film reflection

Film Theory and Criticism

OBJECTIVES

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

n explain the nature of film theory and the types

of questions it investigates

u describe the characteristics, strengths, and liniitations of realist models

describe the characteristics, strengths, and

limitations of auteurist models

z describe the characteristics, strengths, and

limitations of psychoanalytic models

describe the characteristics, strengths, and

limitations of ideological models

410

a deqcribe the characteristics, strengths, and of feminist tnoclels

describe the characteristics, strengths, ancl linutauons of cognitive models

select the Inost appropriate theoretical moclel for the particular type of questions that need answers

understand that multiple theoretical perspectives are required because the cinema is multidimensional

Realist Models 411

[ilm theory and criticism are closely related to one another. Criticism aims to evaluate theof a film or set of films and explore thematic content. A critic evaluates the qualityof a filmmaker's work. How are the shots designed and composed? How effective is the di-rection of actors, and what contribution does performance make to the whole? How is thestory told? Is the film's thematic content supported by the movie's structural design? Thecritic might incorporate one or more elements of theory into the evaluation and thereby produce an auteurist interpretation or an ideological interpretation.

Criticism seeks to arrive at an aesthetic understanding of the expressive designs and achievements of one or more films and to produce novel and interesting interpretations of them. Criticism describes relevant features of a film and interprets these and seeks to persuade the reader that the interpretation is sound.

Theory is not as concerned with evaluating aesthetic achievements. Theory deals with broader questions. Theory is a systematic attempt to think about the nature of cinema: What it is as a medium, how it works, how it embodies meaning for viewers, and what kind of nneanings it embodies.

Six models of film theory have been especially important to critics and scholars. These are the realist, auteurist, psychoanalytic, ideological, feminist, and cognitive models of film theory. Each model is especially good at dealing with some aspects of film style and the view- er's experience while being limited in its ability to deal with other aspects. As a result, each model constructs a somewhat different portrait of the medium from the others.

REALIST MODELS This textbook has emphasized that the cinema has a double capacity. It both re- cords and transforms the people, objects, and situations before the camera lens. Filmmakers use cinema as a recording medium to make pictures of the events, people, and situations in front of the camera, but they can also use the complex tools of their craft to manipulate the visual and•acoustical design of their films. This tension within cinema between its recording functions and the power it gives filmmakers to stylize and transform reality poses a challenge for film theory when it attempts to locate a basis for realism and for realistic film styles. On which at- tributes of cinema should a theory of realism depend?

Theories of realism in the cinema look for points of correspondence between film images and the social, psychological, and physical realities before the camera. Typically, realist film theory restricts a filmmaker's manipulations of audiovisual de- sign in order to honor and respect the integrity of the events and situations before the camera. Realist theory often implies that there is a threshold beyond which stylistic manipulation begins to falsify or distort the truths that the realist filmmaker pursues. Italian neorealists, for example, aimed to define such a threshold by holding a film- maker to the creation of relatively simple stories and the use of nonprofessional actors and real locations, the better to honestly record the social realities of postwar Italy.

Elements of Realist Theory: Bazin Questions about the nature of social or psychological reality, where it properly lies, and how the cinema relates to it are extremely difficult problems. French theorist Andre Bazin offered an ingenious and famous solution. Composed in the 1940s and 1950s, his essays on cinema exerted an enormous influence on the French film critics writing for the journal Cahiers du Cinema, who would themselves later become film

412 CHAPTER 1 1 Film Theory and Criticism

case study OPEN WATER

Theories and concepts of realism often will dictate

specific filmmaking practices. A theorist or filmmaker

aiming for realism will wish to minimize the artificiality

of the situations being filmed. Filmmaker Chris Kentis

felt that everything he saw in films today seemed computer-generated and looked correspondingly fake.

He wanted to go as far in the direction of realism as he

could in filming this story about two divers stranded in

shark-infested waters when their tour boat returns to shore without them.

The film was shot like a documentary to maximize the sense of realism. Kentis used a cast of relatively

unknown actors, avoiding stars because their presence

would diminish the sense of authenticity he wished to

create. He then put the actors playing the two divers

into the ocean and surrounded them with real sharks,

throwing chum (bloody fish parts) into the water to

attract the predators. As his cameras filmed them, the

real sharks swam around the actors, evoking very real

fear responses from the performers.

Kentis was a skilled diver, had worked with sharks

before, and felt secure that he could film this action

safely. Nevertheless, he hired a professional shark

OPEN WATER (Lions Gate, 2003)

Real actors in a real ocean surrounded by real predatory sharks—filmmaker Chris Kentis wanted to get as far from the fakery of computer- generated images as possible. Not surprisingly, the fear responses called for in the story came natu- rally to the actors. Frame enlargement.

wrangler to handle the creatures, and the actors wore

chain mail on their bodies below the water line and

out of sight to the camera. But still, the actors had to

be willing to get into the water with gray reef sharks—

Which have attacked people before and swim with

them while the sharks fed on chum.

Kentis kept his camera above the water because

he knew this perspective—not seeing the predators

below—would be more frightening. The viewer sees

what the characters nervously see—the shark fins

circling around them. The movements were real,

not like the smoothly gliding fins that movies have

shown traditionally and which are not typical of

sharks. Actual fins look, in Kentis' words, like "rat tails

flopping all over."

The realism of Open Water (2003), then, was a

matter of making the filming conditions as much like

the story situation as possible. Kentis' approach was

based on a belief in photographic realism—that mak-

ing the situation in front of the camera real would

enhance the perceived danger in the story and would

feel very different to the viewer than what computer-

generated effects might accomplish. a

c

Realist Models 413

directors (see the section on the French New Wave in Chapter 7). Bazin based histheory on an ethical assumption about the nature of reality, and he suggested specificelements of film structure as the ones best suited for a realist style. ANLNTS OF BAZIN'S RFALISM Realistic film styles for Bazin were those that re-spected and reproduced the viewer's experience of reality. As people move about inthe world, they experience visual and physical space as being whole and continuous,rather than chopped up in the manner established by editing in cinema. Bazin believedthat reproducing the experience of spatial wholeness should be a key objective for a

realist design. He felt that each person's perspective on the world was, to a significant degree,uniquely his or her own and differed from the perspective of others. In this regard,reality possessed an ambiguous quality. Different people viewing the same scene orsituation would tend to extract differing interpretations of it. Bazin believed thatfilmmakers should develop a style that respected these ambiguities and that did not

unfairly coerce or manipulate viewers into sharing a single, mass emotional response to the scene or film. He believed that filmmakers should employ techniques that honor and enhance the ambiguities of reality and give viewers room to develop their own interpretations and responses. These conditions would form the basis of a real- ist style.

Bazin also argued that the special photographic nature of cinema pointed the medium in a realist direction. Photographs are indexical signs, that is, they are physically connected to what they represent; they bear the trace of the object or things they depict. A photograph of one's mother, for example, is imprinted by the reflected light that the camera captured from her presence in front of it. The pho- tographic image testifies to her presence before the camera. It provides evidence of her reality.

Many theorists of photography and of cinema have stressed this aspect of the photographic image. As an indexical sign, it points to, is physically connected with, the existence of that for which it furnishes an image. According to this view, as a pho- tographic medium, cinema is naturally biased toward realism.

BASIS FOR BAZIN'S REALISM Bazin suggested that particular elements of film structure were more or less suited to representing the experience of spatial wholeness and the ambiguities of reality and giving spectators freedom of response. Bazin felt that the techniques best suited for realism were deep-focus cinematography ( where a great distance separates sharply focused foreground and background ob-

j ects) and the long take (shots of long duration) in a style that minimizes the impor- tance of editing.

