Film and the new psychology

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Poetics 21 (1992) 93-116 North-Holland

Film and the new psychology Paisley Livingston

This paper identifies and critiques some of the interdisciplinary strategies adopted in recent trends in cinema studies. Prevalent psychological assumptions and normative claims are examined, and some alternative approaches are proposed. Typical theses about narrative in the cinema provide a particular point of focus.

1. Introduction When Maurice Merleau-Ponty first gave a lecture entitled ‘Le Cinkma et la nouvelle psychologie’ in 1945, the ‘new psychology’ that he had in mind was what he called la psychologie de la Forme - Gestalt psychology interpreted in the light of existential phenomenology. Applying this psychology to the cinema would, in Merleau-Ponty’s view, yield some far-reaching results. Not only would it be possible to describe the relations between perception, everyday intersubjective understanding, and some of the basic structures of cinematic experience, but it would also be possible to provide a psychological basis and justification for a particular aesthetics of the cinema. Merleau-Ponty saw the cinema as a technical invention that could be put to many different uses; whenever true films (de zkritubles films) were made, this was the result of a kind of second invention of the technical device, one in which an artistic will (une uolontk urtistique) appropriated the apparatus in a way that genuinely corresponded to our manner of being-in-the-world. Since phenomenological psychology could explicate our being-in-the-world, it could also be used to corroborate genuine insights into the aesthetics of film. Over forty-five years later, we are now in a position to observe that filmmakers and film scholars have not in general espoused the psychological tenets recommended by Merleau-Ponty; nor have the corresponding aesthetic criteria, such as his disapproval of ‘subjective’ shots, been respected on the whole. Although Jean Mitry’s massive Esthktique et psychologie du cinbmu (1963-65) develops a phenomenology of film art, the structuralist and poststructuralist trends of the past thirty years have defined themselves squarely Correspondence to: Paisley Livingston, Department brooke St. West, Montreal, PQ, Canada H3A 2T6.

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in opposition to that sort of approach. The break was explicit and brutal: as far as Christian Metz (1971) was concerned, the publication of Mitry’s two volumes signalled the conclusion of the first, ‘eclectic’ stage of film studies, just as the annoucement of Metz’s own research programme was meant to inaugurate a second period, one preparatory to a third and final stage in which the great semiological synthesis would be achieved. The shift to psychoanalytical approaches that began in the early 1970’s (e.g. Kuntzel 1973, Lyotard 1971, 1973) and has persisted to this day in cinema studies (e.g. Kaplan 1989, Metz 1977, Mulvey 1989) further underscores the extent to which phenomenology has not provided the guiding framework as MerleauPonty had hoped. Merleau-Ponty’s piece, then, is ‘dated’. Yet there is a sense in which at least one of the strategies adopted in the philosopher’s essay has been echoed in film studies over and over again: substitute one ‘new psychology’ for another, and the basic interdisciplinary connexion remains. In what follows, I shall begin by substantiating this last point by referring to some major trends in cinema studies. ’ Yet my approach here is not that of the disinterested intellectual historian, for I believe that reflecting on these past trends can be a useful first step towards gaining a more lucid and productive understanding of the interdisciplinary relations in which research into cinema is necessarily engaged. My argument is not that it was simply a mistake for film scholars to turn to sources in psychology; I think, on the contrary, that both the strengths and limitations of such a move need to be clarified. Thus, in the third part of my paper, I identify some of the key questions raised by the interdisciplinary tendencies of cinema studies over the past two decades, and go on to make some criticisms of prevalent strategies and assumptions. In my fourth section, I make some very general suggestions about some of the promising interdisciplinary connexions that remain to be explored, and in a final part, I exemplify some of these points by reference to some typical theses about narrative.

2. From semiology to psychoanalysis Reference to a ‘new psychology’, I have suggested, has often informed both the explanatory and normative claims of cinema scholars. An early and influential example is Metz’s initial (1968, 1971) semiological project. Abandoning many of the traditional questions and concerns of film criticism, Metz assigned to semiology the task of explaining how spectators manage to ’ Although in what follows I focus on cinema studies, many of my remarks hold for a lot of work done in communications and media studies more generally, at least in the French, British, and North American contexts. For a sample, see Allen (1987) and Fiske (1990).

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understand films. This is essentially a psychological question in that it could only be answered by describing the relevant psychic processes occurring whenever someone makes sense of a film. In the semiologist’s approach, the assumption is that human cognition is determined by some form of ‘linguistic’ codification. The key premise runs as follows: if films, which are taken to be tissues of cinematic and extra-cinematic codes, can make sense to the members of an audience, this is the case because the spectator’s minds are themselves codificational systems capable of engaging in the ‘work’ of decoding. In the world of semiology, codes go ‘all the way down’, in the sense that there is no aspect of human perception or understanding that is not thought to be governed by linguistic or quasi-linguistic codification. This guiding assumption was once put rather bluntly by Umberto Eco when he declared that ‘if the addressees understand, it means that below their understanding there exists a code. If we can’t manage to get hold of it, that doesn’t mean that there’s no code, but rather that it still has to be found’ (1976: 592). To contend that codification is necessarily the basis of all aspects of cinematic comprehension, and that the existence of the latter entails that of the former, is to make a rather strong claim. As far as we know, it is possible that this thesis could one day be shown to be correct, but it has to be acknowledged that at the time when the film semiologists first made such assertions, belief in such a thesis was not justified by anything even remotely approximating sufficient evidence. What is more, there are some good reasons for thinking that this claim is in fact incorrect. In regard to many aspects of commonplace communicational phenomena, there would seem to be no linguistic or other code that can explain an addressee’s accurate uptake of certain types of utterance. There are, for instance, various highly contextspecific and indirect communicative acts, such as irony, sarcasm, and metaphor, in which a speaker’s success at making himself or herself understood is achieved, not by virtue of the existence of a shared linguistic code or convention, but by virtue of inferential strategies leading to the recognition of the speaker’s intent (see Akmajian et al. 1984: 395). This point is granted even by linguists who continue to believe that one important component of linguistic competence indeed consists of a syntactico-semantic module or device that involves a system of rules (which may be taken to mean that something like a ‘code’ or system of codes does play a role in linguistic competence). Even so, the assumption that codes do aZl of the work is highly problematic in regard to natural languages; when we turn to the so-called ‘language’ of the cinema, the problems of applying a code and message model become even more apparent. If it looks like general inferential processes and problem-solving strategies are what best explain many aspects of linguistic communication, it seems unwise to go on assuming that ‘the code’ simply has to be there, waiting to be found. Surely the burden of proof lies squarely on the shoulders of those who want to contend that the film

