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                Tico Romao

        The 'High-Water Mark' of Film Theory




_Explorations in Film Theory: Selected Essays from Cine-Tracts_
Edited by Ron Burnett
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991
ISBN 0-253-31282-5
xxvii + 289 pages

One of the more significant points that should be borne in mind when
reading _Explorations in Film Theory_ is the original publication dates of
the pieces contained in the collection. Although published in 1991, the
book consists of a selection of essays that originally appeared in the
Canadian journal _Cine-Tracts_ in its short-lived run from 1976 to 1983.
Dating from this period, it is not surprising to find that many of the
essays in the volume work out from the dominant theoretical framework of
the time, what has now come to be known in film studies as
subject-positioning theory. For those unfamiliar with the term,
'subject-positioning theory' designates a hybrid of theoretical concerns,
amalgamating semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism and feminism into one
overarching explanatory scheme. In this framework, signification, ideology
and subjectivity are held to be inherently linked such that the
reproduction of social life and its systems of domination are connected
with the signifying properties of discursive practices and their resultant
constitution of subjectivity. In her foreword to the volume, Kaja Silverman
(a major exponent of this approach) insists upon the continued validity of
subject-positioning theory and claims that this kind of endeavour
represents the 'highwater mark' of theoretical investigation in the history
of the discipline (viii).

There are good reasons to doubt Silverman's claims. Over the past
twenty-odd years various criticisms have been raised against some of the
core assumptions of subject-positioning theory, and its viability as a
research strategy has been seriously questioned. These criticisms,
moreover, have come from a variety of quarters. During the late 1970s
Stuart Hall and David Morley, both affiliated with the Birmingham Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies, were critical of the theory's
unavoidable ahistoricity given its reliance upon Lacanian and Althusserian
frameworks. [1] In the same vein, figures within the reception studies camp
expanded upon the criticisms initiated by the British cultural studies
approach by arguing that the theory's model of film spectatorship was
wholly inadequate with its near exclusive emphasis upon textual
determinations. [2] Lastly, cognitive film theory has produced several
trenchant critiques of subject-positioning theory, perhaps the most
influential of those being Noel Carroll's _Mystifying Movies_, an
exhaustive demonstration of the framework's often shaky theoretical
foundations. [3] It is indicative of the theory's recent standing when one
finds film theorists such as Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake conceding
that the 'project for a unified theory of signification, ideology and
subjectivity was unachievable' even though they are otherwise sympathetic
with the overall objectives of the approach. [4]

One can therefore safely conclude that even at the time of the collection's
publication subject-positioning theory was no longer commanding widespread
assent within film studies. Naturally, when reading _Explorations in Film
Theory_, I found it difficult to set aside these criticisms when reflecting
upon several of the pieces, many of which have long lost their appearance
of being cutting-edge work. In reviewing a volume like this, I was faced
with a question that no doubt arises whenever one returns to earlier
theoretical efforts that have been superseded by arguably superior
accounts: How does one read *old theory*? The question is a good one in
that ideally one ought to avoid the tedious repetition of well-known
criticisms whilst not lapsing into a pointless apologetics of the theory
under question. As I soon discovered, _Explorations in Film Theory_
demanded precisely this strategy. Even though many of the articles
reproduced in the volume are based upon deeply problematic and ultimately
unproductive assumptions, they nonetheless occasionally exhibit insightful
analyses that deserve to be acknowledged and can be incorporated into
current theoretical work.

