Film Cultures Reader (review)

The influence of cultural studies on film analysis has been considered, in certain disciplinary circles, something akin to the sociological barbarians at the aesthetic gates. The articles collected in Graeme Turner's Film Cultures Reader illustrate, to the contrary, that film studies has largely been enriched by the contributions of new disciplines. Indeed, this collection stresses the advantage of a plurality of approaches. As Turner argues in the preface, "recent shifts" in the direction of film studies "reveal the benefit of some relatively new disciplinary influences from cultural studies, television studies, audience studies or ethnography, and social history" (xix). The vari- ety of methodologies afforded by these disciplines multiplies the terms of investigation, building on crucial questions and techniques of analysis offered by more formalist approaches without imagin- ing the text as a mere excuse for talking politics. Unlike the more polemical dismissals of screen theory (such as those of the cognitivists), Turner and his contributors recognize the important questions opened up by psychosemiotics and earlier approaches to the complex set of relations obtaining between texts, contexts, and effects. But certainly, while we can somewhat sanguinely assume that no one in this second century of film criticism would deny either the imprint of the social on art or the imprint of art on the social, the complex nature of this interaction has yet to be settled.

The key challenge to film theory, as outlined in the first section, "Understanding Film," is to avoid a "mechanistic notion of the unconscious," one that also reduces any work of art to a concatenation of so many effects, as Judith Mayne reminds us in "The Paradoxes of Spectatorship" (35). Turner's introduction to this section, along with Bennett and Woollacott's work on reading formations ("Texts and Their Readings"), provides a solid overview of the way British cultural studies, and specifically television studies, first challenged such a uniform model of the text. Janet Staiger's thorough rereading of film theory—from Eisenstein and Munsterberg, contemporary linguistics and cognitivism, to British cultural studies—suggests that even prior accounts of reception theory held to be purely "text-activated" at the very least left room for a "context-activated history of spectators" (59). Many of the articles included herein explore cinema's multiple address to spectators and audiences (Kuhn). Such approaches emphasize a more full-bodied analysis of viewing contexts and imagine more agency on the part of viewers. Still, Mayne warns against toggling to the opposite extreme by imagining the "unproblematized agency" of the audience as an antidote to a theory of text-positioned (and produced) subjects. She argues for a "new 'stage' of spectatorship studies, where the model is no longer the passive, manipulated (and inevitably white and heterosexual) spectator, but rather the contradictory, divided and fragmented subject" (44).

The essays collected in the section on identities develop these concerns, moving beyond the fixing male gaze to theorize an expanding range of representations of gendered and raced identities (Tasker, Jeffords, and Julien and Mercer) and to understand varied responses to mainstream film. For example, Straayer's contribution to this part directly challenges the presumptions that heteronormative desire is mobilized by film texts. Instead, Straayer highlights the possibilities for multiple interpretations opened up by the films she reviews. The already well-anthologized "De Margin and de Centre," by Julien and Mercer, addresses the tension between ethnicity, representation, and national identity. In this volume in general, the nation is not taken for granted as a basis for identity, as an aesthetic preoccupation, or as an audience demographic.

Turner includes articles on national industries as part of a project complicating the question of national identity (and the category of national cinema as an analytical tool) in an era of increasing globalization. The articles move from the defensive strategies of national industries against the dictates of the world market (O'Reagan) to problematizing the "national audience" as either a homogeneous body (Hill) or a historically fixed one (Teo). These essays success-fully explore the...