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spectator’s comprehension is based on - if not completely determined by an autonomous syntactico-semantic device functioning as a system of codification. Has this burden of proof been shouldered? Hardly. In spite of the central explanatory role assigned to the notion in the programmatic literature of semiology, ‘code’ remains an ambiguous and underdeveloped term. 2 It has never been shown that the hypothetical codes effectively play any real role in determining the spectator’s reception of a film, if only because film semiologists have not to date provided any detailed descriptions of any of the codes that they constantly invoke. It would seem appropriate, then, to abandon the rather extreme claims that have been made about cinematic codification (for more details, see Livingston 1983). In this regard, film theory has followed the pattern of literary studies, where the initial semiological project of developing descriptive models of readerly competence quickly degenerated into the business of providing additional literary ‘readings’ of individual texts. Instead of referring to the actual conditions of possibility of texts’ multiple meanings, ‘code’ came to designate any particular network of associations a critic could elaborate in response to a given text. This shift was explicit in the work of Roland Barthes. In an early essay he openly championed the idea that literary theory should imitate Noam Chomsky’s research programme, studying competence and not performance (1966: 56-58). Criticism engages in the production of particular meanings, but literary science describes the conditions of possibility of all literary signification. But in his subsequent writings, Barthes did not carry out this scheme, and the distinction between criticism and literary research collapsed. Barthes continued to suggest that codes were what made literary meanings possible (1973: 30), but he also let on that his use of the term did not genuinely correspond to that concept. Thus Barthes wrote that ‘The word code itself must not be understood here in the rigorous and scientific sense of the term. Codes are simply associative fields, a supra-textual organisation of notations that convey a certain idea of structure’ (1973: 50; cf. 1970: 27-28). A critic’s evocation of ‘codes’ in such a loose sense should hardly be accepted as providing a model of the conditions and psychological processes that effectively make a text’s various meanings possible for readers or spectators. Semiologists, then, took it for granted that the mind is a locus of encodings and decodings. As was the case with Merleau-Ponty, certain normative ’ The ‘definitions’ of ‘code’ proposed in the literature are nebulous, inconsistent, and generally and the like) that rely on a number of other major terms (such as ‘system’, ‘rule, ’ ‘convention’ themselves stand in need of analysis and definition. A recent example is Fiske (1990: 20), who, while claiming that everything from television broadcasts to clothing can be analyzed in terms of ‘codes’, works with the following definition: ‘signs and rules or conventions that determine how and in what contexts these signs are used and how they are combined to form more complex messages’.

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positions corresponded to the psychological assumptions. It has often been complained that film semiology was not the purely descriptive endeavour Metz claimed it should be; instead, film semiologists were said to be biased in favour of narrative and representational films (e.g. Eizykman 1976). But it is not clear that this is the most pertinent point to be made in this regard. Semiologists should not be blamed for the marginal status of non-narrative and abstract films; nor should they be blamed for wanting to focus their research on the kinds of works produced and consumed in the world’s major cinematic institutions. The important normative stances associated with semiology lie elsewhere. Namely, the semiologist’s basic idea that cognitive processes are reducible to codification informs a stance favouring any and all forms of cinematic theory and practice that could be expected to reveal and replace the hidden codes thought to be constitutive of the mind of the ‘bourgeois’ film viewer. Film semiologists generally hold that in its so-called ‘classical’ configuration, the cinematic experience is profoundly deceptive: the codes that make the cinema’s fascinating mimetic function possible determine the viewers’ experience while remaining outside of their awareness. What is more, one purely contingent system of codifications stands as the ‘natural’ (because invisible) and ‘universal’ (because dominant) mode of signification, the result being that film viewers are rather like the deluded prisoners described in the Platonic myth of the cavern (this analogy is evoked in films, such as Bernard0 Bertolucci’s 1970 I1 Conformista, as well as in various essays, such as Baudry, 1975). It follows - or so the argument runs that filmmakers and critics ought to find ways of making the prisoners of the cinematic shadows aware of the illusion - if not of bringing them out in to the world of genuine sunlight. Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, and Daniele Huillet, whose work was usually interpreted along quasi-Brechtian lines, thus stood as the great Kodemeister whose filmic strategies simultaneously attracted attention to and vitiated the repressive codes of the ‘classical’ illusionist film. In short, in the film theory and criticism informed by semiology, a number of psychological tenets were used to support an approach to the cinema that was at once descriptive and normative. Slightly more recently, a similar interdisciplinary stance has been manifested in another major trend of cinema studies. At bottom, this trend has been a matter of film scholars espousing the ‘new’ psychology of Sigmund Freud and his disciplines. In many instances - Metz himself being a central example - the earlier semiological psychology of codification was more or less retained (‘the unconscious is structured like a language’, etc.), but added to its tenets were a number of psycho-dynamic notions, beginning with some very strong theses about the overdetermination of all psychic phenomena by a bundle of unconscious drives, the basic configurations of which were supposed to be determined in early childhood. Thus the psychology of cognition was re-

