My hope in this book is to provide a reasonably comprehensive overview of film theory during “the century of the cinema,” for both those already familiar with the subject and those with little previous knowledge. What follows, then, is a kind of “user’s guide” to film theory. It is a very personal guide, since it is inevitably colored by my own interests and concerns. At the same time, however, I am not personally committed to theories of my own construction, so I hope I have maintained some “ecumenical distance” from all the theories I discuss. I do not pretend to be neutral, of course (clearly, I find some theories more congenial than others), but neither am I concerned to defend my own position or to malign my ideological opponents. Throughout this book I am shamelessly eclectic, synthetic, anthropophagic even. To paraphrase Godard, one should put whatever one likes in a book of film theory. If I am a partisan of anything it is of “theoretical cubism”: the deployment of multiple perspectives and grids. Each grid has its blind spots and insights; each needs the “excess seeing” of the other grids. As a synaesthetic, multi-track medium which has generated an enormously variegated body of texts, the cinema virtually requires multiple frameworks of understanding.

Although I make frequent reference to Bakhtin, I am not a Bakhtinian (if such a thing exists). Rather, I use Bakhtin’s theoretical categories to illuminate the limitations and potentialities of other grids. I have learned from many theoretical schools, but none of them has a monopoly on the truth. I refuse to believe that I am the only person in the field who can read both Gilles Deleuze and Noël Carroll with pleasure, or more accurately, who reads both with mingled pleasure and displeasure. I refuse the Hobson’s Choice between approaches which often strike me as complementary rather than contradictory.

There are many possible ways to describe the history of film theory. It can be a triumphant parade of “great men and women”: Munsterberg, Eisenstein, Arnheim, Dulac, Bazin, Mulvey. It can be a history of orienting metaphors: “cine-eye,” “cine-drug,” “film-magic,” “window on the world,” “camera-pen,” “film language,” “film mirror,” “film dream.” It can be a story of the impact of philosophy on theory: Kant and Munsterberg, Mounier and Bazin, Bergson and Deleuze. It can be a history of cinema’s rapprochement with (or rejection of) other arts: film as painting, film as music, film as theater (or anti-theater). It can be a sequence of paradigmatic shifts in theoretical/interpretative grids and discursive styles – formalism, semiology, psychoanalysis, feminism, cognitivism, queer theory, postcolonial theory – each with its talismanic keywords, tacit assumptions, and characteristic jargon.

Film Theory: An Introduction combines elements of all these approaches. It assumes, first of all, that the evolution of film theory cannot be narrated as a linear progression of movements and phases. The contours of theory vary from country to country and from moment to moment, and movements and ideas can be concurrent rather than successive or mutually exclusive. A book of this type must deal with a dizzying array of chronologies and concerns. It has to confront the same logistical problem that confronted early film-makers like Porter and Edison: the problem of the “meanwhile,” i.e. the problem of relaying simultaneous events taking place in widely separated locales. This book has to convey a sense of “meanwhile, back in France,” or “meanwhile, over in genre theory,” or “mean-while, in the Third World.” While more-or-less chronological, the book’s approach is not strictly so, otherwise we might lose the drift and potential of a given movement, preventing us, for example, from tracing the lines that lead out from Munsterberg to Metz.

A strict chronology can also be deceptive. The mere fact of sequencing risks implying a false causality: post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this). The ideas of theorists working in one historical period might bear fruit only much later. Who would have guessed that the philosophical ideas of Henri Bergson would reemerge a century later in the work of Gilles Deleuze? The work of the Bakhtin Circle, similarly, was published in the 1920s, yet Bakhtinian ideas “entered” theory only in the 1960s and 1970s, at which point a retrospective reassessment defined him as a “proto-poststructuralist.” Often the sequencing of influence depends on the hazards of translation: the bulk of the writings of Dziga Vertov in the 1920s, for example, was translated into French only in the 1960s and 1970s. In any case, I do not generally subscribe to the “great person” approach to film theory. The section rubrics in this book designate theoretical schools and research projects rather than individuals, although individuals obviously play a role in schools.

