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1 Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory David Bordwell What we now call "film studies" has existed for barely thirty years. During the mid-1960s film courses proved to be attractive humanities options throughout North American colleges and universities. Young professors of literature or philosophy, themselves often movie buffs, launched courses on Shakespeare and film or on humanistic ideas in Ingmar Bergman, Satyajit Ray, and Akira Kurosawa. American studies began treating films as indices to social currents ofa period. A mass art had found a home in mass education. Since then, in the United States and Canada, then in Great Britain and Scandinavia, most recently in France and Germany, film theory and history came to be part of the academy. More university presses published books on film, while the number of journals expanded. There is now a "field" of film studies, ifnot a full-fledged academic discipline. This field has hosted many schools ofthought, and a comprehensive survey is out of the question here. Instead, I sketch some leading ideas that have informed the development offilm studies in the U.S. academic setting. After reviewing some important pre-1970s developments, I try to delineate two large-scale trends ofthought: subject-position theory and culturalism. These, I believe, have exercised the greatest influence over the last twenty-five years. I review their presuppositions and trace some changes and continuities. Subject-position theory and culturalism are both "Grand Theories" in that their discussions ofcinema are framed within schemes which seek to describe or explain very broad features of society, history, language, and psyche. By contrast, there has been a third, more modest trend which tackles more localized film-based problems without making such overarching theoretical commitments . A discussion of this "middle-level" research concludes the essay. One caveat before I begin. Most accounts offilm theory identifY more specific schools of thought than the currents I shall trace. A standard account would discuss the 1970s as a period which saw the emergence of film-based semiotics, psychoanalysis, textual analysis, and feminism. The late 1980s would be seen as bringing to the fore Post-Structuralism, postmodernism, 3 4 Part One: State ofthe Art multiculturalism, and "identity politics," such as gay/lesbian/queer studies and subaltern studies. In this essay, these influential movements are situated within the three overarching trends I pick out. For instance, I take academic feminism to be a perspective within which scholars critically examine aspects of women's lives within social orders (notably patriarchal ones). From the standpoint I propose here, we can identifY feminist versions of subjectposition theory, feminist inflections of culturalism, and feminist projects within the middle-level research tradition. Similarly, questions ofpostcolonial identity can be studied from any ofthe three standpoints. Admittedly, situating these developments within broader intellectual trends risks losing some of their nuance and specificity. The compensating advantage is the possibility of tracing conceptual affinities and historical connections among the various approaches. Backstory: Authorship In 1970 academic film studies was a small, disreputable area. A bright undergraduate could read all of the important English-language film books over summer vacation. Film history was treated largely as the development of"film language," as represented by canonized films. Film criticism-never called "textual analysis"-was largely interpretive and judgmental, emphasizing plot, character, and theme. And for English speakers film theory was still largely the province ofthe "classical" theorists: Arnheim and Eisenstein were still names to conjure with, and Bazin's essays had only recently been translated. The reigning conceptual framework was auteurism. The young critics of Cahiers du cinema had argued for an aesthetic of personal expression in cinema, and postwar "art cinema" in Europe and the emergence of major Hollywood directors during the 1950s gave impetus to the auteur line. Throughoutthe world the auteur initiative won the day. Like Soviet montage theory before it, it changed the face offilm theory, criticism, and historiography . Henceforth most film journalism and film scholarship would concentrate upon directors and the distinctive world each body of work manifested.l In the 1970s, even commercial filmmakers picked up the intertextual referencing and homages that had been common practices amongst the French New Wave directors.2 In a wider perspective, however, auteur theory represented an interregnum in some key arguments about cinema that had been conducted for the previ0us fifty years. Cinema had been discussed along two lines: as a new art, and as a political and cultural force characteristic of modern mass society. Bazin and the critics of Cahiers du...

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