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placed by a psychology of conation, even as many of the previous quasi-linguistic assumptions were maintained. Complex cultural practices and institutions were to be explained in terms of unconscious motivational processes, the idea being in some cases that these processes are wholly non-intentional systems of libidinal ‘forces’. Film theorists no longer asked the question of competence (how can spectators understand films?), raising instead the question of motivation: why do spectators want to see films? One kind of ‘answer’ to the latter query quickly became prevalent amongst film theorists, and remains so today. Essentially, that answer amounts to a version of psychological hedonism: people want to see films because doing so is a particular source of pleasure, and this pleasure is derived from those unconscious psycho-sexual sources that are the real mainsprings of human activity, the name for the moviegoer’s syndrome being ‘scopophilia’. I will not engage here in a detailed critique of the psychoanalytic assumptions that have been prevalent in film studies. Excellent epistemological criticisms of psychoanalysis have been in print for some time (e.g. Griinbaum 1984), and the applications of psychoanalysis to film studies have also been intelligently criticized (e.g. Bordwell 1989, Carroll 1988, 1990, Dufrenne 1973). As was the case with the earlier semiology, none of the sweeping theoretical claims about the filmgoer’s psyche has been backed up by anything resembling detailed descriptions, operative models, and empirical tests. We have not been given anything but the most vague accounts of how the putative unconscious motivational processes control or determine perception, cognition, and comprehension. And as before, the film theorist’s explanatory aims have been vitiated by the goal of producing interpretations of particular works. As a result, the turn to psychoanalytical themes and motifs only served to facilitate the production of another series of more or less clever readings of individual films, readings in which a particular sort of ‘symptomatic meaning’ is ‘discovered’ (see Bordwell 1989, for this notion and for an array of important examples). As was the case with linguistic semiology, normative claims have been central to the psychoanalytic vein of film criticism. Typically, films are praised and blamed in function of the implicit spectator generally, the white, bourgeois, phallocentric male - who is supposed to be inscribed within the ‘texts’, waiting to be actualized at the moment of projection, the way a strip of litmus paper changes its colour on contact with an acidic liquid. ’

’ The literature is filled with preposterous claims about how ‘texts’ wholly constitute, cause and determine the experience that human agents (or ‘subject-effects’) have of them. An example is Daniel Dayan’s statement that ‘discourse defines in advance the role of the subject and therefore pre-determines the reading’ (1976: 444).

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3. Norms of interdisciplinarity

The brief sketch I have just presented is certainly not a ‘thick’ description of the many publications in the field, and I am well aware of the fact that there have also been some valuable exceptions to the trends I have identified (one such exception is Wilson 1986). Yet anyone who is familiar with the literature will recognize that my characterization is not simply a caricature. In all three cases that I have mentioned - phenomenology, semiology, and psychoanalysis _ psychological assumptions have served as a fundamental source for a descriptive, explanatory, and normative project in cinema studies. Some fundamental questions are raised by these trends in film studies. What motivates the recurrent recourse to a ‘new psychology’? Why should psychology play such a central role in cinema studies? How have the psychological doctrines in question been selected? What would it mean for film scholars to rationalize their relation to work in psychology and other fields? To what extent is it reasonable to think that a psychology can provide an adequate basis for aesthetic and/or ethico-political norms related to film? These are difficult questions, and film scholars cannot reasonably be expected to have already found definitive answers to them. What is unfortunate and unnecessary, given the extent to which film scholars have engaged in extensive and fundamental interdisciplinary borrowings, is the fact that there have been very few explicit discussions of these sorts of questions, and few explicit justifications of the interdisciplinary strategies that have been adopted. Thus, a very first point that needs to be made is that these questions should henceforth be brought to the fore in film theory and metacriticism. I raise the question of a possible ‘rationalization’ of certain interdisciplinary relations because many of the borrowings and analogies that have been engaged in by film scholars have been quite irrational, and the epistemic and other ends of research would be far better served by adopting a more rational approach to the tasks at hand. In speaking of irrationality here, it is not a matter of invoking unrealistic standards of absolute Rationality and Objectivity; rather, what is at stake are some very moderate, subjective criteria of practical and epistemic reason. This point can be illustrated by reference to the case of psychoanalytic film theory. One looks in vain in these writings for any detailed arguments warranting the selection of particular Freudian doctrines to the exclusion of the many other possible psychological theories and research programmes (for an example, see Metz 1977; for a critique of the widespread tendency to take Jacques Lacan as an unchallenged authority, see Macey 1988). Yet at no point during the last two decades has it simply been ‘obvious’ or self-evident that any one version of psychoanalysis is the correct, or even an adequate, virtuous, or emancipatory theory of human agency; not only has it been a conspicuous public fact that there are a number of competing research programmes and traditions, but

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psychoanalysis itself has been the subject of any number of highly visible and far-reaching critiques. In such a context, an unargued adoption of some particular version of psychoanalysis (such as object relations theory, Lacanianism, or some more or less faithful reconstruction of Freud’s own views) effectively amounts to a violation of an extremely basic norm of epistemic rationality: when you know that more than one belief could be adopted and assert that only one of them is right, you should justify this assertion by giving reasons (e.g. evidence and argumentation) why the other possible beliefs should be rejected and the one belief adopted. Even if it just so happened that one of the psychoanalytical doctrines accepted by film scholars actually explained the essential workings of the human psyche, the cinema scholar’s present acceptance of that doctrine would still be irrational, simply because he or she gives no justification for the choice. It may be objected here that what I have spoken of as a failure to ‘give reasons’ is not a case of subjective irrationality or incoherence, for the simple ‘reason’ that the psychoanalysts of film do not believe that reasons actually can or should play any important role in human life. Do they not cite Lacan’s view that the cursed ‘ego psychology’ is the great American betrayal of Freud’s potentially radical decentering of the subject? Following that line, there are instances of verbal persuasion, effects of authority, and ‘des sLljrts supposb sa~~ir’, but there are no genuine cases of successful arguments and demonstrations, rationally legitimated authority, and true and justified belief. Here we see just how far it is necessary to go to maintain the apparent coherence of the psychoanalytic film scholar’s stance: nothing less than the very goal of making and defending reasoned knowledge claims has to be abandoned. But such a drastic measure can hardly be reconciled with the idea of there being anything like ‘research’ into the cinema, which is why the psychoanalytic film scholar’s stance is at bottom irrational. ’ I turn now to what I take to be another major source of irrationality in some of the prevalent interdisciplinary strategies of contemporary film scholarship, which has to do not with the scholar’s choice of a particular set of psychological assumptions (and with the justification of that choice), but with

’ I am aware of the fact that many film scholars try to give non-epistemological justifications for their reliance on psychoanalysis, which would in that case be ‘a good’ (perhaps even .the right’) choice for moral, therapeutic and/or political reasons. Thus the justification and veracity of the psychoanalytic credo would no longer be the issue. The discussion must then focus on the status of this kind of ‘argument’ itself: what evidence and reasons support the claim that working with psychoanalytic assumptions is a good way to contribute to the non-epistemic ends of film criticism’? How do we know that it is a good idea for film scholars to abandon all properly epistemic goals? Can moral, therapeutic and political values genuinely be realized in the absence of the realization of epistemic values? For example, how can an effective and virtuous cultural critique succeed if it is based on erroneous and irrational assumptions about social institutions and the human psyche?

