Chapter 17
In This Chapter
Recommending key writers and texts on film
Looking at films through others’ eyes
Expanding the critical tools you use to read films
Throughout this book, I make constant use of other people’s ideas. So this chapter is an opportunity to give a little back and pay respects to some inspirational film scholars. Obviously, the work of the ten writers I include barely scratches the surface of the huge variety of methods, approaches and styles that make up film studies. But hey, you have to start somewhere, and each of those featured here are great introductions to a range of approaches when writing about film. So get ready to meet ten fascinating film writers and thinkers, explore their contributions and chew on great quotes from their most notable works.
To discover how to write precise, elegant and weighty film analysis, you can do a whole lot worse than study the writings of Victor Perkins. Perkins began his career as a film critic for the film journal MOVIE. He later co-founded one of the first academic film departments in the UK at Warwick University in 1978, where he taught until he retired in 2004. He’s still an occasional lecturer and active researcher.
Key concepts and where to find more:
In the movies we have to accept the point of view given to us. Our activity in the cinema, discounting the extra-curricular enjoyments of courtship, arson and malicious damage, is very limited. We can watch. We can listen. All the rest is in the mind.
—VF Perkins (Film as Film)
If you love films, you can’t help but be fascinated by the glamour of film stars (find much more on stars in Chapter 3), which means you have to read Richard Dyer at some point. Luckily his writing is witty and intellectually rigorous. Dyer has held professorships in film studies at universities including Warwick, King’s College London and St Andrews. He has been actively involved in gay and lesbian politics in the UK, and he organised one of the world’s first film festivals about homosexuality at London’s National Film Theatre in 1977.
Key concepts and where to find more:
Looking at, listening to [Judy] Garland may get us inside how gay men have lived their experience and situation, have made sense of them. We feel that sense in the intangible and the ineffable – the warmth of the voice, the wryness of the humour, the edgy vigour of the stance – but they mean a lot because they are made expressive of what it has been to be gay in the past half century.
—Richard Dyer (Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd edition, Routledge, 2004)
If the idea of watching early cinema fills you with the fear of being bored out of your mind, take a look at the work of Tom Gunning. He brings the more outrageous and sensational aspects of early film practice to wider attention. Gunning is currently a professor in cinema studies at the University of Chicago. He has published widely on early cinema, film cultures and the history of film exhibition.
Key concepts and where to find more:
From comedians smirking at the camera, to the constant bowing and gesturing of the conjurors in magic films, this is a cinema that displays its visibility, willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator.
—Tom Gunning (‘The Cinema of Attractions’)
Molly Haskel is a journalist, film critic and film scholar, making her among the most accessible of writers on feminism and film. Like her late husband, Andrew Sarris, Haskell wrote for The Village Voice in the 1960s. She has taught at Barnard College and Columbia University. She continues to have a voice on the cultural politics of women and you can follow her on Twitter.
Key concepts and where to find more:
It’s a fitting irony that the example par excellence of this studio-confected world was Gone With The Wind, a celebration of caste and class from the New World’s most democratic medium, the portrait of a never-never land whose harmony and grace depended on the smoothing out of much that was ugly and uncomfortable.
—Molly Haskell (Frankly, My Dear: ‘Gone with the Wind’ Revisited)
Yvonne Tasker writes clever things about (occasionally) stupid movies. Her work on the muscle-bound action stars of the 1980s has been widely influential, and she’s also written about images of women in the workplace and the military. She’s a professor of film studies at the University of East Anglia.
Key concepts and where to find more:
The visual spectacle of the male body that is central to muscular movies puts into play the two contradictory terms of restraint and excess. Whilst the hero and the various villains of the genre tend to share an excessive physical strength, the hero is also defined by his restraint in putting his strength to the test. And it is the body of the male hero which provides the space in which a tension between restraint and excess is articulated.
—Yvonne Tasker (Spectacular Bodies)
Film began as a visual medium, and film criticism has tended to relegate sound and music to a secondary position ever since. This neglect is clearly a great injustice, because sound is crucial for film storytelling and good film music is one of the major pleasures of watching films. As a musician and composer, Michel Chion is well qualified to theorise about film sound. He works and teaches at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Key concepts and where to find more:
This work [understanding sound] is at once theoretical and practical. First, it describes and formulates the audiovisual relationship as a contract – that is, as the opposite of a natural relationship arising from some sort of pre-existing harmony among the perceptions. Then it outlines a method for observation and analysis that has developed from my teaching experience and may be applied to films, television programs, videos and so forth.
—Michel Chion (Audio-Vision)
Film history has traditionally been about the films themselves. The method has tended to involve looking for key classic film texts as ‘milestones’ and tracing aesthetic developments between them. Richard Maltby encourages viewers to return films to their social and economic contexts. His own history of Hollywood cinema is an important text for film students. He has taught film studies in the UK and Australia.
Key concepts and where to find more:
The [Hays] Code’s regulation of movie content can, therefore, best be understood as a generic pressure, comparable to the pressure of convention in a romantic comedy or a Western. ‘Sophisticated’ viewers, familiar with the conventions of representation operating under the Code, learned to imagine the acts of misconduct that the Code had made unmentionable.
—Richard Maltby (Hollywood Cinema)
The digitisation of cinema is one of the most important and urgent issues of contemporary film studies (as I discuss in Chapter 16). But given that digitalisation is a current and ongoing phenomenon, you can’t easily pick out which theorists are going to be the most influential. So I go with the scholar who’s had the biggest impression on my understanding of the topic.
Nicholas Rombes is something of a renaissance man, being a novelist, music critic and film theorist. He’s also professor of English at University of Detroit Mercy. As you’d expect from a digital guru, he has an excellent blog at www.thehappinessengine.net.
Key concepts and where to find more:
[I]n the ruptures and gaps that have opened up as cinema transitions from the traditional analogue apparatus to the digital, there has been an unexpected resurgence of humanism – with its mistakes, imperfections and flaws – that acts as a sort of countermeasure to the numerical clarity and disembodiment of the digital code.
—Nicholas Rombes (Cinema in the Digital Age, Wallflower Press, 2009)
As I note in Chapter 11, the study of world cinema in film studies has moved away from questions of national identity and towards issues of transnationalism. This shift provides space to discuss the many films made across national borders, or the films made by migrant or displaced populations. Hamid Naficy suggests that the latter’s films can be considered ‘accented’ in a similar way to your voice when speaking a language with which you didn’t grow up. Naficy is Iranian and has worked at home and in the West.
Key concepts and where to find more:
In the best of the accented films, identity is not a fixed essence but a process of becoming, even a performance of identity. Indeed, each accented film may be thought of as a performance of its author’s identity. Because they are highly fluid, exilic and diasporic identities raise important questions about political agency and about the ethics of identity politics.
—Hamid Naficy (An Accented Cinema)
British cinema used to have a sorry reputation among film scholars, even British ones. This impression is partly François Truffaut’s fault, because he claimed that the words ‘British’ and ‘cinema’ were incompatible. One of the first scholars to challenge this reputation was Charles Barr. He also helped to set up the pioneering school of film studies at the University of East Anglia where he taught for many years. He is now a visiting professor and remains an active researcher.
Key concepts and where to find more:
I see Hitchcock’s absorption in the London stage as a mark of his rootedness within the culture, and the cinema, of that time and place. To the end of his life, he would remain very English in his public image – dress, speech, deportment, humour – and this Englishness was more than just a facade. My concern is not to deny the cosmopolitanism of his cinema in a spirit of cultural nationalism, but simply to redress a balance.
—Charles Barr (English Hitchcock)