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FILM-PHILOSOPHY  1998

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Subject:

Hurley on Bordwell

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Fri, 11 Sep 1998 01:28:06 +0000

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                    F  I  L  M  -  P  H  I  L  O  S  O  P  H  Y

                                                    review articles

                                                              <////>


                    James S. Hurley

                    David Bordwell's Iron Cage of Style




David Bordwell
_On the History of Film Style_
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997
ISBN 0-674-63429-2
322 pages

'[P]eople whose profession it is to objectivize the social world prove
rarely able to objectivize themselves, and fail so often to realize that
what their apparently scientific discourse talks about is not the object
but their relation to the object.'
Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J. D. Wacquant

'I am happiest, as a critic and a reader, when I am learning how these two
concerns are mutually illuminating -- how the formal properties of a text
are part of the work that text does in the world, and how its work in the
world is enabled or conditioned by our understanding of its properties.'
Michael Berube


For David Bordwell it would seem that the gravest problem for film studies
programs today is not the withering away of institutional funds slotted for
humanities departments, or the imposition on those programs of
profit-driven hiring, admissions, and curricular practices drawn from
business models, or the possible linkages between this hyper-capitalized
version of humanistic studies and postmodern capitalism's need for an
ever-growing number of instrumentalized bodies to fill an ever-enlarging
professional-managerial class -- no, film studies' gravest problem is none
of these. It's that dad-blasted Lacanian-Althusserian Paradigm (LAP) and
the damage it left in its theoretical wake. Bordwell's been in a running
battle with the LAP for too many years to count, and while much of his
animus against it has seemed to me unnecessary, overstated, or just plain
mistaken, there's no denying that: a) he has scored against the LAP many
telling points; and b) he has done so in the context of a body of work that
is as formidable in its intellectual scope as any produced by an
English-language film critic/theorist, living or dead. In other words, if
Bordwell can at times be a bit monomaniacal, he has also shown himself to
be a critic of remarkable range and force -- a thinker to be reckoned with.

In his most recent book, _On the History of Film Style_, Bordwell jabs the
accusatory finger once again at the LAP and its legatees, citing them for
giving short shrift to -- surprise -- film style. For all the razzle-dazzle
attention paid to textual minutia in much of the LAP's canonical critical
work (e.g., Heath's _Touch of Evil_ analysis; the _Cahiers_ editors'
collective reading of _Young Mr. Lincoln_), it never seemed to pause long
enough to note that the films under examination might have quite
distinctive visual textures and tonalities, and that they might then be
something other than symptomatically charged exempla of the classical
Hollywood production system and the ideology putatively embedded in and
advanced by it. Bordwell sees LAP and post-LAP criticism as doubly remiss
here: remiss in that by jettisoning matters of style this criticism ignores
one of the crucial ways in which films shape their viewers' experiences of
them; and remiss in that this criticism is itself unacknowledgedly
subtended by notions of cinematic history and form developed by the very
historians of film style that the LAP purported to superannuate. Bordwell,
in his 1991 book _Making Meaning_, proposed that the vagaries of
theory-bound criticism could best be countered through 'a self-conscious
historical poetics of the cinema'; [1] _On the History of Film Style_ can
be seen as a preliminary step in the development of such a poetics.