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the particular use that is made of the tenets adopted. Typically, that use has been inadequate because of a lack of clarity about what kinds of claims can and cannot be warranted by a psychological theory. Most notably, there has been a failure to clarify and make explicit two sets of relations: (a) the relations between the critic’s psychological tenets and aesthetic judgements; and (b) the relations between the critic’s aesthetic judgements and claims about the socio-political dimensions of cinema. I shall take up these two topics in turn. There is a very loose sense in which the connexion between psychology and a film scholar’s evaluative positions is at once appropriate and unavoidable: aesthetic and other norms relative to the cinema will necessarily have to do with the experience of filmgoers and filmmakers, and therefore one’s psychological (and other) assumptions about that experience will come into play at some point in the argument. That is one reason why this particular interdisciplinary connexion will remain crucial to cinema studies. But the kind of strategy that has been prevalent in cinema studies is of a more particular nature. Essentially, it has been a matter of trying to get the psychological doctrine to legitimate certain ideas about what constitutes a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ cinematic experience and/or film. ‘Classical Hollywood narrative’ is bad, we have been told, because it conceals the ‘work’ and/or ‘play’ of the signifier. In an earlier instance of a similar argumentative strategy (Bazin 197.51,Eisensteinian montage was decried because it violated the ‘actual’ conditions of our real-life experience, substituting a theoretical and directive (read: ideological) succession of views for the ‘openness’ and ‘freedom’ of the everyday perceptual field. Many other examples of arguments of this sort can be found in past and recent writings about film. What is the status of such arguments? The point to be made is not that psychological facts are never directly relevant to aesthetic norms, but that there is a limit to how far such arguments can go. The example from Merleau-Ponty, evoked at the beginning of this essay, can be used to illustrate this idea. The philosopher contended that if a filmmaker’s goal is to make spectators feel dizzy, the most effective means to that end is not to try to create an audio-visual first-person representation of the subjective experience of dizziness, but to provide a convincing external depiction of someone in a situation where that sensation would be likely to be experienced (1950: 104). This aesthetic maxim has a psychological basis (the veracity of which is not my present concern), namely, the idea that an experience such as dizziness cannot be stimulated most effectively - if at all - by cinematic images that cannot represent what it is like to have a direct experience of the loss of one’s equilibrium. The cinematic image can, on the other hand, offer a highly convincing depiction of what someone looks like when experiencing dizziness, and the spectator’s empathetic understanding of the other’s experience will do the rest. What is more, Merleau-Ponty’s point can be general-

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ized and can serve to deflate a number of fairly prevalent claims about ‘subjective’ imagery in the cinema. In many film reviews and scholarly essays, one finds words of praise for films that are said literally to represent the ‘subjective vision’ of the filmmaker. An example would be Federico Fellini’s putative use, in his onirico-expressionist 84 (1963) of ‘first-person’ camera angles said to ‘reproduce’ and directly convey to the spectator the filmmaker’s interiority. ’ In Merleau-Ponty’s view, an accurate understanding of the conditions of everyday phenomenal experience and of our perception of cinematic representations directly discredits such talk, requiring, at the very least, a shift from a literal to a figurative understanding of the notion of the ‘subjective camera’. This sort of argument has strengths as well as limitations. If it has any legitimacy of its own to convey, a psychological doctrine can indeed weaken or lend support to some critical claims about the effectiveness of certain cinematic methods, but it does not by the same stroke warrant the idea that there is only one superior or acceptable cinematic style. In fact, MerleauPonty’s norm is most accurately expressed in the form of a conditional: if the filmmaker’s goal is 4, the most effective means is p. not r. The psychological doctrine may warrant the means-end schema, but it does not legitimate the antecedent clause: establishing the desirability, for aesthetic or other reasons, of crafting films that effectively make spectators feel dizzy (or that reproduce some other aspect of our actual being-in-the-world) is a different sort of thesis, one that cannot be pulled from a psychological doctrine. A psychological theory might one day explain why people sometimes like to get dizzy; it could even enshrine the pleasures of ilinx amongst the invariant forms of play (I have in mind here Roger Caillois’s speculative 1967 essay); but no single aesthetic system or set of criteria can be derived from even the ‘definitive’ and complete psychological doctrine (should such a thing even be conceivable). Given the multiple uses to which the cinema has actually been put by human beings, it seems safe to assume that the tenets of an accurate psychology would be compatible with more than one idea about what the cinematic apparatus should be used for. Even if the psychological theory could provide accurate distinctions between certain types of ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ forms of cinematic experience, these distinctions would not single out one ‘ideal’ or ‘superior’ type of film. One could, for example, coherently accept Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological theory of perception while also defending a highly detailed and coherent aesthetic argument in favour of Fellini’s ‘subjective’ camerawork in S$. Such an argument might grant that the film does not reproduce anyone’s actual subjective perceptions; the value of the film resides, not in its mimetic impact or expressive function, 5 E.g. Pechter (1987: 273X who describes the film as ‘a wholly goes on inside a (wildly humorous and imaginative) mind’.

natural

representation

of what

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but in its comic and highly stylized exploration of the relations between certain cinematic and novelistic forms. A phenomenologist could, of course, mount various counterarguments against such a claim, but their force would not be derived from any purely psychological tenets, but from various norms having to do with authenticity and with art’s proper relation to our being-inthe-world. The psychological assumptions on which scholars rely whenever they refer to the making and viewing of films will always have certain implications for aesthetic norms, but these assumptions should not be thought to yield any fine-grained and restrictive aesthetical doctrines. Failure to understand this is one reason why the relations between normative and psychological claims have been problematic in recent film scholarship. Sometimes critics’ heavy reliance on psychological tenets has only been implicit, and what was presented as a purely aesthetic judgement in fact had its basis - often a tenuous one at that - in a tacit model of the individual human agent. But there is a second reason why the normative structure of much recent film theory and criticism has been faulty, a reason having to do with the tangled relations between psychological, aesthetic, and political claims. To point to a wellknown example, cinematic ‘code-busting’ was often advocated for what was presented as a political motive, namely, the desire to subvert something called bourgeois ideology. Yet these moves towards politics have often been painfully superficial. Ideology is a notoriously problematic notion, yet the version of it that quickly became prevalent in Anglo-American film studies once again without there having been a thorough search for, or evaluation of, the relevant theoretical options - was centred on Lacan’s conception of the subject, the result being that many film scholars tried to derive the hoped-for political results from a speculative theory of the relations between cinematic style and the spectator’s psyche. 6 We can hardly contribute to a valuable understanding of cultural politics by starting with the assumption that the social and moral effects of cinema can be derived from stylistic differences, from the nature of the cinematic apparatus, or from the invariant psychology of the male spectator’s ‘scopophilic’ desires. Similarly, laying it down that ‘good’ films are those that make a radical break with any and all forms of the ‘classical’, phallocratic cinema does not give us answers to the many detailed questions one may have about cinematic point of view, film narrative, the use of colour, music, and sound in film, and so on. Asserting the priority of political values over aesthetic ones, many film scholars then proceeded to aestheticize the political, the result being that neither political nor aesthetic topics were dealt with adequately. If the critic’s idea is that the ultimate ’ A key source on ideology was Althusser (1965, 1971); a few examples of alternative approaches to ideology in film that have been overlooked in Anglo-American film studies are Dufrenne (1974) and Lebel (1971).

