movie analysis

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DAVID BORDWELL

The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice F R O M Poetics of Cinema

Internationally renowned, and one of the most prolific and also most accessible film schol- ars in America, David Bordwell (b. 1947) has made major contributions in narrative theory, the history of film style, cognitive film theory, and the study of national cinemas. He received his doctoral degree in Speech and Communication Arts at the University of Iowa in 1974, and is Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies, Emeritus, in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His numerous books, among them The Classical Hollywood Cinema (with Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, 1985)~ Narration in the Fiction Film (1985)~ and more recently, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story andStyle in Modern Movies (2006) and Poetics of Cinema (2007), have made a consid- erable imprint on film studies, inaugurating a neoformalist approach to the study of filmic texts and providing an alternative to classical film theory. He and his wife, Kristin Thomp- son, are widely respected for their authoritative film studies textbooks, and Bordwell also maintains a prominent blog on international film and film studies.

Bordwell is often considered the founder of cognitive film theory, a theory grounded in empirical research on perception and story comprehension to explain how we make sense of movies. Bordwell's "historical poetics of cinema" is a formal study of cinema that is clearly positioned as an alternative to the theories that dominated film studies in the 1970s and 19805, which Bordwell and Noel Carroll dubbed "Grand Theoryw-somewhat more acrimoniously known as "SLAB" (Saussurean semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusserian Marxism, Barthesian textual analysis). Avoiding what he sees as the gener- alizations of mainstream theory, Bordwell seeks to explain the formal principles behind how films are constructed and how particular effects are achieved. In addition, Bordwell explores the empirical circumstances that give rise to or change these principles.

One of his most widely anthologized articles, "The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice" was originally published in Film Criticism in 1979, and then as an expanded version in Narration and the Fiction Film in 1985. Included here is the original version with Bordwell's 2007 afterword, as it appears in Poetics of Cinema, a book that brings together twenty-five years of his work. Bordwell applies the principles of thematics, narrative form, and stylistics to art cinema, discovering that its range of techniques and effects is different from the principles of classical narration. He argues that art cinema is a distinct branch of film practice, with historical significance and a specific set of formal conventions and viewing modes. Unlike classical cinema where narrative form motivates cinematic representation and a psychologically defined cause-effect structure is devel- oped through goal-oriented characters, art cinema is based on a loosened and ambiguous cause-effect linkage of events, where characters lack clear desires and goals and the author is foregrounded as a formal component in the film's structure. For Bordwell, the art-cinema mode of narration is one of the most significant general modes of film practice

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and one of the few alternatives to the historically dominant classical Hollywood narrative. He is careful t o point out, however, that the lines between the two are not always clear, as these two modes continuously inform and influence each other.

In the afterword, Bordwell moves beyond the formal characteristics of the art-cinema mode of narration to address the significance of institutions that have played a key role in cultivating, sustaining, and institutionalizing art cinema. Film schools and the festival circuit (which i s the world's alternative to Hollywood's distribution system), for example, made visible and established many national cinemas and movements (such as the Iranian New Wave, or Chinese and Japanese cinema) that share formal concerns with European art cinema.

R E A D I N G CUES & KEY CONCEPTS One of the characteristics of art-cinema narration, according to Bordwell, is that it is "less concerned with action than reaction." What does he mean by this? Can you think of examples from classical Hollywood films that use a similar technique?

According to Bordwell, art cinema "defines itself as a realisticcinema," and he establishes realism as one of the main features that motivates the narrative. How is this realism in art cinema different from "verisimilitude" that motivates classical cinema narration?

While Bordwell charts a clear difference between classical and art-cinema modes of narration, he acknowledges that the two influence and learn from each other. Given these crossovers, especially in contemporary cinema, can we still draw clear lines between these two modes?

Key Concepts: A r t Cinema; Ambiguity; Narration; Authorial Expressivity; Realism

The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice

a Strada (19541, 8 11'2 (19631, Wild Strawberries (1957), The Seventh Seal (1957), L Persona (19661, Ashes and Diamonds (1958), Jules e t J i m (1962), Knife i n the Water (1962), Vivresa vie (1962), Muriel (1963): Whatever else one c a n say about these films, cultural fiat gives them a role altogether different f r o m Rio Bravo (1959) o n the one h a n d a n d Mothlight (1963) o n the other. They are "art films," and, ignoring the tang o f snobbishness about the phrase, we can say that these a n d m a n y other films con- stitute a distinct branch o f the cinematic institution. M y purpose in this essay i s t o argue that we c a n usefully consider t h e "art cinema" as a distinct mode o f film prac- tice, possessing a definite historical existence, a set o f formal conventions, a n d i m p l i c i t viewing procedures. Given the compass o f this paper, I c a n only suggest some lines o f work, but I hope to showthat constructing the category o f the a r t cinema is b o t h feasible a n d illuminating.

It m a y seem perverse to propose that films produced in such variable cultural contexts m i g h t share fundamentally similar features. Yet I think there are good reasons for believing this, reasons w h i c h come f r o m the films' place in history. In

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the long run, the art cinema descends from the early film d'art and such silent national cinema schools as German Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit and French Impre~sionism.~ (A thorough account of its sources would have to include literary modernism, from Proust and James to Faulkner and Camus.) More specifically, the art cinema as a distinct mode appears after Worldwar I1 when the dominance of the Hollywood cinema was beginning to wane. In the United States, the courts' divorce- ment decrees created a shortage of films for exhibition. Production firms needed overseas markets and exhibitors needed to compete with television. In Europe, the end of the war reestablished international commerce and facilitated film export and coproductions. Thomas Guback has shown how, after 1954, films began to be made for international audience^.^ American firms sponsored foreign production, and foreign films helped American exhibitors fill screen time. The later Neorealist films may be considered the first postwar instances of the international art cinema, and subsequent examples would include most works of the New Wave. Fellini. Resnais, Bergman, De Sica, Kurosawa, Pasolini, et al. While the art cinema is of little economic importance in the United States today, it evidently continues, as such international productions as The Serpent's Egg (1977) and Strosnek (1977) show.

