New Review of Film and Television Studies

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Eye candy for the blind: re-introducing Lyotard's

Acinema into discourses on excess, motion, and
spectacle in contemporary Hollywood

Simone Knox

To cite this article: Simone Knox (2013) Eye candy for the blind: re-introducing Lyotard's Acinema
into discourses on excess, motion, and spectacle in contemporary Hollywood, New Review of Film
and Television Studies, 11:3, 374-389, DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2013.803906

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2013.803906

Published online: 19 Jun 2013.

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New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2013
Vol. 11, No. 3, 374–389, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2013.803906

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Eye candy for the blind: re-introducing Lyotard’s Acinema
into discourses on excess, motion, and spectacle
in contemporary Hollywood
Simone Knox*

Department of Film, Theatre & Television, University of Reading, Reading, UK

Jean-François Lyotard’s 1973 essay ‘Acinema’ is explicitly concerned with
the cinematic medium, but has received scant critical attention. Lyotard’s
acinema conceives of an experimental, excessive form of film-making
that uses stillness and movement to shift away from the orderly process of
meaning-making within mainstream cinema. What motivates this present
paper is a striking link between Lyotard’s writing and contemporary
Hollywood production; both are concerned with a sense of excess, especially
within moments of motion. Using Charlie’s Angels (McG, 2000) as a case
study – a film that has been critically dismissed as ‘eye candy for the blind’ –
my methodology brings together two different discourses, high culture theory
and mainstream film-making, to test out and propose the value of Lyotard’s
ideas for the study of contemporary film. Combining close textual analysis
and engagement with key scholarship on film spectacle, I reflexively engage
with the process of film analysis and re-direct attention to a neglected essay by
a major theorist, in order to stimulate further engagement with his work.
Keywords: Jean-François Lyotard; acinema; spectacle; excess; contempor-
ary Hollywood; Charlie’s Angels; movement and stillness

. . . For example, suppose you are working on a shot in video, a shot, say, of a
gorgeous head of hair à la Renoir; upon viewing it you find that something has come
undone: all of a sudden swamps, outlines of incongruous islands, and cliff edges
appear, lurching forth before your startled eyes. (Lyotard 1986, 349– 350)
French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard wrote these remarks in his discussion of
what he termed ‘the acinema’, a concept of his that has remained critically neglected,
especially when compared to the prominence and visibility – and, at times,
inescapability – of his writing concerned with the postmodern. Chancing upon the
passage cited above, I was irresistibly reminded of a film I had seen in the cinema a
few years back, a film that featured many moments when the screen is filled with the
protagonists’ hair: Charlie’s Angels. I was intrigued that both a relatively obscure
essay written by a French cultural theorist in the 1970s and a Hollywood action film

*Email: s.knox@reading.ac.uk

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

 New Review of Film and Television Studies 375
from 2000 should deal with moments where ‘something has come undone’,
moments marked by a sense of excess, and where conventional processes of meaning
and interpretation are disrupted, in ways that involve time and motion.1 Using
Charlie’s Angels – a film broadly representative of the dominant strategies of
contemporary Hollywood production – as a case study for exploring Lyotard’s
ideas, this paper aims to make a contribution to the continuing debates on spectacle
and excess within the critical study of film, but its main intention is to bring wider
attention and recognition to a neglected and intriguing piece of writing by a major
theorist. Thus, the present paper invites others to test out Lyotard’s ideas against
other case studies, and to share the insights gained.
Of course, where intellectual gains stand to be made, risks are likely to rush in.
I am mindful that the bringing together of Lyotard’s call for an avant-garde cinema
and a very commercial and derided film might raise some eyebrows. And
commercially successful and critically derided the film has been in pretty much
equal measure: a high-concept, pre-sold blockbuster franchise fully articulated
in entertainment conglomerate Sony’s vertically integrated business strategies
in 2000 –2001, Charlie’s Angels made over 40 million dollars in its opening
weekend in the USA alone and spawned a sequel in 2003. Roger Ebert (2000)
sardonically described the film as being ‘like the trailer for a video game movie,
lacking only the video game, and the movie’ and called the film ‘eye candy for the
blind’. Joe Soria (2000), in his poorly spelled but pithy online review, went as far as
to suggest that any director with only three letters in their name, like Charlie’s
Angels’ McG, should probably not be allowed to direct full-length films. In some
ways, Charlie’s Angels fulfils the notion of mainstream cinema that Lyotard sets
out to challenge with his notion of the acinema; so formulating a conceptual link
between his ideas and this film could seem inappropriate to some, to say the least.
On closer consideration, however, this difficulty, this lack of absolute fit
between the two, is actually one of the reasons why formulating this link is a
worthwhile endeavour. I am always wary of the methodological trap, when
exploring any given theory, of choosing as the case study a film that fits, or suits,
the theory. Here, as noted by Bignell (2000), all too quickly, and often
unnoticeably, a tautological circle forms in which the film works to back up and
confirm the theory, and vice versa; and it is moments of slippage, moments when –
fittingly for the epigraph – something comes undone, that can yield productive
insights. Furthermore, Ebert’s dismissal of Charlie’s Angels as ‘eye candy for the
blind’ promises an intriguing link between this particular film and this concept,
concerned as they are each with moments of intensity and excess. The present
paper will therefore explore the correlations, as well as the slippages, between
Lyotard’s concept of the acinema and Charlie’s Angels, in order to think about
how the presence of excess leads to important questions about representation,
meaning, and interpretation. What stands to be gained from engaging with the
concept of acinema is the potential for thinking through some issues about
contemporary Hollywood cinema in ways that have featured less prominently in
more established debates so far, as well as the bringing together of different strands
376 S. Knox
of critical thinking on film that have a bearing on each other, but remain presently
under-connected. Here, the ongoing debates about spectacle conducted by
scholars including Tom Brown, Geoff King, and Erlend Lavik, are of especial
importance, and my paper will seek to tease out points of resonance, as well as
offer an interesting inflection to existing scholarship. Concerned with how
potential meanings of a text are never fully exhausted by critical analysis, and how
critical analysis is thus never finished, my discussion will be touching on the issue
of what is possible and permissible in film analysis.

