Book Review
The Material Ghost:
Films and Their Medium
The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium by Gilberto Perez. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Pp. 448. $35.00 cloth; $18.95 paper.
During his invigorating discussion of Jean-Luc Godard, Gilberto Perez remarks, "through the concreteness of art . . . Vivre sa vie addresses large matters with dispassionate intensity" (352). A bit later, in the persuasive appreciation of Antonioni that concludes The Material Ghost, he makes a related observation: "Declining the governing stance of superior knowledge usual in storytelling, his camera explores rather than governs, inquires rather than tells" (378). The sort of art that Perez admires keeps its distance while retaining its sympathy, opens its eyes to the chaos and difficulty of human life without ceasing to aspire to a more orderly, accommodating world. It's a cinema that asks rather than tells, or tells only to reconsider. Such is also the critical practice of Perez in his fertile, dispassionately intense thinking about films and film.
When Perez addresses himself to a movie, he is fully absorbed in it and unpreoccupied by doctrine or methodology. He writes not to throttle dissent with a "definitive" interpretation or to dismiss a film to the landfill of the politically incorrect, but to invite conversation with his own apt and imaginative thought. He raises questions eloquently, but his answers do not so much end discussion as open it wider, allow for more or better questions. "The sense of beauty is nothing if not hopeful, nothing if not a reaching, if not the sparkle of an aspiration" (413). His assertions about cinematic beauty are not uncomplicated, but he explicitly eschews the simplistically cynical attitude that the beautiful, whatever it may be, serves as little more than a tool for inculcating ideology, that it has become another opiate for the oppressed masses.
A wide-ranging book, The Material Ghost is nonetheless a concentrated piece of critical and theoretical writing, one that will reward attentive rereading. It reminds one of an understanding of the humanities that used to be accepted as common wisdom--at least before every assistant professor's candidacy for tenure required "evidence that he or she has produced research that will significantly affect thinking in her/his area." Humanists, because of the breadth and antiquity of their field, would normally be expected to do their best, most original work from their mid-forties through their sixties. Perez's writing has the consistent, compact wisdom that comes for most mortals only after a few decades of careful, disciplined, committed thought. If it looks back to the 1960s and '70s, it also accounts for much that was best and worst in film and film studies in the '80s and '90s, and it will be provocative and enlightening for at least the next two or three decades. Like most of the movies it concerns itself with, it will have legs.
The Material Ghost consists of an "Introduction" and ten substantial chapters. Its many frame enlargements are exceptionally well chosen to illustrate its arguments. "Film and Physics," the introduction, acquaints us with both the author--"The Havana where I grew up was a great town for going to the [End Page 105] movies"--and his approach to film. Perez is cosmopolitan by background, education, and temperament. He doesn't so much resist as ignore the USA-centered parochialism of much recent academic film criticism; for what he calls film's "reporting from elsewhere . . . tidings in the form of images," circulates throughout the world, not just within a country or two. As to his approach, it fuses the general and the specific; it is "film criticism consistently drawn to theory" (15). Thoroughly informed by and about academic film studies, Perez nonetheless remains oppositional and revisionist, "consistently drawn to theory but as consistently skeptical of what these days is called 'theory"' (15).
The first two chapters, "The Documentary Image" and "The Narrative Sequence," are the most consistently theoretical. Yet Perez's generalizations rarely appear to precede the data to which they apply; rather, they arise from it. The opening chapters are full of descriptions and interpretations--always acute and usually convincing--of the movies of Riefenstahl, de Sica, Bu. Yet Perez's generalizations rarely appear to precede the data to which they apply; rather, they arise from it. The opening chapters are fulans the judgmental amateur psychoanalyst that the word is sometimes assumed to describe. Perez is "not interested in the personalities of Capra, McCarey, and Hawks as the auteur theory prescribes, but [in] their art . . . on the screen" (11). Predictably, he has little patience with film academics whose rejection of auteurism he sees as being based on "a repudiation of all individuality as a false consciousness inculcated by bourgeois ideology" (4).
