The Analysis of Film.(Review)

The Analysis of Film by Raymond Bellour; edited by Constance Penley Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000 352 pp., $49.95 (cloth)

"alternation is but a special form of repetition"

--Raymond Bellour

As Janet Bergstrom noted in 1979--the year in which Raymond Bellour's L'analyse du film was first published--"all of Bellour's work in film analysis can be seen as an attempt to come to terms with a fascination, a fascination with the logic of the movement of narrative in classical film, especially the American classical cinema" (39). The Analysis of Film finally brings together all but four short essays from the now classic French edition, including (for the first time in English translation) Bellour's monograph length study of North by Northwest and a new chapter, "To Alternate/To Narrate," written after the publication of L'analyse du film and first published (in 1980) in Bellour's still definitive two-volume collection on American cinema, Le cinema americain: Analyses de films.

In the preface to the English edition, Constance Penley (of the Camera Obscura collective responsible for the translation of much of Bellour's work) states that The Analysis of Film is at least four books: (i) in presenting Bellour's "pioneering methods for the close analysis of film," it provides an overview to the methods of interpretation--theories of the text and reading as critical practice--that dominated film studies in the decade 1975-1985"; (ii) read alongside feminist and psychoanalytic film theory of the same period, it addresses "the larger social and psychological issues of subjectivity, desire, and identification in Western culture"; (iii) with chapters devoted to North by Northwest (1959), The Birds (1963), Marnie (1964), and Psycho (1960), it examines the work of Alfred Hitchcock, and the associated structures of perversion, voyeurism and fetishism; and, finally, (iv) it "offers insights that are informed by a lifetime of research on American cinema" (ix).

Although Bellour's book is surely all of these things, Penley might have added a fifth project: namely, Bellour's larger "endeavour to outline the various meanings of the word `repetition' in the specific area of film (films) and of cinema" (Bellour, "Cine-Repetitions" 65). In "Cine-Repetitions," a brief (contemporaneous) essay that provides a concise guide to the theory of repetition developed across the pages of The Analysis of Film, the experience of cinematic repetition is divided into six types, three external and three internal. The first two "external" repetitions pertain to the production (pro-filmic) and reception (distribution and exhibition) of the film (65-66). As these repetitions relate primarily to the film as work (in the Barthesian sense of the physical object), and as The Analysis of Film is mainly concerned with the film as text (the textual system), these repetitions are (here) of limited interest.

The first of Bellour's "internal" repetitions--those pertaining to "the very body of the film"--is a close repetition from frame to frame: "endless repetition, twenty-four times per second" (66). Bellour notes that this most "elementary" of repetitions, the serialization of frames on the film-strip, is also the most "paradoxical" for it is never seen: "the speed at which the film is projected is designed to mask this mechanical repetition, to efface its silent weave" (66). The irony here--not lost to Bellour, who devotes the first chapter of The Analysis of Film to the problems of citing "the unattainable text"--is that the frame or photogram that is "never seen" becomes most visible--as "quotation"--in Bellour's own segmental analyses (more on that below). However, Bellour's central concern here--as for many of the essays in The Analysis of Film--is the second, internal type of repetition: the "fundamental form of film language," alternation (see Bellour "Alternation" 70-103).