The New Cinephilia
Girish Shambu
Caboose, 2015
In a letter I wrote to Girish Shambu about my qualms with 21st century cinephilia last year, I had said: “Part of the reason I am so ardently looking forward to your book is to understand how to give a form to an activity as variegated, vehemently personal and solitary as cinephilia.” Here it is now. Girish’s erudite new book seeks to etch a picture of cinephilia as it exists in the internet age. Bookended by references to Susan Sontag’s 1996 essay on ‘the decay of cinema’, it is a forward-looking, optimistic work that responds to Sontag’s lamentation about the death of cinema and of cine-love. Girish starts off by defining what he means by cinephilia:
“Cinephilia, as we know, is not simply an interest in cinema or the propensity to watch a great number of movies. These are necessary but not sufficient conditions for cinephilia. Not only watching, but thinking, reading, talking and writing about cinema in some form, no matter how unconventional: these activities are important to the cinephile. In other words, cinephilia involves an active interest in the discourse surrounding films.”
The definition above is interesting – and crucial for the remainder of the book – both in terms of the individuals whom it characterizes as “internet cinephiles” and those it excludes through such a specific formulation. For one, it ascribes the cinephile label to those who are involved in the production, dissemination or consumption of ‘texts’ about films online – a cross-section that, whether we like to think of it that way or not, wields the privilege of language. On the other hand, the coinage leaves out not only the vast demographic obsessive film-watchers not involved in film-critical discourse (including film tribes and sub-cultures such as anime fandom), but also those who might be labeled the “cinephilic working class” – people and groups involved in alternate forms of distribution of films: hosts and seeders of torrent trackers, unorganized bootleggers, uploaders of rare VHS and TV rips and voluntary subtitlers, who are, in fact, the players responsible for the reincarnation of New Cinephilia as a global phenomenon. This underclass, as it were, is almost single-handedly responsible for the geographic and intellectual expansion of cinephilia in not only multiplying the breadth of material available to movie-lovers but also providing access to such material to cultures and regions without alternate distributors, arthouses, film societies, festivals or film discourse. Personal experience convinces me that the torrent is the most prominent birthmark of the internet cinephile.
With this definition in place, Girish goes on to touch lucidly on various aspects of this cinephilic upper class, especially those involved in production of film discourse: the internet’s transformation of the subjective after-experience of a film, the shift in style of film reviewing from generally descriptive to particularly analytical, the continuing centrality of conversation in cinephilic practice, the everyday experience of a cinephile on social networking websites and the importance of writing to cinephilia through the ages. Despite numerous commentators bemoaning a number of these changes, detailing the narcissism, knee-jerk reactions and philistinism they foster, Girish sees them in a positive light, viewing them as being organically liked to the continuous, necessary mutation of cinephilia. From his view of New Cinephilia changing foundational ideas about cinema to his affirmative response to the question of whether social change can be brought about by a cinephile qua cinephile, Girish’s indefatigable optimism is, in fact, daunting to a full-time cynic like me who, although he understands how cinephilia performs a useful social function by giving young folk something to construct their identities around, can only see the underbelly of cinephilic explosion in the new millennium. I quote here from my letter to Girish two reasons for my disillusionment with internet cinephilia:
One, that cinephilia in the 21st century, I think, has become a glorified form of consumerism. Not just in the way it facilitates the circulation of material commodities like DVDs, but in its very ratification of the desire to watch as many films as possible, in its insistence on the investment, in terms of time, energy or money, in practicing cinephilia. There was a time that I used to naively think that my cinephilia set me apart from more direct materialist pursuits around me because (a) I don’t collect films as objects and that they are an ‘experience’ (b) it is art appreciation and not consumerism. But it dawned on me, as it dawns sooner or later on anyone willing to think critically, that investing in experiences is the most rampant form of consumerism today. (I am thinking particularly of the valorization of tourism, extreme sports and social networking). I realized that I approached cinema more or less the way people around me were approaching electronic gadgets. I hear people talking about the history of a particular mobile phone, comparing it with its predecessors, appreciating its ergonomics and locating it within a historical trend and I see in it a equivalent to the commodified form of auteurism that the internet cinephiles have bought into en masse. Auteurs are brand names and wanting to consume their films seems to me to be little different from wanting to try out the next hot gadget. Commodity fetish, that was once a domain of material objects, is now displaced on to experiences, art experience in particular. Given that any film now is just minutes away from access, having missed out on a good film, new or classic, is considered an embarrassment and a reason for not being able to get into discussion circles. Obsessive shopping is denigrated while binge-watching is considered a reflection of one’s passion.