In the opening chapter of _Film Style_, Bordwell places his project in the
context 'of what is broadly taken to be the aesthetic history of cinema'
(4). The history of film style is here only one of the histories contained
within this aesthetic history, sharing space with the history of film
forms, genres, and modes; and this aesthetic history is in turn just one of
the larger historical narratives we can construct about film -- other such
narratives including 'the history of the movie industry, the history of
film technology, and the history of cinema's relations to society or
culture' (4). Because, as Bordwell rightly notes, '[t]hese sorts of history
are not easy to mark off sharply', he finds it advisable that critics look
at the construction of historical narratives in terms of '*questions* posed
at different levels of generality' (4). The questions Bordwell sees as
fundamental to the historian of film style are: 'What patterns of stylistic
continuity and change are significant? How may these patterns be
explained?' (4). All of this seems promising enough: Bordwell suggests that
the separating out of these various histories is sometimes arbitrary and
provisional, that the borders between them are thus porous and moveable,
that critics in general will necessarily have occasion to cross or re-draw
such borders, and that critics concerned specifically with film style will
need to go into other historical narratives in order to account for its
changing articulations. It is Bordwell's goal to answer the questions he
has posed in a way that is 'fine-grained' and 'empirically verifiable'. But
although this goal may seem commonsensically admirable (who wants a
criticism shot-through with historical hallucinations, and course-grained
ones at that?), it becomes in Bordwell's hands a form of critical
prophylaxis, drastically and wilfully reducing the range of his discussion.
For, indeed, Bordwell's book may finally be most problematic exactly in the
questions it doesn't pose, in the conceptual and cultural spaces it refuses
to enter: he repeatedly halts his line of inquiry just at the point where
large and interesting questions are arising. For Bordwell, however, these
are inevitably questions that are not answerable in the requisite
'fine-grained', 'empirically verifiable' manner; addressing them will thus
involve moving into historical speculation and generalization -- into, that
is to say, the realm of theory and post-theoretical 'culturalism' in which
too many critics have already misguidedly wandered. But Bordwell's
insistence on these criteria for determining what questions are and are not
admissible to his critical project is no 'innocent' heuristic decision; it
is a choice with profound institutional and ideological consequences. What
Bordwell too often gives us in _Film Style_ is, to adapt a phrase from
Fredric Jameson, not explanation, but that which remains to be explained.

In his next three chapters, Bordwell addresses, not film style's history
*per se*, but its historiography, discussing the writers whose work has
been most important in bestowing narrative shape on the way the history of
film style has commonly been understood. Bordwell introduces four terms in
these chapters that are essential for his historiographical architecture:
the 'Basic Story', the 'Standard Version', the 'Dialectical Program', and
the 'Oppositional Program'. The Basic Story is for Bordwell the 'narrative
that traces the emergence of film as a distinct art' (13), the
once-canonical teleology of cinema that has it moving from the
'primitivism' of the Lumieres' documentary realism to the 'sophistication'
of the Soviet directors' strategies of montage, making the familiar
developmental stops along the way (Melies's fantasy films, Porter's early
advances in editing, Griffith's development of flashbacks, cross-cutting,
close-ups, etc., and the German Expressionists' mobilizing of the camera
and visual intricacy in conveying psychological states). The advent of
sound then arrests the development of film as an art form, locking it into
a theatrical modality that forestalls further exploration and enhancement
of the visual properties that, for the Basic Story, make cinema
aesthetically unique. Bordwell sees the Basic Story as having developed in
a somewhat *ad hoc* fashion: a product of journalistic reviews; higher-brow
writings in specialized film publications; the proliferation of American
and European 'cine-clubs' composed of serious film aficionados; the entry
of cinema into museum culture (New York's Museum of Modern Art decisively
taking the lead); and even promotional materials from movie producers
themselves (Griffith's critical reputation, for example, substantially
benefiting from the publicity generated for him by Biograph). The Standard
Version brings a neo-Hegelian ontological anchoring to this story, seeing
film as an autonomous aesthetic medium whose evolution demonstrates a
self-refining search for its own essential form -- as advanced by such
writers as Erwin Panofsky and Rudolph Arnheim, the Standard Version charts
'a development toward the revelation of cinema's inherent aesthetic
capacities' (27). The first full-dress articulation of the Standard Version
appears with the 1935 _Histoire du Cinema_, by the French fascist writers
Robert Brasillach and Maurice Bardeche (Brasillach would in 1945 be
executed for his collaboration with France's Nazi occupiers); for Bordwell,
the rise-and-fall aesthetic trajectory of their _Histoire_ will serve as
armature for the work of film historians for decades to come, including
that of such widely influential figures as Georges Sadoul, Lewis Jacobs,
and Jean Mitry.

