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Film Theory
Film Theory
richard rushton

I have chosen six titles on which to focus here for the years 2013–14: two
significant works on Jean-Luc Godard’s later films—Late Godard and the
Possibilities of Cinema by Daniel Morgan (UCalP [2013]) and Jean-Luc Godard:
Cinema Historian by Michael Witt (IndianaUP [2013]); D.N. Rodowick’s
genealogy of contemporary film theory, Elegy for Theory (HarvardUP [2014]);
Sarah Cooper’s investigation of the term ‘soul’ and its relation to cinema in
The Soul of Film Theory (Palgrave [2013]); Adrian Martin’s journey through
film technique and interpretation in Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical
Hollywood to New Media Art (Palgrave [2014]); and finally Kristen Whissel’s
attempt to theorize contemporary Hollywood in Spectacular Digital Effects:
CGI and Contemporary Cinema (DukeUP [2014]). The chapter is divided into
five sections: 1. Late and Historical Godards; 2. Elegy for Theory; 3. The
Soul of Film Theory; 4. Mise en Scène and Film Style; 5. Spectacular Digital
Effects.

1. Late and Historical Godards

Morgan’s Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema is very much an enquiry
into the theoretical stakes of Godard’s post-Suave qui peut (le vie) (1979)
output. Its remit is framed by the question of what theoretical differences
there are between the late works of Godard and those which precede it. If
the earlier works can be associated with the influence of Brecht, political
modernism and a certain tendency for politics per se, then Morgan is
adamant that the shift for late Godard is one that places emphasis on aspects
of aesthetics. Featured here is a questioning of what cinema is and what its
possibilities, futures and pasts might be. Additionally, for Morgan, this is not
a matter of Godard turning away from politics, but is instead a rearticulation
of the terms of politics.
Morgan charts the Romantic lineage of Godard’s aesthetics, so that Kant,
Hegel and other German idealists emerge as foundational for Godard’s

The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, 23 ß The English Association (2015)
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234 | Film Theory

aesthetic practices. (Morgan additionally pays great attention to the specifics

of Godard’s late practices, such as the use of dissolves and focus pulls;
pp. 49–54.) All of this leads to a defence of Godard’s ‘turn to nature’ in
the later films, so that one trio of films is associated with the sublime and the
sky (Sauve qui peut, Prenom Carmen [1983], Passion [1982]) while a subsequent
set is allied with the beautiful and the earth (Soigne ta Droite [1987], Nouvelle
Vague [1990], Allemagne 90 neuf zéro [1991]).
Again all of this might be seen merely as a prelude to the crucial dis-
tinction Morgan finds: in the late works Godard turns to painting rather than
photography as the guiding aesthetic for his films. In doing so, Godard
accomplishes a number of things: what he primarily turns away from is
cinema’s reliance on an indexical relation to the real, but allied with this
is a further complication of cinema’s documentary relation to history. Finally,
a conception of cinema as painting also allows Godard to formulate a con-
ception of projection as fundamental for expressing ‘the possibilities of
cinema’ (as the title of Morgan’s book puts it). All in all, Morgan claims
when discussing some specific Godardian methods, ‘[t]hese techniques draw
attention to the appearance of the image and our experience of it, focusing
not on its referential relation to the world, but on the form of its presenta-
tion’ (p. 159). Or, more elaborately, Morgan writes that: ‘Direct reference
on its own, [Godard] seems to be saying, doesn’t give us the world in the
right way; the important relations between film and world have to be
produced, achieved’ (p. 162). Morgan states all this in accord with the
photograph of Richmond, Virginia, laid waste by the American Civil War
that Godard remarks on in Notre Musique [2004]. And the point is clear: the
photographic reference does little ‘on its own’; rather, the image by neces-
sity has to be worked on, worked over, ‘achieved’.
The central theme of Late Godard is that of projection. Morgan constantly
emphasizes Godard’s defence of cinema as projection, especially as such a
concept contrasts with television’s reductions of projection to transmission
(see especially pp. 205–8). (Michael Witt takes up these arguments too in
Cinema Historian.) Projection relates to a number of provocative theses by
which Godard is seen to defend a notion of art against that of ‘culture’
(p. 198), of the image as creation or constellation (p. 233), of a ‘capacity
to judge’ (p. 187), of a-chronological time (p. 242) and ‘off-screen time’
(p. 249ff). Perhaps the essence of what Morgan is trying to articulate occurs
on the final couple of pages of the book, again with reference to Notre
Musique. Projection, as much as montage and as much as history, is a way
of trying to discern how to ‘be two’. Morgan describes this as a process of
‘bringing two things together, holding them up against one another, and then
 Film Theory | 235