Identifying a mode of production/consumption does not exhaustively charac- terize the art cinema, since the cinema also consists of formal traits and viewing conventions. To say this, however, is to invite the criticism that the creators of such film are too inherently different to be lumped together. Yet I shall try to show that whereas stylistic devices and thematic motifs may differ from director to director, the overall functions of style and theme remain remarkably constant in the art cin- ema as a whole. The narrative and stylistic principles of the films constitute a logi- cally coherent mode of cinematic discourse.

Realism, Authorship, Ambiguity The classical narrative cinema-paradigmatically, studio feature filmmaking in Hollywood since 1920-rests upon particular assumptions about narrative struc- ture, cinematic style, and spectatorial activity. While detailing those assumptions is a task far from complete,l we can say that in the classical cinema, narrative form motivates cinematic representation. Specifically, cause-effect logic and narrative parallelism generate a narrative which projects its action through psychologically defined, goal oriented characters. Narrative time and space are constructed to rep- resent the cause-effect chain. To this end, cinematic representation has recourse to fixed figures of cutting (e.g., 180 continuity, crosscutting, "montage sequences"). mise-en-scene (e.g., three-point lighting, perspective sets), cinematography (e.g., a particular range of camera distances and lens lengths), and sound (e.g.. modula- tion, voice-over narration). More important than these devices themselves are their functions in advancing the narrative. The viewer makes sense of the classical film through criteria of verisimilitude (is x plausible?), of generic appropriateness (is x characteristic of this sort of film?) and of compositional unity (does x advance the story?). Given this background set, we can start to markoff some salient features of the art cinema.

First, the art cinema defines itself explicitly against the classical narrative mode, and especially against the cause-effect linkage of events. These linkages become

looser, more tenuous in the art film. In LIAvuentura (1960), Anna is lost and never found; in A bout de souffle (aka Breathless, 1960), the reasons for Patricia's betrayal of Michel remain unknown; in Bicycle Thieves (1948), the future of Antonio and his son is not revealed. It will not do, however, to characterize the art film solely by its loosening of causal relations. We must ask what motivates that loosening, what par- ticular modes of unity follow from these motivations, what reading strategies the film demands, and what contradictions exist in this order of cinematic discourse.

The art cinema motivates its narratives by two principles; realism and authorial expressivity. On the one hand, the art cinema defines itself as a realistic cinema. It will show us real locations (Neorealism, the New Wave) and real problems (contem- porary "alienation," "lack of communication," etc.). Part of this reality is sexual; the aesthetics and commerce of the art cinema often depend upon an eroticism that violates the production code of pre-1950 Hollywood. A Stranger Knocks (1959) and And God Created Woman (1956) are no more typical of this than, say, Jules etJim and Persona (whereas one can see Le Mkpris, 1963, as consciously working upon the very problem of erotic spectacle in the art cinema). Most important, the art cinema uses "realistic"-that is, psychologically complex-characters.

The art cinema is classical in its reliance upon psychological causation; char- acters and their effects on one another remain central. But whereas the characters of the classical narrative have clear-cut traits and objectives, the characters of the art cinema lack defined desires and goals. Characters may act for inconsistent rea- sons (Marcello in La Dolce Vita, 1960) or may question themselves about their goals (Borg in Wild Strawberries and the Knight in The Seventh Seal). Choices are vague or nonexistent. Hence a certain drifting episodic quality to the art film's narrative. Characters may wander out and never reappear; events may lead to nothing. The Hollywood protagonist speeds directly toward the target; lacking a goal, the art-film character slides passively from one situation to another.

The protagonist's itinerary is not completely random; it has a rough shape: a trip (La Strada; WildStrawberries; Thesilence, 1963), anidyll (Jules etJim; Elvira Madigan, 1967; Pierrot le fou, 1965), a search (LIAvuentura; Blow-Up, 1966; High and Low, 1963), even the making of a film (8 112; Le Mkpris; The Clowns, 1971; Fellini Roma, 1972; Day for Night, 1973; The Last Movie, 1971). Especially apt for the broken teleology of the art film is the biography of the individual, in which events become pared down toward a picaresque successivity (La Dolce Vita; Ray's A ~ L L trilogy, 1955-1959; Alfie, 1966). If the classical protagonist struggles, the drifting protagonist traces an itiner- ary, a n encyclopedic survey of the film's world. Certain occupations (stockbroking in L'Eclisse, 1962; journalism in La Dolce Vita and The Passenger, 1975; prostitution in Viure sa vie and Nights of Cabiria, 1957) favor a survey form of narrative. Thus the art film's thematic of la condition humaine, its attempt to pronounce judgments on "modern life" as a whole, proceeds from its formal needs: had the characters a goal, life would no longer seem so meaningless.

What is essential to any such organizational scheme is that it be sufficiently loose in its causation as to permit characters to express and explain their psycho- logical states. Slow to act, these characters tell all. The art cinema is less concerned with action than reaction; it is a cinema of psychological effects in search of their causes. The dissection of feeling is often represented explicitly as therapy and cure (e.g., Through a Glass Darkly, Persona), but even when it is not, the forward

562 ! PART6 NARRATIVE: TELLING STORIES - . ~ ~ ~ ~ -.-.----.-p--.-..........-- ~-.. flow of causation is braked and characters pause to seek the aetiology of their feel- ings. Characters often tell one another stories: autobiographical events (especially from childhood), fantasies, and dreams. (A recurring line: "I had a strange dream last night.") The hero becomes a supersensitive individual, one of those people on whom nothing is lost. During the film's survey of its world, the hero often shudders on the edge of breakdown. There recurs the realization of the anguish of ordinary living, the discovery of unrelieved misery: compare the heroines of Europa 51 (1952), LIAvuentura, Deserto rosso (1964), and Une femme mariBe (1964), In some circum- stances the characters must attribute their feelings to social situations (as in Ikiru [1952], ILive in Fear [1955], and Shame). In Europa 51, a communist tells irene that individuals are not at fault: "If you must blame something, blame our postwar society." Yet there is seldom analysis at the level of groups or institutions; in the art cinema, social forces become significant insofar as they impinge upon the psycho- logically sensitive individual.