Introducing Lyotard’s Acinema

Jean-François Lyotard is most widely known in the English-speaking world for
his work The Postmodern Condition, which examined the role, status, and
condition of knowledge. He is one of a number of theorists who have been
criticised for a lack of detailed engagement with specific examples of media
culture, yet Lyotard’s essay ‘Acinema’, which was first published in 1973 and
which is explicitly concerned with the cinematic medium, has received rather
little attention, especially within film studies. The neglect of this text in
anglophone discourses cannot be attributed to a translation not being readily
available: it was first published in English in Wide Angle in 1978, then in Rosen’s
1986 reader Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology – in which it appears alongside
Kristin Thompson’s (1986) important essay on cinematic excess – and
Benjamin’s (1989) The Lyotard Reader.2 I will now briefly contextualise this
essay within the overall framework of Lyotard’s scholarship, and then proceed to
sketch out his concept of the acinema.
Situated within the poststructuralist discourses about signification that took
place in the 1960s and 1970s, and influenced especially by Nietzsche, Marx, and
Freud, Lyotard’s writing dealt extensively with art and representation. He argued
that Western philosophy has been organised around a set of binary oppositions,
including that of discourse and figure, in ways whereby the former is privileged;
Lyotard was interested in defending the latter (see Lyotard 1971; Best and
Kellner 1991). To focus on his distinction between the discursive and figural for
the moment, matters are not made easier, as Trahair (2005, 177) notes, by the fact
that in Lyotard’s writing, these ‘are mobile terms which designate different
things in different places’; but they can be understood as, respectively,
representation that is ordered, logical, and meaningful, and representation that is
less determined by functionality, intelligibility, and systematicity, more
concerned with difference, instability, and transgression. Crucially, Lyotard
understood the two as imbricated; as Bignell (2000, 43) summarises, ‘Lyotard
argues that discourse itself is never free of the figural, but is disturbed or set in
motion by its energy.’
Drawing on the distinction in Freudian discourse between the reality principle
and the pleasure principle, the essay ‘Acinema’ continued Lyotard’s concern
with the relationship between representational art and normalisation and
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 377
discipline, as well as their opposites. Aligning cinema with the capitalist mode of
production, Lyotard defined cinema as fundamentally concerned with movement.
His essay begins as follows:
Cinematography is the inscription of movement, a writing with movements – all
kinds of movements: for example, in the film shot, those of the actors and other
moving objects, those of lights, colors, frame, and lens; in the film sequence, all of
these again plus the cuts and splices of editing[.] (Lyotard 1986, 349)
Film-making to him generally involves a potentially infinite number of possible
movements, shots, and scenes that the filmmaker has to deal with, choosing
and including some, whilst excluding and eliminating all others. Evoking the
regulation of libidinal energies for the purposes of reproduction, Lyotard (1986)
maintained that, in commercial cinema, the factor deciding inclusion and
exclusion is to do with functionality:
Just as the libido must renounce its perverse overflow to propagate the species
through a normal genital sexuality allowing the constitution of a ‘sexual body’
having that sole end, so the film produced by an artist working in capitalist industry
[ . . . ] springs from the effort to eliminate aberrant movements, useless expenditures,
differences of pure consumption. This film is composed like a unified and
propagating body, a fecund and assembled whole transmitting instead of losing
what it carries. (352)
Parallel and analogous to the economy of cinematic production, commercial
cinema has to render a sense of unity and order; an economy of sense:
And the order of the whole has its sole object in the functioning of the cinema: that
there be order in the movements, that the movements be made in order, that they
make order. Writing with movements – cinematography – is thus conceived and
practiced as an incessant organizing of movements following the rules of
representation [ . . . ]. The so-called impression of reality is a real oppression of
orders. (Lyotard 1986, 350)
In order to ‘protect the order of the whole’ (350), to make sense, commercial
cinema is therefore characterised by the exclusion of movements, shots, and
scenes not ‘identifiable, [ . . . ] not related to the logic of your shot’ (350) and
therefore ‘useless’. This process is due to capitalism’s law of value, which
Lyotard explicated as follows:
The law of value [ . . . ] states that the object, in this case the movement, is valuable
only insofar as it is exchangeable for other objects and in terms of equal quantities
of a definable unity [ . . . ]. Therefore, to be valuable the object must move: proceed
from other objects (‘production’ in the narrow sense) and disappear, but on the
condition that its disappearance makes room for still other objects (consumption).
Such a process is not sterile, but productive[.] (350)
The restricted economy of mainstream cinema is marked by a production of
meaning that is ordered, productive, and not wasteful:
No movement [ . . . ] is given to the eye/ear of the spectator for what it is: a simple
sterile difference in an audio-visual field. Instead, every movement put forward
sends back to something else, is inscribed as a plus or minus on the ledger book
378 S. Knox
which is the film, is valuable because it returns to something else, because it is thus
potential return and profit. (350)
Anything that is incongruous, anything that does not work towards the order of the
whole, anything that is not a return to something else, Lyotard argues, misspends
energy and carries intensity. Lyotard called for a cinema, the acinema, that would
refuse this ordering process through engaging with what he sees at the core of
cinema: movement.
In letting itself be drawn toward [the two poles of immobility and excessive
movement] the cinema insensibly ceases to be an ordering force; it produces true,
that is, vain, simulacrums, blissful intensities, instead of productive/consumable
objects. (351)
As I will explore in more depth shortly, movement and stillness are understood by
Lyotard to offer a move beyond the orderly, the meaningful, the functional, and
as my textual analysis of the opening moments of my case study will now show,
a close engagement with movement and stillness is shared by contemporary
Hollywood production.