judging them’ (p. 261). Godard then takes up this method explicitly by
contrasting production stills of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell from
Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1941). And yet, as Godard states in Notre
Musique, Hawks fails here because he merely ‘shows the same thing twice’
(quoted p. 262). And such a claim might just take us to the heart of the
method of late Godard: projection (and montage and history) are a matter of
putting two things together that do not or cannot go together so that then
one can try to think through the consequences of that incongruity. It is a
matter, then, of trying to discern how something can ‘be two’. If montage is
a bringing together of images, then such images are not brought together
so they can be ‘one’; rather, Godard’s method is one of dividing and
multiplying.
Morgan also tackles, for much of Late Godard, the question of history. It is
here that the questions of montage and projection are again key concerns.
Across the range of films from Allemagne 90 neuf zéro onwards, Godard
follows an approach to history—including the history of cinema—which
refuses explanation or reduction so as to embrace a ‘complex creation of
historical knowledge’ (p. 212). Such a history—histoire—does not reduce
history but expands it, opens it up. Crucially, Morgan tries to tackle Jacques
Rancière’s strong criticisms of Godard’s approach in Histoire(s) du cinéma.
Ranciere’s critique functions on two fronts: firstly, that Godard takes histor-
ical clips entirely out of context so that he can, then, secondly, make those
clips conform to his own, personal, restricted view of history and cinema
history. Morgan counters Rancière by declaring him rather too quick to
judge. Instead of reducing history to his own narrative, Morgan claims,
Godard is opening up and dividing history—and film history—from
within itself. Thus, when commenting on the sequences on Alfred
Hitchcock from episode 4A of Histoire(s)—sequences central to Ranciere’s
critique—Morgan defends Godard’s approach by declaring that the images
and the voiceover are entirely inconclusive, and that Godard’s assessment of
Hitchcock must therefore be ambivalent. And furthermore, such ambiva-
lence is precisely what history itself is: it is impossible to contain. For
Morgan, that is what history can be. And: ‘That’s ok,’ he contends (p. 176).
These are compelling arguments, and Morgan approaches them with care
and subtlety. Michael Witt’s Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema Historian is, like
Morgan’s book, a survey that focuses on Godard’s late works. In Witt’s
book the question of history takes centre stage. Where Morgan is perhaps
overly praiseworthy of Godard’s openness and penchant for ambiguity, Witt
cuts directly to the chase: he provides a remarkably concise account of what
cinema history is for Godard, and from this point an entire picture of the
236 | Film Theory

