October No.23 Winter (1982) - Film Books

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Theory I Criticism

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Film Books A SpecialIssue

Arthur C. Danto

Stuart Liebman Nick Browne Noel Carroll

Philosophyand/as Film and/as if Philosophy ReadingHitchcock TheAnxietyof theInfluencing Machine theLeft Documenting TheFormalist'sDreyer Addressto theHeathen

$5.00/Winter 1982

and UrbanStudies for theInstitutefor Architecture

FredricJameson Joan Copjec

Published by the MIT Press

Politics

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editors Rosalind Krauss Annette Michelson managingeditor Douglas Crimp editorialassociate Joan Copjec

OCTOBER (ISSN 0162-2879) (ISBN 0-262-76013-4) is published quarterly by the MIT Press for the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. Subscriptions: individuals $20.00; institutions $45.00; students and retired $16.00. Foreign subscriptions outside USA and Canada add $4.00 for surface mail or $18.00 for air mail. Prices subject to change without notice. Address subscriptions to OCTOBER, MIT Press Journals, 28 Carleton Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. Manuscripts, accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelope, should be sent to OCTOBER, 8 West 40 Street, New York, NY 10018. No responsibility is assumed for loss or injury. Second class postage paid at Boston, MA, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: send address changes to OCTOBER, MIT Press Journals, 28 Carleton Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. OCTOBER is distributed in the USA by B. DeBoer, Inc., 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, NJ 07110. Copyright ? 1982 by the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The editors of OCTOBER are wholly responsible for its editorial contents.

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Arthur C. Danto Fredric Jameson Joan Copjec Stuart Liebman Nick Browne Noel Carroll

Philosophyand/as Film and/as if Philosophy Reading Hitchcock The Anxiety of the InfluencingMachine Documentingthe Left The Formalist'sDreyer Addressto the Heathen

Coverphoto: Howard Hawks. Bringing Up Baby. 1938.

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NICK BROWNE is Associate Professor of Theater Arts and chairman of the Film and Television Study Program at UCLA. NOEL CARROLL is coeditor of Millennium Film Journal and a contributor to Dance Magazine. ARTHUR C. DANTO is Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University and the author of The Transfigurationof the Commonplace(Harvard University Press, 1981). FREDRIC JAMESON is Professor of French at Yale University and an editor of Social Text. His most recent book is The Political Unconscious(Cornell University Press, 1981). STUART LIEBMAN teaches film and photography at Queens College.

OCTOBER

The essays assembled in this issue represent an effort on our part to investigate and assess the present state of theorization of the cinema. They were, as our readers will easily perceive, commissioned in the spirit of our two recent special issues, numbers 17 and 21, respectively entitled The New Talkies and Rainer WernerFassbinder, and form, therefore, a third chapter in that investigation. More specifically, however, they are presented as an analytic explication of the growth and legitimation of a new discipline which began to take its place within our culture in the late 1960s, that of cinema, its theory, history, and criticism. This issue, then, entirely devoted to review essays of recent publications, will inevitably be seen as a partial evaluation of that installation and of its fruits over the past decade. Several factors are to be borne in mind for an understanding of that decade's work. It insists, in its unparalleled acceleration of production, upon a break with the tradition of informal and belletristic criticism still dominant in the discourse of the American intellectual community at large. Like other developing disciplines, it looks increasingly to philosophy, psychoanalysis, and linguistics for its methodological base; it has, in its search for pertinence and rigor, found one major forum and audience: that of the academy. The publishers of the books herein reviewed, with one exception, are those of universities. (In addition to these we must call attention to the English firm of Routledge and Kegan Paul which, working with the British Film Institute, has recently launched an ambitious, well-designed program of publications in the field.) While trade publishers and an intellectual establishment have, in complicity, promoted and sustained the proliferation of the tape-recorded confession and the journalistic review, the university presses have assumed the essential task of publishing the work of a theoretical avantgarde. It is they who have provided the context for the formulation and exploration of those questions with respect to authorship, the construction and place of the spectator, the function of desire in narrative, the nature of genre, which are among the central concerns of a truly contemporary discourse on the cinema. For the immediate and incontrovertible effect of its production has been the manner in which the enterprise of the film-critical establishment of this country has been rendered irremediably archaic. It is the university presses who are, at the moment, providing support for a reassessment of the existing corpus of film through the publication of important monographs and extensive historical studies. And it is, no doubt, to them that we must look for the work which is next on the agenda of the field: the theorization of film history.

ANNETTE MICHELSON

Philosophy and/as Film and/as if Philosophy Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Cavell, Cambridge,Harvard UniversityPress, 1981.

ARTHUR

by Stanley

C. DANTO

Before dismissing as rhetorical the question posed at the end of this book-"Can there be an honorable objection to the serious humanistic study of film?"-one must ponder the fact of the book itself, if it can serve as an illustration of what the author supposes a serious humanistic study of film must be. Serious studies of film need not be studies of serious films, and clowns can be subjects of critiques. So the seriousness of a study is not hostage to its content, even if, as in the present case, it addresses a subgenre of the Hollywood screwball comedy of the 1930s and '40s, termed by Stanley Cavell-The Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Theory of Value in the of remarriage." Department of Philosophy at Harvard University-"comedies These are comedies, nonetheless, so conspicuously light and frivolous that nominating them to the canon of the serious humanistic film curriculum must be meant to seem paradoxical, almost in the way in which certain revelations are meant to sound paradoxical, as when we are told the first shall be last, or the meek shall inherit the earth, or that the way down is the way up. It is plain that this redemptive and transfigurative spirit drives the book forward, not simply treating from the perspective of high scholarship what scoffers might regard as fairly ephemeral moments of entertainment aimed at a popular audience, but treating them as equal to the highest concerns high scholarship might devote itself to--as though they were philosophical disquisitions en travestie. Thus the author compares, as though they were two modes of conveying much the same thought, Frank Capra's It Happened One Night with Immanuel Kant's Kritik der Reinen Vernunft,the famous blanket between Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable emblemizing the metaphysical boundary between noumena and phenomena; the moral boundaries between self and self; and the aesthetic boundaries between director and audience, condensing, as it were, all three critiques at once. Before proposing this virtuoso juxtaposition, Cavell warns us in a stage whisper that he is about to be outrageous, and if he is, it will be not only to philosophers who will balk at believing Capra's exercise in deflected eroticism can

Frank Capra. It Happened One Night. 1934.

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have muchconceptual weight, but also to film buffs who would like to think they could discuss their cherished subject without studying mathematical logic. As the subject becomes transformed in surprising ways, so does its study, which becomes, perhaps through just this kind of juxtaposition, comedic, allowing its subject to become philosophical. Well, that again is standard in revelations of certain sorts. The humble get exalted as the exalted are humiliated, as when redeemers wash the feet of lepers or, when you come right down to it, consent to assume temporal form by entering the world through a virgin's thighs. "I think of how often," Cavell writes, "I have cast the world I want to live in as one in which my capacities for playfulness and for seriousness are not used against one another and so against me." The task then is not to decide when he is being playful and when serious (as in "a serious humanistic study"). This would be, in his metaphor, sawing the woman in half. Or, in my metaphor, cutting the mermaid in half and serving the fishy portion to one's guests, thinking one has avoided cannibalism. The book has to be taken for what it is and as a whole, which means that we don't ask whether the juxtaposition is a joke, but recognize that it is a joke, but also, without losing its identity, not a joke at all. I mean the book displays its seriousness through its playfulness (or the other way round), being opera seria by being opera buffa (or the other way round), demonstrating through its own sacrifice and exaltation how something as seemingly slight and silly as The Awful Truth can, just by being itself, be as heavy as Also SprachZarathustra(or the other way round). So it is a serious study in a transformed sense of seriousness, and having read the book the problem faces the reader of how it is to be read. Let's begin there, and not face the further question of what the curriculum must be like in the film-study program the author pleads for if the book exemplifies what the author construes the serious humanistic study of film to be. Let's begin, by treating it from the perspective of philosophical prose.

For the past seventy-five years, the favored mode of philosophical expression in my world has been the professional philosophical paper: a literary form consciously modeled on the professional, scientific report-a communication detailing limited results for the information of fellow inquirers engaged in a common cognitive enterprise -implying in consequence that philosophy is an activity with a social structure rather like what Thoman Kuhn has accustomed us to think of as normal science. Hundreds of such normal philosophical papers are published in dozens of philosophical journals in any given year, designed to draw a sharp circumference around their intended readership by affecting a certain technical surface, a willed stylessness, and, hence, a rhetoric of sobriety. Promotion, recognition, and academic mobility pivot on the production of such papers, and philosophical education consists in training students to study

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them so that they might be able to produce publishable versions in their own right, whose form and manner are as prescribed as haiku. They represent a form of literature which defines a form of life and implies the form of what we might term philosophical reality, for there is implied in the specified terms of how one writes about it, a commitment as to how the subject one writes of must be structured. I do not wish to spell this conception of philosophical reality out. I am taking an external posture with regard to a kind of prose in order to think of it as, after all, a body of literature. The perspective is a dangerous one, raising as it does the further question of philosophical truth and hence the question of whether content can be divorced from form to the degree that we can think of truth at all in abstraction from forms of expression. But neither do I wish to face the question of philosophical truth. I am only concerned to suggest that philosophical style is not as peripheral to philosophical substance as those might think who regard style as something philosophical writing outsidethe convention of the professional philosophical paper has, or that it is something that can be trimmed cleanly away, leaving content intact. For consider the amazing variety of philosophical forms, so various that by contrast there is a stolid predictability to the forms of drama, fiction, and poetry which, to me at least, suggests that these are more limited and, if you wish, less dangerous undertakings. Nietzsche, for example, invented perhaps ten distinct philosophical genres, sufficiently diverse that we may wonder to what degree a given passage can be transferred from the book it appears in to another, and, hence, to what degree it can be detached from its parent context and given assertion as an independent thought at all, as "something Nietzsche said." Nor can Kierkegaard's thought be easily torn out of the disjunctive texts, the jokebooks and parasermons, the protodiaries, mock elocutions, and concluding postscripts to otherwise unwritten works, in which his philosophy is expressed. The history of philosophical literature is the history of dialogues, lecture notes, fragments, poems, examinations, essays, meditations, discourses, critiques, letters, summae, encyclopedias, testaments, commentaries, investigations, Vorlesungen,Aufbauen, prolegomena, parerga, pensees, tractatuses, confessions, sententiae, inquiries, aphorisms, commonplace books, and a whirl of other subtler, unnamed forms. The Phenomenologiedes Geistes specifies a genre uniquely occupied by it, whose closest kin is the Bildungsroman,and nothing is like Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.Derrida has invented so many forms, which house we hardly know what, that there is a strong likelihood that each is its own content, enabling him to be creative and empty at once. The class of philosophical texts, in brief, resists easy or any generalization, and the deeper question of what philosophy is had better be postponed until it is clear why this extraordinary graphomorphic profusion is needed. In any case the possibility must be faced that unless the philosopher has been driven to find a novel form of presentation, he has nothing philosophically

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novel to say. And this, if true, assigns philosophical criticism an unusual task, namely that of explaining why the form, which must first be identified, is required by the substance, and then of guarding against distortion of the philosophy through the imposition of criteria suited to another form altogether. Cavell could have written, at times has come close to having written, his irrepressible personality notwithstanding, something close enough to the professional philosophical paper to be subject to professional philosophical criticism. But this book belongs to a different genre, occupied by very few other instances, and the question we shall have to face is what in the philosophical reality he is concerned with can have caused him to address it through what I shall call a writtenconversation.What would we have missed in the substance of these films were we to treat them, or for that matter were we to treat this book, as a "serious humanistic study"? The first great written conversation-I intuit a distinction between conversation and dialogue-must surely be Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau and not, since they were transcribed, the Tischspracheof Goethe. In Diderot's masterpiece, the Philosopher, who is serious, confronts the Musician, who is playful, but the two are faces of one being, and jointly define what Hegel speaks of as spirit, and for which he finds no better illustration than Le Neveu de Rameau. Spirit's Existence consists in universal talk and depreciatory judgement rending and tearing everything, before which all those moments are broken up that are meant to signify something real and to stand for actual members of the whole, and which at the same time plays with itself this game of self-dissolution. This judging and talking is, therefore, the real truth, which cannot be gotten over and overpowers everything. As we shall see, the reality Cavell addresses is like the address itself, a kind of "universal talk" which the address illustrates, so that the relationship between address and subject does not yield to the semantics of everyday discourse so much as present a kind of verbal picture of a kind of discourse, a reality made up of language, a social texture woven out of talk: a form of life. Cavell's inspiration doubtless comes not from Diderot but Wittgenstein, as the Philosophical Investigations virtually consist of brief conversationsconversations that have the same relationship to normal ones that Lacan's seancesbrevesdo to the therapeutic hour of the "talking cure" -in which few exchanges occur between the writer (Ich) and someone who calls Ich "Du" (perhaps Ich himself). "I want to remember a tune, and it escapes me: suddenly I say 'Now I know it' and I sing it. .... Perhaps you will say (Du sagst vielleicht) 'It's a particular feeling, as if it were there."'Or: "Someone might object against me 'You take the easy way out!' (Du machstdu leicht!)." Or: "The red which you imagine (das du dir vorstellst)is surely not the same (not the same thing) as the

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red which you see in front of you. . . ." And so on. The startling intimacy of the Du of self-address is unprecedented in German literature, and has had an immense impact on German poetry, which does not mean that there is more going on in Wittgenstein than philosophy, but that the philosophical reality demands that the philosophical form of investigation into it should be conversational. The parallel question I am raising is what in the philosophical reality of film, or at least these films, makes conversation about them the appropriate philosophical form, granted that they may be discussed nonphilosophically through the more standard vehicles of serious humanistic scholarship. It is true that as a matter of psychological fact we spontaneously talk about the films we have seen as a kind of continuation of the experience, much as we protract intimacy by talking after sex. In both these cases, it is a certain deep silence, a silence together, which may be wanted instead in order to maintain the intensity. The possibility of silence defines the quality of conversation with which either of these experiences can be accompanied, since the standard the neighbors, the children, sports, economtopics of conversation-politics, ics-do not have silence as an alternative. Hence conversation implies intimacy or is a way of being intimate. Cavell's tone is at times intimate in this way, and conversation then exhibits the intensity of engagement and hence the absence of a gap and of a mere objectivity between him and his subject. It is a way of making love, but it is not plain that it is philosophical, though it could be philosophical more easily than it could be film criticism, film history, or film theory. Postfilm conversation also helps us stabilize the narrative by rehearsing what the connections are between event and event, since these were perhaps not obvious to us while we witnessed the events, any more than the meanings of events in real life are obvious to us while we live them. Of course we know, having seen the film, more or less what happened after what: we know, as it were, the chronicle of events. Cavell takes it for granted that we know the films he talks about in this sense. Conversation becomes mutual exploration of meanings rather than transmission of information. If you have not seen these films, you really cannot read the book, or not read it fully: no one, for instance, could reconstruct The Lady Eve from what Cavell says about it (Michael Wood, reviewing the book for The New YorkReview of Books, admits that he had seen all the films recently except The Lady Eve, regarding which he says, admitting it may be his fault, that Cavell "bewilders me entirely"). You can't converse about what you don't know. Twice Cavell summarizes plots, but, again, not to supply missing information but to mark off the main stages, to help us see and then respond to narrative structure in terms of the meaning of what took place. This is an important point. Cavell writes: "Words that on one viewing pass, and are meant to pass, without notice, as unnoticeably trivial, on another resonate and declare their implication in a network of significance." But this implies on the part of directors an artful exploitation of a common feature of

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narrative structures, namely that the earlier events derive their significance through redescription in terms of later ones, to which they stand in variousThis is what gives the historian an adcausal being only one-relationships. vantage over the witness, as it gives the conversationalist an advantage over the audience -and it supplies a sense to the mysterious utterance of Freud which Cavell quotes twice: "To find is to refind." I have anatomized these redescriptions as narrative sentences in my Analytical Philosophy of History. Narrative sentences refer to events in ways to which observers of those events are logically blind. Someone seeing Leda raped by a swan would not see "engendered there,/ the broken wall, the burning tower,/ and Agamemnon dead," that being an available description only after the Trojan War had worked its inner destinies out. Nor can someone who witnessed the birth of Isaac Newton have seen the birth of the author of Principia Mathematica,or at least not by that description, for reasons not dissimilar to those which enable us to know the spuriousness of a relic that pretends to be the skull of the baby Jesus. No doubt conversation stands to viewing as history does to life, but this does not solve the metaphilosophical problem since the establishment of narrative is an endeavor common to a wide class of practices, most notably historiographic practice as such, even when executed by the historians of the Annales School, which is ideologically antinarrativist. But conversation is not notably a historiographic instrument. And after all we can sit through films over and over again, while we can live through history but once. So while it is a fact that we converse in part for narrative reasons, a philosophical connection between film and conversation must be found elsewhere. So perhaps it has less to do with either intimacies or narrative recovery than with something peculiar to just these films, these comedies of remarriage: It Happened One Night, The Lady Eve, Bringing Up Baby, The PhiladelphiaStory, His Girl Friday, Adam's Rib, and The Awful Truth, to exhaust the canon or at least to itemize what Cavell regards as its best instances. Let us consider these.

A central text for Cavell is John Milton's Doctrineand Discipline of Divorce, where he boldly wrote, In God's intention a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage, for we find here no expression so necessarily implying carnal knowledge as this prevention of loneliness to the mind and spirit of man. Despite the secondary sexual meaning of "conversation," it is plain that Milton meant more than sex, even if carnal knowledge is implied. The wife whose desertion of him occasioned the notorious pamphlet was half his age and evidently as giddy as Irene Dunne, with no aptitude nor taste for scholarly

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chatter, incompatability of mind rather than flesh being the startling ground for divorce Milton insisted upon, miscommunications of the flesh having been accepted as ground for annulment all along. Conversation then is synecdoche for marriage, and talking together is the mode in which the copular heroes of these films-two-headed persons rather than double-backed beasts-are together: talk is the substance of their union. "I would say that in these films the central pair are learning to speak the same language," and "talking together is for us this pair's essential way of being together." This is I think at once a human insight and an insight into cinema. It suggests a way in which the addition of sound to film transforms the subjects of film, so that talkies are not silents with vocal adjuncts, like the voice box in a doll. After all, for an illiterate audience to whom subtitles would have been inaccessible, it was always possible for the piano player to speak the exiguous bits of dialogue whose conventional inscription the audiences of the time readily accepted. It has already been recalled that Edison's Kinetoscope sought right at the beginning of cinema's history to integrate sound and image, so that one could hear the character one saw, like Sir Harry Lauder. In the Kinetoscope we could actually hear what in silents we only could infer from what we saw. But sound and sight lay side by side, externally related, the addition of sound entailing no more transformation of the subject than the shift from black and white into color would have, had someone, say, tinted the strip (which now and again did take place). The genius of the directors Cavell celebrates-Capra, in making speech the substance Cukor, McCarey, Sturges, Hawks -consisted of the films so that the images seen silently would be unintelligible: as though the sight gags were really a visual form of the vocal. But that meant that they had to discoversubjects that made talk possible, and of course entertaining. A couple slanging back and forth was naturally such a subject. They could be fellow workers, newspapermen as in His Girl Friday, but narrative demand required a story be told. With a man and a woman in the America of that time the story had to be a story of marriage, but this left unexplained how they learned to talk alike, which implies a prior familiarity. That they had once been married would make a natural explanation, but that meant that the narrative had to be of how they got back together; so the concept of the genuine talkie almost entails the comedy of remarriage as an artistic necessity. Social transformation, of course, helped collaterally: there can be conversation only between equals, though the equality is evidently fragile- was and is evidently fragileas may be seen from the fact that the man in most of these films subjects the woman to lectures on the meaning of devotion, marriage, what you willdoubtless the kind of thing that drove poor Mary Powell out of Milton's dusty domicile. It is possible to argue that in the comedy of remarriage, the talking picture finds its ideal content, so that there is an internal relationship between sense and structure, as there is an internal relationship between words and images in

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these bright, even brilliant comedies. Remarriage of course is what makes them comedies, tragedies being stories that end in divorce, or in the becoming final of divorce, or in death, all cases in which there is a falling into silence which is not the silence of intimacy, but the silence that excludes it because it excludes conversation. So there is an internal relationship too between these films and conversation. This is, I think, an impressive discovery, and an important fact about the book in case people think marriage is something brought in from outside or added to the discussion of film, as sound was first adjoined to the silent image. It belongs with the subject. But this still does not give us the philosophical connection we want, between comedies of conversation and conversation as the philosophical form for responding to these films-unless there is an equivalence betweenfilm and philosophy, so that Cavell can think himself doing in a philosophy book the same thing his directors were doing in another medium or mode. And I think that this is really what Cavell wants us to surmise, not so much putting Kant and Capra in the same boat-or Plato and Leo rather seeing these unlikely counterparts as faces of the same McCarey-but moral solid, aspects of the same thing. This is almost like a theory of the Trinity, in which there are not three distinct persons but a single person with three distinct aspects-or like an intricate solution to the mind/body problem in which these are aspects of a whole which consists in its aspects. So that there is an implied consubstantiality between philosophy and its subject, just as Hegel supposes that a certain way of talking mirrors the way the world is. I don't know how to assess this astonishing claim, but if I am right in supposing that something like this is the implied metaphysical subtext of Pursuits of Happiness, we at least know how the book is to be read. As a conversation it exemplifies as well as refers to its subject. It shows what it is about, and seeks by a desperate sort of magic to become what one would be mistaken in thinking it merely seeks to describe.

Toward the end of his conversation regarding The Awful Truth, Cavell finds (of course) a parallel between Leo McCarey's cute metaphor of a pair of clockwork figures disappearing through a single door, which emblemizes the reconciled pair of the film, and Nietzsche's heavy metamorphical passage in Also SprachZarathustra,where we are told how the Spirit becomes a camel and the camel becomes a lion and the lion becomes a child. A man who finds a parallel there can find one anywhere, yet Cavell writes in mock defense, "How can my linking of Friedrich Nietzsche and Leo McCarey not be chance? How can it be chance?" No it is not chance. The two are not close enough to speak of a connection, hence not close enough even to speak of a chanceconnection. The emphasis should fall not on can but on my, for it is not an accident that Cavell should want there to be a connection between a favorite philosopher and a

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favorite director. And so long as we see such outrageous associations as moves in a conversation instead of objective colligations, we can relax, sit back, and allow ourselves to be amused, allow ourselves to be straight men, instead of throwing the book at the cat, thinking the rules of serious humanistic study had been betrayed. After all, we were told right at the beginning that we were not going to be told just about some films, but about "my"experiences: "Each of the seven chapters that follow contains an account of my experience of a film made in Hollywood between 1934 and 1949." So the questions are always going to be less what it means that the films were made in Hollywood than what it means to Cavell that they were. The book is a soliloquy that has room for those who will sit through it only if the speaker is fascinating. Well, he is fascinating. He takes risks, he bares his heart, he confides. He is obsessed with marriage, divorce, and remarriage, with philosophy, and with film, and has an innocence which leads him to believe the unity of reality is the unity of his mind. He reveres Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, reads Shakespeare dazzlingly, rubs shoulders as a fellow New Englander (which he is not) with Thoreau and Emerson, plays with foolish theories, relishes sly impossible juxtaposings, distracts us with impractical jokes, likes to be outrageous, campy, seductive, and to meet questions with questions. He moons like a walrus in search of a carpenter, writes at times like an angel and at times like Woody Woodpecker, sneers, leers, and lays the toys of his imagination on the seminar table as though they were pieces of several true crosses, all the while flirting openly with himself as though he were someone else. And he is capable of such bad philosophy that we think this must be an instance of playful seriousness. As when he offers a trivializing proof that his is not the only interpretation, that another can be gotten as easily as pulling a rabbit out of a duck. And in this prestidigitatory spirit, he turns Kant and Capra back and forth into one another, making composites out of opposites in order not to be cut in half himself. And making or trying to make us see the blanket in It Happened One Night as the boundary between noumena and phenomena, as well as the boundary between person and person whose falling must issue in the Kingdom of Ends, as well as a metaphor for the movie screen, since Clark Gable must be a surrogate for the director addressing us as audience through the medium of Claudette Colbert, is like one of those books of images we activate with our thumb, their rapid shuffle giving us the illusion of a figure running. Or pounding the obvious so fiercely as to make us forget how banal it is, as when, discussing the home movie as a film within a film in Adam'sRib for ten pages he concludes with what we knew all along: "The people in the home movie, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy [are] the same as the actors in Adam's Rib, who are watching themselves, and who are playing the parts of people watching themselves, in a home movie." This is a voice like no other in philosophy, today or ever, and the only voice it at all resembles is in fiction, indeed in Le Neveu de Rameau, the voice of

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the Musician, seven-eighths moocher and one-eighth genius, who delivers a performance at one point so astounding that Hegel describes it with awe: The content uttered by Spirit and uttered about itself is, then, the inversion and perversion of all conceptions and realities, a universal deception of itself and of others. The shamelessness manifested in stating this deceit is just on that account the greatest truth. The style of this speech is the madness of the musician who "piled and mixed up together some thirty airs, Italian, French, comic, tragic, of all sorts and kinds; now with a deep bass, he descended to the depths of hell, then, contracting his throat to a high piping falsetto, he rent the vault of the skies, raving and soothed, haughtily imperious and mockingly jeering by turns. Had Rameau's nephew written an opera, it would be like this book. All the rules of criticism would have to be altered in order to accommodate it. But is this not in a way what he wants? Not so much just to get us to see these films in a certain way but to learn to talk about them in a certain way? Things can be said, tried, dismissed in conversations that cannot in other genres, and extravagances can be tolerated there which the sturdy dull productions of serious humanistic study cannot accept. In the end I loved the book, loved the author, felt, as with few authors I have read, that I was involved in a relationship something like the one of the couples in the films that I still cannot take as seriously as he: as if the experience of reading the book confirms its thought.

Reading Hitchcock Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, by William Rothman, Cambridge,Harvard UniversityPress, 1982.

FREDRIC

JAMESON

Anothercase, and just as frequent a one, is that of conceptionsof thecinemawhich aim to be theoreticaland generalbut infact consistof justifying a given typeoffilm that onehasfirst liked, and rationalising this liking after the event. These 'theories'are often author aesthetics(aestheticsof taste); they may contain insightsof considerabletheoreticalimportance, but the writer'spostureis not theoretical.... A simultaneouslyinternal and externallove object is constituted,at once comfortedby a justificatorytheorywhich only goes beyondit (occasionallyevensilently ignoringit) the better to surroundand protectit, accordingto the cocoonprinciple. .... To adopt the outward marks of theoreticaldiscourseis to occupya strip of territoryaround the adoredfilm, all that reallycounts, in orderto barall the roads by which it might be attacked. Christian Metz, "The Imaginary Signifier" A powerful interpretive act-in this instance, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, by William Rothman-is usually understood as telling us something about its subject matter; but it can also be interrogated (as will be the case here) for what it can tell us about interpretationas such, its conditions of possibility, what must be left out in order to include what it finally does manage to include. It tells us, too, what all this has to do with the way in which the interpretive operation constitutes a certain object of study, and a certain (institutionalizable) field of study. I am bound to see this somewhat differently, since I

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am peering over into the field from my own (whose object is verbal narrative). I have, therefore, no vested interest in this particular field, whose products I nonetheless sometimes read with a certain envy, as though it were easier to be a materialist when you had a "really" material object to work with. Materiality is, however, not nearly so useful a concept with which to approach film criticism as that of translationor transcoding,which allow you to measure the relative difference between retelling the story of a novel and writing up the sequence of a film. Explanatory power is then proportional to the distance between the two codes (between the aesthetic language and the critical language), and much of our time, in literary studies, is spent distancing and objectifying our object of study (turning it, say, into something called narrative), so that our critical rewriting will come with a certain force or shock. Film criticism, on the other hand, ends up reproducing some of our more traditional literary-critical problems, in particular that of the gap between part and whole, presence and totality, style and plot, in short, what Coleridge called fancy and imagination, and what I have preferred (following Deleuze and Guattari) to call molecular and molar. Nothing is more disturbing for any organic aesthetics than this methodological problem, which also turns out to be a whole historical situation and dilemma. Paradoxically, these distinct levels or dimensions are much easier to deal with when they are in contradiction with one another, or are at least doing two very different kinds of things. Conrad's impressionism, his production of a certain kind of style, is easier to isolate precisely because it is doing something relatively unrelated to, or disconnected from, his plot construction.1 Still, inventing ways to bridge this gap (or even worse, to conceal its existence) is a privileged form of interpretation as bravura gesture and Rothman's interpretive operation, as I intend to show, is no exception to this. An equivalent gap confronts the analysis of film which must decide what to do with the individual frame (or, somewhat differently, with the individual shot). Are these the phonemes, the words, or the sentences of filmic discourse? And since neither frame nor shot are the categories through which the naive viewer experiences film, what is the epistemological advantage of a semiotic commitment to the most self-punishing frame-by-frame analysis of a given film (over and beyond the ritual of professionalism involved), as opposed to the analysis, following the suggestion of Stanley Cavell (who is following the it (insuggestive work of Freud on dreams), of the filmic "object"as we remember cluding our mistakes, holes, substitutions)? I am, however, anxious to reintroduce history back into this problem, which is not only methodological (or epistemological), but which also reflects an objective development in its object, a widening structural distance, within

1.

See my The Political Unconscious, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1981, chapter 5.

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all modern cultural languages, between the micro-text and the macrostructure, or between the molecular and the molar. In this form, that distance (with all the methodological problems it raises for analysis and for criticism) is to be seen as a historical event: one which I am tempted-very hastily and prematurely, very dogmatically, if you prefer-to see as the scars and marks of social fragmentation and monadization, and of the gradual separation of the public from the private in modern times. Film, however, imposes such a historical perspective on us in a twofold, doubly complicated way: for besides the internal logic, the internal evolution and development of its intrinsic languages-from Griffith, say, to Hitchcock and on to Godard and after-it is itself a historically new cultural apparatus, whose material structure may be expected to reflect (and to express), in its very formal structure, a particular moment or stage of capital and of the latter's intensified, yet dialectically original, reification of social relations and processes. This means that critical or interpretive solutions need always to be retheorized, in a second moment, as indices of a historical situation or contradiction. It is this second moment which is missing from Rothman's stimulating book (as from how many others?). We will rapidly assess this loss from two perspectives before we discuss its positive achievements. The question of genre, for example, always one of the privileged mediations between the formal and the historical, is relatively neglected (save for the emergence of romance), it being understood that genre criticism does not properly involve classification or typology but rather that very different thing, a reconstruction of the conditionsof possibility of a given work or formal practice. The question, then, is not one of "deciding" to what genre Hitchcock's films belong, but rather of reconstructing the generic traditions, constraints, and raw materials out of which alone, at a specific moment of their historical evolution, that unique and nongeneric thing called "the Hitchcock film" was able to emerge. Genre functions to prevent embarrassing or unwanted questions from being asked; it is thus like a frame with respect to the reader's or spectator's interpretive temptations. The most obvious example of this, in genres clearly related to Hitchcock's work, is the significance of murder, a theme, problem, or subject which does not (let's be frank) unduly preoccupy us in our ordinary daily lives. To interest us in this topic, therefore, requires a certain amount of justification, which is to say, a certain amount of metaphysical rationalization (for example, "murder is the very metaphor of the human condition," or, "New York is a jungle"). The function of generic framing, as in the murder mystery, is to dispense reader and writer alike from the necessity for such rationalization: the generic label tells us that the centrality of murder is pure convention, that we will all assume in advance that this topic is important and take it from there. We are, then, reemerging once again from that genre andfrom those conventions when we begin to get nervous about the unjustified (or unjustifiable) function of the theme of murder in art like that of Hitchcock, and set ourselves

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the new interpretive task of discovering the meaning of this motif ("the connection between murder and marriage is one of Hitchcock's great subjects," p. 53). At this point, however, we have to distinguish different kinds or even concepts of meaning itself. In symbolic meaning, metaphysics or authorial intention are empowered to impose a given meaning on what is otherwise a random bit of raw material. This, one would think, should be radically separated from at least two other types of meaning (which might be coordinated in the present instance): namely the genealogical, in which murder as part of Hitchcock's historical and generic raw material is accounted for as an element in his own situation, his own dilemma with which he must somehow deal; and the enabling or conditional type, in which the unique perceptions and meanings we do find in Hitchcock are somehow accounted for by the unique characteristics of his narrative and formal apparatus (including the convention of murder). The foregoing can now be somewhat generalized so that the problematization of interpretation it implies becomes a historical dilemma in its own right. At this level of abstraction, we might begin with the fragmentation and privatization of individuals in contemporary society and with the atomization of all hitherto existing forms of community or collective life (including the values and common languages of such groups). Reception of the individual art object thereby becomes rigorously nominalistic, and shared conceptual motifs (symbols, "values") can no longer be assumed or taken for granted. The artist may adapt to this situation by producing the "open work of art," an object that can be used by anybody as they see fit. Such an object does not preselect its public (as only those who share this or that convention of meaning); it is randomly recodable as one likes. Meanwhile, as the artist is equally nominalized (situation-specific, historically and socially bereft of all claims to, or possibilities of, universality), we begin to see the production of private meanings in the work of art. This is the point, paradoxically enough, when film as an emergent cultural language and apparatus of the twentieth century assumes significant historical meaning. For it is, as Metz has instructed us, a very peculiar language indeed, a "language without a lexicon" ("this does not mean that filmic expression lacks any kind of predetermined units, but such units, where they do exist, are patterns of construction rather than preexisting elements of the sort provided by the dictionary" 2). This is to say that the kinds of private language (special signifiers functioning as Lacanian "upholstery tacks") we have become accustomed to in high modernist literature are here somehow authorized by the very nature of the cinematographic apparatus itself. All of Hitchcock then becomes one immense private language, one immense chain of private signifiers, which has however become public and collec-

Christian Metz, The ImaginarySignifier, trans. Britton, Williams, Brewster, and Guzzetti, 2. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1982, p. 212.

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tively accessible and within which, paradoxically, at some second degree, the older modernist private signifiers again stand out. Rothman is particularly good on two of these encodings in Hitchcock: the strategic use of the overhead shot, and the even more idiosyncratic inscription in the frame of parallel vertical bars of various kinds, with which an auditory equivalent-staccato knocking- is identified. The interpretive problem is, however, that even such private languages derive from the recodingof preexisting signifiers, and those continue residually to draw in their wake a laborious train of inherited meanings which must somehow be justified by the critic. It is as though the interpretive process had as its essential function the demonstration that a given spectator-reader need bring no particular form of belief-system-dogma to the reception of this particular aesthetic object. If you have to be Marxist, Freudian, theological, NewDeal-liberal, Tory, or whatever, in order to get the point of the film, then there is something "impure" about it; in other words, a "pure" filmic language, with no ideological preconditions, should be conceivable. But this means, as we shall see, that the overwhelming temptation of the interpreter is to turn all remnants of contentback into sheerly formal phenomena or processes, in order to save the work. I mentioned also a second possible approach to Hitchcock which I found lacking in Rothman's book, which provides a useful perspective from which to evaluate it. This has to do with a way of seeing and using Hitchcock's films, which, however inadmissible, tells us something about their objective properties, tells us, in other words, about their objective susceptibility to misinterpretation and misuse. But I am speaking of a time when no "serious" interpretations of Hitchcock yet existed; the very first of these was, to my knowledge, the Rohmer-Chabrol hypothesis of 1957: since Hitchcock was an AngloCatholic, his films were about sin and confession along the lines of Graham Greene. To parody the philosophers, then, we might say that the matter of interpretation turns on the meaning and function of the word about, a word that played no role in that period. Nothing could have been more distant from the then current New Critical ideals of good reading-namely of responsible and hierarchically unifying or the valorizing through selected bravura seorganic interpretation-than quences, a selectivity, which often enough resembled the rifling of a box of chocolates and the surreptitious replacement of the unwanted flavors, their undersides perforated for inspection by a thumb. Theoretical intuitions were, nevertheless, not wholly absent from such critical practice. For one thing, we dimly sensed the privileged function of certain formal constraints as the conditions of possibility for these moments of filmic "decoration." Indeed, constraint-as in the unities of French classical tragedy-also seemed to account for the persistence of the thriller form throughout these works, as well as the supplementary games Hitchcock seemed to play with himself (most dramati-

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cally in the continuous shot of Rope or the implacable ephemerality of the fall foliage in The Troublewith Harry). This perception was not wrong, but needed to be related more dialectically to the matter of fragmentation itself. Indeed, in retrospect one is astonished by the way in which the great foreigners, the great European exilesNabokov and Chandler fully as much as Hitchcock himself-worked by disassemblage, taking the American misery apart in carefully framed, discontinuous episodes, sometimes as reduced as individual sentences, which then stand as the frame within which their aesthetic concerns are enshrined. It is hard to imagine an American artist greeting the "inexhaustible richness" of American daily life with the same jubilation, but it might be argued that this miniaturizing on the exile's part reveals something about daily life in the United States which the immanence of the native, under the rumbling shadow of the el-train, is unable to focus aesthetically. This has something to do with the invisibility of daily life as such, its peculiar dissolution beneath the centered gaze. And it is this problem, of the representation of daily life, of American daily life, which is addressed in a remarkable letter of Chandler's: A long time ago when I was writing for the pulps I put into a story a line like "He got out of the car and walked across the sun-drenched sidewalk until the shadow of the awning over the entrance fell across his face like the touch of cool water." They took it out when they published the story. Their readers didn't appreciate this sort of thing-just held up the action. I set out to prove them wrong. My theory was that the readers just thoughtthey cared about nothing but the action; that really, although they didn't know it, the thing they cared about, and that I cared about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description.3 Adjusting Chandler's language, we can disengage from this reflection a whole the with respect to both Hitchcock and Nabokov-about theory -illuminating artistic representation-by indirection and laterally, as it were, out of the corner of the eye -of an everyday life whose condition is the ostensible fixation of the public on the molar pretexts of plot, mystery narrative, suspense, and macro-temporality. The recipe has something in common with Proustian indirection, with the indistinctness of the Proustian present. It shares with that common source in the repression of perceptions and the incapacity to live the daily life of the present itself. This last can then become visible only when the raised index finger of the artist holds and engages the public's esprit de se'rieux

3. Raymond Chandler, SelectedLetters, ed. Frank MacShane, New York, Columbia University Press, 1981, p. 115.

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(even if this be sheer "diversion" and "entertainment"), so that other, radically different kinds of perceptions become marginally tolerated in the decorative field around the plot or action proper. Since the experience of daily life is arguably related in some fundamental way to the urban (at any rate, it is clear that the conceptof daily life is very closely related to the concept of the city as it emerges in the late nineteenth century), it may be most appropriate to convey this aesthetic problem through our impressions of cities. Notoriously disunified or random, spanning an immense qualitative range between the personal or private memory on the one hand, and the public, anonymous, institutional, or stereotypical on the other, these impressions do not necessarily and immediately appear as appropriate material for a work of art. To restrict our evocation of a city like San Francisco to its dramatic landscape is to privilege a type of content or raw material that is little more, essentially, than our experience of the picture postcard or tourist poster. To attempt to locate a personal mediation of such material (or, using a different terminology, to position the individual subject within it) suggests operations as impersonal and anonymous as, say, the technique of parking one's car on a steep hill, of adjusting the wheel in the direction of the curb, and so forth. Operations such as these cannot be said to promise much for an aesthetic text in any medium. Nor do they seem to intersect with the other features of San Francisco. -One would want to find evoked here the two- or three-storey wooden house, which overwhelms the visitor with an impression of a culture of daily life from which she is herself excluded; a network of urban routines no less privatized than those of the East Coast, yet more visible, since we see into people's kitchens or their upper windows. Sunlight is another distinctive trait which demands justice in a description of San Francisco, and in some uniquely negative or privative way, in so far as it merely marks the absence of Eastern changes of season (and their effects on daily life, as in extreme heat or heavy snowfall), and not the presence of a distinctive and radically different life in nature, as it does in Southern California. Let us limit ourselves to these already relatively unrelated features (and many more are obviously conceivable). The first problem to arise is not that of the most appropriate way to expresssuch experiences -for that already presupposes that they have been transformed into personal experiences. The first problem is, instead, to posit, or to attempt to locate, a space in which all of the distinct features enumerated would intersect. By our account, they fall into two distinct groups: one has to do with streets and transportation, and the other with housing. One "objective" meeting place of these two groups of distinctive traits would then seem to propose itself, namely the sidewalk-a liminal area between the public and the private, the space of a transformational or transcoding movement from dwelling to transportation, which, in San Francisco, is

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strongly sensed in the passage from the floors of a house to the steepness of the street outside, an area which however still remains substantially pedestrian. Here too, however, we should try to resist the immediate temptation to formulate all this in terms of aesthetic expression,as though the appropriate combination of perception and verbal skill would suffice to identify and convey the peculiar stress of leg muscle, the warmth of sunlight on one's face within the freshness of the air, the commercial level of the cross street before you toward which you seem to descend. But this presupposes an aesthetic which is little more than a naming, as though, for this complex combination of sensations, there existed the possibility of some extended verbal compound which could stand as something like its noun. It is not clear that such an aesthetic has ever been coherent or of any great practical use: what is at least certain is that it does not correspond at all to the procedures of writers whom one would be tempted to take as models. Proust, for example, never directly renders a complex sensation or impression of this kind; he either describes the metaphorical term of the object in question, or inserts the perception as a break within a continuity of habit, such that the story being told is not that of the perception itself, but rather the break in a very different continuum (as when, coming down the steps of a Manhattan townhouse, an unexpected flow of sea air makes us think of San Francisco). Tricks and indirections, these, Proust's art consisting not in his capacity to render such sensations but rather in his ability to avoid doing so. The dilemma of "expression" might plausibly (and with greater historical accuracy) be seen as a symptom of the increasing distance between subject and object in modern society, so that one is tempted to abandon the subject and to pursue the object in all its prosaic and mechanical complexity. More precision and more concreteness is obtained, for example, when we recall that the San Francisco sidewalk is not the exclusive property of the pedestrian, but is also the space where private cars are temporarily parked during the day, so that you have to walk around them, either going out into the street or negotiating whatever room remains between the nose of the vehicle and the garage door. What is, however, existentially unpleasant may be an aesthetic advantage, since this very cramping acts as a condensation that brings all our themes (the house, the slope, the street with its cars) far more closely into relationship with each other. Why does having to walk around these parked cars in San Francisco make a difference to me that it would not make in another city or town? It is not only that what is accidental in another place is customary here, for some reason; it is also that the detour brings me in contact - when I can slip past! -with panels that are at least unconsciously more alarming than the solid masonry of the wall of an ordinary building. One has the impression that if one of these garage doors began to open for whatever reason, the innocent pedestrian bystander would run some risk of being jammed in between the hood of the car and the lid of its empty garage. In truth, our unconscious is poorly informed on all this, and it seems conceivable that these overhead doors

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are tracked so as never to extend into the space above the sidewalk proper. How that would be possible is then also (conceivably) explained by the peculiar tracking of the metal arm to which it is attached, one of those engineering mysteries by which pressure in one direction generates the zigzag of a returning leverage in the other, elbow geometries of a type unknown to us. This puzzlement is then contained by the more permissible enigma of the long distance operating mechanism, whose detached and portable box allows you to switch television channels or turn the whole thing off entirely from your bed. The push-button servo-mechanism of the overhead garage door is not only similar, it occupies the same typological slot (the only two known exemplars!) in the unconscious as the across-the-room television channel finder. It can also more grandly govern outer space, as when it stages a majestic harmony between the Cadillac turning into the street and the garage door rising slowly in the distance; it is not as elegant as a liner berthing or the Concorde in flight, but is perhaps more deeply characteristic of the third machine age. It is also far more sculptural of urban space, relating two gadgets and organizing a multidimensional event, rather than determining the style of a single object in motion through the void. This would then be a mode of perceiving the garage door mechanism in terms of the "sublime," where the pedestrian fear of having it open on you would correspond either to farce or tofilm noir. I have traced all these connections and followed all these complicated wires in order to affirm a scandalous (or perhaps grotesque) proposition, namely that daily life in San Francisco is first and foremost that-the overhead garage door and the steeply sloping sidewalk, the gentrified three-storey wooden house rising vertically, and the traffic heading down and over the hill. It is, first of all, important to underscore the impersonal or reified zone of what is only in a secondary way a personal experience: rarely does one evolve one's own unique, personal style of dealing with cans or with home appliances. Until we become angels, or achieve Utopia, there will necessarily persist this core of purely material and anonymous, I would like to say antipersonal, constraint within our own personal commerce with the urban-industrial landscape. That the latter can never be transparent- after the fashion of private or personal, psychological experience (the kind we think of as being "real life")- does not mean, however, that such activities do not contain a whole cluster or constellation of significant themes, some of which have already been developed here: private versus public and the seams between those realms, a sedimentation of machinery from transportation of a now older variety (the internal combustion engine) to action-at-a-distance mechanisms, two kinds of space, in which one dwells and in which one travels, the shout in the street versus the dim stillness of a furnished interior. The paradox is that the more meaning (allegorical or otherwise) conferred on inert mechanisms, anonymous sidewalks empty of people, blank facades that belong to somebody else, the easier such "symbols" allow themselves to be incorporated into the work of art.