A conception of realism also affects the film's spatial and temporal construc- tion, but the art cinema's realism here encompasses a spectrum of possibilities. The options range from documenting factuality (e.g., I1 Posto, 1961) to intense psycho- logical subjectivity (Hiroshima mon amour, 1959). (When the two impulses meet in the same film, the familiar "illusion-reality" dichotomy of the art cinema results.) Thus room is left for two reading strategies. Violations of classical conceptions of time and space are justified as the intrusion of an unpredictable and contingent daily reality or as the subjective reality of complexcharacters. Plot manipulations of story order (especially flashbacks) remain anchored to character subjectivity as in 8 112 and Hiroshima mon amour. Manipulations of duration are justified realistically (e.g., the temps mortsof early New Wave films) or psychologically (the jump cuts of A bout de soufflesignaling a jittery lifestyle). By the same token, spatial representation will be motivated as documentary realism (e.g., location shooting, available light), as character revelation, or in extreme cases as character subjectivity. Andre Bazin may be considered the first major critic of the art cinema, not only because he praised a loose, accidental narrative structure that resembled life but also because he pin-pointed privileged stylistic devices for representing a realistic continuum of space and time (deep-focus, deep space, the moving camera, and the long take). In brief, a commitment to both objective and subjective verisimilitude distinguished the art cinema from the classical narrative mode.4

Yet at the same time, the art cinema foregrounds the authoras a structure in the film's system. Not that the author is represented as a biographical individual (althoughsome art films, e.g., Fellini's, Truffaut's, and Pasolini's, solicit confessional readings), but rather the author becomes a formal component, the overriding intel- ligence organizing the film for our comprehension. Over this hovers anotion that the art-film director has a creative freedom denied to herlhis Hollywood ~ o u n t e r p a r t . ~ Within this frame of reference, the author is the textual force "who" communicates (what is the film saying?) and "who" expresses (what is the artist's personal vision?). Lacking identifiable stars and familiar genres, the art cinema uses a concept of authorship to unify the text.

Several conventions operate here. The competent viewer watches the film expecting not order in the narrative but stylistic signatures in the narration: technical touches (Truffaut's freeze frames, Antonioni's pans) and obsessive motifs (Bu6uel's

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anticlericalism, Fellini's shows, Bergman's character names). The film also offers itself as a chapter in an oeuvre. This strategy becomes especially apparent in the con-

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vention of the multi-film work (the Apu trilogy, Bergman's two trilogies, Rohmer's "Moral Tales," and Truffaut's Doinel series). The initiated catch citations: references to previous films by the director or to works by others (e.g., the New Wave homages).

A small industry is devoted to informingviewers of such authorial marks. Inter- national film festivals, reviews and essays in the press, published scripts, film series, career retrospectives, and film education all introduce viewers to authorial codes. What is essential is that the art film be read as the work of a n expressive individual. It is no accident, then, that the politique des auteurs arose in the wake of the art cin- ema, that Cahiers du cinkma admired Bergman and Antonioni as much as Hawks and Minnelli, that Robin Wood could esteem both Preminger and Satyajit Ray. As a critical enterprise, auteur analysis of the 1950s and 1960s consisted of applying art- cinema reading strategies to the classical Hollywood cinema."

How does the author come forward in the film? Recent workin Screen has shown how narrational marks can betray the authorial code in the classical text, chiefly through gaps in motivation? In the art-cinema text, the authorial code manifests itself as recurrent violations of the classical norm. Deviations from the classical canon-an unusual angle, a stressed bit of cutting, a prohibited camera movement, a n unrealistic shift in lighting or setting-in short, any breakdown of the motiva- tion of cinematic space and time by cause-effect logic-can be read as "authorial commentary." The credits for the film, as i n Persona or Blow-Up, can announce the power of the author to control what we see. Across the entire film, we must recog- nize and engage with the shaping narrative intelligence. For example, in what Norman Holland calls the "puzzling film,"B the art cinema foregrounds the narrational act by posing enigmas. In the classic detective tale, however, the puzzle is one of story: who did it? How? Why? In the art cinema, the puzzle is one of plot: who is telling this story? How is this story being told? Why is this story being told this way? Another example of such marking of narration is the device of the flashforward-the plot's representation of a future story action. The flashforward is unthinkable in the classical narrative cinema, which seeks to retard the ending and efface the mode of narration. But in the art cinema, the flashforward functions perfectly to stress authorial presence: we must notice how the narrator teases us with knowledge that no character can have. Far from being isolated or idiosyncratic, such instances typify the tendency of the art film to throw its weight onto plot, not story; we play a game with the narrator.

Realism and authorial expressivity, then, will be the means whereby the art film unifies itself. Yet these means now seem contradictory. Verisimilitude, objective or subjective, is inconsistent with a n intrusive author. The surest signs of authorial intelligibility-the flashforward, the doubled scene i n Persona, the color filters at the start of Le Mbpris-are the least capable of realistic justification. Contrariwise, to push the realism of psychological uncertainty to its limit is to invite a haphazard text in which the author's shaping hand would not be visible. In short, a realist aes- thetic and an expressionist aesthetic are hard to merge.

The art cinema seeks to solve the problem in a sophisticated way: by the device of ambiguity. The art film is nonclassical i n that it foregrounds deviations from the classical norm-there are certain gaps and problems. But these very deviations

are placed, resituated as realism (in life things happen this way) or authorial com- mentary (the ambiguity is symbolic). Thus the art film solicits a particular reading procedure: whenever confronted with a problem in causation, temporality, or spati- ality, we first seek realistic motivation. (Is a character's mental state causing the un- certainty? Is life just leaving loose ends?) If we're thwarted, we next seek authorial motivation. (What is being "said" here? What significance justifies the violation of the norm?) Ideally, the film hesitates, suggesting character subjectivity, life's unti- diness, and author's vision. Whatever is excessive i n one category must belong to another. Uncertainties persist but are understood as such, as obuiousuncertainties, so to speak. Put crudely, the slogan of art cinema might be "When in doubt, read for maximum ambiguity."