And two, that 21st century cinephilia is a direct descendent of the rise of nerd culture. I have been in programming circles, quizzing circles and cinephile circles – the major planets in the geek galaxy – and they are all united by their near-total absence of women. The new cinephilia (the only one I have experienced), not just the mainstream version of it, in its rapacious movie-watching, choleric debates and obsession of canonizing and classification feels to me to be characterized by a typically straight, young, male aggressiveness. This cinephilia, unlike the other honest, self-styled nerd groups, has the advantage of seeming to transcend geek culture under the garb of being a higher, more mature pursuit. The stereotype of the New Cinephile being an unkempt omega male in his early twenties, intelligent, atheist, left-leaning, piracy-supporting, career-agnostic, philosophy-loving social misfit derives from a general taxonomy of geeks, but is not without a modicum of truth. Reading many perceptive commentaries about what is now called the “millennial generation”, of which I am most certainly a part, I realize that cinephilia is the direct offspring of this tectonic geek-oriented generational/cultural shift.
But the most thought-provoking part – by which I mean the part I most vehemently reacted to – is the book’s centerpiece titled “Building a large conversation” in which Girish examines the reasons for the large gap between film studies and film criticism and reflects on the possibility of bridging it. To illustrate the reluctance of film critics to keep themselves abreast of the developments in film scholarship, he cites an Artforum roundtable where Annette Michelson puts down late-period Pauline Kael:
To have continued to write into the ’90s with no account taken of the advances made in our ways of thinking about spectatorship, perception, and reception meant that [Kael] ceased to renew her intellectual capital, to acknowledge and profit by the achievements of a huge collective effort. And so her writing, unrefreshed, grew thinner, coarser, stale.
Now, I have neither read the roundtable in its entirety, nor Kael extensively. But the excerpt above seems to suggest that film criticism has an intellectual obligation to learn from film studies. At the risk of antagonizing readers from academic background, I venture to suggest that film criticism has as much obligation to learn from film academia as experimental filmmaking has to learn from genre cinema. To be clear, I am not saying that film criticism has nothing to gather from film studies. Achievements of film theory can clear much rudimentary ground for film criticism by avoiding the need to reinvent the wheel. But the finest film criticism works in a territory that academia has not yet explored. In my mind, film criticism is the avant-garde to the arrière-garde of film studies, the punctum to the studium of scholarship. It must work on aspects of film that have not yet been theorized and institutionalized, that are untheorizable even. While most scholarship treats films as fodder for validating and perpetuating sacred theoretical frameworks, much like Thomas Kuhn’s scientific paradigms, film criticism takes each film primarily as an autonomous art object and derives from the object the analytical tools necessary for discussing it, which may or may not be found in film theory toolkit. I cannot imagine any consistent ‘method’ or ‘system’ of film criticism that will not undermine its essential openness to being surprised and rendered speechless by the art object. Every act of film criticism is like a surgery – always haunted by the risk of failure, always at the risk of discovering something ineffable. No matter how well you institutionalize it, there is always a good possibility that the best critical work comes from outside the establishment. What’s most exciting about film criticism in the internet age is that it is truly democratic: the best criticism can come from the most unexpected quarters, from personalities without any history or credentials in film criticism or studies. It is in this quality of perennially being a level playing field for film criticism that 21st century cinephilia is most promising, rejects as it does both the intellectual priesthood of the academia and the oligarchic taste-making of print criticism.