S hots employing deep focus can create multiple areas of interest and activity withi n the frame, ranging in crisp focus from foreground to background. As a re- stilt, viewers have more to study in a deep-focus shot than in a more conventional shot that is organized around one main area of interest. For Bazin, such shots are more a mbiguous than shots composed using a narrow plane of focus because they afford viewers multiple ways of viewing and responding to the material in the frame • Used in conjunction with deep focus, long takes enhance this visual am- biguity by extending the deep-focus compositions in time. For Bazin, deep focus "brings the spectator into a relation with the image closer to that which he enjoys with re ality. Therefore, it is correct to say that independently of the contents of the

414 CHAPTER 11 Film Theory and Criticism

PSYCHO (PARAMOUNT PICTURES, 1960)

Mass-emotion films, such as Psycho, fail Bazin's test of a realist film by provoking all spectators to share a uniform emotional response (fright, in the case of Psycho). Frame enlargement.

image, its structure is more realistic." By contrast, for Bazin "montage by its very

nature rules out ambiguity of expression."

By minimizing editing, deep focus and the long take respect the wholeness and

richness of space and reality. By contrast, rnontage fractures and divides this whole-

ness. For Bazin, therefore, it was incompatible with a realist style. Bazin criticized

filmmakers who used montage to control the audience, manipulate their responses,

and elicit mass emotional reactions. Slontage-oriented directors who would fail

Bazin's ethical basis for a realist aesthetic include such masters as Alfred Hitchcock

and Sergei Eisenstein.

Using very brief shots edited at a frenzied pace, the shower sequence from

Psycho achieved Hitchcock's goal of making the audience share a single, uniform

response—scream with fright. Hitchcock said about Psycho that he wasn't interested

in the actors or their performances or even the story, but only in using the elements

of pure cinema, primarily editing, to make the audience experience a mass emotion.

A similar strategy operates in Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975), where editing, specifi-

cally cross-cutting, creates considerable suspense and terror about the shark's attacks.

Like Psycho, Jaws is a mass-emotion film in which the filmmaker uses technique

with brilliance and sophistication to ensure that all members of the viewing audience

experience the same intense reactions.

This uniformity of response is precisely what Bazin wished to avoid. Montage editing has an inherit tendency to manipulate the viewer's response, and this placed it outside the ethical basis of his film realism.

BAZINIAN FILMMAKERS Bazin praised the work of directors who employed deep-focus compositions and the long take. He greatly esteemed French director Jean Renoir (The Grand Illusion, 1937; The Rules of the Game, 1939) for his use of deep-focus cinematography and for his tendency to employ camera movement rather than mon- tage. The Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game contain a series of remarkably fluid camera moves and mobile framings. Rather than cutting to a new camera setup,

Realist Models 415

THE RULES OF THE GAME (NEF, 1939) Several areas of action ongoing simultaneously in a deep focus shot. Director lean Renoir relied on the moving camera to choreograph a scene's action and to keep the shots running, enabling actors to perform for longer intervals on screen. His compositions often used extended depth of field, emphasizing the spatial wholeness of a scene as well as

the psychological and emotional dynamics among the characters. Bazin praised his work

as realistic. Renoir, interestingly, said about this film that he wanted to leave naturalism

far behind and to work in the classical style of Moliere and the Commedia del Arte. He

described the film as the portrait of a society that is rotten to the core. Condemned by

French society upon its release, The Rules of the Game is today recognized as one of

cinema's greatest films. Frame enlargement.

Renoir kept his camera and the actors in nearly constant motion, extending the length

Of his shots past the point at which other directors would cut and using deep focus to

create multiple areas of activity within the frame. The resulting richness of his compo-

sitions was the essence of Bazinian realism.

Renoir, too, believed that his technique was realistic because it captured what

he felt was an essential truth of human life, namely, that people are interconnected

rather than being solitary individuals. Renoir believed that close-ups tend to convey

the idea that individuals are isolated from one another.

Bazin also admired U.S. director Orson Welles. In Citizen Kane

(1941), Welles

film ed entire scenes in one or two lengthy shots. In the scene where Kane's

parents

mak e arrangements with a banker to raise him and to act as young Charlie

Kane's

gua rdian, Welles composed the scene in two shots. The action begins

with a long

shot sh owing young Charlie playing in the snow, and the

camera pulls inside the

416 CHAPTER 11 Film Theory and Criticism

.1

CITIZEN KANE (RKO, 1941)

Deep focus in Citizen Kane. Young Charles Kane plays outside while his parents sign away control of his future to a banker. Note the crisp focus in foreground, midground, and background. Frame enlargement.

window of young Charlie's home to reveal his parents and the banker. The camera

tracks in front of his mother as she crosses from the window to a table to sign the

papers, and Welles records this scene in an extraordinary deep-focus shot. In the

second shot of the scene, the camera is outdoors and tracks across the porch of the

cabin to young Charlie in the snow, where the adults join him and announce

his fate. The two extended takes that compose this scene, running nearly four minutes,

represent a clear stylistic alternative to the standard rules of continuity editing, which

would mandate using first a master shot and then inserts matching action to the

master. But instead of editing from shot to shot, Welles uses camera and character

movement to change the compositions, effectively editing within the shot. As Bazin

pointed out with respect to Welles's films, "dramatic effects for which we had for-

merly relied on montage were created out of the movements of the actors within a

fixed framework. "

The supreme example of a filmmaker who employs deep focus, rather than mon-

tage, to create rich compositions with multiple areas of interest is the French director Jacques Tati. In films like Playtime (1967), editing plays virtually no creative role at all. This comic film about the encounters of a bumbling Frenchman with a bewilder- ing modern world of steel skyscrapers and plastic commodities is played out entirely in lengthy shots composed in deep focus where an amazing number of things are hap- pening simultaneously within the frame.

Summary Bazin's theory of realism has important strengths. It connects film style with a view- er's physical and perceptual experience of the world and locates a realist style on the basis of that connection. It also stresses the ethical contract that exists between a film- maker and an audience, and it challenges filmmakers and viewers to think about the

Realist Models 417

cinema'S potential for unfairly manipulating its audiences. Bazin cited ample evidencethroughOUt film history to support his argument that the ethically motivated film-maker, seeking to respect the viewer's experience of reality, should avoid a style that is overtly manipulative and based in 111011tage,

If Bazin was right that individuals' subjective experiences of reality are varied andthat a basis for realist style lies in employing cinematic tools that respect this variety,then it follows that filmmakers who use cinema to manipulate audiences into holding socially objectionable reactions are engaging in an unfair or unethical exploitation oftheir viewers. Although Bazin wrote about film beginning in the 1940s until his deathin 1958, his work has important implications in this respect for contemporary fihn, which tends to use fast cutting to manipulate viewer responses and to elicit uniform reactions from viewers. For a Bazinian realist, such films fail to respect the integrity and uniqueness of each viewer's perception of the world. Bazin's theory of realism has much to say about the ethical contract that obtains between filmmakers and viewers and about the extraordinary potential for coercing emotions that filmmakers have at their command.

At the same time, Bazin's realist aesthetic tends to exist as a potential, as an ideal that is never fully realized in any given film. Some of the filmmakers Bazin cites as practitioners of deep focus or the long take also employ montage. Citizen Kane in- dudes a number of celebrated sequence shots composed in deep focus, but it also em- ploys some striking montages.

Very few films do without the expressive power of editing. In Rope (1948), Alfred Hitchcock tried to dispense with editing. Most of the shots in Rope run a full ten minutes. Hitchcock only cut when the camera ran out of film, and even then he went to great pains to disguise the cut by having it occur at moments when a character or some other obstruction blocks the camera's view. Hitchcock, however, found the practice unsatisfying, and he discontinued the experiment after Rope, rec- ognizing that without editing, he had very little ability to create dramatic and psy- chological rhythm and tempo. Few films representing a pure application of Bazinian principles exist.