This book also has to cope with the difficulties inherent in all such surveys. Chronology deceives and patterns falsify. Generalizations about theoretical “schools” elide the manifest exceptions and anomalies. Synthetic accounts of given theorists (for example, Eisenstein) fail to register changes in their theories over time. The slicing up of a theoretical continuum into neatly separated movements and schools, moreover, is always somewhat arbitrary. “Feminism,” “psychoanalysis,” “deconstruction,” “postcoloniality,” and “textual analysis” are here discussed separately and in succession, for example, yet nothing prevents a psychoanalytic postcolonial feminist from using deconstruction as part of textual analysis. Many of the theoretical “moments,” furthermore – feminism, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, postcolonial theory – are maddeningly intertwined and concurrent; ordering them in a linear fashion implies a temporal succession that doesn’t exist. (Hypertext and hypermedia might have handled this challenge more effectively.)

While this book tries to survey the field impartially, it is – as I have already indicated – a very personal account of film theory. I am therefore confronted by the question of voice, of how to interweave my own voice with the voices of others. On one level, the book is a form of “reported speech,” an enunciatory modality where the social evaluations and intonations of the “reporter” inevitably color and shade the report. To put it differently, the book is written in what literary theorists call “free, indirect discourse,” a style which slides between the direct reporting of speech – quoting Eisenstein, for example – and a more ventriloqual speech – my version of Eisenstein’s thinking – all interlaced with more personal ruminations. To make a literary analogy, it is as if I were mingling the authorial interventionism of a Balzac with the filtrations of a Flaubert or a Henry James. At times I will present the ideas of others; at times I will extrapolate or expand on the ideas of others; and at times I will present my own ideas as they have evolved over the years. When a passage is not marked as summarizing the work of others, the reader can assume that I am speaking in my own voice, especially in relation to issues that have always concerned me: the historicity of theory, intertextuality theory, Eurocentrism and multiculturalism, alternative aesthetics.

My goal is not to discuss any single theory or theorist in exhaustive detail, but rather to show overall shifts and movements in terms of the questions asked, the concerns expressed, the problematics explored. In a sense, my hope is to “deprovincialize” theory in both space and time. In temporal terms, theoretical issues trace their antecedents far back into pre-cinematic history. Issues of genre, for example, have been present at least since Aristotle’s Poetics. In spatial terms, I see theory as implicated in a global, international space. Nor do film-theoretical concerns follow the same sequence in every locale. While feminism has been a strong presence in Anglo-American film theory since the 1970s, feminism (including French feminism) has had relatively little impact in French film critical discourse. While film theorists in countries like Brazil or Argentina have long been concerned with issues of “national cinema,” such issues have been more marginal and recent in Europe and America.

Film theory is an international and multicultural enterprise, yet too often it remains monolingual, provincial, and chauvinistic. French theorists have only recently begun to reference work in English, while Anglo-American theory tends to cite only that work in French which has been translated into English. Work in Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, and German, not to mention Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Arabic, often goes untranslated and is therefore slighted, as is work in English from countries like India and Nigeria. A good deal of important work, for example Glauber Rocha’s voluminous writings on film – analogous in some ways to Pasolini’s written oeuvre, combining theory and criticism with poems, novels, and screenplays – has never been translated into English. While Bordwell and Carroll are right to mock the servile Francophilia of that post-1960s strain of film theory that genuflects to Parisian gurus long after their aura has faded in France itself, its corrective is not Anglophilia or “United Statesian” jingoism, but rather a true internationalism. I therefore hope to multiply the perspectives and locations from which film theory is spoken, although I have hardly succeeded to the degree I might have hoped, since the focus here still remains more or less constricted to theoretical work undertaken in the United States, France, Great Britain, Russia, Germany, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, and Italy, with all-too occasional “visits” to “Third World” and “postcolonial” theory.

The fiction feature film à la Hollywood is often regarded as the “real” cinema, much in the same way as an American tourist abroad might ask: “How much is this in real money?” I assume that “real” cinema comes in many forms: fiction and non-fiction, realist and non-realist, mainstream and avant-garde. All are worthy of our interest.

