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).