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Two distinct problems are thereby posed for the aesthetic appropriation of such material: it must not be impoverished to the point of meaning something in this transparent or abstract sense, and it must avoid an aesthetic of personal expression, as when I try to render my New York by evoking the smooth rising and dipping of cars sweeping at fixed distances from one another down the great north-south avenues of Manhattan, or my Paris as the springy impact of a French vehicle on the cobbled section of a boulevard, the new humming of the tires on its paving stones. There exist, however, other ways of conveying these materials of daily life of which we have said that they are something like the blind spot at the heart of our own present, of our own experience: an objective reality at which you cannot gaze directly without finding it dissolved into its elements, but which stubbornly reconstitutes itself in the corner of the eye when the latter officially fixes somethingelse. The form that this process would take in culture is suggested by Hitchcock's work, and I have indulged the San Francisco example at such length because it is precisely this material that is mobilized in his last film, Family Plot- one of the two great Hitchcock evocations of San Francisco (the other being, of course, Vertigo).I am not aware of a Hitchcock film set in Los Angeles; but one of the dimensions of his work which is important to me (and omitted almost entirely from Rothman's book and most others on this director) is the intimate relationship between the American films at least and place as such: midwestern fields, Mount Rushmore, Quebec City, Phoenix, Bodega Bay, Vermont, Harlem, not to speak of the Riviera, Covent Garden, or the Albert Hall. What Family Plot allows us to witness, as though in a small-scale laboratory situation, is the mechanism whereby the thriller generates a secondary representation of daily life by absorbing the peculiarities of the overhead garage door into the plot proper, exploiting the subliminal anxiety aroused by the lack of windows in the door panel by stationing the telepathic heroine outside in the street, while the strategic space indoors is marked by the hostage in the basement. The chain of associations we have traced in connection with the San Francisco sidewalk and its mechanical adjuncts is here transferred to the local and "degraded" peripeties of the suspense story. The latter, clearly, do nothing to articulate the meanings of the space of daily life as such. Indeed, they would seem to distract us from any form of attention (aesthetic or sociological) to the latter, at least until we recall Chandler's account of a form of representation which operates precisely by way of distraction. Then one comes to admire Hitchcock's eye for the peculiarly invisible yet material nodes in which daily life can be detected: an eye and an immobile gaze that - in a manner not unlike Bruno's stare from the tennis bleachers, which might be taken as its allegory -fixes us ever more insistently from out of the extraneous dynamics of the plot.

AlfredHitchcock.North by Northwest. 1959.

~

F7

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Rothman's approach tends to reify his subject at the level of the auteur, of "genius," not as the capacity to register and process certain kinds of raw material with a rare optical or sonorous range. Our discussion of the form involves, then, a laborious or clumsy shifting of gears into a discussion of content. The five splendid readings of Hitchcock films which he gives us are of course rigged with a view toward Rothman's own interpretation of Hitchcock as a serious artist intent on making philosophical (and psychological) statements on evil, statements far more readily authorized by The Lodger, Murder!, and Shadow of a Doubt than by North by Northwestor The Lady Vanishes. The strategy of containment that frames all this in terms of Hitchcock's "genius" influences the form of Rothman's essay: it is as though the centering of his analyses on what is currently called the phenomenon of mastery in Hitchcock results, by way of the mirror drama of criticism itself, in the exercise of an assumption of an imanalogous mastery in Rothman's own readings-the pressive, admirable, often even enviable authority which is also intellectually and theoretically disturbing, and which I want to question.4 Rothman's book is, however, more than a collection of analyses: it tells a story and models an evolution or trajectory from The Lodger(1926)- taken as a first, already mature statement of Hitchcock's thematics and aesthetics ("not an apprentice work but a thesis, definitively establishing Hitchcock's identity as an artist" [p. 7])-all the way to Psycho(1960), which marks "the end of the era of film whose achievement Psycho also sums up, and the death of the Hitchcock film" (p. 255). The choice of crucial exhibits, then, stakes out a Hitchcock rather different from that of the adventure thriller (although the formal contribution of The Thirty-nine Steps is strategically recognized in a central analysis). This is not the psychoanalyzing or depth-psychological Hitchcock, of

4. Raymond Durgnat's, Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock, Cambridge, M.I.T. Press, 1974, to my mind the only book of comparable quality to this one (if one does not count Raymond Bellour's important articles on the subject), is a useful corrective to Rothman's in many ways: first, for Durgnat's skepticism about Hitchcock's profundity; second, for his (prestructuralist) willingness to entertain the idea that Hitchcock's work, rather than expressing a single coherent ideology or philosophy, might, in fact, be a space in which a host of incompatible, inconsistent, sometimes even contradictory ideologies move; and third, for his sensitivity to something about which Rothman (and many other comparable American intellectuals and critics) is almost wholly color blind, namely social class. For a single striking example, one's whole reading of The Lodgeris transformed by a fact never mentioned in Rothman's elaborate analysis, namely that the lodger is an upper class visitor to Daisy's milieu, and that their romance is an interclass fraternization. It is true that Durgnat is one of the rare Englishmen to have written about Hitchcock and might thus be expected, a priori, to be aware of the indications of class more readily than American or French viewers, but this is in itself an interesting lesson, as though in cultural importation and transplantation, in the translation of cultural artifacts to alien national situations, what travels the least well, what evaporates or becomes invisible more rapidly than any other code or connotation, is that of social class.

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Spellboundor Marnie; and is finally distinct from the self-transcending Hitchcock of Vertigo("Hitchcock's masterpiece to date, and one of the four or five most profound and beautiful films the cinema has yet given us"5), or of The Birds (whose selection as the ultimate or "last" Hitchcock film would have modified the story Rothman has to tell). That story can best be approached initially by way of a rather traditional problem, whose permutation provides the theoretical originality of Rothman's book. This is the problem of identification, whose literary-critical formulation takes the form of Jamesian point of view and of the nature and function of irony-critical concepts which, in the general atmosphere of poststructuralism and postmodernism, have rapidly come to be seen as ideological and archaic, reflecting a metaphysics of the individual subject or a whole aesthetics of a now extinct high modernism. This whole problematic of identification and empathy would seem to run several distinct dangers. If one pulls it in the direction of verbal narrative and Jamesian point of view in its classical sense, then the question of our identification with the character through whose eyes and experience one is made to perceive a set of events becomes a fatally moral or moralizing one. For one thing, the ethical status of the subject of the point of view must be neither too wicked nor too preternaturally superior to support identification. Then there is the possibility of an on-going identification which proves to have been developed on the basis of false premises, or else the alternate possibility of a point of view which, in our own superiority, we reject from the outset, while viewing the action through the unsatisfactory medium of limited vision. The oft-rehearsed mode of irony thus drearily confronts us once again. In film, however, the visual nature of the medium alters the fundamental data of the problem (since point of view in the strictest sense of seeing through a character's eyes -as in Dark Passage or The Lady in the Lake--has been a very marginal narrative procedure indeed). Now, where it is a matter of lookingat the body or features of an actor, something like a whole psychology would seem to displace the ethical framework of the more literary version of the problem, and raise issues, equally false but different, of facial expression, the mirror stage, intersubjectivity, and the like. What is suspicious about both ethical and psychological perspectives is their apparent willingness, in the last analysis, to ground their analyses in some conception of human nature; hence the usefulness of the newer Lacanian permutation of all of this, the concept of suture, in which identification is less the effect of some a priori harmony between my own ego and some external representation of the identity or per-

5. Robin Wood, Hitchcock'sFilms, New York, Paperback Library, 1970. Wood's judgments and reactions are probably, of all the Hitchcock criticism I have read, the closest to my own personal ones.

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sonality of another, than of my mesmerization by the empty place of interpellation, as in the returning gaze, from the open screen, of the shot/reverse shot as that empty place becomes ambiguously associated both with myself as spectator and with the other character/interlocutor.6 This more rhythmic and formal conception of identification as process tends, however, by radically dissolving the link to any given protagonist or star, to liquidate the problem rather than to solve it. At first glance, Rothman's staging of the issue of identification would seem to have distanced us fundamentally from the more literary problem of point of view. The mystery of The Lodgeris no doubt a matter of inside knowledge and privileged information, but it is dramatized in terms of the limits of the visual itself, the necessary and structural externality of the camera, the fact that a face can finally never tell us anything we want to know, nor can it even confirm what we have learned of a certainty from some other source. The closeup, in other words, tends by its own logic to strengthen an uncertainty the plot itself may have already attempted to dissolve (as when we learn that neither the lodger- Ivor Novello - nor the Cary Grant of Suspicion are really murderers): The next sequence begins by fading in on the lodger, who looks right at the camera, a smile on his lips. This shot compels us to recognize that we do not really know who this man is or what he wants. For all we know, the mother's suspicions are accurate and he is a murderer. The shot culminates the film's intimations, to this point, that the lodger is the Avenger, and that he has a bond with the camera. With a knowing look he meets the camera's gaze, as if he penetrated our act of viewing him and were acknowledging complicity with the author of the film. It is as if Hitchcock himself, wearing the mask of Ivor Novello, were meeting our gaze and smiling as recognition dawns on us . . . (pp. 29-30). It is this "relationship of externality" between the camera and the human face which will then, incidentally, explain the privileged status of Cary Grant as the Hitchcock male star par excellence: It is as if Grant has made a pact with the camera: his face may be filmed as long as the camera does not stare long and hard at it or let its focus go soft. And this corresponds to a pact he appears to have made with the world: others may view him as long as they do not

6. See Stephen Heath, "On Suture," in Questionsof Cinema, London, Macmillan, 1981, as well as the texts of Miller and Oudart in Screen,vol. 18, no. 4 (Winter 1977-78), and those of Dayan and Rothman himself in Bill Nichols, Movies and Methods, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1976.

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display their desire for him; in return, he will not display his feelings. Yet Grant finds himself continually gazed upon in ways that perplex and disturb him. He has a whole repertory of ways of addressing others' uncircumspect looks, and an equal repertory of ways of addressing the camera's gaze . . . (p. 122). This function, however, in which a certain use of the camera meets an actor peculiarly suited to it, will begin to emerge only after The Thirty-nineSteps, as we shall see in a moment. What must, according to Rothman, intervene before this fuller development is the moment of Murder!, in which similar thematics are played out as it were in the third rather than the first person, or in other words in a film that lacks a protagonist either of the type of The Lodgeror of that of The Thirty-nineSteps. Murder!stages a conventional separation between the inquiring consciousness (the actor-director Sir John, played by Herbert Marshall) and the guilty consciousness (revealed to be the transvestite/mulatto Handell Fane), whose culpability will pose many of the same problems of judgment as the later, more richly developed "cases" of Uncle Charles (Shadow of a Doubt) and Norman Bates (Psycho). Characteristically, Rothman takes the sexual ambiguity of this figure as the expression of some more metaphysical (and generalizable) vision of nothingness . . . charged with images of death and with signifiers of the realm of human sexuality from which Fane is irrevocably estranged. The vision of nothingness sums up Fane's nature in his own and-as he imagines-in Diana's eyes. It is also Fane's vision of his own death. Death is Fane's mark. In the world, he represents death, and only his own death can release him from his curse (p. 92). It may be wondered whether any interpretive code-no matter how ultimate from any common-sense perspective (as that of death presumably is)-can be invoked in this unmediated way without dogmatism. In fact, Rothman has several supplementary turns in store for us, including the reading of Fane's suicide that immediately follows this passage, in which he glosses one of the most extraordinary moments in all Hitchcock. This is the moment when the guilty trapeze artist, noose around his neck, executes himself in full public view during a performance in the big tent (dropping, however, out of theframe and out of sight of the camera): As with all suicides, Fane's suicide is a private act admitting no audience. . . . On the other hand, Fane does perform his suicide in the most theatrical way possible in a public arena before an audience that is hushed, waiting for the death-defying climax of his act. Fane's private act of suicide is also a consummate piece of theater that brings down the house (pp. 93-94).

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At this point, however, the thematics of death is no longer an ultimately determining interpretive code in its own right, but has itself been reinterpreted in terms of something which will become far more central to Rothman's analyses in the remainder of the book. It might be well to distinguish, at this point, Rothman's readings from those of Chabrol and Rohmer, in which the public immolation of the villain (think also of the raised arms, impaled on a spotlight, at the end of I Confess,or the agonizing conclusion of Saboteur,later transferred to a very different type of figure) is taken as the "imitation" of Christ on the cross, and as the mark of redemption of the sinner (read: the Catholic characters, as opposed to the righteous or "innocent" Protestant protagonists, who do not even have a knowledge of sin). I believe that theological elements are not absent from Rothman's interpretation, but his reading is, at this particular step in the interpretation, far more richly mediated than the AngloCatholic one. It also has the merit of explaining why, in spite of Hitchcock's own stated convictions as to the lack of interest of the whodunit as a form, and his own evident substitution of the adventure-thriller for the detective story as such, Murder! should have retained this second formal framework, in which Sir John-the official protagonist of the film, unlike the occasional detectives and explainers of other Hitchcock works - has the self-appointed function of the investigator of the mystery. Yet we have also observed that Sir John is an actordirector, and must go on to mention the "play within a play" whereby he cinches Fane's guilt. It is indeed the whole thematics of the theater and of theatricality which will provide the key mediation here, and which, as Rothman observes, "plays a role" in the self-definition of contemporary film far beyond the work of Hitchcock alone. But where the explicit and ostensible conflict is between the sophistication of the city actors and the more popular and collective mode of life of the circus troupe as in Bergman's Naked Night (1952), the circus is here assimilated to the theater itself, while the operative distinction is only implicit: that between theatricality (silent movie acting, expressiveness, rhetorical speeches) and filmmaking proper, for which, in the famous phrase, "actors are cattle," and whose supreme and emblematic figure is not the film "star" but rather the film's director himself. All this is strikingly underscored by the climactic suicide of Murder!, whose theatrical "untruth" suggests that it is an act for a public, which will have witnessedthis event, while its filmic "truth"lies in the way in which Fane drops out of the camera's sight and in which his essential mystery is preserved and perpetuated beyond all visibility. The same evaluative axis explains the peculiar status of SirJohn, virtually the only significant Hitchcock character who is the object of irony in its oldfashioned New Critical, Jamesian or high modernist sense.7 (Indeed, one of the 7.

With the signal exception of the James Stewart figure in Rear Window. But I find Donald

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interesting ways of reexamining Hitchcock's evolution would involve the positioning of a "break"with such now traditional forms of ironic point of view, and the emergence of a new narrative language "beyond" irony.) Sir John, in other words, imagines that the writing of a "play within a play" constitutes an index of truth or of correspondence to reality, of truthful representation, since it in fact solves the mystery. He thereby becomes guiltier, although in a very different way, than the ostensible villain, Fane himself, for he now implicitly claims rivalry with Hitchcock himself, as the Absolute Spirit or demiurge of the film as a whole. Hence the peculiar and significant framing of a "happy end" on stage rather than in the film itself, as Rothman perceptively demonstrates. This film has a properly theatrical hubris which consists of its imagining that it can understand other people (most notably, the guilty), and which thereby competes dangerously with the supreme--but absent--power of the director himself. It is this particular element which is, as I suggested above, susceptible to a theological reading, in which Hitchcock is the absent deity of this filmic universe and in which such a play of romantic irony (in the stricter sense developed by the Schlegels, and also significantly revived by Nabokov) has religious overtones. This possibility of reappropriation by a theological reading strikes me as a flaw and an objective weakness in Rothman's work; it is, however, of a piece with everything that is perceptive in it as well, and is, if not qualified, then at the least "complexified" by the later chapters, to which I now turn. The reading of The Thirty-nineSteps, as I suggested above, will, after this particular exercise in third-person narrative, return us to the mystery-the undecidable question of the possibility or impossibility-of some first person narrative via the close-up of the hero's face. It should be noted in passing, however, that Rothman here also briefly turns to another feature of Hitchcock's work which has been excluded from his own book (owing primarily to his choice of examples), namely the matter of romance, the emergence of the couple as hero, which he usefully relates to generic developments in Hollywood film at about the same period (pp. 132-134). The central thesis of Rothman's analysis, however, and the decisive move

Spoto's argument - that the four Stewart films are to be taken as a totality - most persuasive and illuminating. In Rope (1948), Stewart "is the dubious Cadell, a man whose weak leg and slight limp manifest an inner moral weakness. In Rear Window (1954), Cadell's limp becomes Jeffries's broken leg and the period of recuperation reveals a pathetically vulnerable and morally suspect view of life and relationships. In The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), he portrays Ben McKenna, a domineering husband who knows too much for his own and his family's good. And in Vertigo (1958), he is Scottie Ferguson, forced to retire from detective work because of acrophobia that points to more serious spiritual problems." Donald Spoto, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, New York, Hopkinson and Blake, 1976. In the present context, I would want to use this idea to argue that the ironic, or high-modernist positioning of the Stewart figure of Rear Window is also dissolved by the evolution of Hitchcock's form over the four Stewart films.

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in the argument his book has slowly been building, has to do with the originality of Robert Donat's acting, or better still, with the originality of his face and person as the support and medium of the camera's new aesthetic possibilities. These last, however, we are now in a position to understand as constituting themselves against theater and theatrical acting, in some positive and "specific sense that we do not admit the possibility that [Donat] is putting on an act for the camera or for himself" (p. 119). Paradoxically, this failure to stage one's self with a view toward other people's perception is also the fundamental condition of the moviegoer's identificationwith Hannay/Donat, so that at this point our earlier problem returns with a vengeance: Even in its appropriation of Hannay's point of view the camera asserts a separation from him that is, paradoxically, a condition of his status as a figure of identification. We cannot understand the achievement of The Thirty-nineSteps if we assume that identification with a figure on the screen is merely an effect. Our bond with is no illusion caused by the workings of a Hannay/Donat mechanism. To acknowledge this bond, we must be prepared to address such questions as who or what the camera reveals Donat to be, who or what Hannay is, what Hannay's world is, and who or what we are, that we heed the call to imagine Donat in Hannay's place. What imagining oneself in another's place comes to and what a figure of identification is are questions that underlie The Thirty-nine Steps and all Hitchcock's work (p. 114). I have quoted this rather inconclusive passage, both to prepare a more decisive response to it, and to sharpen some of the differences between Rothman's critical operation in this book and those of a more semiotic or continental criticism, since I assume the unidentified polemic references to the working of a mechanism to be allusions to the suture debate in which Rothman participated, and which in turn revolves around the currently fashionable problem of the socalled death of the subject. As this last is generally formulated in a metaphysical way and as an essentially metaphysical problem (Is the ego coherent? Is consciousness something like a substance, or on the contrary something more like an effect?), it does not seem very productive to take sides on the matter, except to observe that the criticism and interpretation generated on either side of this divide will differ greatly from each other. The assumption of the stability and integrity of a conscious subject (in Rothman's book, the place of that supreme coherence will be called "Hitchcock"), will produce a form of interpretation in which the coherence of a given aesthetic artifact will ultimately be shown to emit a coherent philosophical message, while interpretation from the standpoint of the decentered subject will tend to register the work (or the former work, the text) in terms of what are symptomatic meanings of various kinds.

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Rothman's position, interestingly enough, takes him in a historical and sociological direction which he finally does not explore: The Thirty-nineSteps will, after all, be the last work in this study which rehearses the problem of identification around a figure who is not putatively guilty (later on: Uncle Charles or Norman Bates), but around an innocent figure, the protagonist of the film. Identification (or irony) can therefore not be secured by content markers of any kind (either Charles's actual guilt, or Sir John's theatrical hubris), but depends on something else: In the figure of Hannay/Donat, Hitchcock creates his first complete protagonist and figure of identification, the first of a long line of Hitchcock heroes. ... In this film, Hitchcock makes judgements of his human subjects and calls for agreement with these judgements. First and foremost, he calls upon us to accept his judgement that Hannay/Donat is a figure with whom we may identify. Those who accept this comprise Hitchcock's audience. . . . The Thirty-nineSteps insists on a continuity between its protagonist and the figure of the lodger. Yet Hannay/Donat also represents a decisive break with the lodger in the fundamental respect that, from the outset, Hitchcock wants us to recognize him as innocent, possessed of no dark secret. However, while we know everything we need to know about this figure to know that he is no mystery to us, we know next to nothing about him as a character:our faith that we know him and the camera's respect for his privacy are intertwined. . . . Within that unknownness that is inseparablefrom our "knowledge" of a star, Hitchcockdiscoversa disitalics 113, turbingmystery(p. mine). The filmed face, which emerges as a commodity along with the star system itself, is, as Edgar Morin and others have shown us, something like a materialist version of what the movies substitute for theatricality or for what Benjamin called aura. Much of Rothman's analysis could be rewritten or remobilized in the service of an interpretation of Hitchcock's work as an implicit commentary on the commodity form itself (and on film as the privileged aesthetic apparatus of a society for which "the image has become the final form of commodity reification" [Guy Debord]). Rothman does not, however, pursue this particular direction, and his alternative is an instructive one. For one thing, we now achieve something like a definitive formulation of the role and function of the villain in Hitchcock, in this case, the Professor, with his well-known missing finger: "Hannay is oblivious of the Professor's design, but the Professor is no less oblivious than Hannay of Hitchcock's, which mandates Hannay's miraculous escape and the Professor's final defeat" (p. 143). The Professor is thus clearly a reincarnation of SirJohn, with all of the latter's authorial and theatrical hubris, with this signal difference: Hitchcock has now been able to abandon the cumbersome mode of

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irony and to mark the Professor as an official villain, whose "real"crime is not the incomprehensible conspiracy of the film but rather the more overweening attempt to usurp the place of God himself (in the filmic situation, of Hitchcock). As the grand lines of Rothman's interpretation thus begin to emerge, other issues are clarified as well, most notably the nature, until now ill-defined, of the filmic alternative to theatricality, or in other words, the originality of screen acting as such, as opposed to the vice of the theatrical, with its perpetual self-consciousness and self-staging: But the real author of [the climactic scene, the murder of Mr. Memory by the Professor] can only be Hitchcock. Mr. Memory and the Professor act as they must, given Hitchcock's design. Hannay also plays the role Hitchcock calls upon him to play. Hannay is, as always, free; his act is not dictated by his nature. One last time, he finds himself within a situation he did not create. I have been calling Hannay's acting "improvisation" to register that he acts freely and yet is at every moment framed. What is unprecedented is Hannay's unselfconscious acceptance of this condition, the other face of Robert Donat's graceful acceptance of being filmed (p. 167). But at this point, and given the terms of this discussion, it becomes clear that we are on the point of leaving the problem of actor and character--and of identification as such-behind for a rather different one, that of the presiding intelligence of the film, of its demiurge and of our relationship to him, which Rothman, in the Hegelian tradition, characterizes as a matter of recognition. Rothman's discussion of Psychois both the climax of this stage of his argument, and its unexpected permutation, so that I will proceed to it at once without consideration of the fine chapter on Shadow of a Doubt, which in some ways merely recapitulates the themes already indicated, although it also makes a provocative case for this film as the quintessential Hitchcock film (not, as I've already suggested, the Hitchcock that happens to interest me the most). Psycho will, however, recast all this, not merely in the way in which Norman Bates becomes the ultimate bearer of that mystery of otherness whose stages were the Lodger, Fane, the Cary Grant of Suspicion, and the Uncle Charles of Shadow of a Doubt; but also, and even more significantly, on account of the virtual disappearance of the last of the positive protagonists, the last of the trusting love partners - not to speak of the detective-investigator of the Sir John type. All of which should then logically ensure the primacy of the question of the director, and the displacement of our interest away from characters and their more theatrical properties to the supreme mystery of the authorial consciousness itself. At this point, however, a dramatic reversal takes place, one which should

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give a certain aid and comfort to the defenders of the "death-of-the-subject" position. When the hitherto intelligible unities of the characters begin to be questioned, the "Hitchcock" power behind the camera also loses its anthropomorphic properties. The emergent theme of "filmic knowledge," as distinct from theatrical staging and as associated with the authority of the movie director himself, suddenly becomes radically impersonal.The informing power of Psychois no longer a conscious deity with whom one plays Nabokovian games, but rather something very different and far more material, namely the camera apparatus itself. This is indeed what the single most dramatic analysis in Rothman's book-the lengthy bravura piece on the shower scene (pp. 292-310)-undertakes to demonstrate: "Marion's shower is a love scene, with the shower head her imaginary partner, inhumanly calm and poised, and the shower head is also an eye. Marion's murder is a rape, and it is also a blinding" (p. 292). Yet the shower head is only the initial figure for the camera in this scene, in which a bewildering series of displacements insists over and over again upon the camera's violence. Thus, "Marion's open mouth is also an eye," in the moment of the attack (p. 300), as is, finally and most evidently, the drain down which her blood flows, and which echoes her own dead eye. Meanwhile the camera's autonomous movements throughout this scene, whose purposeful logic corresponds to no anthropomorphic point of view, testify to the primacy and independence of this peculiar apparatus, in which machinery and perception are more effectively and symbiotically linked than mind and body. If this is so, however, and even allowing for the depersonalization of the director, who has here become a mechanical apparatus and a mechanical power, a most peculiar conclusion must be drawn, which Rothman does unhesitatingly: the author of this murder is more than analogous, he is virtually at one with the author of the film itself. that verb might mean. What we Norman, then, is Hitchcock-whatever can note is the way in which the most horrific and immediate scene in motion picture history-which has at best been admired for its quasi-pornographic expertise in the manipulation of violence -acquires a meaning: We are not yet prepared to speculate, for example, on whether to regard this monstrous figure as Norman or his mother. But it has to be clear that this figure stands in for Hitchcock. In this theatrical gesture, the camera and the creature that unveils itself by drawing back the curtain are in complicity. Someone real presents to us the views that constitute Psycho, and at this moment that "someone" confronts us with his unfulfilled appetite and his wish to avenge himself on us (p. 299). At this point, however, everything falls into place and the various elements of Rothman's preceding analyses are suddenly and unexpectedly, retroactively,

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unified. In particular the Outsider around whom so many of these films turn - the lodger, Fane, Uncle Charles, Norman himself-proves to have been not merely the expression of a particular theme or obsession of aesthetic interest to Hitchcock, but more than that, the very inscription of Hitchcock himself (and his demiurgic function) within the film: "the lodger has assumed a position in the frame that declares his status as a mysterious incarnation of the author's agency and our viewing presence. Staring into the frame, possessing it with his gaze, he is the camera's double as well as its subject" (pp. 45-46). It is as though, in some peculiar dual inscription, two plots and two whole sets of characters, two distinct and fantasmatic narratives, here momentarily coincided: one set is the official fiction, the story within the film-with its victims, detectives, murderers, witnesses and the like; the other is a quite different dramatic or narrative relationship which involves a creator (Hitchcock), his AlfredHitchcock.Family Plot. 1976.

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surrogates and his rivals, and (presumably) his audience. Every so often (or even perhaps throughout?), these two narrative lines share a common occasion, and come to simultaneous expression within a given shot or scene. Presumably, then, we are also present somewhere in such a complex and auto-referential apparatus; and indeed, the designation of our own place is not long in coming: If this is a demonstration addressed to Marion, it is also a theatrical demonstration addressed to us. Just as we are about to unleash an attack, we are also its victim. The author of Psycho, a creature of flesh and blood, stands before us threatening vengeance. ... In the scene that ensues, we join with Hitchcock in subjecting Marion to a savage assault unprecedented in its violence, while Hitchcock also avenges himself on those who fail to acknowledge him. The author of Psycho declares his separateness from us, yet calls upon us to acknowledge that the agency presiding over the camera is within us as well (p. 301). Yet all this had been present in The Lodgeras well, whose lynch-mob scene (in which Hitchcock makes one of his brief signature-appearances) also, according to Rothman, inserts the public into the spectacle offered it: "The harrowing image of the lodger and the mob is a paradigm, if an enigmatic and paradoxical one, of the relationship between the lodger and the Avenger and the relationship between Hitchcock and us. The relationship between author and viewers, it declares, is at one level a struggle for control" (p. 53). Meanwhile, "if we have faith in Hitchcock, we may assume that our violent struggle with him will be transmuted into a kind of marriage. The Lodgerin fact establishes marriage as Hitchcock's other key metaphor for the relationship of author and viewers" (p. 53). (This is, incidentally, the explanation for the enigmatic remark about "murder and marriage" quoted above: the two are related, not in and of themselves, but because both are figures for the relationship of creator and moviegoer.) We have not yet, however, found our ultimate figural place within this filmic universe. Hitchcock aggresses us, this is some first intuition; that he does so with images seems more complicated to follow until we realize that the latter are sheer light and begin to recall the series of displacements in which, throughout Hitchcock's work, lights - but especially flashbulbs - are used virtually as guns, most notably at the climax of Rear Window but also in the photography scene in Shadow of a Doubt. Now we return to the flashing light at the climax of Psycho itself: Is it that this flashing only casts a spell in which what is lifeless appears to come alive, in which an illusion of magic is conjured? The following shot, the final one of the sequence, is a reprise of the grin-

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ning death's head -but with the frame flashing black and white and divorced from Lila's point of view. . . . In retrospect, our view of the swinging bulb is likewise disclosed as representing the gaze emanating from these empty eye sockets. "Mrs. Bates," like Marion, like Lila, like us, is a viewer, held spellbound as if by a film. Indeed, Mrs. Bates' views are the very views that hold us in thrall. The mummy's private film and the film that casts its spell over us cannot be separated. This withered corpse is one of Hitchcock's definitive representations of his films' viewers. We are this mother who commands death in the world of Psycho and who is possessed by death (p. 330). Meanwhile, it should be added that it is the very explicitness of the representation, the articulation by which the inner plot (the murder) is made to express the outer one (our visit to the movie theater), which accounts for the peculiar status of Psychoin Hitchcock's work, as something of a summa and a testament.

Now it is time to evaluate this elaborate and ingenious interpretive schema. To declare it true or false would be frivolous. What must be said of it first of all is that it is an allegoricalinterpretation, something noted explicitly by Rothman here and there in passing: "Psychois an allegory about the camera's natural appetite" (p. 255); "The Thirty-nineSteps is a fantasy or allegory about the condition of spectatorship" (p. 117). We have already noted some of the advantages of this allegorization of thriller films, which raises them from their seemingly immediate consumption in relief or suspense and promotes them to the more philosophical dignity of meanings. On the other hand, it cannot be claimed that the allegorical method has been officially rehabilitated, has regained its medieval dignity, even though in practice it seems everywhere in wider and wider use. We need to know, therefore, why allegorical interpretation should not simply be considered a facile or lazy way of applying meanings to a text; and also, in the present context, why, confronted with a host of different types of allegorical meanings or codes, Rothman should have felt himself authorized to select this particular one, which I have described as auto-reflexive (that is to say, the content of the film is an allegory of the latter's form, or to be more precise, the events within the film are an allegory of the latter's consumption- rather than of its production, which does not appear to interest Rothman much). The issue is therefore both objective and subjective: there is a historical question about film itself as a medium, and why it should be tempted by such involuted and secondary forms of self-designation which are most commonly associated with high modernism. The other question has to do with the allegorical method itself, and its possible symptomatic value as a

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replacement and substitute for some other impossible or undesirable practice of the interpretive process. The possibility of an allegorical reading of film is of course given at once by the dual function of the camera itself, a duality less obvious or at least less easily articulated in other media: Within the real world, the camera represents the author's act of directing its framings, choosing the views to be presented to us. The camera is the instrument of a real relationship between author and viewer. Following Griffith, movies are designed to arouse the viewer, to make the viewer emotional. The film's author subjects the viewer to his power. Within theworldoffilm, the camera has the power to penetrate its subjects' privacy, without their knowledge or authorization. Furthermore, it represents the author who creates and animates that world and presides over its "accidents," who wields a power of life and death over the camera's subjects (p. 102). This duality, this relative separation of functions, makes possible an allegorical reconnection, a punctual conjoining of the two levels or narratives. Yet, as Rothman goes on to observe, the camera's master "is also impotent. Insofar as his place is behind the camera, he represents only a haunting, ghostly presence within the world it frames. He has no body: no one can meet his gaze...." This second specification of the situation will then supply the "motivation" for the plot, give content to the designs the author has on us as viewers, and finally shape the drama of what Rothman will call the author's quest for recognition-something difficult to define and understand, except in terms of hero worship and the new star system offered by emergent auteurtheory. I think, however, that we must go further into the historical originality and structural peculiarity of the film-viewing process itself than is normally done (particularly in a period for which film viewing is not at all unnatural, but part of a very familiar and ordinary perceptual landscape). This would involve an estrangement of film viewing on the order of what MacLuhan and his school tried to do for the reading of printed books; and it is the great merit of Metz's ImaginarySignifier to have at least made a beginning in his description of this odd and specialized human activity: During the projection, the camera is absent, but it has a representative consisting of another apparatus, called precisely a "projector." An apparatus the spectator has behind him, at the backof his head, that is, precisely where phantasy locates the "focus"of all vision. All of us have experienced our own look, even outside the darkened theater, as a kind of searchlight turning on the axis of our own necks (like a pan) and shifting when we shift (a tracking shot now): as a cone of light . . . [our] identification with the movement of the camera be-

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ing that of a transcendental, not an empirical subject. [Yet] all vision consists of a double movement: projective (the "sweeping" searchlight) and introjective: consciousness as a sensitive recording surface (as a screen). I have the impression at once that, to use a common expression, I am "casting" my eyes on things, and that the latter, thus illuminated, come to be deposited within me. . . . The technology of photography carefully conforms to this (banal) phantasy accompanying perception. The camera is "trained"on the object like a fire-arm (= projection) and the object arrives to make an imprint, a trace, on the receptive surface of the film-strip (= introjection). . . . During the performance the spectator is the searchlight I have described, duplicating the projector, which itself duplicates the camera, and he is also the sensitive surface duplicating the screen, which itself duplicates the film-strip. . . . When I say that I "see"the film, I mean thereby a unique mixture of two contrary currents: the film is what I receive, and it is also what I release. . . . Releasing it, I am the projector, receiving it, I am the screen; in both these figures together, I am the camera, which points and yet which records.8 This extraordinary account repositions Rothman's dramatic myth of recognition (all-powerful yet impotent) within the viewer and within the machinery of perception itself, while at the same time usefully insisting by its figures on the historical nature of that machinery and, as it were, suggesting that the human perceptual machine is constructed on the basis of its own mechanical products at any given moment rather than the other way around. However eternally true, in other words, the dialectic between passivity and activity within perception itself may be (Metz characterizes it as the screen versus the searchlight, but it is also easily identifiable as Abrams's romantic mirror and lamp), one might just as easily argue for the historical articulation or actualization of these functions by a material determinant such as the whole apparatus of film. The emblematic new technology would then have the effect, not necessarily of a cause, but certainly of a factor capable of exasperating an already latent tension and forcing its reorganization or rearticulation into a full-blown contradiction. This is then the sense in which something new and peculiar is being brought to "human reality" by immobilization within the darkened movie theater, some heightened coexistence between the now radically differentiated functions of the passive and the active which, owing to its very novelty as an experience, tends to convert itself into a privileged subject for the new artistic medium. But one would also like to add a genealogical perspective in which the

8.

Metz, pp. 49-51.

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medium (along with its own history, its own technological development) is grasped less as a source of innovation in its own right, than as the material reinforcement of an on-going tendency in social life as a whole. This is the tendency I have called reificationelsewhere in the extremely broad sense of a gradual fragmentation and division of labor within the psyche, as the latter is retrained and reprogrammed by the reorganization of traditional labor processes and human activities by emergent capital. The sharp structural differentiation of active and passive within a single mental function--such as this new one of filmic perception--would then be seen as a historic intensification of the reification process, and one which could partially account for the privileged status of the new medium, for its gradual supersession of more traditional aesthetic languages. In our present context, however, that of the problems of interpretation, what should be noted about this historical perspective is the way in which, by means of the insertion of the mediatory code of reification and the division of labor, it becomes possible to transform the formalism of an autoreferential interpretation (the film's deepest subject as filmic perception proper) into a more complex historical and social one. Much the same is true of the other obvious direction in which the thematics of reification leads, namely the fragmentation of the bodily sensorium and the reification of sight itself, the new hierarchy of the senses which in very uneven ways begins to emerge from Descartes and Galileo on (the primacy of the geometrical) until it becomes the dominant vehicle for the will to power of mature capitalism itself. The specular as a mode of domination and organization both of the outside world and of other people is a subject that has been richly explored by Sartre, and following him, by Foucault; although the thematics of the visual is probably more familiar in its Freudian form (the primal scene, fantasy as a specular process), particularly in contemporary film criticism. Yet a certain historical (and historicist) enrichment might be achieved if the mediation of "reification" were inserted here as well, together with a recognition that the emergence of seeing as a social dominant was the necessary precondition for its strategic functions in psychoanalytic models of the unconscious. This historical coordination of the two explanatory codes of the public and the private, of Marxism and Freudianism, is no less urgent when we deal with the contemporary "culture of the image." The reintroduction of historical issues about the bodily sensorium and perception itself would seem usefully to reground more abstract discussions about the construction of the subject. The perspective I have been outlining is not one of an alternate interpretation to that of the type given us by Rothman, but rather a framework of evaluation in which such findings can themselves be more richly interpreted (and we have already seen this particular film critic approach such a perspective in his assimilation of the mysteries of the close-up to the phenomenon of the star system). Now, however, I want to reverse the problem and make a final, neces-

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sarily dogmatic, reflection on the interpretive operation we have examined in this interesting book. The observation will be dogmatic because it depends on a presupposition that cannot be defended in advance or a priori, namely that there exists for any given cultural artifact the possibility of something like a "concrete" analysis, an interpretation which retrieves the historical situation both of the text itself and of its interpreter, in such a way that it is finally capable of grounding or of justifying itself. Such a squaring of the interpretive or hermeneutic circle (sometimes called dialectical criticism) will however necessarily differ on the occasion of every text. It is therefore impossible to provide a model of the operation. This is not, in other words, a method. I want to use this presupposition to suggest something I already proposed in the concluding section of The Prison-Houseof Language,namely that where, for whatever historical or ideological reason, such "concrete" criticism was impossible, the resultant formalism would attempt to correct itself by an operation which I described as the projection of form onto content, or better still, the transformation of a formal structure or feature into a type of content in its own right. Moralizing about this type of idealism is inappropriate, since the very attempt betrays an unconscious need for content proper, an unconscious awareness that one's reading is a purely formalizing one, a sense of the virtual chemical deficiency, the felt lack or absence of the material ground. Few examples of this process are quite so striking as Hitchcock. The MurderousGaze, in which an initially inert and "meaningless" content-the elements of the murder plot proper-is allegorized into so many figures for the formal process of the film itself, which then - as the theme of the author, his supreme power, and his quest for recognition by the spectator-public-is triumphantly reimported into the filmic object as its deepest content and meaning.

The Anxiety of the Influencing Machine The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and StephenHeath, New York, St. Martin's Press, 1980.

JOAN

COPJEC

. .. fast-footed and lithe of wing, she is a terrifying enormous monster with as many feathers as she has sleepless eyes beneath each feather (amazingly), as many sounding tongues and mouths, and raises up as many ears. Between the earth and skies she flies by night screeching across the darkness, and she never closes her eyes in gentle sleep. By day she sits as sentinel on some steep roof or on high towers, frightening vast cities; for she holds fast to falsehood and distortion as often as to messages of truth. Now she was glad. She filled the ears of all with many tales. She sang of what was done and what was fiction. .. .1 "She" is Fama. The personification of rumor or report, of gossip, swiftest of all evils. Rumor, "whose life is speed, whose going gives her force"-a "cursory contraption."2 She appears in Book IV of Virgil's Aeneid, and although her context is a "miracled up" world of endless personifications in which the simple dawning of day must pass through the rosy fingers of Aurora, she, this description of her, never became naturalized in my reading of the Aeneid. She has always remained for me a riddling point in the text, curious and compelling. Foremost among her curiosities is her sex. How is it that Fama is a woman? How is it that gossip (even in its etymology gossip, which means godmother, is

1. 2.

The Aeneid of Virgil, trans. Allen Mandelbaum, New York, Bantam Books, 1971. I have borrowed the last two phrases in quotation from President Schreber.

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sexed), is provided with a gender which is feminine? What mechanism makes femininity the insistent truth of Rumor's confounding of falsehood and truth? Virgil was a very careful, very slow writer. He spent eleven years writing the Aeneid, which remained uncompleted at his death. Eleven years, and perhaps several days of it on this one description of Rumor's instantaneous narration, to narrate the events of Aeneas's journey from Troy to the Lavinian shores. On one level it is clear that Rumor is a device, the apparatus that Virgil uses for the specific purpose of turning the narrative, of getting from one point to the next, of bringing to the vengeful King Iarbas the knowledge of Dido's and Aeneas's tryst. But it is evident that however hostile Virgil is in his description of Rumor, the tale that he himself "sings"is intimately, integrally related to the one she "sings." The fact that he fails to provide a description of her head ("her head is hidden in the clouds") contributes to the suggestion that he is averting the recognition of himself in her, for from analytic observation we know that the dreamer dreams of himself when he dreams of a person whose head he cannot see.3 What, then, is the relationship of gossip to narrative? Paranoid. Fama (from the Latinfari, to speak) is the paranoid projection, the delusional form of the narrative itself, a defense against the madness with which speech threatens the speaker. This observation has to do not simply with the fact that the image of Fama, that is, of eyes, tongues, mouths, ears, and feathers, is the resolution into its elements of the complex of operations that we call narrative. As opposed to hysteria, which condenses, paranoia decomposes.4 It produces, according to Lacan, "imagos of the fragmented body." 5 The observation has more to do with the fact that Fama appears at a point where the narration has reason to doubt its own omniscience, its own position as source of knowledge. There has been a complete withdrawal by the couple, Dido and Aeneas, of libido from the outside world onto each other, a regression to narcissism. The "fault"which occurs as a result is not only moral, belonging to Dido, but is also cognitive, or better glottic, belonging to the narrative. It should be unable to continue, but instead it begins again with a jolt, with what Schreber would have called a "miracle of howling." A cry is torn from the throat of the narrative which reattaches it to the events of the world. I have chosen to recall this passage from the Aeneidbecause its remarkable image of gossip is a hypostasized image of speech, an intrusion which is simultaneously the very substance of the narrative, its own link with itself. She is also a kind of makeshift resolution of an epistemological problem for the nar3. Victor Tausk, "On the Origin of the 'Influencing Machine' in Schizophrenia," Psychoanalytic Quarterly,vol. 2 (1933), 532. 4. Sigmund Freud, "Psychoanalytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)," in Three Case Histories, New York, Collier, 1963, p. 149. 5. Jacques Lacan, "Aggressivity in psychoanalysis," Ecrits, New York, Norton, 1977, p. 11.