It’s hard for me to imagine how the dominant, non-formalist form of film studies, with its systemic handicap of abstaining from value judgment and not being able to treat the film as an independent aesthetic object capable of producing an infinite variety of affects, can be terribly instructive for the enterprise of film criticism, which necessarily calls for a hierarchy of values on the part of the practitioner and his/her acknowledgement being a sentient, unique subject capable of being transformed by the film. (Presumably to show that this is indeed possible, Girish, taking the example of Tom Gunning’s study of Fritz Lang’s films. tells us how theoretical research and film scholarship has demystified the romantic conception of the artist as an endowed being and challenged auteur theory’s far-flung claims. But then, it speaks only of an awkward state of film criticism if it requires film studies to disabuse it of artistic mythmaking.) These disagreements, rather than being drawbacks, are precisely what make the book so interesting to read because, to me, the book is a logical extension of Girish’s work at his blog, where such disagreements and conversations take place all the time. I can imagine making the same comments at his blog had the material of the book unfolded as a series of blog posts. And true to the spirit of his style of posting, the book is an ideal déclencheur, a trigger to get conversation going. That’s more than a good reason to get to it.
June 21, 2015 at 10:00 pm
Readers in India can order the book from Tokioga (Thanks, Nitesh!)
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June 21, 2015 at 11:19 pm
An interesting take by Girish as well as you. Well Cinephilia could change with the new inventive ways of watching films but one’s appreciation for films should only come from the unconditional love for them. Now I say unconditional because there are so many influences that really shape our cinephilia. The books, the reviews, the essays we read do really change our perspectives (these days the popular poll site IMDB has been changing many perspectives). We might debate over films or could follow different theories, we could be an integral part of the DVD circulations or the torrent culture, we could have material pursuits but in any case films should always remain as a personal experience to us. And cinephilia that goes beyond watching and thinking into reading and discussing many a times bring about such influences that change our original perspectives towards the films. This could be good for us but it shouldn’t really come at the cost of originality of our thoughts which I believe it does many a times.
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June 22, 2015 at 11:44 am
Thanks for the note, Krunal. You raise a good point about originality and influences, which demands the question whether our cinephilic tastes are entirely derived from personal preferences. Of course, the answer is no. But it is useful to reflect on who our taste-makers are – critics? publications? festival programmers? Reflecting on the development of my own taste, I could tell you that there would be (only) about a dozen individuals who have determined my taste to a large extent. That is why I am suspicious of consensus and of the idea that it is a great coincidence that a filmmaker/film is liked by such vastly dispersed people.
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June 21, 2015 at 11:38 pm
Thank You JAFB, yet again for a perceptive review. These are questions that we in our short engagement with the college film society of Christ University have grappled with time and again.
The problem with Film Studies, as I see it despite my modest reading, is that it still functions as an offshoot of literary theory, philosophy and that demon of cultural studies which flattens the formal uniqueness of art forms in its pursuit of reading them as mere containers of cultural content. Formal textual analysis which grows out of the text (film) instead of consuming it under a predetermined framework is crucial to create what Sontag would call ‘erotics of art’ instead of mere ‘hermeneutics’. Theoretical writing too, after all has become consumeristic with the publish or perish dictum of the academia.
I do feel that there has to be some discretion between enthusiastic but not so well thought out judgement of films on Facebook statuses and a thought out response, which too could be on social media. But that discretion cannot be on the basis of how academic or close to film studies the criticism is. Criticism in the internet age has the possibility of engaging more thoroughly with the film form with the process of filmmaking itself so demystified. Cinephiles have the responsibility , if at all any, to create an independent language for film criticism and conversations, independent from all other art forms and also film studies.
Eager to read the book now.
Cheers,
prashant
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June 22, 2015 at 11:54 am
Thank you for the excellent note, Prashanth. I find myself completely agreeing with you.
I must add that my dissatisfaction with film studies might also partly stem from a myopia of now knowing what are its most interesting recent developments. For me. the Bordwellian school of film studies holds promise. And from what Girish describes of Figural Analysis (which on first instance sounds to me to be more suited to be called Figural Studies than Figural Criticism), it looks like a rich terrain. But yes, as long as film studies remains under the aegis of Lit Theory, I feel that it will invariably end up reducing film to something much less than what it is.