The drama of these tendencies can play across a n entire film, as Giulietta degli spiriti and Deserto rosso illustrate. Fellini's film shows how the foregrounding of authorialnarratioa cancollapse before the attempt to represent character subjectivity. In the hallucinations of Giulietta, the film surrenders to expressionism. Deserto rosso keeps the elements in better balance. Putting aside the island fantasy, we can read any scene's color scheme in two registers simultaneously: as psychological verisimilitude (Giuliana sees her life as a desert) or as authorial commentary (Antonioni-as-narrator says that this industrial landscape is a desert).

If the organizational scheme of the art film creates the occasion for maximiz- ing ambiguity, how to conclude the film? The solution is the open-ended narrative. Given the film's episodic structure and the minimization of character goals, the story will often lack a clear-cut resolution. Not only is Anna never found, but the ending of LIAvventurarefuses to specify the fate of the couple. At the close of Les 400 coups (1959), the freeze frame becomes the very figure of narrative irresolution, as does the car halted before the two roads at the end of Knve in the Water. At its limit, the art cinema creates an 8 112 or a Persona, a film which, lacking a causally ade- quate ending, seems to conclude several distinct times. A banal remark of the 1960s, that such films make you leave the theater thinking, is not far from the mark: the ambiguity, the play of thematic interpretation, must not be halted at the film's close. Furthermore, the pensive ending acknowledges the author as a peculiarly humble intelligence; she or he knows that life is more complex than art can ever be, and the only way to respect this complexity is to leave causes dangling, questions unan- swered. With the open and arbitrary ending, the art film reasserts that ambiguity is the dominant principle of intelligibility, that we are to watch less for the tale than the telling, that life lacks the neatness of art and this art knows it.

' The Art Cinema in History The foregoing sketch of one mode of cinema needs more detailed examination, but in conclusion it may be enough to suggest some avenues for future work.

We cannot construct the art cinema in isolation from other cinematic prac- tices. The art cinema has neighbors on each side, adjacent modes which define it. One such mode is the classical narrative cinema (historically, the dominant mode). There also exists a modernist cinema-that set of formal properties and viewing protocols that presents, above all, the radical split of narrative structure from cin- ematic style, so that the film constantlystrains between the coherence of the fiction

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and the perceptual disjunctions of cinematic representation. It is worth mentioning that the modernist cinema is not ambiguous in the sense that the art cinema is; per- ceptual play, not thematic ambivalence, is the chief viewing strategy. The modernist cinema seems to me manifested (under various circumstances) in films like October (19281, La Passion deJeanne dXrc (1928), Lancelot du Lac (1974), Play Time (19671, and An Autumn Afternoon (1963). The art cinema can then be located in relation to such adjacent modes.

We must examine the complex historical relation of the art cinema to the clas- sical narrative cinema. The art film requires the classical background set because deviations from the norm must be registered as such to be placed as realism or authorial expression. Thus the art film acknowledges the classical cinema in many ways, ranging from Antonioni's use of the detective story to explicit citations in New Wave films. Conversely, the art cinema has had a n impact on the classical cinema. Just as the Hollywood silent cinema borrowed avant-garde devices but assimilated them to narrative ends, so recent American filmmaking has appropriated art-film devices. Yet such devices are bent to causally motivated functions-the jump cut for violence or comedy, the sound bridge for continuity or shock effect, the elimination of the dissolve, and the freeze frame for finality. (Compare the narrative irresoIu- tion of the freeze frame in Les 400 coups with its powerful closure in Butch Cassidy and the SundanceKid, 1969.) More interestingly, we have seen an art cinema emerge in Hollywood. The open endings of 2001 (1968) and Five Easy Pieces (1970) and the psychological ambiguity of The Conversation (1974), Klute (1971), and Three Women (1977) testify to the assimilation of the conventions of the art film. (Simplifying brusquely, we might consider The Godfather I [I9721 as a classical narrative film and The Godfather I1 [I9741 as more of a n art film.) Yet if Hollywood is adopting traits of the art cinema, that process must be seen as not simple copying but complex transformation. In particular, American film genres intervene to warp art-cinema conventions in new directions (as the work of Altman and Coppola show^).^

It is also possible to see that certain classical filmmakers have had something of the art cinema about them. Sirk, Ford, and Lang all come to mind here, but the preeminent instance is Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock has created a textual persona that is in every way equal to that of the art-cinema's author; of all classical films, I would argue, Hitchcock's foreground the narrational process most strikingly. A film like Psycho demonstrates how the classical text, with its psychological causality, its protagonistlantagonist struggle, its detective story, and its continuous time and homogenous space, can under pressure exhibit the very negation of the classical system: psychology as inadequate explanation (the psychiatrist's account); character as only aposition, an empty space (the protagonist is successively three characters, the antagonist is initially two, then two-as-one); and crucially stressed shifts in point- of-view which raise the art-film problem of narrational attitude. It may be that the attraction of Hitchcock's cinema for both mass audience and English literature professor lies in its successful merger of classical narrative and art-film narration.

Seenfrom the other side, the art cinema represents the domestication of modern- ist filmmaking. The art cinema softened modernism's attack on narrative causality by creating mediating structures-"reality," character subjectivity, authorial vision- that allowed a fresh coherence of meaning. Works of Rossellini, Eisenstein, Renoir, Dreyer, and Ozu have proven assimilable to art cinema in its turn, a n important point

566 1 PART 6 NARRATIVE: TELLING STORIES L-. . .- ~ -~ .. ... -- .~~

of departure. By the 1960s, the art cinema enabled certain filmmakers to define new possibilities. In Gertrud (1964), Dreyer created a perceptual surface so attenuated that all ambiguity drains away, leaving a narrative vacuum.Lo In LXnnSe derni6re a Marienbad (1961), Resnais dissolved causality altogether and used the very conven- tions of art cinema to shatter the premise of character subjectivity. In Nicht versohnt (1965), Straub and Huillet took the flashback structure and temps morts of the art cinema and orchestrated empty intervals into a system irreducible to character psy- chology or authorial commentary. Nagisha Oshima turned the fantasy-structures and the narrational marks of the New Wave to political-analytical ends in The Cer- emony (1971) and Death by Hanging (1968). Most apparently, Godard, one of the fig- ureheads of the 1960s art cinema, had by 1968 begun to question it. (Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle [1967] can be seen as a critique of Deserto rosso, or even of Une femme marie'e.) Godard also reintroduced the issue of montage, a process which enabled Tout va bien (1972) and subsequent works to use Brechtian principles to analyze art-film assumptions about the unity of ideology. If, as some claim, a historical- materialist order of cinema is now appearing, the art cinema must be seen as its necessary background, and its adversary.