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rative, which, in closing over, opens up for us the question of the relation of speaker to speech, which is eventually the question of the relation of psychic to social organization. Since it is this relation with which the theory of the cinematic apparatus, through Lacanian psychoanalysis, is centrally concerned, she will serve throughout this essay as a reference that locates many of the strands of the discussion. A consideration of The CinematicApparatus,which is devoted to this theory, should, perhaps, begin by addressing the book directly in dialogue. This is the procedure sanctioned by long philosophical tradition and its belief in the ultimate powers of reason. But all too often, because of the elaborate defenses and sidestepping reason allows to the ego, this method proves a failure. It is in order to break through these defenses that the analytic maieutic, as Lacan says, must adopt a different strategy. Must instead unleash the aggressive tendencies renounced by philosophical reason by "inducing in the subject a controlled paranoia."6 I will therefore begin not in the ordinary straightforward manner, but with a slight digression, a slight turning away from reason into the paranoid regions of gossip. Those of you who take for granted the connection between women and gossip will not be surprised (will think it is perfume and a dress that make me so digress) by this strategy; those of you who do not will look to my argument. The CinematicApparatus is a collection of essays which consists of papers selected from among those read at, and those in response to, a conference whose full title was "The Cinematic Apparatus: Technology as Historical and Ideological Form." The conference was the subject of much controversy. Vociferous opposition-which precipitated a boycott of the conferencepreceded and followed its occurrence. Although the charges of this opposition were manifestly leveled at the organizationof the conference, it is clear that it was its subject(defined by the opposition as Lacanian psychoanalysis) that was the primary object of hostility. For finally the accusation was that the conference's manifest organization was designed to hide its latent contentLacanian psychoanalysis. The means of obfuscation, or so the argument implies, was language. The whole attack, then, becomes organized around the charge of elitism and the whole defense becomes an attempt to open the dark corners of language to the clear light of day, to restore an "elitist" discourse to its ties with "common" language. Symptomatic of the fear of elitism (the "heightened feeling of exclusion") and the vain nostalgia for the common is the anxiety that surrounds the use of the word sutureand the consequent attempts to dispel its influence by returning it to its common use in medical-surgical discourse.7 6.

Ibid., p. 15.

7. Here I am referring specifically to the strategy employed in "Report on a Conference Not Attended: The Scalpel Beneath the Suture,"Jump Cut, vol. 17, pp. 37-38.

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If this analysis is becoming somewhat cumbersome and roundabout, it is, I would suggest, because it is carrying around and thus being diverted by a dichotomy that misses the point. To examine the resistance to psychoanalytic discourse in terms of the opposition between elitist and common language is to miss recognizing that "it may well be that . . . the polemical opposition, the systematic non-understanding and misrepresentation, the unsubstantial but eternally recurrent objections are the displaced symptoms of a resistance inherent in the theoretical enterprise itself."8 The essay by Paul de Man from which this quotation is taken is structured around the refrain "the resistance to theory is a resistance to." The phrase is completed in several ways throughout the text so that the resistance to theory is the resistance to "language itself," to "the rhetorical dimension of language," and to "reading." These substitutions are made possible through de Man's argument which distinguishes between the if one grammatical/logical and the rhetorical aspects of language-although follows the argument it is clear that what is at stake is not an aspect, but a concept of language. To extend the terms of de Man's text, it can be said that the grammatical/logical concept of language presupposes a point outside language from which it can be manipulated and where it precipitates meaning. The grammatical and logical aspects lend themselves to an instrumentalist concept of language, make it a matter of a coding and decoding of messages. The rhetorical suspends the assurances of the instrumentalist concept by making reading a process that takes place within language itself and not comfortably outside it. The relevant opposition for our discussion is this one between the instrumentalist and the rhetorical (or structural) concept of language. It is the definition of this rhetorical concept, the way it is related to the concept of suture, and the anxiety it induces that is the concern of this essay. Unfortunately, The CinematicApparatuscannot serve completely as its own adequate introduction. Heath's introductory essay, "Technology as Historical and Cultural Form," serves very well in the delineation of the concept of the apparatus. It explains how the concept breaks from notions of technological determination, how within the theory of cinema itself (particularly in the work of Metz) the technological was redefined and brought to the fore. But as Heath discusses the work of Barry Salt as another example (ultimately) of a base/superstructure model of the history of film technology, we are reminded of another of Heath's essays, "On Suture." This essay also defines Salt's position within current film theoretical debates, but this time in terms of his relation to the concept of suture, his blindness to its multiple functioning and its farreaching importance. The connection between these two essays is not in the chance occurrence of Salt's name in both, but in the fact that the concept of suture is crucial to the concept of the apparatus, as, obversely, Salt's refusal of 8.

Paul de Man, "The Resistance to Theory," Yale French Studies, no. 63 (1982), 13.

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the one is to his refusal of the other. The base/superstructure model makes the superstructure the mirror reflection of the base, its adequate, identical image. The base subsumes and names all the superstructural phenomena that are its products. It contains them so that the two, base and superstructure, together form a closed system. This model turns on the assumption that one presence directly effects another; the base, for example, directly effects the superstructure. The immediacy of the link makes the relationship indexical (as well as iconic). To say that there is an identity between two terms, two presences, is to say that nothing (no truth) has essentially been lost in the transfer from one to the other. The concept of suture interrupts the relationship between these terms. All presences are seen as the representation of the absence, or pure diacriticality to which they are continuously referred back and which they must continuously annul. Although Jacques-Alain Miller elaborates the concept of suture for Lacanian psychoanalysis through Frege's theory of numbers, he disfigures Frege's theory by adding to it what it had explicitly excluded-the subject. Thus Miller breaks with the tradition of logicians within which Frege worked who set themselves the task of explaining how it is possible for one thing to stand for another, how a sign could represent something to someone. Miller (and Lacan) oppose this tradition with the famous formulation "a signifier represents a subject to another signifier." Against the logical tradition that conceives of representation as a process of substitution which preserves itself against loss, Lacanians see representation as an effect of a displacement, a deviation which also entails an irretrievable loss. There is no question of something standing for something else since the "something else" has no content, no existence as such before representation. The question becomes what conditions meaning, how do purely differential markings assume an identity, rather than how does one thing stand for another. The theory of the apparatus takes suture into account by analyzing the it way takes place; it does not (and must not) itself suture. The analyst (and by this we also mean the film analyst) is "by definition, the person who 'does not suture!"'9 Eventually we will want it to be clear how not suturing is equivalent to inducing paranoia when it is a question of an analyst's function. "Suture names the relation of the subject to the chain of its discourse."10 It is an account of the subject's, of meaning's coming into being through two different operations. The one is called "alienation" and refers to the fact that the subject is divided from (or lacking in) its own cause (that is, language), since

9. Stephen Heath, quoting Serge Leclaire, in "On Suture," Screen,vol. 18, no. 4 (Winter 1977-78), 55. 10. Jacques-Alain Miller, "Suture(elements of the logic of the signifier),"Screen,vol. 18, no. 4 (Winter 1977-78), pp. 24-34.

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that cause is located not within the subject but within the Other. Lacan terms this the aphanisis of the subject, its disappearance. It is difficult to describe the other operation, separation, since it seems inextricably bound up, in Lacan's exposition of it, in a complex of puns. The clearest thing one can say about it is that it is paronomastic. The subject procures itself as a pun on its own absence. Se parare, to separate, becomes se parer, to deck oneself out, defend oneself, to parry, and finally (through Latin, that is, through parturition) s'engendrer,to engender. "A lack engendered from the previous time" (that is, the disappearance that language imposes on the subject) "serves to reply to" (is offered by the subject as the object of) "the lack raised by the following time" (the desire, or lack which the subject perceives in the language of another). In short, one lack (desire, the lack in the sexual drive) is superimposed on another (the lack in the chain of signifiers that constitute language). The subject appears at a point which occults its own disappearance. Lacan also presents this two-fold process of the constitution of the subject as the production of a metaphor.He describes the process algebraically in the "formula of the metaphoror of signifying substitution."'' By describing it, instead, as the production of a pun, I wish, by recalling that the pun has been termed "la fiente de l'esprit qui vole," 12 to block any misunderstanding which might confuse Lacan's definition of metaphor with the classical definition from which it differs profoundly. The meaning which accrues in the Lacanian metaphor is purloined, not borrowed, transferred, earned, or in any sense owned by it, the subject. Nor is it owned by some other. When Lacan says that there is no Other of the Other, he means that there is no transcendent place, no elsewhere where meaning resides. Meaning is not something which is taken from someplace else, but is the effect of a feint, a parrying, or putting off of the recognition that the subject is itself only a signifier, only an effect of language. The relata of the metaphor are not embraced by a larger field of meaning as in classical theory, rather a radical and founding rupture divorces them and disrupts any notion of analogy. Yet the feints do not end here. In another essay Lacan employs a pun which is strikingly similar to the ones he uses in the exposition of separation. Separation, as we have said, is the operation in which the subject, turning away from its own mortality with respect to language, is constituted as a desiring, that is, a sexual being. In "The Partial Drive and Its Circuits," Lacan says that this sexuality is constituted, that is, separation is accomplished by the bringing into play of what, in the body, deserves to be designated

11. Lacan, "On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis," Ecrits, New York, Norton, 1977, p. 200. 12. Jeffrey Mehlman, quoting Victor Hugo, in Revolutionand Repetition, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1978, p. 65.

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by the term apparatus - if you understand by this that with which the body, with regard to sexuality, may fit itself up (s'appareiller)as opposed to that with which bodies may be paired off (s'apparier).13 With this coy little pun a very thorny theoretical problem is passed over. This is the problem posed by the theory of sexual difference which says that the process of decking oneself out, fitting oneself up, is not sexually undifferentiated, and does not exclude but defines (sexual difference) and is defined by (the phallus) "that with which bodies may be paired off." So, although the constitution of the subject has been and can be described as a general, sexually undifferentiated process, this is only so on the condition that the male subject be allowed to stand as the norm. Let us now go back and replace all the sexual signifiers that were left out in the previous discussion. Alienation, for example, is assimilable to castration; the anxiety it produces can be allayed by locating oneself as the point of desire, by representing oneself as, and thus annulling, the lack which would annul. But desire, we are told, is masculine, since the penis, the means of representing lack, is only available to the boy. And the formula of the metaphor:

S. s

s)

x

s

in which the capital Ss are signifiers, x the unknown signification, and the small s the signified which is the result of the metaphoric process, that is, the elision of S (represented here by the bar which passes through it)-- is fitted out to become the paternal metaphor: 14 Name-of-the-Father Desire of the Mother Name-of-the-Father ( 0 ) Desire of the Mother Signified to the subject Phallus Now it seems to me that something has changed, from the first to the second formula. The first says that one signifier appears to take the place of another when it elides the recognition of the fact that this other is merely a signifier. As a result there is a passage from the unknown x to the known s, or meaning (not a passage from a known to another known, an annexing through analogy of the unknown by the already known). But the signified which results is never exactly coincident with or adequate to the signifier. The signifier can never take place "over" the signified because the 1, the mark of the difference (that is, also that which is left over when the signified is subtracted from the signifiers), prevents it by occupying that place. What makes the second for-

13. Lacan, "The Partial Drive and Its Circuit," The Four FundamentalConceptsof Psycho-Analysis, London, Hogarth Press, 1977, p. 177. 14. Lacan, "On the possible treatment," p. 200.

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mula more problematic is its substitution of semantic units for signifiers on the left-hand side of the equation. Lacan may seem to protect himself from criticism by leaving the "signified to the subject" unspecified and unknown, by making the Name-of-the-Father respond not to any real absence of the father, but to the inadequacy of the signifier. And yet there is no denying that Lacan makes this equation work through the semanticdifference between mother and father. He restores semantic difference to the left side not as an effect, but as a cause, by making the elision of the Desire of the Mother not an operation performed on a signifier, but a perception of that signifier's meaning, that it is elided, is wounded. In this way the chiasmatypy(the process by which the purely diacritical relationship between two terms in an opposition is crossed out and the two terms given meaning retroactively through their opposition to two other terms in another opposition) which is required by a structural definition of signification is reduced to analogy(in which the difference is significant at the beginning and merely extended to the next opposition). The decussation that takes place among the four terms (again, in a structural definition) is brought to bear here only on one, the mother who is decussed at first sight. Meaning, then, comes to exist outside and prior to metaphor rather than within the operation of metaphor itself. This is opposed to Lacan's own theory of the relation of language to the unconscious: the unconscious is structured like a language. How are we to understand this structure as like a language? In no easy way, since if we begin, like Lacan, with a structural definition of language, we strip "like," analogy, of its power to ground meaning. It is more accurate to say that language is the preconditionof the unconscious, in the sense that language allows the unconscious to come into being as well as that it alone allows us access to (an understanding of) the workings of the unconscious. There is not first language which signifies to the subject and then the unconscious formed as a resemblance to it, rather the formation of the unconscious is simultaneous with the accession to language, the process in which language becomes significant. The unconscious is formed through the repression (the elision) not of some idea, some signified, but of the signifier as signifier, the fact of its existence in the Other. Thus, repression "neither repels, nor flees, nor excludes an exterior force: it contains an interior representation."15 The description of the psychic apparatus which follows from this (not only in Derrida, but in Freud and Lacan as well) is not of a mechanism that transports contents back and forth between consciousness and the unconscious, but of two systems, one of memory, a system of pure signifiers, and the other of conscious perceptions, one the analogue of the other. The unconscious is like a signifieds-neither

15. Jacques Derrida, "Freud and the Scene of Writing," Writingand Difference,trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1978, p. 196.

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language not through any direct resemblance, but through the fact that it, like language, signifies through a system of pure differences, a system in which an originating resemblance is lacking. Both are involved with the production of meaning and not the simple exchange of already constituted meanings. One will find in The CinematicApparatus,in the contributions of de Lauretis and Rose, critiques of the notions of analogy and exchange and of the way they reduce the theory of the apparatus. Beginning with the notion that it is the already meaningful male apparatus, the penis, with which cinema fits itself up, takes shape, that is, beginning with the notion that the form of the penis is somehow immediately meaningful, the cinematic apparatus has nothing left to do but to endlessly reproduce and exchange, like a printing press, this same shape. The phallus is the privileged signifier because it is the most tangible element in the real of sexual copulation, and also the most symbolic in the literal (typographical) sense, since it is equivalent there to the (logical) copula. It might be said that, by virtue of its turgidity, it is the image of the vital flow as it is transmitted in generation.16 Again, in all fairness to Lacan, it must be admitted that his theory is one of the main loci of the development of a nonreferential concept of representation and that he has often denied that the phallus is either the penis or any other organ or object. The phallus is always theorized in relation to desire, to the logic by which the absolute condition of demand annuls all satisfaction which answers to need and produces desire as a residue. In this connection it is less the ideal form of the penis than its alternating tumescence and detumescence (or presence and absence) that insures it as the referent of the phallus. That is, the penis is privileged because it is taken to represent the phallus as grammatical or logical function. However circuitous this route, it is founded still on a notion of immediate resemblance and therefore does not avoid the problem of analogocentrism which turns this theory (and that of the cinematic apparatus) away from the concept of suture, which is its radical premise, and causes it to fall prey to paranoia. Lacan's formula of the paternal metaphor (which, as we have said, contravenes the classical notion of language only to slide, through analogy, back into it) is contained in the essay, "On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis." This essay is concerned with paranoid delusions, particularly Schreber's, and with Freud's analysis of them, particularly in his essay, "On the Mechanism of Paranoia." In his essay Lacan pays homage not only to Freud, but also to Schreber by recognizing in Freud's theory and in Schreber's delusions forerunners of his own. Yet even in the respect he pays 16.

Lacan, "The signification of the phallus," Ecrits, p. 287.

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Schreber, he is following Freud, who recognized in the "rays of God" his own theory of the libido: It remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory than I should like to admit, or whether there is more truth in Schreber's delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe. 17 We will leave aside this question of the relation of paranoia to theory and look instead to paranoia's relation to language. Lacan tells us that it was an early study of paranoia that led him to the threshold of psychoanalysis and we know from his theory that this means that he was led to the recognition of the primacy of the signifier. Anyone who suspects that Lacan, in rereading Freud in terms of linguistic theory, is distorting him would do well to read Freud on paranoia. One finds there a linguistic analysis that defines all the principal forms of paranoia as the representations of the different ways that the single proposition "I (a man) love him (a man)" can be contradicted. After Freud we should not be surprised by Lacan's focusing on Schreber's dictum: "Do not forget that the nature of the rays is that they speak," nor his analysis of Schreber's delusions in these terms: "What is involved here, in fact, is an effect of the signifier in so far as its degree of certainty . . assumes a weight proportional to the enigmatic void that first presents itself in the place of the signification itself."18 But what is most interesting is the similarity between the theory of paranoia and Lacan's theory of the constitution (through alienation and separation) of the subject. Basically psychoanalysis defines paranoia as a defense against homosexuality. There are two primary pathogenic factors involved. First there is a total detachment of libido from the outside world. Then the detached libido reattaches itself to and aggrandizes the ego, thereby forcing a regression to narcissism. (The Schreber case is what, in 1911, forced Freud's discovery of narcissism, which was not to be developed as a concept until 1919.) As a result the subject experiences its own withdrawal of libidinal cathexis from, as the catastrophic end of, the external world.19 Until this point, Freud tells us, the illness proceeds silently, internally. What brings it to the attention of others is the attempt at recovery. The paranoiac tries to recapture a relation to the external world by building a world up again. The systematized delusions, then, are not the pathological product, but "miracled up, cursory contraptions" which 17. Freud, p. 182. 18. Lacan, "On the possible treatment," p. 185. 19. At this point in his discussion, Freud includes a footnote in which he compares the paranoiac experience of "the end of the world" to that of lovers in their moment of ecstasy: "[I]n this case it is not the ego but the single love-object which absorbs all the cathexes directed upon the external world." He cites Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, but he might just as well have included Virgil's Dido and Aeneas.

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reconstruct a world and reattach the libido. In the process, from illness to attempted recovery, the original proposition has been contradicted and a loving relation to the external world is reversed into its opposite, becomes hostile. Freud did not solve in the theory of paranoia all the problems that presented themselves there. He could never satisfactorily explain, for example, the mechanismof projection. This will not concern us here. But we must pay at least passing attention to one problem that the theory of paranoia raised for Freudian psychoanalysis. The discovery of a libidinal cathexis of the ego threatened to destroy the opposition between sexual and self-preservation, or ego instincts upon which (at this time) depended the theory of psychical conflict. In this Freud was in opposition to Jung and his theory of instinctual monism. Although Freud would revise several times his description of instinctual dualism (and even abandon it for a short period), his psychical model is resolutely conflictual. This is indeed one of the features that makes the theory attractive to a progressive politics. Even though Freud says here that the struggle between life and death instincts is only a hypothesis "which we have taken up and are ready to drop again," we witness his concern that the distinction be kept. Lacan keeps it and nowhere more visibly than in "The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I," which again takes up the question of the relation of the egoistic cathexis to the rapport with the external world. Lacan here analyzes the way in which the formation of the subject's own ego from an image at a distance, an image of another, makes identification an alienation of the subject from itself, structures all human knowledge as paranoid. This aspect of Lacan's work, his making of the ego agonistic in its very formation, has been dealt with extensively and I will skip over it for the present.20 I am also more interested in moving the discussion away from the the problem of the relation of knowledge to vision--to the Imaginary-and and the problem of knowledge's relation to language. As Lacan's Symbolicwork implies, the relation of the subject to language (its alienation-separation, suturing in language), which is, in fact, its primary relation to knowledge (visual knowledge is secondary, dependent on language as all structural linguistics shows) is paranoid. But I want to speak of this in particular terms, in terms of the concept of the cinematic apparatus and so I will turn from Lacan to Victor Tausk and one of the most famous essays in psychoanalytic literature on paranoid delusions: "On the Origin of the Influencing Machine (Beeinflussungapparatus)in Schizophrenia."21 20. See particularly Jacqueline Rose's interesting article, "Paranoia and the Film System," Screen, vol. 17, no. 4 (Winter 1976-77), 85-104. 21. This paper was read before and discussed by the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society inJanuary 1918, published in German in 1919, and republished in English translation in 1933 in the PsychoanalyticQuarterly.In the same volume is included an essay by Hans Sachs, "The Delay of the

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First of all, Tausk is at pains in all points of the paper to align himself with Freud's theories.22 In this he is successful, for the clinical picture he presents is consistent with that of Freud outlined above. Tausk, then, elaborates on and extends Freud through the analysis of the typical delusion of "paranoia somatica": the influencing machine. This delusional formation, which seems totally to control the patient, is formed as an attempt at a recovery of object cathexes in order to forestall the anxiety that results from the feelings of alienation that plague the patient. This is Tausk's description of the influencing machine: a machine of mystical nature. The patients are able to give only vague hints of its construction. It consists of boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries. . . . Patients endeavor to discover the construction of the apparatus by means of their technical knowledge. . . . All the forces known to technology are utilized to explain . . . the marvelous powers of this machine by which the patients feel themselves persecuted. The main effects of the influencing machine are . . : It makes the patients see pictures. When this is the case, the machine is generally a magic lantern or cinematograph. . . .It produces, as well as removes, thoughts and feelings by means of waves or rays. ... In such cases, the machine is often called a "suggestion apparatus."23 The influencing machine is, however, only one stage in a series of progressive distortions that the delusion undergoes. (Paranoia, remember, decomposes.) From his observations of his patient Natalija A.,24 Tausk hypothesizes that the delusion begins as a projection of the patient's own body. But through

Machine Age," which attempts to use Tausk's theory of the "influencing machine" of paranoid delusions to explain "why the late classical period did not invent or to any great extent use machines." It is interesting to note that the theory of the cinematic apparatus is also bound up, in the early work (see, for example, Jean-Luc Comolli's "Technique and Ideology" in Cahiers du cinema) with explanations of the delay of the machine. I regret that the necessary comparison between Sachs's and Comolli's arguments, along with Derrida's, on the relation between delay and repression ("Freud and the Machine of Writing," again about the apparatus) will have to remain beyond the scope of this paper. I mention the civility that characterized the relationship between Tausk and Freud to 22. counter the biographical literature that makes of it a subject of the worst sort of gossip. Even inveterate gossips will find the two books devoted to this relationship, BrotherAnimal. The story of Freud and Tausk and Talent and Genius: The Fictitious Case of Tausk contra Freud, obnoxious in the extreme. 23. Tausk, p. 157. We do not learn very much about Natalija except that she is a philosophy student who is 24. deaf, and thus forced to communicate by writing. Freud has, in several essays, made a comparison between the systems of philosophers and the delusions of paranoiacs. For my argument it is Natalija's deafness that is particularly noteworthy, for it means that through her dependence on writing she is exposed to the alterity of language which speech to some extent disguises.

55

TheAnxietyof theInfluencingMachine

a replacement of parts, it gradually loses all its human attributes and finally becomes the typical, unintelligible, influencing machine. Immediately after offering this hypothesis, he suggests a second, seemingly contradictory one: the influencing machine is a projection of the patient's genitalia. This is not supported directly from his observation of Natalija's case history, but indirectly through Freud's work on machine dreams. According to Freud, complicated machines (the influencing machines always are) represent the dreamer's genitalia. The machine becomes complicated because the dreamer progressively adds parts to an originally simpler machine in an attempt to strengthen the inhibition of a repudiated wish for libidinal discharge. The machine's complexity increases intellectual interest and thus weakens libidinal interest. Tausk then attempts to resolve these two hypotheses. Resolution is achieved through an appeal to narcissism, the stage to which the paranoiac regresses. In this stage, since the ego (which coheres in the form of the body image) is cathected by the liberated libido, the entire bodybecomes a continuous libidinal zone, a genital. We are thus assured that Tausk's theory is trustworthy. (Freud: "I shall not consider any theory of paranoia trustworthy unless it also covers the hypochondriacal symptoms by which that disorder is almost invariably The of attention onto the ego as organ by means of direction accompanied."25) the influx of libido is the mechanism of hypochondria. Finally the body is projected outward in an effort to escape the feeling of isolation which is the consequence of this attention. Projection is the mechanism chosen because it belongs to the primary functioning of the ego in the process of object finding: The projection of one's own body may, then, be traced back to the developmental stage in which one's own body is the goal of the object finding. This must be the time when the infant is discovering his body . . . as the outer world, and is still groping for his hands and

feet as though they were foreign objects. At this time, everything that "happens" to him emanates from his own body; his psyche is the object of stimuli arising in his own body but acting upon it as if produced by outer objects. These disjecta membra are later on pieced together and systematized into a unified whole under the supervision of a psychic

unity

....

This

process

takes

place

by means

of

identification with one's own body.26 There circulates in this passage, around the conjoining of paranoia and narcissistic identification, a number of terms found in Lacan's "mirror stage," although the precise nature of the conjunction is, of course, a bit different. In Lacan, the "as if produced by outer objects" is no longer incidental or conjec-

25. 26.

Freud, p. 157. Tausk, p. 542.

56

OCTOBER

tural but rather takes on a structural role in constituting the subject as a fictional object. The finding of this object, its own ego, sets the subject on its own track, as its own rival, and predisposes it to delusions of (self)reference. Identification through projection of its body, in short, produces in the subject a paranoia by splitting it from itself. Tausk's description emphasizes instead the systematization and unification of the subject. The projection of the body becomes not the cause of paranoia but a defense against it-a delusion of reference that attempts to suture a fault, to rebuild the world from which the paranoid has withdrawn. For both Lacan and Tausk the symptom of paranoia is the defaulting of the ego, its failure along the boundaries. The subject is invaded by thoughts. Tausk attempts to find a parallel between this symptom of the paranoiac and an infantile state of thinking in which the child believes the parents know even its most intimate thoughts. A footnote is inserted here indicating a contribution which Freud made to the discussion of Tausk's paper at this point. The contribution is, however, never properly embodied in the paper itself. Freud emphasized that the infant's conception that others knew its thoughts has its source in the process of learning to speak. Having obtained its language from others, the infant has also received thoughts from them: and the child's feeling that others know his thoughts as well as that others have 'made' him the language and, along with it, his thoughts, has, therefore, some basis in reality.27 The subject, then, this observation suggests, constructed in language, is predisposed by the reality of that construction to paranoia. My intention in citing and underlining this is to reestablish the link between paranoia and (1) language,which Lacan threatens to lose by analyzing it as a consequence of the mirror stage. We must not forget that any formulation of this phase takes place only by means of language, that the Imaginary becomes significant only from the position of the Symbolic; (2) sexualdifference,which is constituted as an effect of language, of the entry into the Symbolic. For although paranoia-a defense against homosexuality that projects the body as a genital- is obviously in some way a recognition of sexual difference, there is a tendency for the theoryof paranoia (which links it to the unsexed body in the mirror) to deny it. Witness, for example, the way Tausk dodges the issue. He observes that although it may be a male orfemale body that is projected by the paranoid (Freud in "A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psychoanalytic Theory of That Disease," records the projection by a female patient of her clitoris), the persons who operatethe influencing machine are exclusively male. Tausk recovers from this

27.

Ibid., p. 536.

TheAnxietyof theInfluencingMachine

57

startling observation by first suggesting that it may be faulty or incomprehensive and then by attempting to explain it: However, that heterosexual objects can appear as persecutors in contradiction to Freud's theory of the exclusively homosexual genesis of paranoia, may be explained by the fact that the influencing machine corresponds to a regressive stage in which the important distinction is not between the sexes but between narcissistic and object libido.28 The slip is obvious; no matter how you slice it, "always male" is not the same as "irrespective of sex"; and (3) the conceptof the cinematicapparatusas it relates to language and sexual difference. One wonders whether a particular hypochondriacal theory of the apparatus -which projects the image of a phallic machine reproducing only male spectators -might not be the delusionaldefenseagainst the alienationthat the elaborationof cinemaas a languageopenedin the theory.Just as one wonders what relation the theory of sexual difference has, in general, to the alienation of the subject in language. That is, according to the theory of suture, all subjects are subjects of alienation, experience castration. According to the theory of sexual difference, only women do-men are merely threatened by it. I do not want to deny that there are constructions of sexual difference, nor do I mean to say that those who perceive sexual prejudice against women are paranoid, but that the theory is which anthropomorphizes a social formation. It is this theory of the way difference is constructed that we must question. And yet this questioning-of the construction of subject positions, sexual difference -can only begin with the theory of the cinematic apparatus.I do not mean to contradict myself, but to point out that our one word in English, apparatus, corresponds in French to two, appareil (apparatus, machine, device, camera) and dispositif (also apparatus or device, but primarily arrangement). The English titles of two of Baudry's essays-"The Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus" and "The Apparatus"-disguise the fact that appareilis replaced in the second by dispositif. There is strategy in this. Appareil is usually used in a mechanical or anatomical sense, attached to an organ of reproduction. Dispositif can be used to signal an adherence to a philosophical tradition which includes, among others, Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault, which sets itself against the empiricist position that facts exist outside the science that discovers them. According to this theory-of the apparatus, or phenomeno-technics, or veridical discourses - truths are internal to the signifying practices that construct them. There are many implications of this theory, but for now all we are con-

28.

Ibid., p. 553.

58

OCTOBER

cerned with is how it opposes the appareil(or paranoid) theory of the apparatus. One of its main effects is the elimination of any support for a misreading of suture in terms of analogy, as a role model theory of socialization. It says that there are no fully constructed subjects or objects outside discourse which must thenbe integrated into a social structure. Nor is there any unified subject or object outside discourse that governs it. The subject is, instead, simultaneously constituted and dislocated by speech. This means that the forms that discourses take are not expressionsof a last instance, a sovereignty which maintains and reproduces itself through these discourses. To determine the conditions of existence of a particular discourse is not to reduce these conditions to a monolithic edifice nor to reduce their relation to the discourses that follow from them to one of analogy. What the theory of dispositif allows for feminists is a grounds for the critique of the concept of patriarchy. It allows us to question the anthropomorphic power it assumes, the functionalism it exhibits. Patriarchy can only be an effect of a particular arrangement of competing discourse, not an expressive totality which guarantees its own self-interests. From here we can begin to extricate the concept of castration from the same tendency to conceive of sexual identity as something that is learned from a role model. The category of the structural unconscious intervenes in any attempt to establish identity as an isomorphism between apprentice and master, as submission to a master image. If we are to take Lacan's critique of ego psychology seriously, we cannot accept castration as a means of enforcing adaptation to a social norm. The solution, however, seems not to be to discard castration altogether, for it is this concept which allows the analysis of the radical constitutionof difference. Nor can we allow the categories of sexual difference - of masculinity or femininity - to synthesize an ensemble of multiple effects into unified opposing fields. What must be analyzed is the way particular discourses inscribe sexual differences, different subject positions. We must examine woman as a category that is produced in various signifying practices not to be confused with some biological entity outside them. Mary Ann Doane, for example, has examined the way various theoretical practices describe femininity in terms of immediacy and simultaneity as opposed to masculinity which is described in terms of distance from the self.29 We have seen that Virgil has distanced himself from Fama through this same strategic polarity. The contemplative masculine position negates at the same time as it preserves the knowledge secured from the "swiftest" and hence "evil" feminine one. Other practices produce other polarities. What is important is that the range of these polarities be recognized and kept separate. As they are collapsed together they tend, in their collectivity, to imply a single, un-

29. Mary Ann Doane, "Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator," Screen, vol. 23, nos. 3-4 (Sept.-Oct. 1982), 79-87.

TheAnxietyof theInfluencingMachine

59

problematic reference to a body of women. It is only by becoming attentive to the multiformity of the constructions of sexual difference that we will avoid this error. This error, I am implying, threatens the theory of the cinematic apparatus. It threatens to jettison the radical potential of the concept of the dispositifin favor of the hypochondria of a unified male body image. In pointing to this central shifting between appareil and dispositif in the theory of the apparatus, I have merely duplicated the strategy that informs the organization of The CinematicApparatus,which frames the conference papers in theoretical questions of this sort. This frame should enable the reader to look on critically as the apparatus is defined in the various papers (to query, for example, the use of an unproblematized notion of ideology--as though it were unified and/or conscious) and to form some idea of the history of its development. The earliest formulations of the theory of the cinematic apparatus were fascinated with the conceptual leap that allowed Niepce to invent the photographic process. Cinema was tied at this point, and in the later consideration of the temporary disappearance of deep focus, to an analogy with the photographic image. At about the same time as the photographic process was invented, Charles Babbage, "father of the computer," invented the analytical engine, a kind of prototype of the paranoiac's influencing machine. A reading will make clear the empiricism that condiof Hugh Kenner's The Counterfeiters tioned these inventions which defined things in terms of their function or observed fitness for function and forbid knowledge to extend beyond the senses. Clearly it is a mistake for the theoryof the apparatus to become confused with the same empirical thinking that conditioned these inventions-to become embroiled in the massive and paranoid fears of fraud ("frightening vast cities" with threats of "falsehood and distortion") to which empirical concepts inevitably lead. It is a theory of dispositifthat promises to lead us beyond the impasse that accompanies the appeal to an ultimate reality.

Documenting

the Left

Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942, by William Alexander,Princeton,PrincetonUniversityPress, 1981.

STUART

LIEBMAN

Consider two images of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-second President of the United States. Both are taken from films made during the 1930s by filmmakers who sought to express and shape the aspirations of American workers threatened by the massive failure of capitalism at home and the rise of fascism abroad. The first appears in a sequence from a compilation documentary entitled America Today made in 1934 by Leo Seltzer, one of the most active members of the Workers' Film and Photo League. The section begins with a shot of Italian troops parading under the admiring gaze of Il Duce. There follows a shot of Hitler giving the Fascist salute. Next, one of a U.S. battleship on maneuvers and then one of Roosevelt signing a bill. The cannons on the ship fire; the guns are raised; they fire again. FDR looks up and smiles. The second comes from Native Land, a feature-length documentary with dramatized episodes, released by the Frontier Films collective in 1942 (although most of the film was shot between 1938 and 1939). The longest of these episodes tells the story of corrupt workers who spy for an antiunion businessmen's organization. One of the spies is deliberately exposed as part of a plan to ingratiate the other with the union leaders. The unmasked traitor is forced to walk through the angry crowd of workers gathered in the union hall. An idealized portrait of Roosevelt, reverently hung on the wall, surveys the action benignly. Separated by only a few years, these contrasting images of governmental authority symbolize the two dramatically different political programs of the American radical left during the depression. The first figures FDR as a warmonger, different in degree but not in kind from the openly aggressive European Fascist leaders. It effectively summarizes the outlook of the American Communist party while it embraced the doctrines of Third Period Comintern policy. From 1928 until 1935, its official positions were formulated according to the expectation of imminent repression by bourgeois "social Fascist" governments and the fear of military action against the Soviet Union. In light of these threats, the party insisted upon working-class consciousness and preparedness for inevitable, violent class struggle.

,

-

;1 ~i I ~~i Iix~?~i~i 1;~1M jl;!

::

FrontierFilms Collective.Native Land. 1942.

62

OCTOBER

Leo Seltzer. America Today. 1934. (Photos. Leo Seltzer Collection.)

?9

lfd?7ayIosuzuauznoQ

64

OCTOBER

The presence, in the second film, of a benevolent portrait of Roosevelt in a union hall is a sign of how much the left's political rhetoric and strategy had changed after mid-decade. It quietly affirms the government's support of the workers' right to organize and it implies that the working class could cooperate with the bourgeoisie in order to defend the other democratic rights and freedoms. An expression of the possibility of peaceful social and economic reform and of a united democratic citizenry, the portrait is an icon of the Popular Front era.1 How and why a number of left-wing filmmakers helped to shape these strikingly divergent visions of working-class prospects and policies is the subject of William Alexander's fine new book. Carefully and imaginatively researched, Film on the Left contributes significantly to our understanding of leftist cultural aspirations and achievements in the United States during the 1930s. In recent years, many books have examined leftist activities in Hollywood during this period and the scandalous persecutions of radicals that followed in the '40s and '50s.2 Several studies have also been devoted to Pare Lorentz and the other filmmakers who worked in the New Deal's film service.3 Film on the Left is, however, the first book to offer a detailed assessment of the films made by small groups of American independent radical filmmakers.4 The scope of Alexander's sympathetic and vivid account is broad. Although he focuses on the productions of the Workers' Film and Photo League, Frontier Films, and Nykino, he includes in his analysis films as different in political outlook as Van Dyke's Valley Town, Strand's The Wave, and Ivens's Powerand the Land. In separate sections devoted to most of the famous as well as many lesser known progressive films of the period, Alexander succinctly 1. My characterizations of Communist political programs in the thirties are drawn from Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American CommunistParty, Boston, Beacon Press, 1957. See also Kermit E. McKenzie, Cominternand WorldRevolution, 1928-1943, New York, Columbia University Press, 1964. Daniel Aaron's classic Writers on the Left, New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961, also provides indispensable background information. 2. See, for example, Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, New York, Anchor/Doubleday, 1980; Victor Navasky, Naming Names, New York, Viking Press, 1980; Nancy Lynn Schwartz, The Hollywood Writers'Wars, New York, Knopf, 1982. Pare Lorentz, Lorentzon Film. Movies 1927-1941, New York, Hopkinson and Blake, 1975; 3. Richard Dyer MacCann, The People'sFilms. A Political History of U.S. GovernmentMotion Pictures, New York, Hastings House, 1973; Robert L. Snyder, Pare Lorentzand the DocumentaryFilm, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973. The excellent but still unpublished Ph.D. dissertation by Russell Campbell, "Radical 4. Cinema in the United States, 1930-1942: The Work of the Film and Photo League, Nykino, and Frontier Films," Northwestern University, 1978, focuses on the work of radical filmmakers and excludes consideration of the films of Lorentz, Ivens, Van Dyke, and Dick. Campbell includes more excerpts from the filmmakers' writings in the thirties and offers more telling political criticisms of the films than does Alexander. See also the interesting short memoir by Leo Hurwitz, "One Man's Voyage: Ideas and Films in the 1930s," in CinemaJournal, vol. XV, no. 1 (Fall 1975), 1-15. See also Leo Seltzer's article, "Documenting the Depression of the 1930s," in Film Library Quarterly,vol. 13, no. 1 (1980), 15-22.

DocumentingtheLeft

65

(if not exhaustively) describes each film after detailing its production history. He also evaluates contributions made by individual members of the production teams. In some cases, for example, the WFPL newsreels or Sheldon Dick's Men and Dust, Alexander's analyses will stimulate interest in works that have so far received comparatively little attention by film scholars. In those instances in which he examines films that have long been accepted into the canon of documentary cinema, his discussions cast new light on familiar territory. Never before has the aesthetic impact of The River, The Wave, The City, Heart of Spain, The New Earth, or Borinage, among many others, been assessed more perceptively or persuasively. Film on the Left is not just a critical study of significant cinematic monuments. On the basis of interviews conducted during the 1970s with many of the filmmakers and the critics who supported them, Alexander has also written a remarkable collective biography of the left film movement's leading figures: Leo Hurwitz, Paul Strand, Ben Maddow, Leo Seltzer, Ralph Steiner, Herbert Kline, Pare Lorentz, Sidney Meyers, Joris Ivens, Harry Alan Potamkin, and Willard Van Dyke. As his profiles make clear, these men persevered in dramatizing important political goals out of high artistic ambition and profound concern for the economic deprivation and political repression of vast numbers of people. Alexander's portraits, however, do not idealize his subjects. Alexander acknowledges that their commitments to social change and formal innovation were fueled, but also often undermined, by their arrogance or timidity, their political naivete or inflexibility, their careerism or their simple desire to survive. Few other books on cinema offer a more balanced or compelling account of filmmakers responding to the conflicting personal and social pressures imposed on them by the difficult circumstances in which they lived and worked. Alexander candidly admits in his preface that his interest in these men and their films was motivated by his own political experiences in the 1960s. Acutely aware of the new left's sad descent into political complacency or terrorism, he acknowledges that he "was seeking models, people who had continued to act upon progressive social and political beliefs throughout their lives." By engaging myself fully with a group of dedicated political filmmakers of the thirties, I hoped to further develop my own true roots in the sixties -roots I could then nourish and be nourished by in the years to come. ... In these men of the left, I was searching for political fathers, people whom in my imagination I might have drawn upon throughout life, especially during the crisis of the sixties, and whom I might draw upon now . ... Alexander finds a bond between the generations of the old and the new left in their shared moral outrage at oppression and their acute sense of empathy with

66

OCTOBER

those who resisted. To isolate these undeniably important factors as the primary force behind their work and the source of its quality, however, is to misrepresent both the motives and the achievements of these early radical filmmakers in a significant way. Their aroused humanism accounts, in fact, for only part of their work and its interest for us. Most of these filmmakers were Marxists. Some were sophisticated students of Marxist theory. Many were members of the Communist party or close fellow travelers. Alexander is aware of these facts, of course, but at many crucial points he seems to interpret their Marxism as if it were the demotic Marxism espoused by the militants of the sixties. Whatever their hesitations about specific points or strategies endorsed by the Communist party, the radicals of the depression were not indifferent or even hostile to concrete ideological programs as most of the sixties' militants were. Alexander underestimates the degree to which the party's broad political outlook and even many of its specific tenets sparked their efforts and informed their films. A reading of these films will show that to minimize or gloss over their ideological commitments as Alexander does distorts our understanding of who these filmmakers were and what they accomplished. Many--perhaps most- of the filmmakers and critics responsible for the vital leftist film culture during the 1930s were children of working-class Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Their support of progressive social causes was often a reaffirmation of a family tradition in which radical socialism had taken the place of religious practice. Lack of opportunity and poverty reinforced their political convictions. Several of those destined to become influential in the movement, however, had already begun to rise in the American social hierarchy because of their prestigious college educations.5 If the economy into which they were graduated had been better, many of them might have had to struggle to maintain their political views as they entered into American industry or the arts establishment. The onset of the depression effectively eliminated the need for difficult decisions. At a moment in their lives when they might have expected to begin their professional careers, these men and women had to live with the painful certainty that the economy had no place for them. And this certainty intensified their commitment to a theory of history and political action- Marxism--which alone seemed capable of explaining the contemporary crisis, and, what is more important, of changing the system that had given birth to it. Many future members of the Workers' Film and Photo League, Nykino, and Frontier Films were also actively involved with the arts either as artists or as critics. They became filmmakers or film critics because they were convinced

5. Harry Alan Potamkin was graduated from the University of Pennsylvania; Leo Hurwitz received his degree summa cum laude from Harvard; Ralph Steiner went to Dartmouth; and Ben Maddow was a graduate of Columbia.

DocumentingtheLeft

67

that the cinema was the artistic medium with the greatest potential to effect social change. They knew, of course, that Lenin himself had praised the cinema's ability to persuade and stimulate the masses as early as 1919, when he made his famous statement: "For us the cinema is the most important of all the arts." For these committed radicals, Lenin's judgment had been confirmed by the exPotemkinand October, traordinary works of early Soviet cinema-Eisenstein's Pudovkin's Mother and The End of St. Petersburg,Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera- to name only the most prominent. They were also aware that many radicals in the United States had called for a cinema representing the interests of workers. As early as 1925, William F. Kruse, then secretary of the Communist-dominated Workers' International Relief, forcefully underscored how useful such a cinema could be. Its tremendous revolutionary possibilities, among precisely these elements difficult of access by our ordinary propaganda weaponsthe primitive-minded inert working masses who never go to meetings and never read anything better than a capitalist comic page-as well as special elements like the scattered rural proletariat and semi-proletariat; the oppressed and often illiterate subject peoples; the children and similar groups. These vast masses hold the future of the revolutionary movement in their hands-they will determine the outcome of our struggle against imperialism-we must win them. Every weapon used by the masters to hold them we must seek to turn to help set them free. And the film is by no means the least of these. We must win it for the working class.6 Despite Kruse's cogent arguments, American proletarian organizations did not commit themselves to producing workers' films on a regular basis. By 1930, however, the political left in several European countries, particularly in Germany, had begun to produce an impressive variety of documentary and fiction films expressing the Communist workers' viewpoint.7 It was undoubtedly with models such as these in mind that a small group of men met in the headquarters of the Workers' International Relief in New York City on December 11, 1930. Months of discussion were brought to fruition with the creation of the Workers' Film and Photo League. The depression's tightening grip on the economy and the growing millions of unemployed made 6. William F. Kruse, "Workers' Conquest of the Films," in WorkersMonthly, vol. IV, no. 11 (September 1925), 503; cited by Campbell, pp. 49-50. 7. See Bert Hogenkamp, Workers'Newsreels in the 1920s and 1930s, London, History Group of the Communist Party, n.d. Communist film production was most varied and extensive in Germany due, in no small part, to the effort of the remarkably versatile impressario Willi Munzenberg. Among other important films, German Communist organizations produced Zeitproblem(Dudow, 1930), Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glick (Jutzi, 1929), and Kuhle Wampe (Brecht/ Dudow, 1932).