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source of value of cinematic practices and experiences is political, then this point must be defended, and the critic’s specific political programme and socio-cultural assumptions should be set forth and argued for. But this is what has not been done, even by those film scholars who seem most eager to assert the primacy of politics.

4. New sources and avenues

of enquiry

The reader may have sensed that my overall feeling is that both the materials and the stances I have been reviewing are rather stale. Indeed, these ideas would not even be worth discussing if it were not for the fact that they continue to be set forward confidently in textbooks, courses, and researchlevel publications. We still see new special issues of journals devoted to the business of outlining programmes for future research in semiology, and every fifteen minutes another book on psychoanalysis and the cinema is published somewhere in the world. We are told that the problem with earlier work in this vein has been that Saussure, Freud, Marx and Lacan have not yet been properly understood; once they have, the ‘questions of cinema’ will finally be posed correctly. At a time when the Parisian Althusserian is already an extinct species, one still hears influential American critics rehearsing the theory of the ‘ideological state apparatus’. And feminists - of all people earnestly try to advance their cause by interpreting movies in the light of tired Lacanian slogans. But in addition to a vehement cry of ‘Basta!‘, I have some positive proposals to make concerning alternatives to the tendencies I have been criticizing, the most basic proposal being that film scholars should try to become more aware of the work that is actually being done in linguistics, psychology, political philosophy, sociology, and the other pertinent fields. I do not presume to be in a position to provide film scholars with a list of the sources and assumptions that should guide all future work. Not only would such a list be very long, but I do not pretend to know all of its items. I do know that film scholars should make their interdisciplinary borrowings less selective and irrational by getting in contact with a much broader and more up-to-date range of work in other fields. To that end, I shall now evoke a number of interdisciplinary connexions and research strategies that remain to be explored at the present time. Beginning with psychology, the centrality of which has been a key point in this paper, one may mention the vast amount of work that has been done in the years that have followed the ‘cognitive’ turn of post-behaviourist psychology. Beneath this broad rubric are many intelligent theoretical and empirical studies of direct pertinence to the study of the processes involved in the film spectator’s response to films, including work on perception, mental imagery, memory, categorization,

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judgemcnt, problem-solving, and cognitive development. 7 Some of this work, by the way, picks up on some of the basic insights of the Gestalt school to which Merleau-Ponty called our attention in the 1940’s. Add to this list a wealth of recent studies in philosophical psychology and the theory of action, which should be studied by critics who want to make informed claims about the motives and activities of filmmakers, film spectators, and anyone else involved in the social institutions of cinema. ’ Another body of work that ought to be taken into account by an up-to-date research programme in cinema studies are the many explorations of the processes of discourse comprehension, including an important subcategory dealing specifically with the concepts of narrative and story (more on this topic below). 9 More generally, it is a matter of shifting from outdated structuralist linguistics (and its sceptical implosions in poststructuralism and postmodernism) to current work in the syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics of natural languages, for surely such a shift of emphasis ought to be the prolegomena to any future linguistic analogies. A useful historical perspective on linguistic analogies as such is provided by Thomas Pave1 (19881, and it is good to keep in mind that relying on vague analogies is one of the chief ways in which interdisciplinarity goes wrong. Philosophical aesthetics is another field that ought to be drawn upon in the renewal of the problematics of cinema studies. ‘” Those who are more concerned with the political and socio-cultural dimensions of cinematic practice need no longer imagine that the Althusserians had the final word on our questions concerning ideology and institutions. Pierre Bourdieu (1979) and Jon Elster (1982, 1985) are two important - and highly divergent sources for scholars who still want to develop a leftist cultural critique. Intelligent and complex hypotheses about social institutions are needed, and there are good reasons why cinema scholars should try to follow Siegfried J. Schmidt’s lead in developing an interdisciplinary systems-theoretical perspective on cultural and social history (1980-82, 1985, 1987, 1989, forthcoming). Those cinema scholars who claim to be interested in the pragmatics of culture may find here a way of surmounting the sterile dichotomy between ‘abstract’ and a-social aesthetic topics, and the various reductive sociologies that fail to grasp the specificities of discourses and practices falling within the domain of both popular and elite forms of ‘art’. ’ For a number important

sources

of informative include

survey articles,

see the three volumes

Clark (1989), Cummins

(1982), Johnson-Laird

of Osherson

(1990);

(1983), Pylyshyn

other (1984)

and Schank (1982). x For a start, see Audi (1989), Bishop (1989), Bratman (1987), Dretske (1988), Ginet (1990), Mele (1987), Pettit (1986), Stalnaker (1987), Velleman (1989), and Wilson (1989). y For some background, see Black and Bower (1980), Colby (1982), Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983), Graesser (1981), Hobbs (1990), Meutsch (1986), Meutsch and Schmidt (1985) and Ryan (1979). lo Important examples are Currie (1989, 1990), Goodman and Elgin (1988) and Walton (1990). Carroll (1988, 1989) already explores this connexion in a valuable manner.

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Quite obviously, I cannot pretend to explore all of these interdisciplinary connexions here. In the next section, I will present an argument having to do with only one of the many avenues of enquiry that remain open to film scholars today. I have chosen a topic that will allow me to lend some support to my claim that better interdisciplinary connexions can have some immediate payoffs in the study of cinema.