Afterword The preceding was published i n 1979 and reprinted here without revision. Like many early statements in a research tradition, it has a peremptory tenor: This is this, that is that, no fine gradations allowed. To revise it would go beyond mere updating; I'd want to query its overconfident generalizations. Some of my claims (like the faith i n a n emerging "historical-materialist" cinema) and terms (like "the narrator") no longer convince me. Many of the generalizations still seem to me on the right track, but they would need much more nuancing and refinement, and the result would be very different, and much longer.

Actually, some of the refinements have snuck into other things I've written. Never expecting to reprint the piece, I cannibalized it twice. I used it to counter- point a study of classical Hollywood narrative (The Classical Hollywood Cinema, pp. 370-377), and I expanded it i n a discussion of modes of narration (Narration in the Fiction Film, pp. 205-233). These are more informative, but several readers have told me that they prefer the cleaner outlines of the original, and it has found its way into anthologies and course packets, so I bring it back one last time. As you might expect, though, I can't refrain from making a few new remarks, if only to flag some points that could be usefully rethought. Kristin Thompson and I have tried to offer amore systematic and comprehensive discussion of some of these issues in our survey text, Film History: An Introduction.ll

Since I wrote the piece, some scholars have examined the art cinema as an institution in world film commerce. A great many fiscal mechanisms support pro- duction, distribution, and exhibition on the European scene.lz The varied mix of funding sources (private capital, national subsidy, and European Union programs) has brought forth resourceful media players such as Marin Karmitz of Paris, who started by owning theater screens and has become both a producer and distribu- tor of major films from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Somewhat surprisingly, American investment and distribution have also helped sustain art cinema, from

BORDWELL The A r t Cinema as a M o d e o f Film Practice 1 567

small companies supporting the 1950s efforts to current interest on the part of Sony and others in financing Asian projects.13

In any producing country, films assume many diverse shapes. There are always genre pictures, particularly melodramas and comedies showcasing popular local talent. (The farce featuring TV performers seems a cross-cultural constant.) Local output also usually includes a few prestige items, often adapted from national liter- ary classics or based on memorable historical episodes. But Europe also promoted a conception of creativity that was rare elsewhere: the auteur film. The idea of a director expressing his (only rarely her) vision of life on film remains crucial to the art cinema. The head of New Danish Screen, a funding scheme from the nation's film institute, says, "We secure a place to develop a director's personal style without the pressure of commercial success criteria."14 Yet personal style can have cultural and financial implications. The idea of authorship can accommodate policies that demand that local films reflect national culture (who was more French than Franqois Truffaut, more Bavarian than Rainer Werner Fassbinder?), while also providing a marketable identity to films made with low budgets and relatively unknown stars. A sector of world film commerce still depends on the auteur premise. Acknowledging a powerful creator as the source of the film's formal and thematic complexity yields something marketable internationally, a brand name that can carry over from proj- ect to project, Pedro Almod6var, Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke, Roman Polanski, and a few others are still guarantees of saleable cinema. Individualized branding is even more itnportant as creators become international directors, as Lone Sherfig moves from Denmark to Scotland to make Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself(2002) or the German Tom Tykwer allies with Miramax to make Heaven (2002). And, of course, the concept of authorship spread outside Europe rather quickly, with Kurosawa Akira and Satyajit Ray becoming celebrated as individual creators in the 1950s and 1960s.

Two institutions that I didn't mention have become ever more important in the cultivation of art movies. The first, and less studied, is the film school. The USSR founded a national film school in 1919, and European countries followed after World War 11, Film schools have multiplied since the 1960s, either in universities or under the auspices of national film institutes. Apart from ensuring a flow of trained professionals into the industry, film schools carry in their curricula and course assignments certain presumptions about what constitutes aesthetically worthwhile cinema. Judging from my limited experience, European film academies were in the 1990s still quite oriented to the idea of individual expression-though my sense is that students who were interested in TV production, where most of the jobs were, were less committed to auteur premises. It would be a big project, but someone should study the policies, the taste structures, and the craft practices of non-U.S. film schools, and analyze the films that result.

A second sort of institution is receiving more study just now. The filmmakers and movements that defined the postwar art cinema earned much of their fame on the festival circuit, from Rashomon (winner at Venice in 1951) through If (win- ner at Cannes in 1969). When my essay was published in 1979, there were at most 75 principal film festivals; today there are about 250, with hundreds more serving local, regional, and specialist audiences. The development of low-budget indepen- dent cinemas, the ease with which films can be submitted on video, and the huge

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variety of festival themes (e.g., animation, science fiction, gay and lesbian, and film scores) have made the scene overwhelming. There is even a trade magazine for festi- val planners.15 Each year hundreds of programmers are chasing the world's top three or four dozen films. Everyone wants red carpet events, with major stars and directors turning up for the press. If a festival isn't allowed by the international association to award prizes, the organizers can still fly in three or four critics from the FCdCration Internationale de la Presse Cinkmatographique (FIPRESCI) and establish a jury for a FIPRESCI prize. Festivals enhance tourism and give even the smallest city a moment in the limelight. As packaging events, they build a n accumulating excitement around films that many attendees wouldn't bother to see in regular theatrical runs.