Another limitation in the theory is its tendency to minimize the degree to which even deep-focus—long-take cinematography can shape the viewer's perceptions. In Jacques Tati's Playtime, when Tati needs viewers to look at a particular area of the frame, he uses a sudden loud noise, a rapid movement, or a bright color to draw at- tention there. Even within the long-take—deep-focus approach, filmmakers can still guide and influence viewer perceptions.

Although it has been extremely influential, Bazin's approach is not the only basis for a theory of film realism. In Chapter 8 we examined documentary realism, which offers filmmakers a method for documenting social conditions and events by minimiz- ing the use of fictionalizing techniques.

Another approach to realism emphasizes the nature of the perceptual information found in cinema and its correspondence with the perceptual information people use in everyday life. This approach may be called perceptual realism because it locates a source of realism in cinema at the perceptual level. Film technique builds on a view- er's ordinary perceptual habits and ways of processing the visual and auditory world. Through lighting, sound design, and camera placement, filmmakers build sources of three-dimensional information into their images and can selectively emphasize these sources. As a result, film images look three-dimensional rather than as they truly are, a two-dimensional projection on a flat surface.

418 CHAPTER 1 1 Film Theory and Criticism

Wide-angle lenses, for example, emphasize depth cues. Near objects will appear

larger in size than distant objects; this is an everyday perceptual cue that the eye and

brain use to infer information about depth and distance. Wide-angle lenses exaggerate

these size disparities, making near objects somewhat larger than they are and distant

objects somewhat smaller. Thus wide-angle lenses convey this kind of depth informa-

tion with special vividness (and, as a result, are the basis for the deep-focus realism

of Bazinian theory), in contrast to telephoto lenses, which tend to reduce these differ-

ences by magnifying the size of everything in the frame. The appearance of depth and

distance in the film image is thus a realistic perception because it uses the same infor-

mation that is found in the three-dimensional world. (El hough Bazin did not write in

terms of perceptual science, its findings furnish a strong foundation to his theory.)

Realist theory is a little different from the other models examined in this chapter

because a critic might do an auteurist, feminist, ideological, psychoanalytic, or cogni-

tive interpretation of a film but would be less likely to do a "realist" interpretation

of a film. If, then, realist theory does not provide a roadmap or procedural guide to

interpreting films in the ways that the other models do, it nevertheless deals with es-

sential issues that a theoretical understanding of cinema must confront. These include

the nature of cinema's connection with the world and how recording technologies like

cameras and microphones "capture" that world.

Because cinema largely has been a photographic medium for most of its history,

concepts of realism have been tied to its photographic nature. As cinema shifts into

digital modes, theorists have asked whether these undermine the indexical nature

of photographically-derived images. Because a digital image can be endlessly trans-

formed, and often in imperceptible ways, does that make digital images less real, and

does it mean that realism is a term that cannot be applied to digital images?

While some theorists have answered "yes" to these questions, digital cameras are

recording instruments just as analog cameras have been. The 9/11 documentaries ex-

amined in Chapter 9 are composed largely of digital images. Questions about realism

do not lose their relevance in the digital era—they become more important. People

care deeply to know the truth value of the images they encounter. In this respect, the

problems of realism in cinema that theory investigates are always with us.

AUTEURIST MODELS Auteurist film theory studies film authors. Approaching cinema as an art presupposes

the existence of one or more authors. Movies are created by groups—the team of pro-

duction personnel whose coordinated efforts bring a film to completion—but one or

more people have creative control over the team of artists assembled for a production. Auteurist theory looks for these authors and studies film as a medium of personal expression in which artists leave a recognizable stylistic signature on their work. The prime artist in cinema is generally taken to be the director. The term auteur derives from the French word meaning "author," and this model of theory and criticism has become the most commonly employed and most deeply ingrained method of thinking about film. When approaching film as a creative medium, the director emerges as the central figure of creative authority.

The French origins of auteur theory occurred in the 1950s when the critics for Cahiers du Cinema began to write director-centered film criticism and sug- gested that even in the Hollywood system a handful of auteurs produced great

Auteurist Models 419

films. This was a controversial assertion because in the 1930s and 1940s, duringthe high period Of the Hollywood system, clirectors often were hired functionarieswho filmed the script as econonlically and quickly as possible and who answeredto the film's producer. Nevertheless, the auteur critics suggested that John Ford,Alfred I-litchcock, and Others were true auteurs by virtue of having a recognizable and consistent artistic style from film to film. By contrast film directors today enjoy more prestige and public recognition as artists. In fact, many directors today achieve superstar status, and even directors who have made only one or two films are allowed to place their name above the film title and claim possessive credit, as in "A Film By..

Auteurist criticism developed among the French New Wave critics and then was imported to the United States in the 1960s. Today, director studies are among the most common forms of film criticism. They trace the style of key directors regarded as important artists and as the major creative influence shaping the materials and de- sign of their films. Such directors include Akira Kurosawa in Japan, Ingmar Bergman in Sweden, Federico Fellini in Italy, and in the United States, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and many others.

Elements of Auteurism An auteurist critic looks for consistency of theme and design throughout a director's films. In practice, this means that the critic looks at three correlated elements: cin- ematic techniques, stories, and themes.

Case study ALFRED HITCHCOCK

In the case of Alfred Hitchcock, a director frequently

studied from an auteur perspective, these consistent

and recurring elements include stories about characters

falsely accused of crimes (the "wrong man" theme,

found in such films as The 39 Steps, The Wrong Man,

Strangers on a Train, and North by Northwest) and

visual elements such as cross-tracking shots, the sub-

jective camera, high-angle shots, mirror imagery, and

long stretches of film without dialogue but with an

intensively visual design that Hitchcock called "pure

cinema."

In addition, the critic developing an auteur study of

Hitchcock might seek correlations between Hitchcock's

upbringing and private life and the subjects and tech-

niques of his films. An auteur critic might draw a con-

nection between Hitchcock's intense relationship with his mother and the frequently recurring mother figures in the films or between Hitchcock's Catholic upbringing and attendance at a Jesuit school and the narratives of

guilt, sin, transgression, and crime so common in his films. Hitchcock's fascination with crime, his attendance of murder trials at England's Old Bailey Court, his visits to the Black Museum of Scotland Yard, his attraction to the suspense writer Edgar Allen Poe, and his fascina- tion with celebrity killers such as England's famed John Christie, who buried the bodies of his victims under the floorboards of his house, would seem to have an obvi-

ous bearing on the films.

The auteur critic also could draw on anecdotes told by Hitchcock as a standard part of interviews,

such as the imprisonment story about the time his fa-

ther allegedly took him to a police station where

Hitchcock was locked in a cell and then subsequently

released with a warning by the police that "this is

what we do to naughty boys." By telling such anec-

dotes, Hitchcock encouraged the search for connec-

tions between his personal life and his films. He said,

"I was terrified of the police, of the Jesuit fathers, of

(continued)

420 CHAPTER 11 Film Theory and Criticism

STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (WARNER BROS., 1951) In Hitchcock's moral univcrsc, everyone is guilty of something, if not by deed then by thought. Accordingly, many of his films focus on a "wrong man" theme, with a character falsely implicated in a crime he did not commit. Guy (Farley Granger) is unwill- ingly drawn into a bizarre plot to murder his wife, and though he does not commit the deed and even protests against it, he has harbored murderous thoughts about her. To suggest this moral guilt, Hitchcock frames him be- hind bars, with his face half in shadow. Frame enlargement.

PSYCHO (PARAMOUNT PICTURES, 1960) Hitchcock's lifelong fascination

with crime certainly influenced his screen work. He studied the careers of England's famous mur- derers and helped create some of

the screen's most famous villains.

Norman Bates (Tony Perkins) in

Psycho remains one of cinema's

most chilling monsters. Frame enlargement.

physical punishment, of a lot of things. This is the

root of my work." To the extent that the auteur critic can find consis-

tent themes, stories, and audio-visual designs running

through the body of a director's films, and can even tie these elements to the filmmaker's private life, the critic can argue that such a director is a true auteur whose films embody a personal and artistic vision.