68

OCTOBER

the realization of its ambitious program a matter of extreme urgency. The group's aims were articulated by the critic Harry Alan Potamkin in the July 1931 Workers'Theater: 1. The education of the workers and others in the part the movie plays as a weapon of reaction; 2. The education of the workers and others in the part the movie plays as an instrument for social purposes-in the U.S.S.R.; 3. The encouragement, support and sustinence [sic] of the left critic and the left movie-maker who is documenting dramatically and persuasively the disproportions in our present society; 4. The creation of a chain of film-audiences who morally and financially guarantee such films; 5. The regular publication of a periodical devoted to our purposes; 6. The fight against the class-abuses of capitalist censorship; 7. The attack upon the invidious portrayal in the popular film of the foreign born worker, the Negro, the oriental, the worker generally; 8. The opposition to the interests of the institutions like the church as they participate in the shaping of the monopolized film; 9. The use of methods of direct action, boycott, picketing against the anti-working class, anti-Soviet film; 10. The distribution of suppressed films of importance; 11. The defense of artists and critics abused by reactionary elements (as in the Eisenstein case); 12. The re-discovery and presentation of neglected films of significance; 13. The education of the critic and worker by closer contact. THE SECOND PART OF NUMBER 3 IS EVENTUALLY OUR PURPOSE! Our filmmakers need more MOST IMPORTANT that is and got by more opportunity. THIS PURPOSE IS training, MADE MEANINGFUL BY NUMBER 13.8 Although the WIR, the WFPL's parent organization, could only provide limited funds and the league members were all unpaid volunteers, the group accomplished a surprisingly larger number of these goals during the five years of its existence. Many foreign and domestic films with progressive social con-

Cited by Alexander, p. 7. This program appears to expand upon one offered by Com8. no. 1 (15 April 1928), n.p. I thank munists in France in 1928. See "Le Decret de'32," in Spartakus, Richard Abel for this information.

DocumentingtheLeft

69

tent were distributed by their organization (later by Tom Brandon's Garrison Films) to enlighten working-class audiences. Protests against reactionary and Fascist films were successfully mounted. Although their own periodical, Film Front, was short-lived, many members championed the movies as an "instrument for social purposes" in several sympathetic film and general interest magazines (particularly New Theatre, The New Masses, ExperimentalCinema, and the Daily Worker).As Potamkin stressed, however, the league's primary task was the production of films useful to the workers in their struggle against an oppressive and morally bankrupt economic system. Like other league objectives, this goal was realized through the extraordinary devotion and sacrifices of individual members. The general character of league films was determined by a complex mixture of aesthetic predilections and ideological convictions as well as by economic necessity. They repudiated the technical sophistication and formal conventions of American narrative cinema because these techniques seemed fundamentally tied to the escapist or reactionary ideas regularly purveyed by the commercial film studios. The league members realized, in any case, that they had neither the money nor the training to make movies to compete with Hollywood. They also believed that their political purposes would not necessarily be best served by fictional narratives. As Leo Hurwitz emphasized in an important article, "The Revolutionary Film-Next Step," published in the May 1935 issue of New Theatre,league productions were intended to "serve an agitational and revelational function to arouse the working class and as a corrective for the lies of the capitalist agencies." They were therefore predisposed toward the documentary mode. Documentaries also did not require actors, sets, or a complicated technical apparatus, and they were therefore both cheaper and easier to produce. These facts were crucially important to a group with little money and an amateur staff. During the 1920s, Henri Barbusse, one of the leading French Communist intellectuals, was fond of saying that at the present time "truth is revolutionary." Many league members who witnessed the daily misery of the unemployed agreed. It is perhaps for this reason that many of the newsreels produced by the league were formally unsophisticated records of widespread squalor and of the mass demonstrations and speeches organized (often by the Communist party or closely affiliated groups) to combat it. These films were composed of a series of short takes and were usually edited to follow the temporal continuity of the events they described. Many of the more thoughtful filmmakers and critics realized, however, that simple illustrations of events were not persuasive enough. "To a class conscious worker," Hurwitz later argued, "our May First reels, which show hundreds of thousands of workers mobilized in the street, may be a source of inspiration and a stimulus to militancy, but to a non-revolutionary worker, unless we clearly and effectively dramatize why these thousands are marching, May Day is another parade of

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70

marching, marching, and marching."9 The filmmakers needed film forms that would convey their ideological views more forcefully. They found models in the complex montage schemes of Russian documentaries such as Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, Turin's Turksib, and Shub's Cannons or Tractors?While they were allegedly based on undisguised and unrehearsed fact, these innovative works used the most fundamental procedure of cinematic art-montage-to analyze the processes that produced these facts.10 Their obvious ideological commitments and their experimental shooting and editing techniques made the facts themselves speak in behalf of revolutionary transformation. Inspired by these examples, league cameramen and editors learned quickly. Although none of their films were ever as intricate as those of Vertov or Shub, the formal rhetoric they developed nevertheless effectively conveyed the league's political perspective. The beginning of Bonus March (1932), edited by Leo Seltzer and Lester Balog from original and stock documentary footage, is perhaps the best example of how formally sophisticated league films could be. TITLE:

"1917.

. ." / swinging

sign:

"Go Places

with

the US

Army"-travel photographs, picture of ship, etc. / sign: "Adventure Over the World," and doughboy picture / mass parade of troops / battlefield: tanks and troops advance / swinging sign: "Travel-US Army" / cannon fires / another cannon fires / "Travel-US Army" sign / shells explode, blowing up building / battlefield: shells explode / "Travel-.US Army" sign / tank flattens tree / soldiers leap into trench / ship on sign "Go Places with the US Army," swinging / battleship / ship on sign / battleship / ship on sign (FLASH) / ship's cannon is raised / interior of gun barrel, ZOOM IN / ship's cannons fire / another battleship / battleship / (DIFFERENT ANGLE) battleship smoking / German war-plane / explosion in the trenches / soldiers advance (FLASH) / explosion in the trenches / dead on battlefield / garden party, for injured and maimed servicemen / servicemen line up to be greeted / servicemen shake hands with VIPs / man on crutches, legless man / shaking hands / nurses attend to servicemen / shaking hands / stretcher patient wheeled up / US flag / cathedral / another cathedral, TILT DOWN / down-and-out unemployed man on bench, head in hands / cathedral, TILT DOWN /

Leo Hurwitz, "Survey of Workers' Films: A Report to the National Film Conference," in 9. New Theatre(October 1934), 27. 10. Vsevolod Pudovkin's Film Technique,first translated into English in 1929, was the primary theoretical text used by the WFPL filmmakers. They were also aware of several remarks and lectures made by Vertov published by Barbusse in France, and several had met Eisenstein during his American stay.

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priest in street / heroic statuary / sign: "Catholic Charities, St. Francis Xavier's Parish" / US Eagle sign on Bank of the United States building / same man on bench / sign: "The Salvation Army-Jesus for the Bowery" / CLOSE-UP, man on bench / older unemployed man / bindlestiffs in street / sign: "The Salvation Army-The Bowery for Jesus"; people walk past / sign in stones: ". . . body a seat and we have been setting down ever since"; Hooverville, water in background; TILT UP / same sign, on riverbank, cabin in the water behind; PAN to reveal waterside Hooverville shacks / shacks, and inhabitant / HIGH ANGLE, bread line: "Emergency Food Station, The Salvation Army" / (DIFFERENT ANGLE) bread line / STRAIGHT OVERHEAD, bread line; TILT UP revealing its length / OVERHEAD (CLOSER SHOT), men in bread line / (STREET LEVEL, MEDIUM SHOT) men in bread line, reading newspapers; PAN as they inch forward.11 Even in this brief introductory sequence, central bourgeois institutions such as the church, the military, and the government are charged with direct responsibility for the plight of the suffering veterans. Later in the film, the police and the army disperse the Bonus Marchers, exposing the myth of the democratic state. Behind these indictments lies the highly sectarian ideology of the Third Period Comintern policy that designated the augmenting of class consciousness and class solidarity as the principal task of national Communist parties. National parties were also quite aware, however, that the revolution was not at hand, and they pushed for militant action to achieve short-term goals. Most league films clearly reflect these views. By offering graphic records of struggle and concrete responses to crises, the filmmakers hoped to attract militant workers, and by unmasking the allegedly benevolent institutions of bourgeois society as objectively Fascist, they believed they could provoke greater class solidarity in their working-class audiences. It is for this reason that so many WFPL members often risked physical injury to bring their films to the factories, farms, and mining towns where strikes were in progress. Although it is difficult to measure how successfully these films won audiences over to their ideological position, the morale and resolve of those already committed to the struggle must have been raised by the films' arrival on the front lines with the message that the strikers were not alone. By late 1934, this tactical address to committed workers, so well integrated with overall Third Period political strategy, began to encounter increasing criticism in leftist cultural circles. Several filmmakers, most notably Ralph Steiner, Irving Lerner, and Leo Hurwitz, were among the most vocal

11.

I borrow this excellent summary description from Campbell, pp. 249-250.

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critics of league production to date. "The test of propaganda is persuasive power," Hurwitz wrote in October 1934, "and our films have not been persuasive. This is due largely to the fact that they have presupposed upon the part of the audience a knowledge and sympathy with our point of view." 2 Discontent was the result of other disappointments as well. Although the league's film output was quite remarkable given the difficult circumstances in which WFPL members had to work, production was irregular. Bursts of productivity were followed by periods of inactivity. Some filmmakers also felt that the league's commitment to the newsreel form was artistically constraining. Steiner and Hurwitz proposed a solution to these problems. They argued for the creation of an elite group of filmmakers, similar to the shock troops of the Workers' Theater, which would be rigorously trained and supported by the league in its efforts to create new and more effective propaganda forms. These arguments were carefully reasoned and many league members were sympathetic to what Hurwitz and Steiner were trying to accomplish. Financial and ideological considerations, however, led the national board of the WFPL to lend only token support to the dissidents' proposals. Disappointed and angry, Hurwitz and Steiner left to found their own production collective, Nykino, at the end of 1934. Although bitterly attacked by many of their former colleagues, the Nykino group, now augmented by new recruits (Paul Strand, Sidney Meyers, Ben Maddow, and Lionel Berman), was encouraged by the changing political climate and the concurrent reevaluation of the role the arts should play in effecting political change. The years 1934 and 1935 were a time of transition in left-wing politics around the world. By mid-1933, the horrible failure of Third Period policy, dramatically symbolized by Hitler's accession to power and his immediate persecution of German Communists and Socialists, could no longer be overlooked except by the most doctrinaire Communist ideologues. In the United States, moreover, Roosevelt's programs were winning workers for the New Deal and away from the party. Changes in approach were needed to recapture the workers' loyalty and to broaden the base of party support. Although the Comintern did not officially reverse its position until its Seventh Congress in 1935, it allowed greater autonomy to national Communist parties from mid-1933 on. As a consequence of this relaxation of control, the Communist Party of America (as well as the French Communist party) orchestrated a slow about-face. In late March 1933, the Daily Workercalled for a "United Front to Fight Fascism," and party-affiliated cultural and political organizations began to court individuals, especially prominent artists, intellectuals, and liberals, who only weeks before were considered class enemies. Until the Hitler-Stalin Pact, these efforts to attract fellow travelers to a party of the peo12.

Hurwitz, "Survey," p. 27.

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pie were vigorously pursued as a series of crises in Ethiopia, China, Spain, and Czechoslovakia intensified the party's awareness of the dangers international fascism posed to the Soviet Union and the Western democracies alike. These political maneuvers were accompanied by two perceptible shifts in leftist aesthetic policy in the United States. First, there was a growing recognition of the artist as an independent professional whose work could not be judged exclusively by political standards. Left-wing cultural journals no longer automatically praised any proletarian novel for its adherence to the party line. Even critics close to the party began to take into account a novel's literary quality. Second, as the fellow-traveler critic Malcolm Cowley remarked at the time, leftists came to the realization that in the arts as in politics "any radical movement would have to speak a reformist and pragmatic language if it wished to be understood by the average citizen." The message to artists was clear. The inherited forms and standards of bourgeois culture were no longer to be regarded as necessarily antithetical to progressive political expression. The core members of Nykino carefully formulated an aesthetic for the films they wished to make. In September 1935, Steiner and Hurwitz wrote that Pudovkin's Film Techniquehad led them to stress the role of editing at the expense of what they now termed "the primary step": the conception and rendering of a story, mood, or idea in dramatic terms. Only theatricalization could "transform concepts, relationships and feelings into three-dimensional happenings that are plausible, effective and rich in significance."13 Only such a transformation, moreover, could engage the spectator's emotions and lead him to accept a film's political message. Although they did not wish to make dramatic fiction films exclusively, they were interested in reintroducing those elements-individual characters, acted scenes, and a more complex story a with few line-which, exceptions, had been almost entirely excluded from the WFPL newsreels.14 The arrival in New York of several new films and filmmakers further whetted their interest. In 1935, the socialist-realist film Chapayev,hailed by Eisenstein himself as an important new direction for Soviet cinema, was screened for a New York audience.'5 Paul Strand returned to New York with news of The Wave, a dramatic account of a fisherman's strike, which he had just completed for the Mexican government. Finally, the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens screened his films and lectured in the United States in early 1936. 13. Leo Hurwitz and Ralph Steiner, "A New Approach to Filmmaking," in New Theatre (September 1935), cited by Campbell, p. 196. Both Campbell and Alexander stress the immediate influence of Lee Strasberg and his work at the Theatre Collective School. 14. One exception, Maurice Bailen's The GreatDepression (1934), incorporates fragments of a fictional story of an unemployed worker contemplating suicide. It is discussed by Campbell, p. 136. 15. Sergei Eisenstein, "The New Soviet Cinema; Entering the Fourth Period," in New Theatre (January 1935).

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Hurwitz and Steiner proposed a mixture of documentary and dramatic elements, believing this synthetic form would present the facts more clearly and powerfully. Such films would need, Hurwitz recently explained, a principle of growth, enabling the film to grow out of its parts into a whole, much as a plot functions in a fiction film. One needed in the documentary film an equivalent of plot, with connectives of "but," "against," "despite," "growing into." The key to this, we found, was that a sequence had not merely to describe or relate, but to create a need in the audience, as in a fiction film, by identification with the characters, a feeling of want or anxiety is created in the audience. Then one could look at the structure of a film and design it -with image and word and sound-as a chain of interactive needs progressing toward a resolution. If you were handling ideas, then your ideas would also have to be woven into this progression of needs.16 Because they believed that Pare Lorentz offered them the opportunity to put these ideas into practice, Hurwitz, Steiner, and Strand agreed to work with him in 1935 on the government-sponsored project The Plow thatBrokethePlains. The controversies that soon developed between the two vocal Nykino radicals (Hurwitz and Strand) and the New Dealer Lorentz reveal how different their ideological perspectives actually were. All agreed that the film should dramatize the disastrous conditions prevailing in the Plains region. Hurwitz and Strand, however, were interested in exposing capitalism's rape of the land, an interpretation of events that Lorentz's government position, his political tact, and his faith in reform could not allow him to accept. Although Lorentz ultimately controlled the film's structure, the Nykino team's contributions are apparent in the film's emphasis on forceful shots with clearly shaped content, the careful control of individual scenes, and the "plot"which progresses toward a resolution along "a chain of interactive needs." Allied with a more explicitly radical viewpoint, these innovative strategies became central features of the best of these filmmakers' later work. Nykino proved to be only a transitional group. A nonprofit production company, Frontier Films, was created in March 1937 to take its place. Great hopes attended the birth of the new organization, dedicated, as one of its publicity pamphlets said, to "the production of films that truthfully reflect the life and drama of contemporary America." Frontier Films boasted an expanded board of directors as well as a large number of supportive advisory members, technical consultants, and famous well-wishers. Loans and donations from wealthy left-wing sympathizers promised a greater measure of financial stability and artistic opportunity to the former Nykino members who were chiefly responsible for film production. 16.

Hurwitz, "One Man's Voyage," pp. 12-13.

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According to Paul Strand, during the five years of Frontier Films's existence, the group made six good films and a couple of great films. The continuing popularity of and critical acclaim for Heart of Spain (1937), China StrikesBack (1937), People of the Cumberland(1938), Return to Life (1938), and Native Land (1942) confirm Strand's judgment. Striking imagery, literate commentary, effective scoring, and carefully calculated scenic and montage structure make these films highly complex and individual works of art, certainly among the most accomplished ever produced by independent left filmmakers in the United States. Covering most of the major issues of concern to the left at the time - from China and Spain to the cause of civil liberties and better living conditions in the United States - Leo Hurwitz has correctly said of them that "they were responsive to important aspects of the human experience and the underlying forces of the time."17 The assessment of the underlying forces of the time these films offer was largely determined by their makers' contemporary political outlook. John Howard Lawson, whose Communist affiliations were well known, was the nominal secretary of the board of directors of Frontier Films, and several other of its important staff members and advisors also had close ties to the party. There is no reason, however, not to believe the many members of the organization who emphatically deny that the party exercised any direct control over their choice or treatment of filmic subjects.'8 Nevertheless, well-known Communist party positions clearly guided the general ideological orientation of the films. China Strikes Back (1937), for example, reflects the party's foreign policy during the mid-1930s. The film's six sections, which alternate in the negative-positive dialectical arrangement common to several Frontier productions, allude in many ways to China's political isolation and the need for national unity. America (and, by implication, the West) is presented as a distant spectator to the grim events in the Orient. Japan's naked military aggression is contrasted with the Chinese people's heroic preparations to resist. There is a tacit recognition of China's internal political divisions in the scenes shot in the Communist-controlled Shensi province and other unidentified regions of China. The full implications and the history of this last, and perhaps most crucial source of national disunity, however, are not stressed. Although the terms democraticand Fascist are never used in the film, the filmmakers clearly accepted the Communist party's position that all national forces had to unite if victory over the Fascists was to be achieved. Following the party line, the filmmakers glossed over political identifications in the film. Mao Tse-tung appears, but he is identified only as a man "on the left, quiet, resolute, modest . . . whose political insight is respected in the capitals of Europe and Asia," and not as the Communists' leader. All references to past, present, or 17. 18.

Ibid., p. 14. Campbell, p. 231.

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future class struggle are eliminated. There is no mention of the Kuomintang's long and bloody suppression of the Communists. People of the Cumberland(1938), a film about the Highlander Folk School's efforts to aid unionization of miners in Tennessee, is more forthright in its emphasis on the need for working-class solidarity. The miners, however, are characterized in dramatically different terms than the workers in the WFPL newsreels. As the narrator tells us, they are "the stock of pioneers, the tough Scots and the English," 100 percent Americans. In their battle against exploitation, moreover, they have a powerful ally: the Federal government. "Who's against us?" a Highlander teacher asks. The associations of manufacturers, the no-strike injunctions, the men who won't look and won't listen, the thugs hired in Memphis, the unions faked by the company. Who's for us? The Government. The Wagner Act. The Constitution backs us up. American symbols and rituals celebrate this new alliance of workers and government throughout the film. The Stars and Stripes appears at several crucial points; traditional folk dancing is prominently featured; '9 a happy Fourth of July rally and parade accompanied by a medley of songs including "I've Been Working on the Railroad" and "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" concludes the film. All these elements proclaim the truth of Communist Party Chairman Earl Browder's famous slogan: "Communism Is Twentieth Century Americanism." Frontier Films productions were distributed more widely than any earlier radical films and they often scored notable critical successes.20 Unfortunately, they earned little money for the struggling film collective. The constant search for funding had disastrous consequences. Latent personal and ideological tensions were exacerbated. Lack of financial security and resentment of Hurwitz and Strand for the way they steered the projects led Van Dyke and Steiner to question their commitment to an organization more radical than they were. In 1939 they left to found their own film production company, American Documentary Films.21 Other trusted collaborators, Ben Maddow and Irving Lerner, also left to seek work outside the collective. Lack of money also impeded the realization of Frontier's most ambitious 19. Folk dancing and song motifs were also used to characterize the people in China Strikes Back, Heart of Spain, and Return to Life. Before its commercial release in June 1938, People of the Cumberland(along with Heart of 20. Spain and China StrikesBack) was shown to liberal congressmen on March 29, 1938, and Eleanor Roosevelt received a private screening of the film in the White House in early May. See Campbell, p. 328. Their departure was attended by many bitter recriminations. Several in the Frontier Films 21. group believed that red-baiting had been used to steal the commission for The City (which became American Documentary Films's first project) from them.

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project, the feature-length synthetic documentary Native Land. Denied funds by the American Civil Liberties Union because of the film's allegedly excessive prolabor orientation, the Frontier filmmakers had to stop work again and again in order to solicit money. These recurring delays postponed the film's release until mid-1942. By then, its dialectically structured reminder of the need for eternal vigilance in the defense of domestic civil liberties 22 was eclipsed by the popular calls to unity for the war effort. The fate of the film and of Frontier Films itself was sealed when the Communist party, well aware of the surging tide of prowar sentiment, refused to endorse Native Land. The film played for a short time in a few scattered movie houses. Frontier Films folded shortly thereafter. The demise of Frontier Films in the middle of World War II, and the rise of HUAC and Joe McCarthy in the postwar decade, brought independent leftwing film production in the United States to a virtual halt for many years. Only in the 1960s did the numbers of younger radical filmmakers begin to grow again. These filmmakers, and those who have followed them in the '70s and '80s are probably the audience Alexander had most in mind as he wrote Film on the Left. Although his book possesses all the customary scholarly attributes, Alexander clearly wishes it to be read as something more than simply an academic study of films and the men who made them. His explicit purpose in writing the book was to create "a usable past," a sense of tradition that could inspire and sustain progressive and radical filmmakers today. His assessment of how the filmmakers of the '30s succeeded and why they failed is an integral part of his attempt to understand how political action through cultural production is still possible. At the end of the book, Alexander summarizes the lessons progressive filmmakers should learn from the examples offered by their "political fathers": The role of an artist and educator is to help people define their situations in their own images and language and to facilitate their discovery of workable methods for improving their conditions. Such methods must often be reformist at the outset, and only later, when the audience has been exposed to new possibilities, can they become

22. As Russell Campbell points out in his brilliant political analysis of the film, Native Land also clearly embodies Popular Front positions endorsed by the Communist party. It includes farmers and blacks as protagonists, and it also depicts the state, small businessmen, and progressive religious leaders as allies of the workers. Small, domestic, racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Legion, as well as unnamed reactionary corporations, are indicted as the workers' enemies. This curious conjuring of insignificant political forces in the United States is done in an effort to project the international fascist menace into the heart of the country. Finally, like People of the Cumberland,Native Land also deploys the American flag, the Statue of Liberty, the Capitol Building, and statues or portraits of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt as representative symbols of national unity and the country's traditions of liberty. See Campbell, pp. 384-393.

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class-conscious and revolutionary. This awareness means an ability to listen and to see, an ability to communicate authentically, an avoidance of the attempt to impose theories and actions instead of understanding that they must occur gradually through the process of realization and struggle. . . . This approach implies the kind of community--shared work and purpose, solidarity, love for justice, and love and concern for one another- an openness to new situations that artists and nonartists in the 1930s and in the 1960s at their best were able to achieve. Because the militant filmmakers of the 1930s did learn that a consideration of potential effects must be the basis of any political initiative, they came to accept the idea that gradualism may be-at least initially-a more fruitful spur to social change than revolutionary incitement. Consistent with this approach, they also attempted to use symbols and ideas familiar to their desired audiences as rhetorical support for their own political messages. Although contemporary political filmmakers often disdain such concessions to their audiences, the positive results they promise ought at least be measured against the claims of certain avant-garde "revolutionary" filmmakers. Well intentioned as Alexander's conclusions may be, however, they are not faithful to the animating motives and achievements of the filmmakers he admires in at least one important respect. His optimistic vision of authenticity, which unhappily echoes the maddeningly vague and sentimental rhetoric of the 1960s, obscures the crucial role played by theoretical reflection and party loyalty in the creation of their works. To the men who worked in the Workers Film and Photo League, Nykino, or Frontier Films, Marxist political theory was not a conceptual structure arbitrarily imposed on events. Although they found it imperfect at times and occasionally moved in advance of official changes in policy, Hurwitz, Strand, Maddow, and many others believed that Marxism offered the best explanation of what shaped and moved the world. It provided them with a fundamental orientation that not only focused their attention on issues that had to be addressed, but also helped them to define the political forces and tactics that could make the needed changes possible. Marxist theory was a precondition of and not an obstacle to formulating and powerfully communicating what they wished to express. Today, the need for political and social theory to guide the practice of filmmakers, at least in the advanced industrial countries, is more urgent than ever before. As Fredric Jameson reminds us, the reality of the 1930s was of a far simpler Europe and America "that had more in common with the life forms of earlier centuries than it does with our own." It was a world in which social conflict was sharpened and more clearly visible, a world which projected a tangible model of the an-

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tagonism of the various classes toward each other, both within the individual nation states and on the international scene as well.23 In the contemporary Western world, this clear picture of social relations no longer exists. Social conflicts, however, have not withered away. They remain powerful, effective forces, but are often undefinable by certain old categories of political theory. We have even come to question such notions as "community" and "communicating authentically." Nostalgia for such notions will not help indeed, it may hinder-contemporary political filmmakers as they attempt to discover what a political cinema might be and how it might function at this historical moment. Only a thorough theoretical interrogation of the meaning of a political cinema at the present time can animate and focus the practice of political filmmakers today.

23.

FredricJameson,

Marxism and Form, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1971, p. xvii.

The Formalist's Dreyer The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer, by David Bordwell, Berkeley, University of CaliforniaPress, 1981.

NICK BROWNE

The Marxist analysis of artistic practice has, in its extended confrontation with the method and literature of Russian formalism, repeatedly raised the question of the relation of the art object to its social context. The Marxistcentered opposition contemporaneous with Russian formalism, as advanced by Medvedev and Bakhtin, saw in the assemblage of formalist precepts and methods a resolute exclusion of ideological content and a refusal to acknowledge the social determinations of artistic form and meaning.' The schema of literary history derived from those precepts provided no defensible model of explanation with respect to historical change. The transposition of the formalist perspective from its initial site of elaboration, literature, to film compounds these standing difficulties by shifting them to another epistemological register. For Medvedev, Bakhtin, and now Jameson,2 the concept of estrangement generates the inaugural formalist gesture by which the object of study--the literariness of the artwork- is constituted; it establishes, but also separates, the work from social structure and historical process. The critique of the formalist conception of the artwork has addressed several interlocked premises: the centrality of plot as a "motivating" structure; the indifference of content, even if overtly ideological in character; the view of "content" as the sum of artistic devices; the sense of literary history as a cycle of automatization and defamiliarization; the conception of artistic perception and its relation to the object as a datum external to consciousness. Moreover, the critique denied the articulations proposed among these propositions. Jameson argues, as did Shklovsky's contemporaries, that even in the domain of the formalist strong1. P. N. Medvedev and M. M. Bakhtin, The FormalMethod in LiteraryScholarship.A Critical Introductionto SociologicalPoetics, trans. Albert J. White, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. 2. Fredric Jameson, The Prison House of Language, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1972.

Carl-TheodorDreyer. Vampyr. 1932.

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hold of plot, neither the enumeration of artistic devices, nor the concept of "motivation" constitutes a theorization of plot as a critical category. The critique maintained that the formalist concentration on the object as a literary fact, as construction, led to an accounting of the artwork as an object determined only by immanent relations to other parts of the whole. In this way "construction" displaced mimesis as the basis of scientific poetics. Formalism thereby denied the possibility that an extrinsic force could affect the intrinsic nature of literature, except by negation; it did not, therefore, provide the method for a culturally based poetics. It offered neither a theory of ideology, nor a model with genuine explanatory power in relation to historical change. The legacy of formalism and its justification, on several fronts, remain contested. It's credited with focusing the attention of literary study on the "work itself" and providing the procedures and rationale for a certain sort of rigorous, analytic study that informs the practice of certain kinds of textual analysis. In this respect, its attention to the text, its resemblance to American New Criticism is a superficial one - and not just because the formalist doctrine of estrangement was the term in a futurist politics that sought to valorize the new by opposing it to the received and conventional. The transfer and application of formalist doctrine to the field of cinema studies has never been rigorously implemented in those instances where it has been engaged. Screen'searly efforts to establish the pertinence of the Russian experience of the '20s, in ScreenReaderI for example, ignored or failed to establish the methodological importance of formalism. Eisenstein's analyses of formal structure were dominated by an eclectic version of Hegelian dialectics; Burch's investigation, in The Theoryof Film Practice(1969), of the formal possibilities of various parameters of cinematic organization (works were cited as instances) was associated with the critique of illusionism in advanced European cinema. Burch's most recent work, To the Distant Observer(1979), subtitled "Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema," demonstrates the manner in which the form of texts, and more generally the system of representation and its transformations, must be linked to a complex analysis of elements of culture-artistic traditions, economic factors other than those of the film industry, social circumstances, especially class relations, and political/ideological forces-as textual determinations.Burch explicitly refrains from identifying the presentational "radicalization" of Japanese scenographic practice with the gestures of Western artistic "modernism." ("What was a mass cultural attitude in Japan was a deeply subversive vanguard practice in the Occident.") Burch's adoption of a formalist vocabulary for purposes of description of the formal properties of the work (for example, "surface" and "depth") appears in his attempt to establish meaningful contexts. Burch holds that Japanese scenographic form can be explained, historically and aesthetically, only through a complex matrix of determinations he is at pains to elaborate. In so saying, Burch contextualizes and

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limits the significance of formalist readings, thus distinguishing himself from a narrowly formalist perspective. Cinema studies in recent years, through deliberate efforts to articulate the relation of the work to its social contexts, has advanced chiefly along two fronts: the elaboration of critical languages suited to the description of texts, their structures, and processes of the production of meaning (an investigation now thought to be in the phase of consolidation); and secondly, and more comprehensively, the development and analysis of a more or less integrated field of problems that link the pertinence of social and ideological forces to forms of textual order and of spectator position and reception. Indeed, a significant part of the field is now shaped by an inquiry into those frameworks -the process of the inscription of ideology in the text, the general ideological environment, the matter of artistic convention, the question of the subject, and of audience "perception"-that Medvedev and Bakhtin called "sociological poetics." The compatability of Marxist or socially oriented formulations of these issues with formalist doctrine and practice remains to be demonstrated. In this present context, therefore, the appearance of a book by one of the most accomplished younger writers on cinema, one that explicitly adopts Russian formalist doctrine as a definitive critical orientation, seems to hold out the possibility of a critical synthesis. This, however, will require more than the assimilation of formalism's power to an already independently established tradition of textual analysis. Conventions regulating the languages of formal and structural description are substantially in place. Rather, if formalism is to claim recognition and standing as a critical system or as a general method, which offers more than coincidental or occasionally useful critical application, it must prove itself by being able to offer broad and coherent models of explanation for a range of problems of history, ideology, and spectatorship now formulated within this field. In this respect, the substance of the problem is not a matter of formalist description, but one of formalist epistemology. The accomplishments and limits of David Bordwell's The Films of CarlTheodorDreyerare related to his thoroughgoing deployment of the Russian formalist aesthetic and method. Bordwell's project is two-fold: an analysis of the "text"of Dreyer and a demonstration of the powers of formalism to define and reopen an ensemble of significant critical/historical problems. The book is organized around a series of analyses of the narrative strategies and aesthetic design of the canon of the late films (1928-64), namely La Passion deJeanned'Arc, Vampyr, Day of Wrath, Ordet, and Gertrud,conducted within its explicitly formalist framework. Bordwell proceeds by arguing that formalism provides a set of central aesthetic propositions on the status and structure of the artwork that define the "challenging strangeness of Dreyer's films." The conception of art as an affair of perception is central to this version of formalist theory. As such, it presents the perceiver with problems of unity (that is, narrative design, artistic

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tradition) and disunity (defamiliarization). Art as a matter of perception (Shklovsky is quoted for maximum effect: "The process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself.") produces an effect of defamiliarization through the modification of artistic norms and conventions. After introducing a body of additional critical concepts (author, historical background, form, representational system) and characterizing the structure and space of classical narrative film form, Bordwell proceeds to consider the work proper. Bordwell's Dreyer consists of the emergence -from the early films, which are a close narrative and stylistic variant of the classical Hollywood film-of a "theatricalized" text conforming in every significant respect to the essential tenets of formalist poetics. The book offers an exposition, through meticulous analysis of extended passages and complete films, of the chief formal features of the Dreyer text; and employs a critical vocabulary designed to evoke and describe artistic structures that serve to achieve the defamiliarization effect. Essentially, the proposed model of the Dreyer text is one of discontinuity, tension, or active opposition between image and narrative, and between story and plot. The result of these oppositions and deformations creates a problematic unity that leads to a display of cinematic figures which, when supported by the temporal delays accomplished by narrative and the execution of certain camera movements, produces what Bordwell terms the theatrical style. Within this form, the spatial and temporal figures of cinematic representation become separated from narrative causality. Given the tendency in Dreyer to subsume individual psychology within an overall abstracted, natural, or supernatural schema, "character" loses the force of subjectivity and the form of the text merges with the abstract pattern of narrative. The film text in this view is divided between the tendency to order and the tendency to disorder, between attention to narrative and attention to heightened cinematic dramatization (estrangement). Bordwell rigorously describes, with an abundance of frame enlargements for illustration, the formal elements -deformation of plot, rhythm, intertitles, sound, point-of-view structure, shot composition, variants of pictorialism, and so on-that realize this cinematic theatricalism. The chapters in which these descriptions are set out remain insistently committed to a given idiom and explicitly reject either interpretation or explanation of the form or function of these cinematic figures by reference to theme, character (either psychology or physical movement), or author (as camera). Interpretation or thematic readings of the films are rejected as predicated on a narrow view of textual unity that obscures Dreyer's formal singularity. These chapters are outstanding examples of the force and clarity of a certain school of textual analysis; they are, in fact, models of cinematic argument and demonstration. Bordwell's version of neoformalism is an empiricism that, as a principle of method, puts meaning in parenthesis. The adoption of this model necessarily involves certain specific commitments and consequences. The account is

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restricted to the observation of perceptual features of the texts. Yet Bordwell never gives an account of the domain of perception; he does not justify it as a comprehensive explanation of the viewer's encounter with the text. Meaning, or significant structure, is limited to the recognition of formal pattern. The key determining categories of the formalist analysis of the filmic text in this case are space, time, and causality. Causality is the chief category of narrative operation. For the analyst and audience, then, the text of Dreyer is figured through classical epistemological categories and modeled as a physicalistic, not a psychical, object, whose operations of reception are perceptual, not semiotic. Narrative and its associated structures of presentation are reduced to a literal framework of space/time parameters and its systems of exposition limited to determination by causality. The supposition that the film text should or might be viewed through physicalistic categories appears to derive from a misapplication or transfer of the formalist conception of literary perception to film. By not defining the scope of the term perceptionin the transfer from literature to film, one risks conflating perceptual and semiotic levels. And such is the case here. By limiting itself to observables, or to a particular way of talking about those observables, the empiricist formalist paradigm cuts analysis off from particular levels of textual construction and determination. For Bordwell, however, the chief interest of this study lies not in its investigation of Dreyer per se, but in the way it poses "important problems for the study of art, industry, and historical process." This work seeks to make a case for the general application of formalist methods to cinema and it has, in this respect, important metacritical ambitions. Necessary and central to the elaboration of this method of study is the assignment of status and function to the author. Questions regarding the author are reformulated, condensed, and presented through the concept of the biographical legend, the accumulation of a more or less coherent body of industrial production practices and aesthetic precepts. The aesthetic precepts, especially, revolve around Dreyer's stated views on the importance of realistic psychology as the basis of characterization and performance, and on the cinema as an art based on an extension of literature and drama. Functionally, the legend is made to include the filmmaker's relation to concrete production circumstances, the difficulties posed by an artistic tradition, and the struggle with contemporary representational norms. Strangely, this curious figure/ practice is endowed with the predication of subjectivity, namely intentionality. It responds ("we need to specify the situation to which the biographical legend responded") and seeks ("Dreyer's biographical legend seeks to clear a space for itself" and "Dreyer's biographical legend sought to solve the problem"). The legend is presented as the reformulation of the author as an extratextual function and is assigned a privileged explanatory role. This includes, Bordwell asserts, the assisting and directing of spectator perception. No account of the dynamics of the construction of this figure is offered. The concept elides or

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disclaims distinctions grounded in both narratology and psychoanalysis, between subject, author, implied authorial persona (immanent in the text), narrator, even critic and critical practice. The category chiefly functions to accomplish the book's paramount critical reduction, reducing the complexity of the productive subject over a career of fifty years to a single essential and evidently transcendental function: Within Western film production, Dreyer constituted his artistic personality around a single problem: that of art in mass production. To this problem, specific production problems, practices and theoretical precepts would constitute a solution. The ideas informing these practices and precepts challenged contemporary norms by applying a Romantic conception of visionary creation and transcendent value to a twentieth-century art form. The legend reduces the problem of the subject to a singular, continuous function. Other questions not addressed in any substantial way are the status, meaning, and function of Dreyer's self-understanding (misunderstanding?) in relation to the texts, or the contradictions implied by Dreyer's traditionalism in relation to Bordwell's modernist stance. The legend secures the fundamental auteurist axioms of unity and consistency of personality while leaving unresolved its own precise theoretical foundations. As authorial displacement it remains ambiguous in its collapse of significant distinctions and problematic as to its own status and function. The effort to eliminate the subject and, indeed, subjectivity, results in a reification. The category of the subject remains, apparently, exterior to the tenets of a formalist empiricism. Two independent lines of exposition converge in the account Bordwell proposes of the role of the camera, the description and explanation of its setups and movements: the assertion of the independence of the cinematic elements from the narrative, and that of the inappropriateness of the concept of the author to the study. Two types of cinematic figures dominate the attention of the structures, and the long-take tracking shot. In extended essay-point-of-view discussion

of La Passion dejeanne d'Arc and Vampyr, Bordwell treats point-of-view

structures as an essential compositional technique. Point-of-view structures, however, do not characterize (i.e., cannot be read in terms of character psychology), for character in this account is merely a convenience of plot (a point of convergence, a thread, though sometimes, a consciousness). Such a mode of point-of-view construction serves exclusively to disorient the viewer. The longtake used principally in Ordet and Gertrudfunctions in a similar way. While often following character actions, the camera in the long take is chiefly a device for foregrounding the shot itself as an element of cinematic perception. In matters of cinematic style Bordwell regularly insists that these cinematic figures are not motivated either by character psychology or directorial design, thus separating cinematic form from what the humanities often take as "meaning."

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"Motivation" here, like "perception" in other contexts, is a central critical category which has a polemical as well as expository function. Given the term's ambiguity and Bordwell's position on subjectivity, the interpretation of such figures (which in Gertrudare explicitly regarded as empty) is rejected. One may or may not be tempted or committed to thinking that such figures can appropriately be assigned meanings in relation to character. Since this study seeks to link formalism to the general conditions of meaning production in the cinema, the discursive and authoritative function implied by these cinematic figures remains unresolved. Clearly, the external biographical legend will not serve to fill the void of the "author" that Bordwell has methodically vacated. (The composition of this legend is inconsistent with the films.) The second half of the story of narrative is narration. Yet the book fails to align in a coherent or conclusive way voices implied by the title cards or other written materials with those implied by or inscribed within the imagery. It figures the question of textual authority only as an absent cause. The question of authorship, however, is not limited to the matter of biographical personality, for narration as such has specific formal structures and strategies (explored in the 1920s by Bakhtin's study of polyvocal narration in Dostoyevsky). The book's effort to reformulate authorship in terms of discourse fails because it lacks an elementary theory of enunciation or narration. In its commitment to perceptible qualities, this version of formalism does not seek to account for the authority or genealogy of the form of the text except by reference to an absent cause, another version of formalist self-reference. Bordwell's major claim that "Dreyer" is formulated through a conflict between artisanlike production in an arena of mass production/consumption raises questions beyond that of auteurist appreciation or reading. This schema of antagonism constitutes an ambiguous critical/theoretical gesture, opening onto the larger question of Dreyer's historical and ideological inscription. Bordwell's characterization of Dreyer as a resolutely marginal figure whose work is formed principally by a rejection of conventional narrative forms and cinematic figures that leads, as in Gertrud,to absolute negation of the value of signification, makes establishing the pertinent social-philosophical context singularly important. Yet history and context in Bordwell's formalist vision exclude consideration of cinematic influences on Dreyer; he is intentionally not presented as a member of any European avant-garde. This understanding of Dreyer's artistic autonomy largely separates and isolates his practice from ongoing events in the world of film by treating his practice almost exclusively as the negation of a certain mode of production and its stylistic conventions. Indeed, apart from vague, largely incredible testimonials to Dreyer's importance, Dreyer's significance for film history and practice is established in the book principally in relation to modernist reformulations of narrative, such as those of Godard or Straub-Huillet. It takes "modernism" to situate Dreyer

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meaningfully. That is, contemporary critical interest is grounded in Dreyer's exploration of formal problems, specifically the separation of image from narrative determinations. This disjunction or"gap," according to Bordwell, drawing on Cahiers's influential typology of signifying practices, is itself an ideological category. The spectator cannot readily "pass through" the representation to the narrative; the theory of "perception" is interposed to rationalize the claim of an ideological effect and the gap blocks pleasurable assimilation/consumption of the narrative object. The social/historical import of Dreyer remains, then, in stylistic innovation. His legacy is composed of "paradigms of possible cinema" which modernist directors can borrow and use. In sum, Dreyer's historical importance lies in his "contradictory in-betweenness" between dominant and "another cinema." The formalist method as developed through Dreyer proceeds from and enforces a number of reductive schematizations. It yields a series of striking analyses of textual operations and elicits and refines a number of useful critical distinctions for describing important structures of the Dreyer text. As a theoretical project, it does not succeed in reformulating artistic, historical, or ideological issues in ways that the current field of film studies is likely to find compelling. The analyses are excellent within the framework set out, yet the theoretical scope of the essay remains constrained by formalist reduction, which leaves the method, as applied, resourcefully independent, but, like the view of Dreyer offered, marginal.

Address to the Heathen Questions of Cinema, by Stephen Heath, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1981.

NOEL

CARROLL

I.

Introduction

The history of film theory reads like a history of modern thought: since the 1920s several major conceptual frameworks for film analysis have successively developed and declined. Compared to the literature of an ancient art such as dance, this surprisingly extensive body of theoretical literature has been generated for film, in part, because of the fight this medium has had to wage for its very legitimation as an art and as an object worthy of serious study. In the '70s, one position emerged from this welter of theories with some claim to provisional consideration as dominant. This position is an amalgam of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusserian Marxism, and the textual analysis of Roland Barthes, with a commitment to feminism. Since the latter part of the decade, this position has commanded more attention and exposure than any other in serious film journals. Interestingly enough, cinema studies is an area of academic inquiry in which Marxism and psychoanalysis are regarded as established, mainstream methodologies. It is within this context that Questions of Cinema assumes its present significance, for its author, Stephen Heath, is a prominent representative of this approach to cinema within the Englishspeaking world, and his book is likely to become a standard text in this country.1 In the later '60s and early '70s, European film theory was preoccupied with the application of semiological method to the study of film. The leading figure in this enterprise was Christian Metz, and the work of Saussure pro1. My discussion of Heath is offered as a questioning of the adequacy of his theory as theory. Others have also questioned the viability of the Althusserian-Lacanian approach as Marxism; see especially Kevin McDonnell and Kevin Robins, "Marxist Cultural Theory," in One-Dimensional Marxism, London, Allison and Busby, 1980. Questions about the degree to which Heath's theory is acceptable as psychoanalysis are beginning to be raised as well; see David Will, "Questions of Heath," in Framework,no. 18 (1982). Feminists, I suspect, may also want to object to Heath's version of feminism. In this essay I leave these questions aside.