At the same time, festivals are the world's alternative to Hollywood's theatri- cal distribution system. A decentralized, informal network of programmers, gate- keepers, and tastemakers brings to notice films of daring and ambition.16 Festivals are the major clearinghouse for art cinema, with prizes validating the year's top achievements. To win at one of the big three-Berlin, Cannes, and Venice-or to be purchased at Cannes, Toronto, or Sundance lifts a film above the thousands of other titles demanding attention. The payoff goes beyond cinephilia: Taiwan and Iran have used victories on the festival circuit to improve their cultural image." Hong Kong cinema would not have gained its prestige in the West without the energetic proselytizing of festival programmers and loyal journalists.I8

Not all movies screened at festivals are art films, but festivals sustain the formal and stylistic conventions that my essay tried to isolate. Those conventions emerged earliest, I still believe, in Western and Eastern European cinema, but the essay did slight other cinematic traditions. For example, filmmakers in developing countries like Turkey and Egypt were sensitive to developing art cinema trends, but I simply didn't know enough about them. Nor did I know enough about South American film to do justice to it. Italian neorealism had a strong influence there in the 1950s, and a few film- makers, notably Leopoldo Torre Nilsson in Argentina, quickly picked up on Bergman and Antonioni. Brazil's Cinema NBvo and other trends criticized art cinema traditions in ways roughly comparable to the politicized modernist cinema of Europe.

Asia may have lagged somewhat, with the exception of Japan. Although lack- ing exact counterparts to the standard-bearers of European art movies, Japan had an experimental tradition in mainstream production, and there were many more convention-busting directors at work than the essay suggests (such as Suzuki Seijun and Wakamatsu Kojiro). As the 1980s unfolded, however, the other cinemas of Asia were drawing heavily on the models I review here. Directors of the Fifth Generation in China, the Hong Kong New Wave, and above all the New Taiwanese Cinema were salient examples. ChenKaige's neorealistic YellowEarth (1984) and his more stylized efforts like The Bigparade (1986) and King of the Children (1987); EdwardYang's That Day, on the Beach (1983) and The Terrorizers (1986); Ann Hui's The Secret (1979); and Patrick Tam's Love Massacre (1981) and Nomad (1982)-these and many other works attest to the emergence of a transnational Chinese art cinema. Wong Kar-wai's Days ofBeing Wild (1991) brought Hong Kong art cinema to maturity, and his time-bending lyricism, from Ashes of Time (1994) to 2046 (20041, has been indebted to Western literary and cinematic models.lg In Taiwan, the earliest New Cinema films belong to a n autobiographical redrafting of neorealism, but several directors moved beyond it. Edward Yang was strongly influenced by European cineastes, notably Antonioni,

-. BORDWELL The A r t Cinema as a M o d e of Film Practice / 569

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and his masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day (1991) married local realism (the film is based on a notorious murder) and self-conscious artifice. Hou Hsiao-hsien was no cinephile, working instead in Taiwan's local industry, but after making triumphant contributions to New Cinema realism, he widened his ambitions. He experimented with decentered historical narrative (City of Sadness, 1989; The Puppetmaster, 1993), reflexive construction (Good Men, Good Women, 1995; Three Times, 2005), extreme technical restraint (Flowers of Shanghai, 1998), and self-conscious invocations of film history (the Ozu homage Cafb Lumii.re, 2004).20

The 1990s also saw the emergence of a new generation of Japanese directors, including Kore-eda Hirokazu (Maborosi, 1995), Suwa Nobuhiro IMfOther, 1999), Aoyama Shinji (Eureka, 2000), and Kitano Takeshi, who shifted between poetic genre films and more abstract efforts like Dolls (2002). At the same period, South Korean directors Hong Sang-soo (The Power of Kangwon Province, 1998), Lee Chang-dong (Peppermint Candy, 20001, Kim Ki-duk (The Isle, 2000), and Park Chan-wook (Sympathy for MI, Vengeance, 2002) began winning festival acclaim. Mainland China has reinsti- tuted art cinema as an export commodity, with films such as Tian Zhuangshuang's Springtime in a Small Town (2002) and Jia Zhang-ke's The World (2004).

Many of these newer traditions, it seems, replay at a n accelerated pace the trajectory of European art cinema. An indigenous realist movement, somewhat comparable to Italian neorealism, becomes more conscious of the conventions in- volved in realism, and develops more abstract experiments in form. The emergence of Iranian cinema is a remarkable instance. Budgets are bare-bones by Western standards, and by using nonactors and locations, filmmakers have presented post-Shah Iranian culture to a world that knew little of it. The humanistic strain of neoreal- ism finds echoes in films like The Key (1987), The White Balloon (1995), The Apple (19981, The Child and the Soldier (2000), and Blackboards (2000). At the same time, and often within the same films, we find sophisticated games with cinematic tech- nique. The Mirror (1997) starts with a little girl's frustration with trying to cross a busy intersection, then shifts its story action almost wholly to the soundtrack when she barricades herself behind her household gate and refuses to meet the camera. Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Moment of Innocence (1996) shows him staging a film based on a crime he committed in his youth, and the result is a dizzying mise en abyme reminiscent of 8 1/2. The country seems immersed in cinephilia. When a laborer and film fan pretends to be director Makhmalbaf, Abbas Kiarostami covers his trial and stages a meeting between him and Makhmalbaf. He calls the result Close Up (1990). But then the impostor justifies himself by making his own film, called Close-Up Long-Shot (19961. Kiarostami himself-superb screenwriter, director of exemplary documentaries and fiction films, and experimenter with portable video and Warholian recording (Ten, 2002; Five Dedicated to Ozu, 2003)-stands as an emblem of a culture in love with cinematic artifice but also compelled to bear witness to the lives of ordinary people. Who in the West would have predicted that a great cinema, at once humanist and formalist, would have come from Iran?

Not that the period proved unproductive elsewhere. Russia and Eastern Europe contributed to the tradition of philosophically weighty works with Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror (1975) and Nostalghia (1983) and Krzysztof ~ieilowski's coproductions, notably the Three Colors trilogy (1993-1994). Aleksandr Sokurov created mournful, quasi-mystical works (The Second Circle, 1990; WhisperingPages, 1993) that paralleled

( PART 6 NARRATIVE: TELLING STORIES - - -----a- - - - -

the elegiac music pouring out of late Soviet and post-Soviet composers likeArtymov and Kancheli. In Hungary, BCla Tarr (Satartstango, 1994) and Gyijrgy Feh6r (Passion, 1998) created harsh, palpably grimy tales of rural life. France continued to support Philippe Garrel, Claire Denis, and others of ambitious bent, whereas Belgium sustained the regional realism of the Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc. Denmark provided Europe's newest Cinema of Quality, with well-carpentered scripts, thoughtful themes, andversatile actors, as well as, thanks to the Dogme 95 impulse, some films pushing against the ethos of professionalism with rawer works. A film, said Lars von Trier, should be "like a pebble in your shoe."21 Yet quite outside the dominion of Dogme lay Christoffer Boe, whose Reconstruction (2003) owes a good deal to Alain Resnais' polished time jumping.

