Film StudieS
An Introduction
This book is dedicated to the memory of my father
Film StudieS
An Introduction
Warren Buckland
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by John Murray Learning. An Hachette UK
company.
Based on material previously published as Understand Film Studies, 2010
This edition published in 2015 by John Murray Learning
Copyright © Warren Buckland 2015
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Contents
Acknowledgements
vii
introduction
ix
1 Film aesthetics: formalism and realism
1
mise-en-scène
Set design
mise-en-shot
Film sound
Theoretical analysis of film aesthetics
2 Film structure: narrative and narration
31
Narrative structure
Restricted and omniscient narration
3 Film authorship: the director as auteur
77
The origin of the auteur policy
Style and themes in Alfred Hitchcock’s films
The cinema of Wim Wenders
The cinema of Kathryn Bigelow
The contemporary auteur
4 Film genres: defining the typical film
119
Problems in the study of genres
Genre film as myth
New studies of melodrama
Film noir
1950s science fiction
5 the non-fiction film: five types
of documentary
153
Expository documentary
Observational documentary
Interactive documentary
Reflexive documentary
Performative documentary
6 the reception of film: the art
and profession of film reviewing
179
The four functions of film reviewing
The four components of film reviewing
Evaluation
Three reviews of interstellar
taking it further
201
Film studies on the internet
Bibliography
205
index
217
vi
Acknowledgements
Most of this book has grown out of lectures that have been
‘tested out’ on undergraduate students at the University of East Anglia, Liverpool John Moores University, the University of Amsterdam and Oxford Brookes University. The need to present points that are obvious to the lecturer/writer (points that have, in fact, been acquired over years of study) but which are new to the listener and reader requires a determined effort to be concise and informative at the same time. I hope I have gone some way to achieving these qualities in this book. This book, therefore, owes a great deal to the students who sat through the original lectures. Their reactions helped me to transform my notes into the following chapters.
On a more personal note, many friends and colleagues have read individual chapters, and have offered critical and creative suggestions for revision. I would, therefore, like to thank Glen Creeber, Sean Cubitt, Kevin Donnelly, Thomas Elsaesser, Sibel Karabina, Peter Krämer, Julie Maclusky, Steve Marchant, Alison McMahan, Brian O’Leary and Lydia Papadimitriou for their comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Philip French and The Observer for allowing me to reproduce Philip French’s review of The English Patient.
Acknowledgements vii
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Introduction
To study the cinema: what an absurd idea!
Christian Metz
In this book I hope to show you that studying the cinema is not an absurd idea (Metz, the French film scholar, made his living out of studying the cinema, so of course he did not think it was an absurd idea either). To study film should not be thought of as an activity inferior to studying other arts, such as theatre, painting or opera, for two reasons. Firstly, film occupies a dominant place in society and because film is a popular medium, it should be studied seriously. Secondly, if the film student adopts a serious, responsible and critical approach to film, then film studies becomes as important as any other type of study. I use the term ‘film student’ in the broadest sense
– that is, anyone who wants to develop an interest in analysing, comprehending and evaluating films; the term does not just refer to those who study in higher education. Ultimately, it is the student’s attitude that justifies the study of film, not the nature or popularity of film. If the student takes his or her task seriously, then studying Steven Spielberg’s film The Lost World: Jurassic Park becomes as important and legitimate as studying Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors or Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute.
Metz also wrote that ‘The cinema is difficult to explain because it is easy to understand’. In this book I hope to show you that the cinema is not so difficult to explain onc
e you become familiar with the main critical tools film scholars use to analyse films. As a secondary aim, we shall look at films that are not easy to understand and we shall see what makes them difficult.
By analysing the complex nature of difficult films, we should be able to appreciate them more.
In studying films, film scholars and film critics end up describing and/or analysing them. With description, we repeat in words
Introduction
ix
what we see in a film. We can describe the content of the film (what we see): for example, in Jurassic Park, we can describe the moment when Grant (Sam Neill) walks beside a brachiosaur, and stares up at it in wonderment. Or we can describe the film’s form (how the film is constructed): in the same example, we can describe how the camera pans and tracks to the right as Grant and the brachiosaur move. Description is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for writing about film. The writer simply ends up repeating what the film shows.
We need to supplement description with analysis. Analysis involves examining a film’s overall form or structure – that is, the film’s design. We look for patterns that give significance to films, or individual scenes. The art critic Clive Bell came up with the term ‘significant form’ to indicate what he believes distinguishes good art from bad art. When we say that a film has ‘significant form’, we mean that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
The film’s parts add up to create a new entity that does not exist in each part. The film scholar Stefan Sharff wrote:
Significant form is the opposite of pedestrian rendition… Images fit together so magnificently that they ascend to a higher level of visual meaning.
The Elements of Cinema, p. 7
A pedestrian film is one that is not more than the sum of its parts. The parts of a pedestrian film, when joined together, do not attain ‘a higher level of visual meaning’, but remain a collection of parts. To determine whether a film has significant form or not, we need to go beyond mere description and analyse how a film’s individual parts fit and work together. If we can then identify ‘significant form’ in the way the individual parts fit together, this gives us a good reason to evaluate the film positively, by judging it a well-made film.
But how do we recognize significant form? You need to train yourself to appreciate the special qualities of a film, or each scene in a film. You need to acquire a broad knowledge of the inner workings of film (which is one of the aims of this x
book), and be sensitive to the unique meaning of each camera movement or framing in each scene in a film. Not all camera movements are the same. A tracking shot in Spielberg’s
film Jurassic Park is different from a tracking shot in Max Ophuls’s film Letter From an Unknown Woman or in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Le Weekend. All film-makers use the same standard tools, but not in the same way. To understand the special qualities of each film, you need to develop a filmmaker’s perspective, his or her sensitivity to single shots and scenes in individual films.
