Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 23, August 2002
Asbjørn Grønstad
The Appropriational Fallacy
Grand Theories and the Neglect of Film Form
'Film is made first of all
out of images and sounds; ideas intervene (perhaps) later'.
(Noel Burch) [1] 'All Theories as Toys'. (T.
E. Hulme) [2] If the title of this article
resounds with the polemical palavering of literary theory in
the 1940s, I have to submit that the allusion is not
entirely accidental. It is not my intention here, however,
to resuscitate the arguments of W. K. Wimsatt Jr and Monroe
C. Beardsley, but rather to evoke a sense of parallelism
between their issues and those at stake here. A crucial
objective which informed Wimsatt's and Beardsley's project
was to buttress the significance and irreducibility of the
literary text in the face of monopolistic authorial and
receptional meaning-making. [3] The scholarly
environment that was American New Criticism tended to
consider intentionalism and emotionalism as threats to the
epistemological prominence and integrity of the text, which
was all too readily lost in a plenitude of contexts whose
relevance for the literary work was not always impressively
transparent. Similarly, within the domain of film studies,
it has perhaps become increasingly unclear whether the real
object of study is the film text itself, or rather a
concatenation of different disciplinary discourses hailing
from departments of psychology, sociology, and biology (to
name a few). The colonization of cinema studies is not a
novel development; as a process its apogee was in the
1970s. Two different but
nevertheless related manifestations of contemporary
scholarship -- neoformalism/historical poetics and
cognitivism -- have progressively challenged the hegemony of
1970s 'Grand Theory'. Unfortunately, the latter 'movement',
though presenting theories far more convincing than those of
psychoanalytical/semiotic origins, tends to relegate the
film itself to the same shadowy margins wherein it was
abandoned under the former theoretical regime. Although
insights into the cognitive-emotional processing of
audiovisual fictions are indispensable to the field of
cinema studies, there is a certain limit to how much
negligence our primary object of study can be subjected to
before the legitimacy of the discipline is compromised. It
is my objective to briefly survey the current relationship
between old and new Grand Theories on the one hand, and
text-centered approaches on the other. Throughout the last decade,
film studies as a heterogeneous discipline has been in a
process of immense transformation. As noted above, the
dominance of psychosemiotic theories -- almost completely
imperious in the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s --
has been overthrown by a new set of approaches, most notable
of which are historical studies, cognitive film theory, and
postcolonialism. In varying degrees each of these research
areas is also reception-oriented in some way. This current
multiplicity of approaches has led certain scholars to
proclaim the demise of what has commonly been referred to as
'Grand Theory', and David Bordwell and Noel Carroll's
_Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies_ (1996) provides a
symptomatic manifestation of this changing climate.
[4] The charges Bordwell and Carroll hurl at the
older paradigm are too numerous to recount here, suffice it
to say that what they propose in the place of 'Grand Theory'
is a problem-driven research program known as middle-level
theory. In short, this approach is one which focuses on
smaller scale, concrete queries, which refrains from
attempting to explain 'everything', and which generally
proceeds inductively. In a paper delivered at a
1999 conference, [5] Torben Grodal launched a
critique of Bordwell's seemingly categorical dismissal of
grand theory. Grodal complains that, 'the problem with Bordwell's
argument is that he confuses a critique of bad theories and
bad applications of deductive reasoning and unconvincing
exemplifications, with a critique of a theory-driven
procedure as such. From my point of view grand theories are
necessary, not only in themselves, but also as guidelines
for middle-level research.' [6] With this statement Grodal
also proffers his own stance on the subject: the presence of
grand theory in film studies is not only acceptable but even
necessary, given only that it is -- in keeping with his
terminology -- a 'good' grand theory. He then advances
toward the following conclusion: 'What makes some theories
'grand theories' is that they have a series of implications
for research on a middle-level. That is the beauty of grand
theories, they provide deep insights to a series of problems
on many different levels. But the beauty is of course also
the possible danger: A wrong grand theory provides a massive
series of false insights in a series of levels and fields.