Beginning in the late 1940s, however, the Basic Story becomes subject to an
inversive intervention, most powerfully at the hands of Andre Bazin. What
Bordwell calls Bazin's Dialectical Program stands many of the aesthetic
precepts of the Standard Version on their head, so that the essence of film
is no longer seen as fully realized through silent cinema's capacities for
hyper-stylization (Expressionism) or dynamized abstraction (Soviet
montage), but rather through cinema's heightened self-consciousness of its
intrication with the world of material reality. For this reason Bazin
embraces the 'theatrical' cinema that according to the Standard Version was
an impoverishing bastardization of the medium; Bazin locates in this cinema
an analytical approach to the image, enacted through 'invisible' continuity
editing techniques ('*decoupage*'), that filmically interrogates the
minutiae of reality. And, of course, Bazin sees as evolving out of
*decoupage* the great *summa* of film's engagement with and exploration of
reality: the deep focus *mise en scene* of Renoir, Wyler, and Welles.
Bordwell lauds Bazin, not just for opening up new narrative possibilities
in the Basic Story that the Standard Version had foreclosed, but for
bringing unprecedented sensitivity to the nuances of films' visual
operations.

This is a position similar to the one he takes regarding his next seminal
thinker, Noel Burch, main proponent of the Oppositional Program. The Basic
Story of film history had, for Bordwell, been shaped by distinctly
modernist notions of the evolution of aesthetic form -- Bordwell observes
that cinema was seen as moving in the 'leaps from vanguard to vanguard'
that Harold Rosenberg claimed for modernist art practice (21); Bazin had
countered this modernism by privileging its dialectical Other: realism.
With Burch, modernism again asserts itself, but here in more formally
sophisticated and politically charged fashion. Bordwell sees Burch as
bringing a rich observational acuity to film, attending to formal
properties and possibilities of cinema previously unconsidered by critics
(e.g., the complex deployment of spatial 'parameters' within the frame; the
various types and uses of offscreen space). Burch does this in the service
of a project whose goal is to discredit the routinizing formal procedures
of mainstream cinema (what Burch calls the Institutional Mode of
Production) and to valorize new, formally radical approaches to film
practice. Burch's influence on film historiography is for Bordwell
profound: Burch provides a lexicon that encourages a closer engagement with
and understanding of the difficult 'high-modernist' films of such directors
as Antonioni and Resnais, and that lays much of the conceptual groundwork
for the anti-bourgeois 'political modernism' of directors such as Godard.
Burch's opposition to the Institutional Mode of Production also forces a
revisiting of the early, 'primitive' cinematic practice the IMP supplanted,
which must now be seen as more formally dense and politically complex than
had previously been acknowledged.

As a general synoptic history, these chapters are for the most part deft,
Bordwell concisely covering a great deal of ground. There are, however,
significant points in his narrative which he treats in reductive or
inconsistent ways -- Bordwell's ambition for a fine-grained film history
would seem not always to find its analog when he addresses matters of
intellectual history. For example, Bordwell courts real confusion when he
links Bazin's realist turn to a general postwar increase in realism's
cultural currency. This claim is questionable enough on the face of it, but
becomes even more so when, in his discussion of Burch, Bordwell much more
accurately notes that, following a brief lull during World War II,
'modernism returned with a vengeance' (84); this, of course, is the moment
when modernism undergoes its full institutional appropriation -- e.g., the
U. S. I. A. makes abstract expressionism one of America's official cultural
exports, Faulkner and Eliot win their Nobels, _Ulysses_ becomes a fixture
in university literature departments, etc. (The confusion here is most
notable when the work of Brecht -- held up by Bordwell as an example of
realism in chapter three -- returns in chapter four as an example of the
ascendancy of modernism.) Also problematic is Bordwell's criticism that
Bazin's rewriting of the Basic Story is undergirded by a neo-Hegelian
apprehension of the contours of history that makes his Dialectical Program
more sweeping in its claims than the actual particulars of film history
will permit; Bordwell attributes Bazin's historical assumptions, in part at
least, to all that Hegelianism suffusing the intellectual culture of
postwar Paris (Kojeve goes unmentioned, but his is obviously the influence
Bordwell has in mind). While these claims are supportable enough as far as
they go, a more detailed attention to this complex and varied intellectual
milieu is called for: the phenomenological dimension so central to Bazin's
criticism begs in particular for a discussion of his work in the context of
the prominent position held in postwar French intellectual life by such
thinkers as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. While all of these
philosophers stand in clear debt to Hegel, none can adequately be described
simply as 'neo-Hegelian'.