5. An argument

about narrative

Many film scholars have operated with some sort of distinction between ‘Hollywood’ cinema and alternatives to it, there usually being a strong normative thrust behind the use of this dichotomy. It is easy to be sympathetic to the general spirit of this contrast, especially if one is aware of the strategies whereby the Hollywood film industry, often with the direct support of the government of the United States, has imposed its products on both internal and external markets, effectively limiting the possibility of alternative forms of cinema throughout the world. Some very basic political and aesthetic norms, shared by critics who would disagree on many other major points, support the idea that the world’s cinema should not be dominated by one centre of production. But usually the critics’ arguments are not limited to purely geo-political observations about the control of production and markets, for the deeper claim is that ‘Hollywood’ stands for a certain type of cinema that can now be produced in many different countries. On the face of it, this claim also has a certain appeal. Yet at the same time, it seems necessary to remark that when one looks closer, the arguments generally suffer from an appalling lack of precision. What, one wants to know, is the precise nature of the Hollywood pattern that it is a matter of decrying? To what extent have the films made in Hollywood genuinely instantiated that pattern in a homogeneous manner? Given a particular film, what makes it possible to say whether it is another instance of the pattern or something significantly different? What is it precisely that is wrong, aesthetically, morally, and/or politically, with this pattern, aside from the marginalisation of other possibilities? Critics who have no adequate answers to these questions are hardly in a position to make strong arguments against Hollywood films and in favour of the various alternatives. Although it would be unreasonable to expect perfect arguments to have been constructed before critics try to influence cultural politics, we should be suspicious when such interventions are guided only by inaccurate slogans and accusatory dichotomies. Various notions have been used in efforts to distinguish between Hollywood cinema and its other, but a nebulous idea of ‘narrative’ has probably served as the central concept (for background on this topic, see Bordwell et al. 1985). One reason for the central role of the concept of narrative is that the salient alternatives to it have a way of going wrong very quickly. One can,

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of course, deal with the issue rather drastically by condemning all ‘illusionist’ and ‘representational’ films, meaning all films manifesting any degree of photographic realism (with a small ‘r’). Such a bold stroke has the merit of blasting all Hollywood films, but then it can hardly be a matter of a specific critique of a Hollywood style of filmmaking, for both Louis Lumiere and Georges Melies - Frenchmen alike - relied heavily on the cinema’s mimetic capacity, the one to film such things as trains arriving at stations, the other to film staged activities and stylized decors. At the other extreme are far less global ways of trying to isolate the hegemonic pattern. One approach is to think in terms of a certain style of montage, lighting, and sound-image relations. This way of trying to categorize films has enjoyed a kind of disciplinary privilege, partly because it has the appearance of being based uniquely on the ‘specificity’ of the cinematic medium. But once again, the results have not been satisfactory, not only because the stylistic features in question have never been described with any precision, but because there are too many counterexamples, that is, valuable films that exemplify at least some of the Hollywood stylistic traits. The attempt to substitute the notion of a ‘bourgeois camera style’ for that of ‘Hollywood film’ can only work if the specific nature and pernicious effects of the former can be convincingly identified, which has yet to be done. A more liberal and nuanced strategy is to speak of the ‘classical’ film, allowing that some of its specimens are neither American nor devoid of value. At that point, however, the contrast becomes rather fuzzy. Thus the idea of narrative tends to return as the principal argumentative device in this vein of film criticism. A recent and influential example of the kind of argument that I have in mind here is provided by Gilles Deleuze’s (1983, 1985) claims about a ‘crisis’ of Hollywood that began with neo-realism in post-war Italy and led to a massive and multi-faceted transformation of the cinema. Deleuze identifies this transformation in terms of five main characteristics: (1) the replacement of global situations by various forms of dispersion; (2) the absence of a line or vector linking events together; (3) the replacement of ‘sensory-motor action’ by wandering and spatial dispersion; (4) the replacement of genuine ‘wholes’ by cliches of factitious unity; and (5) the condemnation of plot. At bottom, these five traits all seem to have something to do with the disruption of narrative, and indeed, Deleuze speaks of the Hollywood paradigm as ‘the cinema of the action-image’ with its ‘sensory-motor connexions’ and two major narrative formulae: situation-action-situation’ (SAS’) and action-situation-action’ (ASA’). Deleuze does not present his readers with any definitions or detailed clarifications of these various terms and concepts; instead, he illustrates them with many brief evocations of particular films. For example, he says that Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di Biciclette (1948) exemplifies the ‘shattering’ of the ASA’ form because the protagonist’s search for the stolen bicycle is fortuitously interrupted by a rain shower. He adds that an

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even more extreme breakdown of Hollywood narrative occurs in Federico Fellini’s I I/itelloni (19531, a film that points not only to the ‘insignificance of events but also to the uncertainty of their linkage, and to their distance from those involved in them’ (1983: 286). One is reminded here of Andre Bazin’s hyperbolic claim that when neo-realist films manifest the ‘ontological equality’ of all ‘concrete instants of life’, they ‘destroy the category of drama in its very principle’ (1975: 333). , On the face of it, one has every reason to be sympthetic to the idea that cinematic narration has changed in some significant ways in the course of the century. To mention only the case of Italian cinema, works by Marco Ferreri, such as Storiu di Pieru (19831, clearly do not tell stories in the manner of the ‘white telephone’ films of the 1930’s, and there is even a world of difference between De Sica’s stylized comedies, such as Teresa Venerdi (19411, and the neo-realist works made by the same director only a few years later. The problem faced by the film theorist is not that of noticing and extolling such broad differences, which is relatively easy, but of saying something more detailed and reliable about them, particularly when it is supposed to be a matter of major transformations and rejections of something as basic as ‘narrative’. Although the point is painfully obvious, it has to be noted that in the absence of a slightly precise notion of narrative, it remains impossible to say whether this or that film (or aspect thereof) really does partake in the great transformation announced by Deleuze and so many other film critics. Here is where a more careful form of interdisciplinarity could be useful. ” It ” It cannot be denied that Deleuze’s two books on film are interdisciplinary, but they are a particularly egregious example of the irrational type of interdisciplinarity that has been under criticism in the present essay, not because Deleuze privileges, without reason, one particular school of psychology, but because of the highly selective, erratic and underdeveloped nature of his various references. Sweeping comments on particular films are interlaced with brief evocations of disparate metaphysical notions that Deleuze attributes to such figures as Henri Bergson and Charles Sanders Peirce. Deleuze does not motivate or justify his choice of these sources; nor does he cite a single work on Peirce, whose voluminous writings (many of which are unpublished) raise extremely difficult exegetical problems, Tossed into the mixture are references to popular works on neuroscience and Carlos Castatieda’s spurious ethnography. The psychedelic teachings of the latter make it possible, Deleuze suggests, to grasp the transition from a ‘liquid’ one that is no longer ‘formal or material, but to a ‘gaseous’ form of ‘camera-consciousness’, genetic and differential’, so that we move ‘from a real to a genetic definition of perception’. In such remarks, the gaseous nature of Deleuze’s version of interdisciplinarity becomes apparent; before the reader has even a chance of grasping what this genetic definition of perception could be, Deleuze has moved on to another series of references. Deleuze’s utterances are, of course, totally unproblematic if we take them merely as advice about some optional and fanciful ways of ‘looking at’ aspects of certain films. But if that manner of understanding Deleuze’s remarks shields them from rational criticism, it also undercuts the philosopher’s theoretical ambitions. for he explicitly claims to articulate important aspects of the cinema’s creation of concepts concepts which he deems as genuine and as effective as any form of practical activity. Deleuze’s remarks are meant to be taken as referring accurately to an actual transformation of cinematic concepts and experience, and not merely as fanciful thought associations. An example of a critic who appears to accept Deleuze’s claims is Greene (1990).