The antidote for this danger is however not to shun grand
theories, but to replace bad grand theories with better
ones.' [7] It is my contention that the
implications of a cognitivist perspective (of which Grodal
is but one proponent) -- in their advocacy of an
evolutionary epistemology as the new grand theory -- are
characteristic of the principal direction in cinema research
during the last three decades: the privileging of the
spectator-apparatus relation as the focal point of analysis,
and the concomitant and increasing negligence of the film
text itself. Whether the methodological framework is
psychoanalytic/semiotic/Marxist or cognitive, post-classical
film theory has been fervently preoccupied with defining
functions relating either to the cinematic machinery, or
institution, or to the psychology of the viewer. In the
1970s scholars such as Christian Metz, Colin McCabe, Laura
Mulvey, Jean-Louis Baudry, Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean-Pierre
Oudart and many others appropriated the work of Lacan,
Althusser, Benveniste, Barthes, and Foucault to weld a
highly idiosyncratic brand of critical film theory. Central
to most of the various manifestations of this movement was
the notion of subject positioning. According to this
argument, classical mainstream cinema represented an
oppressive force which pacified the spectator in a number of
ways: being the product of a bourgeois, capitalist system,
all of popular cinema per definition inculcated in the
spectator a certain (false) ideology (the Althusserian
version); Hollywood films had the capacity inevitably to
transform any audience into a group of male voyeurs (the
Lacanian version); and dominant cinema tended unscrupulously
to mask its greatly opinionated discourse as 'natural' (the
semiotic version, i.e. Metz's and Gerard Genette's and
Raymond Bellour's renditions of Benveniste's enunciation
theory). [8] Although some publications in this
tradition, such as Raymond Bellour's 'The Obvious and the
Code' and Stephen Heath's 'Narrative Space', [9]
attended closely to the text through detailed frame
analyses, even this work paid lip-service to film aesthetics
since the investigation of textual form was highly
compromised by the ready-made grand narratives that informed
the analyses. The essentializing, agenda-driven approach to
film research propagated by the SLAB (from Saussure, Lacan,
Althusser and Barthes) concoction represents, as Bordwell
and Carroll note in _Post-Theory_, a foundationalist system
which conflates theory and interpretation, shies away from
deductive and inductive reasoning, and is biased against
formalist methods. [10] Specifically, Bordwell and
Carroll object to grand theory's claims that an
understanding of how viewers interact with films requires a
theory of the subject, that spectatorial response
presupposes identification, and that verbal language
represents an adequate analogue for film.
[11] In a certain sense Bordwell
and Carroll merely rehearse an old lamentation in their 1996
anthology. The first sign of a reaction to the
Lacanian-Althusserian school of film studies was launched
more than a decade before with the publication of Bordwell's
own _Narration in the Fiction Film_ (1985). This work may be
seen as the first instance of a clearly formulated cognitive
approach within film studies. In the chapter 'The Viewer's
Activity', Bordwell submits an outline of his reception
theory which declares that 'the spectator's comprehension of
the story is the principal aim of narration'. [12]
Bordwell's theory is constructivist and relies fundamentally
on notions such as hypothesis and inference-making, mental
schemata, and bottom-up and top-down processes of active
perception and comprehension of textual data. Perhaps
because Bordwell is also vigorously engaged with
establishing a neoformalist and a historicist framework for
his rethinking of filmic narration, the cognitive component
is not yet as gargantuan as it is to become later in the
work of other film scholars. _Narration in the Fiction
Film_, albeit, exhibits a consistent constructivist aspect
which arguably provided film scholarship with fresh ideas
that eventually were to transform the discipline.
[13] Although I certainly do not
dispute the accomplishment of the contributions referred to
above, it has occurred to me that amid the burgeoning growth
of cognitive film studies -- as well as its relentless
polemic with the psychosemiotic paradigm -- the significance
of the textual artifact has been somewhat under-appreciated.