But 'neo-Hegelian' is a term Bordwell dispenses rather freely in _Film
Style_, using it to describe virtually any mode of interpretation that
develops 'abstract' general categories in order to account for concrete
social and historical particulars. Such interpretive approaches, argues
Bordwell, produce 'top-down' histories which do procrustean damage to the
specific phenomena they treat (nuances are lost; the 'course-grained'
prevails) and which, moreover, construct overbroad and finally speculative
conceptual apparatuses purporting to explain those specifics. Bordwell is
much more energized by what he sees as this latter problem; indeed,
although he does want to fine-tune the Basic Story in _Film Style_, one of
his happy claims in the book is that, the self-important radicalism of the
LAP thinkers notwithstanding, the earlier critics and historians
collectively responsible for the Basic Story got things more right than
wrong (an especially notable achievement given the archival vagaries within
which they worked). When Bordwell scores these earlier writers it is, as a
rule, because they have made what he views as some 'unverifiable' move that
places film history in a larger, 'determinative' social/economic/historical
context. So, for example, while the Marxist Sadoul is praised because he
'nuances' Brasillach and Bardeche's historical narrative, his attempt to
show that film history had been profoundly shaped by class interests is
tacitly equated with his fascist predecessors' claims that the shaping
force involved was a cabal of (implicitly Jewish) capitalists -- Bordwell
blandly treats these explanatory accounts as mere ideological inversions of
each other. (Indeed, one of the most troubling results of Bordwell's
refusal to ask the big, 'neo-Hegelian' question is that he never addresses
the possible ramifications for the Standard Version of film history that,
according to him, its foundation was largely laid by fascist ideologues.)

Similarly, the main problem with Burch's Oppositional Program is that it,
too, relies on seeing class conflict as the engine of historical change for
film style, the rise of the Institutional Mode of Production being for
Burch a product of cinema's economically-driven need to legitimate itself
with a middle class whose bourgeois subjectivity required 'psychological
identification' with aesthetic works. As a shortcoming of Burch's argument,
Bordwell points to the viability for bourgeois audiences of other,
historically coincident aesthetic forms such as opera, ballet, and abstract
painting, which didn't provide the reality effects supposedly needed for
such identification (113-4). But if Burch's historical model does indeed
call out for greater refinement, Bordwell's counter-argument here is itself
rather unrefined. Are we really to understand that it was largely the same
audience with the same class investments and social assumptions that went
to see museum exhibits of post-Impressionist paintings and movies starring
Mary Pickford or Rudolph Valentino? While surely there were some
significant demographic overlaps between moviegoers and the patrons of the
'high culture' aesthetic practices Bordwell mentions, to lump these groups
together under the aegis 'middle class' is to ignore significant
distinctions that should be drawn *within* classes, distinctions that
complexify traditional notions of economic class, and that may finally
speak to the need to demarcate categories of class very differently. In
light of the subtlizing work on class done by such social theorists as Erik
Olin Wright and Pierre Bourdieu, Bordwell's thinking on class here seems at
least as baggy and imprecise as many of the 'neo-Hegelians' he criticizes.

In chapter five of _Film Style_, 'Prospects for Progress: Recent Research
Programs', Bordwell shifts from historiographical overview to issues of
current and pressing concern in film and cultural studies. This is perhaps
the most intellectually ambitious chapter in Bordwell's book; it is
certainly the most contentious. Bordwell addresses two divergent approaches
in contemporary film studies, that of the 'revisionist historians' who,
through extensive archival research conducted within a modest and flexible
conceptual framework, have shown the factual errors and historical gaps
that marred the Basic Story, and that of the LAP theorists and their
cultural-studies descendants who insist on imposing broad-brush,
ideologically self-fulfilling paradigms on their objects of study. While it
is the practitioners of the former approach who are Bordwell's intellectual
heroes in this chapter, it is when addressing the latter group that his
argument takes on its greatest urgency -- it is only slightly too
hyperbolic to say that, for Bordwell, the LAP is the nightmare from which
film scholarship must awake. But, as at earlier points in _Film Style_,
Bordwell's goal of historical subtlety and precision softens when he
encounters intellectual positions he opposes and critical methodologies he
rejects: his discussion of the LAP, which he terms 'Grand Theory', is
woefully reductive and open to historical and conceptual dispute.