American filmmakers have been assimilating art-film conventions for a long time, as my essay suggests, but the process has been given a new force by the rise of the independent film sector. Steven Soderbergh can remake a n Andrey Tarkovsky film (Solaris, 1972 and 2002), Paul Thomas Anderson can borrow sound devices from Jacques Tati (Punch-Drunk Love, 2002)) and Hal Hartley can absorb ideas from Jean- Luc Godard and Robert B r e ~ s o n . ~ ~ The burst of experimentation on display in films like Memento (2000), Adaptation (2002), and Primer (2004) probably owes as much to the European heritage as it does to U.S. traditions of film noir and fantasy. In many respects, the U.S. indie cinema blends Ellropean art-cinema principles with premises of classicalHollywood ~torytelling.~~Ahmad, the protagonist of Ramin Bahrani's Man Push Cart (2005), has as firm a set of purposes as any Hollywood hero, but the first half-hour of the film conceals them from us. Instead, the scenes concentrate on his daily grind as he sells coffee and pastries from a wheeled stall. We get to know him by the way he lugs his propane tank, fills the coffee roaster, unpacks doughnuts and Danishes, and hauls his massive cart through midtown traffic. Suspending our aware- ness of the protagonist's goals forces us to focus on minutiae of the story world.

Several books would be needed to do jostice to this worldwide activity,24 so I'll close by pointing out two areas that have intrigued me from the standpoint of a poetics. First is a new stylistic trend that coalesced as I was writing my essay. As if in rebuke to the 1960s reliance on montage and camera movement, several directors cultivated a n approach based on the static, fairly distant long take. In Europe, this took the shape of what I've called the planimetric image. The shot is framed perpen- dicular to a backwall or ground, with figures caught in frontal or profile positions, as in police mug shots. We can find this emerging in the 1960s, with the new reliance on long lenses, but it became a feature of much European staging of the 1970s and 1980s, and it was picked up in other national cinemas.25 This device presents the scene as a more abstract configuration, perhaps distancing us from its emotional tenor, and it can support those psychologically imbued temps morts that are crucial to the real- istic impulse of the mode. This visual schema can also display some of the arresting boldness of an advertisinglayout, as ih the cinkmadu looktrend of 1980s France. The planimetric image became quite common in world cinema and constitutes one of the art cinema's permanent contributions to cinema's pictorial repertoire. As a sub- stitute for orthodox shotlreversk-shot cutting, it became a staple of deadpan humor in both art films like Kitano Takeshi's and cult hits like Napoleon Dynamite (2004).

BORDWELL The A r t Cinema as a Mode o f Film Practice J - -. - --

A second aspect touched on in this essay became a concern of my book Narra- tion in the Fiction Film. The art cinema engages us not only by asking us to construct the fabula action but also by teasing us to make sense of the ongoing narration. So how is this slippery narration patterned across the length of the whole film? Taking as my example Resnais' La Guerre estpnie (1966), I argued that many art films create a "game of form." The film initially trains the viewer in its distinctive story- telling tactics, but as the film proceeds, those tactics mutate in unforeseeable ways. In La Guerre estfinie, the key device-the hypothetical sequence, showing several alternative actions the protagonist might take in the future-is announced quite early. At first it seems difficult and disruptive, but through repetition it becomes stabilized. Then, however, the narration renders the hypothetical sequences more indeterminate, introducing uncertainty by mixing in flashbacks and abrupt tran- sitions to new scenes. The final section of the film is the most transparent, as the story action comes to the fore, but there are stillvariations that make the premises of presentation somewhat unpredictable. The finale leaves open both the conse- quences of story causality and the rules governing the narration itself.26

Such formal play constitutes one norm within art cinema narration. It's as apparent in the disjunctive editing and misleading camera positions as in works from 40 years before. The study of this tradition from the standpoint of poetics con- tinues to bring new possibilities to light.

NOTES 1. More radical avant-garde movements, such as Soviet montage filmmaking, surrealism,

and cinkma pur, seem to have been relatively without effect upon the art cinema's style. I suspect that those experimental styles that did not fundamentally challenge narrative coherence were the most assimilable to the postwar art cinema.

2. See Thomas Guback, The International Motion Picture Industry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 196% passim.

3. See, for example, Philip Rosen, "Difference and Displacement in Seventh Heaven," Screen 18, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 89-104.

4. This point is taken up in Christian Metz, "The Modern Cinema and Narrativity," in his Film Language, trans. Michael Taylor (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1974), 185-227.

5. Arthur Knight compares the Hollywood film to a commodity and the foreign film to a n artwork: "Art is not manufactured by committees. Art comes from a n individual who has something that he must express. . . . This is the reason why we hear so often that foreign films are 'more artistic' than our own. There is in them the urgency of individual expres- sion, an independence of vision, the coherence of a single-minded statement." Quoted in Michael F. Mayer, Foreign Films on American Screens (New York: Arco, 19651, vii.

6. "The strategy was to talk about Hawks, Preminger, etc. as artists like Bufiuel and Resnais" (Jim Hillier, "The Return to Movie," Movie, no. 20 [Spring 19751: 17). I do not mean to imply that auteur criticism did not at times distinguish between the classicalnarrative and the art cinema. A book like V. F. Perkins' Film as Film (Baltimore: Penguin, 1978) insists not only upon authorial presence but also upon the causal motivation and the stylistic economy characteristic of the classical cinema. Thus, Perkins finds the labored directorial touches of Antonioni and Bergman insufficiently motivated by story action. Nevertheless, Perkins'

572 : PART 6 NARRATIVE: TELLING STORIES I-. ..._ - . . ..

interpretation of the jeep sequence in Carmen Jones in terms of characters' confinement and liberation (80-82) is a good example of how Hollywood cutting and camera place- ment can be invested with symbolic traces of the author.