Evidently, much of the work of Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
-- which constitutes a trend in itself -- is an exception:
publications such as Bordwell's _Ozu and the Poetics of
Cinema_ (1988), _The Cinema of Eisenstein_ (1993), and _On
the History of Film Style_ (1997), as well as Thompson's
_Breaking the Glass Armour: Neoformalist Film Analysis_
(1988), are all works invaluable to film studies. However,
generally speaking, the interest in poetics does not appear
to be as influential or far-reaching as the interest in
hermeneutics. [14] What I find to be a lack of
adequate sensitivity to the poetics of cinema involves two
different levels. One is the position of aesthetic inquiries
vis-a-vis biological, historical, and psychological
(psychoanalytic) ones. The other, which is perhaps the more
serious, is the relative neglect of poetic concerns *within*
the various manifestations of reception theory. Despite the
professed commitment, pronounced or implicit, to a
dialectical approach -- one that defines the filmic
experience itself as a product of the confluence of text and
viewer -- many cognitive scholars seem to pay scarce
attention to the textual part of the equation. A work such
as Joseph D. Anderson's _The Reality of Illusion_ (1996)
serves as an illustration of the situation. In order to
overcome the perceived shortcomings of 1970s Grand Theory,
Anderson champions a biologically situated metatheory which
he calls *ecological*. 'To ask how we process continuity and
character and narrative in motion pictures,' Anderson points
out, 'is to ask how the forces of evolution equipped us to
know where we are in space and time, to make rapid judgments
of character, and to narratize the events of our existence.'
[15] Both Grodal and Anderson assume that a
'culturalist' procedure is patently inapt in explaining the
mechanics of film viewing, and they advance instead a
methodology derived from Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory,
sociobiology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. A
cognitive-ecological approach holds that concepts such as
vision, narrative, and character can be more easily
explained with reference to biology than to culture. Rather
than relying on culturalist terms such as voyeurism or
scopophila when describing visual processes, an ecological
theory would stress the universality and functionality of
vision as basic parameters for the viewer's transactions
with moving images. Whereas I do not object to
the correctness of ecological approaches, my question is
nevertheless: in what ways does an examination of the human
visual system -- no matter how accurate -- promote our
knowledge of films and the various institutions of cinema?
Secondly, as regards emotion, ecological theory maintains
that evolutionary psychology is better equipped than Grand
Theory to expose and explain the nature of emotions which
are universal. The ecologist would claim that Grand Theory
provides an inadequate theory of emotion because it reduces
emotion to a matter of desire and its suppression. Informing
this argument is the conviction that film fiction typically
involves a wider range of emotional categories than Grand
Theory allows. Assuredly this is beyond any dispute.
Notwithstanding, although the study of emotion in relation
to film is a most commendable and necessary avenue of
research (and, I might add, one which hitherto also has been
somewhat overlooked), one needs to investigate the myriad
ways in which different emotions are produced and manifested
textually, rather than simply point out the presence of
general universal emotions in the motivations and actions of
film protagonists. That feelings such as care, aggression,
altruism, love, hate, envy, fear and numerous others have a
direct impact on narrative relations and effects within a
given film is not a very specific observation. Most artistic
expressions -- cinematic or other -- are precisely about
these emotions, and it is therefore difficult to see how an
awareness of this fact contributes to shedding new light on
the aesthetic makeup of an individual film text. Rather than
being content with identifying universals, one ought rather
to explore how the text causes these universals to come into
existence, how it might transform them and how it ultimately
deals with them. In his discussion of concrete films,
Anderson's analysis does not seem to depart from a general
thematic level. With reference to _Citizen Kane_ (1941), for
instance, Anderson accentuates the importance of our
penchant for character recognition and attribution to
solidify his assertion that 'problems of character
recognition and attribution are universal . . .
