irish cinema, Robert VonDassanowsky (2005) on Austrian cinema, andPaul Coates (2005) on Polish cinema. Manyother examples could be given. Such workadds up to a particularly significant body ofEuropean film scholarship, supported by theemergence of new journals, such as Studiesin European Cinema, which first appeared in2003.

The school of popular cinema historiog-raphy referred to above could be labelled‘pragmatist’ with a small ‘p’ in recognition ofits turn from high theory to more empirical,observable and realizable forms of analysis.However, during the 1990s, a school ofscholarship emerged, largely in America,which might be labelled ‘Pragmatist’ witha capital ‘P’. Like postmodernism andhistoricist approaches, American Pragmatist-influenced film theory eschewed a concernfor abstract theory, and turned, instead,to more restricted enquiries into empiricalor intermediate categories of concept andmaterial. It was impelled to do so, in part,by the conviction that such concepts andmaterial would provide more useful, classi-fiable and testable results. However, whetherconsciously or unconsciously, this pragmatistpractice tended to secrete a bracketing ofhigh theory under the veil of an opposition toscreen theory, and, in particular, the unifyingimperative underlying screen theory. So, forexample, Bordwell argues against the needfor a ‘Big Theory of Everything’, by which



he means screen theory, or any contemporaryfacsimile of screen theory (Bordwell andCarroll, 1996: 29–30). The problem is thatwhat Bordwell calls ‘middle-level’ theoriz-ing (Bordwell and Carroll, 1996: 29), andwhat Noël Carroll refers to as ‘piecemealgeneralisation’ (Carroll, 1996: 332), does notjust stand as an opposition to screen theory,or even to ‘big’ comprehensive theories, butalso, as argued, as a general opposition to thepredominant use of chiefly abstract theoreticalcategories within film research.

One consequence of this is an avoidanceof the high ‘culturalist’ issues which fall toofar outside the technical discursive territoryof what Bordwell calls the ‘middle-levelresearch programme’ (Bordwell and Carroll,1996: 29). Another is an avoidance ofengagement with the political. Although thereis no necessary contradiction between a prag-matist approach and political engagement,in practice, the general orientation of thepragmatist approach is to bypass the political.This pragmatist school of Film Studiesdeveloped in the United States was influencedby North American pragmatist philosophy,from William James to Richard Rorty, andis closely linked to the development of filmscholarship based upon principles derivedfrom cognitivist methodology and Anglo-American analytical philosophy. A pragmatistorientation towards theory fits less easilywith the history of European film theory andscholarship, which has always been basedon high theory, and on the engagement withthe kinds of ‘culturalist’ categories whichpragmatist film theorists would prefer todistance themselves from.

Some attempts have been made to introduceboth analytical philosophy and cognitivistmethodology into European scholarship, as(in the latter case) in Murray Smith’sEngaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion andthe Cinema (1995) and Torben Grodal’sMoving Pictures (1997). As with Smithand Grodal’s work, the value of applyingcognitivist methods to the study of film liesin the degree of detail and close empiricalanalysis which can be generated. Anotherimportant intervention into the field of film

scholarship stemming from the analyticaltradition is that offered by Stanley Cavell, and,in particular, byTheWorldViewed: Reflectionson the Ontology of Film (1979). Whilst writingmainly on the American cinema, Cavell haswritten on some European films and film-makers, including Jean-Luc Godard, Bergmanand Rohmer. When discussing Godard’s Jevous salue, Marie (France/Switzerland/UK,1984), for example, Cavell invokes LudwigWittgenstein in order to explore notions ofthe ‘soul’, ‘miracle’, and the Christian ideaof the relationship between soul and body, ashe believes them to be portrayed in Godard’sfilm (2005: 179–80). Although Cavell’s workcontinues to spawn ongoing critical inter-pretations, most of this work, as in WilliamRothman’s Cavell on Film (2005), tends tobe carried out in North America, rather thanEurope. In addition to Cavell, scholars suchas Carroll and Cynthia A. Freedland, write onFilm Studies from within the perspective ofanalytical philosophy. Finally, Terry Lovell’sPictures of Reality (1980) andAitken’s RealistFilm Theory and Cinema (2006) attempta critique of conventionalist, relativist, prag-matist and cognitivist positions from withina theoretical framework of ‘philosophicalrealism’: a branch of analytical philosophyassociated with philosophers such as RoyBhaskar, Roger Trigg, Rom Harré and others,and encapsulated in Trigg’s Reality at Risk:A Defense of Realism in Philosophy and theSciences (1989).

In addition to the Anglo-American ana-lytical tradition, another relatively recent,though in this case ‘continental’philosophicalinfluence on European film scholarship, hasbeen that of Gilles Deleuze, and particularlyhis Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986)and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989). Inthese two books, Deleuze attempts to developan understanding of the aesthetic specificityof cinematic form based on conceptionsof temporal experience which he derivesfrom the philosophy of Henri Bergson.Bergson considered space and time to beaspects of ‘durée’, or ‘duration’. The universe(duration) is conceived of as a flow of matter-movement, which condenses into space, time



and discrete objects. Durée is, therefore,a continuously changing manifold flow ofsuccession, which constitutes an evolvingtotality (Bogue, 2003: 3). This notion ofduration as fluctuating totality forms the basisof Deleuze’s understanding of the cinema,within which he conceives of the film ‘frame’as a slice of duration, ‘montage’ as a linkedcombination of such slices, and the ‘shot’as the material basis of both frame andmontage. The cinematic image is, therefore,a framed image-in-movement: what Deleuzerefers to as the ‘movement-image’, becausethe image captures the movement occurringwithin a slice of durée. Deleuze arguesthat the ‘movement-image’ characterizes thecinema from its origins to the 1940s, afterwhich it evolves into the ‘time-image’, whichprovides the aesthetic basis for later, moremodern/modernist cinema. Deleuze’s accountof the progression from movement-imageto time-image appears to suggest that suchprogression is both inevitable and benign, and,although Deleuze has claimed that he is notarguing that ‘the modern cinema of the time-image is more “valuable” than the classicalcinema of the movement-image’, the thrust ofhis argument leads in that direction (Deleuze,1986: x).