Thanks again and cheers!
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June 22, 2015 at 8:41 pm
Srikanth, thank you for this post! And for taking on the role of interlocutor and engaging with the book! This is one of those times when the Internet feels woefully inadequate to me: you bring up SO many points on which I want to conduct a dialogue with you. I wish we were at a café or bar instead, debating vigorously over multiple drinks and many hours … but we don’t have that luxury now (perhaps at some point in the future …)
So, here are some comments in the spirit of conversation …
— You write that the book’s definition of cinephilia “leaves out … vast demographic obsessive film-watchers not involved in film-critical discourse (including film tribes and sub-cultures such as anime fandom) …”
Actually, I see such subcultures as being very much involved in film discourse on the Internet: take, for example, anime fans who converse about films on message boards or on social media like Twitter. Film discourse (for me a capacious umbrella term) comes in multiple, unconventional and frequently “humble” forms (not just in the form of formal “published texts”)—including something as simple as two cinephiles conversing about films in person or online …
— Now, here is where I draw a line in the sand: To me, a film-watcher who watches films obsessively and yet takes no interest in talking about them or reading about them is not really a cinephile; this person is instead involved in solipsistic consumption, and shows no curiosity in thinking about the relationship between the films and the world. This is why, to me, cinephilia is never a “vehemently personal and solitary activity”. Instead, it is an activity that constantly involves going beyond one’s own experience in order to read, to think, to listen and talk to others—and to “write” about cinema (this writing activity defined extremely broadly to include, even, for example, emails, Facebook comments, tweets, or personal jottings in a diary). Seen in this broad way, I see the association between cinephilia and writing—an association I claim is essential to cinephilia—to be quite uncontroversial.
— The definition of cinephilia I’m working with does not exclude the many groups of people you bring up (hosts, seeders, bootleggers, uploaders) who work on making films available on the Internet. I don’t address them in the book because the focus of this (very small) book is on writing and conversation about cinema, which I see as a key defining characteristic of cinephilia. I will admit that the book has a polemical thrust in this regard! It wants to “make a plea” (as Daniel Morgan says on the back) for writing about cinema, in a multiplicity of forms …
— Srikanth, I find your distinction between the “cinephile working class” (those who work on making films available on the Internet) and the “cinephile upper class” (those who write about cinema on the Internet) to be problematic. These terms have strong connotations (from Marx on down): the “upper class” owns the means of production, and hires the “working class” to labor and produce goods and/or services, which the “upper class” sells at a profit. This analogy simply doesn’t hold in the world of cinephilia. Instead of this hierarchical framework that you (provocatively) propose, what I see are two communities who toil, devoting their energies to different activities, with occasional benefit to each other.
— Where I disagree deeply with you, Srikanth, is the way you hierarchically place film criticism above/ahead of the work that takes place in the discipline of film studies. I don’t see a one-way relationship in which film criticism plays the role of “avant-garde” to the “arriere-garde” of film studies. The reality is more complex—and the relationship is two-way. I think the projects are doing something different and important—and have useful things to teach each other. They BOTH alternately play “avant-garde” and “arriere-garde” to each other.
This is because there can be no film criticism without IDEAS. Film criticism involves thought, reflection—the bringing together of films and ideas. If the role of the critic is to pay close attention to the film that he/she is writing about, then the discipline of film studies (an effort, on the whole, much larger in scale than the activity of film criticism) works on asking deeper theoretical questions (there is theory underlying the simplest, most banal observations and judgments of any critic—whether acknowledged or not), doing the hard work of historical research, developing new frameworks through which to look at and make sense of the world (e.g. applying to films paradigms as varied as feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and a host of other theoretical approaches such as those derived from philosophy, aesthetics, etc). These are tools that, at every turn, offer possibilities for richer criticism. (Like in any other endeavor, these tools can be abused or used unthinkingly, but this is true of all ideas—and does not mean that we should cease developing new ways of looking at and making sense of the world.)
