Abstract
A collection consisting of all the works published in Cinema Journal (from its inception in 1961 until 2016), Wide Angle (through the whole of its existence), Screen (from 1969 to 1984), and Movie (from 1962 to 2000) might reasonably be seen as representative of the work of film studies generally. An exhaustive survey of all that material, aside from offering a synoptic history of film studies, makes clear that interpreting individual films is, and has always been, a relatively minor concern of the discipline, whose main interest (surely rightly) has been history. As one would expect, Screen put more emphasis on theory than did the other three; and Wide Angle, the most trend-sensitive of the four journals, was more engaged with cultural studies. But for three of the four journals historical analysis was the central focus. Movie is, of course, the outlier. Seen against the extensive overlapping in the patterns playing out in the other three journals, Movie is, in fact, unusual—the exception that proves the rule.
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Notes
- 1.
Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, “The Academy and Motion Pictures,” Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham: Duke UP, 2008), p. xi, hereafter cited in text.
- 2.
See Mark Lynn Anderson, “Taking Liberties: The Payne Fund Studies and the Creation of the Media Expert,” pp. 38–65; and Dana Polan, “Young Art, Old Colleges: Early Episodes in the American Study of Film,” pp. 93–117: all in Grieveson and Wasson.
- 3.
See Grieveson and Wasson, p. xi.
- 4.
See Lewis Jacobs, “World War II and the American Film,” Cinema Journal 7 (1967–68), 1–21; Russell Merritt, “Nickelodeon Theaters: Building an Audience for the Movies,” Wide Angle 1.1 (1976), 4–9.
- 5.
Christian Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier,” Screen 16.2 (1975), 14–76. The response is Ben Singer, “Film, Photography, and Fetish: The Analyses of Christian Metz,” Cinema Journal 27.4 (1988), 4–22. Singer takes exception to Metz’s conception of film as fetish.
- 6.
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (1975), 6.
- 7.
D. N. Rodowick, “The Difficulty of Difference,” Wide Angle 5.1 (1982), 4–15.
- 8.
In the actual accounting I do to produce percentages, I count such an essay as one half theory and one half interpretation.
- 9.
See Raymond Bellour, “The Obvious and the Code,” Screen 15.4 (1974), 7–17.
- 10.
See Stephen Heath, “Film and System: Terms of Analysis, Part I,” Screen 16.1 (1975), 7–77; and Stephen Heath, “Film and System: Terms of Analysis, Part II,” Screen 16.2 (1975), 91–113. For a bit more discussion of the Heath essay’s relation to interpretation, see Chapter 9. pp. 232–33.
- 11.
The reference to psychologizing about the appeal of difficult films concerns an essay in an early issue of Cinema Journal: Norman N. Holland, “The Puzzling Movies: Their Appeal,” The Journal of the Society of Cinematologists 3 (1963), 17–28.
- 12.
For examples of work in the field of cultural studies that I label interpretation, see Therese Grisham, “Twentieth Century Theatrum Mundi: Olrike Ottinger’s Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia,” Wide Angle 14.2 (1992), 22–27 and David E. James, “Toward a Geo-Cinematic Hermeneutic: Representations of Los Angeles in Non-Industrial Cinema—Killer of Sheep and Water and Power,” Wide Angle 20.3 (1998), 23–53. By contrast, I classify as cultural studies Tom Gunning’s “From the Kaleidoscope to the X-Ray: Urban Spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin, and Traffic in Souls (1913),” Wide Angle 19.4 (1997), 25–61. Again, by way of contrast, I label as history an earlier, less theoretically informed, example of cultural studies: John H. Weiss, “An Innocent Eye: The Career and Documentary Vision of Georges Rouquler up to 1945,” Cinema Journal 20.2 (1981), 38–62.
- 13.
The metacritical examination of readings of The Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942) is John Berks, “What Alice Does: Looking Otherwise at The Cat People,” Cinema Journal 32.1 (1992), 26–42. The response, by one of the critics whom Berks had mentioned, is Karen Hollinger, “On John Berks’s ‘What Alice Does: Looking Otherwise at The Cat People,” Cinema Journal 33.1 (1993), 55–57.
- 14.
Volume 14 (1974–75) was comprised of three issues, the result of the inclusion, that year, of the journal’s first special issue.
- 15.
See Cinema Journal, 14.2 (1974–75): Special Issue: Symposium on the Methodology of Film History; 15.2 (1976): Special Issue: American Film History; and 18.2 (1979): Special Issue: Economic and Technological History.
- 16.
See David Bordwell, “Introduction,” Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1996), pp. xiii–xvii.