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happens to be the case that the film scholar has a lot of excellent material to draw upon in thinking about narrative and story-telling. I have in mind not only the research tradition of narratology (for syntheses, see Chatman 1978, Martin 1986, Prince 1987, Rimmon-Kenan 1983), but more importantly, the large amount of work on narrative and story comprehension coming out of cognitive psychology, text linguistics, and artificial intelligence. Although film scholars have often drawn on the former, they have rarely drawn on the latter. l2 In what follows, I shall try to show that reference to these materials can make possible an evaluation of Deleuze’s claims, which I take to be fairly typical of a certain vein of film criticism. A good place to begin is the literature dealing with the nature and psychological reality of the very distinction between discourses that do and do not tell stories (two useful overviews are Stein 1982, and Stein and Policastro 1984). By drawing on this literature, we can delineate a number of basic positions on the story discourse/non-story discourse distinction: (1) A sceptical view holding that the distinction does not correspond to any widely held intuitions or to any objective features of discourse. The term ‘narrative’ does not correspond to any essential schemata or patterns of comprehension. (2) A minimalist approach (Prince 1973) holding that the distinction does correspond to widely held, if not universal, intuitions. According to this approach, the distinction hinges on the reader’s recognition of the existence, in story discourse, of one basic pattern, namely, the recounting of one or more fictional or real events (‘event’ being understood here as a change of state from one situation to another); a somewhat less minimal type of approach (2’), stipulates that there must be at least two recounted events constituting some sort of whole, this relation of ‘coherence’ between the events being open to further specification (for an excellent discussion of types of text coherence, see Hobbs 1990). (3) An action approach (e.g. Wilensky 1983) holding that the distinction corresponds to widely held intuitions and hinges on the reader’s recognition of the existence, in story discourse, of one basic pattern, namely, the recounting of some animate agent’s goal-directed or problem-solving behaviour. (4) A pragmatic action approach imposing more specific constraints on the recounting of action, on the action patterns required by stories, and/or on the intended effects on the reader. A caricatural example of the latter approach is the idea that the intended function of stories is to entertain the reader (Brewer and Lichtenstein 1982). Another example requires l2 Bordwell(1985) is one exception. In literary studies as well, attempts to bring these two bodies of work into contact are fairly rare (exceptions are Van Dijk 1985, Pave1 1985, Robertson 1988, and Schmidt 1978).

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the depicted agent’s goal-directed behaviour to involve some sort of difficulties or conflict; other stipulations could involve constraints on the role of the narrator and on the expression of attitudes about the depicted actions. (5) A cluster-concept approach (e.g. Stein and Policastro 1984) holding that the distinction does not correspond to any sharp concept or definite set of features, contending instead that the features identified in approaches (2) (3) and (4) all apply, but in varying and context-sensitive ways. The next step in the argument is to examine the implications that each of these approaches might have for Deleuze’s claims about cinematic narrative. It should be clear that position (1) has the effect of deflating such claims: if ideas about whether a filmic discourse tells a story or not do not involve any invariant features or general patterns of background attitudes, it is hardly interesting to praise a film that breaks with the pattern(s) of narrative, for the simple reason that there was no reason to believe in the latter in the first place. If the thesis is to be amended to state that what goes into crisis is not narrative as such, but some particular Hollywood narrative pattern, the critic then owes us a precise and well-established description of the latter. No such thing has been provided. Similarly, minimalist conceptions of narrative (2) are of no use to a film critic who wants to support the kind of thesis that Deleuze advances. Given such loose constraints on narrative discourse, the only way a film could stand as an exception to narrative would be to depict an absolutely static situation, or to depict nothing at all (non-representational or ‘abstract’ film, or if one prefers, Deleuze’s ‘gaseous camera-consciousness’). But this tells us nothing about the differences between the most abject Hollywood film and the most glorious instance of neo-realism. We move closer to Deleuze’s thesis with approach (3) as Deleuze’s own talk of basic SAS’ and ASA’ patterns would suggest. Yet it is hard to imagine how the films Deleuze names could be said to diverge radically from the pattern of narrative if it is defined this broadly. In the majority of the films Deleuze cites, such as Ladri di Biciclette and I Vitelloni, consistent co-reference to a handful of recognizable agents who engage in purposeful activity contributes massively to the coherence of these discourses. It follows that the ability to make various inferences about the goals and means-end reasoning of the characters is an essential part of any competent spectator’s comprehension of the discourse: the viewer who hasn’t a clue about what Antonio Ricci and his son Bruno are looking for as they wander through the streets of Rome simply has not understood the film. It is true that Bazin once claimed that Cesare Zavattini’s ultimate neo-realist dream was to make a whole film out of ninety minutes in the life of a man to whom nothing happens (which leaves open the question whether that man does anything during those ninety minutes); but the fact remains that the films that Deleuze identifies as