The collection is thematically organised into four sections, with each of
the sections intended to represent 'the main ideas which the magazine
pursued' (xviii). The first section, 'The Turn of the Subject', is
primarily devoted to the explication of subject-positioning theory and its
application to the analysis of film. Patricia Mellencamp's opening piece,
'Spectacle and Spectator', is an analysis of the American musical and
identifies the ideologically motivated techniques that the genre employed
to contain and delimit proper spectatorial response. Other pieces in the
section depart from the traditional emphasis upon Hollywood films by
applying subject-positioning theory to other forms of filmmaking. Linda
Williams's 'Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions' traces the roots of
the cinema's representation of sexual difference back to the work of
Eadweard Muybridge and Georges Melies. Thomas Elsaesser's essay, 'Primary
Identification and the Historical Subject', takes the theory in another
direction by reworking the psychoanalytical model such that it is capable
of capturing the forms of spectatorial engagement solicited by Fassbinder's
films in the context of post-war Germany.

The first section assumes pride of place in the volume through its
demonstration of the utility of subject-positioning theory as a critical
enterprise. Although the remaining sections of the collection pursue other
issues that are less directly related to subject-positioning theory, there
is a loose attempt to tie together the themes of the collection into an
integrated whole. Several of the essays in the second section, 'The
Documentary Cinema', are informed by the semiotic critique of the concept
of verisimilitude and attempt to make evident the social (and hence
arbitrary) conventions that underlie the purported 'realism' of the
traditional documentary. Jeane Allen's and Judith Mayne's contributions,
for instance, privilege the 'self-reflexive documentary', particularly as
instantiated in the work of Chris Marker and Dziga Vertov due to their
contravention of traditional documentary practice. The third section,
'Signs of Meaning', explores a range of different methodologies that can be
used to link the analysis of meaning in films to the wider historical
context. In her piece, 'Paradoxes of Realism', Margaret Morse claims that
Ian Watt's _The Rise of the Novel_ presents a method by which the textual
structures of films can be connected to an investigation of their social
conditions of existence. In like manner, John Fekete's essay, 'Culture,
History, and Ambivalence', contends that Walter Benjamin's work provides a
model for contemporary cultural analysis in that Benjamin purposively
avoided any problematic conception of culture as a cohesive and integrated
unity. The last section of the volume consists of a mixed bag of essays
that are awkwardly lumped under the themes of the section heading, 'Film
Form/ Film History'. These essays are the least related to the interests of
previous chapters, with some pieces not even appearing to be strictly
aligned with subject-positioning theory.

Aside from these last pieces tucked in at the end of the volume, much of
the collection manifests what is perhaps the typifying feature of
subject-positioning theory: a commitment to explain a wide range of
phenomena on the basis of a few core (usually psychoanalytic) assumptions
that are embedded in either a Marxist or feminist perspective. Yet,
whatever gains the theory has achieved in terms of explanatory breadth,
they are nonetheless offset by its ill-founded assumptions and a tendency
to rely upon questionable modes of reasoning. These problematic areas have
been succinctly itemised in a recent essay by David Bordwell that is
directly applicable to my appraisal of _Explorations in Film Theory_. [5]
Several of the liabilities that Bordwell identifies with the
subject-positioning approach as a whole are in evidence with respect to
many of the pieces in the collection. Modifying Bordwell's list somewhat, I
shall highlight the four principal problems that I feel vitiate the
arguments of several of the pieces in the volume: 1) an inadequate
conception of the human agent; 2) an insufficient concern for proper
historical investigation; 3) a reliance upon 'grand theories'; and 4)
associative reasoning. Although I shall restrict my comments to specific
articles, their applicability extends to other essays in the collection
which rely upon similar theoretical assumptions.

1. Heath on the Individual/Subject Distinction

Stephen Heath's essay, 'The Turn of the Subject', from which the title of
the opening section derives, attempts to rectify some of the attendant
conceptual problems associated with the post-structuralist notion of *the
subject*. Although Heath does not explicitly refer to the Stuart Hall and
David Morley articles mentioned previously, it soon becomes apparent that
he is directly responding to the criticisms they raise. One charge that
Hall directs at the post-structuralist notion of the subject is that it
effectively eliminates any possibility of theorising resistance. [6] Heath
is alive to this charge and tries to circumvent it by maintaining that the
concept of the individual and the subject are distinct notions and are not
be conflated (26). While Heath acknowledges that Althusser's account of the
subject in 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' is the primary
source of this conflation, he claims that Lacan himself avoids the problem
by keeping the concepts distinct, and it is to his work that
subject-positioning theory should turn (27-28).