- 17.
See John L. Fell, “Darling, This Is Bigger Than Both of Us,” Cinema Journal 12.2 (1973), 56–64; Elisabeth H. Lyon, “Louis Bunuel, “The Process of Dissociation in Three Films,” Cinema Journal 13.1 (1973), 45–48; and Birgitta Steene, “Images and Words in Ingmar Bergman’s Films,” Cinema Journal 10.1 (1970), 24.
- 18.
See Donald E. Staples, “The Auteur Theory Reexamined,” Cinema Journal 6 (1966–67), 1–7; and Peter Harcourt, “What, Indeed, Is Cinema,” Cinema Journal 8.1 (1968), 22–28.
- 19.
See David A. Cook, “Some Structural Approaches to Cinema: A Survey of Models,” Cinema Journal 14.3 (1975), 41–54.
- 20.
By my count, twenty-four of the one hundred and thirty-nine articles published during this stretch included significant attention to textual detail.
- 21.
By my count, 74 of the 281 essays published included analysis of textual meaning.
- 22.
See Tag Gallagher’s vituperative condemnation of feminist theory’s incursions into the field, a process he describes in terms of infestation: “Tag Gallagher Responds to Tania Modleski’s ‘Time and Desire in the Woman’s Film’ (Cinema Journal Spring 1984) and Linda Williams’s ‘“Something Else besides a Mother”: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama’ (Cinema Journal Fall 1984),” Cinema Journal 25.2 (1986), 65–66.
- 23.
See Jean Mitry, Martin Sopocy, and Paul Attallah, “Thomas H. Ince: His Esthetic, His Films, His Legacy,” Cinema Journal 22.2 (1983), 2–25; Charles Musser, “American Vitagraph: 1897–1901,” Cinema Journal 22.3 (1983), 4–46; and D. William Davis, “A Tale of Two Movies: Charlie Chaplin, United Artists, and the Red Scare,” Cinema Journal 27.1 (1987), 47–62.
- 24.
An example of an essay designed to explore the cultural functioning of a given trope or type would be Mimi White, “Representing Romance: Reading/Writing/Fantasy and the ‘Liberated’ Woman of Recent Hollywood Films,” Cinema Journal 28.3 (1989), 41–56. The essay discusses a number of movies, but the movies themselves are not what is of interest. What is of interest is the deployment in them all of a certain image of woman. For an example of an essay identifying a historical shift in cultural understanding, see William Boddy, “Approaching The Untouchables: Social Science and Moral Panics in Early Sixties Television,” Cinema Journal 35.4 (1996), 70–87, which examines the way contemporary controversy (in the form of Congressional debates) over the television series The Untouchables marked a shift in the public’s understanding of the “role of television in society” (70).
- 25.
Between the fall of 1982 and the fall of 1999, Cinema Journal published, by my count (which excludes introductions to special sections, brief editorials, and book reviews) 281 pieces of writing. In the period from winter 2000 to fall 2015, that number jumps to 695.
- 26.
The percentages depend, again, on how we count the essays in the In Focus section of the journal. Equally weighting everything published produces the following percentages (taking just the top three categories): History 52%; Cultural Studies 16%; Interpretation 14%. If we exclude the In Focus essays altogether, those numbers change as follows: History 37%; Interpretation 24%; Cultural Studies 20%. Counting as I have done, with the In Focus work figured at half the weight of the other essays, produces these numbers: History 48%; Interpretation 17%; Cultural Studies 16%.
- 27.
If we weight all the material, including that published in the In Focus section, equally, that number drops to fourteen percent. If we exclude the material from In Focus altogether it increases to twenty-four percent.
- 28.
There are personal accounts of teaching experiences, editorials on the troubles besetting efforts at teaching film at the secondary level, reports on experiments in film pedagogy. See, e.g., Roger Watkins, “Film and Television: A Main Subject Course at Bulmershe College of Education,” Screen 10.1 (1969), 34–41; Elfreda Symonds, “The Development of Film Study at Hammersmith College for Further Education,” Screen 10.1 (1969), 42–66; and Roger Hudson, “Camera Adventure: An Experiment in Hornsey,” Screen 10.2 (1969), 56–68.
- 29.
