The Cinema Effect (review)

This is a lengthy book of film theory, rather than traditional historical analysis. Sean Cubitt is more concerned about the variable of time in cinema, not change over time as defines the traditional goal of historians. His goal is to make general statements about the ontology of cinema, and then pinpoint what makes cinema unique.

Cubitt starts as all theorists of cinema start, by first examining still image. Art historians and theorists of photography have argued for more than a century about the unique power of the image. Thus it is appropriate that the first chapter of The Cinema Effect be titled "Entree: The Object of Film and the Film Object." Cinema is thirty-five images passing per second. But what does cinema do? Cubitt considers numerous cinematic examples, but fails to answer this question. Indeed, his book is best characterized as a series of questions, rather than a series of questions and answers. He invites the reader to reconsider cinema and its theories, but offers no theory of his own.

The questions are divided into three parts. The first concerns "pioneer cinema," or what film historians now call early cinema, before filmmakers settled on a universal narrative. This part makes for an interesting read, but fails to connect with the vast literature that has grown up in the past ten years. Although there is now an organization called Domitor that studies nothing but this period, one would not know it from reading The Cinema Effect.

Part 2, "Normative Cinema," is an examination of a selection of filmmakers and their use of sound. Cubitt divides his narrative into three sections: music, dialogue, and all other uses of sound. He examines the films of Sergey Eisenstein and Jean Renoir, and those of a single Hollywood studio, RKO. It remains unclear why he chose the most marginal of the Hollywood studios of the 1930s and 1940s, but at least he confronts the most powerful use of cinema of its hundred-year history, namely the classic Hollywood model. But for Hollywood, whose literature I know the best, he adds little to the work of David Bordwell. He even gets his studio history mixed up by not considering the mountain of work on RKO's development, with which he seems to be entirely unfamiliar.

The longest section is the third, "Post Cinema." This reads simply like observations on Cubitt's favorite directors, such as Sam Peckinpah; on the modern Hollywood blockbuster, but with only a single mention of Jaws; and on the digital revolution. Trying to assess the effectiveness of Cubitt's analysis of films made since the 1960s puts the historian on tricky ground. Can a strong case be made that a classic narrative studio system ruled through the 1930s and 1940s, but then ended? I would say it cannot. This part of the book consists of a series of speculations lacking historical perspective. It is both film theory at its best and self-indulgence at its worst.

The Cinema Effect ends with a seven-page summation, which only asks additional questions, and Cubitt's final paragraph is even framed as a question. While film theorists will find this fascinating, I am afraid that most historians will only find it frustrating. It may help, however, to generate a new historical methodology.