One of the best ways to acquire a broad knowledge of the inner workings of film is to analyse the decision-making process that took place in a film’s construction.
This involves looking at the various technical, stylistic and narrative options available to a film-maker and the choices that he or she makes in putting together a film or sequence of film. To emphasize a film’s construction combines the study of film practice and film aesthetics. This is because we consider both the practical choices that are made when a film is
constructed and the aesthetic effects these choices have on the film spectator.
For example, what is the difference between shooting a scene in one continuous take, where the camera is left rolling while the whole of the action takes place, and shooting the same scene in several shots? The first option involves the film-maker filming the action as it unfolds, uninterrupted. The second option involves breaking the action down into individual shots. Each new shot will include a change in camera position, camera angle, shot scale (the distance between the camera and the action) and so on. Film-makers have to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of choosing one technique over another for each scene, since the choice of technique will influence the way spectators respond to the film. This is just one of the questions we shall be looking at in this book.
However, you may think that analysing a film in this way destroys the pleasurable experiences we get when we go to the cinema. My response to this point is to argue that film studies does not destroy our experiences of films but transforms them.
Introduction
xi
In his poem The Dry Salvages, T. S. Eliot wrote: We had the experience but missed the meaning
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form…
The opposition Eliot sets up between experience and meaning is useful in explaining the relation between watching a film and analysing it. My aim in this book is to employ critical tools to analyse a film’s meanings, which involves the spectator taking a step back from his or her experience of the film. Yet, as Eliot makes clear in his poem, the analysis of meaning will restore the experience in a different form. So my main point is that critical analysis does not destroy the spectator’s pleasurable experience of a film, but transforms it. This transformed experience primarily involves developing a critical understanding of how films are made and what effects they have on you.
Peter Wollen describes what is involved in studying film: There is often a hostility towards any kind of explanation which involves a degree of distancing from the ‘lived experience’ of watching the film itself. Yet clearly any kind of serious critical work … must involve a distance, a gap between the film and the criticism… It is as though the meteorologists were reproached for getting away from the ‘lived experience’ of walking in the rain or sun-bathing.
Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, p. 169
This leads me to one of my main arguments about the aim of film studies. Film studies is not simply about accumulating more and more information about films, film-makers and the film industry.
This is a passive form of learning. In this book I do not present you with pages and pages of facts on the cinema. Instead, you will find an emphasis on an active form of learning in which you develop critical and analytical skills – skills that can be applied to any film. I want to discourage you from merely talking about xii
your personal impressions of a film and simply passing judgement on it (‘I liked this film’ or ‘I didn’t like this film’). This is a very superficial way to talk about films and I hope this book will enable you to go beyond this impressionistic type of criticism.
We have already seen that the idea of ‘significant form’ enables critics to make an informed evaluation of a film, by asking:
‘Do the separate parts of a film join together to create a higher level of visual meaning?’ If they do, then this is justification for evaluating the film positively. By adopting this informed approach, this book is encouraging you to become a film
connoisseur (more commonly known as a ‘cinephile’). Just as wine connoisseurs can identify and explain very small and subtle differences in the taste of wine, so the film connoisseur can identify the subtle differences between films – especially the small differences that make a difference.
Film studies consists of a huge amount of histories, theories, critical tools and discussions of individual films. Due to the overwhelming amount of information available, I have decided to be very selective in the topics I write about. One of the questions I asked myself when selecting topics is the following: ‘What works in film studies?’ A great many of the issues and problems that film scholars decide to write about are badly chosen and ill-formed.
Because they do not always work in particular instances (they are not general enough), the theories and critical tools that some film scholars use are irrelevant and misguided.
Furthermore, I have divided up the topics in
this book into those that develop an internal perspective on film and those that develop an external perspective. An internal perspective develops an intrinsic approach to film and studies a film’s inner workings. That is, an internal perspective studies the film itself, in isolation from any historical, moral or social context. This approach is often referred to as ‘poetic’.
Chapters 1, 2 and 3 outline those approaches that develop a poetic perspective on film. Chapter 1 scrutinizes the work of the formalist film scholars (such as Rudolf Arnheim and Sergei Eisenstein) and the realist film scholars (such as André Bazin) and looks at the particular filmic techniques they promote in their cause to define film as an art. The formalists
Introduction xiii
promoted editing, montage, low and high camera angles and so on, while the realists promoted the long take and deep focus photography. This chapter also offers a brief survey of colour, the techniques of continuity editing and film sound.
Films discussed include: The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles), Citizen Kane (Welles), Secrets and Lies (Mike Leigh), Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock) and Jurassic Park (Spielberg).
Chapter 2 investigates the structures of narrative and narration at work in the cinema, including narrative structures such as cause–effect logic, character motivation, transformation, linear and non-linear chronology, together with restricted and omniscient narration. Films discussed include: Psycho (Hitchcock), North by Northwest (Hitchcock), Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese), Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk), Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino) and Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch). Chapter 3 explores the concept of the director as auteur (author), charting the history of this approach to films from the 1950s to the present day. The chapter looks at the stylistic and thematic approaches to auteurism and investigates the careers of three directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Wim Wenders and Kathryn Bigelow. It can be argued that auteurism is an external approach to the cinema. However, I have emphasized that auteurism looks for stylistic and thematic patterns in a group of films, which therefore defines it as an internal approach.
Chapters 4, 5 and 6 outline those approaches that develop an external perspective on film. An external perspective studies the relation between the film and particular aspects of reality outside it. This type of criticism places a film within its historical and social context. For this reason, external approaches are often called ‘contextual criticism’. Chapter 4
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