Moments of movement and stillness

The opening moments of Charlie’s Angels have been called ‘a flagrantly flashy
calling card’ (Medhurst 2001, 44), that, according to O’Day (2004, 210), set
‘the template for the film’s style’. The film begins with the camera entering and
slowly travelling through a plane until it picks out an African-American man (rapper
LL Cool J), who is involved in a hijacking/terrorist scenario with a man carrying a
bomb. In a self-reflexive acknowledgment, the in-flight entertainment shows (the
actually non-existent) T.J. Hooker: The Movie, causing the following exchange:
African-American man (sighs): Another movie from an old TV show.
Bomber: What are you gonna do?
African-American man: Walk out.
As Mogilevich (2002) suggests:
the sequence that immediately follows is an attempt to stop people from walking
out, to establish that it has something novel to add to the story, as the film nervously
tries to justify its existence [ . . . ] in a parachuting and water-rescue sequence that
shows exactly what a big-budget movie can do that TV, and the original ‘Angels’,
cannot. (40)
In an abrupt shift of tone, rhythm, and pace that is underlined by the score
changing from a suspense-building bass line to aggressive and loud electric guitar
chords, the African-American man suddenly grabs the bomber and leaves the
plane via the emergency exit. As they plummet earthwards, a strong sense of
energy, vibrancy, and chaos is conveyed through the use of a hand-held camera
that frequently rotates and makes use of zooms, with much fast movement
trajected diagonally across the frame.
The sequence showcases what distinguishes high-end (and especially action-
adventure) Hollywood production from other entertainment media, at the same
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 379
time as reflecting the increasing convergence between film and television,
especially by the use of compositional and editing techniques strongly associated
with music video and advertising. (It is, of course, not surprising that much
criticism of the film notes that this is where McG started out.) The disorientating
editing repeatedly cuts from close-ups to wide shots, and switches between
numerous camera positions and angles. Neither camera nor editing are employed
in a smooth and orderly fashion, but appear jerky and disjointed; the pace abruptly
slowing as the camera moves past a helicopter out of which a black-clad and
helmeted figure jumps. A sudden freeze-frame reveals the figure to be Alex (Lucy
Liu), who effortlessly disarms the bomber mid-air and then makes a perfect
parachute landing on a powerboat driven by bikini-clad Natalie (Cameron Diaz).
Once on the boat, Alex removes her helmet and shakes out her long black hair
in a close-up, her flowing tresses moving across the frame to a floating sound
effect that lends an almost otherworldly quality to the movement. Bringing to
mind both the famous hair-flicking from the television series and hair care
commercials, this moment is slowed down and thus so prolonged that it becomes
conspicuous. It is followed by the African-American man removing his face mask
Mission: Impossible style, revealing himself to be Dylan (Drew Barrymore), her
auburn hair a halo of glowing orange due to the copious use of lighting and
warming gels. With the third angel thus safely descended from the heavens, the
trio drive off and the remake of the iconic credits begins; the opening sequence
comes to a close as the film’s remediation – to use Bolter and Grusin’s (2000)
term – of the television series reaches its first overt peak.
What my close analysis of the first few minutes of the film has been trying to
convey is a sense of the extremity and excess of the primary-coloured spectacle in
this film. The film is from the start preoccupied with managing its relationship to
the television series, which itself was marked by a sense of excess in the form
of glamorous costumes, big hair, an array of sports cars (with phones!), and other
desirable consumer goods. Indeed, a sense of excess permeates the film in different
ways: the DVD commentary claims that the speaker box used in the film is the
original speaker box from the series – what I find interesting here is not whether
this is indeed factually correct or not, but the excessive preoccupation with the
source material. Directed by the epithetically named McG, the Angels in their big-
screen outing manage improbable feats of action that defy the laws of physics
(especially helmet hair), while the high velocity use of camera, editing, music,
and visual effects constitutes an almost physical assault on the visual and aural
faculties of the audience. In this showcase for big-budget digital effects, movement
in relation to temporality is strikingly crucial, as time and movement appear to
be both slowed down and speeded up. The opening sequence is punctuated by
moments that do not move smoothly at the standard speed of 24 frames per second,
but follow a pattern of fits and starts that destabilises conceptions of time as ordered
and unified. These moments are moments of stillness and excessive movement.
Moments of stillness such as the sudden freeze-frame allude to the immobility
and stasis of still photography, pluck particular instances from the flux of images,
380 S. Knox
and explore the intensity of the single moment, capturing the evanescent
and fleeting, and truncating the frantic speed of camera, action, and editing. The
moments of excessive movement have an almost whiplash effect that injects the
film with a sense of energy and vibrancy, and highlights the rhythmic possibilities
of film. Making use of the cinematic apparatus and digital technology, both kinds
of moments make up a texture that challenges and exceeds the capacity of ordinary
human vision, thereby drawing attention to themselves as illusions, to the act of
construction involved. As such, they address the very essence of film, its ability to
animate, quite literally to bring to life, the stillness of the single image. What is
contained within this essence – and thus highlighted by these moments – is both