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vided its methodological base. According to Heath, Saussurean linguistics was, in certain respects, too limited for the needs of film study; it was insensitive to questions of ideology. The move from linguistics to psychoanalysis as the framework for film theory was dictated by the desire to deal with the way in which ideology functions both within and through film. Questionsof Cinema is an attempt to create a psychoanalytically informed film theory that will explain the way in which the practices of narrative commercial cinema implement the production and reproduction of ideology. Heath holds a rather special theory of ideology, together with a special theory of psychoanalysis, in which Marxism and psychoanalysis mesh-at least on paper. The theory of ideology is that of Louis Althusser, according to which capitalism must reproduce itself in order to sustain itself. This involves not only the replacement of depreciating machinery, but also of the labor force. Moreover, the labor force - indeed, the entire population of a capitalist state -must not only be physically reproduced; it must also be reproduced socially; that is, society must be reproduced in such a way that the roles, values, and even the metaphysics requisite for capitalism remain relatively stable from generation to generation. The function of ideology is to reproduce itself; this means its function is to reproduce capitalist subjects. The ambiguity of the word subjectshere is crucial. For Althusser, it refers both to one's belief in oneself as a unity, an autonomous "I,"the center of one's own experience; and to one who is subservient to some system of domination. It is at this point that psychoanalysis enters the picture. For the psychoanalysis endorsed by Althusser and Heath-that of Jacques Lacan-is identified as a discipline that studies subject construction. Thus, the analytical categories of Lacanian psychoanalysis are marshaled to describe the different phases and dynamic interrelations that result in subject construction. What has this to do with film? Film is a means of propagating ideology, or a means through which ideology functions, that is, produces subjects. To study film's ideological operation is to examine the ways it constructs subjects. To this end, Heath analyses certain elements of film--the mimetic image, narrative construction, editing, sound, and so forth-to explicate how these elements have been employed in order to facilitate subject construction. Furthermore, the interaction of these elements with spectators is characterized in Lacanian terms, since that type of psychoanalysis presumably supplies us with the best analytical categories for dealing with subject construction.2

Here I am offering an interpretation of what I take Heath's motives to be. Heath begins 2. Questionsof Cinemawith an account of what he believes is the relation between Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the ideological study of film. This is an exercise in wool-gathering. Heath wrenches Marx's metaphor of the camera obscura and Freud's metaphor of the photographic negative out of context to tell us how film brings psychoanalysis and Marxism together. Perhaps partly as the result of the influence of Marcuse, Marxists in the '70s became interested in the usefulness of psychoanalysis to Marxist theory. For example, in Alienation (New

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Like the majority of classical film theorists, Heath does not give his readers the argumentative justifications for the basic philosophical presuppositions in his book. He assumes readers who are familiar with, understand, and agree with the basic tenets of the Lacanian-Althusserian position. Before examining Questionsof Cinemain detail, therefore, one must consider some of the unargued metaphysical, sociological, and psychoanalytic premises that rule the text. Heath's basic premise is that the prime function of ideology is to construct subjects. (This process is also known as positioning or"interpellating" subjects.) Ideology has various means -institutions and structures, called apparatuses to this end. These include not only government with its laws, courts, and police, but also the educational system, religion, the arts, and so forth. These ideological apparatuses are not mere bodies of ideas; they are modes of address. They have a discursive component, and it is through this discourse that subjects are constructed. How does this happen? To understand this, we must start with a distinction between the individual-the human organism, a biological, numerically distinct entity-and a subject-a socially constructed identity which is less than the sum of all the properties of the numerically distinct entity. This entity acquires an identity - becomes a subject - by being addressed by an institution or apparatus in a certain way. Consider this heuristic example: I get a letter from the Internal Revenue Service that says, "Dear Mr. Carroll, Please appear at our New York Office to explain your deduction of $3,000 for moviegoing on your 1977 taxes." The IRS is implicitly addressing me as a subject of a specific sort, viz., as a taxpayer (rather than, say, as a rhapsodizer of the film Airplane). The discourse, in this case the letter, determines what I am within this situation, that is, what my relevant role and response should be. This process is interpellation-the letter addressesme in a certain way; it requires that I react as a certain kind of subject in terms of a specific role or position. The subject is characterized by the address; the subject is said thereby to be constituted or constructed by (or in) the discourse, or to be positioned by (or in) the discourse. Moreover, this aspect of interpellation is held to be a dimension of all ideology, since all ideology has a discursive component; it is always addressed to concrete individuals3 who are then transformed into concrete subjects (subjects with a certain position). Lest my modest tax example be deceptive, it is important to pause to spell

York, 1971), Bertell Oilman criticizes Marxism for its lack of psychology. Oilman, however, does not turn to Lacan to fill in this gap, but to Reich; see also Social and Sexual Revolution, Boston, South End Press, 1979. I mention Oilman to point out that even among Marxists who feel the need to embrace psychoanalysis, there is no consensus about what sort is correct in terms of the overall theory of Marxism. 3. This is not strictly accurate. For Althusser and Heath, ideology always addresses already interpellated subjects, that is, subjects who have already been affected by previous address.

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out the extremely wide scope of the preceding demonstration. All ideology has a discursive component, an address; therefore, every instance of ideology functions to position a subject, thereby reproducing a condition for the reproduction of capitalism. Three things worth noting in this story are: (1) The concept of ideology at issue is much broader than usual; the constitution of a subject, of identity, is ordinarily ascribed to a culture (which may or may not be ideological in nature). What is called ideology in this analysis has the proportions of what would normally be called a culture. (2) The realm of what is discourse has become quite extensive, encompassing almost every phenomenon of civilized life; my T-shirts, insofar as they are mine, in virtue of the institution of private property, have a discursive dimension which, I suppose, warns you not to wear them. (3) Subjects are being produced (positioned, constructed) by virtually every unit of discourse.4 We might think of this by saying that just as every piece of discourse performs some illocutionary act, it also has the perlocutionary effect of positioning its receiver as a subject.5 When thinking of examples like my IRS letter, it is easy to picture this perlocutionary effect because we can name the purported subject position by a well-defined social role. But when a radio announcer proclaims "It's 1:00 P.M.," one wonders what the accompanying subject position might be. Where the discourse can be defined as addressing an individual in terms of a social role, one can grasp the Althusserian point and perhaps even concede that it has some ideological or political relevance. But what of cases of discourse that do not appear to stipulate a readily identifiable social role for their prospective receivers? To answer this, we must assume that the subject may be positioned not a nameable role but as a formal unity. That is, coherent discourse, inas only telligible discourse-for example, "It's 1:00 P.M."-has the force of manipulating the individuals who understand it into believing that the unity and coher-

4. The virtually here is to acknowledge that Althusser, at least, seems to allow that scientific discourse might in some sense be subjectless, though the text is incomplete on this point; see his "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1971, p. 171. Heath denies that his analyses are causal ones but then goes on to offer causal analyses. 5. For example, the concept of the "causation of the subject" is used explicitly throughout the text. Also, Heath speaks of cinema machines and the cinematic apparatus and this sounds causal to me. Moreover, his concept of contradictions seems to be causal, since contradictions are treated as compelling forces that producestates of affairs. Heath criticizes causal analyses by noting that searching for cause-effect relations is like believing that solving questions of historical materialism is easier than solving an equation in the first degree. I don't understand his point: does this mean that the phenomena under investigation involve more variables than an equation in the first degree? No one has ever claimed that causeeffect relations can only be analyzed by equations in the first degree. Heath's need for more sophisticated mathematical tools than equations of the first degree does not show that his analyses or the phenomena they investigate are not causal. I am not sure that Heath understands his own his argument, for his grasp of mathematics at other points in the book is pretty shaky-witness endorsement of an absurd foray into the foundations of arithmetic by Jacques-Alain Miller (p. 84).

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ence of the discourse is a property of themselves as subjects. Individuals are constituted or constructed as unified subjects from the outside, so to say.6 In this theory, the relevant outside independent variable is discourse. Discourse addresses the individual as a unified subject, and the individual mistakes the intelligibility, unity, and coherence of the discourse and its address as its own unity of self. The important presuppositions here are that (1) the belief in the unified subject is false, that is, in some sense the individual is not a unity; (2) this false experience of unity is a result of misrecognition; the individual apprehends the apparent coherence of the discourse and its address but wrongly attributes it to himself as a unified, self-determining, autonomous, homogeneous subject/agent; (3) the myth of subject unity and the construction of unified subject positions are ideological operations because the perpetuation of capitalism requires the belief in the unified subject, and unified subject/agents. Lacanian psychoanalysis presumably plays an indispensable explanatory role in this theory by providing an account of the psychic mechanism that underlies the occurrence of misrecognition--the mistaking by the individual of the apparent unity of the discourse for his own unity as a subject. The mechanism is called the Imaginary. Its origins are believed to reside in the earlier stages of our psychosexual development. This process culminates in our first experience of ourselves as individuated entities and is designated the "mirror stage." The external reflection of our image in the mirror gives us our first sense of wholeness and unity as an entity numerically distinct from other objects and persons. What is important in this is that our sense of self arrives from the outside, from the Other. In this respect the mirror experience can be seen as representing more than a single event. Rather, it summarizes the totality of our constitutions as individuals, shaped, as it were, from the outside (parents, society, and so on). We distinguish ourselves as selves versus others. But in fact we are constituted by the Other. This represents an originary contradiction (where contradictionis understood as designating a property of a state rather than a property of an argument). Our mirror stage experience of wholeness and individuality ironically arrives from the Other; thus, our belief in our unified, autonomous self as opposed to the Other is based on an extrapolation from the intuition of an outside unity. We are not autonomous but products of the Other; we are not unified subjects but composite organisms with roiling and conflicting drives, instincts, 6. The vocabulary and problematic of the Lacanian-Althusserian position are very Hegelian. Without accepting the Hegelian reconciliation of self and Other in the Absolute, Lacanian Marxists adopt the Hegelian characterization of the relation of the self and the Other; e.g., consider Hegel's "I am a being for itself which is for itself only through another. Therefore the Other penetrates me to the heart. I cannot doubt him without doubting myself, since self-consciousness is real only insofar as it recognizes its echo in another." See especially the section entitled "SelfConsciousness" in The Phenomenologyof Mind in order to grasp the importance of Hegelian thinking for Lacanian-Althusserianism.

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and desires. Yet through the Imaginary we construct a mythic inner self, unified and sui generis, which is a metaphysical illusion masking the fact that we are both heterogeneous complexes and products of the Other. The Imaginary continues to operate through later developmental stages, and it functions to transform apparent external unities into confirmations of the illusion of selfunity. Since these external unities are themselves only apparent, the Imaginary is also the mechanism through which illusions of external unity are apprehended (or, rather, misapprehended) as unities. The apparent coherence or unity of a movie, for example, produces the illusion of subject-unity in a spectator which, in turn, supports the persuasiveness of the illusion that the movie is unified. The Imaginary is the mechanism that responds to apparent external unity by producing illusions of subject-unity, which enhance the illusions of external unities. At this stage of exposition, it is useful to note the extraordinary variety of the apparent external unities that the Imaginary can use to project subjectunity. These extend from whole bodies to meaningful utterances; they include coherent films and aesthetically "unified" artworks. One wonders how these infinitely different stimuli can function in the same way as inputs in the causal system of subject construction. It would seem to be the vagueness and lack of specificity of the concept of unity in this account that is allowing its proponent to treat things as dissimilar as bodies and sentences as if they were functionally equivalent. The only connection is a verbal one; we call whole bodies unified in virtue of their continuity within the limits of their contour; coherent utterances are unified in virtue of their meaningfulness; a piece of music may be unified because of a recurring theme. Despite the fact that we may use the same word to speak of all three things, we are nevertheless discussing three different kinds of things. Once we undertake to describe them less amorphously, we must ask how such disparate causes manage to evoke the same effect, that is, why and how the mirror experience moves from projecting subject-unity on the basis of intuiting the reflection of a complete body to doing so on the basis of witnessing some point-of-view editing in a narrative film. In short, we need a further mechanism to explain the mechanism of the Imaginary, unless the latter has only been fabricated through the equivocation of the word unity. That is, there is no reason to assume that everything we are willing to call unified shares the same causal potential for the Imaginary. Moreover, if we say that the Imaginary is able to use all these different unities to project subject-unities because these different things all have the common property of self-identity, then we have traveled in a circle, since it is the Imaginary that is supposed to explain how things are grasped as self-identifiable entities. It is thus somewhat embarrassing to invoke the principle of identity to explain how the Imaginary works. And, of course, it is being assumed that these external stimuli are not truly homogeneous entities anyway, so how would something like a principle of identity be of any use whatsoever?

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Heath does not provide us with anything like proof of the preceding theoretical framework. Rather he asserts it, though not in the most perspicuous manner. Nevertheless, his analysis of film requires all this machinery if it is to succeed. The bulk of the text is occupied with showing the manner of operation of the formal devices of commercial narrative cinema: editing, camera movement, plotting, and so forth. This is a question of demonstrating how they comport themselves as apparent, coherent unities. Once these devices are said to project an illusion of unity, Heath repeats the Lacanian account of the way in which this causes subject-unity. When a device is described abstractly enough for nomination as a unity, the same story of subject construction is invoked. This means that most of the book is devoted to repetitiously rehearsing its laws of Lacanian subject construction. Psychoanalytic description, rather than what one would customarily identify as political criticism, dominates the text. Given Heath's presupposition as to the ideological significance of subject construction, however, this psychoanalysis is, by definition, political analysis. (Many Marxist film scholars might dissent on this point.7) Throughout Questionsof Cinema, Heath also examines styles of filmmaking that present alternatives to the dominant, commercial narrative style, and he remarks on their consequences for subject construction, ideology, and political emancipation. Despite the novelty of Heath's philosophical and psychoanalytic sources, the outline of his theory approximates the structure of most traditional academic film theories.8 His central task is the analysis of the commercial narrative cinema. He identifies the role of this cinema as the maintenance of ideology through the construction of subjects. In light of this role, film's determinant characteristic is its capacity to promote illusions of unity on the screen, which, in turn, provoke subject-unities. His analytic energies are then turned to a case-by-case review of various articulatory processes of the commercial narrative cinema to show how its various devices and their combination engender illusions of unity. Structures such as sync sound dialogue are examined for the way in which they exemplify his determinant characteristic of film. Heath's 7. The Marxist argument holds that the abstractness of Lacanian subject construction is ahistorical; it depicts a formal unity that is difficult to connect with any specificity to concrete historical developments. In this theory, what is the difference in the subject constitution of a medieval serf, a nineteenth-century German factory worker, and a white, middle-class, junior vice-president of Manufacturers Hanover Trust? Heath is aware of this charge on his left flank and often urges the importance of specific historical analyses. He never provides, however, a fullblown example of what he has in mind as an adequate, historically sensitive case study. This is an especially striking oversight; for, given the abstractness of Heath's psychology, the historical task has no readily perceptible means of proceeding under the aegis of his Lacanian generalities. Thus, one may not only chide Heath's failure to provide an example in terms of a failure to show how the Marxist analyst is to proceed, but also in terms of a failure to show that he can in fact proceed to concrete historical studies of subject construction while using the Lacanian conceptual framework. 8. For a discussion of the structure of classical film theories see my "Film History and Film Theory," Film Reader, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University, no. 4.

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subsidiary project is to speculate on the possibilities and structures of antiillusionist, politically progressive cinema. Though Heath leaves the presuppositions of his Lacanian-Althusserian framework unexamined, responsible readers cannot. I cannot show that all the formulations of the Lacanian-Althusserian line are irretrievably mistaken. But many are questionable enough and their central concepts so ill-defined that the burden of their proof can be shifted back to their proponents. The most glaring problem of the analytic framework is that its concept of ideology is too broad. By identifying ideology with subject construction, the concept has become roughly coextensive with that of a culture, and the term thus loses its pejorative force. Ordinarily we do not want our ideas and our thinking corrupted by ideology. For if a belief is ideological, that implies that it is (1) false and (2) that it is a rhetorical tenet of some practice of social domination-for example, "All black men want to rape white women." 9 Not all the beliefs enunciated or presupposed by a culture are ideological in this way. Moreover, it is self-defeating for a Marxist to employ such an overblown concept of ideology, since Marxism proposes to found a culture which under this approach will be ideological. Every community will have to have a culture. The negative force of ideologywill be lost, however, if every conceivable culture must be ideological. There will be no point in extricating ourselves from ideology if we do so only at the price of entering a new ideology, especially where that new ideology engages in the same "tyrannical" process of subject construction. Whereas, when the idea of ideology is connected with practices of demonstrably avoidabledomination where the beliefs in question are lies and falsehoods, one clearly feels the negative pressure of the charge "ideology" and is thereby moved to dissociate oneself from what is ideological. The hortatory force of ideologyis lost when ideology becomes culture, since the critical sense of the concept requires us to disavow ideology, while it is impossible (and politically unnecessary) to disavow all culture. The preceding observations are related to the question of the usefulness of the idea of the ideological construction of subject-unity. It is held that every bit of discourse enjoins a subject position. In Heath's hands, this focuses analysis on what might be thought of as relatively small sets of phenomena-camera movements, cutting patterns, the narrative structures of whole films. He provides moment-by-moment recitations of how, with each device, the projection of coherence results in the construction of subject-unities. The fluctuation of these momentary subject positions is said to be interminable, and Heath's role is to stress the factors of perturbation and equilibrium in this process. I will discuss the interminability thesis later. But for the present, I would merely like

9. I discuss broad and narrow conceptions of ideology in film studies in my "From Real to Reel: Entangled in Nonfiction Film," in Philosophical Exchange (forthcoming Fall 1983).

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to point to the awkwardness that the category of subject-address entails insofar as it predisposes an analyst to offer micro-descriptions of the subject-unity constructions that accompany every bit of discourse. It is no accident that the notion of subject-address commits one to blowby-blow accounts of the way in which each discursive unit provokes subjectunity construction, since the key claim for the importance of the discovery of subject-address is that every piece of discourse has a subject position-something that had hitherto gone unremarked. Research, therefore, proceeds by isolating and explaining the formation of these positions. But will this method ever succeed in illuminating the kind of ideological subjects that are relevant to social analysis? Let us make a rough, pragmatic distinction between two kinds of subjects: the occurrent,unified subjects constructed on a moment-to-moment basis by the interpellating discourse, and stable subjects, subjects with, among other things, personality profiles that remain relatively intact over long periods of time. An obedient worker, a misogynist, a bigot, and a bureaucrat are examples of what I am calling stable subjects. Ideological analysis would surely be concerned primarily with the creation of these sorts of stable subjects. But it is hard to see how we are to get from the construction of momentary subjectunities to stable ideological subject/agents of the type just listed. It is an act of faith rather than of science to believe that these momentary constructions amount to particularized, stable, ideologically instilled subject/agents. What are the patterned variables and regularities that transform momentary subjectunities into stable ideological subjects? Heath describes a battery of subject constructions, but it is impossible to see how these combine into ideologically mystified agents with the inclination to uphold practices of social domination. The idea of ideological address describes its almost formal subject-unities, but it does not explain the formation of ideological agents. One way to appreciate the force of the preceding charge is to note that though I may be addressed ideologically, and though I may understand that address as a coherent utterance - for example, "Unions are by their very nature anti-democratic"-I may reject the utterance. Or, to take an example from film, I may resist the heroic portrait of the KKK in The Birth of a Nation. These examples show that I am not the simple, reflex effect or imprint of every coherent signifier. But how do these resistances happen? And what are the differentia between being positioned as a believer-unity of an ideological address and as a disbeliever-unity? An answer to this might begin to establish the relation of occurrent subject construction and stable ideological subjects, but neither Althusser nor Heath provides us with many hints in this direction. At the very least, this suggests that address and subject-unity construction simpliciter are not particularly useful concepts for supplying us with an analysis of the formation of ideological agents. The animus of my objection here is not essentially political. I am not saying that the problem is that the concept of subject-unity is not helpful for revolutionary praxis (though probably it isn't).

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Rather my point is logical. That is, the concept of subject-address falls short of what it ostensibly promises to explain-the creation of ideological agents. A major assumption of Althusser's adopted by Heath is that subject-unity construction, in and of itself, is negative. On the face of it, this seems an unlikely premise. For if the problem of subject-unity construction is that it secures a necessary condition for further ideological operations-for example, for the creation of ideological agents-then it must be admitted that subjectunity construction also appears to afford a necessary condition for individuals to adopt emancipatory roles, to become revolutionary agents. Am I not interpellated by "Workers of the world unite!" and wouldn't the subject-unity imparted by the coherence of that text become a condition for revolutionary agency? If this is so, then how can subject-unity constitute a special problem apart from the problem of the specific kind of role-agency with which it is, in fact, correlated? That is, the theory's negative attitude toward the construction of subject-unities is unmotivated unless a persuasive account is offered of the way revolutionary agents are constituted without presupposing subject-unity construction. It is of no theoretical value to say that true revolutionary agents are or will be constituted differently from those of capitalism; an adequate theory must portray the why and the wherefore of this. Althusser provides an argument for the negative attitude toward subjectunity construction: "The individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e., in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e., in order that he shall make the gestures of his subjection 'all by himself."' 10Here is a statement of determinism with respect to subject-address. We might call it discourse determinism, wherein the subject is an effect of the discourse (of the signifier). Such a position is fraught with the difficulties of determinism plus some of its own making. Those of its own making derive from the primacy of place that it accords discourse; the postulated causal nexus between subject position followed by subjection is implausible. Hearing does not necessitate believing, let alone complying. If subject-address has causal efficacy, how does it connect up with the individual's conative network? Also, what of the common experience of rejecting what we are told? Unless we get an explanation of these cases that fits with the rest of discourse determinism, then we have no reason to believe that we are always subjectedby interpellation. It may be urged that whenever I reject one subject-address, it is because I have already been positioned by an earlier, contradictory subject-address. But why do I choose one among rival subjectaddresses? Can an account be given of that which decisively precludes all free action on the part of the individual? Furthermore, if it is argued that the individual is unfree because he is initially an empty organism shaped completely by

10.

Althusser, p. 182.

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some discourse, then it would seem that the definition of freedom is too extreme. It amounts to the claim that the only free individual would be sui generis. But the relevant idea of freedom is based on a belief that agents can do otherwise and not that they ultimately create themselves. As Althusser's argument indicates, one of the grounds for the negative attitude toward subject-unity construction is that it involves an illusion: I believe I am freely acting when I am only being acted upon by ideology. This formulation seems to ride on a specious notion of free action. There is, however, another, related illusion that the theory attributes to subjects: I believe that I am unified, but in fact I am a construction. Several problems with the putative illusion arise here. First, unity and constructionare not mutually incompatible terms. The George Washington Bridge is unified, and it was and is a construction. Thus, the fact that someone believes x is unified does not preclude the belief that x is a construction. Also, the fact that a subject believes he is a unified subject does not entail that he holds the supposedly false belief that he is not a construction. Furthermore, I may truly believe that I am a unity and yet be unaware of the process by which I was constituted. The belief in subjectunity, in other words, does not, on its own, suggest any false or illusory beliefs about whether or not the individual believes himself to be a construction. Of course, an agent may believe both that he is a unity and that he is not a construction. But it does not seem to be commonly believed, in either modern capitalist or socialist society, that individuals are not constructions. Nurture, environmental conditioning, behavioral modification as well as the admission that people change over time are commonplaces rather than secrets in contemporary industrial society. That is, if it is a common belief that people are unities under capitalism, that belief is conjoined with the logically compatible belief that people are, in various respects, constructions.11

11. There is an analogous argument current in academic film writing which is applied to films rather than subjects. It is held that when audiences perceive films as unified, they are deceived because the film is really a production. This argument involves the ambiguity of the word production. It suggests both a process and a finished product. Film theorists claim that by presenting itself as a finished product, the film effaces the fact that it was made by a process, thereby offering itself as a natural artifact or event. The film is not a unity because the process of production has been deleted from its final representation. But since there is no contradiction between the two senses in which a film is a production -a film is a process of production before its release and a product at the time of its release- there is no reason to postulate that it must efface one of these conflicting facts. There is no reason to deny that the film is a unified production because its process of production is not represented in the product-production. When speaking of unified films, the sense of production as process is irrelevant. Supposedly, commercial narrative films are illusions because they mask the fact that they are the result of a process of production. Audiences accept such films as natural unities because the fact that these films result from processes of production is masked. This argument flies in the face of even casual observation. People do not mistake films for actual chains of events. The whole institution of film-with its emphasis on stars, the acquisition of new properties, etc. -is based on the audience's knowledge that films involve processes of production.

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Since the conjunction of a belief in subject-unity and subject construction is not necessarily contradictory, the source of falsity or illusion in the belief in subject-unity must lie elsewhere. The idea of subject construction is the main discovery of the theory. Therefore, the belief in subject-unity must be the relevant false belief. The theory must, at this point, offer some compelling arguments to demonstrate the falsity of the individual's confidence in being a unified subject. The attack on the belief in personal identity is longstanding in philosophy; it has been advanced by Hume12 and Nietzsche. 3 In the context of the Althusserian position, the unity of the subject is denied for apparently two reasons. First, it is believed that there is no subject, unified or otherwise, because the self is always the production of the Other. We are constituted from the outside. We are not unified, since not all the causes of our decisions are internal to us. Effectively, this implies that the self, or anything worth (metaphysically) calling the self, would have to be sui generis. But this entails defining the self out of existence; of course, we are left with only the Other. Nevertheless, one wants to know whether we've got hold of a problem with the self or a problem with the definition. Concepts like self, subject, and autonomy play a range of descriptive and explanatory roles in everyday language, and in scientific and moral theories. They are applied to a cluster of phenomena to which they refer. But being sui generis does not appear to be a necessary condition for their application. I may make an autonomous decision to become a lawyer, but this does not require that I have invented the legal institution any more than my decision not to steal requires that I wrote the Ten Commandments. I inherited the possibility of making these decisions from the Other but that does not entail that I do not behave freely and autonomously. The error of the Althusserian position seems to lie in proceeding from the correct recognition that the self cannot possibly be totally disjunct from the Other, to a move in which the self is entirely swallowed by the Other. This translates into an impossibly demanding definition of the free subject rather than one that defines the nature of free subjects in virtue of the options presented them; as Engels suggests, freedom emerges within the bounds of necessity.14 The second line of argument against the existence of subject-unity seems to rely on the existence of the unconscious. At any point in time, the individual is a mass of forces, many of which elude the purview of consciousness. Some aspects of the individual, like the deep generative rules of his grammar, are merely unknown to the individual, while others are repressed; these latter are the contents of the unconscious. Subject-unity is a myth constructed by ignoring many of the properties of the individual, including not only those that are 12. 13. 14.

David Hume, A Treatiseof Human Nature, Book I, part iv, sections 1, 5, and especially 6. E.g., Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Goodand Evil, especially Chap. I, sections 12 and 16-23. Frederick Engels, HerrEugenDuhring'sRevolutionin Science,trans. E. Bruns, London, p. 128.

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unknown, but more importantly those that are unconscious. The individual always exceeds the subject-unity. The conflicting drives and forces of the unconscious are sublated from our concept of the self. The subject-unity is a construct. The subject-unity is an illusion. Here we see the existence of the unconscious being used to make a metaphysical point. But exactly what metaphysical point is being made or refuted? Is the fact of the unconscious supposed to refute my belief that I have a personal identity over time, that I am the same person today that I was two weeks ago? This belief does not rest on an assumption that I have all the same properties I had two weeks ago, nor does it assume that I or anyone else should be able to enumerate every one of my properties of either two weeks ago or today. My lack of knowledge about many of my properties does not seem pertinent to my belief that I am the same substance today as I was yesterday. If I learned to my surprise that one of my properties was "the being who was almost killed by his angry third grade teacher on December 1, 1956," I might be amused but I wouldn't feel that this ignorance on my part challenged my belief that I was a unified substance over time. In terms of the unconscious and its contents, even its conflicting and contradictory contents, a belief in my personal identity over time commits me to believing that I have had the same, continuing, numerically distinct unconscious over time -that I have not had someone else's unconscious, so to speak- but I need not be committed to knowing all of the contents of my unconscious in order to believe that I am the same person over time. The above argument is meant to show that the fact of the unconscious does not confront the metaphysical question of personal identity where the claim that there is a personal identity over time amounts to the belief that I am a continuing subject, numerically distinct from other human substances. But perhaps the fact of the unconscious is supposed to address another metaphysical issue, viz., the claim that a person is a self-conscious being. This claim often arises when theorists attempt to make a distinction between persons and nonpersons. In making this division - in saying what a member of the class of persons is-theoreticians often include as a characteristic of persons that they be self-monitoring or self-aware. But if persons have an unconscious dimension, then there are necessarily some things that they do not monitor and of which they are not aware. Therefore, the idea of a self-monitoring person is a mythical construct. This argument, of course, is too hasty. In defining persons partially in terms of self-consciousness, it is not necessary to claim that they are conscious of everything about themselves. Self-consciousness amounts to the ability to audit a number of one's own responses but not to understand every mechanism - biological and psychic - of one's own organism. The existence of the unconscious, since it does not exclude the possibility of some areas of selfconsciousness, does not directly confront the metaphysical claim that there are such things as persons and that this concept is more than a fabrication.

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The traditional philosophical position closest to the Althusserian attack on subject-unity is that of Nietzsche.15 In Nietzsche, we find the theses that the "I" of the cogito is an illusion, that we acquire our identity through language, that the hypostatization of the "I' is a confusion of grammar, and that this spurious entity is used to support the rules of society in terms of the myth of responsible agency. The crux of Nietzsche's attack is that the "I" of common sense and philosophy is a construct; Nietzsche calls it an interpretation. It is akin to the postulation of a theoretical entity like an atom. It cannot be perceived directly. It is not a simple reflection of all the flux of forces it stands for. It is what Nietzsche refers to as a fiction. For purposes of argument, we might admit part of Nietzsche's attack and at the whole. Let us assume that the "I"is postulated (even though this balk yet is an extremely controversial assertion). For Nietzsche, it is enough to say that if something is postulated, then it is in error. Nietzsche says this because he assumes that if there is any sense to the traditional concept of truth, it would be explicated by something like a perfect-picture, correspondence theory of truth. Armed with this reasoning he is able to discount the claims of philosophy and common sense. Every concept falls short of a perfect, automatic re-presentation of the world. One need not, however, accept this polemically charged conception of truth and there are, furthermore, some very respectable arguments for a realist position regarding theoretical entities postulated through a process of inference to the best explanation.16 The point of enlisting Nietzsche here is that he seems to offer the clearest expression of the metaphysical sentiments that underlie Heath's manner of discussing the subject. Every hypostatization of the subject is an illusion because it falls short of a perfect representation of the individual. Anything short of such a representation is somehow "incomplete" and "false." Ideology in all its workings, including film, proliferates subject positions so that recognition of the inadequacy of the "I"to reflect reality is obscured. But this presumes that the task of any representation-linguistic, conceptual, mental, and so on-is the detailed replication of its object in all its ontological fullness. And this position presumes that anything less is a falsification. But one can argue that these premises, though they guarantee skepticism, are bad accounts of the nature of 15. Nietzsche, Beyond Goodand Evil. Also, in The Gay Science, Nietzsche argues that consciousness only develops with language and that our thoughts even about ourselves always derive from society. But here Nietzsche may only be making the Wittgensteinian point that "There would be no question of ascribing one's own states of consciousness or experience to anything unless one also ascribed, or were ready and able to ascribe, states of consciousness, or experiences, to others of the same logical type as that thing to which one ascribes one's own states of consciousness. The condition of reckoning oneself as a subject of such predicates is that one should also reckon others as subjects of such predicates. . ... If only mine, then not mine at all" (P. F. Strawson, Individuals, London, Methuen, 1959, pp. 104, 109). 16. E.g., Hilary Putnam, "Realism and Reason," in Meaning and the Moral Sciences, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.

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representation and falsity. This, of course, is not the place to attempt to erect a competing metaphysical/epistemological theory. My aim is only to forewarn film scholars that the foundations of Heath's project are anything but settled. It is commonly assumed in cinema studies that Lacanian psychoanalysis leaves the Kantian transcendental ego swamped in its wake. But it is difficult to see the relevance of psychoanalysis to the claims made for the unity of apperception by Kantians.17 Psychoanalysis seems rather to pertain to what Kantians would include in the realm of the empirical ego. This is not to assent to the notion of a transcendental ego, but only to say that psychoanalysis does not drive it away as neatly as a cross does a vampire. Nor do I understand why ideologically motivated film theorists are so preoccupied with attacking the transcendental ego. Other conceptions of the subject, like Hume's bundle theory and logical behaviorism, have been conjectured under capitalism, and these seem to be theories that can be as readily absorbed into the culture of capitalism as can Zen Buddhism and Catholicism. Capitalism does not seem to require one ruling conception of the subject for its continuity. The transcendental ego is not an indispensable element of capitalist mythology, nor is it clear that it or any specific theory of comparable generality is a prerequisite for capitalism. Film theorists, therefore, are not assured of finding the key to all capitalist ideology through the attempted isolation of something like thecapitalist subject. Lacanian metapsychology, as it blends into metaphysics, may just be the wrong starting point for the analysis of ideology in film. II.

A Brief Digression. The Legacyof Brecht'sErrors

Bertolt Brecht supplied a number of the operational assumptions of mainstream film theory in the '70s, especially insofar as that theory was concerned with the relation of the dominant (narrative, capitalist) cinema and the alternative (nonnarrative, putatively anti-capitalist) cinema. Brecht was drafted into service by Godard, who cited Brecht as the source of his own attempt to create an alternate style to that of commercial cinema. But Godard misinterpreted Brecht, imitating the latter's politically committed reflexivity but ignoring Brecht's equally politically motivated commitment to entertainment and accessibility. The results were works by Godard and his imitators of increasingly hermetic reflexivity-Marxism merging with modernism. This error was not Brecht's but the film world's and especially film academia's misappropriation of him. 17. See Immanuel Kant, Critiqueof PureReason,especially "Criticismof the Third Paralogism of Transcendental Psychology."There Kant points out that the unity of the self as the transcendental unity of apperceptionneither entails nor is equivalent to the identity of a person. Psychoanalysis does not confront the issue of the transcendentalself at the proper level of generality. For an example, though probably an unsuccessful one, of a direct confrontationwith the Kantian variety of self-unity see Jean-Paul Sartre, TheTranscendence of theEgo, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957.

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There is, however, another error traceable to Brecht from which he is less easily exonerated. It derives from the conflation of verisimilitude with ideological illusion. In contrasting his revolutionary Epic Theater with prevailing styles of naturalism, Brecht writes, Just as the composer wins back his freedom by no longer having to create atmosphere so that the audience may be helped to lose itself unreservedly in the events on the stage, so also the stage designer gets considerable freedom as he no longer has to give the illusion of a roomor a localitywhen he is buildinghis sets. It is enough for him to give hints, though these must make statements of greater historical or social interest than does the real setting.18 and Restoring the theater's reality as theater is now a precondition for any possibility of arriving at realistic images of human social life. Too much heighteningof the illusion in the setting, together with a "magnetic" way of acting that gives the spectator the illusion of being present at a fleeting, accidental "real event," create such an impression of naturalness that one can no longer interpose one's judgments, imagination and reactions, and must simply conform by sharing in the experience and become one of "nature's" objects. The illusion created by the theatre must be a partial one, in order that it may always be recognized as an illusion.19 These passages indicate that Brecht believes that the mimetic techniques of staging create illusions of reality in spectators.20 Moreover, like Plato2l and

Bertolt Brecht, "A Short Organum for the Theater," from Brechton Theater,ed. and trans. 18. John Willet, New York, Hill and Wang, 1964, section 72, p. 203 (italics added). 19. Brecht, "From the Mother Courage Model," Brechton Theater,p. 219 (italics added). One, of course, wonders if Brecht can consistently reject naturalism tout court given the pragmatic instrumentalism he adopts toward symbol systems in "Against Georg Lukacs," New Left Review, no. 84 (March-April 1974). I think that one way to assuage this tension might be for exegetes of Brecht to say that the "illusionism" quotations that I am stressing in this section are off-hand or careless remarks of Brecht that do not really reflect the central parts of his thinking on this matter. That may be true. Nevertheless, I still feel it is important to examine the claims of the interpretation of Brecht that I characterize above because something like that interpretation is shared by many cine-Brechtians as well as by certain exponents of avant-garde theater. a theory that says One argument in favor of an illusion theory of spectator response-i.e., spectators believe they are somehow witnessing the "real thing"-is to ask a psychological question: "Why would audiences cry and scream unless they believed the events before them were actually occurring?" I do not examine this type of argument in the section above because it is not one that cine-Brechtians rely on. However, for the record, let me say that I would begin to answer it by denying the psychological assumption that we are only moved by events that we believe are actual.

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Kant,22 Brecht takes a dim view of mimesis. (Throughout, I use mimesis as shorthand for visual verisimilitude.)For Brecht, not only are techniques of verisimilitude illusions in themselves, but they also facilitate further illusions. They prime the audience to accept the ideological falsehoods enacted in the plot. They also induce acceptance of falsehoods that inhere in classical plotting as such -the illusion that everyone behaves as the characters of the narrative do, the illusion of compelling momentum, that is, the way the event is presented is the way it had to happen-that society cannot be changed. This illusion theory of naturalist theater was adopted by film theorists and avant-garde filmmakers, who applied it to the dominant narrative cinema. The theory has three tiers of illusions: of verisimilitude, of narrative structure, and of the specific story. Applied to a film like Rocky III, the theory would be exemplified in the following way: The photographic image itself, plus set details, costuming, and so on, promote the illusion of cinematic verity; the genre structure of the plot suggests as a social law that the only way to deal with uncivilized misfits like Slugger Lang is to beat their brains in; the specific saga of Rocky is a gaudy, optimistic, ideological advertisement for the power of positive thinking and the indomitable potential of the individual will. Each of these illusions are ideologically motivated and are coordinated to produce an overall ideological effect. Cinema scholars can study the interrelation of these tiers of illusion or they can study the tiers separately. Much of the ambitious film theory of the '70s, such as Heath's, has concentrated on analyses of narrative illusionism and of the illusionism of cinematic verisimilitude, and on analyses of the interrelation of these two tiers of illusion. Though one can understand how film scholars are extrapolating from Brecht, the move is inadvisable, since the Brechtian framework is riven with errors. We are asked to believe that mimetic staging and, by extension, mimetic photography are illusions. But what can be meant by illusion in this context? Clearly, it means something which leads to a false belief. But this meaning must, of course, be even more refined because anything can be used to lead someone at some time into a false belief. Illusion, therefore, must be something that has a high probability, in normal circumstances, of leading normal subjects into false beliefs. But what false beliefs do naturalistic staging and mimetic In writing this section I have benefited greatly from discussion with James Hamilton as 20. well as from reading his "'Illusion' and the Distrust of Theatre," The Journal of Aestheticsand Art Criticism, Fall 1982. Hamilton's essay deals not only with the reputed illusionism of naturalist staging, but also with the reputed illusions of naturalistic acting, a topic I do not discuss here. 21. Plato attacks mimesis on epistemic grounds in Republic, Book X. It is this attack that Hegel attacks in the opening of his "Introduction" to the Philosophy of Fine Art. It is also interesting to note, from the perspective of contemporary film criticism, that Plato not only condemned mimesis on epistemic grounds but also condemned mimetic drama for inclining spectators toward incorrect behavior (cf. Republic, X, 606d). 22. Immanuel Kant, "Analytic of the Sublime," in CritiqueofJudgment, section 42.