As he sketches it, the Lacanian-Althusserian Paradigm was a monolithic
theoretical entity that attracted critics with its hubristic claims to
systematicity and comprehensiveness, and then 'imploded' as a result of
criticisms from without and contradictions from within; the result was that
its adherents 'began purging their shelves of Althusser and Lacan' and
turned instead to 'cultural studies', their 'empty shelf space . . .
quickly packed with works by Foucault and the Frankfurt School' (140-1).
Virtually all of Bordwell's account of the LAP and its critical aftermath
is uncharitable (and I mean this both generally and in Donald Davidson's
specific sense of that term), and some of it is simply wrong. [2] The
'internal contradictions' Bordwell cites, for example, could be seen to
indicate that those working within Grand Theory occupied a more diverse
range of critical vantage points than he allows (we can think here of the
differences between feminist theorists such as Laura Mulvey and Pam Cook
and their male counterparts within the LAP on the key idea of spectatorial
subject position -- differences that led to the *refinement* of this idea,
not, as Bordwell asserts, its abandonment). Grand Theory also looks less
monolithic in the context of Bordwell's assertion that it could not
withstand 'persistent criticism by skeptics' (140); a more generous (or
charitable) way of putting this might be that Grand Theorists were open to
revising their positions in light of provocative work done by critics
coming from other perspectives (I recently had occasion to re-read Mulvey's
monograph on _Citizen Kane_, and was struck by her cheerful and intelligent
use of insights into the film by Barry Salt and Noel Carroll, two of the
LAP's bitterest foes). [3] In this respect, critics working within or
developing out of the LAP may have shown greater theoretical flexibility
than have their sternly dismissive opponents.

An apparently more niggling, but finally quite revealing criticism of
Bordwell's account involves his pointing to the abandonment of Lacan and
Althusser in favor of Foucault and the Frankfurters (the former pair,
according to Bordwell, seemingly erased from historical memory, like some
out-of-step Party bureaucrat in a Kundera novel). One problem with this
claim, of course, is that it is erroneous; as Kaja Silverman, Slavoj Zizek,
Parveen Adams, and Teresa de Lauretis forcefully demonstrate, Lacan and
Althusser live still in film and cultural studies. Moreover -- and this
will seem the niggling point -- the Frankfurt School, with the exception of
peripheral member Walter Benjamin (whom I'll discuss in a moment), has not
played nearly as important a role in cultural studies as Bordwell's glib
formulation suggests; in order to be historically accurate, where Bordwell
says 'Frankfurt School', we should substitute the name 'Antonio Gramsci'.
This substitution, however, has implications going beyond mere historical
accuracy. The intense interest in Gramsci's thought on the part of cultural
critics signalled their increasing awareness of significant limitations in
Althusser's theory of ideology, at least as it had most often been
construed (Zizek's recent work has shown that this theory can be deployed
in remarkably supple ways); and that these critics turned as a rule to
Gramsci rather than Horkheimer/Adorno indicated a more general suspicion
regarding theories of ideology and the 'culture industry' that saw them as
working in strict, unilateral, 'top-down' fashion. Cultural studies'
Gramscian inflections show critics' growing concern with the varieties of
spectatorial agency, with the complex and often quite flexible modes of
engagement viewers bring to the films they watch. Such a shift in emphasis
strikes me as another example of theoretically informed criticism's ability
to question and revise itself (a key moment for film theory, at least
symbolically, may have been the interview Stephen Heath conducted with
Raymond Williams in 1986, the LAP's greatest English-language avatar there
making common cause with one of British cultural studies' towering
figures). [4] This shift also strikes me as demonstrating the willingness
of cultural studies to attend to an aspect of film that Bordwell has rather
notoriously elided in his own work (he certainly does so in _Film Style_)
-- the particularities of experience among film audiences. Bordwell's
mention of the Frankfurters and omission of Gramsci is an especially
telling argumentational maneuver in _Film Style_: it allows him to
characterize cultural studies as simply engaging in more of that gloomy and
monolithic old ideological claptrap; and it allows him to claim of
culturalism that it has a reductive view of audience response -- a claim,
as we shall see, that can much more accurately be made about Bordwell
himself.

