The State of Things

I find myself, near the end of a long career teaching film, and looking forward to a concentrated period when I can write about film and related matters, somewhat troubled and even a little saddened. I feel bad that for all our efforts and the intellectual and emotional energy we have brought to our discipline that it has not grown as fast as it should have. There are obviously many administrative and financial reasons for this, but I'm sure that, again, despite our best efforts, we have not been able to convince enough people that studying film is a serious business. I cannot avoid the thought that, for most people, the movies remain one of the few things that do not require intellectual engagement, and such people grow resentful when we try to say otherwise. Just look at a New York Times review of a museum exhibit or art opening, in which the formal elements of the artist's work are analyzed. Then turn to a movie review and what do you get: plot summary.

Fine, so film studies gets no respect, but the paradox is that many of our graduate students are getting academic jobs and are writing scholarly books and articles. Film studies may not have grown as fast as we would have liked, but the field has become moderately accepted, especially in the academy. It has become part of larger academic disciplines, including cultural studies, visual studies, and media studies. These are largely administrative maneuverings, good ones, I think, and the recent name change of SCS to SCMS reflects this.

But even with this shifting ground, are things going to get better, or is the study of film going to become more diffuse and more off the mark? The mark I'm talking about is the film text—or the television text, or the text of a video game or Web site; or the larger texts of medical imaging, of the interrelationship of film and painting, photography, and the graphic arts. Will we shift back to the text and return to the seriousness and a celebration of complexity, history, and politics—marks of modernist practice and criticism that have been ignored or made light of by postmodernism?

Let's first consider the text. Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media, the best book on the subject, takes the construction of screen space as his text.¹ He nicely weaves cinematic metaphors with the digital domain and comes up with new ways of thinking about the textuality of both. Likewise, Stephen Mamber's extraordinary digital analyses of filmic events have retextualized the cinematic visible and invisible, turning them into a kind of imaginary ur-text in which we can see what the filmmaker only imagined (or didn't).

Academic cinema studies began with the text. Auteurism was a means of analysis that led us to the filmic text and, simultaneously, led academic institutions to open their eyes a bit because here was a discipline with proper names attached to tangible works. (Of course, administrators were from the very beginning of film studies impressed by student demand.)

Textual studies enabled us to discover how the structures of film differed from those of literature, to appreciate and talk about the grace of a camera movement or the audaciousness of a cut. We also discovered the larger textuality of a film's making and reception, genre, conventions, and the economies—of the studios, the production, and a film's narrative form. A new film history came with this, as questions arose about how texts were developed within the larger contexts of the studios, the technologies, and the audiences who viewed the films.

As larger theories emerged or were borrowed, the text seemed to do a slow dissolve, to become a ghost that haunted larger issues, behind the theories themselves. Or, if the text reappeared, under the guise of one or another cognitive theory, it was stripped of cultural, gender, and political complexities: a given apparently only to be...