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cinematography lead normal viewers to embrace? Purportedly, viewers mistake the events depicted by these means of representation for actual events. But this is absurd; the mistaking of plays and films for the real thing by yokels is a standard, universally appreciated, age-old joke of both theater and film because one would have to be abnormally dim-witted to make such an error. Most plays and films, when seen in standard viewing conditions, don't look like events and locales outside the theater. Things like the monocular station point, scale variation, and black-and-white photography work against a film's being taken for reality while the missing fourth walls should persuade uninformed theater goers that something is amiss. But, of course, the telling point is that theater goers and film goers are informed; theater going and film going are institutionalized activities; the normal spectator in the normal viewing circumstances is there to see representations, not the real thing. The apocryphal yokels are funny because of their extraordinary ignorance. They are not normal viewers. Maybe they are such stereotypical comic butts because everyone can feel superior to them. There is, perhaps, a sense in which "x is an illusion of y" means simply that "x looks like y." A stage flat is an illusion of a house if it looks like a house in certain relevant respects. This does not mean that it looks exactly like a house. Indeed, it may not look like a house at all in the sense that it can be taken for a house, and yet it may look like a house across a limited number of dimensions it has a door and windows while also being obviously a piece of canvas. In this sense a spectator can call the stage flat an illusion when that means that it looks like a house because it has certain representationally relevant similarities to a house, but saying this does not commit the spectator to believing that the stage flat is a house. Let us call this the (epistemically) benign sense of illusion. The Brechtian, ideological sense of illusion, however, regards mimetic stage flats and film images in a way that implies that normal spectators are deceived or ensnared in falsity by verisimilitude. The argument seems to succeed by initially describing its objects by means of the benign sense of illusion and then fallaciously switching to the deception sense of illusion mid-proof. In respect to its capacity for equivocation, perhaps the benign sense is not so benignant after all, and might better be dropped altogether. The problem with the deception sense of illusion as applied to mimesis is that it takes at face value effusive critical claims like "the play was so good it seemed real." These are obviously tropes of hyperbolic praise-the play was so good that it achieved something impossible (it seemed unequivocably real)and not the data of a theory of mimesis. Plays and films are often spoken of as if they were optical illusions-presenting misleading appearances, like straight sticks in streams. This talk may prompt theorists to regard plays and films as deceptions. But such theorists are victims of their own metaphors. For optical illusions only become full-blooded illusions when they provoke the formation of false beliefs in the face of obvious

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counter-evidence or information. And, as psychologists never tire of pointing out, human organisms do not simply rely on what is imprinted on their retinas for their beliefs about the world but on other evidence and information that surround the moment of perception. I do not turn the image in my bathroom mirror into a belief that my doppelganger is before me not only because I know about mirrors (though that is very crucial) but also because the doppelganger hypothesis is refuted by my other senses-just as my hand corrects my eye when dealing with straight sticks in water. The likelihood that a normal perceiver could be deceived by a film image drops precipitously as soon as he can perform physical operations in relation to the screen; I can change my position enough (even in my theater seat) to realize the visual array is not threedimensional if I am ever in doubt about film's oddly glowing "realities." And with theater and film, even if there were not ordinarily, in fact, other cues, my knowledge that these appearances are presented as representations within the institutions of theater and cinema would be enough to block the occurrence of (epistemic) illusion, just as I would reject these appearances as real because they don't fit coherently with the rest of my knowledge about the way the world is physically, architecturally, and socially (do people usually squabble in kitchens with views fronting on fifteen-hundred seat auditoriums?). And, of course, even though plays and films may employ optical illusions as constituent elements, entire plays and films are not optical illusions. They are marked and disseminated as what they are - plays and films - and they trick no one except theoreticians. Nor are the producers of these spectacles interested in fooling spectators. Imagine the chagrin of the makers of Tora! Tora! Tora! had the opening of that film not been reported in the arts section of The New YorkTimesbut on the front page as a news item under the headline-"World War II Breaks Out on Broadway." In short, the idea that the practice of mimesis and representation can be explicated by reference to an epistemicallypejorativeconceptof illusion is utterly confused. Defenders of the position may claim that there is some special sense of illusion that I am insensitive to. If so then it is up to them to produce it. If mimesis does not produce the illusion of real events, there is even less reason to believe that in and of itself, it produces the illusion that society cannot be changed. With respect to this claim the Brechtian line is ambiguous, for it holds that mimesis is not just illusory but also conducive to further illusions. Mimetic appearances abet the audience's acceptance of the ideological falsehoods that are stated in the plot and implied by the plot structure. For Brecht, mimetic appearances accomplish this by putting the spectators in a sort of trance which paralyses their critical faculties in respect to social falsehoods. Mimetic appearance is rather like the immobilizing sting of the spider. Mimesis and diegesis are thus synchronized in order to dispense vicious propaganda. The postulated connection between mimetic appearances and uncritical acceptance is a causal hypothesis. As armchair psychology, it is a reasonable

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formulation; it is neither self-contradictory nor silly. But it needs to be weighed against the evidence. And once it is matched with the available data, the thesis as stated, though reasonable, appears absolutely false. Think of all the critical faculties that were not paralyzed by an exercise in verisimilitude like Fort Apache, the Bronx. Moreover, one asks of those viewers who thought the film was truthful about communal life in the South Bronx whether it was the mimetic cinematography that got to them rather than the fact that they already believed certain myths about the unrelenting violence of black social life? And wouldn't such viewers continue to believe these myths if the film were shown out of focus or if the production had been a stick-figure cartoon? Also, the lack of verisimilitude does not correlate to the operation of the spectators' critical faculties. Witness Jordan Belson's religioso-cosmic abstractions, which evoke an ultimate sense of inevitability without a glimmer of mimesis. Nor does the practice of revealing the film to be a film (by alluding internally to the process of filmmaking) guarantee that the film will be viewed critically. Both Roma and Clowns are about themselves and their author, but Fellini's reflexivity only subserves his macrocosmic/microcosmic sensibility, which transforms everything into yet another emblem of his life-affirmative belief in the zesty pluralism of reality. Indeed, one suspects that Fellini's intrusions in the films allow him to get away with his shameless exploitation of shopworn universalistic (clown as man, city as life) images. Be that as it may, the belief that visual mimesis necessarily inclines the spectator toward acceptance of the ideological falsehoods of the diegesis is ill-fated. Similarly, the claim that narrative structures per se instill ideological complacency deserves demonstration rather than repetition. For what are we to say of particular films like Rules of the Game, Kammeradschaft,Mother, and La Terra Trema, which, though classically narrated, all in their different ways suggest that society should be otherwise? I have introduced the Brechtian framework because it provided the working model for most mainstream film theory in the '70s. Heath's position is basically a variation on that model. But the model itself is not in very good shape, and variations on it are likely to preserve its weak points. They also develop problems of their own in the process of further elaborating it. This is true of Heath, who tries to offer an Althusserian-Lacanian account of the way in which cinematic mimesis and diegesis are ideological illusions, and of the manner of their coordination in the production of a single ideological effect. Moreover, Heath holds mimesis and diegesis to be congruent in terms of the means by which they produce ideological illusions. He fleshes out the Brechtian model by making subject-unity the focal ideological effect of his analysis of narrative, mimetic cinema. One might say that in doing this he is providing the psychological underpinning for the premises of the Brechtian model - though one might marvel that anyone would bother to attempt to itemize the causal substructure of phenomena as unlikely and as unproven as the various Brechtian

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illusions. Nonexistent phenomena have no causal substructure. In fact, Heath seems to be trying to explain some extremely shaky claims about what is dubiously thought of as cinematic illusionism by means of some equally suspect psychology. III. NarrativeSpace Like other cine-Brechtians, Heath holds that in the dominant narrative cinema mimesis and diegesis represent a coordinated system for producing ideological illusions. The key illusion that Heath is concerned with is subjectunity. Mimesis, which is discussed primarily in terms of perspective, and narrative each create subject-unities in the same way; they both supposedly position or centersubjects in relation to the space represented in the film's visual imagery. Perspective is said to do this because a perspectival image entails a single (putatively unified and central) viewing point for the spectator. Each perspectivally correct cinematographic image entails an exact station point from which the cone of vision emanates. That point is the subject's position. Heath claims that the operation of perspective in film faces certain formal problems that do not exist in painting. These problems are a result of the fact that there is movement of character and camera in film. This movement putatively provokes a crisis within the perspective system, since, for example, with every cut the subject position is altered. How does the dominant cinema hide this so that the spectator does not become apprized of the disunity of subject positions? The answer is found in narrative. The "disunity" of changing perspectival points is masked by the unity and coherence of the story and by the coherence of various narrative-cinematic devices, such as point-of-view editing. In Heath's variation of the cine-Brechtian position, mimesis does not simply pave the way for the illusions of diegesis: diegesis "supports" mimesis as well by occulting the shortcomings of the mimetic, perspectival system in regard to that system's positioning of the subject in film. Thus, in an important way, the coherent space in films of the dominant cinema is first and foremost narrative space. Narrative enhances the effectiveness of cinematographic mimesis, and that enhancement, in turn, increases the effectiveness of the ideological address of the film as a whole. IlIa. Heath on Perspective Linear perspective is built into the camera. It is a system of representation that is derived from the optical theory of vision. When a picture of x follows the rules of perspective, it is said that the picture delivers a sheaf of light rays to an appropriately positioned viewer which is in pertinent respects isomorphic to the visual array that x would deliver to the fixed monocular station point of a viewer of x in the world. For centuries, perspective was regarded as a nonrela-

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tivistic, nonconventional system for accurately depicting the world. It was held to be the best means for achieving pictorial fidelity.23 In recent years, this position has corre under attack.24 Heath believes that perspective is a relativistic convention that is presented as an accurate depiction of the look of the physical world for ideological purposes. Heath opens his attack on perspective by noting its historical origins in the Renaissance. He emphasizes the way in which this system is based on the model of a visual pyramid with the eye at the apex. But he also adds that what is shown by a perspectivally correct cinematographic image is not a perfect replica of what we ordinarily see. Perspective is based on the presupposition of a fixed, monocular station point, whereas we most typically view things binocularly, scanning constantly, readjusting our vantage point on an array, and so forth. Thus, perspective does not really replicate the world as we ordinarily see it. This leads Heath to call it an ideal, a utopian ideal, by which he means, in part, that it is an idealization of normal perception. There is, moreover, something deceptive about it because it is proffered as the way we see when in fact we do not customarily view the world under the constraints of the linear perspective system. We of Western culture, furthermore, have spread our ideal of vision as part of our general program of imperialism. Quoting the art historian Pierre Francastel, Heath avers, "in the fifteenth century, the human societies of Western Europe organized, in the material and intellectual senses of the term, a space completely different from that of the preceding generations; with their technical superiority, they progressively imposed that space over the planet" (p. 29). Heath, like Francastel, believes that perspective is a convention that must be seen as relative to a certain historical moment. "Spaces are born and die like societies; they live; they have a history" (p. 29). We have come to accept perspective as an accurate depiction of space but this is really a matter of habituation. "For five centuries men and women exist at ease in that space; the Quattrocento system provides a practical representation of the world which in time appears so natural as to offer its real representation, the immediate translation In this section I am particularly indebted to Alan Tormey's "Seeing Things: Pictures, 23. Paradoxes, and Perspective," in PerceivingArtworks, ed. by John Fisher, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1980. I am adopting the concept of pictorial fidelity from Tormey. Recent attacks on perspective include Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, Indianapolis, 24. Bobbs-Merrill, 1968; Marx Wartofsky, "Rules and Representation: The Virtues of Constancy and Fidelity Put in Perspective," Erkenntniss12 (1978); and Wartofsky, "Art History and Perception," in PerceivingArtworks. Major defenses of perspective include J. J. Gibson, The Senses Consideredas PerceptualSystems, Boston, 1966; Gibson, "Pictures, Perspective and Perception," Leonardo 4 (1971); E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, New York, 1960; Gombrich, "The 'What' and the 'How': Perspective, Representation and the Phenomenal World," in Logic andArt, ed. R. Rudner and I. Scheffler, Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1972; and Gombrich, "Mirror and Map: Theories of Pictorial Representation," Philosophical Transactionsof the Royal Society of London, B., Biological Sciences,vol. 270, no. 903 (March 13, 1975). Margaret Hagan summarizes a number of the positions in the debate in "Picture Perception: Toward a Theoretical Model," PsychologicalBulletin, vol. 81, no. 8 (1974).

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of reality itself" (pp. 29-30). But it is not a "real representation" seemingly because, though it presents itself as a replica of ordinary vision, it is not. Also, its ideal of vision is itself ideological because it engenders the production of ideological subject-unities. Heath makes this point by exploiting the similarity of the terminology used in the description of perspective with the terminology that describes subject construction. Speaking of G. Ten Doesschate's description of perspective, Heath says, The component elements of that account should be noted: the possible exact match for the eye of picture and object, the deceptive illusion; the centre of the illusion, the eye in place. What is fundamental is the idea of the spectator at a window, an "apertafinestra"thatgives a view on the world-

framed,

centred,

harmonious

. . . (p. 28).

The perspective ideal of vision is coincident with illusionary subject-unity. It implements subject positioning, literally suggesting a correct place for the spectator. The pivotal point in this argument is that perspective is an ideal rather than an accurate way of depicting the world. Though it presents itself as a replica of vision, it is not a perfect duplication of the way we see. But though it is true that perspective does not replicate ordinary vision, I am not convinced that this is the purpose of perspective, nor does it seem to me to decide the case against perspective as an accurate, indeed as the most accurate, means of pictorially depicting the world. In other words, I don't believe that Heath has defeated the nonrelativistic, nonconventionalist claims for perspective. To defend the accuracy of perspective we must clarify what perspective is supposed to be accurate about. If we say that perspective must, in order to be accurate, afford a perfect replica of normal vision, then perspective is not accurate. But is this the right requirement for accuracy? Heath can obviously find theoreticians who will make claims of this sort for perspective's accuracy. But are they correct? I think not. When I say that a perspective picture of a scene in nature is accurate I do not mean that it is a perfect replica of anything, including human vision. Rather I mean that it provides accurate information about certain aspects of the appearance of the natural scene; of course, the information perspective drawings excel in providing concerns the appearance of the relative positions of things in space and the distances between them. No other system of pictorial representation is as good at giving us this kind of information. Other systems of representation, the ancient Egyptian for example, had other purposes than the perspective system does. But it cannot be denied that for the purpose of pictorially projecting the placement of things in space the perspective system is superior-that is, contains more accurate informationthan the Egyptian system. In fact, the perspective system is more accurate in terms of affording spatial information than any other mimetic pictorial system.

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Two points in my argument need to be extended. First, there is the difference between the claim that a system provides a perfect replica of the world or vision and the claim that it provides an accurate replica. For accuracy is a matter of degree. My claim is that in the nonconventionalist sense, perspective, transculturally considered, is the most accurate mimetic representational system. But how do we measure accuracy across representational systems? We can't, unless we stipulate the meaning of accuracy in respect to some specific dimension. This leads to my second point: when nonrelativists claim accuracy for perspective, they are saying that no competing mimetic representational system is as accurate as perspective in rendering information about the appearance of the relative disposition of objects in space.25 This, it seems to me, is incontestable. Furthermore, perspective accomplishes this because it has been grounded in the laws of vision. No other system of representation is based on scientific laws in this way. And the laws from which perspective derives are in no sense conventional, arbitrary, or adopted by fiat. They are laws. This is the source of what gives the system the accuracy it has in recreating the spatial appearance of the world. Moreover, the laws of the scientific theory in question were not adopted as a result of a social compact or decision; they were not invented; they were discovered.26 The relativist, considering the preceding argument, will believe that he has located a slip up. For to make my argument I must stipulatethat the relevant sense of accuracy is accuracy in respect of the disposition of objects in space. This is correct but it does not cut against my argument since it is a conditional one -if we want pictorial accuracy or fidelity about the appearance of the disposition of objects in space, then perspective is best suited to the purpose. I admit that we may not be especially concerned with this kind of accuracy, but this is beside the point. If we want to saw through metal, then we do best to use a hack saw; if we want accurate spatial information about the appearance of the world from our pictures, then we use perspective. In neither case are we playing by the rules of society. We are adapting to the structure of the world. The relativist is right in arguing that there are many different representational systems. And many of these systems are not devoted to giving accurate information about the way the world appears-for example, abstract expressionism. These nonperspectival systems may interest us-especially from an aesthetic point of view - because they have features and purposes besides those of delivering accurate spatial appearances. And for purposes other than delivering accurate spatial information, these other systems may be moredesir-

25. The notion of perspectival accuracy as relative to contrasting pictorial systems, for example, can be found in John White, TheBirthandRebirthof PictorialSpace,New York, Harper and Row, 1972, p. 125. 26. Tormey, p. 69.

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able and superior to the perspective system. But if one is committed to pictorial fidelity in respect to spatial appearance, then perspective is, as a result of its scientific origins, the best means to that end.27 We may make our point in a related but slightly different way by drawing a distinction between the genus, representational systems, and the species, mimetic systems. Representational systems include pictorial practices that refer to the world but which do not necessarily resemble the objects they stand for. Mimetic systems are representational pictorial systems that refer to their objects by way of resembling those objects in certain respects. As the relativist points out, there are many pictorial representational practices in which the mimesis of spatial appearances is not a priority, or is a very low priority. Indeed, one may have a representational, pictorial practice that does not demand any sort of resemblance. Its existence in a culture's representational system may be a product of the social contract. But the fact that there exist nonmimetic pictorial practices does not tell against the accuracy of perspective; it only shows that there can be representational systems for which such accuracy is is a question of a degree of a irrelevant. The question of accuracy-which arises when we confront a range of avowedly of accuracy specific variety mimetic systems which include among their purposes the portrayal of the spatial appearance of the world. Note, here, that I am only speaking of a subset of mimetic systems. But of this subset, those that employ perspective are the most accurate. Are we confronting the imperialistic arrogance of the West, as Francastel believes? No. In the early eighteenth century, the Japanese taught themselves the Western perspective system by comparing the perspective illustrations of Dutch scientific books to their own illustrations, and they judged the Dutch illustrations to be more "lifelike"28 (which I would interpret as more accurate for the purpose of spatial mimesis). This resulted in the genre of Uki-e, or "relief pictures," pictures of 3-D effect using perspective and shading, made by Hokusai, Kunizoshi, and Hiroshige, among others, and easily marketed.29 It may make sense to be an "incommensurability" relativist about perspective when we are debating whether it is the aesthetically best pictorial system; certainly paintings with "floating points of view" can be aesthetically superior to perspective paintings, and it may be difficult to weigh the comparative value of a masterpiece in the perspective style with a masterpiece of the floating pointof-view style. We can make the prosaic observation, nevertheless, that, all things being equal, the perspective painting will give us more accurate information about spatial appearances than will the painting with the floating point 27. Ibid. Ichitaro Hondo, "History of Japanese Painting," in Painting, 14th-19th Centuries:Pageant of 28. Japanese Art, Tokyo, Tokyo National Museum, 1957, vol. II, pp. 54-55. Ibid. 29.

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of view. This is the sense in which perspective can be said to be "true" to the world, though it may be better to express this by saying that it has the highest available fidelity. That is, perspective is not a dissimulation, as Heath would have it, a counterfeit replica of vision: it is the most accurate means of rendering information about spatial appearance.30 Insofar as Heath fails to establish that our faith in the pictorial fidelity of perspective is a piece of self-deception, his explanation of the mechanism of this self-deception is chimerical. A brief review of Heath's attempted explanation will be instructive, however, since it can alert us to certain peculiarities of argument that run through the entirety of his book. The perspective system, built into the camera, positions the subject. The film poses an image, not immediate or neutral, but posed, framed, and centred. Perspective-system images bind the spectator in place, the suturing central position that is the sense of the image, that sets its scene (in place, the spectator completesthe image as its subject) (p. 53). We can give Heath's first use of "in place" some literal sense. Namely, a perspectival image has an optimal station point, a place in space. When viewing a movie, few of us ever occupy this precise station point. Yet, the image may be said to have this point, even if our inhabiting it is rarely germane to our still deriving accurate spatial information from the image (I can sit in the side aisle and still know that Humongus is about three feet behindhis next victim). Heath would have it that the perspective system somehow enjoins us to believe that we are at that station point-that we identify our position, wherever we are in the theater, with the location of the camera lens in relation to the profilmic visual array. We are thus seduced into believing that we have a certain position in relation to the film, a unitary place in the center of the action. This sense of "in place" leads to another-the Althusserian-Lacanian sense of "in place" in the above quotation. Identifying with the visual center of the action causes a sense

I believe that it is the sort of "incommensurability" case, described above, that relativists 30. have in mind when they denigrate perspective. Their real point is that different cultures and different peoples may seek qualities different from those offered by perspective. True enough. If, however, you prize accurate spatial information above all else in your pictorial system, you must adopt perspective. In recent times, some theorists have claimed that perspective is a representational system uniquely suited to capitalism. Stan Brakhage, in a talk at the Millennium Film Workshop, called perspective a form of land-grabbing, while John Berger, in Ways of Seeing, claims that it is one of a repertoire of devices that enable the capitalist to display his possessions. But, though perspective may suit capitalism, I see no reason to believe that it uniquelysuits capitalism. Perspective's basic concern is with where things appear to stand in space. This is an inescapable human concern, one of quite as much interest to hunter-gatherers as to shipping magnates. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that the biologically deep concern to which perspective responds elevates pictorial perspective above every other kind of pictorial enterprise.

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of psychological subject-unity-the illusion of the self as a single, unitary, placed, centrally positioned center of experience-which presumably, in turn, heightens the illusion of the image. I am far from convinced that a perspectival image leads me to identify my position with that of the camera. I, like the majority of my fellow spectators, have a rough idea of how cameras work as well as the knowledge that the film image that I am seeing is camera generated. Consequently, I do not identify the image with my vision. Perhaps it is too extreme to claim that most viewers regard the image precisely as a centrally projected optic array. But viewers do know that the image is the product of a camera and this is what is crucial to their comprehension of the film event. A simple phenomenological examination of normal film viewing shows that spectators do not identify with the camera. Most of the time the camera "sees" more than I see since I tend to focus only on those quadrants of the image where the action is. Indeed, filmmakers often exploit this fact by suddenly introducing a "surprise" character in a part of the screen that I have been ignoring. My eye usually navigates inside the camera image; I do not take my vision to be coextensive with that of the camera's visual field, which I assume I would if I identified with the camera. We don't identify with the camera - it makes certain things availablefor sight; the image is not taken to be sight nor, for spectators aware of how cameras operate, is it surrogatesight. We treat camera images more like the way we regard the world-as opportunities for sensations and perceptions-than the way we our own sensations and This is not to that we take regard perceptions.31 say these images to be real in any sense, but that we respond to them with an

31. Although I do not accept Cavell's realist position with regard to film images -that film exhibits the world past - I find his characterization of our sense of being outside the film more accurate than Heath's notion of camera identification. See Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed, New York, Viking, 1971. Unlike Cavell, I would not analyze the viewing situation in terms of witnessing a world past but as witnessing camera images, which we view as such, fully cognizant of how they are made. It seems to me that one of the pressing limitations of traditional film theory is that it forces us to understand the viewing situation through either the metaphor of the image as a reproduction of sight or the metaphor of the image as a piece of reality. Both options are inadequate. It should be noted that Heath has an argument against the idea that film reproduces reality. Heath writes, "Instead of holding a reproduction of life (Lumiere was adamant in later years: 'the film subjects I chose are proof that I only wished to reproduce life'), it (film) holds to a reproduction of the image of life. Of Lumiere one has the right to demand to know where this 'life' comes from -and the answer is certainly not from itself, for life is composed on screen of representations of work, family and leisure, La Sortie des usines, Le Repas de bebeand LArroseur arrose, chosen subjects indeed. Of the reproduction thesis one has the right to demand to know where the image comes from and what it is doing in the film" (p. 4). Heath seems to be saying that film cannot objectively reproduce life because its images are selected. This is a bad argument. Selectivity, in and of itself, does not preclude objectivity. I have elsewhere discussed the wayward arguments of film theorists who claim that the necessity of selection in filmmaking undercuts the possibility of film's being objective; see "From Real to Reel: Entangled in Nonfiction Film."

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awareness that we are "outside" rather than "inside" the world of the photograph; and it is this quality of outsideness that makes seeing a motion picture like seeing an event (though only in this specified respect). Moreover, this does not cause the spectator any particular sense of mystery or confusion since the spectator knows how camera images are generated. Indeed, that knowledge is also one of the factors that leads us to look at the image rather than to take the camera's view as coextensive with our own. The relation between the spectator and the screen is not best explicated by a two-term relationship: the spectator identifies with the camera. Rather, the spectator sees an image which he understands was generated by a camera in a determinate position as regards the profilmic event. We look at successive camera views rather than identifying with successive camera views. Our knowledge of cameras enables us to follow what is happening on screen, confident of where our seat is in the theater and of where the camera was. We don't have to postulate spectator identification with the exact position of the camera in order to explain how spectators are able to orient themselves to perspectival screen images, but only some very rudimentary, readily available knowledge about cameras. If spectators did identify with the position of the camera, they could only do this by ignoring a great deal of visual information which the human organism has at its disposal (if only subliminally). Cameras don't "see around corners." So when I watch a film from the extreme left side of the theater, I will not see the same thing that I would see if I occupied the same seating arrangement in relation to the profilmic event. This does not prevent me from getting accurate information about spatial appearances from the screen, for if I know about cameras, I know the disposition of objects is relative to the lens and not to my seat. But if Heath wants to claim identification with the camera he must explain how the organism represses all the available spatial cues at its disposal. Heath attempts to do this through reference to an unconscious mechanism that is especially responsive to perspective. In order to assess Heath's putative explanation, we must scrutinize the supposed internal workings of this unconscious mechanism. Heath describes perspective in terms of a central position, a unified place. Words like central, position, unified are key words in the Althusserian-Lacanian psychology. They are words used to describe subject construction. Indeed, subject construction, in the conceptual framework that Heath assumes, is synonymous with subject positioning and subject-unity. Thus, the explanation we are being offered of the spectator's identification with the camera appears to be that given the central (single, unified) position (place) of the station point in perspective, the spectator is lured (and deceived) into identifying with the camera lens (and filtering out all the contrary, available spatial cues) because the structure of perspective reinforces the illusion of subject-unity (in the psychological-ideological sense) and, presumably, because spectators are prone to accept reinforcements of the illusion of subject-unity above countervailing cognitive and perceptual stimuli. Is this a persuasive explanation?

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If we agree that there is a literal sense in which perspective involves a position, then the sense in which it "positions spectators" is nonliteral; it does not, for example, move them around the theater. Furthermore, the sense in which spectators are positioned as subject-unities is also not literal, but rather is an explanatory metaphor, one that pertains to a conception of the self without any reference to actual points in space. But what do these different phases of the identification process have to do with each other besides the fact that they are described by a similar vocabulary? Perspective does not require that we be positioned at the literal monocular station point of the image in order to work effectively as a mimetic representation, so it does not literally position usthough it may metaphorically position us in the sense of establishing the orientation of the action. But even if perspective did somehow literally dictate our central position, how would that cause the belief that each of us is a unitary subject? After all, the idea that we are the (nonspatial) centers of our experiences is another metaphor. How do we or our psyches parlay a (doubtful) spatial position of centrality into a belief about the centrality of the subject? The latter is a very different phenomenon from the former even if it is described in similar words. The Althusserian-Lacanian position does maintain that visual stimuli have an especially powerful role in the formation of identity. Nevertheless, the equivocation on the word centerin Heath's account cannot be bolstered by a simple allusion to the mirror stage since literal, physical centering is not a necessary component of that phenomenon -couldn't a child be standing at the left corner of his looking glass? Rather it seems that Heath will have to postulate an etymologically playful psychic mechanism that moves from perspective's station point to subject-unity along a series of puns. That, in and of itself, is not, in principle, an insurmountable problem, since it has been established that the unconscious is fond of literalizations and verbal images. The problem is more specifically whether Heath can postulate unconscious receptivity to the puns he relies on in his explanation -position, for example. That is, either the receptivity to such puns is part of the psychic mechanism or it is an equivocation on the part of Heath's attempted explanation. The former, without further argumentation, appears unlikely, especially when one recalls that certain of Heath's subject-unity metaphors are not common parlance, but esoteric jargon of a very recent, marginal school of psychoanalysis. Are we to believe that the unconscious knew these puns as early as the Quattrocento? Also, are we to believe that the normal viewer unconsciously knows the rhetoric of the theory of perspective? On the other hand, a weakness for equivocation colors all the rest of Heath's enterprise and, thus, seems in operation in this explanation too. IIIb. The Stabilization of CinematicPerspectiveby Means of Narrative Each perspectivally correct film image positions the spectator. But the ideological effect of perspective in film is threatened by cinematic movement.

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For Heath, character movement, camera movement, and editing potentially imperil the subject position constructed by the film image through perspective. The question, then, is how in the dominant cinema, whose ideological task is to position subjects, the filmic system is able to sustain the perspective effect, despite the potential conflicting disruptions of cinematic movement. The answer given is narrative. The coherence of a narrative positions the subject and maintains the perspective illusion by centering the subject through diegetic intelligibility and closure. The narrative is able to do this because, like perspective, narrative is a system that places and centers subjects. Perspective and narrative are not only coordinated systems but also systems that independently have the same effect. When the perspective system begins to flag, the same effect is imposed on the spectator by the story. We might think of perspective and narrative as two pumps calibrated to bail out a set volume of water. When the perspective pump sputters, the narrative pump makes up the difference, though the less reliable perspective pump is still an irreplaceable asset to the system insofar as the given volume of water could not be evacuated without it. Narrative contains the mobility that could threaten the clarity of vision in a constant renewal of perspective; space becomes placenarrative as the taking place of film -in a movement which is no more than the fulfillment of the Renaissance impetus. . . . what enters cinema is a logic of movement (human action, author's addition) and it is this logic that, in other words, is constructed as narrative space (p. 36). Once films are films of people, the spectator is centered by the logic of human action, thus compensating for the distractions of human movement in the perspectival array. For Heath, the presence of people in a film image is a sufficient condition for considering the image narrative.32 And the narrative of such an image stabilizes the subject position. As shots are added to shots or as the camera moves, the subject center is sustained by the coherence of the story as an intelligible representation of human action. Techniques of continuity editing, grounded in the logic of human action and the continuity of the narrative, support the illusion of the central subject position that is engendered by cinematographic perspective. For Heath, one of the most important techniques of narrative film in this process is point-of-view editing. Consequently, he explains at length the way in which point-of-view editing recapitulates the perspective effect in editing. The type of editing analyzed involves a shot of an object, person, or event 32. According to Heath, you have a narrative as soon as you have people in a film. This overly broad concept of narrative is endemic in contemporary film theory where it seems that it is virstructured or that makes tually impossible to make anything that is not a narrative -anything sense is seen as a narrative (or maybe even as an allegory). This folderol should be abandoned.

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which gives way to a shot of a character who is ostensibly looking at the contents of the first shot. This framework, and more complicated variations on it, occur very often in narrative films. It has been estimated that such cutting patterns may account for thirty to forty percent of the editing in the films of the dominant narrative cinema.33 Heath sees it as a cornerstone in the construction of narrative space. How to make sense in film if not through vision, film with its founding ideology of vision as truth? The drama of vision in the film returns the drama of vision of the film: the spectator will be bound to the film as spectacle on the basis of a narrative organization of look and point of view that moves space into place through the imageflow: the character, figure of the look, is a kind of perspective within the perspective system, regulating the world, orientating space, profor the spectator (p. 44). viding directions-and The point-of-view framework stabilizes the image flow and enables the spectator to "read"(comprehend) it by centering the imagery in a coherent human action (looking) and by creating a virtual perspective system (the character as station point) within the film itself. Thus, the point-of-view cut is an exemplary narrative device in film because it so perfectly realizes the ideological narrative function of sustaining the subject positioning accomplished by perspective. Also, though point-of-view editing supports the illusion of the perspective effect, it, like a snake devouring its own tail, relies on the perspective myth of the central eye. The spectator must see and this structuring vision is the condition of the possibility of the disposition of the images via the relay of character look and viewpoint which pulls together vision and narrative. . . . the whole Quattrocento system is built on the establishment of point of view, the central position of the eye, and in so far as the mode of representation thus defined brings with it fixity and movement in a systematic complicity of interaction-brings with it, that is, the "objective" and the "subjective", the "third person" and the "first person", the view and its partial points, and finds this drama of vision as the resolving action of its narrative (pp. 48-49). Heath devotes more of his analysis to point-of-view editing than to any other technique. But for each technique, his explication is the same; insofar as a technique subserves a narrative function, it promotes coherence and meaning and positions a subject. Thus, synchronous sound dialogue is described as the equivalent of the look because it is an increment in representing narratively in33.

Barry Salt, "Film Style and Technology in the Forties," Film Quarterly(Fall 1977).

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telligible human action. Narrative holds a film together and maintains the illusion of the central subject position, initiated by perspective, in force; each device of narrative film technique participates in maintaining this effect. Heath's conception of the relation between perspective and narrative in film is not without problems. To begin with, his argument rests on the dubious assertion that the perspective effect is endangered by cinematic movement. But there is no evidence that movement in film, of any of the sorts discussed, causes any perceptual confusion or unclarity. Nor is this lack of evidence due to the fact that most people usually watch narratively stabilized films. With regard to editing, for example, the final row of replacement images in Zorn's Lemma is easily comprehended by normal viewers despite the renewal of the station point from shot to shot. Film viewers will sometimes report confusion or disturbance if certain kinds of shots are edited together too rapidly. The effect may be to animate the contours in these shots and to leave the impression of tumult in the images. Yet this is not caused by the renewal of station points, but by the appearance of motion generated by the phi phenomenon. Moreover, this type of visual disturbance can occur whether a film has a narrative or not. Thus, since there does not seem to be any evidence that perspective is imperiled by the kinds of cinematic movement described, Heath's theory must be mistaken. He sees the narrative as solving the problem of the disturbance of perspective by means of compensating for the viewer's compromised center. But where there is no problem, there is no solution. That is, the theory is predicated on imputing a function to narrative in relation to perspective. But the motive for attributing this function to narrative and, therefore, the function itself are groundless. One might attempt to meet this objection by saying that I am misconceiving the problem as a perceptual one, and that this misleads me to look for perceptual evidence of Heath's cinematic disturbances of perspective. One might say that what Heath has postulated is a disturbance of the subject's position as a psychic center and not any disturbance detectable by the naked eye in the visual field. But shouldn't something as conditioned by vision as the subject center of perspective yield some correlative disturbance in perception when it is disrupted? That is, how can this subject center of vision be dislodged by occurrences like the renewal of station points without any trace of that eruption showing up in the normal viewing experiences of, for example, a succession of perspectivally correct, nonnarrative images (for example, Bruce Conner's Valse Triste). Heath's theory constructs a tier of spectator illusions which originate in perception-the perception of perspective and its disturbance-but which are not supported by the data of film perception. We are given subject centers that are both visual and metapsychological/metaphysical entities, and we are given their putative interrelations, but at the ground level of vision we have no evidence for the initiating disturbance that sets this illusion machine in motion. This is reason enough to discard Heath's illusions as theoretical hallucinations. Apart from the question of whether film narratives stabilize perspective,

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Heath's theory makes another substantive claim, one that is popular in film circles and one that cries out for investigation, that is, that perspective and narrative are systems that serve the same purpose by producing the same effect. This is a key point in a larger, extremely fashionable thesis which could be called the equation of mimetic and diegetic verisimilitude. The arguments offered for this hypothesis are very unpromising. In general, they rely upon using the same terms to describe the effects of perspective and various effects of narrative; both are said to place, position, and center spectators in such a way that spectators acquire the illusion that they are unified subject centers.34 But if perspective imparts a central position illusion to spectators, it must be granted that this is in some sense a spatial illusion - an illusion of occupying a literal place in regards to which the geographic layout and structure of the image is perspicuous. But when we read that the narrative places, positions, and centers subjects by means of narrative logic, coherence, and meaning, we note that though the terms are spatial, the illusions they purportedly describe are those of intelligibility, homogeneity, and unity and not necessarily of space.35 As an example, consider Tron. The story inside the computer world derives its narrative coherence, meaning, and closure by reworking a well-known myth, that of the creator/saviour (Flynn) who visits his creation (incarnated as a computer program) and who gives his life (in the world of the computer) to save the computer people (programs).36 That Tron is highly coherent as a narrative in virtue of this myth does not, however, orient the spectator to the geography in any strict sense of orientation. We may assumethe computer world is spatially coherent (for the purposes of the story) and we may not note any contradictions in the space, but the coherence of the story does not map the computer world so that we grasp, or even have the illusion that we have grasped, its spatial structure. At best, the narrative of Tron moves fast enough so that the audience doesn't question where things are situated in relation to each other in the computer world. But this is not what perspective is said to achieve. Thus, if we indulge Heath and say we are centered by the narrative coherence of Tron, we must also say that this is a different "center" than the one given by perspective. It has a different purpose, different structure, different conditions, and a different effect. To speak as though narrative and perspective are doing the

34. Heath's description of everything- film devices, whole films, and subjects - with the same words -position, center, etc. -enables him to slide rhetorically from the description of a device to an effect on a subject; a centered narrative centers a subject. One can only guess at the internal structure of these cause-effect relations. Is it contagion? I shall later discuss Heath's substitution/transformation model of narrative. Let me say 35. now that that model in no way implies that a narrative has a spatial center, even though that model may appear to suggest this insofar as it relies on a metaphor of equilibrium. 36. This myth is also connected with other cultural cliches. Salvation comes with "free access" to the computer which obviously stands for "free market" so that the message of Tron is "Capitalism saves."

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same thing is pure nonsense.37 Furthermore, Tron is not exceptional in terms of its propagation of narrative space; it is, despite its sci-fi trappings, quite conventional. We may say that perspective makes space coherent and that narrative makes a series of human actions coherent without granting that making something coherent is always accomplishing the same task. The deduction "p or q, not q, therefore p" makes logical sense. In Heath's vocabulary, it would position (and probably even center!) a subject, but this positioning is not equatable with the perspective effect. To say this is to imply that everything that imbues coherence is the same. But this makes the prospects of ever saying anything theoretically useful about different types of coherence dim. Narratives, perspective, counterpoint, rhymes, mathematical theorems will all be grouped together in such a way that we will never understand what is special about each of them. An analogy can be drawn between the preceding disjunctive syllogism and the various logical structures of narrative, enabling us to say that just as the syllogism has no perspectival center so a narrative structure need not have a center in the strict orientational sense that perspective does. But it may be argued that my analogy is poor on the grounds that narratives always refer to space. Of course, this is false-can't we write a structurally replete narrative about the time a bodyless God got the blues? I do not deny that most film narratives concern actions that occur in space. But the question is whether narrative structures organize space in the way perspective does. For example, most narrative film editing does not orient the spectator to the space of the film; rather the spectator assumes the space is coherent unless there are glaring inconsistencies in it. This is quite different from the absolutely explicit organization of space by pictorial perspective. To summarize, narratives do not necessarily involve space, and even when narrative films do involve space they do not rigorously organize that space in a way that can be mapped with any precision (at most, in the standard case, care is only taken to avoid suggesting the space is unmappable). Thus, narrative is not to be equated with perspective. Moreover, narratives also promote a range of not-necessarily-spatial effectsthe closure effect, the meaning effect- which are not only distinct from each other but distinct from the perspective effect. Heath, because of his jargon, treats all narrative effects as if they were spatial effects, indeed as if they were all spatial effects equivalent to the perspective effect. But this is to offer a theoretical blur where we need a taxonomy. Heath attempts to buoy his account of the perspective/narrative relation by citing an argument which states that narrative is the correlative of perspec-

37. Heath also argues for an equation of mimesis and diegesis on the basis of the notion of framing. This argument is dismantled in the section of this essay entitled "Heath's Rhetoric."

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tive since causality and perspective both organize space in terms of what follows or comes next in it (p. 71). This is a questionable analogy. On the one hand, it assumes that the central narrative connective is causality, a claim that in its clearest statement appears to have been refuted.38 But even if narrative is essentially causal, the argument will not succeed, for there is a problem in the concept of causation presupposed by the argument. The analogy hangs on the acceptance of contiguity between cause and effect as a defining feature of causation. This move corresponds to a Humean account of a cause: "an object precedent and contiguous to another, and where all the objects resembling the former are placed in like relations of precedency and contiguity to those objects that resemble the latter." 39 But this definition is false, exactly because of the contiguity condition. Britain's attack on the Falklands and the US's compliance causedVenezuela to denounce the US. But where is the contiguity in all this? One might criticize the example unsuccessfully by saying that it uses agents rather than objects as its causal factors. But even if this foolhardy attempt were made, we would still have to ask what it does for Heath's larger argument, since most narratives are concerned with human agents. In short, causality cannot be used to argue an equivalency between perspective and narrative. Heath's best example of the interlocking equivalency of narrative and perspective is point-of-view editing, which he treats as a perspective system internal to the film, orienting the spectator to a rectilinear space. The character in the film is at some virtual station point looking at the perspectival view of a preceding or ensuing shot. The spectator identifies with the character while also identifying with the perspectivally engineered camera. These three different cases of looking become identified through some vague process of relays, and the central perspective viewpoint of the succeeding shots is confirmed by the character's act of looking. This account, though seemingly precise, is quite nebulous. Speaking of point-of-view editing as an internal perspective system is inaccurate. The only similarity between the perspective model and the pointof-view model is that both involve someone looking at something. A point-ofview format can and most often is made with little or no respect for the exact geometric relation of the character's position and the station point of the perspectival image the character is looking at. King Kong can look down at Ann Darrow and we can see her squirming in a shot that was taken from an eyelevel camera position and yet still we know that the point-of-view conventions are implying that Kong is looking at her. A character can look off the screen with his head turned fifty degrees to the left and what he sees can be shown frontally, and point-of-view editing will still do its work untrammeled. Often, point-of-view editing implies that characters are seeing things that defy human 38. See John Holloway's attack on Todorov's theory of narrativecausality in NarrativeandStructure.exploratory essays,Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979. 39. Hume, A Treatiseof HumanNature,Book I, part iii, section xiv.

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visual capacity -two gunfighters blasting away at each other from the distance of a mile; the good guy in close-up pokes his head up from behind his rock and aims; there is a cut to a medium shot of the unlucky bad guy peeking over his rock just in time to catch the good guy's bullet. There is no question of perspectival accuracy (or even perceptual possibility) here. One need only think of an extreme exercise in point-of-view editing like The White Gorilla to see how successful point-of-view editing can be while violating the geometrical accuracy of the character's perspective on what is seen. The White Gorilla is a B sound film that was made by intercutting a silent jungle serial with a sound framing story. The film has a narrator and the old and new footage are segued by consistently having the narrator in the new footage looking (via point-of-view editing) at events represented in the old footage. The geometry, as you may well imagine, of many of these cuts is often literally impossible, let alone perspectivally plausible. Yet this causes little or no difficulty for an audience in following or comprehending the film. Perspective or even a feigned adherence to its rules is utterly irrelevant to the understanding of point-of-view editing. We generally understand point-of-view editing though we probably rarely see shots that have been aligned according to the rules of perspective. In fact, perspective as a system of rules is unrelated to the generation and perception of point-of-view editing. Filmmakers don't characteristically employ perspective formulas in making their matches, and spectators don't recognize and comprehend point-of-view editing by virtue of an intuition that the character is analogous to someone standing at the actual station point of a picture-indeed, within the convention of point-of-view editing, it is internally incorrect to think of the characters as looking at pictures (except in cases like Benson in Suspicion, where, within the fiction, they are looking at pictures). The only thing in common between perspective and point of view is a viewer. But the mere presence of a viewer before an array is not sufficient to establish that the relation between the viewer and the array is to be described by perspective. Therefore, the fact that the point-of-view editing has a character/viewer is not sufficient to establish that it is an internal perspective system, as the vagrant geometrical relations between film characters and what they see should already attest. The irrelevance of perspective to point-of-view editing can also be shown by recalling that point-of-view editing is actually an instance of a broader convention of editing. If I cut from an image of a person to an object, I immediately suggest that there is a relation between them. This relation can be of many sorts, but one of the broadest categories is that of awareness - the person is shown to be aware of the object: remembering, imagining, wishing for, or foreseeing it. The narrative will generally specify which of these options is correct. Point-of-view editing is a subclass of this awareness editing convention. It operates in narrative contexts where the spectator infers that the character is perceiving rather than, say, imagining the object. Thus, we need not search for an account of how point-of-view editing works in terms of perspective, but rather in terms of the logic and pragmatics of the awareness editing convention.

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Undoubtedly, there are important relations between cinematic and narrative space, especially (if not trivially) in narrative film. Theoreticians such as Mitry, Metz, and myself have emphasized, for example, the degree to which an audience's understanding of editing is dependent on their understanding of the story. Hence, Heath's notion of narrative space, insofar as it signals the importance of the narrative for the arrangement of the imagery of a narrative film, is neither contentious, original, nor unique. It is, rather, Heath's account of the dynamics of the relation between cinematic space and narrative-focusis original. ing on the supposed interplay of narrative and perspective-that it is also confused and Unfortunately, thoroughly unconvincingly argued. IV. Suture One technical term of Heath's system that we have not yet discussed is "suture," a generic' term for subject positioning, conceived of as a "binding" or "stitching" of the subject into the film. The idea of suture was first introduced into film studies by Jean-Pierre Oudart primarily through a discussion of point-of-view editing.40 According to Oudart, when a shot appears on the screen, it is greeted with jubilation. But this gives way to an awareness of an absence, not only of what has been left out by the framing, but also of the reverse field of the shot, the field in which the viewer of the shot would have been stationed. The viewer in this absent reverse field is called "the absent one." The classical narrative film, however, moves to efface this absence, to sustain the viewer's sense of plenitude and wholeness. It does this by putting a character in the place of the absent one. Thus, it sutures or fills in the absence. The spectator also participates in this filling in or suturing by identifying with the character who replaces the absent one. The spectator is thus bound or stitched into the film by covering the gap produced by the absence of a reverse-field viewer in the presentation of the image. Heath is not in total agreement with Oudart concerning suture. He argues, for example, that in Oudart's usage the term becomes evaluative. Also Heath is afraid that, through the writing of Daniel Dayan,41 the concept has become too closely wedded to the explication of point-of-view editing, whereas Heath, following Jacques-Alain Miller,42 believes that it would be better to regard suture as a description of the operation which makes all signification possible. That is, discursive structures, though posing themselves as coherent, autonomous units, always require spectators to complete them. A painting in perspective, for example, presupposes a viewer at a station point. The spectator in film fills in the incomplete structures of the film, completing them and thereby deriving a sense that the film is coherent, unified, and homogeneous, which qualities, in turn, are appropriated by the subject himself. The film is 40. 41. 42.

Jean-Pierre Oudart, "Cinema and Suture," Screen, vol. 18, no. 4 (Winter 1977-78). Daniel Dayan, "The Tudor-Code of Classical Cinema," Film Quarterly(Fall 1974). Jacques-Alain Miller, "Suture," Screen, vol. 18, no. 4 (Winter 1977-78).

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sutured by binding, or positioning, the subject in the process of the production of meaning by the film-as-discourse. Suture refers to the relation of the individual as subject to the chain of its discourse where it figures missing in the guise of a stand-in; the subject effect of the signifier in which it is represented, stood in for, taken place (the signifier is the narration of the subject) (p. 52). That is, a spectator is addressed by a discourse which positions him by setting forth the conditions under which it, the discourse, will be understood. This subject, then, completes the discourse by filling in its meaning. The subject is thereby bound into the discourse while at the same time under the illusion that the discourse is the complete source of the meaning. The discourse is producing its meaning by producing its subject positions, while also sustaining the illusion that these concrete subjects are unified. This occurs whenever meaning is produced. In terms of cinema studies, this entails that suture is not merely something to be analyzed as a phenomenon of run-of-the-mill narrative films. Rather, all films, including experiments like News from Home, will suture insofar as they produce meaning. Suture in film, therefore, should be studied by examining the way different discursive practices and systems-for example, narrative films, art films, and so forth-as well as different formal devices-for Suture, then, is the royal road to the example, synchronized dialogue-suture. investigation of subject positioning. As a generic operation which produces the very possibility of signification, suture has a general, abstract, dynamic structure. Discourse, which has the function of producing subject-unities, always involves absence and is heterogeneous. In order to perform its function it hides these facts behind a mask of coherence. But this coherence requires that the subject complete the work of coherence making. This sutures the subject in the discourse, and the concrete subject makes up, stands in for, what is missing in the discourse. This engenders another absence, however, because the process of the production of discursive meaning, the subject positioning, is not represented in the discourse. Thus, the discourse has provoked another absence (the absence of the representation of the process of subject positioning) which means that the process of subject positioning must begin again. Hence, suture is interminable; one suture evokes another. How does this apply to film? In its movement, its framings, its cuts, its intermittences, the film ceaselessly poses an absence, a lack which is ceaselessly recaptured for-one needs to say "forin"-the film, that process binding the spectator as subject in the realization of the film's space (p. 52).

