So Many Fragments, So Many Beginnings, So Many Pleasures: The Neglected Detail(s) in Film Theory

1. Antistructural Criticism

Cannot each text be defined by the number of disparate objects (of knowledge, of sensuality) which it brings into view with the help of simple figures of contiguity (metonymies and asyndetons)? Like the encyclopedia, the work exhausts a list of heterogeneous objects, and this list is the work's antistructure, its obscure and irrational polygraphy.

—Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes

"WE USED TO WALK the cold, deserted streets," recalled Phillipe Soupault, "in search of an accident, an encounter, life." ¹ And then they discovered American cinema through a movie poster—perhaps of Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery—showing "a man, his face covered with a red handkerchief, . . . pointing a revolver at the unconcerned passersby." ² Like that of all Surrealists captivated by the camera's automatism, Soupault's writing reveals his fascination with the ordinary details that the camera brings to life. In fact, for Surrealists, a film's narrative was never as significant as the poetic power that lay in what René Crevel called "a single minute's lyricism, the detail of a face, the surprise of a gesture." ³ But what happened to this Surrealist faith in cinema's lyricism, in photogénie, after the paradigm shift in film studies in the direction of semiotics? Is it possible to recuperate the Surrealist respect for cinema's "rhythmic impression," ⁴ considering "'impressionistic' became one of the new paradigm's most frequently evoked pejoratives, designating a theoretical position that was either 'untheorized' or too interested in the wrong questions" ⁵?

What if, as a way to begin, we ask the wrong questions? For instance, what if, instead of asking what it represents, we asked of René Magritte's Les trahison des images, why a pipe? What effect would a substitute object, like a cup, or a hat, or a pen, create? What if, instead of reading the pipe, the most potent phallic symbol, within the psychoanalytic paradigm, we experience it as an open signifier? These questions are not intended to generate singular or identical responses; in fact, they are unrestricted and meant to lead to more questions. But these questions do require that we step outside the bounds of structuralist ideologies that have guided most visual image theories since the late 1960s. In other words, the questions—and this essay will raise several of them—demand that we focus on the marginal, the multiple, and the auxiliary details, to move toward an antistructuralist criticism.

The motivation for a new kind of criticism comes from Roland Barthes, and so does the method. In "Change the Object Itself," Barthes reveals an intense frustration with the institutionalization of semiotics. Instead of enabling the deconstruction of the symbolic, he argues, "a mythological doxa has been created: denunciation, demystification (or demythification), has itself become discourse, stock of phrases, catechistic declaration." ⁶ The task of criticism, according to Barthes, should not be to dismantle certain myths and create new ones in their stead. Our task ought to be the disruption of the very logic that creates mythical metanarratives; for "the problem is not to reveal the (latent) meaning of an utterance, of a trait, of a narrative, but to fissure the very representation of meaning, is not to change or purify the symbols but to challenge the symbolic itself." ⁷ But semiotic film criticism does not offer an adequate challenge to the symbolic. Indeed, since semiotic theories read the cinematic image, or the visual sign, as an imaginary signifier located in the Symbolic Order, the image becomes no more than a representation of the ideological structures that underlie all symbolic systems, including language. ⁸ To put it another way—and this is what antistructuralism rejects—as an imaginary signifier, the cinematic image is interpreted through its continual re-appropriation by metanarratives of feminism, Marxism, postcolonialism, and so on, such that every film is always already a representation of another...