The Soul of Film Theory by Sarah Cooper (review)

Veterans of the 1970s wave of film theory, such as the present reviewer, may well react with surprise to the conjunction of that term with ‘soul’ in the title of Sarah Cooper’s erudite and elegantly presented work. Yet the sometimes rebarbative materialism of that still influential moment often occluded a tradition of theorizing film that goes back to the very early days of the medium, and is in no way dependent upon any specific theological conception of the soul, or indeed even on acceptance of its existence. Cooper’s stated aim is ‘to give soul its moment rather than be complicit in its loss’ (p. 22), and this she achieves admirably through a multiple marshalling of the ‘usual suspects’ (Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, André Bazin) along with theorists who might well bridle at the concept (Lacan, Christian Metz, Vivian Sobchack) and — perhaps her book’s most significant contribution — the work of thinkers nowadays underrated or ignored, most notably Henri Agel and Amédée Ayfre. The common ground that Cooper finds in this array of writers is above all phenomenological, even neo-Cartesian in its concern with ‘the world of extension’ rather than ‘the world of thought’ and, concomitantly, with ‘the body as mirror of the soul’ (p. 79) — much as, it might be thought, in a Bazinian problematic a film might be at once mirror of the pro-filmic world and of the perspective of its director. Cooper situates her understanding of the soul differentially, as that which is neither mind nor spirit but partakes of both. If the Platonist Agel and the more explicitly phenomenological Ayfre have latterly fallen into neglect, it is doubtless because of a perceived holism in their approach that sits ill with the privileging of difference and fragmentation in, for instance, Screen or feminist film theory. Yet, as Cooper points out, ‘a plurality of souls is produced within theory’ (p. 66) and that ‘philosophical heritage that dates back millennia’ (p. 18) has been overdue for revisiting and re-evaluation. She slightly soft-pedals Abel Gance’s overt Pétainism, and I was surprised to find no reference to Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film (1972), which, like Ayfre, conjoins and contrasts Carl Dreyer and Bresson, and but one reference to Godard’s 1980s work — see, in particular, Passion — which surely foregrounds the soul quite as much as his 1965 Alphaville. Cooper brings us right up to the present day with her reflections, inter alia, on Nancy’s reinscription of the soul and the Dardennes’ indebtedness to Levinas. This is a major contribution to film theory and indeed — if such a thing may still be said to exist — to theory tout court.