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So suture stops manifestations of absence by binding the subject into fictions of coherence. But, What must be emphasized . . . is that stopping-the functioning of suture in image, frame, narrative, etc.-is exactly a process: it counters a productivity, an excess, that it states and restates in the the very moment of containing in the interests of coherence-thus film frame, for example, exceeded from within by the outside it delimits and poses and has ceaselessly to recapture (p. 53). In brief, the film must appear to the spectator to be homogeneous in order to produce a unified subject. But the film is not homogeneous because it has gaps, since: (1) it is edited, has narrative ellipses, and so forth, and (2) it is a stimulacrum rather than its referent.43 The film, if it is to produce subject-unities, presents itself as coherent (and homogeneous) to suture these absences by means of mobilizing the subject position which stands in for the absence. But this ruse is only momentary and generates its own new problems. These derive from the fact that coherence itself belies absence. For example, a coherencemaking feature like framing evinces an excess, viz., the process of framing raises an awareness that something (an excess) has been deleted by the initial selectivity implied by framing. And, moreover, any sutured totality does not include the representation of the suturing process itself within its representation, and, thus, another excess is excluded from the film. The suturing process, as in a perpetual motion machine, begins again. This set of interactions presupposes a spectator who is, in an ontological sense, a heterogeneity (rather than a homogeneity), and who is, therefore, 43. The concept of absence in this system is not useful for film theory. Very different things are called absences, from the referent of an image to what is not included in the representation of an action by montage, that is, something that was never photographed at all. I see no reason to believe that these very different things should have the same effect. I am not convinced that everything that Heath calls an absence should be so named. For Heath, all representations are absences because they are not their referents. But this way of talking makes sense only if you believe that representations should be their referents. This is absurd. There would be no point in having institutions that produce representations if we expected that representations be their referents rather than stand-ins for them. And if we expect representations to be stand-ins, we should not, then, experience them as absences, incompletenesses, or gaps. A cinematographic image is not an absence; it is the presence of a complete representation. The abstractness of the term absencealso leads to other dubious consequences. The theory tells us that absences are filled in, but does not tell us anything about how this actually works. How, for example, can the absence of the film image's referent be filled in by the spectator's Imaginary experience of himself as a whole; how, that is, can the absence of an ocean liner in The Navigatorbe filled in by my sense of my complete body or by my experience that I am I? Examples of this sort are easy to multiply, but the point is unavoidable. By speaking in vague abstractions the theorist gains the patina of explanatory power, although he is really only masking the fact that the internal structures of the processes he outlines are absolutely imponderable.

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marked by absence (alienation and division) rather than by a sense of totalizing self-unity and plenitude. The task of ideology is to induce this sense of unity, which the organism, given its psychosexual evolution, is prone to accept. The evocation of this sense of unity, however, is always on the brink of collapse because the unity is constructed and construction and true homogeneity are mutually exclusive terms in this theory.44 Enter the film as ideological instrument. Like the spectator, the film is really a heterogeneity; it is a construction with gaps, lacks, and absences, but it poses as coherent and meaningful and, thus, homogeneous. Once homogeneity is achieved, the subject's sense of unity is confirmed. But this is an inherently unstable process since the illusion that the subject is positioned and unified is grounded in the illusion that the discourse is homogeneous and self-sufficient, which, of course, is produced by activating the illusory subject. Because of the suture instability of the process, suturing must always begin again-another must always come on the heels of an earlier one. The film must feverishly proffer new coherences to bind the subject, who is always on the edge of realizing the heterogeneity of the film and the constructed nature of the subject position. In order to bind the subject, the film must always stay one step ahead of it, producing new sutures as previous ones become unstable. Cinematic devices like continuity editing, as well as narrative structures like closure, all perform the function of suture by projecting the coherences that position and suture the subject. Suture theory in film derives from suture theory in Lacanian psychoanalThat form of psychoanalysis offers Heath a kind of metastory, or drama, of ysis. the subject's experience in language. It is the drama of the subject's parrying of its lack-in-being via its relation to the discourse of the Other and thereby postponing its recognition of the truth of division and heterogeneity. The abstract descriptions of this drama that Heath quotes have the flavor of ancient, highly anthropomorphic cosmologies in which the subject is a sort of homunculus: this happens, then this happens, then this happens in a series of psychic events whose occurrence and order appear arbitrary rather than strictly determined by a set of general laws. Heath's theory is an attempt to impose this Lacanian myth of the subject 44. Actually Heath uses the concept of "homogeneity" in a way such that nothing could ever satisfy its requirements. Thus, if ever we have an intuition of homogeneity, we must be having a fantasy. I, for one, am methodologically suspicious of the practice of implicitly or explicitly defining a familiar concept so that it cannot possibly have any referents. Another ordinary language argument might be brought against Heath's concept of unity. Someone might say that unity means "the bringing together of parts." Unity, therefore, implies parts. For someone to say that "x has unity" would entail that that person is aware that "x has parts." Heath, it might be said, is using the concept of unity incorrectly. Thus, his analysis of what spectators might mean if they say "x is unified" is exactly the opposite of what such a statement reports.

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in language as a theory of film viewing. This amounts to the citation (rather than the discovery) and description of cinematic devices in terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The discussion of these devices is then pursued through the formulaic restatement of the myth of the subject parrying its lack-in-being, along with the assertion that subject causation is an ideological process. Much of the book is comprised of baldly repetitious rehearsals of the myth. Films and techniques are described in just enough detail and with just enough abstract language to claim that they suture absence by posing coherences that bind subjects. There may be variations in the decorative elaborations but not in the basic form of Heath's accounts: absence leads to posed coherence leads to suture. Suture theory offers little insight at the level of structure and pragmatics into the workings and differentiation of cinematic devices and conventions. It seems less concerned with exactly how - logically, rhetorically, structurally film devices make (or appear to make) sense (communicate meaning), and more concerned with the fact that they do make sense. That a particular device sutures is the conclusion of each explanation. Since suture is a general account of what makes coherence possible, it functions merely by telling us how every film device and practice is the same- they all suture; they appear to make sense by masking an absence and binding a subject. Some specificity seems required in suture explanations when the analyst names the particular absences incurred by a given device, and when the analyst outlines the way in which the device poses its appearance of homogeneity. But this is not a really compelling degree of specificity because (1) the absences denominated are fairly routine; and (2) the structural descriptions of the device's coherence involve the same key words- center,position, bind, and the rest of the Lacanian litany - for whatever device is under examination. Thus, suture theory gives almost the same account for every cinematic device and practice. Some limited ingenuity may be required to blend Lacanian terms into these descriptions, but once this is done, the explanation converges on the same subject-in-language myth. Film theory seems to devolve into showing how every question can be given the same (ultimate) answer, the same answer given by Lacanian theory in its study of linguistics or of culture as a whole. The generality and uniformity of the explanations leave unanswered the specific theoretical questions that are asked about, for example, the different potential uses of the close-up. The suture theorist may say that the above objection is grounded in a misconception of what film theory should be. Such a theorist might say that what has been gained by suture theory is a bridge between film theory and the theory of the subject and of ideology in general. We should put aside the remaining questions of film theory as unimportant and be happy that we now have a formula that tells us about the inner spring that powers everything. But the remaining questions of film theory-such as what are the different types of camera movement and what underlying principles interrelate them?- won't disappear when we are told that camera movements suture subjects. People

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who make, study, teach, and otherwise strive to understand film will still require answers to the mundane questions of film theory despite their acquisition, via suture theory, of the ontology of the subject. Indeed, oddly enough, the suture theory of film seems to require the existence of ordinary film theory in order to isolate the coherence-making structures of film and to supply the basic account of those devices upon which the suture account is then grafted. One must ask whether suture theory, in this regard, is an addition to or a parasite upon the structural and rhetorical analyses of ordinary film theory. If suture theory is threadbare as film theory, it is also impoverished as a putative scientific theory. It explains too much. In claiming that all discourse is sutured, it is rather like the theory that God makes everything happen. I ask why the flower died, the brakes jammed, and the sun rose, and I'm told in each case, "God made it happen." I soon see that this kind of answer is going to get me nowhere in understanding the phenomena at issue, and I search for answers in terms of the more restricted fields of biology, auto mechanics, and physics. Similarly, if I ask what makes a simple declarative sentence coherent and a structuralist materialist film comprehensible, and I'm told in each case that suture made it happen, then I begin to suspect that the answer is more general than the question with which I am concerned. Scientific theories are aimed at explaining variations in phenomena. That involves explaining not only how such and such a state of affairs came about but also how things might have been otherwise had the relevant conditions been otherwise. For scientific purposes, the theory of suture, like the theory of God, is vacuous. By explaining everything, it explains nothing.45 By accounting for News from Home as well as classical Hollywood films, it accounts for nothing. One of the most shocking features of Heath's proclamation of suture theory is his complete neglect of cognitive-perceptual psychology.46 Part of the It is a mark of the naivete in regard to theory on the part of contemporary film scholars that 45. Philip Rosen thanks Heath for saving "suture" from a narrow definition since it is suture's global application by Heath that makes suture a theoretically useless concept (see Rosen, "The Politics of the Sign and Film Theory," October,no. 17 [Summer 1981], p. 19). Perhaps Rosen got the idea of congratulating Heath from Heath, who, in a similar gesture, congratulates Lacan for discovering the concept of lalangue, a similar ombudsman term of no theoretical specificity. 46. This is also a point that Richard Wollheim makes against all Lacanian theory in his "The Cabinet of Dr. Lacan," New YorkReview of Books, vol. XXV, nos. 20 and 22 (1979). This article is a well-reasoned, blistering analysis of Lacan that should be required reading for all film scholars. Heath inherits his obliviousness to cognitive psychology from his sources, because he merely assumes the truth of his sources and maps them onto film. He wends his way from the general, metapsychology of discourse to the particular discourse of film, moving from the universal to the example in a verbal adventure that is hardly scientific. Instead of examining the data and competing scientific explanations of the data, Heath seems satisfied that the work of theorizing is done by redescribing the phenomena in Lacanese. Though this kind of verbal analogizing may have some popularity in literary studies, it falls far short of meeting the logical requirements for confirmation of anything that advertises itself as science. Heath momentarily broaches the issue of cognitive psychology when he quotes the follow-

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aim of suture theory is to explain how spectators make sense out of films. An obvious source for explanations, or explanatory frameworks, of how subjects comprehend stimuli is cognitive psychology. But Heath attempts to do the whole work of explanation within the fra1nework of an arcane branch of psychoanalysis. Why are no cognitive or perceptual structures included in Heath's model of film reception when it seems so painfully clear that some such mechanisms must come into play when audiences recognize a given film as coherent? If Heath believes that these structures are inadequate to the task at hand, he owes the reader an explanation why. There is, moreover, an important consideration of method here: scientific theories vindicate themselves through competition with other scientific theories, and the way to argue for a new scientific theory is to show that it is superior to all other competing explanations. Freud, knowing this, introduced The Interpretationof Dreams with an exhaustive refutation of previous dream theories. One accepts Freud's theory and one allows him to postulate certain theoretical, unobservable processes because he has demonstrated that his theory explains the data better than competing theories. Heath, however, does not confront competing cognitive-psychological explanations of the way film spectators recognize screen stimuli to be coherent. He does not scientifically demonstrate that the operations he postulates are warranted since he has not shown that we cannot get better explanations from research in cognitive psychology. He has only shown that film theory can be reworded in Lacanian terms. This is a literary accomplishment at best. It is also helpful to add that often in psychoanalysis one does not postulate the operation of an unconscious mechanism, as in the case of a parapraxis,

ing argument by Paul Hirst: "Recognition, the crucial moment of the constitution (activation) of the subject presupposes a point of cognition prior to the recognition. Something must recognise that which it is to be .... The social function of ideology is to constitute concrete individuals (notyet-subjects) as subjects. The concrete individual is 'abstract', it is not yet the subject it will be. It is, however, alreadya subject in the sense of the subject which supports the process of recognition. Thus something which is not a subject must already have the faculties necessary to support the recognitionwhich will constitute it as a subject. It must have a cognitivecapacity as a prior condition of its place in the process of recognition. Hence the necessity of the distinction of the concrete individual and the concrete subject, a distinction in which the faculties of the latter are supposed already in the former (unless of course cognition be considered a 'natural' human faculty)." This passage is important not only because it brings up the problem of cognition in this framework, but because it points to a logical conundrum in the Althusserian-Lacanian position. Heath, however, never confronts these points directly. He changes the subject and examines the related but different claim that psychoanalysis might only examine one aspect of subject constitution, which claim he denies by an argument from authority: Lacan's theory says it accounts for all subject construction. Of Hirst's puzzle, we are told by Heath that it is correct as far as it goes. How far is that? Enough to topple Heath's system (see pp. 103-107). I should also note that there may be another logical lacuna in the suture system. For, according to suture, the subject is both the effect and a cause of the process. It seems that we need the subject construct already before we can construct the subject position, in place (as Heath says), by the suture process. Unless this process can be clarified by differentiating various subject-construct-states at discrete phases of the suture process, there could be a real problem here.

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unless there is a breakdown in a cognitive (or organic) mechanism which cannot be accounted for except by postulating an irrational mechanism. That is, something irregular has to compel the inference of unconscious agency. This seems to me to be a methodologically sound constraint if only because the irrational mechanism will perforce be less familiar, more a matter of speculative extrapolation than a cognitive processing mechanism. And, of course, there really is nothing to explain by means of the unconscious mechanism, by reference to the irrational, until rationality has broken down. The indeterminateness, contradictoriness, unpredictability, and arbitrariness imputed to irrational structures make them epistemologically hazardous processes to postulate. One should not rush to proliferate unconscious processes. One should attempt to exhaust other possible, logically determinate explanations first. I am not saying that the unconscious should be foresworn as an explanatory device, but that we should hypothesize unconscious operations only after we have exhausted other avenues. Heath, however, never waits to see whether a cognitive model might account for the coherences he discusses. This is as intemperate as starting to explain how I know to answer "twelve"when you ask me "How much is six plus six?" by reference to my psychosexual development. Heath assumes that his variant of psychoanalysis explains everything, whether or not the phenomena call for a psychoanalytic explanation. He treats the central Lacanian propositions as so many philosopher's stones. It may be that Heath believes not that cognitive models are incorrect, but that they complement his own (Lacanian) model. Thus, he does not explore cognitive-perceptual frameworks for explaining his data because he believes these will only enrich the fundamental description he gives with more (rather than competing) details. But this approach raises an epistemological problem. For, how does Heath know that cognitive mechanisms alone cannot fully account for the way spectators come to see cinematic spectacles as coherent, that once specified, they will not render talk of suture beside the point? What suture gropes to explain abstractly, cognitive psychology might explain concretely, without reference to almost mystical concepts like "the absent one." 47

47. My own approach to the analysis of coherence reception in film begins by assuming spectators with relatively stable cognitive processes and with knowledge of the film medium and its conventions. The combination of these factors provides us with spectatorswho at any moment in the film have a range of rationally grounded expectations, which allows them, through processes of tacit reasoning, to derive meaning from the cinematic stimuli. I think that if we build knowledge and cognition into our model of the film spectator-hardly frivolous presuppositions-we simply do not need to talk about suture. Indeed, I feel that, in part, Heath arrives at his abstract account of perpetual suturingbecause he begins with an insufficientlydetailed picture of the spectator. His is a spectator without cognitive faculties or knowledge who, preoccupied-albeit unconsciously-only with subject unity, is buffeted eternally on the waves of suture. It is true that several times in the book, Heath mentions a process called preconstruction, but he does not tell us very much about what content he attributesto preconstructedsubjects. Perhapshe would include

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In order to give some substance to this objection, we can review a brief case. It is fairly well established that subjects are able to go beyond the stimuli that they are given in an experiment and to infer the system of relations that underlie the items in the experiment even though they have not seen every item in the system.48 Subjects, in short, know more about what they see than what is directly available to sight. Psychologists have discovered that subjects are not only able to identify what event is being represented upon being shown an incomplete series of photographs of the event, but they are also able to identify, on later presentations, the photographs that belong to the event series but which were hitherto not shown to them.49 The series of photographs hang together as coherent because the subject knows the event that generates them. This has obvious implications for our understanding of film editing in which, of course, moving pictures of parts of an event are put together to depict an entire event. What makes these hang together? Why does the spectator see new shots in the array as coherently related to other shots? One answer, suggested by the slide experiments, is that spectators have a cognitive capacity to apprehend a whole event on the basis of seeing only parts of it. Also, we need not offer a psychoanalytic account of this, since the development of such a cognitive processing faculty in organisms can clearly be explained by the sheer evolutionary advantage it gives the organism -the capacity to know what is going on with only a few glimpses of an event. Cognitive psychology would endorse the postulation of an eventrecognition capacity in the organism which is able to detect given event-specific invariants. If we could isolate the scanning mechanism, the event-invariants, and the process through which the organism stores and compares representations, what need would we have for suture? Nor, I think, can one blithely say that this event-recognition capacity is what Heath has in mind, if only obscurely, when he speaks of suture in editing. If he did, he would have no need to claim that the process in question is interminable. Of course, it can be the subject's cognitive capacities, knowledge, and expectations as part of the preconstructed subject, but this is unlikely. For, if we say the spectator knows the image is not the referent, knows how the camera works, understands the point-of-view editing convention, has the ability to recognize events from their partial representation, and so on, then we need not postulate that the subject is deceived into mistaking these representations and patterns of coherence for homogeneities in some totalizing sense. Heath, it seems to me, is vague about what we can attribute to the preconstructed subject exactly because only vagueries enable his analysis of the moment-bymoment drama of the occurrent subject. I doubt that we would have such moment-to-moment fluctuations, in any nontrivial sense, if we had an adequate account of the preconstructed subject. 48. E. A. Esper, "A technique for the experimental investigation of associative interference in artificial linguistic material," LanguageMonographsof the Linguistic Societyof America, 1925, 1; Esper, Analogyand Associationin Linguistics and Psychology,Athens, Georgia, University of Georgia Press, 1973; W. G. Chase and H. A. Simon, "Perception in Chess," Cognitive Psychology,no. 4 (1973). 49. James J. Jenkins, Jerry Wald, and John B. Pittenger, "Apprehending Pictorial Events: An Instance of Psychological Cohesion," in Perceptionand Cognition: Issues in the Foundationsof Psychology, ed. C. W. Savage, vol. IX, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophyof Science.

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pointed out that we do not yet have a complete event-recognition model. As a working hypothesis, however, event-recognition, because of the specificity it offers the investigator, seems far more promising than suture. It is, in any case, up to Heath to say why such models will not make suture theorizing unnecessary. Aside from the question of whether or not suture theory affords a viable research program, certain puzzles remain as to its inner workings: why, for example, does the subject react as he does to such features of the stimuli as absence, the nonrepresentation of the suture process, and coherence? I will take up some of these issues later.50 But for the time being, let us begin with Heath's account of coherence in this process. The film projects the appearance of coherence, which leads the subject to complete it in his quest for unity and homogeneity. Heath's writing abounds with descriptions of the coherence-making features employed in film. These are activating devices in the process of counterfeiting homogeneity. They are also the sorts of devices- for example, narrative - that classical aesthetic theories have always regarded as unity- or coherence-making features. But Heath's analysis is different from that of classical theorists because he sees the unity and coherence of these devices as connected with some totalizing homogeneity. Yet, in the tradition that speaks of unity and coherence in art, these aesthetic unities and coherences are understood by the concept of unity-indiversity.51 That is, Western tradition sees artworks as producing not a unity or coherence that turns the work into a homogeneity, but one in which unity is seen in tandem with heterogeneity, variety, and diversity. That is, this tradition is quite clear that artworks are in some sense heterogeneous. Spectators find pleasure in the tension between unity and diversity.The tension, and hence pleasure, is destroyed, in fact, if the work is viewed as homogeneous. Heath may say, of course, that the tradition is lying about what it advocates, and that it is really calling for the illusion of some sort of wholeness other than the relative "wholeness" of unity-in-diversity. But then we are left with the question of how these heterogeneous materials can be a source of homogeneity for the subject. If Heath's evidence for the aim of the coherence-making features in film is the emphasis on unity in Western art theory, then he cannot damn that tradition -which has never claimed that unity-making features in its own art are connected with some totalizing sense of homogeneity-by words. If, on the other hand, Heath wants to depart from the typical account of that special sort of unity that we call aesthetic unity and to argue that such

50. See the section of this essay entitled "The Interminability Thesis." 51. See, for example, Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry ConcerningBeauty, Order,Harmony, Design, sections II and IV; and Kant's CritiqueofJudgment, "Analytic of the Beautiful," especially "General Remarks on the First Section of the Analytic." To be fair to Heath, it should be mentioned that there are some theorists in the tradition who speak as if artworks did engender an illusion of seamless homogeneity, e.g., Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic, Boston, Nonpareil Books, 1978. But he represents the mystical wing rather than the core of the tradition.

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unities do engender a totalized sense of homogeneity, then he must explain how the spectator systematically transforms the qualified unities of artworksrhymes, thematic coherence, narrative-into fantasies of homogeneity, despite the fact that aesthetic coherence is disseminated as unity-in-diversity. Must we postulate that the spectator and his unconscious misreads the Western art institution in the same way as Heath? an aesfunctions as a quasi-law-that How is the postulation-which thetic unity or coherence entails a homogeneity, a sense of unalienated wholeness that pertains both to the subject and the film, established by Heath? It seems, like many of his analyses, to be accomplished by word play. In certain uses, words like unity, coherence,and homogeneityare synonymous. If x is coherent it can be said to be unified and, therefore, homogeneous. But these implicatory relations do not hold for every qualification we offer in the use of these central terms. If a poem has a uniform meter, we may say that it is metrically coherent or unified along the dimension of meter, but it would remain to be seen if it were homogeneous in the special sense of "provoking an illusion of wholeness verging on that of undifferentiated plenitude." The sentence "This utterance has five words" is coherent because it is meaningful. Is it a unity? Perhapsthough to call it "grammatically unified" would be closer to the mark. Yet, if it is unified, can we say that the coherence that the listener grasps (or reads in) is, in any unambiguous way, related to Lacanian homogeneity? Hardly, since grasping its significance requires seeing that the sentence is constructed from five parts. Similarly, a film narrative will be called unified and, perhaps, coherent if its last scene returns us to its first scene, or recapitulates some opening scene as in Oblomov,whose beginning and ending presents us with a boy child's anticipating his mother's arrival. This sort of recapitulation is one device of narrative closure. As a narrative unity-making feature, it is especially esteemed when the plot takes a long and winding path of complications in setting out this sort of repetition. We say such a plot is unified in that it is purposively coherent. In saying this we are claiming that the given series of events is coherent-something we do not ordinarily experience of a series of events and something that we regard as an achievement against obstacles when we encounter it in narrative representations of event series. But acknowledging or appreciating this type of narrative coherence cannot be the same as experiencing Lacanian homogeneity; this type of coherence depends on a relation to a heterogeneity (here, a series of disparate events). To get from this sort of plot coherence to Lacanian homogeneity, one must suppress the relevant qualifications of the reference of the terms coherenceand homogeneity,and illicitly treat the two as the same, unless, of course, one can provide a psychic model that accounts for why something as specific as a plot coherence should induce a homogeneity response. Although Heath postulates the existence of such a mechanism, the only proof he seems to offer for it is based on an equivocating relationship between words such as meaning, coherence,unity, and homogeneity.

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V. The Internal Structureof Narrative For Heath, narrative is the key suturing device in the dominant cinema. Narrative is able to perform this function because it moves from equilibrium to disequilibrium to equilibrium, the final state of which is taken to be the equivalent of homogeneity. Heath writes, "Narrativization is scene and movement, movement and scene, the reconstruction of the subject in the pleasure of that balance (with genres as specific instances of equilibrium) - for homogeneity, containment" (p. 54). A narrative film purportedly begins with a state of equilibrium which is disrupted- E.T. and his friends are interrupted by earthlings in such a way that E.T. is left stranded-and which is finally restored after the rejoins his own kind; E.T. goes plot complications have unraveled-E.T. film is a set of transformations which operate on home. The plot of a narrative that some sort of narrative equiwith the net result a series of disequilibriums librium emerges. A narrative action is a series of elements held in a relation of transmovement of the transformation such that their consecution-the a state S' differformation from the ones to the others-determines ent to an initial state S. Clearly the action includes S and S' that it and end are grasped from this action, specifies as such-beginning within the relations it sustains; the fiction of the film is its "unity," that of the narrative. A beginning, therefore, is always a violence, the interruption of the homogeneity of S (once again, the homogeneity-S itself- being recognized in retrospect from that violence, that interruption); in Touchof Evil this is literal: the explosion of a bombplanted car, killing the two passengers. The task of the narrative the point of the transformation - is to resolve the violence, to replace it in a new homogeneity. "Replace" here, it must be noted, has a double edge: on the one hand, the narrative produces something new, replaces S with S'; on the other, this production is the return of the same, S' replaces S, is the reinvestment of its elements. Hence the constraint of the need for exhaustion, the requirement of practicability: every element presented must be used up in the resolution, the dispersion provoked by the violence must be turned into a reconvergence. Ideally, a narrative would be the perfect symmetry of this movement: the kiss the explosion postpones is resumed in the kiss of the close of the film as Susan is reunited with Vargas-the same kiss but delayed, set into a narrative (p. 136).52

Heath calls this a simple definition. He seems to think that it is not complex because it does 52. not address the purported fact that the narrative cannot suture every element in the film. None of my above arguments against Heath's theory of narrative, however, is based on exploiting the lack of this complication in the equilibrium definition.

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One of Heath's presiding metaphors in describing the work of narrative is "getting things back into place." In the beginning of Touch of Evil, the leading female character is morally (that is, sexually) untarnished. The "disrupting" complications of the plot throw her reputation into question. The conclusion reinstates her virtue. Heath does not claim that every detail presented in a plot does, in fact, play into this transformation-substitution nexus, but only that a classically narrated plot gives the impression (illusion) of this sort of homogeneity, and that pleasure in narratives is grounded in the tension between equilibrium and disequilibrium (homogeneity and heterogeneity) in which homogeneity ultimately wins out. The transformation-substitution process (which governs closure), plus the narrative's consistency (presumably its logical consistency and its internal cause-and-effect plausibility), plus its economy (the gun that appears in the first scene goes off in the last) give the narrative film its unity, a Lacanian homogeneity in which the moving picture presents itself in the totalized form of a narrative image, "a kind of static portrait in which it comes together" (p. 133). The repetitions inherent in the transformationsubstitution process (and the logic of other aspects of narrative structure) imbue the film as a whole with the appearance of homeostasis, the illusion of a static (unchanging!?) equilibrium in the service of an impression of homogeneity, wholeness, and plenitude. In its films, classic cinema is a certain balance of repetition: a movement of difference and the achievement in that movement of recurrent images -for example, the woman as "the same," a unity constantly refound. Narrativization, the process of the production of the film as narrative, is the operation of the balance, tying up the multiple elements-the whole festival of potential affects, rhythms, intena line of coherence (advances and sities, times, differences-into recall), a finality for the repetition (p. 157). As with most of these analyses, the characterization of the internal structure of film narrative appears to succeed by blurring important distinctions. Specifically, every sort of narrative unity-making device is credited with the same effect as the replacement-transformation-repetition scheme. The strongest case for the homogeneity-instilling capacity of classical narrative is made by the notion that narratives are machines for replacing disruptions of an initial state of affairs by repetitions of the initial state of affairs-E.T. with his ship; E.T. separated from his ship; E.T. back with his ship. Citation of this kind of repetition might appear to warrant the postulation of a homogeneity response because this kind of repetition is often called "circular" by literary critics, and in the same (rather free) associative mood we might call it "static," which would bring us to "unchanging," which would be enough to argue that we have a fantasy of homogeneity (an impression of undifferentiated wholeness and plenitude). Of course, we could stop such an explication by pointing out

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that spectators who are entertained by circular structures do not literally believe they have witnessed an unchanging or static image. Rather circular,static, and unchangingare really critical metaphors that describe certain patterns of literal changein traditional narratives. Let us, however, suppose the argument for a connection between narrative repetition and homogeneity is successful. It must then be pointed out that the type of repetitive device Heath has in mind is only one type of narrative ending. A narrative may also end in the reversal of an original state of affairs, for example, Bringing Up Baby or the remake of Invasionof the BodySnatchers.Or, a narrative may end in an event which stands in merely a consequent (and neither a symmetrical or anti-symmetrical) relation to earlier narrative states, for example, Treeof WoodenClogs, Nashville, Kiss Me Deadly. Nor need narratives be comprised of scenes that vary earlier scenes either as repetitions of motifs or as subplots. Thus, even if narrative repetition could be connected with the appropriate form of homogeneity, it would account for only one type of narrative device, and an optional one at that. Moreover, there are dimensions of narrative unity that are not dependent upon the repetition or recapitulation of scenes. A film's narrative logic (the structure that organizes what follows what), its narrative economy, the internal plausibility of the film's causal relations, and the film's consistency are each unity-making features, though none of them requires repetitions or variations of earlier scenes in order to operate. Narrative economy does demand repetition of certain objects and characters, not, however, the repetition of scenes. Heath treats all unity-making features of film narrative as if they were the same, and he speaks as if they all produced the homogeneity response that he attributes to narrative repetitions. But this is only the result of his confusing all of narrative's different structural unities with the type of unity he associates with the transformation-replacement model. Where Heath should be differentiating stratas of effect-for example, the logic of resolution from the subclass of the transformation-replacement variant-he is, true to form, congealing them. Furthermore, Heath cannot argue that other increments of narrative coherence, for example, consistency, can be explicated by the repetition effect on the grounds that these other devices are always subservient to the ideal of narrative symmetry. Narrative logic, economy, plausibility, and consistency can and do operate in films that do not have scene repetitions and symmetries. These unitymaking features are quite independent and distinct from the symmetries of the transformation-replacement schema and should be analysed individually. Theorists have attempted to use the equilibrium model as a general model for analyzing dominant film narrative, but it is a blunt instrument.53 It is not

53. For example, Stephen Neale in his book, Genre,British Film Institute, 1980, tries systematically to apply Heath's idea that genres are "instances of equilibrium." In the attempt to identify

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the case that all film narratives begin with a state of affairs that is restored at the end. A great many films begin with an untoward state of affairs-the end with its reversal goodly townfolk savaged by the cattle ranchers-and -the cowboys vanquished by the lone gunslinger turned avenging angel. If there is anything that we could profitably call an initial equilibrium here, it preexists the film either as a golden age or as an ideal of law and order. Nor need a film begin with an untoward state of affairs that the film proceeds to correct: a character may just be unmarried, for example, only to be wed by the ending. Calling this a transformation-repetition is simply wrong, as is saying that the film begins with some equilibrium. It begins. It begins with some state of affairs or some event which may be restored (if only symbolically), reversed, or merely forgotten. Nor, where the film begins with a state of affairs is it accurate to say it is always disturbed or disrupted by violence. This may be a dramatic mode of speech, but films do not require disturbances of equilibriums for the narrative to proceed; they require changeswhich may be neither disruptive nor violent: the male romantic lead notices that the girl next door is suddenly allgrown-up, or a billionaire hears so and so sing and decides to bankroll a show.54 Also, a film may end without restoring either initial or ideal states of affairs: King Kong, YouOnly Live Once. Of course, a researcher may take it to be definitional that a film narrative in the dominant tradition ends in a balanced state or equilibrium and then go on to take any type of closure as a case of equilibrium. But then equilibrium no longer has any explanatory power; it becomes just another word for the end (and, in this theory, for the beginning.) Butch Cassidy and the SundanceKid achieves closure but not as a state of equilibrium generated by repetition. If we call its ending an equilibrium then that term is merely synonymous with closure, the very thing the equilibrium model supposedly explicates.55 The theory, as stated, allows a certain ambiguity on the issue of whether the balance achieved in closure is formal (the repetition of an initial scene) or moral (the restoration of a preferred social order). In Heath's example of Touch

equilibriums and disequilibriums for every film genre, these concepts are bent completely out of shape. Equilibrium can mean order, law, harmony, and so on, while disequilibrium takes into account dramatic conflict, criminality, and discord. Neale does not confront the issue of genre films like The Red Shoes which do not end in equilibriums as he has characterized them. Are unhappy or tragic endings equilibriums even though they would seem to be discordances in the system of homologies Neale outlines? Neale might say that these endings areequilibriums because they reinforce some ideological tenet. But once we begin talking about disequilibriumequilibriums, the system seems very ad hoc and equilibriumis emptied of explanatory power. 54. Once the film scholar takes possession of a theoretical term like violence,he can begin readit remarkable, for example, that the initiating ing the theory into the story of the film-finding change in such and such a film is literally a violent act. Thus, a description becomes parlayed into something that sounds like an analysis. Such exercises are merely Lacanian allegorizations. 55. Heath himself tends to identify the balanced repetition of a narrative with narrative coherence as such (for example, p. 157).

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of Evil, the logic of narrative and the law of patriarchy converge in their effect; both determine the restoration of the woman's virtue. And certainly the structure of the narrative can reinforce the moral of a film in this way.56 But these two elements of a narrative film are very distinguishable and may not be synchronized to achieve such harmonious effects. A film, for example, The Circus, can begin and end with moral disequilibrium while formally repeating the tramp's initial condition in the conclusion; or a film such as Dead of Night can begin in moral order and proceed to moral disorder while the beginning formally mirrors the end; and, of course, there is the very common case of movement from moral disorder to order without a formal structure of repetition. This last case can become especially tricky for researchers committed to the equilibrium model because they are tempted to take films that restore some moral order (rather than some specific scene) as confirmations of the theory when they literally are not. Heath also writes as if the transformation-replacement-repetition schema were the same as plot resolution when the former is merely one form of the latter. This obfuscation of class and subclass may prompt some theorists to look always to the end of the film in order to explain its structure, finding there some repetition of or similarity to the beginning. With enough cleverness and with broad enough notions of repetition and similarity, success is almost assured. But this enterprise is likely to miss the point of the actual plot resolution for the sake of stressing some repetition. You could say that Annie opens and closes with the titular juvenile singing, but this misses the thrust of the narrative climax: she is now rich and has a daddy whereas she started poor and an orphan. If you respond that the film has reproduced the ideologically predictable moral order of things, you are probably right but have switched from a discussion of a formal order based on repetition to a discussion of an ideal ethical equilibrium. Heath's model of the internal structure of narrative is not refined enough to deal with the data. To make it appear to work, one must either inflate its central concepts so that they will fit anything, or bend the evidence to fit the preordained scheme, or a little bit of both. From the viewpoint of the advancement of narrative theory, Heath's is a path better not taken. VI. The InterminabilityThesis The current notion that texts are multiple, or in some sense infinite, is supported by a range of arguments. These extend from the absurd claim that each reader has his own meaning to a theory which holds that since each word is interdefined by others within the language system, each word leads us ceaselessly to others- as though syntax and pragmatics could not localize the mean56. For other examples, see my "The Moral Ecology of Melodrama: The Family Plot in Magnificent Obsession,"New YorkLiteraryForum, Melodrama Issue, 1980.

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ing of most specific instances of discourse. Heath has his own view of the infinite chasm that is the text. His view of textual infinity and flux is, like his variation of Brechtian illusionism, psychoanalytic, revolving around the subject. For Heath, a film is always - interminably and ceaselessly - constructing and reconstructing the subject through the film discourse. From the practical viewpoint of film criticism or film theory, the interminability thesis holds dark prospects. What consequences does it have for research? How would it, for example, guide one to analyze a film? Would one sit at one's viewing machine and chart each ceaseless suture as it appears? The result would not be unlike the formal, descriptive analyses of the early 1970s. Since the suturing work of the film is interminable, the analyses are equally so. It is not clear how such a mass of descriptions would lead to what Heath says he marked by is setting the groundwork for: a materialist history-presumably different stages-of the ways and means of ideological subject positioning in film. Such interminable analyses are necessary only if we accept the idea of interminable subject construction. But it is hard to believe that, in any meaningful sense, the subject is in ceaseless, Heraclitean flux. As I have already argued, even if there is a subject position presupposed by every instance of discourse, it would not seem to construct or reconstruct the subject in any sense relevant to the sort of ideological studies promised. I understand "2 + 2 = 5," so the proposition must position me. Does it reconstruct me? Not if that means it changes my beliefs about mathematics in any way. You can say my understanding of the proposition at the moment of its utterance presupposes a subject position but it is not one that I identify myself with, nor, I hope, do others identify me with it. At best, that subject position is the name of the formal conditions that give the proposition its sense. The proposition does not construct me in any sense of lasting change. If I am changed at all, it is only in the trivial sense that I change with every moment of experience. In this sense, subject construction is interminable as long as the individual lives. But this is far removed from any analysis of the positioning of ideological agents who accept and reject propositions, whose acts and inclinations are determined and changed by the acceptance and rejection of discourse. That sort of subject construction requires more than the axiomatic claim of the existence of a formal subject position for each discursive unit. This, in fact, is a banality of no theoretical use. The analysis of ideological agents requires the explanation of how individuals are influenced (and not influenced) by the form and content of ideological address. And outlining the conditions that promote the appearance of mere coherence is not enough to even begin this task.57 57. Heath may claim that once a theory of the preconstruction of the subject is in place, my questions about the acceptance and rejection of ideological discourse will be answered. But the burden of proof is on Heath.

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Given the prima facie disutility of the interminability thesis, it is important to scrutinize Heath's arguments for it. The basic form of his position runs as follows: 58 the film discourse presents itself as coherent along many dimensions. This, given the complicity of the subject in the process of suture, produces the apprehension of homogeneity. This is explained by the putative fact that the subject, though heterogeneous, has a propensity, because of its passage through the mirror stage, to accept the appearance of external coherence as a pretext to mask heterogeneity (excess) in both itself and in outside stimuli. At the same time, however, the film belies its lack of homogeneity. The organism grasps this because, along with the Imaginary, it has another component, acquired at the Symbolic or Oedipal stage of its psychosexual development, which enables it to apprehend discursive systems and language and enables the spectator to be sensitive to difference, separateness, heterogeneity, and absence. When the film appears meaningful, or discursively intelligible to the Symbolic component of the spectator, the Imaginary component fills that coherence in through the process of suture. The sense of homogeneity which this yields is immediately endangered by the spectator's sensitivity to heterogeneity, and the feigned coherence weakens before an intuition that something (the excess) is excluded or absent. Films cannot avoid belying the fact that they are not homogeneous and that they merely mask absence. Why? They are absences as such. Photography presents the image of a past that is absent at the time of projection. Also, the various processes of film such as editing and framing entail separation and absence-they select and, therefore, exclude details (while masking this exclusion). Narrative structures are not homogeneous; they involve change. And, above all, films entail absence because they present themselves as finished products whereas they must, in truth, be finished by subjects through the process of suture. This process, which Heath calls the film's performance, is not included in the film's system of representations. It is absent. The film is a heterogeneity that presents itself as unified and complete, but it cannot be complete because it does not represent its own process of meaning production. Similarly, the subject it constructs is also more than the subject position because the process of subject construction is not foregrounded in the subject construct. Thus, for every absence the film sutures, a new one emerges. The deepest confusion in this argument lies in the concepts of unity and homogeneity. At least two senses of unity are employed throughout. On the one hand, to say x is a unity is to say it is whole or complete, that it is one indivisible unit of which it is inappropriate to say that it is missing anything. This is the homogeneity sense of unity. When Heath says that films, discourses, and subjects are not unified he is using the word in this sense. They are not consid58. Though interminability arguments recur throughout the book, the fullest statement of the position is to be found in the chapter entitled, "Film Performance."

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ered whole because they do not include within themselves a representation or acknowledgement of the total process by which they came about. They lack process-wholeness. (To expect this of the homogeneous unit is to expect it to have an almost theological self-sufficiency.) And they are not unified because they are divisible-films are obviously composed of parts, whereas subjects are constructed out of differenttemporal phases and operations. Anything that is constructed out of materials over time is likely to lack unity in this sense. There are other senses of unity, however. One is what we could call unity as coherence. If x is coherent, we mean that x coheres by means of some natural or logical principle, or some set of principles(which need not be reducible to one principle). To say a sentence is coherent is to say it has a meaning, is intelligible, and has a structure; it meets various semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic requirements. This is to treat the sentence as a unit, but not as a homogeneity. It does not mean, for example, that the sentence is indivisible. Indeed, the sentence is coherent because its acknowledged parts cohere as a result of a set of principles. Nor is it necessary to regard a coherent sentence as a processwhole. Anyone who uses a language knows that the words in an utterance are drawn from a larger vocabulary, so that there is no need to acknowledge that process by some added operation within the sentence.59 Moreover, when we move from sentences to the other sorts of things we call coherent, it is clear that we do not demand that the principles that generate coherence be absolutely exhaustive for the phenomenon in question: that is, a set of principles need not account for every part of whatever we are calling coherent. A windbreak in a park may be coherent in virtue of its principle of circular design without that principle accounting for the shape of every leaf of every tree. Though there may be relations between these two concepts,of unity, it is clear that they are not the same. Coherent units are not indivisible, not processwholes, and not necessarily exhaustively explained by the principle(s) that makes them coherent. Homogeneous units reverse these criteria. Most of the unities we experience are coherence units, whereas some abstract, theological versions of God sound like our best examples of homogeneity units. (Some people have suggested to me that Aristotelian prime matter and Lucretian atoms might also meet the homogeneity criteria, but of this I'm uncertain.) Almost every major point in Heath's interminability thesis depends on a momentary misrecognition of a coherence unity as a homogeneity unity. The film appears as a coherent representation, but it is not its referent; it, therefore, That coherence unity must be distinct from homogeneity unity is illustrated by the fact that 59. we will continue to regard a meaningful sentence as a coherence unity even if it is not a homogeneity unity. We do not regard sentences as only apparentlycoherent or apparentlymeaningful because they are not indivisible or because they are not process wholes. It would be absurd to deny that sentences are truly coherent for these reasons (though this is what Heath's theory does with both sentences and film structures).

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does not literally present us with its basic causal ingredient and therefore lacks process-wholeness. It also lacks process-wholeness because it does not represent the suture operation. Editing and framing make sense in the film but obviously presuppose selection, fragmentation, and divisibility as well as masking their process-unwholesomeness. Likewise, narration. Heath attributes the incessant confusion of coherence unity for homogeneity unity to the spectator who is guided in this by the structures of the film which position the spectator as subject. But one must ask whether the mistaking of coherence for homogeneity is attributable to the spectator rather than to an equivocation of the two senses of unity in this theory. Heath's basic line of argumentation is to take examples of coherence unity and to show that, spectator response to the contrary, they are not examples of homogeneity unity. His charge is that coherence unities pose as homogeneity unities. Also, just before coherence unities are caught in this act of imposture, the film proliferates more illusion producing coherence unities. The organism is entrapped in this interminable process because it not only has a propensity for grasping coherence unities-through the Symbolic which correlates with its language/meaning capacity-but also because it has another component, the Imaginary, which takes any kind of unity and fills it out as a homogeneity unity. This apprehension of homogeneity unity does not last long-because the Symbolic can detect divisibility and difference-so the process begins again interminably. 60 How can we tell whether this confusion of types of unity belongs to Heath or to the spectator whose response Heath means to explain by reference to this confusion? One reason to believe the confusion is, above all, Heath's is that he offers analyses of film and of representation in which he himself perpetuates the confusion even when not directly commenting on the subject's reception process. For example, he presents the following generalization: In its classic forms in our "advanced societies," representation is the achievement and operations of systems of coherence, of unity, which make up for the process of their structuration with strategies of comfading, difference, pletion that mask the heterogeneity-movement, contradiction-they effectively serve to contain, to figure out (p. 96). But why bother to point out that a coherence-making structure masks a heterogeneity (rather than simply saying that it unifies a heterogeneity) unless you yourself believe that homogeneity is the only true test of unity, that is, unless you yourself believe that unity has the univocal sense of homogeneity. In other 60. I have not been able to figure out on the basis of Heath's exposition why, a moment after the film is over-when it is no longer proliferating heterogeneity masking coherences-the whole suture process doesn't fall apart. This, it seems to me, should be a consequence of the claim that the film's suturing must be interminable in order to mask itself.