Auteurist Models 421

Summary Auteur criticism has helped elevate cinema to the level of art in the eyes of critics, film-makers, and the general public. By stressing the uniformity and integrity of a director'sartistic vision, the auteur critic argues in favor of a unified body of work. By doing so,the critic implies that film is more than just a business, a product manufactured forprofit, or an ephemeral and diverting entertainment. By stressing film as an art, auteurcriticism undeniably bolsters the power of directors relative to producers and othermembers of the production crew and has helped to legitimize the film medium.Moreover, in many cases, the director is the catalyst of a production, the keycrew member who synthesizes, directs, and helps guide the contributions of otherpersonnel. Production designers and cinematographers emphasize the need to subordi-nate their artistic vision and interests to the desires of the director in an effort to helpthe director get the results he or she wants. With many directors, therefore, it is legiti-

mate to argue in favor of some degree of auteurism. If one looks at enough films of any director, however, visual and narrative patterns

probably will begin to emerge, but not all of these are meaningful, nor should they neces- sarily be attributed to the director. Filmmakers sometimes execute an effect simply because they like the way it looks or even, more mundanely, because they had to shoot or edit a scene a certain way owing to uncooperative weather, the scheduling of in-demand actors, or simply running out of money. Many factors that influence the look of a finished film are things over which filmmakers have little or no control. Japanese director Akira Kurosawa was asked about his framing of a scene in Ran (1985), a film about samurai warfare in sixteenth-century Japan. Kurosawa's response says much about the realities of filmmaking. He replied that he had to shoot from the angle he used: Any other angle would reveal the Sony factory and airport nearby, incompatible with the film's period setting.

One problem with a strict auteur approach is that film production is collab- orative. It is often impossible to assign responsibility for an effect to a particular individual such as the director, even when the filmmaker in question is one with a readily recognizable style, such as Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock collaborated with the screenwriters on most of his films but mainly to guide the design of the narra- tive and ensure that it afforded him opportunities to create interesting visual effects. Constructing a narrative from scratch and building it into an elegant finished struc- ture was something Hitchcock did not do on his own, in the manner of a filmmaker such as Woody Allen. He needed the services of accomplished screenwriters. The elegant charm and light spirit of Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), and The Trouble With Harry (1956) have an important point of origin in the scripts John Michael Hayes furnished for these films. Much of Hitchcock's other work lacks the unique spirit of his collaborations with HafeS,'and this suggests that Hayes played a considerable role in shaping the style of these pictures.

Some of Hitchcock's finest films, such as Notorious (1946), about U.S. agents infiltrating a nest of Nazi spies in Brazil, were shaped by decisive creative interven- ti0n from the producer. In the case of Notorious, producer David O. Selznick insisted again and again that the scripts from Hitchcock and his writers were not good enough and needed merciless revision. As was his custom, Selznick even offered specific sug- gestions for changing the characters and story situations. Only when the revisions satisfied Selznick was Hitchcock allowed to begin filming.

The auteur critic detects consistent patterns across the body of a director's films and hopes that those things attributed to the director are, indeed, justified. In most

422 CHAPTER 11 Film Theory and Criticism

cases, though, the critic attributes things on faith, without documentation in the form

of interviews or written records about who on the crew did what. Many auteur critics

respond to this problem by claiming that, by "Hitchcock," they mean not the private

individual but rather the body of films with their unified themes and visual designs.

Accordingly, "Hitchcock" becomes a construction required by theory, referring to the

films and not to the man. This stratagem is a way of dealing with the objection that

a critic can never really know who is responsible for what in a film, and it corrects

some, but not all, of the reasons for making tile objection.

It is also important to note that many fine directors do not impose a consistent

stylistic signature across a body of films. Their talent lies in being able to film scripts

in consistently intelligent, interesting, and diverse ways. Hollywood director Michael

Curtiz, for example, has never been regarded as an auteur. And yet, if one looks at

the films he directed, an astonishing body of great filmmaking is there. These include

classic swashbuckling adventures starring Errol Flynn (Captain Blood, 1935; The

Charge of the Light Brigade, 1936; The Sea Hawk, 1940) and major films show-

casing Hollywood's biggest stars, such as James Cagney (Angels With Dirty Faces,

1938; Yankee Doodle Dandy, 1942), Humphrey Bogart (Passage to Marseille, 1944;

Casablanca, 1942), Joan Crawford (Mildred Pierce, 1945), and John Garfield (Four

Daughters, 1938; The Breaking Point, 1950). Curtiz was comfortable working in

genres from the Western (Virginia City, 1940) to the musical (White Christmas, 1954).

Norman Jewison (In the Heat of the Night, 1967; Moonstruck, 1987) and

Sidney Pollack (Tootsie, 1982; Out of Africa, 1985) also were fine filmmakers who

fall outside of the auteur framework. They directed many films that are diverse

BROKEN EMBRACES (UPI, 2009)

Distinctive filmmakers may establish careers as international auteurs, recognized in global

film culture as important artists. Pedro Almodovar is a prominent, contemporary Spanish

director whose films are noted for their sexually flamboyant content, highly saturated

colors, intensive melodrama, and focus on strong women. He established a long-term,

collaborative relationship with actress Penelope Cruz. In Broken Embraces, her fourth

film with Almodovar, she plays an aspiring actress involved with a manipulative, jealous

patron. The collaborative partnership between Almodovar and Cruz recalls other great

director—actor pairings, including Michael Curtiz and Bette Davis and Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann. An auteur director often rises to distinction based on close relationships with key collaborators, including cinematographers and scriptwriters as well as actors. Frame enlargement.

Psychoanalytic Models 423

and stylistically varied, unified only by the fact that the work is intelligent, well-designed and sharply focused. The auteur perspective has had difficulty comingto terms with such filmmakers, who by any definition are great directors but whosubordinated their own self-branding to the needs of the script and varied their sig-natures accordingly. While, then, an auteur approach is essential to understanding cinematic artistry,it highlights directors who have a recognizable signature across a body of films andtends to overlook other fine directors who don't meet this criterion.

PSYCHOANALYTIC MODELS Drawing primarily from the writings of Freud and French psychoanalyst JacquesIncan, psychoanalytic film theory emphasizes film's elicitation of unconscious sourcesof pleasure and desire. For psychoanalytic critics, the film medium activates deep- rooted psychological and nonrational desires and drives.

Elements of Psychoanalytic Models In his landmark book The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Freud wrote that dreams provided access to the workings of the unconscious mind. He argued that our conscious thoughts and feelings represented only a small portion of our mental life and that the most significant and strongest motivations underlying our behavior are unconscious. For Freud, the mind was not a unified whole but was, instead, fractured into relatively separate components. Thoughts, feelings, and ideas we are aware of belong to the ego; those that were unconscious belonged to the id, and many of these were formed by repression, the blocking from consciousness of impulses and desires that are socially prohibited but which nonetheless remain active.

A famous example that he wrote about was castration anxiety, suffered by a male child when he realizes that his mother lacks a penis. The resulting fear of sexual difference—rooted in the realization that women are physiologically different beings from men—in Freud's view causes the male child tremendous anxiety, which is repressed and may resurface in the form of fetishes and other obsessive behaviors.

Psychoanalysis was Freud's method for uncovering the impulses of the unconscious mind, and the interpretation of dreams was a key component of psychoanalytic technique. Dream imagery when properly interpreted, Freud believed, reveals the repressed contents of an individual's unconscious. What a person remem- bers of a dream when awake is its manifest, or surface level, content. Its true content is latent and accessible only to psychoanalysis.