Auteurist film theory is a consistent preoccupation of Screen’s during this two-year period (and beyond). A kind of fragment of an ongoing dialog begins with Alan Lovell taking issue with the work of Robin Wood. While Lovell is sympathetic to Wood’s auteurist approach, he wants to see film studies move away from its grounding in a “Leavisian critical method” (49). In the following issue of the journal, Wood responds, which prompts a response, in turn, by Lovell. Both writers are trying to work out what it might mean to do serious film criticism, with Lovell calling for more rigorous interpretation and less evaluation, and Wood insisting that criticism is an art, not a science, and thus deeply personal, but the whole of the discussion is framed by their shared commitment to auteurism. See Alan Lovell, “Robin Wood: A Dissenting View,” Screen 10.2 (1969), 42–55; Robin Wood, “Ghostly Paradigm and H.C.F.: An Answer to Alan Lovell,” Screen 10.3 (1969), 35–48; and Alan Lovell, “The Common Pursuit of True Judgement,” Screen 11.4/5 (1970), 76–88.
The issue of auteurism gets addressed in other ways as well. Edward Buscombe, who becomes an early proponent of situating interpretation in historical context, uses an essay on genre to push against the focus on auteurism, which, he argues, is not very adept at assessing genre films. See Edward Buscombe, “The Idea of Genre in American Cinema,” Screen 11.2 (1970), 33–45. Richard Collins then takes issue with Buscombe’s argument and writes in support of auteurist approaches to film. See Richard Collins, “Genre: A Reply to Ed Buscombe,” Screen 11.4/5 (1970), 66–75.
- 30.
This concern about the rigor of contemporary film criticism was expressed directly in the theoretical debates about auteurism (see n. 29 above). But it was also expressed in the book reviews that were being published at this time. See, e.g., David Spiers’s review of Elizabeth Sussex’s book on Lindsay Anderson (Screen 11.2 [1970], 88–90): “Too often ‘criticism’ means little more than a fairly detailed description of the films themselves” (88).
- 31.
Editorial Board, “Editorial,” Screen 12.1 (1971), 4.
- 32.
Sam Rohdie, “Education and Criticism: Notes on Work to Be Done,” 9–14; Terry Lovell, “Sociology and the Cinema,” 15–26; Jean-Luc [sic] Comolli and Paul [sic] Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” 27–38; Claire Johnston, “Film Journals: Britain and France,” 39–48; Ben Brewster, “Structuralism in Film Criticism,” 49–58; and Ashley Pringle, “TV Studies: An Introduction to a Critique of Television,” 63–71. All in Screen 12.1 (1971).
- 33.
See, esp., in this regard, Volume 12, Number 3 (1971), which documents the crisis at the BFI and SEFT, precipitated in no small part by Screen’s turn to theory: Eileen Brock, Alan Lovell, et al., “An Open Letter to the Staff of the British Film Institute,” 2–8; Editorial Board, “Editorial,” 9–12; Alan Lovell, “The BFI and Film Education,” 13–26.
- 34.
Having published a translation of Comolli and Narboni’s “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism” in the spring of 1971, Screen followed up with translations of editorial sniping between Cahiers du Cinéma and Cinéthique in the summer issue. See Gérard Leblanc, “Directions,” 121; Jean-Paul Fargier, “Parenthesis or Indirect Route,” 131–44; and Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism 2,” 145–55. All in Screen 12.2 (1971).
- 35.
Much of Volume 12, Number 4 (1971/72), for example, is devoted to presentation of translated texts drawn from the Soviet journals LEF and Novy LEF. Screen, here, is following the lead of Cahiers du Cinéma, which had devoted a special issue to Russian theory from the 1920s. See Cahiers du Cinéma, 220–221 (May/June 1970), Russie années vignt, which includes translations into French of work by Vladimir Lenin, Sergei Eisenstein, Yuri Tynyanov, and others.
- 36.
Screen uses the occasion of reviewing the recently published Movie Reader and V. F. Perkins’s Film as Film to fire a broadside at all those associated with the journal Movie. See Sam Rohdie, “Movie Reader and Film as Film,” Screen 13.4 (1972/73), 135–45. “All hope of a theoretical, scientific view of cinema, abstract and specifying, was ruled out,” Rohdie argues, “by this approach” (138). Screen picks up the attack again when Movie, after a three-year hiatus, returns to publication: “With n 20, Movie re-appears after a gap of three years. That period has seen the emergence of Marxism, semiology and structuralism into the field of film study in this country. The arrival of these disciplines has resulted in a concerted theoretical attack on much that Movie held dear and on much that constituted its critical methods and assumptions. Movie and its writers have now had ample opportunity to re-consider and re-assess these methods and assumptions in the light of this attack, but, as the new issue reveals, any re-consideration and re-assessment there has in the main ended with an affirmation of the former concerns, positions and values, despite numerous demonstrations of their inadequacies” (Steve Neal, in “Film Culture,” Screen 16.3 [1975], 112).