When Bordwell deals directly and at length with culturalism, he
concentrates on critical work that falls into what he calls 'the 'history
of vision' approach' (141), which argues that the way subjects perceive the
world is conditioned by the socio-economic circumstances of their given
historical moment. Bordwell discusses three versions of this approach:
Benjamin's, in his famous essay, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction'; Tom Gunning's, developed in a number of articles on the
early 'cinema of attractions'; and Regis Debray's, in his 'massively
epochal' book _Vie et mort de l'image_ (139-49). As Benjamin is clearly the
best known and most widely influential of these thinkers, I'll restrict my
comments here to Bordwell's treatment of his work. Of specific concern to
Bordwell is Benjamin's claim in the 'Work of Art' essay that modernity had
effected whole-cloth changes on the human experience of social reality, now
perceived for Benjamin as an unending series of sensory shocks that result
in the ongoing psychic 'distraction' of modern subjects; Benjamin sees the
volatile visual dynamics of film (*motion* pictures) as both contributor to
and register of this distraction. Bordwell's core criticism of Benjamin's
essay is two-fold: its view of film's visual operations is predicated
solely on Eisensteinian theories of editing in which images exist in
collisional relation to each other; and it posits that all subjects living
under the modern dispensation experience social reality in exactly the same
way, and thus neglects distinctions that should be drawn among members of
the modern socius on the basis of class, region, etc.. Moreover, Bordwell
sees much of the culturalist work in film studies as carrying forward
Benjamin's overbroad assumptions (141-3).

Bordwell's criticisms have some merit: Benjamin, in this thirty page essay
which is, among other things, a historically specific assault on the
fascist aesthetics of the 1920s and 30s, certainly speaks in sweeping terms
at times. But granting this, there is much in Benjamin's piece, even within
his too-broad assertions, that can bear significantly on our understanding
of history, culture, and film form. First, we must note that Bordwell's
correlation of Benjamin's view of film as perceptually disruptive with film
editing is itself an overbroad claim: Eisenstein, as Benjamin would have
known, argued that montage can take place not just between but within shots
(through compositional strategies, movement within the frame, etc.).
Moreover, Benjamin does not locate the shock of the film experience solely
in film's editing procedures, but discusses it in terms of 'the moving
image', a capacious formulation that can encompass editing, camera
movement, and action within the shot. [5] This is an important point in
that it is this extended sense of film's formal mobility and dynamism that
a number of significant contemporary critics (e.g., Anne Friedberg, Steven
Shaviro) have taken over from Benjamin; such critics are not, as Bordwell
argues, locked into a paradigm of film that privileges editing above other
of its formal features. Second, while Benjamin's phenomenological claims
about modernity are inarguably highly general, even Bordwell acknowledges
that the Benjaminian model of modern perception 'does seem
phenomenologically convincing' (301). But he then goes on to 'hypothesize'
that this perceptual shift might best be seen in biological terms -- human
cultural developments (e.g., the rise of the modern metropolis) having
outstripped the physical evolution of the human sensorium (301). That this
line of speculation is any more empirically verifiable than theories that
point to the transformative cultural energies of industrial capitalism
seems quite debatable. But even if Bordwell's hypothesis could be proved
correct, why it would then negate 'culturalist' lines of inquiry is not at
all clear (the last I heard, even such rigorous neo-Darwinians as Richard
Dawkins were still leaving a place for culture's effects on human
experience).

Bordwell repeatedly maintains in _Film Style_ that he is open to
considering film in larger social and ideological contexts. As I think the
above example illustrates, however, he is in fact willing to go to great
lengths to resist such considerations. This is nowhere clearer than in the
final chapter of his book, 'Exceptionally Exact Perceptions: On Staging in
Depth', in which he traces the way the use of cinematic depth of field has
changed over the course of film history. Bordwell develops the methodology
he will employ in this chapter at the end of the previous one, offering it
as an alternative to the purported excesses of the theory and culturalism
he has there discounted. For Bordwell, the place we must go for a properly
nuanced understanding of film style is the filmmaking process itself. This
process, he argues, is an unpredictable, frequently *ad hoc* affair in
which directors are confronted with myriad problems to which they must find
solutions, such problem-solving taking place against a background of
institutionally established filmmaking norms (Bordwell uses as a model
figure here the harried director played by Francois Truffaut in his _Day
for Night_). These institutional norms result in certain stylistic
'schemas' within which directors work; the problems directors encounter --
which include such 'non-technical' matters as narrative coherence, the
depiction of characters' psychological states, and the highlighting of
important actions and events, etc. -- can bring about modifications to
those schemas. The task of the historian of film style is then to look with
scrupulous precision at a voluminous body of films, charting the way in
which, over time and as a result of specific logistical problems, schemas
emerge, consolidate, and undergo revision. 'The model I propose', writes
Bordwell, 'seeks to be more delicate [than theoretical or culturalist
approaches], building from patterns of task-governed decision-making to
schemas and thence to norms and their open-ended dynamic across time' (157).