The significance of the individual/subject distinction for Heath is that it
provides a gap between the ideological constitution of subjectivity through
discursive practices and the individual, a space from which 'real and
effective action and transformation' can arise (29). Heath is unclear on
the precise relationship that holds between the subject and the individual,
but given that in his account the discursive constitution of subjectivity
is the site of ideological determinations, one must assume that the
initiative for transformative action can only come from the individual side
of the equation. To seek the source for the initiative of transformative
action one must necessarily turn to Heath's conceptualisation of the
individual. This is the definition that he supplies:

'What one confronts is 'a precise constituted materiality' and there is no
single opposition of the type individual/subject adequate to that
constitution which then demands every time a multiple analysis of
instances, articulations, determinations that intersect, cut different
ways, open into contradictions one with another. To say that the subject is
not equivalent to the individual is one moment of a stress on such
multiplicity, of a necessary attempt to pull away from the reductionism of
Althusser's essay so as to refind something of the difficulty of his given
-- 'abstract', 'concrete' -- individual' (30).

Among the instances that go to make up the individual, Heath cites such
things as genetic inheritance and social environmental effects, hardly
groundbreaking claims in that such factors are widely acknowledged in
developmental psychology. But what is specifically problematic with this
account is that the interrelations between these factors are left entirely
in the open when it is obviously the business of theory to specify these
relations. Heath's term -- 'precise constituted materiality' -- is then
simply a misnomer. There is no precision in his account, only a space
provided for endless speculation on the part of the reader. [7] Although
Heath avoids the crass reductionism of the Althusserian framework, his
attempted resolution of the subject/individual distinction nonetheless
fails to provide an informed account of the human agent. Despite supplying
a few psychological truisms as to the nature of the individual, Heath's
account in no way illuminates the possible sources of transformative action.

2. The Historicization of Subject-Positioning Theory

Thomas Elsaesser's essay, 'Primary Identification and the Historical
Subject', can also be seen as an attempt to resolve some of the more
evident problems with the theory. The Lacanian account of the formation of
the subject, upon which much of subject-positioning theory rested, had been
criticised for being a 'trans-historical and trans-social' account of human
development. [8] Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz inherited this
ahistoricism in their psychoanalytical formulations of the systems of
identification by which the cinematic apparatus positioned the spectator.
Dissatisfied with the lack of historical specificity of these accounts,
Elsaesser's solution is to treat the cinematic apparatus as a historically
mutable institution whose psychic economy varies with respect to social
context. As his test case, Elsaesser points to the New German Cinema and
claims that Fassbinder's films are better understood in terms of
exhibitionism as opposed to voyeurism, and are ultimately symptomatic of a
different psychic economy operating within German social life (94-96). To
support these broad historical claims, Elsaesser refers to Alexander
Mitscherlich's metapsychological reading of Germany during the Nazi and
post-war periods as providing a confirmation of his analysis (96-98).

How successful is Elsaesser's attempt to historicize subject-positioning
theory? Not very. Although Elsaesser's rejects the postulation of universal
psychic mechanisms by favouring the identification of processes that are
more historically localisable, his account is still much too abstract to
capture the undeniable heterogeneity of spectatorial response within a
concrete national context. Elided from Elsaesser's account are questions
pertaining to the ways in which gender, ethnicity, sexuality and
generational differences (to cite just some of the more favoured categories
of reception studies) may impact upon spectatorship. To speak, therefore,
of a 'historical subject' in the singular is to engage in a thoroughly
problematic mode of historical investigation.

