Readings and Writings (review)

186 the minnesota review Peter Wollen. Readings and Writings. London: Verso Editions, 1982. Pp. ix + 228. $8.95 (paper). In Readings and Writings it seems that Peter WoUen does not mind if we know aU about his abiüty to "go with the flow" in contemporary film scholarship. For the past sixteen years, the period of time covered in Readings and Writings, WoUen has not clung to any single party line and his critical dexterity evidences a tendency and real ability to shift jargons and methods. To somethis may appear to bethe height of opportunism—or worse, the height of intellectual cowardice. But such is not the case. Wollen's strategy in this "new" coUection hinges on a brazen confidence. He assumes our familiarity with his work: Signs and Meaning (1969), his foray into the world of Peircean semiotics and film, as weU as the essays contained in this coUection, which appear as they were first published in the major British film journals. He also assumes that we can or will share his sense ofthe faddish and pluralistic nature offUm criticism. After aU, it is Wollen's own meanderings through the different critical trends that we wade through in Readings and Writings. But though many of the essays appear dated to us now, WoUen seems to be asking us not to simply dismiss them as old hat, but rather to consider how quickly they have fallen out of fashion. What makes Wollen's strategic gamble in Readings and Writings doubly interesting is that he leaves the process of contextualization completely in the hands of the reader. The opening essay, "Cinema and Semiology: Some Points of Contact," was first published in 1968 and as it asks us to consider the "potential" critical importance of Barthes and Metz to the "future" of film studies it allows us (today) to recapitulate and re-evaluate the importance of semiotics to the developments in fUm criticism since then. As the opening gambit of Readings and Writings, this essay takes on several different functions. In his critique of Metz, which serves also as a celebration of Eisensteinian aesthetics, WoUen sets his film history in motion, which is not the history of films but rather the history of how we have tried to understand fUms. The essay caUs attention to particular problems with Metz, who at the time was at the center of any semiotic debate regarding the cinema, while calling for a re-focussed attention to the Prague School (Mathesius and Veltrusky in particular). At the same time Wollen establishes a link between semiotics and "Lapolitique des auteurs." This is Wollen's first reference to Bazin, who clearly stands in as WoUen's critical muse. In advocating the importance of semiotics to late sixties film criticism, Wollen formulates what could well be an introduction to his own semiotic version ofthe auteurtheory, which is laid out at length in the secound chapter of Signs and Meaning. The second essay, "North By Northwest: A Morphological Analysis," pubUshed eight years later, invites us to consider the relationship between the semiotic method and narratology . As WoUen indexes story form through a careful "functional analysis," he displays his own facility with and at the same time asks us to remember when it was fashionable to refer to the method expounded in Vladimir Propp's Morphology ofthe Folktale. In order to display some possible directions to take away from the rather pristine and fetishistic practice of Proppian functional analysis, WoUen proceeds, in the foUowing two essays, to investigate two different psychological readings of narrative. The first, his Freudian reading of Psycho (via Hamlet) estabUshes the groundwork for the second, his rereading of North By Northwest via the Lacanian critique of Freud and its relevance to the problem of spectatorship in cinema. That Hitchcock should be read by linking a detailed consideration of psychology and narrative structure identifies why these two peices should appear appropriate today. WoUen's discussion of Lacan's "triad of looks" (seeing, interpreting, knowing) as the foregrounding of three narrative forms (suspense, mystery, shock) evidences not only an elastic and expansive method, but a sense ofthe relevance ofa critical dialogue to particular films, types of films and finally certain...