'Exceptionally Exact Perceptions' attempts an epic scope, its one
hundred-plus pages ranging over almost the entirety of film history and
across numerous national cinemas. Bordwell's cinematic erudition verges on
the preternatural -- he has not just seen but *scrutinized* an almost
unimaginably large number of films. Unfortunately, the extremely narrow
analytical frame he has imposed on himself in _Film Style_ precludes his
ability to say much of real interest about them: throughout this chapter
Bordwell offers detailed descriptions of film images, but does so almost
invariably in the service of their rudimentary functionality -- e.g.,
'Preminger's four-and-a-half-minute *plan sequence* [i.e., long take] needs
no shot/reverse shot. Characters take turns assuming an over-the-shoulder
stance with utter naturalness, and the tightly confined camera movements
present constantly changing foregrounds that hold or deflect our attention'
(233). We encounter here (at least) two problems. First, Bordwell's
functionalist formalism finally treats film style as little more than a
matter of particular visual strategies that have been chosen in order to
guide the viewer's eye ('hold or deflect our attention'). But in doing
this, Bordwell is implicitly positing an abstract or 'ideal' spectator who
can stand in as a representative for all spectators; or, to put this a
little differently, Bordwell is assuming that all viewers will respond to
specific visual strategies in more or less the same way. I'm not at all
convinced that this is the case -- certainly much interesting work in
feminist and queer theory suggests it is not. One of the advantages of the
subject position model that Bordwell rejects, especially as it has been
developed by critics such as Mary Ann Doane, Teresa de Lauretis, and D. A.
Miller, is that it points to a wide range of possible modes of spectatorial
engagement with and response to films. It is a bit of an irony, then, that
Bordwell's approach presents us with a film viewer seemingly as
unparticularized and manipulable as did the first generation of Grand
Theorists.

Second, there is here once again the problem of the questions Bordwell
chooses *not* to ask. For example, Bordwell argues that in US film
production, an early reliance on single-take scenes with considerable depth
of field gave way by the late 1910s to 'continuity editing', in which
more-or-less seamless cutting strategies were used to jockey viewers into
closer relation with that which appeared on the screen (this was the
prototype for what would later be termed the invisible editing of the
classical Hollywood film). Bordwell writes that the visual conventions
developed in the US were soon taken up by other national cinemas: 'The
eventual . . . assimilation of US continuity devices seems to be a
pervasive tendency across the world's silent cinema. It is a testimony to
the powerful appeal of classical cutting that a director like Victor
Sjostrom, who in 1913 displayed subtle mastery of the one-take scene in
depth, could half a dozen years later seize on the advantages in timing and
emphasis yielded by delicate reverse angles and eyeline matching' (136-7).
But is 'the powerful appeal of classical cutting' really a sufficient
explanation for the international spread of this approach to editing? Is
there not good reason to ask about the role of the market in this global
'assimilation' of what is both an editing technique and an industrial
manufacturing strategy? Is there not a possible relation between the way
the US style was imitated by other national cinemas, and the huge success
American films enjoyed in foreign markets? And is this international
success of American films not clearly linked to the enormous economic
advantages held by the apparatus responsible for their production,
promotion, and distribution -- to the ability of American film companies to
lavish money on their movies so that they routinely looked slicker, had
higher advertising budgets, and more extensive export networks than did
films made in other countries? Whatever Bordwell's answers to these
questions might be, he has in this book taken the questions themselves off
the table. It seems to me, however, that, given America's historical
hegemonization of so many other national cinemas -- and not just in terms
of product but in terms of style -- these are questions that demand to be
addressed (indeed, the current, spectacular success of American cultural
and economic colonialism makes these questions more pressing now than ever;
the history of American cinema is in many ways the pre-history of this
colonialism).