that the cinematic experience consists of ‘the illusion of movement where of
course there is nothing but still images flashing at a prescribed speed’ (Neupert
1999, 319) and that the rate of motion as 24 frames a second is not ‘technically pre-
determined [ . . . ] but is always a choice’ (Lawrence 2003, 17), reflecting not the
naturalness of vision, but its systematic and constructed character.3
Crucially, these moments of stillness and movement resonate with the
moments Lyotard refers to in his concern for the avant-garde experimentation of
the acinema. He stated that his call for an acinema was not equal to
demanding a raw cinema. [ . . . ] We are hardly about to form a club dedicated to the
saving of rushes and the rehabilitation of clipped footage. And yet . . . We observe
that if the mistake is eliminated it is because of its incongruity, and to protect the
order of the whole (shot and/or sequence and/or film) while banning the intensity it
carries. (Lyotard 1986, 350)
The acinema refuses to arrange its cinematographic material following ‘the figure
of return, that is, of the repetition and propagation of sameness’ (353). Because of
this, film stops being ‘an object or worth valued for another object. It is not
composed with these other objects, compensated for by them, enclosed in a whole
ordered by constitutive laws’ (351). The acinema refuses the functional order and
economised movements by following the logic of pyrotechnics, using moments
of stasis and extreme mobilisation. As Lyotard expands:
These two effects, the one an immobilization, the other an excess of mobility, are
obtained by waiving the rules of representation which demand real motion recorded
and projected at 24 frames per second. As a result we could expect a strong affective
charge to accompany them, since this greater or lesser perversion of the realistic
rhythm responds to the organic rhythm of the intense emotions evoked. (354)
The use of movement in such a way that everything is no longer part of an
ordered whole, always referring back to something else and thus under control,
I argue, also applies to Charlie’s Angels. Here, too, ‘[i]nstead of good, unifying,
and reasonable forms proposed for identification’ (Lyotard 1986, 357), it is
a sense of intensity, disorderliness, and fascination that is rendered available
through the specific use of movement. I will now turn to the moment in the film
when these qualities are most strongly noticeable, linking my discussion to
existing debates on spectacle, excess, and analysis.
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 381
Spectacle, excess, residue
Situated at the narrative turning point in the film, when the Angels come under
attack, the moment in question begins with Alex preparing a meal in her boyfriend’s
movie trailer. Suddenly, shots are fired, and she wedges herself across the inside of
the trailer’s roof to escape the bullets, all of which is cross-cut with Natalie fending
off an attack in a nightclub toilet. What makes this scene of Alex as she is wedged in,
surrounded by flying splinters from furniture being shot to pieces, so striking is the
sense of excess that permeates it. Not only is an unnecessarily large number of
bullets being fired – the ‘Angelic Effects’ DVD featurette refers to this moment as
the ‘Swiss cheese’ scene – but the action is also slowed down, and texture becomes
more noticeable. The scene is framed in such a way as to emphasise not, for
example, Alex’s body as it displays strength and skill, but her hair; the camera is
positioned directly below her face, framing her head in a close-up, with her long
black hair hanging down and occupying a large part of the frame and the foreground
of the shot. Whilst it makes sense that Alex turns her head to the side to protect her
face from the flying splinters, that Alex keeps moving her head back and forth
makes decidedly less sense, but it keeps her tresses flowing, which (almost
inappropriately, it would seem) recalls the previous moments of hair-flicking in
the film.
With this combination of composition, slow motion, figure movement, and
texture, there is a sense of excess, of sense-less-ness to the scene, in which the hair
seems to take over and has a sense of plasticity, sensuality, and tangibility to it
(reinforced by the fact it is now curly when it was straight before). McG remarks in
the DVD commentary at one point that he had the volume of the actresses’ hair
increased through hair pieces in order to ‘have hair all over the place’, and this has
indeed been achieved: framing the shot and following perspective lines, the hair is
all over the place; to say it in Lyotard’s words, ‘something has come undone’.
Yes, the hair is located within an intertextual framework of meaning that
includes the television series, hair care commercials, music videos, and the
floating hair motif known from manga and anime. Yes, this shot can (nay, needs)
to be understood in terms of gender and Laura Mulvey’s (1975) formulation
of ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’, which often features in discussions of spectacle.4
And yes, this shot is intelligible within the context of contemporary blockbuster
cinema production, the significance of big-screen spectacle within a
conglomerate multi-platform media environment, remediation, and brand
distinction. And most certainly, the shot can, and needs, to be discussed in
relation to issues of spectacle and narrative, specifically the often-supposed
tension between them, and to this I turn next.
Tom Brown (2008, 157) points out that Steve Neale has stressed that
spectacle has been a notoriously difficult term, ‘yet Neale is in fact one of the
very few critics to deal with spectacle so directly’. Indeed, Neale (1979, 66)
offers a useful definition of spectacle in his formulation of ‘a signifying system
[ . . . ] whose basis lies in the specific form of the evocation and satiation of the
382 S. Knox
scopic drive, a system which is especially concerned [ . . . ] to stress, to display,
the visibility of the visible’. Brown (2008) himself offers many good reasons why