Dreams work according to mechanisms of condensation and displacement. Psychic energy and impulses become condensed into one or more resonant dream im- ages. Often these images are displacements, substitute objects that take the place of the more fundamental and forbidden desire. Dreaming is an act of secondary revision; it imposes a narrative coherence upon the raw stream of imagery generated by the Unconscious. The object of psychoanalytic dream interpretation is to connect the nar- rative in the dream to its underlying latent content.

Freud's model of the mind and of dream analysis has exerted a strong influence upon filmmakers as well as film critics and scholars. Movies have been likened to dreams, and the act of watching a movie has been compared with a state of dreaming- while-awake.

424 CHAPTER 11 Film Theory and Criticism

Numerous films throughout cinema history have tried to reproduce the weird

logic and imagery of dreams or have incorporated dream sequences into the narra-

tives. Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalou (1929) is a surrealist attack

on polite society that works by evoking the irrationality of dreams—a man bicycles

dressed as a nun, two priests drag a pair of pianos into an apartment on top of which

is a bleeding animal carcass, narrative events are contradictory and fail to cohere or to

observe unities of time and place.

Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. (1924) uses the connection of movies to dreams as

a source of comedy. Keaton plays a projectionist at a movie theater who wants to

become a famous detective and win the respect of his girlfriend. He achieves these

things when he falls asleep at the theater and steps into the movie on screen which

functions according to the logic of dreams. The seashore abruptly changes to a win-

try landscape, so that Keaton's dive into the water lands him in a snowbank. The

dreamworld of cinema fulfills the character's deepest desires and fantasies.

The ambiguity of dreams, seeming more real than reality to the sleeper, has en-

abled filmmakers to play with the logical status of dreaming and wakefulness. In Luis

Bunuel's The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1973), characters throughout the

film suddenly awaken in bed and remark that everything a viewer has just seen was a

dream. Dreams within dreams become so numerous that the viewer can no longer tell

what is a dream and what events belong to the waking life.

SHERLOCK, JR. (BUSTER KEATON PRODUCTIONS, 1924)

Longing to be a famous detective, but in reality working as a janitor and projectionist at a movie theater, Buster falls asleep and enters the dream world of a film where his fantasies come true. The connection of movies and dreams has been recognized by filmmakers the world over. Frame enlargement.

Psychoanalytic Models 425

Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010) works in a similar way, placing charactersinside dreams within dreams, taking thenl down into deep layers of the unconsciousmind such that a viewer, watching the filno's final moments, cannot tell whether themain character, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), has returnecl to consciousness or re-mains within a dream. The logical status of all the narrative events in David Lynch'sMulholland Dr. (2001) is suspect, with the story becoming increasingly weird as it

REAR WINDOW (PARAMOUNT, 1 954); VERTIGO (PARAMOUNT, 1958) Greatly influenced by Freud, Hitchcock used film to explore the repressed, unconscious desires of characters. From a psychoanalytic standpoint, Rear Window is a drama about castration anxiety and sublimated potency. In Vertigo, Scotty Ferguson (James Stewart) h as a phobia of falling from high places. This fear is a displacement of his desire for death. Hired to trail a mysterious woman (Kim Novak), he falls in love while voyeuristically watching her. In the shot pictured here, he conceals himself in a back room and gazes at h er while she visits a flower shop. Watching her in secret arouses his desire for her. To Freud, scopophilia was the erotic pleasure of voyeurism, and Hitchcock considered it to be one of the fundamental appeals offered by cinema. Frame enlargements.

426 CHAPTER 11 Film Theory and Criticism

progresses until it seems probable that everything in it is the dream of a character

(Naomi Watts) undergoing a psychotic breakdown. A psychoanalytic interpretation of cinema examines the dream-like qualities of

film narrative and film technique, with particular attention to repressed, unconscious desires and motives on the part of characters in a film and to the ways that cinema may elicit such desires from viewers.

As a director, Hitchcock was very influenced by Freud's work, and many of his films are quite rewarding for Freudian analysis. In Rear Window, Jeffries (James Stewart) is a photographer confined to his apartmcnt with a broken leg. Bored, he takes to spying on his neighbors, watching them through their windows using his camera's long-focus lens. He constructs fantasies and imaginary stories about the lives he sees from a distance in ways that make his situation as a voyeur comparable to the cinema viewer, who also derives pleasure from watching people on screen from the safety of a darkened auditorium.

Jeffries fears Lisa (Grace Kelly), the woman who loves and wants to marry him. He fears her differences as a woman from his preferred ways of living. If he marries her, she'll change his life, and he isn't sure he wants that to happen. Rear Window, then, can be seen in part as a movie about castration (fear of Lisa and her sexual difference, a fear symbolized by Jeffries' broken leg) and displacement. Jeffries dis- places his anxieties onto the pleasures he derives from fantasizing about the substitute worlds of his neighbors' lives. Using his long-focus lens, Jeffries sublimates his lost potency by connecting it to the fantasy world that gives him pleasure. And he accepts Lisa only when she steps into that fantasy world, going across the courtyard to enter one of the apartments where Jeffries can watch her retrieving the clue to a crime.

For Freud, "scopophilia" was the erotic pleasure that a person derived from looking at people or things, and psychoanalytic models of cinema take it as a me- dium that provides scopophilic pleasures to its viewers, offering them voyeuristic opportunities. In a classic essay called "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Laura Mulvey argued that cinema mobilizes a scopophilic drive and that women are presented as objects for the male gaze. Cinema techniques, such as close-ups, can draw the viewer's attention to aspects of the screen spectacle that arouse scopic pleasures. Male directors, for example, may use long, lingering close-ups to exam- ine the glamorous, sexy appearance and costuming of female stars such as Marlene Dietrich or Marilyn Monroe, who embody male erotic desires.

FETISHIZING THE BODY Psychoanalytic critics describe Dietrich's elaborate costuming and ritualistic visual presentation in a series of films she made for director Josef von Sternberg (Morocco, 1930; Shanghai Express, 1932; Blonde Venus, 1932; The Scarlet Empress, 1934; The Devil Is a Woman, 1935) as a kind of visual fetish. With lingering attention, the camera studies the precise outline, design, and appearance of Dietrich as an erotic object. While the Sternberg films enjoy a high critical reputation owing to their exquisite artistic design, many less reputable films display the bodies of their performers in a fetishized fashion, a practice that includes male stars as well as female ones.

Mulvey argued that male characters are not subject to the controlling gaze of the camera or a viewer in ways that are scopophilic, but many films made after the 1970s, when she wrote her essay, seem to do precisely this. The glistening, well-defined muscles of Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger command a great deal of at- tention in their action films. This attention emphasizes their bodies as idealized sexual objects conforming to an exaggerated cultural ideal of male potency and power.

Psychoanalytic Models 427

GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (20TH CENTURY FOX, 1953) Psychoanalytic theory examines the gaze in cinema as a gendered construction. Female stars, such as Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe (pictured here), were constructed by color design, composition, and camera set-ups as objects appealing to the gaze of male view- ers. Male stars in earlier decades were rarely presented in such overtly erotic terms to female viewers. Frame enlargement.

But, significantly, such attention is disavowed and its erotic component is re- pressed, absorbed by violent action and physical combat that the narratives view as appropriately male behavior. The engorged muscles of Stallone and other action he- roes are examples of condensation, a site of erotic energy and attention, energy that is repressed in the films through displacement onto spectacles of violent action.

Films offer spectacles of sex and violence that excite viewers in ways they would

deny in polite society. Viewers of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) eagerly spend time in

the company of serial killer Hannibal Lecter, whereas in real life they would shun such

a person. Unlike real-life violence, bloodshed and killing on screen give many viewers

intense aesthetic pleasure. For psychoanalytic critics, the cinema's ability to excite view-

ers with spectacles of sex and violence illustrates its powerful appeal to an audience's

primitive, nonrational desires. Polite society restricts outward expressions of sexual or aggressive behavior, yet the cinema displays these in extremely arousing ways.