- 37.
See Philip Rosen, “Screen and 1970s Film Theory,” Inventing Film Studies, pp. 264–97. Rosen identifies the journal’s preoccupations, as the subheadings have it, as “Filmic Realism and Ideology” (270), “Textuality” (274), and “The Filmic Enunciation and Theory of the Subject” (277).
- 38.
See Stephen Heath, “Anato mo,” Screen 17.4 (1976/77), 49–66.
- 39.
The tensions involved in this particular transformation of the journal are too complicated to detail here, but in broad-brush terms they concern Screen’s role in the educational mission of SEFT (inasmuch as the abstruse theorizing that served as center of interest at Screen throughout the 70s seemed to many to be inaccessible to the teachers and working-class students whom it was SEFT’s mission to serve) and Screen’s relation to the academy, with which it was becoming increasingly (and thus, for many, problematically) engaged and intertwined. For a fuller account of these issues, see Terry Bolas, Screen Education: From Film Appreciation to Media Studies (Intellect, 2009), esp. Chap. 8, “Screen Saviors,” pp. 227–58 and Chap. 9, “SEFT Limited,” pp. 259–91.
- 40.
- 41.
Enrique Fernández, “‘Witnesses Always Everywhere’: The Rhetorical Strategies of Memories of Underdevelopment,” Wide Angle 4.2 (1980), 52, hereafter cited in text.
- 42.
Sandy Flitterman, “Guest in the House: Rupture and Reconstitution of the Bourgeois Nuclear Family,” Wide Angle 4.2 (1980), 19, hereafter cited in text.
- 43.
Christopher Orr, “Closure and Containment: Marylee Hadlee in Written on the Wind,” Wide Angle 4.2 (1980), 29, hereafter cited in text.
- 44.
Frank Krutnik, “The Shanghai Gesture: The Exotic and the Melodrama,” Wide Angle 4.2 (1980), 36, hereafter cited in text.
- 45.
Bryan Crow, “The Cinematic and the Melodramatic in A Woman of Affairs,” Wide Angle 4.2 (1980), 44, hereafter cited in text.
- 46.
See William Luhr and Peter Lehman, “The Case of the Missing Pipe Cinch: Blake Edwards’ Gunn in the Context of His Genre Films,” Wide Angle 1.1 (1976), 38–51.
- 47.
See Dean McWilliams, “The Ritual Cinema of Yukio Mishima,” Wide Angle 1.4 (1977), 28–33.
- 48.
See James Leach, “Notes on Polanski’s Cinema of Cruelty,” Wide Angle 2.1 (1978), 32–39.
- 49.
See, e.g., Alexandre Astruc, “‘Sherrif’ Alexandre Astruc Does Justice to Howard Hawks,” tr. Dorothea Hoekzema, Wide Angle 1.2 (1976), 4–6 (originally published in Paris-Match, 1108 (August 1, 1970); and Marie Claire Willeumier, “On Fashion,” tr. Dorothea Hoekzema, Wide Angle 1.3 (1976), 14–16 (originally published in Esprit, 2, February 1965 as “De la mode”).
- 50.
See Nick Browne, “The Politics of Form in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” 4–11; Alan Williams, “The Camera-Eye and the Film: Notes on Vertov’s ‘Formalism,’” 12–17; Lucy Fischer, “Dr. Mabuse and Mr. Lang,” 18–26; and Deborah Linderman, “Uncoded Images and the Heterogeneous Text,” 34–41, all in Wide Angle 3.3 (1979).
- 51.
See Michael Budd, “Authorship as Commodity: The Art Cinema and the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” 12–19; Christopher Orr, “Authorship in the Hawks/Wyler Film Come and Get It,” 20–26; and Peter Baxter, “The One Woman,” 35–41, all in Wide Angle 6.1 (1984).
- 52.
For the analytical essay, see Paul F. Starrs, “The Ways of the Western: Mor(t)ality & Landscape in Cormac McCarthy’s Novels and Sergio Leone’s Films,” 63–74; the essay on National Geographic photography is Barry C. Bishop, “Machu Puchari: Places and Peoples on Pages and Screens,” 31–33; the pedagogical project is Rachel Strickland, “5 Exercises in Place and Recording,” 42–47; the essay on creative media projects is Michael Naimark, “Presence at the Interface; or, Sense of Place/Essence of Place,” 50–61; all in Wide Angle 15.4 (1993). The various personal reflections are as follows: Bernard Nietschmann, “Authentic, State, and Virtual Geography in Film,” 5–12; Brenda Laurel, “Art and Activism in VR,” 13–21; Philip E. Agre, “Landscape and Identity: A Note on the History of the Suburbs,” 22–29; Widdicombe Schmidt, “Not Just Another Pretty Place: Some Reflections,” 35–40; again, all in Wide Angle 15.4 (1978).