the term spectacle is to be used with caution – ‘[h]owever one approaches
spectacle, there is always a dilemma between a very broad definition, which
might conflate all cinematic display with spectacle, and an exclusive definition,
which may privilege one form of spectacle over others’ (159); ‘it is potentially
problematic to discuss actions and objects as necessarily in and of themselves
spectacular; they only become so when filmed in particular ways’ (160); and that
spectacle is not to be conflated ‘with all other visual pleasures the cinema has to
offer’ (161) – before he goes on to demonstrate precisely the kinds of valuable
insights that stand to be gained from opening this particular can of worms.
With spectacle a difficult term, the relationship between spectacle and
narrative has also proven notorious, giving rise to a series of thoughtful responses.
For Geoff King (2000), views that see spectacle and narrative in an oppositional
relationship are frequently hinged on a conflation of narrative per se (or perceived
absence thereof) with particular dimensions and attributes (or perceived absences
thereof) of narrative, such as forward moving plot development, narrative
depth, and complex characterisation. Aylish Wood (2002) has taken issue
with understanding the relationship between spectacle and narrative – whether
spectacle is seen as interrupting the flow of narrative, or enhancing the effect of it –
in a way that rests on an opposition of space and time, arguing that space has a
temporal component. King (2000) sums it up well when he asserts the dynamic
relationship between the two, whereby ‘[t]he fact that spectacle and narrative act
in concert in some ways does not prevent them continuing to obey their own logics
and appeals in others. Neither dimension necessarily “contains” or “disrupts” the
other’ (32; emphasis added).5 Issues of spectacle and narrative clearly have
relevance for any analysis of Charlie’s Angels; indeed, they feature in most
reviews of the film, encapsulated well by Medhurst’s (2001, 44) comment that the
film’s plot is ‘a mere peg on which to hang a series of showy action sequences and a
succession of stardom-enhancing moments for the leads’.
However, I would argue that these existing debates do not quite articulate what
is going on in this film in the moments under scrutiny here. There is a residual
presence in Charlie’s Angels that is lingering, that is not quite articulable using the
established parameters of narrative –spectacle discussions, and that is contained
within Ebert’s phrase of turn ‘eye candy for the blind’. There is an excess,
pointlessness, unnecessariness, and indeed ‘inappropriateness’ that remain and
reside in the film, which reflexively raise some interesting methodological
questions about the act of analysis, and for which Lyotard’s writing proves
illuminating. In the slowed down, yet brief shots of Alex’s head, there is a
spectacle and presence-ness of hair that seems out of place in what is ostensibly an
action sequence. Tone, to use that delicate term Douglas Pye (2007) has explored,
and spectatorial address are equivocal here: the image holds spectacular attraction,
but not of a kind that calls for wondrous awe from the spectator; it represents a
moment of suspense and is likely to elicit laughter; its overt awareness of
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 383
the spectator is combined with an uncertainty about its intended functionality.
Moving away from transparency and ‘indifference’ of the co-presence of text and
spectator, there is a strong sense of irrelevancy, unnecessariness, and pointlessness
to the excess here; the motivation and function of these moments move beyond an
economy of sense.
At least to a certain extent, these moments can be thought of as ‘lost’ in
themselves, as being so very much about representation (and beyond it) that they
are, at some level, about nothing but themselves. They are ‘not an object or worth
valued for another object’ (Lyotard 1986, 351), not valuable only in so far as they
are ‘exchangeable for other objects and in terms of equal quantities of a definable
unity’ (350), they do not make ‘room for still other objects’ (350), or refer back to
something else in an orderly system. As such, they tap into Lyotard’s distinction
between sterile and productive moments, which he explained with the following
vivid example:
A match once struck is consumed. If you use the match to light the gas that heats the
water for the coffee which keeps you alert on your way to work, the consumption is
not sterile, for it is a movement belonging to the circuit of capital [ . . . ]. But when a
child strikes the matchhead to see what happens – just for the fun of it – he enjoys
the movement itself, the changing colors, the light flashing at the height of the blaze,
the death of the tiny piece of wood, the hissing of the tiny flame. He enjoys these
sterile differences leading nowhere, these uncompensated losses; what the physicist
calls the dissipation of energy. (350 – 351)
The moments of stillness and movement can, at some level, be thought of as
‘sterile moments’, that, like the match struck by the child ‘to see what happens –
just for the fun of it’ can be enjoyed for themselves, for ‘the movement itself, the
changing colo[u]rs’, for their own intensity, their own sake. Distracting in their
excessiveness, they do not so much ‘follow the figure of return, that is, of the
repetition and propagation of sameness’ and coherence, their diversity is not
folded back ‘upon an identical unity’ (352), but they stick out in their intensity, an
intensity that is not balanced out, that ‘misspends’ energy. In these moments,
briefly, representation is not economised, restrained, brought back to the
commensurate and the productive, but is pointless in its excessiveness. In this
sense, the excess in Charlie’s Angels can be thought about in relation to
‘pyrotechnics’ (351), a refusal of libidinal normalisation and an opportunity for
‘the sterile consumption of energies in jouissance’ (351).