[our] capacities to cope with these problems were
developed through evolution, and the manifestations of those
capacities are, as we might expect, similar from culture to
culture'. [16] Such a description might be accurate,
but if it were not for the explicit mention that the text in
question is in fact a motion picture, one would not know if
Anderson was referring to a novel, a play, a poem, or a
ballet. A general problem with exclusively thematic
criticism is that it too often tends to *appropriate* the
text as an instrument with which preformed arguments and
interpretations may be justified. The kind of interpretation
'ecologists' espouse is reminiscent of what Bordwell and
Thompson call *symptomatic* meaning. 'The more abstract and
general our attributions of meaning,' they write in _Film
Art_ (1993), 'the more we risk loosening our grasp on the
film's specific formal system. As analysts, we must balance
our concern for that concrete system with our urge to assign
it wider significance.' [17] In his _The Possibility
of Criticism_, Beardsley proposes a new label for the type
of appropriated, symptomatic interpretations Bordwell and
Thompson refer to; he prefers to dub them
'superimpositions'. [18] Beardsley thus passes a
judgment on the appropriational urge that is even harsher
than that of the Madisonians: 'the moment the critic begins
to use the work as an occasion for promoting his own ideas,'
Beardsley writes, 'he has abandoned the task of
interpretation'. [19] Beardsley's overall thesis is
perhaps best summarized by himself when he concludes that
'we are not likely to get the other judgments of a poem
right unless we can first make a sound *literary* judgment
of it'. [20] Even if we grant that
evolutionary grand theory is one concerned more with
identifying the convergent aspects of film fiction rather
than with tracing its divergent forms, the biological
framework still implies such a level of generality that one
may risk losing sight of the film altogether. The theory's
failure to differentiate between the stylistic, formal, and
narrative techniques which the individual text materializes
thus represents a serious obstacle to the accretion of our
knowledge of the specificity of the filmic medium. More than
fifty years ago, Wimsatt and Beardsley lambasted
reception-oriented theories for a similar lack of precision:
'The purely affective report', they suggested, 'is either
too physiological or it is too vague.' [21] The
universality of bio-psychological functions such as vision
and curiosity, just to name two discussed by
evolutionary-oriented theory, and of formal features such as
narrativity and spatial systems of representation, may
account for some broad parameters essential to an
understanding of the viewer-text relationship. However, the
new grand theory seems incapable of generating film-related
pronouncements. As a matter of fact, evolutionary evidence,
such as the functional motivation behind the development of
human vision (finding food, avoiding enemies, spotting
possible mates) does not have much to do with the discipline
of film studies at all. Again I emphasize that the problem
is not so much related to the degree of factuality as to the
degree of relevance. Nor is there anything about the
inclusion of biological research into the film libraries
which is worthy of critique. On the contrary, Grodal's
_Moving Pictures_ and Anderson's _The Reality of Illusion_
are among the most important publications in contemporary
film theory. Serious problems may arise, however, if, as one
has reasons to suspect, a whole body of
evolutionary-oriented film research is emerging as the new
grand theory par excellence. At the time of the
publication of _Narration in the Fiction Film_ there was
certainly a felt need for inquiries which acknowledged the
active, participatory role performed by the viewer in the
creation of film meaning. Just as processes of reading and
reception were highlighted within literary studies through
the work of Jauss, Iser, Fish and others in the 1970s and
early 1980s, so the activity of viewing audiovisual fiction
has been duly scrutinized in a number of works following in
the wake of Bordwell's book (and significantly those
mentioned above). Nevertheless, much of the cognitive film
theory of the contemporary stage, I argue, pursues the
biological hermeneutic as if all of film fiction was made up
of generalized, canonical narrative scenarios, and, in
effect, as if a poetics of cinema were non-existent. Textual
meaning is constructed by the perceiving subject, as
cognitive reception studies rightfully maintain, but it is
not something constructed out of thin air. An aesthetic
source must be provided in order for perception to take
place to begin with. Furthermore, the importance of having a
grand theory to accompany one's research also appears most
questionable. In the conclusion to his paper, Grodal
recognizes the need for middle-level research but
underscores at the same time the absolute necessity of
developing a new Grand Theory along the lines suggested by
evolutionary biology. [22] Essentially, what Grodal
proposes is to replace one monolithic system with a new one,
but the argument does not really address the issue of what
exactly the advantages of grand theory over middle-level
research consist of. In other words, even as Grodal
convincingly makes a case for cognitive film theory as being
superior to psychosemiotic models, his demonstration of the
strengths of grand theory vis-à-vis 'smaller'
theories appears much less persuasive. If the middle-level approach
is only useful insofar as it may be subsumed by grand
theory, the situation for film studies may not become much
different from how it was in the 1970s. A change of prefix
may be all, as an extreme culturalism is supplanted by an
extreme biologism. The reliance on a master framework
(Freudian or Darwinian) when explaining all kinds of film
phenomena is a dubious starting point. Not so much because
middle-level research is in any way incompatible with the
generation of broader hypotheses (the latter often
contributes a larger perspective mandatory for the
methodical legitimacy of the individual project) -- the real
problem, as I see it, begins when the *same* theoretical
framework is attached repeatedly and indiscriminately to any
middle-level research problem. To a great extent this was
unfortunately what happened to film theorizing in the days
of the old grand theory. Slogans such as 'it is the place of
the look that defines cinema', [23] and 'film
functions in many ways like a mirror', [24]
epitomize this proclivity for formulating totalizing
judgments that sapped much of the creative vitality and
scientific rigidity out of film studies during the 1970s.