Summary Psychoanalytic criticism emphasizes the complex ways that film arouses an audience's repressed emotions and desires. These desires may not be conscious or fully under-

stood by viewers, yet films can reach deep inside viewers' minds to influence the ways they understand their world, themselves, and their feelings. Sometimes the emotional response of an audience is so extraordinarily intense and concentrated, at such an un- bearable pitch, that a psychoanalytic explanation seems warranted.

428 CHAPTER 11 Film Theory and Criticism

RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART Il (TRI-STAR, 1985) Rambo is tortured by his Vietnamese captors, but first he must be undressed in order to display his body. Sylvester Stallone's engorged, glistening muscles exemplify the Freudian ideas of condensation and displacement. As a symbolic image, they concentrate ideas about the erotic appeal of male bodies coded in terms of physical action and suffering. Action displaces the erotic energy that is otherwise on such obvious display. Frame enlargement.

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (ORION PICTURES, 1991) Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) in The Silence of the Lambs exerts a powerfulfascination for viewers who are repulsed by his monstrousness yet attracted by his witand intelligence. The special power such a character has over viewers may require apsychoanalytic explanation because it seems to contradict a viewer's rational judgmentthat such a person is evil and to be avoided. Frame enlargement.

Psychoanalytic Models 429

i

UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929) Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali aimed to assault the viewer's eye and mind with a catalog of irrational, disturbing, and offensive imagery and to explode narrative with a collection of illogical and disconnected episodes. They intended Un Chien Andalou to be an act of violence committed against the medium of cinema and for its images to appeal to the primitive, unconscious mind of its viewers. To symbolize this assault on mind and vision, in the film's opening moments, director Bunuel pulls out a straight razor, opens a wom- an's eye, and slices. The camera does not look away. Frame enlargement.

As an example, consider the opening of Luis Bufiuel's and Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalou (1928), which features one of the most shocking images in screen history. In the scene, a man (played by Buiuel) stands behind a seated woman. He pulls out a straight razor and opens her left eye. The film then cuts to a long shot Of clouds slicing across a moon, as the audience breathes a sigh of relief, thinking that, as usual, the camera has turned away from something that promises to be too horrifying.

In the next moment, though, the filmmakers show what viewers most dread. The razor slices into an eye that pops and disgorges a blob of gelatinous fluid. This is an Old movie, and violent images have a way of becoming less intense and horrifying Over time. This, though, is not one of those cases. The image has a special, sustained POWer to disturb and nauseate viewers. Contemporary audiences recoil with the same intensity and disgust that viewers felt in 1929.

A Psychoanalytic explanation can help here. As Freud suggested, among all the Parts Of the body that might potentially be wounded, people seem most sensi- tive about their eyes. Freud connected this anxiety to fears of castration. Whatever One might think of such a connection, Freud seemed correct in noting the special

430 Film Theory and Criticism

intensity of the instinctual anxiety over the threat of wounds to the eyes. When

an object or situation is so charged with emotional energy, psychoanalysis looks toward the unconscious for an explanation. The anxieties seem, in some way, to be fundatnentnl and pritnitive cornponents of human identity, and, for psychoana- lytic theory, the unconscious is the most primitive part of the mind. Psychoanalytic theory, then, enables critics to ask about why certain film images seem so charged with ernotional energy and about how, in such mornents, the cinema provokes and

intensifies the reactions of its audience. A psychoanalytic approach must be careful not to overextend itself, to be used

as a Incans of explaining all dimensions of an audience's emotional response to

Il)ovics. Psychoanalysis emphasizes mainly repressed and irrational desires and per- ceptions. On the contrary, though, many aspects of the viewer's response to movies are entirely rational and do not require special explanation with reference to the unconscious mind. Among these are the demands for reference and correspondence with experience that viewers expect from a photographically-based medium like cinema.

IDEOLOGICAL MODELS Critics use ideological film theory to examine the relationship between movies and so- ciety and, specifically, how film represents social and political realities. An ideology is

a set of beliefs about society and the nature of the world, involving assumptions and judgments about the nature of right and wrong, good and evil, justice and injustice, law and social order, and human nature and behavior.

Societies contain multiple ideologies, and these are not always coherent or har- monious. Because of this, all societies are subject to ideological tensions and conflicts. Among conflicting ideologies in U.S. culture are the commitments to individual free- doms, on the one hand, and, on the other, the power of state and local governments to enforce law and maintain public order.

The ongoing controversies over gun control illustrate these conflicting ideolo- gies. Proponents of gun control emphasize the need for government to ensure public safety by getting guns off the street. Opponents emphasize the individual right to own and bear arms. Such conflicts are very difficult to resolve and tend to arouse a great deal of emotion on each side, as the ongoing battles about gun control illustrate. Ideological conflict is a typical social phenomenon arising from the simple fact that not all of the belief systems that circulate through a society are compatible or consis- tent with one another.

Elements of Ideological Models Ideological film critics study the ways film portrays society and gives voice to one or more social ideologies. The ideological critic often starts by describing certain social trends or habits of thought and then demonstrates how these are represented in given bodies of film. Ideological critics, for example, emphasize the way that many I-lollywood Westerns, which portray Native Americans as villains and as obstacles to be removed, support traditional cultural beliefs about manifest destiny, the inalienable right of European settlers to claim the wilderness and divest Native Americans of their land.

Ideological Models 431

Social ideologies exist in films on either first- or second- order levels, that is, they arc either explicit or implicit. Ratnbo: First Blood Part [I (1985), about a super U.S. warrior who returns to Vietnam many years after the war and defeats the Vietnamese in battle, offers U.S. culture a kind of substitute and vicarious sytnbolic victory in a war the nation lost. By virtue of its explicit treatment of social, political, and historical topics, it is an overtly ideological film.

story deals with anxictics about the role of the United States as a world super- power and with lingering questions about its defeat in Southeast Asia. As such, the images and narrative of Rmnbo are ideological in an immediate, explicit, first- order way.

Films that are ideological on a second-order level present social messages and portraits of society that are implicit, indirect, and subtle. Examples of second-order ideological films are Back to the Future (1985) and Field of Dreams (1989), both of which are intimately connected to the mood of the era in which they were produced, especially the nostalgic myth of a return to the past represented by 1980s political culture.

In Back to the Future, the hero, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), travels back in time, and Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) from Field of Dreams mysteriously recre- ates the past in an Iowa cornfield of dreams. Both characters meet their parents from the past, and by doing so, they reclaim their boyhood. An ideological critic would show how these narratives correlate with the political culture of the 1980s, particularly its nostalgic embrace of an ideal past and the folklore of small towns and close-knit communities that underlay the appeal and vision of the Reagan presidency.

Unlike Rambo, where the political ideologies are up-front and out in the open,

Back to the Future and Field of Dreams do not strike one immediately as politi-

cal films. An ideological critic, however, could argue, correctly, that these films are

closely entwined with the political culture of their period. As a result and despite their

overt appeal as entertainment vehicles, they are ideological in a second-order, implicit,

and indirect way.

IDEOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW Just as films may be directly or indirectly ideological,

they also may take up a variety of positions with respect to the ideologies they por-

tray and the views of society developed in their narratives. Although a wide range of

such positions exists, three main categories are the most important. Films can support

established social values, criticize established values, or offer an incoherent, ambigu-

ous, and unresolved presentation of social values. To describe the ideological position

of a film, a critic must specify two things: the constellation of social values within

the film and its attitude toward them, and, second, the social groups to whom those

values belong.

Position One: Ideological Support The first position—support for established social

values—is illustrated by many contemporary war films, which take a very positive and

patriotic stance with respect to America's military forces. Black Hawk Down (2001),

for example, recounts the horrendous fighting in Somalia between a local warlord's

army and U.S. Marines. Consistent with war films since Saving Private Ryan, the

depiction of battlefield violence is graphic and intense. This violence, though, serves

to emphasize the heroism, bravery, and determination of U.S. forces, qualities that the

film stresses.

