Direct Theory: Experimental Motion Pictures as Major Genre

Notes

129 Notes Introduction 1. Qtd. in Allen and Gomery, Film History, 112. 2. Fielding, introduction, n.p. 3. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 16. 4. Ibid., 112–13. 5. Ibid., 116–17. 6. Raman Selden and Peter Widdowson, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 3rd ed. (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1993), 104. 1. Experimental Motion Pictures as Direct Theory 1. Andrew, Major Film Theories, 5. 2. Bazin, What Is Cinema?, 15. 3. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 16. 4. Metz, Film Language, 123. 5. Andrew, Major Film Theories, 6. 6. Eisenstein, Film Form, 60; his emphasis. 7. Arnheim, Visual Thinking, 13. 8. Ibid., 148. 9. Michael S. Gazzaniga, “The Split Brain in Man,” Scientific American 217.2 (August 1967): 29. 10. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 68. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 112. 13. Barthes, Semiotic Challenge, 4; his emphasis. 14. Ibid., 157; our emphasis. 15. Le Grice, Abstract Film and Beyond, 153. 16. Christian Metz, personal letter, Paris, July 1, 1985. 17. Carl Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, vol. 8 of Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 417–519. 18. MacDonald, Critical Cinema, 2–3; his emphasis. 2. Experimental Motion Pictures as Major Genre 1. MacDonald, Critical Cinema, 1; our emphasis. Notes to Pages 23–34 130 2. This argument is more thoroughly detailed in Small’s article “Literary and Film Genres: Toward a Taxonomy of Film,” Literature/Film Quarterly 8.4 (1979): 290–99. 3. Animation, however, is transgeneric. Strictly speaking, animation is a technique (of single-frame cinematography), not a genre. The animated cartoon is a likely candidate for a major genre, but animation is a technique employed by all genres. Consider the animated maps in documentaries, the animated models in 2001, and the diverse modes of animation employed by television commercials and music videos. Further, experimental production’s embrace of technical innovations is highly interrelated with animation. See Russett and Starr’s Experimental Animation. 4. Renan, Introduction to the American Underground Film, 17; his emphasis . We are indebted to this out-of-print study not only for a number of our provisional characteristics but also because it provided a genuine foundation for academic interest in this special body of films. 5. This first and the following seven generic characteristics have been published in slightly different fashion as part of Small’s chapter “Film and Video Art” ineditorGaryEdgerton’s FilmandtheArtsinSymbiosis(NewYork:Greenwood Press, an imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, CT, 1988). 6. Curtis’s Experimental Cinema unfortunately also remains out of print. 7. Renan, Introduction to the American Underground Film, 25. 8. Ibid., 36. 9. For a far more detailed discussion of this important point, see Small’s essay “Avant-Garde Silent Films” in editor Frank N. Magills’s Silent Films (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press, 1982). 10. Renan, Introduction to the American Underground Film, 34. 11. Metz calls these “the time of the telling” and “the time of the thing told,” respectively; see Film Language, 18. 12. Alan Williams’s “Is a Radical Genre Criticism Possible?” also argued for the same trichotomy, which he called “principal film genres,” independent of and five years after Small’s Literature/Film Quarterly essay; see the Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9.2 (Spring 1984). 3. The European Avant-Garde 1. Eisenstein, Film Form, 125. This retrospective and rather conciliatory essay, “Film Form: New Problems,” was written in 1935, after the advent of Soviet Socialist realism, which discredited Eisenstein’s many experiments with intellectual montage. 2. Metz, Film Language, 18. Metz’s translated signifier and significate are derived from Saussure’s key semiotic terms/concepts signifiant (e.g., the letters/phonemes the reader now regards) and signifié (e.g., the actual mentation from the same regard). For both Saussure and Metz, the resulting amalgam of sign inextricably bonds signifier and significate (more typically translated as signified). Notes to Pages 35–46 131 3. Perhaps the best study of these pronounced similarities between Léger’s many cubist (and futurist) paintings and select frames from Ballet Mécanique is Lawder’s Cubist Cinema. Lawder also cataloged (photographically ) every shot in the film, perhaps using a MOMA print, seeking to provide a precise synopsis. Like many early films, there are a number of versions of the Ballet Mécanique floating around, each one claiming more or less to be “authentic,” with scenes in different order or even...