When the premises for film analyses wax as foundationalistic
as those of SLAB theory, the epistemological gain of a given
examination diminishes because, in practice, conclusions
have already been provided in advance. And the fact that
these premises tend to be based on erroneous assumptions
does not make the SLAB version of grand theory any more
reassuring. In certain respects one
could claim that the new grand theory of evolutionary
biology falls victim to some of the same problems for which
the SLAB approach has been criticized. In particular its
Neo-Darwinian postulations, such as for instance the
functionalist accounts of the faculties of vision and
emotion, constitute a programmatic thesis similar to those
of Mulvey and Willemen above. The crucial difference, of
course, is that the cognitivist program on the whole
provides a considerably more plausible theory than the
Freudian one, but, as mentioned previously, this is a
plausibility or, if you will, factuality which should not be
absorbed without some sobering qualifications. A statement
typical of evolutionary film thought -- such as Grodal's
'the holistic cognitive coordination of the total organism
enhances survival by mapping and acting on objects in space'
[25] -- is presumably correct, but that does not in
itself vouch for its pertinence to film theory. Moreover,
when discussing narrativity and cinema, Grodal insists that
the narrative structure of classical Hollywood cinema is
merely a transformation of older storytelling strategies
embedded in various forms of verbal narratives. [26]
My reservation here is twofold. First, Grodal's assessment
of narrative structure is somewhat oversimplified. On a
certain level of generality, commonalities might be detected
anywhere. Second, his thesis is filmically reductive since
he only takes into account the formal elements shared by all
media which produce classical narratives. Since Grodal's
theory concerns trans-medial narrative structures that are
biologically embedded, it is difficult to see why the claim
should have any more to do with films than with any other
narrative expression. The argument is singularly preoccupied
with abstract cognitive systems related to narrativity, and
does not consider narrative in its textual embodiment.
Likewise, Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith seem to zero in
on large-scale film-emotional structures that are too
comprehensive to be able to distinguish fruitfully between
the aesthetic specificity of one film in comparison with
another. They write that cognitive scholars 'tend to examine
phenomena in quite precise detail . . . Instead of dealing
with broad emotional concepts such as pleasure . . .
[they] tend to discuss particular kinds of emotion
cueing . . . such as sentimentality or comedy'. [27]
It is true that pleasure, being common to both
sentimentality and comedy, represents a more general notion
than the two other concepts. Nonetheless, it amounts to no
exaggeration to point out that sentimentality and comedy are
still very broad categories with no particular
epistemological consequence for the individual film
text. How does one account for the
emergence of grand cultural theory and grand biological
theory historically? Although the multiple variables are far
too complexly intertwined to recapture here, there seems to
be a marked difference between classical and modern film
theories with regard to their ways of approaching the object
of study. Whereas for the theorists of the classical period
the understanding of cinema was both the means and the end
of film scholarship, for the modern theorists cinema has, as
noted above, represented a vehicle for other academic
concerns. Generally speaking, this development may be
charted as one proceeding from an aesthetic to a doctrinaire
perspective on film. The main theorists of the past --
Rudolf Arnheim, Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, Dziga
Vertov, V. I. Pudovkin, Bela Balazs, Andre Bazin, and Jean
Mitry -- encompassed a tradition whose scholarly emphasis
was on ontological and formal aspects of cinema. V. F.