432 CHAPTER 11 Film Theory and Criticism

CLOSE UP

9/1 1 and Hollywood Film

Imagery of the terrorist attacks on September 1 1 t

2001, captured in photographs and videos by

onlookers, seared the national consciousness. The

imagery included throngs of panicked New Yorkers

fleeing the collapsing towers of the World Trade

Center, the cloud of ash and dust that followed the

collapse, and, before this, the gaping holes in the

buildings, the fires and black smoke, and the bliz-

zard of paper that blew out of the towers' offices.

And in the days to come, crowds gathered around

numerous pictures of missing loved ones that had been posted throughout the city.

In general, Hollywood films stayed away from

direct portraits of 9/1 1 because the event was so

tragic and emotional that few moviegoers wished

to see a dramatization of it on the screen. But

many films that were not about 9/1 1 used the

iconic irnayery of that day to give their stories an

extra resonance. Cloverfield (2008), for example,

depicts a monster destroying Manhattan and uses

jittery, hand-held video cameras to create images

of fleeing crowds that resemble the footage pro-

duced by witnesses on 9/1 1 . The monster-movie

spectacle of Manhattan's destruction is keyed to

the disaster on 9/1 1 .

From an ideological standpoint, Hollywood

feared making films about 9/11, believing that

they would be box-office disasters and in bad

THE DARK KNIGHT (Warner Bros., 2008)

Batman's nemesis, the Joker, is depicted in this film as a terrorist seeking to cre-

ate chaos and destruction. The Joker and his men bomb numerous buildings in

Gotham City, and Gotham's politicians and police debate whether to use harsh

interrogation tactics—torture—on the terrorists in order to stop them. In its fo-

cus on terrorism, the film becomes an ideological account of post-9/11 America

and the dilemmas it has faced. The scene pictured here, showing Gotham fire- fighters coping with the aftermath of a bombing, recreates iconic 9/11 imagery of firefighters at work in the devastated remains of the World Trade Center. Frame enlargement.

taste as well if they were made as entertain- ments. But many Hollywood filmmakers feltcompelled to use film to acknowledge 9/1 1, and most did so in an indirect way, giving their films ideological content in a second-order and im- plicit manner.

Steven Spielberg, for example, made three films that were indirectly about 9/11. The Terminal (2004) is a comedy about the closing of America's borders by Homeland Security. War of the Worlds (2005) uses the iconic 9/11 images of destruction and fleeing crowds in telling a story about alien inva-

Ideological Models 433

sion (based on H.G. Wells' novel). Munich (2005) depicts Israel's response to the killings of its Olympic athletes in 1972 by the Black September terrorist group and treats this event as a precursor to 9/1 1. The film's closing image shows the 1 970s-era New York skyline with the twin towers of the World Trade Center in prominent view. These are a digital effect

because when the film was made the towers could no longer be photographed. But Spielberg intends for the image to make an ideological point, con- necting the events in Munich with our contempo rary experience.

WAR OF THE WORLDS (PARAMOUNT PICTURES, 2005) In the aftermath of 9/1 1, many Hollywood films incorporated iconic images of that day of destruction. Steven Spielberg's film depicts terror-stricken crowds fleeing alien invaders and shows an airplane that has crashed into a building. But the film's ideological perspective on 9/1 1 gets some important things wrong. Speilberg shows people turning on another with anger and hatred, screaming, and fighting among themselves. It is a very negative por- trait of how people might behave in situations of danger. It fails to square with what all reports about 9/1 1 have shown, namely, that those in the stricken World Trade Center calmly made their way to the exits and helped others who were hurt. People were at their best because they were in the worst of circumstances, a fact of human behavior that eludes the film's ideological portrait. Frame enlargement.

(continued)

434 CHAPTER 11 Film Theory and Criticism

WORLD TRADE CENTER (PARAMOUNT PICTURES, 2006) In one of the few Hollywood films to directly portray the events of 9/1 1 , Nicolas Cage plays New Jersey Port Authority Officer John McLoughlin, who, with three other Port Authority Officers, was trapped in an underground concourse beneath the rubble of the Trade Center's south tower when it collapsed. McLoughlin and

one other officer were rescued. The characters and events are real, presented by

the film in an emotional and inspiring way. The story is one of lives saved whereas

one of 9/1 1 's most important meanings lies in the number of lives that were lost. Ideological meaning in film often arises from the way that events are selected, portrayed, omitted, or emphasized. World Trade Center searches for a positive

experience to offer moviegoers, and while it is a fine film, the events that it selects

to portray do not include a recognition of the scale of death that occurred on

9/11. Frame enlargement.

Like many contemporary war films, Black Hawk Down does not offer a political

perspective on the fighting. In fact, it avoids political analysis and, instead, offers a

straightforward tribute to America's military by concentrating on the close-in details of

hand-to-hand fighting.

More recently, We Were Soldiers (2002) portrays the courage and determi- nation that enabled a battalion of 400 U.S. Army soldiers to prevail over 2000 enemy soldiers during the Vietnam War in 1965. The movie stresses the strong family and religious background of the main character, Lt. Col. Hal Moore (Mel Gibson). Many scenes show Moore at home and his devotion to family. He frol- ics with his kids, has heart-to-heart talks with them, and prays with them before bedtime. By giving family and religion such emphasis, the film scores ideologi- cal points. The character is defined in terms of a very positive vision of a good, moral life, and this moral framework is then transferred to the battle scenes in Vietnam, helping them to become a statement about American patriotism and bravery.

Ideological Models 435

(a)

(b)

BLACK HAWK DOWN (COLUMBIA, WE WERE SOLDIERS (PARAMOUNT, 2002) Many contemporary war films avoid dealing with the politics of war and questions sur-rounding the projection of U.S. power overseas. Instead, they take a close-up view of battlefield violence and stress the bravery and patriotism of American soldiers. In BlackHawk Down (a), Americans find themselves outgunned in Somalia but manage to prevail. In We Were Soldiers (b), Lt. Col. Hal Moore (Mel Gibson) prays with his children at bed- time while his wife looks on approvingly. The film uses family and religion for ideological purposes, stressing that virtue and patriotism are the essential meanings of the Vietnam War. Frame enlargements.

The major ideological effect of We Were Soldiers lies in the way that it erases the War's controversy, substituting for that a redemptive and heroic vision of American sacrifice. Toward this end, the filmmakers deleted a key scene placed at the end of the film in which, after the battle, Moore warns Pentagon officials that the Vietnamese will be a tough enemy, suggesting that a decision to pursue the war would be foolish. The scene added a very different point of view, one that was more critical of the war. It Was, therefore, cut out. Consistent with many contemporary Vietnam War movies,

436 CHAPTER 11 Film Theory and Criticism

We Were Soldiers portrays a controversial war by ignoring the controversy and emphasizing instead traditional elements of patriotism.

Because societies contain multiple communities and multiple ideologies, films might support social values that have currency within one community or subgroup but that are disdained or rejected by other groups. Longtime Companion (1990) examines the spread of AIDS in the 1980s by focusing on a small, closely knit com- munity of gay men in New York City. When released, the film was controversial because its affectionate, supportive portrait of gay life clashed with the values of groups convinced that gay sexuality is wrong or who blamed the gay community for the spread of AIDs.