Film theory is rarely “pure”; it is usually laced with an admixture of literary criticism, social commentary, and philosophical speculation. The status of those who practice film theory, moreover, varies widely, from film theorists strictu sensu (Balazs, Metz), through filmmakers reflecting on their own practice (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Deren, Solanas, Kluge, Tarkovsky), to freelance intellectuals who also write about the cinema (James Agee, Parker Tyler), through practicing film critics whose collective oeuvre “hides,” as it were, an embryonic theory to be teased out by the reader (the case of Manny Farber or Serge Daney). Recent decades have witnessed the “academicization” of film theory, in a situation where most theorists have a university base.

The semiotic film theory of the 1970s and 1980s presumed a kind of quasi-religious initiation into the sacred texts of the then-reigning maîtres à penser. Much of film theory came to consist of ritualistic invocations (and crude summaries) of Lacan and other poststructuralist thinkers. In the 1970s “theory” became “Theory”; the Religion of Art transmuted into the Religion of Theory. For Lindsay Waters, theory was the crack cocaine which got people high and then let them down. Current theory, thankfully, is more epistemologically modest and less authoritarian. Grand Theory has abandoned its totalizing ambitions, while many theorists have called for more modest approaches to theory, in tandem with philosophers like Richard Rorty who redefine philosophy not as system-building à la Hegel but rather as a civil “conversation” without any claims to ultimate truth. Theorists such as Noël Carroll and David Bordwell, similarly, have called for “middle-level theorizing” which would “countenance as film theory any line of inquiry dedicated to producing generalizations pertaining to, or general explanations of, filmic phenomena, or devoted to isolating, tracking, and/or accounting for any mechanisms, devices, patterns, and regularities in the field of cinema.” Film theory, then, refers to any generalized reflexion on the patterns and regularities (or significant irregularities) to be found in relation to film as a medium, to film language, to the cinematic apparatus or to the nature of the cinematic text, or to cinematic reception. Instead of Grand Theory, then, only theories and the “activity of theorizing,” and the workmanlike production of general concepts, taxonomies, and explanations.

To slightly modify the formulation, film theory is an evolving body of concepts designed to account for the cinema in all its dimensions (aesthetic, social, psychological) for an interpretive community of scholars, critics, and interested spectators.

While I endorse the “modesty” of the Bordwell–Carroll perspective, this modesty should not become an alibi for censuring larger philosophical or political questions about the cinema. There is a danger that “middle-range” theory, like “consensus history” or “end-of-ideology” discourse, will assume that all the big questions are unanswerable as posed, leaving us only with small-scale inquiries susceptible to direct empirical verification. That some questions, such as the role of the cinematic apparatus in engendering ideological alienation, were answered ineptly or dogmatically does not mean that such questions were not worth asking. Indeed, even unanswerable questions might be worth asking, if only to see where they take us and what we discover along the way. Film theory, to put it paradoxically, can generate productive failures and calamitous successes. Modesty, furthermore, can lead in many directions not necessarily anticipated by the cognitivists. The patterns and regularities noted in the field of cinema, for example, might have to do not only with predictable stylistic or narratological procedures but also with patterns of gendered, racialized, sexualized, and culturally inflected representation and reception. Why are materials on “race,” for example, or on “third cinema,” not seen as “theoretical?” While on one level this exclusion might have to do with the artificial boundaries constructed around areas of theoretical inquiry, one wonders if it might not also have to do with the colonialist hierarchy which associates Europe with reflecting “mind” and non-Europe with unreflecting body? In a sense, this book broadens film theory to include the larger field of theorized film-related writing: cultural studies, film analysis, and so forth. I have therefore tried to include such diverse schools as multicultural media theory, postcolonial theory, and queer theory, in short the entire gamut of all the complex, subtle, and theoretically sophisticated film-related work performed under a wide variety of banners.

Although film theory has often involved debates, argument is only one, rather narrow, dimension of film theorizing. Theorists are often at their worst, moreover, precisely when they are hell-bent on annihilating an opponent; the stupidity the polemicist projects onto the straw-man antagonist ends up, through a kind of boomerang, by implicating the polemicist. Indeed, there is something disturbingly masculinist and testosterone-driven in the view of theory as cockfight or shouting match à la Crossfire. A real dialogue depends on the ability of each side to articulate the adversary’s project fairly before critiquing it.