Perkins's _Film as Film_ (1972) and Noel Burch's _Theory of
Film Practice_ (1969) are perhaps the last significant
contributions within the classical tradition before the
purveyors of grand theory -- Metz, Mulvey, et. al. -- came
onto the scene around 1970. As the pendulum swings from the
culturalist to the biologist stance, Bordwell and the
Wisconsin-Madison school of film studies represent, through
their focus on middle-level research, an alternative
approach which, in matters of perspective and interest,
clearly has more in common with the classical theorists than
with either of the grand theoretical paradigms. The work of David Bordwell
represents at the same time both an aesthetic and a
historical turn in contemporary cinema studies. His and Noel
Carroll's call for a piecemeal, problem-oriented research
program in _Post-Theory_ materializes in his following
publication _On the History of Film Style_ (1997), which
demonstrates that the middle-level approach can function
remarkably well without the accessory of grand theory. In
the Introduction to the book Bordwell explains the values of
making inquiries into the poetics of cinema as an
alternative to culturalist agendas, which often tend to make
epistemological claims that are too broad and
formulaic: 'stylistic history is one of
the strongest justifications for film studies as a distinct
academic discipline. If studying film is centrally concerned
with 'reading' movies in the manner of literary texts, any
humanities scholar armed with a battery of familiar
interpretive strategies could probably do as well as anyone
trained in film analysis. This is especially true as
hermeneutic practices across the humanities have come to
converge on the same interpretive schemas and heuristics.
But if we take film studies to be more like art history or
musicology, interpretive reading need not take precedence
over a scrutiny of change and stability within stylistic
practices.' [28] Unlike the grand theories of
culturalism and biologism, Bordwell's conception of a
style-centered research strategy acknowledges the primacy
and irreducibility of the text for film scholarship. This
position, however, does not, as some might be prone to
think, usher us into an impenetrable formalism. One still
needs to consider the dialectics of film viewing; that is,
the process by which the text manifests itself fully only in
the consciousness of a perceiving subject. These ideas are
by no means incompatible. A recognition of the activity of
the viewer does not preclude a textual focus (and vice
versa), but sustains it in the sense that the history of
cinema stylistics and film form is the result of a certain
competence shared by filmmakers and audiences alike. Viewer
constructivism and formal patterns are both part of the same
filmic process. The latter, notwithstanding, assumes a
flexibility which the former does not. Take for instance the
faculty of vision, which has not changed much throughout
human history. Whatever type of formal examination of a
given film we might undertake, the paramount function
enacted by our visual organs remains invariant. The
constancy of our perceptual system does not imply that this
mechanism is in any way less significant than the aesthetic
phenomena in the film text, but merely that to problematize
vision in every film analysis is perhaps not required.
Evidently, this is an exaggeration, but the principle should
be clear enough, and it is also representative of other
evolutionary elements within the cognitive grand theory.
Narrativity is an example. When Grodal remarks that the
investment in narratives is a universal feature,
[29] it has important repercussions for a theory of
reception, since it suggests, implicitly, that the quality
of narrativity is equally aesthetic *and* cognitive.
Although the latter component is just as consequential as
the former, albeit, there appears to be little need to
rehearse the biological aspect whenever given the
opportunity to do so. Because the nature of universal
features is such that it intrinsically resists change
(except for change of an abnormally slow kind), the
continuation of the inquiry which lead to the postulation of
the universal has in a certain sense become redundant. Our
perceptual apparatus, naturally, does not change with the
same pace as formal, stylistic and technological phenomena.