— You speak of the gender imbalance in cinephilia (an important point!). If the SCMS conferences I have been annually attending for the last 5 years are any indication (and I believe they are), the discipline of film studies has a much healthier balance between men and women—and offers a good model for alternative (and more gender-balanced) modes of social engagement about films than those in traditional, male-dominated cinephilia.
— Finally, let me say that the specter you raise (in your email) of film-watching as absolute consumerism—a mere collecting of “experiences” like tourism or extreme sports—is undoubtedly a danger of the super-abundance of the Internet. But the reason why extreme sports or tourism are consumerist is that they remain acquisitive quests for collecting (in this case, experiences) but with the ABSENCE of critical thought or reflection upon those experiences and their relationship to culture and the world at large. We return once again to the importance of ideas and thought—and joining them to experience. Absent this joining together of experience with thought, we will remain in the realm of consumerism …
Ultimately, of course, the goal is not simply to generate critical thought but to allow that thought, over time, to affect and change our individual actions in the world—in the way we treat those who are different from us, weaker than us, who don’t have the kind of privileges we do. Ultimately, we want the films we watch to make us better people in the world …
Sorry that I have gone on for so long, Srikanth! I hope you will accept my comments in the spirit of dialogue spurred by your gracious tone and invitation … Cheers!
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June 23, 2015 at 12:06 am
Thank you so much for your detailed comment, Girish. I am really happy that you took your time to respond to the post. Absolutely, it would have been just fantastic to have this conversation over the table! Such a day in on my bucket list. Would love to meet you soon.
– I understand that you characterize cinephilia as a conscious reaching out to the world in some form – going beyond one’s own experience, as you put it, be it through some sort of writing, real-life or virtual conversations. Given this, it is interesting to me that you also include personal diary jottings as being part of this practice, because I had thought that, by your formulation, to be involved in film discourse is to interact with the minds outside yourself. If by “thinking about films”, you also include hermetic personal reflection, the coinage, to me, renders the definition of cinephilia much looser as to be useful to draw a line. It is hard for me to imagine ANY movie-goer not reflecting on the film she/he watches on at least some rudimentary level, although he might not note it down in a written format. I’m thinking of the film-goers in the film CINEMANIA. I am sure that they do have opinions on cinema, they do think about the films they watch, they do have preferences and they would at least be good at, at the very least, comparing and contrasting each film they see with others. Basically, I think we are arriving at an idea of a non-cinephile (who is a movie-watcher) who is simply an image-consuming machine, which seems to me to be an abstraction.
– Yes, I can see the central purpose of the book to problematize Sontag’s constricting definition of cinephilia and explore the newer, wider forms it has taken on the internet. Perhaps my comments about whom the book does not deal with (“excludes”) seem perhaps overly critical of the book, while I actually wanted to contextualize what kind of internet cinephilia the work sets out to explore, because I thought to even speak of New Cinephilia as an umbrella ‘movement’, as a broad church spanning vast variety of practices, without acknowledging the existence of these distrubutional activities (or defining them clearly as non-cinephilia), runs the risk of narrowing the area of focus. Thank you for your clarification here.
– True, Girish. The two groups do work in the benefit of each other. And it is the knowledge workers like film critics who are the working class in film-critical universe, if we are to go into economic relationship. No question about that. The class-based terms that I used are intended very loose and do not imply a struggle between these two communities. I hope I was clear enough that it is meant not in a Marxist sense (OK, I mean that I used quotation marks!) but in a social sense. I call one a “working class” because of the invisible labour it does in facilitating and widening cinephilia and the other group – the discourse producers – the “upper class” because of the automatic respectability their/our activity engenders. Though they might be heroes for cinephiles, bootleggers and torrenters cannot come “overground” identifying themselves as such. They even owe their existence partly to the anonymity that internet allows.
