Film and Theory : An Anthology

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Appadurai, Arjun 1990. “Disjunction and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture Vol. 2, No. 2 (Spring).

Brazilian cinema, literature, and popular culture form another node in Stam's research. He co-edited Brazilian Cinema (1982) with Randal Johnson. Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture (Duke, 1997) offered the first book-length study in English of racial representation, especially of Afro-Brazilians, during the century of Brazilian Cinema, within a comparative framework in relation to similar issues in American cinema. Auerbach, Erich 1953. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press. A cognate theme was the celebration of film as a new universal language, a theme which resonated, as Miriam Hansen points out, with sources as diverse as the French Enlightenment, the metaphysics of Progress, and Protestant Millennialism (Hansen, 1991, p. 76). The cinema could thus repair the ruins of Babel and transcend barriers of nation, culture, and class. As a contributor writes in American Magazine (July 1913), there is in the cinema The popular masses, uncouth and infantile, experience while sitting in front of the screen the enchantment of the child to whom the grandmother has recounted a fairy tale; but I fail to understand how, night after night, a group of people who have the obligation of being civilized can idiotize themselves [in movie theaters] with the incessant repetition of scenes in which the abberations, anachronisms, inverisimilitudes, are made ad hoc for a public of the lowest mental level, ignorant of the most elementary educational notions. (Mora, 1988, p. 6) Braudy, Leo, and Marshall Cohen, eds. Film Theory and Criticism. 7th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.Here the notion of photogenie, later developed by French filmmaker-theorists like Jean Epstein to advance the specific potentialities of the seventh art, becomes a normative epidermic notion of beauty, associated with youth, luxury, stars, and, at least implicitly, whiteness. Although the passage does not mention race, its call for clean and hygienic as opposed to dirty faces, and its generally servile stance toward the lily-white Hollywood model, suggest a coded reference to the subject. 6 At times, the racial reference becomes more explicit. One editorialist calls for Brazilian cinema to be an act of purification of our reality, emphasizing progress, modern engineering, and our beautiful white people. The same author warns against documentaries as more likely to include undesirable elements: The concept of realism, while ultimately rooted in the classical Greek conception of mimesis (imitation), gained programmatic significance only in the nineteenth century, when it came to denote a movement in the figurative and narrative arts dedicated to the observation and accurate representation of the contemporary world. A neologism coined by French critics, realism was originally linked to an oppositional attitude toward romantic and neo-classical models in fiction and painting. The realist novels of writers like Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, George Eliot, and Eça de Queiròs brought intensely individualized, seriously conceived characters into typical contemporary social situations. Underlying the realist impulse was an implicit teleology of social democratization favoring the artistic emergence of more extensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of subject matter for problematic–existential representation (Auerbach, 1953, p. 491). Literary critics distinguished between this deep, democratizing realism, and a shallow, reductionistic, and obsessively veristic naturalism – realized most famously in the novels of Emile Zola – which modeled its human representations on the biological sciences.

Welsh, James M., and Peter Lev, eds (2007) The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation. Lanham, Maryland : The Scarecrow Press. Much of the early writing on cinema was produced by literary figures. Here is the Russian novelist Maxim Gorky responding to an 1896 screening of a film: Cahir, Linda Constanzo. (2006) Literature into Film: Theory and Practical Approaches. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc..Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there – the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air – is dipped in monotonous grey.… It is no life but its shadow.… And all this in a strange silence where no rumble of wheels is heard, no sound of footsteps or of speech. Not a single note of the intricate symphony that always accompanies the movements of people. (Quoted in Leyda, 1972, pp. 407–9)

The question of cinematic specificity can be approached (a) technologically, in terms of the apparatus necessary to its production; (b) linguistically, in terms of film’s materials of expression; (c) historically, in terms of its origins (e.g. in daguerreotypes, dioramas, kinetoscopes); (d) institutionally, in terms of its processes of production (collaborative rather than individual, industrial rather than artisanal); and (e) in terms of its processes of reception (individual reader versus gregarious reception in movie theater). Whereas poets and novelists (usually) work alone, filmmakers (usually) collaborate with cinematographers, art directors, actors, technicians, etc. While novels have characters, films have characters and performers, a quite different thing. Thus Pierre Louÿs’s 1898 novel The Woman and the Puppet features one entity (the character Conchita) while the Buñuel adaptation of the novel That Obscure Object of Desire features three (or more) entities: the character, the two actresses who play the role, and the dubber who dubs both actresses. Foucault, M. (1986 (1969)) ¿What is an Author¿, in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 101-20.

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The course takes an expanded approach to the question of adaptation, seeing film as not simply based on literary antecedents but as an art form which draws on other forms of art. It will consider movements across genres - from literary classics to comic books - and across historical periods and geographical spaces. A streamlined collection of essays introducing readers to some basic texts of film theory along with foundational essays by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. For graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media (Rutgers, 2000), coauthored with Ella Shohat Many early commentators, like Gorky, were ambivalent about the cinema. From the beginning, there were simultaneous tendencies to either over-endow the cinema with utopian possibilities, or to demonize it as a progenitor of evil. Thus while some promised that the cinema would reconcile hostile nations and bring peace to the world, others gave expression to moral panics, the fear that film might contaminate or degrade the lower-class public, prodding it toward vice or crime. In such reactions, we sense the convergence of the long shadow of three discursive traditions: (1) Platonic hostility to the mimetic arts; (2) the puritanical rejection of artistic fictions; and (3) the historical scorn of bourgeois elites for the unwashed masses. Film theory is what Bakhtin would call a historically situated utterance. And just as one cannot separate the history of film theory from the history of the arts and of artistic discourse, so one cannot separate it from history tout court, defined by Fredric Jameson as that which hurts but also as that which inspires. In the long view, the history of film, and therefore of film theory, must be seen in the light of the growth of nationalism, within which cinema became a strategic instrument for projecting national imaginaries. It must also be seen in relation to colonialism, the process by which the European powers reached positions of economic, military, political, and cultural hegemony in much of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. (While nations had often annexed adjacent territories, what was new in European colonialism was its planetary reach, its attempted submission of the world to a single universal regime of truth and power.) This process reached its apogee at the turn of the twentieth century, when the earth surface controlled by European powers rose from 67 percent (1884) to 84.4 percent (1914), a situation that began to be reversed only with the disintegration of the European colonial empires after World War II. 1