Excess and film analysis: mixing discourses

The use of the term excess – linked to spectacle, but not subsumed by it6 – raises
important conceptual and methodological issues for both my argument and the
process of film analysis more generally, and which will allow me to critically
return to Lyotard. To explore these issues further, I draw on Thompson (1986),
whose discussion, itself engaging with Stephen Heath’s work, offers the
following definition of excess:
384 S. Knox
[ . . . ] films can be seen as a struggle of opposing forces. Some of these forces strive
to unify the work, to hold it together sufficiently that we may perceive and follow its
structures. Outside any such structures lie those aspects of the work which are not
contained by its unifying forces – the ‘excess’. (130)
Dating from roughly the same time period, Thompson and Lyotard’s essays share
inclusion in Rosen’s Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology; with clear resonances
and potential for cross-pollination between the two, they deserve to be read and
discussed together more. What emerges strongly from Thompson’s writing is that
excess is a problematic concept: it implies a norm or a threshold, which would
suggest stability or fixity, while it is arbitrary, relative, and historically contingent.
The latter is particularly so because of the issue of spectatorship. Thompson (1986)
makes the following observation here:
Repeated viewings of a film are likely to increase the excessive potentials of a
scene’s components; as we become familiar with the narrative (or other principles
of progression), the innate interest of the composition, the visual aspects of the
decor, or the structure of the musical accompaniment, may begin to come forward
and capture more of our attention. The legibility has shifted for us; we now can
simply recognize the unifying narrative elements, rather than having to perceive
them for the first time. As a result, we now have time to contemplate the excessive
aspects. The function of the material elements of the film is accomplished, but their
perceptual interest is by no means exhausted in the process. (135)
That excess is linked to the perception of it as such, and that the propensity
for excess to come into being increases on repeated viewing – and indeed, for
viewing that is interested in the presence of excess – is something I have been very
aware of when writing this paper. While it has been counter-balanced to a certain
extent by my home consumption of the film subsequent to my first encounter of
Charlie’s Angels on the big screen with surround sound, this matter of course
touches on one of the fundamental issues of film analysis: the inherent instability of
film texts, which come into being in the experience of being watched, which
inevitably changes with each repeated viewing. As such, I naturally cannot resolve
this issue here, only be mindful of it and note that spectatorship remains a present
absence – or, to explicitly link to the idea of sight and blindness as evoked by
Ebert, a blind spot – in Lyotard’s essay.
Thompson (1986) further points out that notions of excess are prone to
encounter some resistance, as meaning-making, legibility, and coherence are
interwoven into dominant cultural discourses:
[M]ost viewers are determined to find a necessary function for any element [ . . . ].
For some reason, the claim that a device has no function beyond offering itself for
perceptual play is disturbing to many people. Perhaps this tendency is cultural,
stemming from the fact that art is so often spoken of as unified and as creating
perfect order, beyond that possible in nature. (133)
It is worth emphasising here that Lyotard’s and Thompson’s discussions rest on
understanding the dominant mode of cinematic production in terms of the
classical Hollywood text, but in their concern with avant-garde and experimental
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 385
film-making, both leave this notion under-explored.7 They undertake no analysis
of Hollywood films; and it would certainly be interesting to see how their
arguments might have developed had they done so. Certainly, Lyotard and
Thompson’s decision to focus on, and champion excess in, avant-garde and
experimental film-making is unsurprising. As Erlend Lavik (2008) observes, film
criticism has been marked by the apparent paradox that, while textual attributes
such as excess and/or narrative incoherence are usually perceived as failings
within Hollywood films, the same attributes are likely to be valued as positive
achievements within art cinema. This is because the latter – and note the ‘art’ in
the above quotation by Thompson – is understood as pursuing different goals.
Moreover, this is also because, I would add, the power to unsettle the mastery of
the viewer – who, facilitated by textual legibility and narrative coherence,
successfully traverses the film text – is more readily granted to art cinema; here,
any spectatorial struggle with meaning is compensated by affirmation of the
spectator’s high cultural status. The presence of excess within mainstream films
does not unproblematically yield to spectatorial reading; unsettling the notion of
spectatorial mastery, apparent ‘lapses’ of legibility and coherence are here more
likely to be pejoratively dismissed as textual failings.
My bringing together of two discourses, namely, ‘high culture’ theory and
mainstream film-making, both aligns the present paper to some extent with the
writing of Justin Wyatt (1994), Scott Bukatman (1998), Andrew Darley (2000),
and Michele Pierson (1999, 2002), and sets it apart from Lyotard and Thompson,
whose work remains ensconced within ‘high culture’. I draw on a piece of high
cultural writing by an esteemed theorist, but my intention is not driven by the wish
to benefit from the cultural status of my conceptual material. I hold that Lyotard’s
essay is stimulating and deserves to be tested out, that there is something within
Hollywood films like Charlie’s Angels that is interesting and can be articulated
through Lyotard’s ideas, and that bringing together and mixing such different
discourses can open up slippages that yield productive thinking. As I will explore
now, my mixing underlines the importance of adopting a reflexive methodology
and facilitates a re-evaluation and re-conceptualisation of Lyotard’s essay.