Hence, the pursuit of an evolutionary epistemology in cinema
studies does not seem to be as critical an enterprise as the
exploration of the ever metamorphosing patterns of film
style. There is no evident correlation between an expanding
knowledge of biological factors on the one hand, and the
shedding of light on aesthetic patterns in films on the
other. Will a grand biological theory be able to explain
phenomena such as, say, recurring formal patterns in the
films of Hou Hsiao-Hsien, the use of color in the cinema of
Takeshi Kitano, or the ever increasing presence of spectacle
in contemporary Hollywood film? I do not argue against the
pertinence of cognitive grand theory as a *background*
against which the study of cinema might take place. As I
mention earlier, however, serious problems may result if or
when the Neo-Darwinian paradigm aspires to become the next
grand theory. In contrast to the
ecologically oriented grand theory, much of the 1970s SLAB
approach appears to be both unsuitable and contrafactive,
particularly in its penchant for making sweeping
generalizations about the text-viewer relation. I will use
one familiar assertion to illustrate the difference between
grand theorizing and a middle-level procedure. Concomitant
with the problematization of the notion of the *gaze* within
psychosemiotics was the claim that all of cinema was
essentially about voyeurism, e.g. Jane Gaines's remark that
the film industry represents the 'institutionalization of
voyeurism'. [30] According to this theory, to assume
the position of the spectator was therefore in effect to
embrace perversion. In opposition to this totalistic theory
one might imagine a middle-level hypothesis proposing that
there might be individual films, say _Rear Window_, _Blue
Velvet_ or _Sliver_, which in significant ways really are
about voyeurism. Not only does the latter claim appear less
excessive and more specific, but it also returns reflection
on cinema to the level of the text. There is also one more
reason to reject the grand theory of voyeurism, one which
involves the nature of the medium of cinema. Nobody is
likely to dispute that the textuality of film is made out of
images and sounds. Hence, what enables the perceiving
subject to access the text of the film in the first place is
an act of looking. The active gaze, female as well as male,
is therefore an instrument of textual admission, and
precedes the possible onset of the psychological modality
known as voyeurism. Those who maintain that all of cinema is
about voyeurism conflate the required perceptual activity
which grants us access to the text with the highly specified
activity of obtaining pleasure by watching others perform
sexual acts. Such a conflation illustrates the theoretical
vulnerability of arguments that rely heavily upon the use of
analogy. The notion of voyeurism as generally applicable to
film, however, is manifestly meaningless because the
analogical scenario it sets up happens to be a necessary
condition for the technical perception of filmic textuality.
Thus, cinema can be no more about voyeurism than other media
that fundamentally involve vision, i.e. the graphic arts.
Moreover, I suspect that few would agree to the claim that
all literature was ultimately about reading. There are
certainly literary works which thematize the act of reading,
but one can hardly claim that every single novel or poem
foreground the activity of reading as its main diegetic
emphasis. The act of reading, just as that of looking in the
cinema or in the art gallery, is a technical act which
facilitates the entrance into the world of the
text. By framing specific
questions that take their cue in part from the nature of the
textual material examined rather than from some
all-embracing theory with claims to universality, one might
avoid the kind of self-fulfilling and occasionally
tautological explanations proffered by the grand theories of
film studies. Finally, middle-level theorizing embodies an
enduring commitment to what is undeniably the central
aspects of the discipline. In closing this essay, I am
reminded of an advice given by J. Hillis Miller: 'My recommendation is that
we should give up the attempt to transfer ethical themes
directly from literature to life. It would follow that
departments of literature should reduce their function to a
kind of linguistic hygiene, that is, to a study of the
rhetoric of literature, what might be called 'literariness'.
The rest should be left to departments of history,
philosophy, religion, American studies, Victorian studies,
programs in 'modern thought', and so on, where that rest
belongs.' [31] University
of Bergen,
Norway Footnotes 1. Noel Burch, _Theory of
Film Practice_ [1973], trans. Helen R. Lane
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), p.
144. 2. T. E. Hulme, _Selected
Writings_, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Fyfield
Books, 1998), p. 58. 3. See W. K. Wimsatt Jr and
Monroe C. Beardsley, 'The Intentional Fallacy' (1946) and
'The Affective Fallacy' (1940), both in W. K. Wimsatt Jr,
_The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry_
[1954] (London: Methuen, 1970), pp. 3-18 and
21-39. 4. See David Bordwell and
Noel Carroll, eds, _Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film
Studies_ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).
(Film-Philosophy's
review) 5. The name of the
conference was 'Grand, Medium and Small Film Theories --
Nordic Film Theory at the Turn of the Millennium', hosted by
the Department
of Film and Media Studies at the University of
Copenhagen in
December 1999. 6. Torben Grodal, 'Grand
Theory and Post Theory: Reflections on Trends in Cognitive
Film Studies' (unpublished conference paper), 'Grand, Medium
and Small Film Theories -- Nordic Film Theory at the Turn of
the Millenium' (University of Copenhagen, 10 December 1999),
p. 2. 7. Ibid., pp.