From his experience of movies, Perez has educed an understanding of film that prefers "both/and" to "either/or." The theorists to whom he turns for support and illustration exemplify his inclusiveness; among them are Aristotle and Barthes, Cavell and Derrida, Robert Warshaw and André Bazin, Plato and Charles Sanders Pierce. The medium of motion pictures embodies for Perez a balanced in-betweenness: "Between documentary and fiction, camera and projector, index and icon, absence and presence, past and present, narrative and drama, material and ghost, the film medium seeks its poise" (49). But not between reality and representation, for everything about a movie is necessarily the product of an artificer, and even "on-the-scene" news reporting achieves only "a specious credibility" (30). Fiction films and documentaries that do not conceal their makers' hands, however, tell no lies because they claim no truths.
To be between is also to be in the middle, and for Perez fiction films are very much the core of his enterprise. He reinvigorates the tradition from Aristotle to Northrop Frye that puts at the center of the humanities imaginative work, which is by its nature more universal than history and more concrete and vivid than philosophy. Perez's study of Films and Their Medium supplies much lively film history and theory, but as the title promises, movies themselves occupy the high-definition focus of his gaze. The theorists to whom he turns most often, Cavell and Bazin, reflect his preference for inductive approaches that emerge from personal experience. [End Page 106]
As a theorist of motion pictures in his own right, Perez often clarifies or extends his predecessors. Broadly speaking, he regards all art as mimesis; and he maintains that even at their most realistic, motion pictures imitate rather than reproduce. Expanding and making more precise the formulations of Bazin and Cavell, Perez declares that "the out of frame is not a fact . . . but a convention, a creation of film technique, in most cases not what was actually there out of range of the camera's picturing but what we are to accept as being there in the space off screen" (137). For anyone who has been present on or even seen pictures of a movie set, this statement will be self-evident, but it has important consequences, for it cuts the tie that is often innocently postulated between unmediated reality and the cinematographic image. Similarly, the camera does not embody or achieve a gaze; rather it "enacts the fiction of a perceiving eye . . . imitates a gaze, a point of view, an act of perception and of consciousness" (225). Modernism, a critical topic that sometimes seems nigh played out, remains for Perez fundamentally a "problematic matter" and therefore productive of illuminating insight. "Modern art," he remarks, "declares its means not because they are its only subject but in order to put them in question, because it feels it cannot take its assumptions for granted in its search after truth" (261). Although the unity art appears to achieve "may be an illusion in many cases and even a deception, [it] is in other cases better described as an aspiration" (304). Accepting that the makers of modernist cinema practice in good faith, Perez concludes that the self-reflexivity so nearly obsessive in Godard and kindred spirits is not narcissism, fraud, or self-evasion. Rather, "the undisguised formative process . . . comes to stand for the endeavor to find, the striving to construct, an order in the world: the making of art, not as art's chief subject, but as an allegory of the ordering of life" (357).
For all of its abundant and persuasive notations on theory, the chief glory of The Material Ghost resides in its eloquent commentaries on the movies and filmmakers Perez understands so well. The discussion of Nanook of the North that ends the second chapter debunks Flaherty's debunkers and returns an enriched understanding of that remarkable movie. The third chapter is devoted to Buster Keaton, and its title, "The Bewildered Equilibrist," reflects not only a brilliant comprehension of that brilliant comedian-director, but also much of Perez's apprehension of film itself. Vernon Shetley has declared it to be the best writing ever on Keaton (cf. College English, March 1999). Like all the filmmakers that Perez especially admires, Keaton "looks at life with perpetually questioning eyes" (121). His puzzlement informs his camera, his marvelous plots, his animated interactions with objects, and his paradoxically expressive deadpan gaze. The subject of the next chapter is mostly Murnau's Nosferatu--for itself, as an especially illuminating work in its director's oeuvre, and in its context in film history. All three perspectives reveal a great deal about the film, its influential director, and its cinematic forebears and progeny. Perhaps the [End Page 107] most glorious pastoral elegy ever created on movie film, Dovzhenko's Earth anchors the broad-ranging chapter on Soviet cinema and its international contexts. The eloquence of the writing is equal to the eloquence of the movie; Perez's commentary moved James Naremore to "mourn the fact that James Agee is no longer alive to appreciate its lengthy treatment" (cf. Cineaste 24.4, 1999). On Renoir, Perez is precise and persuasive; his discussion of A Day in the Country, the larger part of his sixth chapter, is among the most luminous and humane writing on film that I have ever encountered. "American Tragedy" puts together what Perez, following Warshaw, considers to be the two most American film of genres, the Western and the gangster movie. For