Theory of the Image: Capitalism, Contemporary Film, and Women (review)

Ann Kibbey's book traces the iconoclastic tradition in contemporary theory to the early writings of Jean Calvin, whom she provocatively dubs "the first modern French theorist on the theory of images" (6). Bent on destroying false images, Calvin paid homage to the "true image." In attacking the allure of the image, theorists remain steeped in the very thing they are critiquing. How can we devise, the book asks, a more flexible approach to the image? How can we understand its dynamics without either fearing or elevating it? In order to forge "new theories of the image," Kibbey turns to transnational contemporary film. The first chapter attempts to adumbrate a theory that might accommodate "a more complex and variable relation between people and images" than has been promulgated; more particularly she seeks to unsettle the legacy of a "symbiotic relation between woman and image" (2). In an effort to enact her "theory," the subsequent two chapters present detailed, nuanced readings of The Suitors (1988), made by Iranian writer and director Ghasem Ebrahiminan, and then Milcho Manchevski's Before the Rain (1994), set in Macedonia and London during the Bosnian War. Kibbey's book is a welcome window upon transnational film, upsetting the usual commonplaces of film interpretation. This is an engaging book that forces us to re-examine our visual practices and, more largely, it provides a model for reinvigorating analysis of films.

Kibbey describes how Calvinist iconoclasts not only destroyed paintings, statues, tombs, and so on, but how they also transformed such representational images into useful objects: "Altar stones became paving stones, bridges, fireplaces, or even kitchen sinks" (7). The most important element in her discussion, however, is the process of consecration, "understood as metonymy. By making the loaf of bread into the body of Christ, the iconoclast renamed but did not transform the image." This renaming, Kibbey argues, leads to the claiming of a "mystical corporate body," uniting the congregants by joining a sign with an invisible object. How does such a process relate to capitalism (one of the key words in the book's title)? She explains that "when you get into your Lexus to take a drive, the corporation that sold it to you hopes that you will believe … that you have become something that you were not before, even though you remain physically the same person …. Something's missing without the Lexus" (15). This is a legible example, but how can this be applied to cinema studies? It remains somewhat mystifying how acts of corporate consecration specifically manifest in transnational films.

While Kibbey claims to have no "single grand theory of the image," she ambitiously aims to examine "the image theories of French post-structuralists Barthes, Debord, and Baudrillard" as well as "the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan to show how these widely regarded critical theories remained within the iconoclastic/capitalist theory of the image, describing its effects rather than offering an alternative" (2). Kibbey's brisk, dexterous smash-up of the idols appears to be a necessary clearing of the ground for a theory of the image—but one not yet to be fully devised.

The theoretical first chapter makes a rather stunning leap from Calvin to contemporary theorists. At times Kibbey's language evokes a latter-day iconoclast, dismissing the hard-won arguments of those who have preceded her. These are plucky acts, but not entirely satisfying. Ultimately, she does not do justice to each theorist's struggle to describe more volatile processes of perception. For instance, Kibbey dethrones psychoanalysis as lacking "a recognition of historical or cultural contingency" (37). This contention founders with the important (but here unexplored) work by feminist psychoanalytic film critics such as Kaja Silverman, Teresa De Lauretis, and Tania Modleski (to name a few) who deploy psychoanalytic tropes to move towards a wider cultural analysis. Finally, Kibbey casts out Laura Mulvey's groundbreaking work as propelling the universalism it claimed to deride. According to Kibbey, Mulvey equates woman with her...