Re-conceptualising Lyotard: (a)cinematic moments

What is rendered visible by engagement with ‘Acinema’ is a blind spot in
Lyotard’s (and Thompson’s) approach: concerned as it is with artistic challenges
of established conventions, it simultaneously remains within established
evaluative hierarchies. It has to be said that Lyotard articulates a reductive
view of mainstream film-making within his essay. For example, his discussion of
the ‘gorgeous head of hair à la Renoir’ continues as follows:
[ . . . ] upon viewing it you find that something has come undone: all of a sudden
swamps, outlines of incongruous islands and cliff edges appear, lurching forth
before your startled eyes. A scene from elsewhere, representing nothing identifiable,
has been added, a scene not related to the logic of your shot, an undecidable scene,
386 S. Knox
worthless even as an insertion because it will not be repeated and taken up again
later. So you cut it out. (Lyotard 1986, 349– 350)
Lyotard argues that mainstream film-making either omits such potentially
challenging moments for ‘the sacred task of making itself recognizable to the
eye’ (353), or, if they do occur, these do not necessarily ‘act as real diversions or
wasteful drifts; when the final count is made they turn out to be nothing but
beneficial detours’ (353) to the representational order, submitting to ‘the same
law of a return of the same after a semblance of difference’ (353). This represents
a curiously closed down approach that, Bignell (2000, 43– 44) notes, confines
‘the progressive function of critique to a tiny corpus of avant-garde art’. This
approach must be a key reason why the essay has so far not received the critical
attention its potential deserves, and I suggest here a re-conceptualisation of
Lyotard qua Lyotard.
In ‘Acinema’, Lyotard does not articulate a nuanced process at stake within
mainstream film-making, partly because that is not part of his remit within the
scope of his essay. In his wider concern with the figural, however, Lyotard
understands the figural as a residual presence within the discursive, a libidinal
presence that can potentially burst into disruptive intensity and energy. If we
extend and apply his wider thinking to open up his argument in the ‘Acinema’
essay, it becomes possible, I would argue, to conceive of a residual presence, a
potential for an acinematic sensibility, within moments of excess in mainstream
film. This view understands capitalism (and without wishing to fall into a
reductive Marxist perspective, mainstream film) as striving towards order,
coherence, and homogeneity, because (and Lyotard would surely agree)
capitalism is itself not orderly, not coherent, not homogenous. Because
capitalism is itself not orderly, not coherent, not homogenous, it must strive for
order, and disorder can and must come through. This is the double-bind of
capitalism working to resolve its irresolvable contradictions and tensions, which
can, and inevitably do, leap out; indeed, perhaps the harder it grips, the more
likely something will leap out from its grasp.
In Charlie’s Angels, what leaps out are those moments that I have discussed,
moments that, interestingly, overtly reference the original series and so contain a
degree of recognition, legibility, and coherence, and that at the same time are also
the moments when coherence and unity are most noticeably placed under stress
within the film. Strongly located within the dominant production strategies of
contemporary Hollywood, these moments are cinematic and acinematic –
perhaps one could term them (a)cinematic – yielding to legibility and meaning-
making within the spectator’s intertextual viewing experience, and at the same
time, offering a residual presence to the spectator, a residual presence that comes
through in Ebert’s ‘eye candy for the blind’ as well as Mogilevich’s (2002, 38)
related comment ‘that one hardly needs to see the film to, in a way, have already
seen it’.
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 387
Beyond closure
This paper has been concerned to show that Lyotard’s hitherto neglected writing
on what he terms the ‘Acinema’ deserves much more attention as it has much to
offer to the study of film, especially its potential to enrich debates about spectacle
and excess. It stimulates thinking about moments in film that do not absolutely
defy legibility, meaning, and interpretation, but that are somewhat less
manageable for analysis, that ‘cannot be folded back upon the body of the film’
(Lyotard 1986, 355) unproblematically. Both Lyotard and these moments grapple
with issues fundamental to film and the study of it, and can illuminate one
another. By bringing together noticeably different sets of discourse, this paper has
worked to offer a reconceptualised perspective on a fascinating piece of writing
by an important critical theorist.
This paper ends by reiterating my invitation to others to engage with
Lyotard’s ‘Acinema’ and to test it out against other textual and spectatorial modi
operandi. Mindful of the elusive nature of film and the continual provisionality of
its study, I wish to end beyond a point of closure at which discussion comes to a
halt; indeed, there can be no closure for (a)cinematic eye candy for the blind.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Sewing Circle and the Theory Group in the Department of Film,
Theatre & Television at the University of Reading for our productive discussions, as well
as Professor Jonathan Bignell and Dr Greg Singh for their helpful comments on drafts of
this paper.