To be fair, Elsaesser is aware that his account may be criticised for
falling into a certain form of psychologism by employing psychoanalytical
concepts in the investigation of a given historical period (97). Yet, in
the end, these reservations do not lead him to doubt the adequacy of his
own psychoanalytical framework, and his attempt to ward off these potential
criticisms is, frankly, confusing. He writes:

'What is different between the Freud of Riesman, Erikson, Klein on the one
hand and that of Lacan, Metz, or Baudry on the other, is that the latter
emphasize . . . the specularity of relations which for the former are
somehow substantial, physical, like the symptoms displayed by Freud's
hysterical patients. Lacan's insistence on the image, the eye, in the
deformation of the self . . . shows the extent to which he has in fact read
Freud in the light of concrete historical and social changes' (98).

As should be apparent, the reasoning behind this response is patently
circular. Elsaesser believes that his psychoanalytical reading of
Fassbinder's films avoids the charge of ahistoricism in that he bases it
upon a Lacanian understanding of the social determinations of the regimes
of specularity, determinations not sufficiently acknowledged by certain ego
psychologists. But this is simply to assume what is precisely in question,
that is, the adequacy of analysing from a historical perspective the social
relations of post-war Germany in terms of notions of specularity and
exhibitionism. To make matters worse, this response is also incompatible
with the general thrust of his argument. It is odd that Elsaesser invokes
the names of Metz and Baudry as the guarantors of the historical soundness
of his analysis when the initial section of his essay is devoted to a
critique of the inflexibility of their very frameworks.

In many ways, Elsaesser's essay is indicative of the problems
subject-positioning theory faced when it began to address historical
questions. At least in this essay, Elsaesser's conclusions on the dynamics
of post-war Germany are primarily based upon a textual analysis of
Fassbinder's films and a reliance upon a few secondary sources. This was
the typical manner in which subject-positioning theory attempted to
historicize its framework. Instead of rolling up one's sleeves and engaging
in empirical research, subject-positioning theorists remained content to
engage in a mode that restricted itself to pure conjecture. It would be
fair to say that what was truly inimical to subject-positioning theory was
not so much the idea of history itself, but the proper mode of its
investigation through empirical research.

3. The Search for Grand Theory

Given the broad theoretical aspirations of subject-positioning theory, it
is not surprising that it was criticised for indulging in 'Grand Theory',
the construction of a theoretical system that, crudely put, attempted to
explain virtually every aspect of cultural production. [9] Despite talk of
rejecting 'totalizing' schemes, subject-positioning theorists were for the
most part untroubled by the ambitiousness of their project.

Margaret Morse's essay 'Paradoxes of Realism' represents a rather clear
instance of grand theory in operation. Her essay begins by lamenting the
fact that film studies lacks an approach that 'makes the link between a
history of changing social relations and cultural institutions, the mode of
production and reception of film texts and the analysis of the texts
themselves in their historical context' (155). In other words, Morse wants
nothing less than a single theoretical system that exhaustively
incorporates just about every angle through which the cinema has been
studied. She finds such an approach at work in Ian Watt's _The Rise of the
Novel_, and attempts to update Watt's methodological procedures by
translating them into the concepts privileged by subject-positioning theory
(157-158). For instance, we are told that Watt's distinction between
'formal realism' and 'realism of assessment' corresponds to the
history/discourse distinction as used by Metz and other film theorists
(160-162). More importantly, Morse finds in Watt's work a means to connect
a film's textual features with its social conditions of existence. As
cultural forms, both the novel and film serve the same socialising function
by providing in fictionalised form an imaginary identity of coherence as a
relief from the unremitting fragmentation of the social realm through the
forces of capitalism and technological development (162-164). Films bear
the traces of such fragmentation not only in terms of their physical
construction, as an assemblage of shots, but also in respect to story
material. Morse provides the example of how the social division of labour
between men and women inflects the diegesis of Griffith's _The Lonedale
Operator_ in which the social division is manifested in the form of the
female protagonist's unfamiliarity with tools, (in this case, a wrench)
(163-164). In the future, with the ever increasing fragmentation of the
social realm, Morse concludes that realism as an aesthetic strategy will no
longer be capable of offering effective images of imaginary coherence.