7. See, for instance, Mark Nash, "Vampyrand the Fantastic," Screen 17, no. 3 (Autumn, 1976): 29-67; and Paul Willemen, "The Fugitive Subject," in Raoul Walsh, ed. Phil Hardy (London: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1974), 63-89.

8. Norman Holland, "The Puzzling Movies: Three Analyses and a Guess at Their Appeal," Journal of Social Issues20, no. 1 (January 1964): 71-96.

9. See Steve Neal, "New Hollywood Cinema," Screen 17, no. 2 [Summer 1976): 117-33; and Paul Willemen, "Notes onsubjectivity: OnReading Edward Branigan's 'Subjectivity Under Siege,"' Screen 19, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 59-64. See also Robin Wood, "Smart-Ass and Cutie Pie: Notes Toward a n Evaluation of Altman," Movie, no. 21 (Autumn 1975): 1-17.

10. See David Bordwell, he Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

11. Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Film History: A n Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003). On art-cinema traditions, see chs. 4-6, 8, 16-20, 23, 25-26, and 28.

12. Steve Neale made a n early contribution to this line of thinking with "Art Cinema as Insti- tution," Screen 22, no. 1 (1981): 11-39. For an overview of state support of the European cinema, see Anne Jackel, European Film Industries (London: British Film Institute, 2003).

13. See Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company that Changed the Film Industry (Madison: University ofWisconsinPress, 1987), chs. 7 and9; andPeter Lev, The Euro-American Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993).

14. VincaWiedemann, quoted in Jacob Wendt Jensen, "Northern Lights," Screen International, May 5,2006,16.

15. See Film Festival Todaymagazine and its website, http://www.filmfestivaltoday.com. 16. On film festivals' role in international film culture, see Thompson andBordwel1, Film History,

716-18. A more extensive account is provided in Thomas Elsaesser, "Film Festival Net- works: The New Topographies of Cinema inEurope," i n his European Cinema: Face to Face W i t h Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005),82-107.

17. The Tehran-based magazine Film International has kept track of festival entries and awards. See for example the charts in Mohammad Atebbai, "Iranian Films and the International Scene in 1997," Film International, no. 19 (1998): 17-20; and Mohammad Atebbai, "Iranian Films in the International Scene in 1998," Film International, no. 23 (1999): 10-14.

18. See my PlanetHongKong: Popular Cinemaand theArtofEntertainment(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 87-89.

19. For a thorough account of Wong's debts to prestigious literature and film, see StephenTeo, Wong Kar-wai (London: British Film Institute, 2005). I discuss Wong's experimental impulses in my Planet Hong Kong, 266-89.

20. On Hou's context and development, see Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), chs. 1, 2, and 4. Hou's stylistics and industrial context are considered i n chapter 5 of my Figures Traced i n Light (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

21. Quoted in StigBjorkman, "Preface," inLars von Trier, Breakingthe Waves (Condon: Faber and Faber, 1996), 8. For detailed discussions of Dogme and von Trier, see Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie, eds., Purity and Provocation: Dogme 95 (London: British Film Institute, 2003); and Mette Hjort, Small Nation, Global Cinema: The New Danish Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). I discuss modern Danish film as a n accessible art cin- emainmy "AStrong Sense of Narrative Desire:ADecade of Danish Film," Film (Copenhagen), no. 34 (Spring2004): 24-27, http://www.dfi.dk.

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22. I discuss Hartley's adaptation of some European staging principles in "Up Close and Im- personal: Hal Hartley and the Persistence of Tradition" (June 2005), http://www.l6-9 .dk/2005-06lsidell-inenlish.htm, or by a link from my website http:llwww.davidbordwell .net. Itwas first published as "Nah dran und unpersonlich: Hal Hartley und die Beharrlich- keit der Tradition," in Die Spur durch den Spiegel: Der Film i n der Kultur der Moderne, ed. Malte Hagener, Johann Schmidt, and Michael Wedel (Berlin: BertzVerlag, 2004),410-21.

23. See Geoff King, American Independent Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). See also David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 19851, 372-77; and J. J. Murphy, Me and You and Memento and Fargo (New York: Continuum, 2007).

24. See Andrds BBlint KovBcs' comprehensive study, Modern European Art Cinema From the 1950s to the 1970s, Cinema and Modernity Series (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). See also John Orr, Cinema and Modernity (London: Polity, 1994).

25. On the planimetric image, see my O n the History of Film Style, 261-64; my Figures Traced i n Light, 167-68, 173-76, 232-33; and my essay "Modelle der Rauminszenierung im zeitgenossishen europaischen Kino" in Zeit, Schnitt, Raum, ed. Andreas Rost (Munich: Verlag der Autoren, 1997),17-42.

26. See David Bordwell, Narration i n theFictionRlm (Madison: University o f Wisconsin Press, 1985), 213-28.

TERESA DE LAURETIS . . . , e . . . m . . . * . . . . . , . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . , . . . . . , . . . . . . . . . .....................

Desire in Narrative FROM Alice Doesn't

Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Teresa de Lauretis (b. 1938) made an indelible contribution t o con- temporary film theory with Alice Doesn't (1984)~ the book from which this selection is drawn, and her subsequent Technologies of Gender (1987). Born and educated in Italy, de Lauretis came to cinema studies through literature and semiotics, and her inquiries into avant-garde practice, narrative film, and poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory are always informed by her feminist approach. Based for a number of years at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaulcee, de Lauretis participated in a series o f crucial cinema conferences there in the 1970s~ one of which resulted in the influential publication The Cinematic Apparatus (1980), co-edited by de Lauretis and Stephen Heath. In the iggos, de Lauretis emerged as an important figure in lesbian and queer theory, and her most recent books are sustained engagements with psychoanalytic theory.

In her work, de Lauretis carefully distinguishes between "Woman" and "women": the first is the myth or representation constructed through literary, visual, and other cultural practices; the second is the female-gendered person, the "social subject" who may internalize the myth and struggle with it, but whose practices, habits, and desires