- 53.
See Kimberly SaRee Tomes, “Shu Lea Cheang: Hi-Tech Aborigine: Interview,” 3–15; Paula Rabinowitz, “Stairmaster Yeats: An Epic,” 17–35; John L. Butler, C.A.S., “Sound Bites and Bytes: An Introduction to Microphones,” 37–46; and Alan Wright, “A Wrinkle in Time: The Child, Memory, and The Mirror,” 47–68; all in Wide Angle 18.1 (1996).
- 54.
An online only successor version, Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, began publication in 2010, putting out one volume a year. At present that journal, which has strong ties, in terms of approach and personnel, to the original Movie, has, according the web site, gone to a “rolling publication model.”
- 55.
For the panel discussion, see Ian Cameron et al., “The Return of Movie,” 1–25; see, also, Charles Barr, “Approaching Television,” 26–28; Douglas Pye, “Genre and Movies,” 29–43; all in Movie 20 (1975).
- 56.
See Andrew Britton, “The Ideology of Screen,” Movie 26 (Winter 1978–79), 2–28.
- 57.
Ian Cameron, “Films, Directors, and Critics,” Movie 2 (1962), 5.
- 58.
See V. F. Perkins, Film as Film (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 7.
- 59.
See N. A. Morris, “In Defence of Fatal Attraction,” Movie 33 (1989), 53–55.
- 60.
Mark Shivas, “The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse,” Movie 4 (1962), 6.
- 61.
Mark Shivas, “Two Views of Le Caporal Epinglé: One,” Movie 4 (1962), 11.
- 62.
Ian Cameron, “Two Views of Le Caporal Epinglé: Two,” Movie 4 (1962), 12.
- 63.
Robin Wood, “Attitudes in Advise and Consent,” Movie 4 (1962), 14–17.
- 64.
Paul Mayersberg, “Le Rendez-vous de minuit,” Movie 4 (1962), 34.
- 65.
Paul Mayersberg, “Carmen Jones and Porgy and Bess,” Movie 4 (1962), 21.
- 66.
Mark Shivas, “The Password is Cleaning Coths,” Movie 4 (1962), 30.
- 67.
V. F. Perkins, “Giant,” Movie 4 (1962), 31–33.
- 68.
Ian Cameron, “The Limits of Suspense,” Movie 4 (1962), 26–27. The film was originally released in the United Kingdom under the title Grip of Fear, the title Cameron uses in his review.
- 69.
Robin Wood, “Persona,” Movie 15 (1968), 22–23, hereafter cited in text.
- 70.
Paul Mayersberg, “Huston’s Reflections,” Movie 15 (1968), 25, hereafter cited in text.
- 71.
Raymond Durgnat, “Bunuel: Belle de Jour 1: Love in the Afternoon,” Movie 15 (1968), 27–29.
- 72.
Robin Wood, “Bunuel: Belle de Jour 2: At Night All Cats Are Grey,” Movie 15 (1968), 31.
- 73.
Richard Winkler, “Far from Vietnam,” Movie 15 (1968), 34–36.
- 74.
See Robin Wood, “Smart Ass & Cutie Pie,” Movie 21 (1975), 1–17.
- 75.
Jim Hillier, “Jennifer on My Mind,” Movie 21 (1975), 18.
- 76.
See Douglas Pye, “Junior Bonner,” Movie 21 (1975), 22–25.
- 77.
Tom Ryan, “The Pursuit of Happiness,” Movie 21 (1975), 27.
- 78.
See Richard Dyer, “The Towering Inferno,” Movie 21 (1975), 30–33.
- 79.
Terrence Butler, “Two-Lane Blacktop,” Movie 21 (1975), 34–37.
- 80.
Cinema Journal, the only one of the four journals surveyed that was conceived as an academic journal rather than a magazine, reviews books; but after the first issue, it stopped reviewing movies.
- 81.
Other anomalies mark Movie as well. Very few of the essays, only three percent, focus on theory (compared to eleven percent at Cinema Journal, twenty-five percent at Screen, and fourteen percent at Wide Angle). And cultural studies, which, on average, concerns about fourteen percent of the work in the other journals surveyed, accounts for just four percent of the work in Movie.
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Novak, P. (2020). The Work of Film Studies: An Analysis of Four Journals. In: Interpretation and Film Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44739-7_5
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