2-3. 8. Some core texts in the
'Grand Theory' of the 1970s and early 1980s are: Jean-Louis
Baudry, 'Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic
Apparatus', _Film Quarterly_, vol. 28 no. 2, Winter 1974-75,
pp. 39-47; Laura Mulvey, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema', _Screen_, vol. 16 no. 3, Autumn 1975, pp. 6-18;
Paul Willemen, 'Voyeurism, The Look, and Dwoskin',
_Afterimage_, no. 6, 1976, pp. 40-50; Daniel Dayan, 'The
Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema', _Film Quarterly_, vol. 28
no. 1, Fall 1974, pp. 22-31; Christian Metz, _The Imaginary
Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema_ (London and
Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1982); and Kaja Silverman, _The
Subject of Semiotics_ (New York: Oxford University Press,
1983). 9. For the Bellour article,
see _Screen_, vol. 15, Winter 1974-75, pp. 7-17; and for
Heath, see _Questions of Cinema_ (London: Macmillan, 1981).
10. See Bordwell and
Carroll, _Post-Theory_, pp. 38-52. 11. Ibid., pp.
13-17. 12. Bordwell, _Narration in
the Fiction Film_ (Madison, Wisconsin: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 30. 13. In the course of the
last fifteen years the field of cinema studies has
accommodated a continuous flow of inflections of cognitive
and biological theories. Bordwell's own _Making Meaning:
Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema_
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989) was among
the first. Later publications include: Edward Branigan,
_Narrative Comprehension and Film_ (London: Routledge,
1992); Murray Smith, _Engaging
Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the
Cinema_ (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995); Richard Allen, _Projecting Illusion:
Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality_
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
(Film-Philosophy's
review); Warren
Buckland, _The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind_
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995)
(Film-Philosophy's
review); Greg
Currie, _Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive
Science_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
(Film-Philosophy's
review); Joseph
Anderson, _The
Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive
Film Theory_
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996)
(Film-Philosophy's
review); Ed Tan,
_Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an
Emotion Machine_ (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996);
Torben
Grodal, _Moving
Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and
Cognition_ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997) (Film-Philosophy's
review); and Carl
Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, eds, _Passionate Views: Film,
Cognition and Emotion_ (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999). 14. I am limiting this
observation to the theoretical branch of film research. That
of film criticism is obviously intrinsically disposed toward
issues relating to aesthetics. 15. Anderson, _The Reality
of Illusion_, p. 15. 16. Ibid., p.
127. 17. David Bordwell and
Kristin Thompson, _Film Art: An Introduction_ [1979]
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), p. 52. 18. Monroe C. Beardsley,
_The Possibility of Criticism_ (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1970), p. 44. 19. Ibid., p. 40. 20. Ibid., p.
111. 21. Wimsatt and Beardsley,
'The Affective Fallacy', in Wimsatt, _Verbal Icon_, p.
32. 22. Grodal, 'Grand Theory
and Post Theory', p. 10. 23. Laura Mulvey, 'Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', in Philip Rosen, ed.,
_Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology_ (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986), p. 208. 24. Paul Willemen,
'Voyeurism, The Look, and Dwoskin', in Rosen, ed.,
_Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology_, p. 210. 25. Torben Grodal,
_Cognition, Emotion and Visual Fiction: Theory and Typology
of Affective Patterns and Genres in Film and Television_
(Copenhagen: Department of Film and Media Studies, 1994), p.
56. 26. Grodal, 'Grand Theory
and Post Theory', p. 5. 27. Plantinga and Smith,
_Passionate Views_, p. 3. 28. David Bordwell, _On the
History of Film Style_ (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University
Press, 1997), p. 8. (Film-Philosophy's
review) 29. Grodal, 'Grand Theory
and Post Theory', p. 5. 30. Jane Gaines, 'Women and
Representation: Can We Enjoy Alternative Pleasure?', in
Patricia Erens, ed., _Issues in Feminist Film Criticism_
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p.
75. 31. J. Hillis Miller, 'Is
There an Ethics of Reading?', in James Phelan, ed., _Reading
Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology_ (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1989), p. 99. Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 Asbjørn
Grønstad, 'The Appropriational Fallacy: Grand
Theories and the Neglect of Film Form', _Film-Philosophy_,
vol. 6 no. 23, August 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n23gronstad>.
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