Teaching film theory in a post-film era.

Abstract

Given the post-film, post-theory era in which we find ourselves, of what value is film theory to our students? My reflections on this question lead me to two conclusions. First, film theory provides a conceptual horizon against which students can assess what is both new and very old about "new media." Second, I think there is value in film theory itself, in the study of it, as one path to take in the pursuit of a liberal arts education. Through a discussion of canonical texts by Eisenstein, Bazin, and Barthes, I hope to evoke some sense of how students can be encouraged to "experience themselves otherwise" through their engagement with film theory--as passionate producers rather than cool consumers, as believers rather than facile skeptics, and as embodied rather than disembodied thinkers.

Teaching Film Theory in a Post-Film, Post-Theory Era

Self-contained: having all that is needed in oneself; independent; uncommunicative, reserved or restrained in behavior. That's how I would describe the students in my senior seminar this term. Images of the strong, silent type come to mind--The Duke, Clint, Arnold. Self-containment is valued in our culture--at least in the stories we like to tell ourselves about who we are or would like to be. And yet, there is something troubling to me about this particular group of students. They are terrific thinkers, many of them, and sweet, but they are also sad, manifesting little fire, little passion. In front of them, seeing myself in their eyes, I see old newsreel footage of Lenin or Trotsky haranguing a crowd, arms waving, carrying on obsessively. When self-containment is a value, enthusiasm in any form looks absurd. Making a spectacle of oneself is the ultimate social faux pas. The goal is to blend-in, look right--be cool. Recognize this worldview? It is that of consumer culture, wherein you are what you buy. Identity is assembled out of the contents of a shopping bag. Contrary to the exhortation of the Brad Pitt character in Fight Club, you are your bleeping khakis. If those khakis happen to be flat fronts from the GAP, so much the better.

It is to a group of cool customers, then, that I market my goods: film theory. That's right, film theory--at a time when the specificity of film as a medium is being digitized out of existence and theory is considered by many to be much less central than it was to the discipline of cinema studies. Film, in the words of Robert Stare and Ella Shohat (2000), is "dissolving into the larger bitstream of audio-visual media" (p. 394). To the extent that film is digitized, it will no longer be distinguishable from the content of other media such as the television or the computer. Marshall McLuhan's famous statement must be revised: the medium is no longer the message. Whatever "messages" are implicit in the "medium" are homogenized by digitization. A medium is merely one possible embodiment of a message that can have multiple embodiments, all derivable from the same data. One day soon, film as a photochemical medium will no longer be the primary aesthetic object anchoring the discipline of cinema studies.

Meanwhile, much of film theory is being called into question. Film scholars David Bordwell and Noel Carroll (1996) have mounted a campaign against so-called "Grand Theory," which includes the two most influential contemporary theory movements in cinema studies--screen theory and cultural studies. Screen theory gained prominence in the 1970s in the British film journal Screen, but it is rooted in French theory of the 1960s, in the structuralisms of Saussure and Levi-Strauss and the poststructuralisms of Lacan and Althnsser. There is a tendency in structural and poststructural theory to "bracket the referent," to privilege the interrelations between signs over those between signs and the real, material objects to which they refer. Consequently, screen theory has been taken to task for its ahistoricism, for detaching films from their social and historical contexts. Cultural studies offers itself as an alternative to the ahistoricism of screen theory, shifting the focus from film as film to the uses people make of all kinds of media representations. It gained prominence in the 1980s via the writings of scholars associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the UK, but its theoretical roots are also in the 1960s, in the writings of British leftists Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, and Stuart Hall. Whatever beef exists between screen theory and cultural studies is beside the point for Bordwell and Carroll, however. For them, screen theory and cultural ...