The analytical method of distilling a theoretical text into its separate premises, as deployed by a Richard Allen or a Gregory Currie or a Noël Carroll, has clearly demonstrated its usefulness in clearing up logical ambiguities, conceptual confusions, and misfired deductions. But not everything is reducible to the dessicated skeleton of an abstract “argument.” The complex, historically situated, densely intertextual theories of a Bertolt Brecht, for example, cannot be reduced to a “truth claim” to be rebutted. The analytic method sometimes commits what literary critics used to call the “heresy of paraphrase”; it fails to recognize that the playful, oxymoronic, paradoxical writing of a Walter Benjamin or a Roland Barthes cannot always be broken down without loss into an arid sequence of “propositions,” a syllogistic armature from which all the vital juices have been drained. Sometimes tension and ambiguity are the point. Nor is film theory a kind of conceptual chess leading to an indisputable checkmate. Theories of art are not right or wrong in the same way as scientific theories. (Indeed, some would argue that even scientific theories are merely a sequence of metaphorical approximations.) One cannot discredit Bazin’s theorized defence of Italian neo-realist films in the same way as one can discredit the defence of outmoded “sciences” like phrenology and craniology.

Rather than being simply right or wrong – although on occasion they are one or the other – these diverse grids are relatively rich or impoverished, culturally dense or shallow, methodologically open or closed, fastidiously anal or cannibalistically oral, historically informed or ahistorical, one-dimensional or multidimensional, monocultural or multicultural. In theory, we find brilliant exponents of impoverished paradigms, and mediocre exponents of rich paradigms. Some film theories try to amplify meaning, while others try to discipline it, close it down. Robert Ray contrasts the impersonal, positivist approach to theory with what he calls the baroque, surrealist, essayistic approach. Indeed the history of film theory exhibits a kind of dialogue between two necessary moments, that of imaginative creation and that of analytical critique, a productive oscillation between ecstatic enthusiasms (those of an Eisenstein, for example) and the dry analytical rigor of those who tidy up the enchanting mess the creative enthusiasts have made. (Which is not to say that critique cannot display its own enthusiasm and creativity.)

At the same time, theoretical research programs, or metaphors like “film language” and “film dream,” can obey a law of diminishing returns, exhausting their capacity to generate new knowledge. Theoretical movements can begin as exciting and then become boring and predictable, or they can begin as boring and then suddenly become interesting as they “mate” with other theories. Theories can be safely correct in positivist terms or ambitiously interesting but wrong-headed. Profoundly mistaken theorists can make brilliant points “along the way.” Theory can be methodical and rigorous or it can consist of the anarchic play of a sensibility over a text or an issue. Theory can liberate the energies of its users or inhibit them. Theories are also task-specific. “Ideology critique” is well-suited for exposing pro-capitalist manipulations in Hollywood films, but it is rather ill-equipped for delineating the kinesthetic pleasures of a camera movement in Murnau’s Sunrise. Analytic or post-analytic film theory, like analytic philosophy, is good at taking things apart; it is less adept at discerning correspondences and relationalities.

Theories do not supersede one another in a linear progression. Indeed, there are Darwinian survivalist overtones in the view that theories can be “retired,” that they can be “eliminated” in competition. It would be silly to adopt a scorched earth policy that suggests that one movement or other got everything wrong. Theories do not usually fall into disuse like old automobiles relegated to a conceptual junkyard. They do not die; they transform themselves, leaving traces and reminiscences. There are shifts in emphasis, of course, but many of the major themes – mimesis, authorship, spectatorship – have been reiterated and reenvisioned from the beginning. At times, theorists broach the same questions, but answer them in light of different goals and in a different theoretical language.

Finally, I offer this book as a kind of antechamber to film theory, an invitation into its mansion. Needless to say, I hope readers will visit the various rooms in the mansion by reading, if they have not done so already, the theorists themselves.