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86Rocky Mountain Review FREDRIC JAMESON. Signatures ofthe Visible. New York: Routledge, 1990. 254 p. Marxist critic and literary theorist Fredric Jameson has collected eight ofhis own "occasional essays" to give us a stimulating book about film. Published between 1977 and 1988 in such journals as Social Text and Critical Inquiry, these critical analyses deal not only with film styles from realism to modernism to postmodernism but also with films in their broader cultural contexts, as expressions of high or mass culture and of socio-political history. The essays reflect Jameson's conviction that community and class ties should supersede individualism; and that a Blochian, hopeful Utopia is worth aiming for. Unlike Jean-Paul Sartre or Walter Benjamin, whose works serve as models for Jameson, his cultural criticism is not pessimistic. Rather it incorporates optimistic elements ofpractical ideedism that is uniquely Americein. What these culture critics do share is a strong sense of social responsibility, and this is the motivating force that drives Jameson's film essays. In a brief introduction, Jameson outlines his eirgument: "that the only way to think the visued, to get a handle on increasing, tendential, all-pervasive visuality as such, is to grasp its historical coming into being ... ; history alone . . . can mimic the sharpening or dissolution of the gaze" (1). Historicizing, diachronic reading grounded in Marxian materialist dialectic is Jameson's basic analytic tool, one that proves its mettle in essay after essay. Methodologicedly, Jameson consistently takes as point of departure ideological as well as socioeconomic factors when interpreting film, just as he does with other forms of culture, whether literature, art, architecture, or music, thereby demonstrating that, for him, Marxian dialectics is capable of subsuming each new critical approach from psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan) or critical theory (Frankfurt School) through structuralism, semiotics, and poststructuralism. The content of Jameson's film essays ranges broadly, and he submits each film to the scrutiny of wider cultural concerns. Only his own commitment to Marxism remedns unquestioning, and the current dissolution ofcommunist governments unexamined. Yet the arguments he brings to his subjects are uniformly so eloquent and his insights so penetrating that each essay contributes to the literature of film criticism emd to offering em overview of Jameson's own theoretical development over more than a decade. He begins with an essay in which he defines the terms on which he grounds his analysis. In "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture" (1979), as in the second essay, "Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film" (1977), Jameson, following Brecht, sets "mass" culture apart from the films of "high" culture. In the four mass culture films he interprets, he shows the cultural manipulation that occurs (as in Godfather I) and how it is sometimes subverted (as in Godfather II). In Jaws, Jameson finds the Utopian dimension of his title in the film's conclusion, where social order is renewed, and he demonstrates how such a resolution falsely displaces class antagonisms through fraternity. DogDay Afternoon is criticized for the lack of distance of its camera, intensified by Al Pacino's method acting, and the superficiality ofthe story line. Nevertheless, for Jameson, it is a "Political Film" (35), owing to subtextual exploration of "the space which is the result Book Reviews87 of . . . historic changes" (45-46) which have led to suburbanization and the consequent ghettoization ofcities. This second essay is the most tightly argued of the collection and thus the most interesting with respect to narrative. Jameson's fourth essay, " 'In the Destructive Element Immerse': HansJ ürgen Syberberg and Cultural Revolution" (1981), examines "classical modernism," where culture "lays claim to the place and function vacated by religion" (74). He considers Syberberg's films technically intriguing with their "stance of the amateur" (64) and "improvisation effect" (65), but he sheirply condemns the filmmaker's overall "vision of history" (70) which reduces Germany's "bloody past ... to the playroom or the toybox" (66), producing "historical amnesia" (78). Furthermore, Syberberg refuses to confront actual problems of the present and future, which, according to Jameson's cultural critique, is a primeiry failure. Whereas modernism in film does not fare well with Jameson, filmic postmodernism and play with genres emerge in a...

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