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words, Heath acts as if there is only one sense of unity where there are at least two. Thus, when confronted with unities of coherence, Heath observes that they don't meet the criteria of homogeneity unity, and he treats the former as somehow counterfeit. The unities of a sentence, of a story, or of a point-of-view segment of a film are not, however, counterfeit. They are called unities, correctly enough, but they do not fall under the category of unity explicated by homogeneity. Throughout Questionsof Cinema, Heath really only accepts one sense of unity, the homogeneity sense, and he himself takes the measure of coherence-making unities, like continuity editing, against the homogeneity standard. Thus, he is always offering the astounding "discovery" that this or that coherence-making structure is only forging an appearanceof unity. The problem is that Heath's use of the term unity is masking the fact that he is shuttling between two concepts while also accepting only one of them as legitimate. These two concepts of unity are not contradictory; they are different. Coherence unity is not inauthentic. It is distinct from homogeneity unity. But this is unproblematic unless, like Heath, you believe that every sort of unity must be equivalent to homogeneity.61

That the confusion of types of unity is Heath's does not exclude the possibility that it can also be attributed to the audience although there is little direct evidence of this one way or the other. In ordinary conversation, moviegoers will commend films by saying that they are unified, but they don't seem to have the homogeneity sense in mind when they say this because if you ask them what they mean they explain it by saying that "Everything fit together"-where everything,I take it, admits of divisibility. Moreover, if you countered our informal film critic by saying that the film was not unified since it does not contain If we abandon the requirement that coherence unities be homogeneity unities, then we can 61. abandon Heath's notion that sentences, films, and so on only appearcoherent. We can say instead that they are coherent. I think that it is indeed ironic that Heath, the enemy of fantasies of homogeneity, should himself presuppose homogeneity as a standard of coherence. Here, perhaps, is the place to comment on two other ironies of the theory. First, if it is true that one reason the Lacanian-Althusserians distrust the notion of the subject is because, like Nietzsche, they distrust constructs and postulations, then it is ironic that they are untroubled by the notion of the unconscious, which is also a construct. A second irony pertains to Heath's film criticism. Though he eschews the role of arbiter of taste, Heath does appear to endorse certain films-for example, he finds that Death by Hanging supplies better clues to the proper direction of politically conscious filmmaking than avant-garde experiments in the deconstruction of formal devices (pp. 64-65). When Heath states his case for this film, he does so by arguing that the editing and the narrative raise questions of identity. I do not believe his analysis of editing is cogent, but, for the moment, I want to put such specific objections aside in order to note the general form of Heath's argument. It is a very traditional critical approach, sometimes referred to as imitative form. It is based on the idea that formal elements echo or dovetail the content of the story. What is ironic about Heath's use of this critical strategy (which he repeats in his analyses of News from Home and Empire of the Senses) is not that it is so conventional, but that Heath never explains why the form/content unities which he adduces in his favored films are not instances of deceptive homogeneities.

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reference to the process of its own production within its system of representations, I suspect that you would be told that that is not what was claimed by "the film is unified." I suppose that the type of evidence that might be used to show that spectators mistake film unity for homogeneity might include the fact that spectators do not follow narrative films shot by shot, but through larger events and stories. But even if spectators do not pay attention to shot transitions, this does not mean that they don't know that they are there. Indirect evidence for this is that phrases like "go in for a close-up," "cut," "zoom-in," and so forth are parts of everyday language where they are not only used metaphorically but also in informal, nonprofessional descriptions of film. Ordinary viewers of film don't possess complete knowledge of film editing, nor do they attend to every cut in a film. But this does not mean that they don't know the film is edited-constructed from parts which, in this case, are distinct shots. Undoubtedly, Heath would waive aside the above discussion by saying that he is not concerned with what spectators consciously know or believe. Rather, he is concerned with an unconscious process of misrecognition and one, moreover, which must occur. What could be the force of must? Probably it is that coherence unity is in some sense dependent on homogeneity unity. But then what is the nature of this dependence? My guess is that Heath believes that before you can have an idea of parts cohering into one unit, you must have the idea of "one." And, furthermore, the idea of one discriminable thing is based on a sense of homogeneity. And one could then say that this sense of homogeneity is acquired at the mirror stage of psychosexual development where it is grounded in the apprehension of the reflection of one's body as the first discriminable unity (an apprehension which comes from the Other, but is not so recognized, and, therefore, transmits a tendency to blindness as regards lacks of process-wholeness to the organism from the start). This account of the dependence of coherence on homogeneity is a mixture of logical and genetic considerations. I am least persuaded by the logical considerations. I don't see that homogeneity, in the sense that Heath uses it throughout the text, is more fundamental than coherence. Both coherence unity and homogeneity unity presuppose the idea of a unit. But Heath's use of homogeneity also seems to presuppose what I have called process-wholeness. This does not appear to be a necessary element of what it is to be a unit. Thus, the kind of homogeneity Heath discusses cannot supply us with the logical analysis of the idea of a unit. The implicit definition of homogeneity that Heath appears to hold is, in fact, itself partly dependent on the more basic notion it supposedly explains. That is, coherence unity and homogeneity unity are both built up from a more primitive notion of a unit; neither concept seems "deeper" than the other; neither explains the other. (I leave it to readers exasperated with these abstractions to determine whether film theory, following Heath, should make the problem of the One and the Many an object of its concern.)

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Of course, Heath need not claim that coherence unity is logically dependent on homogeneity unity. And he does not explicitly make such a claim. Rather his emphasis is on the genetic dependence of coherence unity on the sense of homogeneity. The mirror stage precedes the Symbolic and makes the latter possible. But even if this is a viable developmental model-and I, for one, would not bet on it-why does it continue to be the case that throughout our adult life we require the constant mobilization of the Imaginary to recognize things as coherent, meaningful, and intelligible? Of course, I realize that the claim that the Imaginary is a permanent feature of our psychic makeup is a central assumption of the Lacanian system. But that it is central does not mean it is uncontroversial. Indeed, its supposed permanence requires proof. For even if there were such a thing as the mirror stage -that was used as a ladder to ascend to the Symbolic-it would still be logically and theoretically open to us to hypothesize that the ladder was thrown away once we acquired the capacity to process meaning. That the Imaginary was once a condition for the Symbolic does not imply that it is still in operation in our processing of sense, sentences, and movies. In short, why must we conjecture the continued operation of the Imaginary in our encounters with the coherence-making practices of language and film? Heath himself does seem aware that a demonstration of the continued operation of the Imaginary is appropriate. And to that end he tries to show us that the postulation of the Imaginary is forced upon us by certain enduring and inescapable facts about all representation. Heath's argument is connected to his belief that there are certain permanent features of representation, language, and film which force the subject constantly to relive the drama of its acquisition of language. Heath's account is very detailed, so I will quote it in full. The function and functioning of the performance of representations can be grasped more readily in the light of insights from analytic work on the relations of the individual as subject to meaning in language. Such work- stemming above all from a linguistics responsive to the problems raised by psychoanalysis-recognizes an important distinction between the subjectof the enouncedand the subjectof the enunciation, between the subject in the proposition or statement made and the subject of the making of the proposition or statement. Thus, a classic paradoxical example, in the utterance "I am lying," it is evident that the subject of the proposition enounced is not one with the subject of the enunciation of the proposition-the "I"cannot "lie"on both planes at once: there is a division of the "I"necessary for the utterance to mean. Freud himself alludes to this splitting of the subject in language in his comparisons of the multiple appearance of the ego in dreams with the common fact of anaphoric pronominalization in sentences of the kind "When I think what a healthy child I was" and

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more recently the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan has been concerned with the enounced/enunciation distinction in its descriptions of the constitution and process of subjectivity. The passage into and in language divides and in that divisioneffectsthe individual as subject: "The cause is the signifier without which there would be no subject in the real. The subject that is is not the beginning but the result of a structure of difference, of the symbolic order, and that result indexes a lack - the division - which is the constant "drama of the subject in language," the inscription of desire and the elaboration of an imaginary order of wholeness, a set of images in which the ego seeks resolution as totality: "it is because it fends off this moment of lack that an image takes up the position of bearing the whole cost of desire: projection, function of the imaginary. . . ." The construction of the identity of the subject is a movement of exchange, a movement ceaselessly for balance between subject of enounced and subject of enunciation, symbolic and imaginary. In short, there is a permanent performance of the subject in language itself; permanent and interminable, never finished, the passage into and in language without end and hence the point of highly developed forms of social attention and regulation, the determination of institutions to play out the drama of meaning, to repeat the production of cohesion and identity, to provide fictions and images, to make sense (p. 98). From the above, we see that language and, by extension, every form of representation supposedly replays the subject's acquisition of language and, thus, the Imaginary constantly repeats the work it performed way back when. This is necessitated by a fact of speech that Heath characterizes by the "enounced/enunciation" distinction. All utterances, all representation, including film, somehow split the subject. Thus, we must postulate a mechanism, the Imaginary, which resolves the split, at least momentarily. And, of course, once we postulate the Imaginary, the interminability of subject construction follows because the sense of homogeneity the Imaginary imbues will always be belied. The crux of this story is the distinction between the "enounced" or statement and the "enunciation" or speech act. If this split is not forced upon the subject by all representation, then there is no reason to postulate the Imaginary as the means of overcoming the cleavage it is said to impose. The interminability thesis would thus lose its support. What is the distinction? I say, "I went to the store yesterday." The subject, "I," inside the quotation marks is the subject of the statement. The subject outside the quotes, the "I" speaking the sentence in the present tense, could be seen, heuristically, as the equivalent of the subject of the speech act. Or, to be more precise, the simple utterance "I went to the store yesterday" really has two subjects, the "I"(of the statement) who went to the store, and the unwritten "I"that speaks the sentence

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(the subject of speech act). Every utterance has these two subjects, and they are not the same. Why? Heath cites the liar paradox to state his case: in the sentence "I am lying," the subject of the statement is lying, but the speaking subject (subject of the speech act) is presumably telling the truth and, therefore, is not lying (or, if the subject of the speech act is lying, then, paradoxically, the subject of the statement is telling the truth, that is, "I am lying"). Every utterance and representation involves this duality between logically different and irreconcilable subjects. And the Imaginary bridges the gap between them. This account, as Heath argues it, is extremely improbable. It asks us to believe that every sentence and every representation involves a split subject. The evidence is based on first person utterances: "I went to the store." But what about second and third person utterances? I say, "He went to the store." Where is the split subject? It's true that I said it and he did it, but what would this have to do with the identity of the speaker. Also, sometimes first-person, presenttense utterances don't imply a duality of subjects. Asked what I am doing at this moment, I reply, while still pushing my pen, "I am writing." Thus, the distinction between the subject of the statement and the subject of speech act seems to apply only to a limited range of utterances. So, why is it generalized as a feature of all languages and all representations? How can such a limited phenomenon reveal something that is true of all representations? There is a further problem with Heath's account. Not only is the statement/speech act distinction said to apply to all utterances, but it is said to portend a split in the subject, and not only a differencein subject(s) of the sentence. When a sickly adult says, "I was a healthy child," we understand him as saying that in respect of health, he was once better off, but we do not take this to mean that he has been split-logically, the ontologically, or psychologically-from child he once was. The sickly speaker is an enduring substance who has different properties at different times. The only evidence Heath gives that the subject is split-rather than merely instantiating different properties-is an allusion to the liar paradox. This is a rare (and arguably solvable 62) phenomenon-how can it show anything generic about all first-person utterances? It is a deviation, not the norm, and it is doubtful that one could demonstrate that anything resembling it surfaces in examples like "I am writing." And again, what relevance would this paradox have to second- and third-person utterances? It is true that the paradox is part of a family, called paradoxes of selfreference, which have third-person examples-"Does the set of all sets that include themselves include itself?" (Russell's paradox). But what do these have to do with psychological subject splits? Indeed, Heath's examples are splits in speakers. Thus, it is hard to see the relevance of the liar paradox to most of the See Alfred Tarski, "The Semantic Conception of Truth," Philosophical and Phenomenological 62. Research, 4 (1944); and Tarski, "The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages," in Logic, Semantics, and Mathematics, trans. J. Woodger, Oxford, 1956.

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phenomena he discusses in Questionsof Cinema, where his emphasis is on receivers, not senders. And perhaps more importantly, it is difficult to understand why observations about a limited range of first-person utterances should be applied to all forms of representation, since not every type of representation possesses the grammatical system of person differentiation. Film, for example, does not, except when it employs language in the form of dialogue and commentary. Therefore, the distinction between the subject of the statement and the subject of speech act does not appear to compel us to postulate the continued operation of the Imaginary, especially as regards film. That is, since the paradox Heath believes is rampant in representation is, in fact, not very widespread, there is no need to hypothesize the Imaginary as continually wrestling with it. And with that, the interminability thesis fails. Heath does not see the limitations of the liar paradox example, and throughout his book he attributes a paradox to cinematic representation based on the statement/speech act distinction. A film is always finished, enounced; and finished, enounced, even in its enunciation which is given, fixed, repeated at every "showing" or "screening." One has to think in this respect of the accomplished fact -the fait accompli- of film and the power of the image in that accomplishment (leading to those descriptions of film as characteristically an effacement of discourse; to the feeling of a loss of any historical sense, history constrained into the "objective," into the form of a visibility and vision, where Marxism in its practice and its theory gives a history that is quite the reverse of "visible"; and so on); the power which is there in the very regularity of the flow of images in time (smoothly, no resistance, a well-oiled defile for consciousness). Yet, in that fixity, that givenness of the film, there is nevertheless, always, a present enunciation, the making of the film by the spectator (p. 100). Thus again we have a paradox whose masking will trigger an interminable process. But here it is clear that, once we strip away the unsupported linguistic trappings (statement/speech act), the "paradox" we are left with is perfectly harmless: a film is a finished product (an object in a can, the result of a process of production involving writers, actors, cameramen) and yet it also remains to be "completed," again and again, when it is screened in theaters for spectators. If this argument is accepted, the results will be bewildering. For it implies that every object made for use is paradoxical. A car that rolls off an assembly line is a finished product; but it is not completed until people buy it and drive it. But is there anything paradoxical or contradictory about this? No. The apparent paradox only comes from Heath's misleading way of expressing himself. In the preceding quotation, we are led to regard finished, fixity, and given-

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ness as opposites of presentenunciationwhich stands for each time a film is shown again. Underlying this opposition there lurks the presupposition that somehow the film is "completed" and "not completed" at the same time (and we know, given the totality of Heath's theory, that the film is not merely "not completed" because it remains to perform its function of being shown, but because it remains to be completed by suture). However, it is not the case that the film is both complete and not complete, finished and not finished at the same time, in the same way, in any sense that is paradoxical. For these putative paradoxes disappear once we qualify our way of using the concepts of complete and finished. Heath is simply retreading an ancient, fallacious argument form-one Plato relished, but Aristotle corrected. The film as a coherent structure (not as a homogeneous, process-whole) embodied in celluloid and ready to be mounted on a projector is finished or completed at the time of its release. A car is finished as a car is when it rolls out of the factory. The term of its literal construction is over. Of course, it is an object for use. So one might say that it is not completed until it is used. But this is a new sense of completion. It is a function sense, rather than an object sense. In a certain patriarchal way of speaking, it is said that a woman is not complete until she has borne a child. Here, the sense of "completeness" is not that of a numerically identifiable entity but that of "fulfillment." The film is constructed, finished, and complete as an identifiable entity at the time of its release. It remains to fulfill the task it was made for through repeated showings. So it is not that the film is both complete and not complete, but that it is finished as an object in terms of its construction but remains to perform the task it was constructed to perform. There is no paradox, though Heath is led to see one because he equivocates on the sense in which we are to understand finished. A follower of Heath might balk here and charge that though I have said the film is finished in terms of construction, I am wrong. The film remains to be constructed by the process of suture. But this rejoinder only moves the equivocation from finished and relocates it in construction.That is, now we have two meanings of constructionmasquerading as one. But, of course, we can unravel this Gordian knot best by cutting it into two, noncontradictory concepts. The film is finished as a constructed object-in terms of processes like writing, editing, and so on-while it remains to be used. If you want to describe its use as another process of construction - a process of reading in or suture - that is fine. But realize that these two uses of constructionare different and noncontradictory. A film could be constructed in the first sense above and yet never be screened for anyone. But saying that such a film was both constructed and not constructed according to some univocal sense of constructionwould be prattle. Similarly, it is simply humbug to say that How Green Was My Valley is not finished, and to leave it at that, when you mean to say that it will continue to be shown to spectators who will respond with their own readings-in. The above argument parallels the argument that a coherent narrative film

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is not really a unity unless it reveals that it is a production-a fictional world constructed by a team of cineastes and by a process of suture. I have always wondered why title sequences were not enough to acknowledge the former sort of construction. But, in any case, it must be stressed that films can be called unities without being "whole" in the rather monumental sense demanded by the concept of unity that underpins Heath's argument. To regard coherencemaking structures in film as feigned or deceptive or inadequate unities is to apply an inappropriate sense of unity to them.63 Heath's arguments for the interminability thesis seem generally grounded in unconvincing accounts of the metaphysically/metapsychologically paradoxical and disunified nature of film. At other times he seems to base his arguments on the supposed fact that subject construction is interminable throughout the life of an individual. This is the worst of his arguments. For, it confuses interminable in the sense of "without end"-for example, the term of a psychothe sense of "ceaseless"-that is, happening again and again analysis-with with each moment. Obviously, something can be interminable in the former sense without being interminable in the latter sense. Moreover, only the latter sense of interminability can apply to any phenomena involved while viewing a film. So why does Heath mix the interminability of subject construction in the life of the individual with the interminable subject construction engaged by the suturing devices of an individual film? Surely the former cannot be evidence for the latter, even if it is a truth about subject construction.

63. Undoubtedly Heath's insensitivity to the difference between types of unity is heightened by his commitment to deal with the entire range of phenomena of film reception in terms of psychoanalytic theory. If his theory contained cognitive psychological components, he would not be compelled finally to refer every explanation of unity back to the vague interaction of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. In fact, most of the interminability in Heath's theory seems to derive from the fact that these two psychic mechanisms are so poorly characterized that they can always be said to be working for and against each other. A more salutary way of dealing with coherence or meaning reception would be to build models that involve specific processing mechanisms (language and picture-processing mechanisms, for example). In that way, we could account for the processes through which the limited coherence unities proferred by language and art are understood without drifting into metaphysics: the Yin and Yang battle of Unity versus Disunity. That the problem lies in Heath's tools and not in the phenomena he examines can be illustrated by noting that the same results-for example, interminability- can be generated by adopting any procedure analogous to Heath's. Take two large, vaguely defined, ostensibly contrary concepts, for example, natural and conventional-and attempt exhaustively to catalogue an entire field of data with them. You will soon find your distinction on the verge of collapse as you uncover more and more examples that do not fit exclusively into either category. At this point, you should realize that your categories are not articulated well enough. But you may stick to the categories, and instead of abandoning them outright (as you should), you may wonder how people are able to tolerate the instability of this distinction. Then, you might effectively eliminate one of the terms of the distinction; you might say that nothing is natural-what appears natural is really conventional, but its conventionality is masked by convention in such a way that people are always fooled and that this masking must be interminable so that the game is not given away.

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VII. Heath's Rhetoric The style of Questionsof Cinema is dense. The book is packed with neologisms, pleonasms, misuses, and strained uses of words and grammar-Heath, the book has one surmises, enjoys calling things by the wrong name-and strong tendencies toward formulaic repetition and belletristic rambling. If Questionsof Cinemafails to become a favorite of graduate film students, this will undoubtedly be a consequence of its prose style. Throughout, the tone of the book is bullying. Heath liberally peppers his commentary with thus, and therefore-words that ordinarily signal the conclusion of a piece of reasoning-where there is no argument in the vicinity. The reader searches for nonexistent premises until he gives up-staring blankly at the poker-faced text. Heath also tends to overuse words like preciselyand exactlyat just those points in the exposition where he is least precise and exact. The ideological operation lies in the balance, in the capture and regulation of energy, film circulates-rhythms, spaces, surfaces, narrativization moments, multiple intensities of signification-and entertains the subject-on screen, in frame-in exact turnings of difference and repetition, semiotic and suture, negativity and negation (p. 103). The effect of exact in this verbiage is to suggest rigor while cajoling the reader into believing that the passage is quite clear, even precise. Anyone should be able to understand it. A review of Questionsof Cinemacould certainly be written by composing a random selection of logically incoherent and tortuous quotations made all the more ludicrous by their self-celebratory gravity. I will, however, restrict my comments now to those aspects of Heath's writing style that have some bearing on the question of the book's adequacy as a work of theory. Most of the putative explanations in Questionsof Cinema are couched in terms of metaphors and analogies. This might be criticized on the grounds that metaphors have no essential place in scientific discourse.64 This draconian view is not mine and I would agree with the contrary position on scientific metaphor.65 But although I think that metaphors can be scientific, I do not believe that Heath's use of metaphor generally accords with acceptable scientific practice.66 The modern locus classicus of the position against metaphor as an essential part of science 64. is Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structureof Physical Theory, trans. P. P. Weiner, New York, Atheneum, 1962, especially part I, chapter IV. 65. The locus classicus of the defense of scientific analogy is Norman Campbell, What Is Science?, New York, Dover, 1953, chapter V. See also R. Harre, The Principlesof Scientific Thinking, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1970. 66. See Mary B. Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 1970, for a thorough discussion of the logic of scientific metaphor.

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The function of a scientific metaphor is to give us knowledge about some phenomenon that we know little about by reference to something we know more about. The metaphor of waves is particularly useful in physics. But in order for a scientific metaphor to work, we must have a distinct picture of the known phenomenon that is being used to illuminate the unknown phenomenon. Heath's supposedly explanatory metaphors are often, however, as vague or more vague than the topic they are meant to elucidate. For example, the subject is always sliding and turning in Heath's accounts. These images are introduced to help us grasp obscure psychic processes. But forget the psychic phenomenon for a moment. Now concentrate. Soon you will ask-just what are we supposed to envision as concrete examples of sliding and turning? Is the sliding done in a groove or on a slippery surface? Is the turning like that of a rock suspended by a string, like a planet on its axis, or like the needle of a compass? That is, what concrete physical forces are we to have in mind? For, if we have none in mind, how can we extrapolate from them so as to understand the even more obscure psychic processes that supposedly correlate to them? These metaphors generally are so vague and abstract that they are not internally rich enough to supply us with an initial picture of anything, let alone with a template with which to trace the outline of obscure psychic processes. We may call this the fallacy of the indigent metaphor. It might be said that Heath's slidings and turnings do perform some service. They tell us that the subject is slippery and in motion. But this is not particularly informative unless we have a grasp of what they are slippery and in motion in reference to. The metaphor will be viable in proportion to the clarity of its focusing term. Moreover, a strong scientific metaphor should have some degree of systematicity and fecundity. That is, it should enable us to expand upon it. If A and B are similar in respect to property x, and if A, the focusing term of our metaphor, also has properties y and z, then we test to see if properties analogous to y and z can be found in B. But since Heath's metaphors are often too vague, we cannot use them to articulate further the structures and forces within the psychic processes in question. Also, when we have a firm grasp of the processes referred to by the focusing term in a metaphor, we can use that to predict the next stage of the process that is mysterious to us. This feature is also related to the teaching of that metaphor-that is, the student can use the metaphor to see how the mysterious process hangs together as a sequence because the student has a clear picture of the process in the focusing term of the metaphor. But what comes before or after Heath's hazy slidings and turnings is anyone's guess. Heath's grammar is also peculiar in a way that raises theoretical questions. Consider this passage which begins a paragraph (!) and which is referring both to Touchof Evil and to what is repressed ("the something else") by that film: "The something else, the other film of which this film says everywhere the

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slips and slides: the narrative of the film and the history of that narrative, the economy of its narrative production, its logic" (p. 107). Sentences like this are not rare in Heath. Indeed, this is a rather gentle example. This one shows two frequent tendencies in Heath's writing: the omission of a main verb and the use of an inventory in which the relations between the items on the list are not conspicuously clear on the basis of the sentence. Both tendencies give Heath's sentences the aspect of juxtaposed shots in montage. We are offered a run of nouns and noun phrases; it is up to us to put them together. We are given the elements that are to be related to one another, but we must divine their relations. For example, is everything in the above list that is not separated by commas in apposition to everything else? Is "the economy of its narrative production" the same as "its logic?" Or does Heath just want us to think of all these things at the same time? Throughout the text, we get asyndetic inventories of this sortonly longer-as well as nouns without verbs between them. The upshot is that often we cannot tell whether the noun phrases are causally related (and if so, how), identical, or correlated in some other mysterious fashion. What is at stake here is not just a stylistic quirk. Rather, these stylistic flourishes are antitheticalto the task of theorizing.The theorist's job is to clarify the interrelations between his various theoretical terms. To lay such terms out without specifying exactly how they relate to each other is not merely slipshod and lazy. Nor is it merely evasive. It is toforsake theorizingentirely. The reader is not supposed to guess at how these juxtaposed noun phrases go together. The theorist is supposed to chart explicitly their precise interrelations. Had Heath propounded the Einstein mass-energy relation, it would have read "E,m,c,2" rather than "E = mc2." Heath often leaves out the grammatical and logical connectives that make assertion-and, hence, truth or falsity-possible. The major rhetorical technique of Questionsof Cinema is, as we have seen, equivocation; the book is a tissue of puns. As a general method of refutation, one could replace all the qualifications that Heath deletes and the desired "emperor has no clothes" effect would follow almost immediately. For example, Heath wants to make the rather startling point that narrative is "a decisive instance of framing in film" (p. 13). The narrative is to be considered on a par with framing in the literal sense of the visual, compositional element. Thus does contemporary film theory attempt to equate mimesis with diegesis. Heath supports this discovery by citing the importance of narrative closure. He also feels that, in some way, the narrative "encloses" the space of the film. He wants us to think of the narrative as a literal frame. But what does narrative closure have to do with a frame? If one says the narrative encloses the space of the film, one uses an extremely loose metaphor that means the space of a narrative film is coherent in terms of the narrative. A narrative does not, however, enclose a visual expanse by surrounding it in the way a frame does. The argument -that a narrative encloses, and, therefore, frames-is therefore, not sound. For once we add its missing premise -all frames enclose (in the qualified sense of sur-

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round)- we see that the way narratives enclose is not really covered by the relevant, qualified generalization. By searching for equivocations, one can derail most of these analyses. Since there is an especially high incidence of equivocation in Heath's work, the reader must patiently attend to every different meaning of a word like centeror frame within an analysis. The unwary reader is likely to be unhinged by the incantatory repetition of the same words, caught in the undertow of an oceanic experience rather than led by reasoning. Heath's equivocations are encouraged by the fact that many of the main concepts in his system are associatively intersubstitutable. Meaning, closure,coherence,position, binding,frame, center,homogeneity,unity, balance, and so forth are either cognates for Heath, or so enmeshed that mention of one licenses his invocation of any of the others (despite the apparent disjunctiveness of many of these concepts-to have a meaning is not a necessary or sufficient condition for being balanced, and vice-versa). This allows Heath to move rapidly from claims such as "narratives have closure," to "narratives frame," to "narratives center." And once there, he can equate narrative and perspective insofar as they both center. These associative trains run over the differences within the phenomena under discussion. But what really grounds these associations? In fact, they are not rigorously defined and interrelated theoretical terms. Rather, they are garden-variety image clusters - words grouped together in ordinary language because they share rather broad connotative qualities. Centerand unity go together in the same way that gap and absencecould be grouped with cold and gray, or, to use a classic example, with ping (rather than pong). These words, in short, are interchangeable because they share affective resonances and not because Heath's theory has successfully shown us that they represent the same phenomena in every case, or even in many cases. He acts as though his terms are interdefinable when they really only belong to similar emotive meaning clusters. As he arraigns veritable parades of these terms in his exfoliating, repetitive, appositional inventories, momentum gathers and his equivocations are rushed along. But this is conjuring, not theory. A favorite stratagem of Heath's could be called the flip-flop. Heath loves to turn a process of the sort we would normally attribute to a spectator to the film. For example, it is said that the film rather than the spectator has a memory. This reversal is in accord with Heath's Lacanian commitment: the subject is an effect of the signifier, or the Other, which, in this case, is the film. A narrative can function as the film's "memory for the spectator placed as its subject" and "without narrative, the memory of the film fails" (p. 171). Now it is certainly true that a spectator will remember something that has a structure, like a narrative, better than something that lacks a structure-because the former is simpler to code for memory storage.67 So memory is dependent on the struc67. See Robert E. Ornstein, On the Experienceof Time, Baltimore, Penguin, 1975, especially the chapter entitled, "The 'Storage Size' Metaphor."

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ture of its object. But does it make sense to regard this type of dependence as a reason to reidentify the efficient cause of the memory-the narrative structure of a film- as the memory itself? If the disposition of stars on a clear night forms a memorable gestalt, would I speak of the universe's memory? No matter how determinant the film is in the production of a memory, the term memoryapplies to a species of cognitive process. Films don't have memories in this sense. A print of The Roaring Twenties does not "lose its memory" as it gets older; films neither forget nor remember anything. It may be objected that I am unduly harsh. Heath, it might be said, is well aware that films are not organisms with literal memory faculties. Instead, he is using memory in a special, extended sense, a sense, moreover, which enables him to connect film theory with Lacanian metaphysics. But have we learnt something new about the phenomenon in question, or have we just translated what we already know into another, Lacanian, way of speaking? Such an exercise is akin to rewriting Film as Art in the language of Parmenides, or rephrasing what we know of spectator responses as monad responses. Often one has the feeling that Heath has said something differently but that he has not said something different-that he has worked a truism into a muddle. If it is argued that these linguistic dislocations must be undertaken to get the metaphysics of the phenomenon right, so much the worse for metaphysics. VIII. The CinematicApparatus One of the favorite concepts of film theory in the late '70s was that of apparatus. Like many of the "technical" terms of the period, it has the air of precision and scientific rigor. Just as physicists study quantum mechanics, so film scholars study the apparatus. But a glance at the wild assortment of things that are included in a jumbled book like The CinematicApparatus reveals that one could study almost any aspect of film and say that one was examining the apparatus. "The cinematic apparatus" is a phrase in search of a definition rather than a theoretical postulate that directs a coordinated research program. As with much contemporary film theory, the concept of the cinematic apparatus proceeds in a way that is methodologically backwards: first the term is coined, and then researchers struggle to find out if it applies to something. Heath has his own ideas about what is to be included under the banner of the apparatus, as well as suggestions about how it should be studied. If the phrase "the cinematic apparatus" calls up for you an image of the machinery of film-cameras, projectors, and so forth-then you have a narrower concept of the apparatus than Heath does. For he includes under the study of the apparatus such things as spectator response (subject positioning by the metaphorically denominated cinema machine), film technology, film ideology, film distribution, and the study of individual films. If you are about to ask why this should be called "studying the apparatus" rather than, less cryptogrammically, "studying film," you have already anticipated one of my objections.

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Heath arrives at his conception of the apparatus through a series of steps. He examines several likely candidates for the title of the cinematic apparatus, and rejects each one in turn. These rejected options include the study of the apparatus as the study of technology, as the study of film as business, and as the study of formal techniques. Heath pursues his elimination of these alternatives while presupposing that whatever the proper study of the cinematic apparatus is, it will be historical in nature. Heath offers no argument for this; but he seems predisposed to such a view by his purported Marxism and by the fact that the types of studies he is attacking are historical. Heath begins his assault with some general remarks about the methodology of history. He remarks that history is written from a perspective, from what he calls a theoretical-discursive articulation (p. 225). This, he seems to think, inclines various historians, implicitly or explicitly, to take a determinist position on whatever dimension of the historical process they study, so that they espouse that aspect of history as the single-cause, driving force of history. Historians of film technology become technological determinists (this invention caused this style of composition to arise). Historians of the film business become economic determinists, or a combination of economic and technological determinists, while historians of technique see the formal needs of the medium as the motor force of film history-that is, filmmakers became interested in shots of longer duration and as a result the crab dolly was invented. I gather that Heath thinks that each of these determinisms is too limited to cover the complexity of all the available data. And that is, of course, true enough. In opposition to technological determinism, Heath says, Cinema does not exist in the technological and then become this or that practice in the social; its history is a history of the technological and social together, a history in which the determinations are not simple but multiple, interacting, in which the ideological is there from the start -without this latter emphasis reducing the technological to the ideological or making it uniquely the term of an ideological determination (p. 227). Here, the problem seems to be not that technological determinism can't explicate every case, but that in every case to which it is applied, it overlooks the importance of ideology in its account of this or that event. Economic histories ignore the history of formal development. While histories of formal developments are bedeviled by troublesome data, for example, some formal innovations are the product of technological innovations. Given the limitations of these approaches to the cinematic apparatus, Heath tells us how we might envision its proper study. In the following quotation, he begins with an attack on Barry Salt but ends with an enumeration of the factors that are pertinent to the analysis of the cinematic apparatus:

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Within cinema, as it were, the question of the relation between technological determinants (the inventions, advances, improvements) and techniques (the standard or individual practices) in which technology is exploited is a question at the level of films: the determination of the forms of films by technical elements or/and the determination of the technical elements by the aesthetic requirements of film forms, "technique" being the term that shifts between the one and the other. Technology itself is then always found and finally confirmed as an autonomous instance, with ideology involvedshould the argument envisage it-in the creation and maintenance of the various techniques, even if (just because)-again should the is also acknowledged argument even pose the problem-technology as bound up with the determinations of economic forces guiding its development in this or that direction. Effectively, a kind of base/ super-structure model is deployed in which technology provides for techniques which are the point of the relations of ideology. The question of films, of film forms, is important and, moreover, as yet relatively unacknowledged in this context: what, for example, would be a textual analysis informed by reflection on technology/techniques (where the answer, of course, could not lie in the simple adoption in the analysis of technical terms, odd references to depth of field or whatever) ? At the same time, however, a further question can be, has been posed (with consequences in return for the question of film forms): that of the applied technology of cinema, the machine, of the apparatus, in fact, with reference to which large areas in themselves, and not merely a particular technique, become crucial forces for discussion, camera, colour, sound, and so on; the question of the limits of cinema, historical and ideological, and the effects of the technology there:the apparatus as instruments, mechanisms, devices, and of the subject-as that history too (pp. 232-233). This dense passage beckons us not to approach the cinematic apparatus from a single determinist vantage point. It asks us to see the apparatus from the perspective of textual systems while seeing textual systems through the optic of the apparatus, which is, in turn, an interaction of technology, formal techniques, economics, subject positioning, and ideology. We are to be sensitive to the history of these variables, to each independently and to all of them in concert. Thus, if one asks where to start an analysis of the apparatus, the answer is simple: "Everywhere, preferably all at once." The attack on the various historical approaches to the apparatus is ambiguous. The attack is mainly directed at different kinds of historical determinism (technological, economic, and formal). But it is important to stress that this does not undercut the legitimacy of undertaking perspectivally limited histori-

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cal projects. One can agree that not every question about film will be solved by recourse to economics while also seeking to answer certain economic questions about the history of the Hollywood film business in the '20s without executing a textual analysis of Sunrise.Refuting economic determinism does not undermine the prospects of a delimited study of the economic history of the film industry. technological, Refuting the idea that any single type of cause-economic, formal-always explains all our questions about cinema does not entail that this or that fact about cinema may not be best explained by a technological, economic, or formal analysis that brackets certain considerations as not relevant to its domain. The refutation of any single-cause determinism might lead someone to say that there is no unified theory of film history-that is, there is no history unified by the predominance of one kind of cause-but it does not imply that narrowly focused analyses of certain events or event series in the history of cinema are problematic. Heath, however, seems to regard his refutations of various single-cause determinisms as grounds for suspecting the adequacy of any narrowly focused historical analysis. Why? Technological explanations tend to overlook ideological factors; economic explanations tend to overlook relevant aesthetic factors. That is, all such explanations are partial. They are called into question on the basis of what can only be a belief in the availability of an overarching explanatory framework which, if it is not a unified theory, is, at least, an ultimate theory. Heath offers no detailed account of that theory, but he enumerates some of the causally interacting factors that such a theory would track: subject positioning, technology, technique, the relation of individual films to the apparatus and vice-versa, ideology. Supposedly a materialist history could be written on the basis of this framework, but as yet that work remains to be done. Heath himself has not started work on such a project. He has just attempted to isolate some of the factors that will go into that history. I doubt that such a history will be written. For it is not apparent on the basis of Heath's suggestions that it could be written. Nor if something were produced, do I think we would get anything theoretically satisfying. To lay out the grounds for my skepticism, it is enough to begin with the concept of the cinematic apparatus, which might as well be called the cinematic everything. It is not defined enough to serve as a starting point for theory building. If you want to analyze the workings of the apparatus, Heath's concept of the apparatus will not help you determine what can be bracketed from your purview. No theory explains everything-not even everything about the object of its investigation (Newton didn't worry about what made his famous apples tart). Every theory must put some questions to the side in order to begin the work of theorizing. Every theory must distinguish the aspects of its field of investigation that are salient for its purposes from those that are not. This is not an unpardonable epistemological sin, as film scholars sometimes intimate; it is simply a fact about theories and explanations. As a theoretical concept for film theory, the cinematic apparatus is bogus

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because it does not tell you what is excluded from your area of research. Consequently, if your task is to write a theoretically informed history of the apparatus, you will have to attempt to chronicle every influence of every element in the apparatus on every other element. This history will be awesomely detailed but it will have little shape. For though Heath extravagantly indicates the ingredients of the apparatus, his formulation is little more than a cosmic shopping list. He tells future historians the variables and perspectives they should keep in mind, but he is vague about the hierarchy or priority that should obtain among these perspectives. This not only leaves us puzzled about which relations and lines of influence are important, but also about where to start tracing the lines of influence between all the variables enumerated. Is any point as good a starting point as any other since all roads lead back to the apparatus (as it is inchoately defined) ? The only directions one can glean for beginning the recommended history of the apparatus involve the cataloguing of all the interactions of the variables technological, formal, ideological, presented, from various perspectives-the psychological, economic, as well as from the viewpoint of the analysis of individual "film-texts." The result would be all-inclusive. It would be an encyclopedic report, a relentless account of every phase of film history, taken from every angle. It is unlikely that this could be written. To produce either a theory or a theoretically informed history, you have to start with something-rather than everything-that you want to know, and that something will guide your research. You can neither ask nor answer everything at once, though that seems to be what Heath is telling us to do. And if this advice leads to any account, it will be a cognitively indigestible one. The all-inclusiveness of Heath's recommendations reveals a general tendency of his mode of theorizing. He seems to believe that a theory should ideally be ontologically comprehensive -that it should report on all and everything that really is in its field of research-rather than that it should merely be pragmatic. In his discussion of the various approaches to the apparatus, he presumes that it is sufficient to reject an approach by showing that there is some aspect of the history of film that an explanation of a given sort leaves out. Instead, he urges us to grasp Spinoza-like the history of film from a multitude of perspectives, for anything short of a full picture of the total reality of film is inadequate. The proper approach to the apparatus will be ontologically accurate, which means that it will include reference to every interacting element and level in the system. Heath appears to think that a theoretical account of film should be a mirror of its total reality, noting all the continuities and discontinuities therein. And it is in this respect that I would call Heath an ontologist as regards the role of theory. I question whether ontological comprehensiveness of this sort is either a necessary or a desirable feature of any theory. I surmise that it is not a necessary feature since it is not a feature of most theories. The ecological theory that explains the killing of certain animals, say reindeer, by other animals, say

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wolves, in terms of the population ratios between predators and prey does not give us an ontologically comprehensive picture of all the relations between the reindeer and the wolves of a given region. It does not even give us an ontologically comprehensive picture of the relation of each dead reindeer to each respectively satiated wolf. If you ask why that half-eaten reindeer is dead, the theory says because the wolf population is large relative to the reindeer population. This explanation, of course, excludes many facts about the death of the particular reindeer, for example, that the reindeer was upwind of the wolf who ate it. Yet, it is a perfectly good explanation for answering certain questions, viz., "Why is the reindeer dead?" (as opposed to why did the reindeer die when and wherehe did?). Explanations, as this example illustrates, address specific questions and in the process they select theirown appropriatelevelof generality.And this is why they are not ontologically comprehensive. Theories do not offer a portrait of every element and level of interaction in their field of study. If they did they would not be able to answer the specific questions they are designed to deal with. That is, theories typically screen out vast portions of the available data including all manner of causal relations. And theories do this in order to supply answers to the questions that concern them. Ontological comprehensiveness is not necessary for a theory, and it may even be a detriment in a putative theory; it may clutter the theory with too many details to supply an illuminating answer to its questions. Theories are pragmatic; they serve specific purposes; they supply specific answers to specific questions. This is the point of a theory; theories are not made to mirror reality in all its richness. If Heath criticizes theories because they fail in this regard, or if he proposes a theoretical research program to achieve this end, then he just doesn't understand what a theory is. And if film scholars mistake the exorbitant demands of Heath's framework as a truly rigorous standard for dealing with the apparatus, then they are foolishly accepting a metaphysical yearning for a comprehensive vision of reality in place of the more moderate pragmatic, logical, and epistemological requirements of theorizing. I said earlier that Heath's taste for ontologically comprehensive theories is a general tendency of his approach. So far I have only shown its relevance to his recommendations about the cinematic apparatus. But I think it also surfaces in both the theory of interminable suture, and in his applications of that theory in certain analyses he performs on individual films. That is, the theory of interminable suture invites analysts to essay what I called micro-descriptions of the wealth of proliferating sutures of a given film or film segment. And this tendency is, in fact, borne out in parts of Heath's own work, most notably his monograph-scale study of Touch of Evil,68 but in other places as well, such as 68. Heath, "Film and System: Terms of Analysis," Screen, vol. 16, no. 1 (Spring 1975), pp. 7-77; and vol. 16, no. 2 (Summer 1975) pp. 91-113; additional note, "Touch of Evil-the long version," Screen, vol. 17, no. 1 (Spring 1976), pp. 115-117.

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the analysis of the scene from Suspicion (pp. 19-24). But why would one construct a theory whose primary virtue seems to be that it enables us to describe what it identifies as every fluctuation in the film-viewing process unless one took the role of theory to be to facilitate the accurate portrayal of the momentby-moment process engaged by film viewing? Moreover, such a project seems justifiable only if one believes that theoretical knowledge about films can be acquired only when we can account for the moment-by-moment details of their viewing. It may be argued that the preceding is unjust - that it makes Heath's system sound like a mass of descriptions unconnected by any summary laws or explanatory principles. And this is not true. There is the story of suture and subject positioning which imparts some order to Heath's approach. But, as I have already argued, the level of explanation afforded by suture is unacceptably abstract; it flattens all the diverse data of film into one interminably repetitious process. Its hyper-generality is enfeebling. Thus, Heath's theory seems to pull in two different directions. On the one hand, suture theory is too abstract to provide satisfying explanations (indeed, it is so general as to be vacuous). On the other hand, the research program Heath offers in terms of microdescriptions of the moment-to-moment film viewing situation and the charting of all the interrelations of elements and levels of the cinematic apparatus is impracticable because it sacrifices focus for detail. Heath's theory is uninformative bothbecause his central explanatory principles are threadbare, and because his drive for ontological inclusiveness produces a research program that is shapeless. He gives us too little, and he wants too much. His theory never settles on a fruitful level of generality.

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Paule-Leon Bisson-Millet Literatureof the 20th Century FirstEditions-IllustratedBooks- Periodicals Documentationon Art-Photography-Autographs

SURREALISM Futurism- Dadaism- Parasurrealism

Catalogueon Demand Postfach 1160, D-6900 Heidelberg 25 Tel. (6221)800322

The editors of OCTOBER wish to acknowledge the generous support of the Pinewood Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency; and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Trusteesof theInstitute and UrbanStudies for Architecture Armand P. Bartos, Honorary Chairman A. Bruce Brackenridge, Chairman Charles Gwathmey, Vice Chairman Peter D. Eisenman, Vice Chairman John Burgee Colin Campbell Henry Cobb Frank 0. Gehry Gerald D. Hines Arata Isozaki Eli S. Jacobs Philip Johnson Paul Kennon Phyllis Lambert Edward J. Logue Gerald M. McCue Cesar Pelli Kevin Roche Amanda M. Ross Paul Rudolph Edward L. Saxe Carl E. Schorske James Stirling Frederieke S. Taylor Massimo Vignelli

OCTOBER 24 & 25 Leo Steinberg

The Sexualityof Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion

Michel Foucault

RaymondRoussel

John Rajchman

Foucault, or the Ends of Modernism

Jo Anna Isaak

Old Mistresses by Rozika Parkerand GriseldaPollock

Scott MacDonald

Interviewwith Beth and Scott B

F. T. Marinetti

To the Russian Revolutionaries

Christopher Phillips

CalotypeAestheticsat Princeton