– The relationship between film studies and film criticism, is for me, the meatiest part of the book. And it is my favorite part of your rejoinder here as well! “They BOTH alternately play “avant-garde” and “arriere-garde” to each other.” – gives me something to really think about, because I would really like to be convinced of it.
I will not mince words here. I do tend to place film criticism above film studies, and it’s likely because of my own acknowledged philistinism towards the latter. And I do agree that there can be no good film criticism without ideas. But what I can’t get my head around is that why is it that it should necessarily come from film studies, and not other fields of thought. (Now, if we view film studies as a larger endeavour assimilating all these other fields, doesn’t it render it a largely derived domain of study, thus undermining it’s claims of being the avant-garde to criticism? I don’t know.) You say “there is theory underlying the simplest, most banal observations and judgments of any critic—whether acknowledged or not”. If this is true, I think it speaks more of the all-pervasive power of academia that has institutionalized most forms of organized thought and less of the influence that film studies has had on thinking about films as a critic-cinephile.
My gripe with film theoretical frameworks (that they look for answers where only questions and contradictions exist) aside, I will have to confess, it unsettles me that we believe that theoretical frameworks are ineluctable for approaching and discussing films. The thought makes me think wonder whether we aren’t treating cinema as painted word – or rather, filmed word – to paraphrase Tom Wolfe. (That I quote Wolfe perhaps betrays more about me than I would like!) It is my conviction that it is the duty of film criticism to evade earning insights on the cheap, by blindly applying the shibboleths of academic frameworks. Furthermore, I think best criticism actively deals with the untheorizable in cinema. I am convinced that this is indeed possible and would exemplify it with some of the writing of Danny Kasman and Ignatiy, to name only a couple. Since criticism largely entails value judgment and judgment, however determined by political and social forces, is in the final instance uniquely subjective, criticism, to me, is a spiritual activity that reduces neither the art object to a matrix of pre-determined theoretical constructs nor the practitioner to one whose work can be replaced by any equally scholarly trained person. To put it bluntly, I believe that the science of film studies disallows original, subjective interventions thanks to the demands of academic rigour. For my own sake, I hope I am proved wrong about this.
– That’s great. It is very heartening to hear that film studies provides a salutary gender balance than the mainstream internet cinephilia I witness/am part of.
– Regarding consumerism: firstly, Matthew Flanagan pointed me to a very interesting paper on traditional Marxism’s approach to consumerism, where the author argues that “capitalism is in many ways incompatible with consumerism” and that attempts at criticizing capitalism on the basis that it creates artificial desires are “barking up the wrong tree”. That was a bracingly new thought for me. Thanks, Matt!
Elsewhere, my friend Sourav Roy reminds me rightly that “No form of knowledge production or organised activity in any age can be untainted or at least partially uncontrolled by the dominant economic and cultural patterns of that age and the most hallowed intellectual activity of any age can be reduced to being products of that age but that runs the risk of being reductive scholarship.”
I think your comment about a critical reflection differentiating cinephilia from other forms of experience consumerism also dovetails well into the argument above.
I think the key then is to not throw the baby with the bath water, to not reject cinephilic pursuit because it is a symptom of its age, but to be aware of that fact and maintain a critical distance from it all the time.
Thank you once again, Girish, for such a level-headed and elaborate response. I had to really dialectically work with it!
Cheers!
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June 24, 2015 at 3:36 pm
As an aside to the cinephilia as consumerism thesis, a very interesting development: http://pastebin.com/qy3SLK3D
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June 24, 2015 at 3:40 pm
Hi Anuj,
I’m not able to access this file right now, but I am guessing it is from “Judex”. Was reading it this morning. Very, very interesting. Need to wait and see where this leads.
Cheers!
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June 25, 2015 at 8:21 pm
Thank you, Srikanth, for your detailed reply!
There are SO many fertile areas of discussion in our conversation above. The next time I am in India, perhaps we can try to meet up and spend a few hours talking about them–that would be fun!