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exemplifying neo-realism do not realize that dream. is If ‘narrative’ is as basic a pattern as a transition from one situation to another brought by means of human action, then both Hollywood and the various cinematic movements that Deleuze praises instantiate that pattern. Perhaps Deleuze’s reference to such basic narrative patterns as SAS’ and ASA’ are somewhat misleading, his implicit understanding of narrative involving some more particular model, along the lines of approaches (4) or (5). But what would that implicit model be? Let us look at Deleuze’s remarks in more detail. He says that De Sica ‘shatters’ the ASA’ form, suggesting that the ‘action’ of Ladri di Biciclette is deflected when the protagonists’ quest for the thief is interrupted by rain. The idea here could be that the Hollywood model is transformed as soon as parts of a film do not contribute to the SAS’ or to the ASA’ patterns that organize the overall narrative. The specificity of Hollywood, then, would be its systematic imposition of a rigid model of purposive-action connexions, and these connexions are loosened in the neo-realist films. But if we look at the sequence from Ladri di Biciclette more closely, we may observe that the fortuitous occurrence of the shower hardly puts an end to the purposeful activity of the characters, or to the spectator’s need to draw inferences about these actions. When the rain starts, Ricci and his son actively position themselves against a wall so as to avoid getting wet (a basic example of purposeful behaviour or SAS’), and are soon joined there by a group of Viennese seminarians, whose movements also arise in response to one situation and deliberately replace that situation by another one. The foreign looks and conversation of these young men attract young Bruno’s curiosity, and we are shown his puzzled reaction. The seminarians’ actions, and Bruno’s reactions to them, are thus central to the sequence, and the way for the spectator to make sense of what is going on is to think in terms of subjectively meaningful human behaviour. Nor have the overarching lines of the plot simply vanished during this sequence. As any competent spectator of the film will at this point know, the interruption occurs at a time when Ricci’s strategy for recovering the bicycle has begun to look hopeless: the initial idea, suggested by Ricci’s friends, was that it would be possible to find the bicycle by searching the marketplaces where such stolen items are resold; the spectator has witnessed the first, unsuccessful visit to the market at the Piazza Vittorio, and Ricci and his son are desperately trying a second market (that of the Porta Portese) when the rainfall begins. It is here that they see the thief talking to an old man, and the chase is thereby renewed. A similar argument can be rehearsed in regard to what Deleuze writes about I Vitelloni. That the film is about a circle of aimless, unemployed I3 Definitions of neo-realism vary wildly and there is no consensus on a definitive list of genuinely neo-realist films; it may be noted that Deleuze’s use of the term is more catholic than some critics would allow. For background, see Bondanella (1990), Marcus (1986) and Overby (1978).

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young men in post-war Rimini hardly warrants Deleuze’s idea that there is no structured action or that the ‘events’ are disconnected, insignificant, and somehow detached from those who are involved in them. Fausto, whom the voice-over narrator identifies as the boys’ ‘spiritual leader’, is presented as a lustful and impetuous individual who has gotten a friend’s sister pregnant and who continues to chase other women after his father forces him to marry the girl. The dramatic crescendo comes when the brother finally accuses Faust0 of cowardice, and when the wife’s disappearance instills in Faust0 an at least momentary, and seemingly violent, sense of regret. Overwhelmed by grief, Faust0 rejects the advances of a woman he had earlier hotly pursued, and when the sorely-missed Sandra finally returns, the audience is treated to the anticipated scene of tearful reunion, enveloped by one of Nino Rota’s charming and sentimental airs. The film’s depiction of these characters and their doings involves a certain comic distance or framing, but this does not entail that one can make sense of the work without noticing any of its many coherent links between actions and situations. Deleuze’s suggestion that the links between events are uncertain and that the events do not concern the parties involved are belied by any competent spectators’ reports on what happens in the film. The viewer who has just seen and understood this work can be expected to know that Fausto, having taken his new bride to the cinema, is consumed by a lustful desire for a woman who happens to be seated next to him; he rubs his leg against hers, and when the woman leaves, he follows her out of the cinema and accosts her in the street. When Faust0 finally returns to look for his wife, she is waiting for him alone outside the empty cinema. He lies to her, and her reaction clearly shows that she cannot believe the excuse he gives for his sudden departure; her tears show that she is hardly indifferent to Fausto’s actions, which are not, in her view, so many disconnected, unmotivated, and insignificant events. Deleuze has in half a phrase proposed a highly speculative statement about the overall meaning of the film, but the phrase is contradicted by many basic and obvious components of the plot that would figure in any competent spectator’s understanding of the film. Deleuze’s claim that aspects of these films ‘shatter’ the overall narrative pattern is akin to saying that the dramatic pauses ‘shatter’ the melodies in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The only way to save such a claim would be to work with a highly restrictive notion of narrative, but Deleuze moves in the opposite direction with his talk of such broad patterns as the SAS’ and the idea that what disrupts Hollywood narrative are disconnected, unmotivated, and insignificant events. It is not difficult to establish that narratives in cultures all over the world have consistently eschewed the latter. The foregoing considerations suggest that if film critics want to describe what makes certain films, such as a number of post-WWII Italian productions, significantly different from ‘the formulae’ of Hollywood, it is necessary

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to establish a much more fine-grained model of the latter. None of the general concepts of ‘narrative’ will suffice, for any plausible version of the latter will be broad enough to include such works as La&i di Bicicktte, I Vitelloni, and Bellissima (Visconti 1952), as well as L’awentura (Antonioni 19601, and La Visione de1 Sabbat (Bellochio 1988). If one wants to develop, within the general category of narrative discourse, some valuable subcategories and distinctions, it will be necessary to determine what kinds of pragmatic, semantic, and syntactical features are to be deemed pertinent. Elsewhere I have argued in this regard that ethical considerations should be kept squarely in view. It is probably the case that critics’ actual discriminations between Hollywood and other films have in fact been guided by deep-seated thematic attitudes and social judgements, some of which may be highly astute. Yet critics would do well to clarify and make explicit the bases of these judgements, as opposed to presenting them in nebulous philosophical, aesthetic, and psychological guises. The findings of these and other fields are directly relevant to arguments in film studies, but the ‘fast and loose’ forms of interdisciplinarity of the last two decades have not yielded a responsible exploration of such connexions.

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