Anatomy of the Action Picture

[January 2007] : For a long time Kristin Thompson and I have been interested in how films tell stories. We’re fascinated by the principles that govern different storytelling traditions. For the sake of simplicity, we’ve called the principles norms. The term implies a standard of craft competence, along with a dimension of collective decision-making. Norms are preferred alternatives within a tradition. A norm isn’t a single and inflexible law; it’s best seen as a roughly bounded set of options. Within any cluster of norms, there are always different ways to do anything. [read the essay]

Hearing Voices

[September 2006] : If you want your movie to fail, be sure to have an independent journalist publish a day-by-day account of its making. History is on your side. In Picture (1952), the founding entry in the genre, Lillian Ross followed the making of Huston’s Red Badge of Courage; the movie sank. Theodore Gershunny’s Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture (1980) expended 340 pages on Rosebud, one of Preminger’s biggest embarrassments. In The Devil’s Candy (1991), Julie Salamon chronicled the fiasco that was The Bonfire of the Vanities. Clearly, an outsider’s making-of book portends a flop. [read the essay]

Preface to the Croatian edition of On the History of Film Style

[August 2005] : Visual style was a major preoccupation of critics, theorists, and filmmakers in the 1920s and thereafter, yet the study of it unaccountably went out of favor at just the moment when it should have been in full flower. As film studies entered the Western academy in the 1970s, most scholars turned away from such “aesthetic” concerns. Instead they promoted a cultural/political framework for examining cinema, emphasizing a symptomatic method of interpretation and a metapsychology derived from psychoanalysis. The influence of this framework is still being felt: Slavoj Žižek is continuing it, more playfully but no less dogmatically. Today’s most influential frame of reference, cultural studies, has continued the anti-aesthetic tradition, replacing questions of artistic design and effect with questions about audiences and broad cultural processes. [read the essay]

Slavoj Žižek: Say Anything

[April 2005] : In The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between Theory and Post‑Theory (London: BFI, 2001), Slavoj Žižek makes some criticisms of my arguments bearing on the history of film style. I reply to those criticisms in the last chapter of Figures Traced in Light (pp. 260–264). But there is much more to say about FRT, and this online essay supplements my remarks in Figures. [read the essay]

Film and the Historical Return

[March 2005] : An assembly of position papers in Cinema Journal, “In Focus: Film History, or a Baedeker Guide to the Historical Turn” (Cinema Journal 44, 1 [Fall 2004], 94–143) raises issues of continuing interest around how historical research might be pursued. It seems to me, however, that the collection offers as many grounds for discouragement as for hope.

The letdown can partly be attributed to the contributors’ embrace of fairly fixed conventions of the symposium genre. The essays carry an unhappy cargo of truisms. We should “construct interdisciplinary discourse” (97); linear narrative is bad; we should encourage non-westerners to write histories of their cinemas; collaboration between scholars would be good (but it carries risks). And, in case anyone has forgotten, “history matters” (124). There’s also the usual call to get with it, the announcement that we’re tired of one thing and need a fresh departure (in particular, what the writer is currently working on). It’s time to discard old habits. For Richard Abel, the primary question of historical research is, “Where next?” (107). “An exclusive focus on gender should be passé,” the collection’s editor Sumiko Higashi warns (97). Those who believe that academic work in the humanities is driven by fashion and a search for novelty at any cost will find some evidence here. [read the essay]

Studying Cinema

[2000] : People talk about the movies they see, and some people write about those movies for newspapers and magazines. How does film studies, as an academic discipline, accord with these more common ways of talking and thinking about films? The two ways of thinking about film aren’t completely distinct, I think, but some differences are worth noting.

First, ordinary discourse about cinema centers on evaluative talk. “That movie was great! I loved it!” “Really? I didn’t think it was very good.” Likewise film reviewers take as their primary goal the evaluation of films, giving thumbs up or thumbs down, saying whether they regard them as worth the ticket price or not. Academic film studies can involve evaluation, but for most film scholars evaluating a particular movie isn’t, or isn’t always, the goal. [read the essay]

Annotated List of Principal Essays