Srikanth, my friend, let me be honest: I sense in you an *irrational* resistance to checking out and exploring the kind of writing and work that scholars have done on film. I find this baffling, my friend! You cannot judge an area until you learn about it in some depth–just as we critics don’t take seriously the judgments of someone who criticizes/makes blanket statements about cinema without seriously and deeply investigating it/watching it/learning about it over a healthy period of time. The binary opposition (and hierarchy) you create between the higher, “subjective” activity of critics and the less valuable, “scientific” and “rigorous” work of scholars is, to me, simply a caricature. It bears no resemblance to reality. An actual immersion in the work of scholars for a few months will make this evident.
Now, I am not sure there is anything more I can say at this moment to persuade you on this point; this is, instead, a discovery YOU will have to make for yourself. And it is a project that will truly require an openness and *curiosity* on your part; and a temporary setting aside of pre-judgments …
All I can do now is try to point the way a little bit. If you are interested in checking out the work of cinema scholars in some depth, rather than diving in randomly I would suggest starting out with a handful of scholars who have both (a) written great film criticism (by the way, the binary between film criticism and film studies is problematic for another reason as well: there is a plethora of great film criticism written by scholars); and (b) whose writing is clear and attentive (as opposed to indifferent) to matters of style, a factor that I personally find important in my own reading.
A few examples, then, of scholarly writing for you to consider looking at closely: Adrian Martin on HOLY MOTORS in the Journal of Screenwriting; Matthew Flanagan’s PhD thesis on slow cinema; Tom Gunning’s book on Fritz Lang; James Naremore’s book on Vincente Minnelli; Joe McElhaney’s books “The Death of Classical Cinema” and “Albert Maysles”; and Lesley Stern’s “The Scorsese Connection”. Also keep in mind that there is no hard break between the work of critics and scholars. There is a lot of early writing produced by critics that scholars have now taken up and built upon (and thus, this early critical work has now become an integral part of the corpus of scholarship): well-known examples in this category would include Bazin, the 4 Cahiers du Cinema collections, the writings of MOVIE and Robin Wood, etc, etc.
You write: “the best criticism actively deals with the untheorizable in cinema.” I disagree strongly with this statement: NOTHING under the sun is untheorizable! Theory is not just something that occurs in the the rarefied ivory tower of academia. Any good and responsible critic is also (and frequently) engaged in the activity of theorizing–whether he or she knows it or not.
So, what is “theory”? Theory is a speculative activity that is an attempt to give an account of something, an attempt to explain the workings of something. That’s all it is–nothing more. Bazin’s writings frequently function simultaneously as criticism and as theoretical exploration, constantly occupied with fundamental questions such as “what is the essence of cinema? what sets it apart from the other arts? what is its relationship to the other arts?” This is nothing but theory in action! Think of Tom Gunning’s work and the way he asks fundamental questions about what early cinema was trying to do; he proposes the idea of “the cinema of attractions” to account for its effects. Think of Adrian’s recent book that theorizes mise en scène: what is this idea, what are all the things it has been, and how has it been transformed over the course of several decades? He performs a number close analyses of scenes from films (and draws from a vast amount of literature in multiple languages) to provide evidence for his (ambitious) account.
Finally, I see Ignatiy and Danny’s work as being *frequently* theoretical–only this theorizing is implicit, not explicit as it might be in the work of a scholar. In so many of their pieces, Ignatiy and Danny are writing BOTH about the film in front of them AND also simultaneously making general statements about cinema and its powers as a medium, as an art-form, as experience. The making of general assertions that pertain not just to one object but to something larger: a *range* of objects or artifacts or events–this is what theory is.
Thanks again for a terrific conversation and exchange, Srikanth! Perhaps we can try to meet up in India the next time I’m there.
Cheers!
