Words and Moving Images ed. by William C. Wees and Michael Dorland (review)

HUMANITIES 519 Norwegian 'springar' to illustrate that, even in an area as basic as the perception of pulse, one cannot rely on the observations of musicians trained in other traditions. Also concerned with differences between insiders' and outsiders' perspectives is Christopher Marshall's 'Toward a Comparative Aesthetics of Music.' Finally, it is fitting that the late Alan Merriam, whom many regarded as the major ethnomusicological protagonist of cross-cultural comparison during the 1960s, should play devil's advocate, in 'On Objections to Comparison in Ethnomusico!ogy.' He identifies both strengths and weaknesses in the anti-comparativist statements of such scholars as Hood and Blacking and advocates a multiplicity of approaches within the discipline. While reiterating that his own interest lies in the study of music as culture, he advocates the development of more feasible ways of making comparison a useful research tool in ethnomusicology. The papers in this volume have already moved towards a realization of Merriam's recommendations. This book is an important contribution to the discipline and a worthymemorialto MieczyslawKolinski. (BEVERLEY CAVANAGH) William C. Wees and Michael Dorland, editors. Words and Moving Images Mediatexte Publications. 216 This is not the first time that the proceedings of the annual conference of the Film Studies Association of Canada have been brought together in print. The 1981 conference papers appeared in a special number of Copie Zero (11, 1981), and those of 1982in a special number of Cinema Canada (97, June 1983). But this is the first time that they have been edited into book form, and, boldly, they are declared the first of the Canadian Film Studies series. The fourteen papers from the 1983 conference are loosely gathered around the theme of the title. They do not constitute a tightly knit debate around a homogeneous set ofcriticalquestions. William Wees's introduction suggests that he envisaged the latter possibility at the outset, but his openingnine pages reveal that any attempt to tie the papers together must remain general and superficial. He offers the visual specificity debate of Soviet and French filmmaking circles in the 1920S as the ideal jumping-off point for the discussion of recent avant-garde obsessions with the relationship between words and images. Oddly, Wees leaves unchallenged the notion that no critical discussion came to challenge the visual primacy school ofthought (a challenge thatbegan as earlyas the 1930S) or, later, the view that 'Truffaut's deep and abiding interest in literary works may seem anachronistic, even reactionary, in the face of cinema's long-standing efforts to break its ties to literature,' since there are many 520 LETTERS IN CANADA 1984 strands offilm theoryand practice apartfrom dominantAmerican models which have devoted themselves to discovering new relationships between cinema and literature. It is perhaps Larouche's article that most closely embodies the ways in which the new schools of criticism approach questions of words and images in the context of the avant-garde, confidently declaring I dans Ie cinema de la postmodernite, c'est l'enonciation qui l'emporte sur l'enonciateur (cinema narratif classique) et l'enonce (films de Duras, Syberberg, Schroeter, Straub, etc.)' (p 62). It follows two sessions on Michael Snow's work. The first is a question and answer sessionwith the filmmaker whichaccompanied a screeningof his 1982 work So Is This. Snow is in good form, spiritedly answering questions from an occasionallyfaltering audience, and although he is able to describe his processes and the principles which guided him, he spends some time fending off questions which are designed to incorporate his 'text film' into foreign debates about words and pictures. Elder's philosophical study of 'representation' through an analysis of Snow's Presents suffers by being truncated, the latter part of the study relating this film to So Is This being cut for 'considerations of space.' Readers will have to wait for this essay to be published in full elsewhere. Wait is something readers certainly don't have to do for longer versions of the Kay Armatage and Seth Feldman pieces, which both appeared in expanded form in the same year in Take Two (reviewed elsewhere in this issue). Indeed Feldman seems to have published three versions of his article in the one year, a...