Deleuze argues that the film image is amaterial entity in itself before it is an imageof something, and that, because of this, theexpressive potential of the image should beallowed to transcend any representationalimperative imposed upon it. At the same time,Deleuze also contends that, in the case of the‘movement-image’, the primary expressiveand substantial character of the film imageis beset by such an imperative. Furthermore,that imperative is necessarily caught upwithin dominant, ideological representationalsystems of logic, language, and rationality,because such macro-systems possess thepower to determine the structure and functionof all representational systems operatingwithin and beneath them. The cinema ofthe movement-image is therefore problematicfor a number of reasons. Above all, itsubordinates expression to representation,and such representation necessarily serves to

reproduce dominant ideologies. In addition,the movement-image is only able to encase asegment of duration, and is, as a consequence,unable to portray the extensive nature of duréedirectly: although the image is able to indicatethe presence of the manifold as it spreadsbeyond the confines of the image, it is unableto portray that presence directly. Finally, themovement-image is unable to portray themovement of duration itself, because eachshot constitutes only a fragment of duration.Despite the overall thrust of his argument,Deleuze does not abandon the belief that themovement-image remains of value, becauseof its ability to represent duration, albeitindirectly, and because it still holds onto someof its latent, expressive character.

For Deleuze, two principal factors explainthe shift from the movement-image to thetime-image around 1940. The first was theexperience of the carnage and atrocities ofthe Second World War: an experience subse-quently directed into a critique of the formsof naturalized rationalism and ideologically-driven logic which had provided legitimationfor such carnage and atrocities. This critiquefound expression within the cinema in termsof a desire to free the medium from theoverriding sway of its representational andnormative functions: functions which workedto make manifest an ‘effect of truth’ thathad now been brought into profound question(Deleuze, 1989: 142). In place of the natu-ralizing function of the movement-image, thetime-image now emphasized the expressiveand material character of the film image.In addition, the cinema of the time-imagesought to establish ‘unnatural’ links betweenthings, as part of a deconstructive ‘modern’phase of the cinema, in which film mobilizedthe ‘powers of the false’ in repudiation ofprevailing assumptions (Deleuze, 1989: 126).The second cause of the shift to the time-image lay in the inability of the movement-image to portray durée directly, as an open,evolving whole. Such incapacity made itimperative that a new means of portrayingdurée more directly be found. It was in theuse of long-take deep-focus photography byOrson Welles, suggests Deleuze, that, perhaps



for the first time in the cinema, the time-image came to correspond more directly to theactual character of duration as continuouslychanging totality.

Although preoccupied, at one level, withfilm’s ability to represent space and time as hebelieves they exist within duration, it is clearthat, at another level, Deleuzian film theoryis driven by a contrary stipulation that filmshould not be regarded primarily as a rep-resentational medium. Such a stipulation haslarger implications, which stretch well beyondthe prospective significance of Deleuze’sown theoretical system. His insistence thatthe deconstructive and ‘expressive’ aspectsof the film medium must take precedenceover any representational function ultimatelyderives from his more general understandingof the philosophical concept as an expressive‘force’, rather than as something which isparticularly commensurable, or representa-tional; and this, in turn, places Deleuze’sthought firmly within a greater body ofpostmodernist thought, one which has becomeincreasingly influential within European filmtheory and scholarship since the 1980s.That postmodernist tradition possesses manyattributes, including a predisposition for thedeconstruction of naturalized ideology, themobilization of an array of complex conceptsdrawn from a variety of disciplines, the abilityto engage with the political, and a celebrationof the values of polysemy and difference.It also draws upon important intellectualsources within European intellectual history,including figures such as Sören Kierkegaard,Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger,and theoretical schemas such as those ofpsychoanalysis, linguistics and philosophy.

Although a great deal of highly productiveEuropean film scholarship continues to becarried out within this postmodernist tradition,it would be unfortunate if it were to becomehegemonic at the expense of the othertraditions of scholarship addressed within thischapter. The academy of European film schol-arship needs to remain open and accessible.It should resist the temptation to close in onitself as it tended to during the period of screentheory, and as it could again. In addition to

supporting postmodernist research, Europeanfilm scholarship will flourish best if it adoptsa reflective, and, in cases where it is warranted,revisionist stance, in order to engage withthe heritage of European film, and EuropeanFilm Studies, as they have developed fromthe beginning of the twentieth century tothe present. This, in turn, will require thecontinued deployment of historiographicaland related methodologies as part of a largerstudy of European film history. European filmscholarship will also benefit from a continuedengagement with both pre-twentieth centurytraditions of European thought, and the othertraditions covered in this chapter, namely,those of nineteenth century realism/classicalMarxism, intuitionist realism and modernism,auteurism, Saussurian, and postmodern post-structuralism/pragmatism.

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