Perez they are both political genres, the former as romantic allegory, the latter as ironic realism. This chapter, solid and useful, would be more notable in a less dazzling book. The longest chapter at 76 pages, "History Lessons" takes it name from the Huillet-Straub film of that title--a film and a directorial team likely to be little known to most American readers (none of their movies is currently available on video in the United States). Perez's detailed description also serves as the occasion for a series of typically compact, sensible meditations on modernist art in general. The last two chapters, dispassionately passionate excursi on Godard and Antonioni, end The Material Ghost on a high point. Perez's appreciation for Godard's late movies is especially convincing; since they have been heretofore difficult or impossible to see in the United States, one hopes that his writing will eventually catch the interest of distributors. "An Antonioni film weaves a texture of incompleteness, partial views of arresting partiality, empty spaces, narrative pauses, spaces between . . ." (368). Perez's articulations of those spaces makes them, as he writes, "heedful" without papering them over. In Antonioni and Godard and in modernism generally, Perez finds what he most admires, "an unsettled position both involved and estranged" (371). Film and literary theory of the '70s and '80s embraced such unsettled positions, yet the stock of the filmmakers who embodied them--among them Godard and Antonioni--suffered a prolonged decline. Perhaps indeterminacy is easier to talk of in the abstract than to analyze concretely. However that may be, Perez's inspired explications serve as models for such analysis and suggest that the time has come for European modernist filmmakers, so exalted a generation ago, to return from the margins of film studies.
In order to give rave reviews increased plausibility, rhetorical tradition requires that the reviewer find something to express reservations about--that one praise, as it were, with faint damnation. Deferring to that tradition, I offer the following. Without weakening his book, Perez might have suppressed some of his crabbiness about academic film studies in general and about a "simplistic interpreter in semiotic garb" in particular; but I'll confess that I took guilty pleasure in most of his zingers and understand the provocations [End Page 108] that led to them. On a slightly more serious note, I think that Perez, like virtually all cineastes, is credulous about the "fidelity" of still photography to the exterior reality it presumably transmits with minimal intervention. He does not, as I have noted, show such credulity about the cinema. Photographers make too many image-affecting decisions to support this confidence in the objectivity of the camera or to justify our trust in its secure connection to the world. Film stocks, black-and-white and color, respond differently to visible light and some also respond to light invisible to human eyes. Different lenses give different appearances, whether because of focal length, contrast and accutance, or sharpness of focus. Various developers lead to images of different texture, contrast, and color; and filtration can sharply alter the balance of color films and the contrast and monochrome translation of black and white ones. Shutter speed can, as we say, make all the difference in the world. Aspect ratios are infinitely variable. And now, digital alteration of images can change pretty much everything. We ought to abandon the idea that photography "has a necessary material connection with reality" (34), or at least recognize its fundamental uselessness. Having said that, I note that few of Perez's theoretical statements depend upon a naÀ5Àve view of photography.
Even in the cause of credibility, it is difficult to find much to complain of in The Material Ghost, more difficult to limit one's rehearsal of its manifold virtues. It is as fine a book on film as I have ever encountered, a hypermarché of insight, precise and lovely writing, information, and clear thinking. Page after page elaborates arguments so acute and aptly formulated that I have no doubt I'll be exploiting them in the classroom and in writing for the rest of my career. Two final examples, both having to do with directors' handling of the camera: "De Sica's camera loves his characters not because they are good or beautiful or admirable but because they are. The love it shows is not eros, the love of the desirable, but agape, the kind of love God bestows on his creatures" (35). Describing Godard's close-ups of Anna Karina, Perez recalls the adoring portrait of the heroine in Way Down East: when Griffith "focused his camera on the face of Lillian Gish, he composed close-ups that are perhaps the most beautiful in existence. Whereas close-ups nearly always take their proximity for granted, these don't; rather they treat it as something indeed remarkable, a privilege, a gesture of genuine intimacy" (350).
However packed with such incidental delights as The Material Ghost is, and however complex and far-faring its argument may be, Perez's book never wanders out of sight of its controlling theses concerning the nature of movies and the stuff they're made of. About the movies of which he writes so sympathetically and perceptively, and about the medium of cinema in general, any reader of this book will learn a precious lot. Densely woven and long as it is, I never found it obscure nor wished it shorter. On the contrary.
Lesley Brill
Wayne State University
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