Position Two: Ideological Critique Films offering a genuinely critical view of estab- lished social values are less common in the U.S. industry than those that offer clear support for such values. Nevertheless, in the late 1960s, films such as Easy Rider (1969) and The Wild Bunch (1969) presented heroes who were outlaws or rebels dissatisfied with and struggling against what was then termed "the establishment." In Easy Rider and The Wild Bunch, audiences sympathized with the outlaws and not with mainstream society; the heroes' rebellion exposed the pettiness and intol- erance of society. More recently, Robocop (1987) offered a savage critique of the social Darwinism that underlay 1980s economic policies, especially those cutting the social safety net from under the poor while revising the tax laws to benefit the very wealthy.

Outside relatively rare social satires such as Robocop, critiques from a left- wing perspective are uncommon within the U.S. industry. By contrast, European

PHILADELPHIA (TRISTAR PICTURES, 1993)

Commentators and critics argued over the ideological content of Philadelphia, which focused on the film's portrayal of a homosexual man (played by Tom Hanks) with AIDS. Some critics suggested that the film minimized the character's gay identity and sexuality in the interest of appealing to heterosexual audiences that traditionally have avoided gay-themed films. Frame enlargement.

Ideological Models 437

THE WILD BUNCH (WARNER BROS., 1969) The savage violence of The Wild Bunch contained a powerful indictment of society. Thefilm viewed society as being hopelessly corrupt, and its outlaw heroes were only slightlyless bad than everyone else. Frame enlargement.

filmmakers are much sharper in their political critiques. Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, in The Battle of Algiers (1965) and Burn! (1969), critiqued the imperial- ism of France and England at the time of their empires; these films portrayed heroic guerrilla struggles for revolution and independence. Furthermore, by implication, Burn! offered a critique of U.S. intervention in Vietnam. This kind of left-wing, socially critical filmmaking is virtually nonexistent in the U.S. industry.

The reasons are not hard to understand. Many millions of dollars are at stake in a film production today, and Hollywood is not eager to risk losing big chunks of its market with hard-edged social criticism. It is easier, and potentially more profitable, to reinforce existing ideologies than to challenge them in fundamental ways. Starship Troopers (1997) offers an instructive lesson in this regard. Director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Ed Neumeier tried to use the format of World War Il propaganda films in order to equate war with fascism, but this critique was overwhelmed by the film's intense violence and bravura special effects. These made the film very market- able and more conventional and conservative by blunting the sharpness of its political critique of imperialism and militarism.

Position Three: Ideological Conglomeration Radical ideological criticism is rarely found in the U.S. industry. Hollywood films more commonly assume a position Of ideological conglomeration; that is, they contain a mixed set of appeals and so- cial outlooks. This is an understandable result from the conditions of mass-market Pt0duction. Major studio films are designed for consumption by large, heterogeneous audiences composed of diverse groups, communities, and subcultures. To appeal to these diverse groupings, Hollywood often puts, ideologically, a little of this and a little Of that into a film. The resulting mix creates a sufficiently ambiguous product calcu- lated to attract as many Inembcrs of the target audiencec as possible while offending few• Ideological conglomeration enables Hollywood to appeal to a multitude of differ- ent viewers.

The futuristic social satire Total Recall (1990) portrayed ruthless corporations

exploiting workers on a Martian mining colony and using the media back on earth to

438 CHAPTER Film Theory and Criticism

camouflage and disguise political reality. Excessive product placements in the film under-

tnined its social satire. Total Recall was 1990's product-placement champion; the film

that featured Inorc placements than any produced that year. The anticorporate satire

of Total Recall did not sit well with the continual corporate advertising carried by the

product placements. By helping to tame the film's anticorporate satire, the product place-

ments provided a greater degree of social familiarity and ideological comfort to viewers

watching the movie's disturbing futuristic world.

African-American Film Ideology in film is determined in part by the social

perspectives that given films

express. These, in turn, are related to the distribution of power, privilege and oppor-

tunity within the larger society. Throughout film history, this distribution of power

and privilege has operated to deny or to marginalize the voices of social groups,

based on gender, race, ethnicity or class. In older Hollywood films, nonwhite ethnic

groups are almost always stereotyped and caricatured. A brief examination of how

African-Americans have fared in the Hollywood industry can help to illustrate how

films have reflected social inequalities and then began to change as these, too, have

changed. Before the 1990s, it is nearly correct to say that no African-American

directors

worked in Hollywood. Sidney Poitier, a prominent actor, directed occasional films in

the 1970s and 1980s, which included Uptown Saturday Night (1974) and Stir Crazy

(1980). Michael Schultz directed Cooley High (1975) and Car Wash (1976), but these

are relatively rare examples.

THE 1990S GENERATION Of the filmmakers who emerged during and after the 1990s,

their African-American identity is sometimes highly visible and relevant to their work. But

not always—sometimes the result is simply an entertaining popcorn movie. The industry

has made room for this new generation of filmmakers in a variety of ways, which include

blockbusters at the highest levels of industry financing.

Tim Story, for example, followed his breakthrough comedy Barbershop (2002)

and Taxi (2004) with the summer blockbuster Fantastic Four (2005). Director

Antoine Fuqua has moved easily from cop films such as Training Day (2001) and

Brooklyn's Finest (2010), with their sharp sense of the streets and contemporary ra-

cial issues, to the medieval world of King Arthur (2004), where the focus is on legend

and myth. Carl Franklin has moved from a brilliant adaptation of Devil in a Blue Dress

(1995), based on the Walter Mosley novel that re-imagines the detective genre from

the standpoint of a black detective, to One True Thing (1998), an accomplished melo-

drama about a white family in which the mother is dying of cancer.

This is a healthy situation in which black filmmakers can work on a variety of

projects aimed at differing audiences. Compared with the rigid racial policies that

prevailed in Hollywood 50 years ago, the creative situation today is far more fluid and

flexible, and this is largely due to the influence of a new generation of filmmakers, keen

to work on a variety of projects rather than be confined to making one kind of film for

one kind of audience.

Spike Lee was the first of this group to emerge. After She's Gotta Have It (1986),

which was one of the most prominent independent films of its period, Lee's Do the

Ideological Models 439

Right Thing (1989) achieved a high degree Of visibility by stimulating dialogue anddiscussion around the country about the state of race relations in America. Lee's por-trait of a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, showed numerous racial and ethnictensions among the black, white, Latino, and Asian characters. The tensions climaxwith a protest that elicits police violence, and Lee ends the film with an ambiguouscontrast between the pacifist philosophy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the more aggressive and radical teachings of Malcolm X.

Lee then embarked on a series of stylized, imaginative productions, many of which took race among their primary themes. These included MO' Better Blues

Girls (1997), Clockers (1995), and Bamnboozled (2000). 25th Hour (2002) is one of the best of that era's 9/11-themed films. Lee has also been very active as a documen- tary filmmaker, work that includcs the acclailnccl I IBO production, When thc Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006), about Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans.

John Singleton was the next major director to appear after Spike Lee. His Boyz N the Hood (1991) was a highly acclaimed directorial debut, and its appearance follow- ing Lee's films confirmed that a major change was taking place in American cinema. The film was a melancholy portrait of the crime, violence, and lack of opportunity that was decimating a generation of black men in the cities. He then made three very original pictures—Poetic Justice (1993), Higher Learning (1995), and Rosewood (1987)—before joining the Hollywood remake game with Shaft (2000), a slick updat-

ing of the "blaxploitation" classic. His more recent efforts have been action films—2

Fast 2 Furious (2003) and Four Brothers (2005). Like Singleton, Albert and Allen Hughes made a highly acclaimed debut with

Menace Il Society (1993), also about the gun violence claiming young black men. This

was the most profitable film of its year owing due to its low production cost and good

box office return. Julie Dash directed the acclaimed independent film, Daughters of

the Dust (1991), a period drama about a family migrating from the Sea Islands off the

DO THE RICHT THING (UNIVERSAL,

Spike Lee was the first to emerge of a new generation of black filmmakers in Hollywood in the 1990s. Do the Right Thing, his break- through film, stimu- lated wide-ranging national discussions about race in America. Frame enlargement.