Generally speaking, Morse's essay manifests all of the hallmarks of grand
theory, particularly its shortcomings. As a result of the scale of Morse's
theoretical ambitions, her analyses of particular films (and these are
rare) are remarkably unilluminating. Take, for example, her analysis of
_The Lonedale Operator_. We are told that the social division of labour
between men and women is somehow a causative factor in the manner in which
the female protagonist is represented. But the reader is nonetheless left
in the dark as to the concrete mechanisms by which this social division of
labour had produced this specific representation of femininity. It is
dubious to assume that the social conditions from which _The Lonedale
Operator_ was produced necessarily mandated that all women were to be
represented as mechanically inept. The causes of this particular
representation must be sought elsewhere, more plausibly, I would suggest,
in the immediate production practices of the filmmaking institution in
which Griffith and Co. worked. As Henry Jenkins has correctly observed,
'historical explanations must start with the work itself and move gradually
towards its most immediate context rather than adopt global or
transhistorical theories'. [10] Morse, however, works from the opposition
direction. In typical grand theory style, Morse begins with large-scale
social processes, such as the fragmentation of social life, to explain a
particular textual feature. What is primarily missing from her account is a
recognition of what mediates these two levels of analysis, that is, the
historical specificity of the filmmaking system itself.

4. Associative Reasoning

Subject-positioning theory has not only been taken to task with respect to
the theoretical assumptions upon which it was based and the level of
generality at which it operated. It has also been criticised for the very
manner in which it made its arguments. [11] Loose metaphorical connections
made between phenomena are often taken to be indicative of deeper, more
substantial relations. Since these criticisms are widely known, I shall
only briefly indicate the most glaring occasion in which such associative
reasoning appears within the essays of _Explorations in Film Theory_.

Mary Ann Doane's essay 'Misrecognition and Identity' consists of an attempt
to clarify the many senses associated with the concept of identification.
To accomplish this, Doane isolates three specific types of identification
that are the most relevant to the analysis of film spectatorship: a)
identification with character; b) the identification of objects, people,
etc. on screen; and c) identification with the camera and the field of
vision that it provides. Although these three types of identification are
'drawn from entirely different and alien problematics' she sees them as
being 'inextricably linked' (16). The remainder of her essay is devoted to
the demonstration of how these three forms of identification are analysable
and made compatible once viewed from a Lacanian framework.

My concern here is with the viability of running together these three
different senses of identification. What I find the most problematic is
Doane's attempt to analyse type b) identification from a psychoanalytical
perspective. Doane claims that object recognition stems from a drive to
'trace back to something already known . . . what Freud isolated as the
compulsion to repeat' (17). While this explanation may account for some of
the pleasure derived from recognising objects, it certainly does not
explain how we, in the first place, are able to identify the objects
represented on screen. To understand this ability, one must turn to
perceptual psychology and not to psychoanalysis.

This recourse to an alternate explanatory framework outside of
psychoanalysis undermines the apparent identity of the three types of
identification postulated by Doane. Where Doane sees a deeper affinity
underlying these types, I see distinct processes that require their own
specific forms of explanation. [12] In the end, one wonders if Doane's
motivation to connect the process of the identification of objects with the
process of the identification of characters is based upon a purely verbal
similarity between the two expressions. Such associative reasoning was by
no means alien to subject-positioning theory. But it seems to me that if
film theory is to progress it will rest upon its ability to make clear
conceptual distinctions rather than generating the obfuscation arising from
an associative leap.

It would be false to suggest that nothing worthwhile can be found in
_Explorations in Film Theory_. Just as not all film theorists during the
1970s and 80s worked out of subject-positioning theory, not all of the
writings in the collection are aligned to that theoretical position. Here,
one immediately recalls David Bordwell's piece 'Camera Movement and
Cinematic Space' which gives a compelling account of the narrative
functions served by camera movement. Also falling outside of the remit of
the general theoretical position of the collection is Raymond Williams's
essay 'Realism, Naturalism and their Alternatives'. Williams carefully
distinguishes between the associated aesthetic strategies of realism and
naturalism, and provides an informed account of their historical
development.