In concluding this review, I want briefly to return to three issues I
raised in my opening paragraphs. I think Bordwell is correct when he says
that style is an underexplored aspect of film studies and that it does play
a crucial role in conditioning the experience of filmgoers. But looking at
style in this context requires, I believe, a much wider and more flexible
sense of the different ways in which different viewers may be coming at the
films they see -- and the way certain stylistic approaches may be
attempting to elicit various spectatorial modes among those different
viewers (the films of Douglas Sirk, with their multi-leveled stylistic
strategies, come readily to mind, here; that Sirk -- one of the most
complex and self-conscious stylists in the history of Hollywood -- goes
unmentioned in Bordwell's book is a curious omission). [6] I think Bordwell
is further correct in calling for a 'self-conscious historical poetics of
the cinema'. We have yet to see such a poetics fully developed in film
studies, and Bordwell's own work in this area so far strikes me as an
unpromising beginning. The powerful nexus between art and commerce that has
from film's inception set it apart from other aesthetic practices (if only
because of the vastly larger amounts of capital involved) necessitates a
poetics capable of intricating matters of form, history, ideology,
economics, and the social -- a tall order I know, but not an impossible one
(the work of Kenneth Burke, for example, attests that such an intrication
is achievable in the study of literature; I think it is for film studies,
too). As the quotation from Michael Berube at the beginning of this review
suggests, aesthetic form is indeed a crucial issue, but not one easily
separable from a network of numerous others.

Moreover, such a historical poetics should indeed be self-conscious,
attempting to attain exceptionally exact perceptions of its own historical
presuppositions. Although Bordwell acknowledges the inevitability of some
form of 'presentism' -- the reading back of the historical moment in which
a critic lives onto the historical moment said critic analyzes -- he seems
to have made no attempt to examine the way certain prevailing
historico-cultural assumptions may have informed his own historical
narrative. It is precisely the historico-cultural assumptions I see
subtending Bordwell's project in this book that I find most distressing
about it. Repeatedly while reading _Film Style_ it occurred to me just how
happy my students -- especially those from non-humanities disciplines --
would be if I talked about films in the courses I teach the way Bordwell
does in this book. His functionalist, 'goal-oriented', problem/solution
approach to the formal and stylistic operations of films accords, all too
neatly, with the instrumental approach to reason that is the operational
logic of those students' business, economics, and pre-Law courses -- the
logic they will then take to the life-world that awaits them outside the
academy. Perhaps it is a self-delusion among humanities academics that
their work represents any real alternative to this instrumentalizing logic.
Perhaps humanities academics should just give up that ghost, accede to the
brute economic fact that what a university education in the pan-capitalist
moment mostly means is dressed-up vocational training, and teach
accordingly -- Bordwell's book might then be appropriate. Perhaps. But for
me, not yet.

University of Richmond, USA
August 1998


Footnotes

1. Bordwell, _Making Meaning_, p. 266.

2. Bordwell's reductiveness and lack of 'charity' regarding 'Grand Theory'
is especially disappointing here in that his earlier _Making Meaning_,
while registering many of the same criticisms, did so with a filigreed
intellectual sophistication, and through a real engagement and dialogue
with the theory it took to task (as a result, although I often disagree
with it, I believe _Making Meaning_ to be one of the most important
contributions to film studies in the last decade).

3. See Mulvey, _Citizen Kane_, pp. 14, 17, and 20-1.

4. See Heath and Skirrow, 'An Interview with Raymond Williams', p. 3-17.

5. Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', p. 238.

6. It occurs to me that Bordwell's striking elision of Sirk from his
discussion may be an act of quiet provocation directed at the many Marxist,
feminist, and queer critics for whom Sirk has been such an intriguing
figure.


Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction',
trans. Harry Zohn, in Hannah Arendt, ed., _Illuminations_ (New York:
Schocken Books, 1969).

Bordwell, David, _Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the
Interpretation of Cinema_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

Heath, Stephen and Gillian Skirrow, 'An Interview with Raymond Williams',
in Tania Modleski, ed., _Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to
Mass Culture_ (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1986).

Mulvey, Laura, _Citizen Kane_ (London: British Film Institute, 1992).

                          ********

James S. Hurley, 'David Bordwell's Iron Cage of Style', _Film-Philosophy:
Electronic Salon_, 11 September 1998
<http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files/hurley.html>.


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