Notes
1. There are interesting links between my discussion and debates on cinephilia (see, for
example, Keathley 2006, and Sperb and Balcerzak’s 2009 edited collection), but these
are beyond the scope of this paper.
2. One of the few places where it gets attention is Bignell’s (2000) Postmodern Media
Culture, which does not test it out through textual analysis.
3. My discussion here touches, of course, on the links between (digital) cinema,
animation, and painting, which have been explored by a range of scholars, including
Lev Manovich (2001), who has argued:
[ . . . ] the manual construction of images in digital cinema represents a return to
the pro-cinematic practices of the nineteenth century, when images were hand-
painted and hand-animated. At the turn of the twentieth century, cinema was to
delegate these manual techniques to animation and define itself as a recoding
medium. As cinema enters the digital age, these techniques are again becoming
commonplace in the filmmaking process. Consequently, cinema can no longer
be clearly distinguished from animation. It is no longer an indexical media
technology but, rather, a subgenre of painting. (295)
This return to a foregrounding of film’s links to painting and animation is discernible
in Charlie’s Angels even before the start of the ‘film proper’: as the Columbia studio
logo appears, the camera moves into one of the logo’s painted clouds, which then
transforms into a ‘live’ cloud, and the camera continues its way into the plane. With
388 S. Knox
the use of manga and anime’s floating hair motif, and the Angels’ ‘kung fu’-style
posing and shouting bringing to mind Hong Kong Phooey rather than the tradition of
Hong Kong martial arts cinema to which the film’s DVD extras are so keen to refer,
the link between film and animation has a bearing on this film, which does not strive
for verisimilitude or to create a transparency of style.
4. See Marc O’Day (2004) for a discussion of Charlie’s Angels as a proponent of ‘the
contemporary action babe cinema’. I wish to make two observations. Firstly, the
moments of hair-flicking are just too excessive to be a straightforward objectification,
drawing attention to themselves and to the fact that the film is pulled between
constructing agentic female subjects who enjoy themselves, and incorporating them
into the ideological givens of patriarchal consumer culture. The film tries to cope with
its misogynist premise without appearing ‘unattractively feminist’; it is caught within
this contradiction, a contradiction which it cannot – and does not want to – resolve and
which comes through – and as such cannot be smoothed over – in these excessive
moments. Secondly, the contradiction within the film has a resonance within gender-
related tensions that mark the television series: Charlie’s Angels (ABC, 1976– 1981)
has divided critics including Ellen Seiter (1985) and John Fiske (1989) about its gender
politics, and Susan J. Douglas (1995, 216) has argued that the show’s success was very
much due to how it placed ‘feminism and antifeminism [ . . . ] in perfect suspension’.
5. Lavik (2008) furthermore points out the particular genre dimensions within which
spectacle – narrative debates have been mostly conducted.
6. See Lavik (2008) for a discussion of the broad differences between spectacle and
excess, and how these terms are evoked in different cultural discourses.
7. In this, their work is not alone; indeed, spectacle – narrative debates have noted a
general tendency within film criticism to rely on the supposedly stable, coherent, and
orderly ‘classical Hollywood text’ with its codes and conventions of representational
realism. King (2000, 4) here rightly argues that ‘[t]he coherence, or drive towards
coherence, often ascribed to classical Hollywood films can be a product of a particular
kind of critical reading rather than a quality of the text itself’. The chicken-and-egg-
ness of this issue of how we can know what the classical Hollywood text is when
this is partly produced by our reading of it (and our conditioning to read it as such),
is a conundrum already familiar from genre theory, and one I shall, of course, leave
unresolved here.

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