In addition to these exceptions, one should also acknowledge the moments of
illumination that subject-positioning theory was capable of producing,
despite its theoretical commitments. Even bankrupt theoretical principles
do not completely stultify one's work. With its close attention to textual
detail, subject-positioning theory has frequently produced many pieces that
are models of textual analysis and _Explorations in Film Theory_ is not
without such moments. Patricia Mellencamp's essay 'Spectacle and Spectator'
offers a sophisticated analysis of the formal strategies employed in
_Showboat_ by which spectatorial attention is focused upon the protagonist.
In a similar fashion, Linda Williams's 'Film Body' offers a convincing
discussion of the representation of sexual difference in Muybridge's
imagery through her attentiveness to the details of his photographs. These
kind of analyses have not lost their relevance for film studies and can be
profitably returned to. But, as for the status of subject-positioning
theory as a whole, one can only be highly sceptical of Silverman's remarks
pertaining to its continued viability as a productive avenue of research.

University of East Anglia, England
November 1998


Notes

1. Stuart Hall, 'Recent Developments in Theories of Language and Ideology:
A Critical Note', and David Morley, 'Texts, Readers, Subjects', both
reprinted in _Culture, Media, Language_ (Hutchinson, 1980), pp. 157-162 and
163-173.

2. Barbara Klinger, 'Digressions at the Cinema: Reception and Mass
Culture', _Cinema Journal_, vol. 28 no. 4, 1989, pp. 3-6. Lisa Taylor,
'From Psychoanalytic Feminism to Popular Feminism', in Joanne Hollows and
Mark Jancovich, eds., _Approaches to Popular Film_ (Manchester University
Press, 1995), pp. 152-171.

3. Noel Carroll, _Mystifying Movies_ (Columbia University Press, 1988).

4. Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake, _Film Theory: An Introduction_
(Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 12.

5. David Bordwell, 'Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand
Theory', in David Bordwell and Noel Carroll, eds., _Post-Theory:
Reconstructing Film Studies_ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1996), pp. 12-26.

6. Hall, 'Recent Developments in Theories of Language and Ideology', pp.
161-162.

7. My criticisms here parallel those that Noel Carroll makes with regard to
Heath's recommendations for the analysis of film history. Carroll correctly
points out that Heath's enumeration of the (countless) variables that are
in play in any historical conjuncture is explanatorially useless in that
what is left unspecified are the interrelations that hold between them. Be
it the analysis of the individual or the investigation of historical
conjunctures, Heath appears to have the uncanny habit of stopping
theoretical effort precisely at the point at which such efforts would be
most productive. See: Noel Carroll, 'Address to the Heathen', _October_,
no. 23, Winter 1982, pp. 157-163.

8. Hall, 'Recent Developments in Theories of Language and Ideology', p. 160.

9. For detailed critiques of the explanatory problems associated with grand
theory, see: Noel Carroll, 'Prospects for Film Theory', in _Post-Theory_,
pp. 38-41; David Bordwell, 'Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes
of Grand Theory', pp. 18-21.

10. Henry Jenkins, 'Historical Poetics', in _Approaches to Popular Film_,
p. 100.

11. Carroll, 'Address to the Heathen', pp. 153-157; Bordwell, 'Contemporary
Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory', pp. 22-24.

12. Here I am following Murray Smith's lucid unpacking of the concept of
identification into three distinct processes of recognition, alignment and
allegiance. See: _Engaging Characters_ (Clarendon Press, 1995).

                          ******

Tico Romao, 'The 'High-Water Mark' of Film Theory', _Film-Philosophy:
Electronic Salon_, 8 December 1998
<http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files/romao.html>.

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