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June 25, 2015 at 10:17 pm
Thank you once again, Girish, for that detailed and through-provoking response. Each of your post is bettering the previous one ;)
I’d like to engage with it in reverse order. First off, a note on the idea of ‘theory’. There seems to be a gap in what I mean by theory and what you delineate here, and I think this ‘gap’ would go a good way in explaining my possible misconception about and antagonism towards Film Theory. The description of theory that you invoke here is to my mind simply the objective of all critical analysis. And I am very much of the notion that film criticism must deal with ideas and thus every critical account must ‘theorize’ about the object of critique, which is to say draw inferences about ontology and aesthetics of film in a way that opens up your field of view for future film-viewing. Why, in fact, this might be the very reason – this opening of a particular film into greater possibilities – I love and valorize film criticism. But, as I said, I believe that this kind of analysis must “derive from the object the analytical tools necessary for discussing it”. When I say that film criticism must deal with the untheorizable, I mean that its critical discourse must surpass such pre-fabricated, framework-driven approach and drive the film’s thematic and stylistic contradictions to newer directions.
But what I refer to theory (and criticize), on the other hand, is Theory with a capital T; the grand narratives (and their numerous intersections) deriving majorly from literary theory; the structuralist-semiotic approach for which the hermeneutic framework is of paramount importance and the film object itself secondary. This is the jargon-haunted, mechanically theoretical academicism (Marxism, Feminism, Narratology, Psychoanalysis, Queer Theory, Post-colonialism, Racial Theory, Genre Studies) that I refer to as Film Theory – and, perhaps problematically but very consciously conflate with Film Studies in general. Whatever suspicion I have raised here towards Film Studies pertain to this idea of film studies, which reduces film with some a-filmic essentialism. And this is the reason I choose to set it aside from Bordwellian/formalist school of studies, which I think is of much promise, considers as it does each film in its throbbing cinematic vivacity. I am equally enthusiasic to embrace early cinema theorists like Pudovkin and Kuleshov, who don’t form a part of the idea of film studies I am talking about.
I do understand the gradation of difference between scholars and critics. I love Robin Wood’s book on Hitchcock, and I thought of it as a great balance between the Grand Theory approach and criticism. Some of my favorite critics hail an academic background and others have taken up studies after years of writing criticism. My gripe, however, was between the two approaches (of Theory and criticism) to films. Your suggestions here, Girish, are invaluable. I would have soon written you a mail seeking recommendations about books and the list here sound like a great starting point. But they also sound like works I would indeed consider film criticism, though they come from academics and university presses. (For the record, I think books like THE ALTERING EYE, THE NEW WAVE, Donald Richie’s Kurosawa book are masterpieces of criticism.) To study, say, a director’s films, treat them primarily as independent films but also situate them historically, culturally and stylistically is, for me, good criticism. On the other hand, I dread to approach the two-volumes of MOVIES AND METHODS that is sitting on my bookshelf for some time now (though they do occassionally contain pieces like those of Bazin).
So I think it comes down to my idea of film scholarship (which I equate intentionally with Grand Theory, which also still seems to be the driving force behind countless student papers). And this is where I, in a comment above, conceded that my myopia about new developments in academia might be causing me to conflate film theory with Grand Theory. I admit I don’t know what are the newer approaches in film studies, but if it is anything that resembles replacing of one of the gods of Theory with another equally reductive one, I would be inclined to maintain my prejudice towards the field. At the same time, I am able to entertain the possibility that this is a gross reduction of what film studies in its entirety is. But for the outsider such as me, the ultimate impression is this identity between Film Studies and Grand Theory.
Thank you once again, Girish, for such a placid and informative response. I do well understand that anyone else with a temperament such as my own from an opposed camp would have shreded me to pieces for these (consciously) uncharitable comments of mine where I have hazarded my opinions more than I ever have on this blog. But I had to put these thoughts to words one point in time or the other.
Cheers!
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June 25, 2015 at 11:51 pm
Thank you, Srikanth: I’m enjoying it too!
I’ll try to come back and respond in the next couple of days.
“… where I have hazarded my opinions more than I ever have on this blog.”
This is great to hear: I’m very happy you were emboldened to do so!
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June 25, 2015 at 10:33 pm
Girish, this is the most elaborate and exciting discussion I have had in this blog in ages. Thank you!
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July 3, 2015 at 5:03 pm
Came across these articles by Bordwell and Fujiwara. Strangely, I find myself agreeing with both of them. Very good reads.
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