SHORT CUTS INTRODUCTIONS TO FILM STUDIES OTHER SELECT TITLES IN THE SHORT CUTS SERIES THE HORROR GENRE: FROM BEELZEBUB TO BLAIR WITCH Paul Wells THE STAR SYSTEM: HOLLYWOOD’S PRODUCTION OF POPULAR IDENTITIES Paul McDonald SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA: FROM OUTERSPACE TO CYBERSPACE Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska EARLY SOVIET CINEMA: INNOVATION, IDEOLOGY AND PROPAGANDA David Gillespie READING HOLLYWOOD: SPACES AND MEANINGS IN AMERICAN FILM Deborah Thomas DISASTER MOVIES: THE CINEMA OF CATASTROPHE Stephen Keane THE WESTERN GENRE: FROM LORDSBURG TO BIG WHISKEY John Saunders PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA: THE PLAY OF SHADOWS Vicky Lebeau COSTUME AND CINEMA: DRESS CODES IN POPULAR FILM Sarah Street MISE-EN-SCÈNE: FILM STYLE AND INTERPRETATION John Gibbs NEW CHINESE CINEMA: CHALLENGING REPRESENTATIONS Sheila Cornelius with Ian Haydn Smith ANIMATION: GENRE AND AUTHORSHIP Paul Wells WOMEN’S CINEMA: THE CONTESTED SCREEN Alison Butler BRITISH SOCIAL REALISM: FROM DOCUMENTARY TO BRIT GRIT Samantha Lay FILM EDITING: THE ART OF THE EXPRESSIVE Valerie Orpen AVANT-GARDE FILM: FORMS, THEMES AND PASSIONS Michael O’Pray PRODUCTION DESIGN: ARCHITECTS OF THE SCREEN Jane Barnwell NEW GERMAN CINEMA: IMAGES OF A GENERATION Julia Knight EARLY CINEMA: FROM FACTORY GATE TO DREAM FACTORY Simon Popple and Joe Kember MUSIC IN FILM: SOUNDTRACKS AND SYNERGY Pauline Reay MELODRAMA: GENRE, STYLE, SENSIBILITY John Mercer and Martin Shingler FEMINIST FILM STUDIES: WRITING THE WOMAN INTO CINEMA Janet McCabe FILM PERFORMANCE: FROM ACHIEVEMENT TO APPRECIATION Andrew Klevan NEW DIGITAL CINEMA: REINVENTING THE MOVING IMAGE Holly Willis THE MUSICAL: RACE, GENDER AND PERFORMANCE Susan Smith TEEN MOVIES: AMERICAN YOUTH ON SCREEN Timothy Shary FILM NOIR: FROM BERLIN TO SIN CITY Mark Bould DOCUMENTARY: THE MARGINS OF REALITY Paul Ward THE NEW HOLLYWOOD: FROM BONNIE AND CLYDE TO STAR WARS Peter Krämer ITALIAN NEO-REALISM: REBUILDING THE CINEMATIC CITY Mark Shiel WAR CINEMA: HOLLYWOOD ON THE FRONT LINE Guy Westwell FILM GENRE: FROM ICONOGRAPHY TO IDEOLOGY Barry Keith Grant ROMANTIC COMEDY: BOY MEETS GIRL MEETS GENRE Tamar Jeffers McDonald SPECTATORSHIP: THE POWER OF LOOKING ON Michele Aaron SHAKESPEARE ON FILM: SUCH THINGS THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF Carolyn Jess-Cooke CRIME FILMS: INVESTIGATING THE SCENE Kirsten Moana Thompson THE FRENCH NEW WAVE: A NEW LOOK Naomi Greene CINEMA AND HISTORY: THE TELLING OF STORIES Mike Chopra-Gant GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST CINEMA: THE WORLD OF LIGHT AND SHADOW Ian Roberts FILM AND PHILOSOPHY: TAKING MOVIES SERIOUSLY Daniel Shaw CONTEMPORARY BRITISH CINEMA: FROM HERITAGE TO HORROR James Leggott RELIGION AND FILM: CINEMA AND THE RE-CREATION OF THE WORLD S. Brent Plate FANTASY CINEMA: IMPOSSIBLE WORLDS ON SCREEN David Butler FILM VIOLENCE: HISTORY, IDEOLOGY, GENRE James Kendrick NEW KOREAN CINEMA: BREAKING THE WAVES Darcy Paquet FILM AUTHORSHIP: AUTEURS AND OTHER MYTHS C. Paul Sellors THE VAMPIRE FILM: UNDEAD CINEMA Jeffrey Weinstock HERITAGE FILM: NATION, GENRE AND REPRESENTATION Belén Vidal QUEER CINEMA: SCHOOLGIRLS, VAMPIRES AND GAY COWBOYS Barbara Mennel ACTION MOVIES: THE CINEMA OF STRIKING BACK Harvey O’Brien BOLLYWOOD: GODS, GLAMOUR AND GOSSIP Kush Varia THE SPORTS FILM: GAMES PEOPLE PLAY Bruce Babington THE HEIST FILM: STEALING WITH STYLE Daryl Lee INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AND FILM: SPACE, VISON, POWER Sean Carter & Klaus Dodds FILM THEORY CREATING A CINEMATIC GRAMMAR FELICITY COLMAN A Wallflower Press Book Wallflower Press is an imprint of Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York . Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © Felicity Colman 2014 All rights reserved. E-ISBN 978-0-231-85060-5 Wallflower Press® is a registered trademark of Columbia University Press. A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-231-16973-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-85060-5 (e-book) A Columbia University Press E-book. CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup- [email protected]. CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction: The Written Matter of a Cinematic Grammar 1 Models 2 Technology 3 Spectators Conclusion: Film Theory as Practice Bibliography Index ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to the students and teachers of film theory that I have worked with, and all encounters that have helped my thinking on and through this discipline, especially Angela Ndalianis and Barbara Creed. Special thanks to Apollonia Zikos, Erin Stapleton, Anna Hickey-Moody, Roy and Dr Tang, who have helped me immeasurably in vital moments. Thanks to Yoram Allon, Commissioning Editor at Wallflower Press, for his tireless support of the discipline of film studies. INTRODUCTION: THE WRITTEN MATTER OF A CINEMATIC GRAMMAR Writing about Werner Herzog’s documentary film Grizzly Man (2005) in Cineaste magazine, Conrad Geller reminds his readers of one of the unforgettable scenes of the bear-loving naturalist, Timothy Treadwell. Geller writes of a moment selected by Herzog from Treadwell’s video blog, where Timothy is ‘fondling a large pile of bear dung. It was, he says, produced by one of his familiar bears, Wendy. “It’s still warm” he says wonderingly. “It was inside of her!”’ Geller characterises this film through such scenes, later asking ‘Did Treadwell do some good?’ He concludes that Grizzly Man ‘comes down to a kind of metaphysical debate between Treadwell and Herzog’ (2005: 52–3). The type of approach that Geller takes typifies contemporary writing about film. An affectively resonant scene from a film is re-drawn with words with emotive emphasis (fondling; wonderingly), a conceptual index is applied to the film (metaphysical), and a philosophical argument concerning ethics is drawn in with the question of ‘doing good’. But how would we describe Geller’s own mode of theorisation? Would we label him a Marxist theorist as he looks to the relationship between Treadwell’s social world of film production and that world’s continuation of social inequities and hierarchies (not the least between man and animal)? Or would we categorise him using a phenomenological approach, where the ‘encounter’ is deliberately not reduced to representational terms, but can only be personified in terms of its sensate dimensions (for example, see Sobchack 2004)? Geller further asks us to consider auteurist theory (see Bazin 2008), with his equalising reference for both director and film subject (such as we see in other theoretical accounts of Herzog, such as Noys 2007). Or should we set up a polemic with Geller, and state that in fact what he describes is not metaphysical, but more to the point, a post- metaphysical, realist narrative (such as Ruiz 1995 might suggest), that is, contingent upon his authorial position as a spectator of the spectacle of ‘beast, man, and nature’? In fact, all of these approximations might be considered, but there are yet numerous other approaches we could take to analysing this curious film. What is film theory? Film theory is a written interaction with and of the images and objects and ideas produced in and of film, and the cinema industry. The film theorist is a transdisciplinary practitioner, a writer of sound-images, connecting the temporally determining worlds of moving sound-images with the materiality of writing. The work of these practitioners, as I explore in this book, creates and utilises a filmic grammar, one specific to the expression of the cinematographic. This grammar ranges from the opinionated story about watching a film of choice, to the construction of a rigorous technical theoretical system of analysis, to the production of speculative thought, abstract ideas that may or may not be realised. The theory may be class, race or gender specific, or it may be couched in broader terms, where ‘everyone’ is a complicit viewer. The grammar can be enriched through intergenerational, transdisciplinary and transtechnological research and teaching. Or the grammar shows itself to be gender-blind, racially impervious, politically, philosophically and theologically biased, and can be patronisingly colonial and/or patriarchal in tone. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, film theory is still marked by its medium obsession – look what this new technology can do!; and look, here is another site of a demolished movie theatre. But, as much as it must adhere to the restraints of a discipline that went under the university’s official radar for quite a while, being taught in classes such as Anthropology, Art History, Enthnography, English, Gender, Languages, Music, Sociology, Philosophy, film theory has been largely sidelined by the perceived vocational popularity of Media Studies in universities, and its fate is ironically somewhat more secure than other humanities disciplines, many of which from that list have been subject to cuts in the early twenty-first century (such as Gender Studies departments). It arrives, and is funded there, along with broadcast media, animation and games studies, as a technological medium that is recognised as playing a central role in politics and culture, and which can reap huge political and economic benefits.1 Meanwhile, as a commercial industry, filmmaking has shown itself to be forever tied to national funding models, restrictions of censorship and political ideological impositions, as the subject of propagandist themes, and the peddler of militarism,