history of the twentieth century (and beyond) is formed. For Godard, the
history of cinema goes something like this: It is underpinned by an equation
between cinema and montage, and it hinges on a conviction that the silent
cinema, in its best forms, had drawn on all the other arts to create something
unique and sublime. During the 1930s, however, the rise of the talking
picture turned cinema away from its former grandeur in the pursuit of
profit. The Second World War definitively sealed cinema’s fate: the inability
of cinema to counter Nazism or to document the Holocaust were sins from
which the cinema could barely recover. The emergence of television then
reduced the possibilities of cinema even more. Today, cinema can pretty
much only ever provide us with a ‘memory of montage’, and this is precisely
what Godard tries to do in Histoire(s) du cinéma.
What, then, is montage? Like Morgan, Witt makes Godardian montage a
key theme. By way of montage the cinema enables disparate images to be
placed side-by-side in ways that invariably create an association between
them: connection, disjunction, shock, and anything else. The cinema created
this notion of montage in a way that no other art form had. The memory of
montage Godard creates in Histoire(s) is thereby also an experiment in the
coming together of montage and history, or more precisely, of montage
as history. All of this adds up to a conception of montage that is not
merely one that relates to specific cinematic materials—shots, frames,
images, sound—but also to relations between historical events, between
people, between spectator and image, image and world, and so on.
Much of this history can be summed up by Godard’s hostility towards
television. Where he associates cinema with montage, projection and revela-
tion, he associates television with ‘unlearning’ how to see (p. 170). If cinema
is projection, then television is merely programming. With television the
image is reduced and made irrelevant: seeing is eclipsed by speech and
language, and the image is there only as an illustrator for language. But
Witt takes us further into Godard’s critique here: with television a whole
visual repertoire of cinema is undone; there is a lack of attention to framing,
to the duration of shots, to scene composition and, perhaps most crucially,
television brings with it the disappearance of a sense of history (p. 176).
And, in the end, for Godard, the experiences of cinema and television are
entirely different: ‘experiencing films with strangers in the darkened theater
away from one’s family (and the transgressive promise of that experience),
and watching television at home’: the transgressive, open, public promise of
cinema is closed down and domesticated by television (p. 178).
Alongside this Witt articulates Godard’s distinction between cinema and
films. By ‘cinema’ Godard means something like an overarching sense that
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the films one goes to see and which have a life in a culture are things that also
shape that sense which a culture has of itself. A culture or nation that could
be defined as cinematic would be one that values those principles of projec-
tion, revelation and montage that the best films can provide. In other words,
cinema does not merely mean ‘the films one goes to see’ but it additionally
means the constellation and composition of the world that arises from a film
culture that cinematizes (my word) the world. By contrast, films are merely
those isolated things—call them commodities—that one might go to see, but
which have little bearing on the life and times of a culture. Films, then,
might just be one of the many things that add up to a generalized eclecticism
of contemporary culture: to eat at McDonalds, then go to the movies, then
listen to the Top 40 on the radio and watch a talk show on TV. For Godard,
today we still have films, but we do not have cinema; ‘We make films,
but not cinema,’ he declared in the 1980s (p. 140).
Witt takes readers on a journey through Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma
project from its initial conception, through its production trials and tribula-
tions, through its ancillary works (such as Je vous salue, Sarajevo (1993) or
De l’origine du XXIe siècle (2000)), while also charting the myriad influences
on the project, from historians—Michelet, Braudel, Péguy, Walter
Benjamin, and others—to art historians—Élie Faure, André Malraux—
cinema historians—Henri Langlois above all—found-footage essayists such
as Guy Debord, all the way through to significant cinematic influences such
as Welles, Cocteau, Bresson and Hitchcock.
What then is history for Godard? History is pretty much equated with a
conception of montage, but a conception of montage that privileges dialec-
tics, ‘constellation’, reconciliation and rapprochement (Witt pp. 181–3;
Morgan makes similar arguments, for example, p. 233). Such approaches
to montage foreground what Witt, after Godard, calls images in order that
the image be distinguished from mere representations or pictures. The image
emerges as a profound conception for Godard; it expresses a ‘combination,
tension, and dynamic interplay among a number of component elements’
(p. 180).
Overall, Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema Historian is quite simply a brilliant book,
a sustained meditation on Godard’s approach to history and his Historie(s) du
cinéma, but also an extraordinary summation of Godard’s entire career. Witt
seems to have an expert knowledge of pretty much all of Godard’s output
and is a master of the critical literature. Together with Morgan’s Late Godard,
scholars now have definitive surveys of Godard’s post-1979 works. Both
books prove that Godard remains a constant challenge for every considera-
tion of cinema.
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2. Elegy for Theory

If the publication of two books on the later works of Jean-Luc Godard is a
reason for celebration for film scholars, then so too is the much anticipated
publication of D.N. Rodowick’s Elegy for Theory. Rodowick’s book meticu-
lously charts ninety or more years of reflecting on film, all from the per-
spective of a central question: how did film theory become film theory?
In reflecting on this question Rodowick takes readers on a journey through
some of the formative writers of what might—or might not—be called film
theory: Canudo, Kracauer, the Lukács of Theory of the Novel (1920), Bazin,
the filmology movement in France (Aristarco, Cohen-Séat, Souriau), while
also commenting on the rise of conceptions of aesthetics in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries (Baumgarten, Kant, Hegel).
By the middle of Elegy for Theory Rodowick arrives at the key moment:
the publication of Christian Metz’s ‘Le cinéma: langue or langage?’ in 1964.
It is here that Rodowick discovers something quite extraordinary. The
second half of Metz’s article is devoted to questions of the potential applica-
tion of linguistics to the analysis of films and cinema—and Metz is rightly
remembered for his contributions to film semiotics. But something else is
going on the first half of the article: Metz is, Rodowick argues, reconceiving
the entire history of film writing in order to invent what will come to be
known as film theory. ‘[T]he implicit concern of the first half,’ writes
Rodowick, ‘is to review the history of film theory and to construct an
idea of what it means to have a theory’ (p. 178). Metz is doing this,
Rodowick emphasizes, from the perspective of there being no existing
sense of what film theory was, is, or could be. ‘Metz tries to put in place
a vision or concept of theory that does not yet exist as such,’ writes
Rodowick, ‘and at the same time reflects continually on the value of such
an enterprise’ (p. 179). What Metz tries to tackle in this formative essay,
then, is the issue that film theory, in the sense Metz wants to give it, does not
have a history and in another sense, therefore, does not exist. Metz wants to
give it a history and therefore create this thing called film theory; he wants
to—and does—bring film theory into existence.
If that is not enough, then Rodowick discovers more. Metz might very
well be associated with the project of language and cinema or a semiotics of
cinema, but from the very beginning—‘langue or langage’ was his first
published article—Metz recognized that structural linguistics could never
provide an adequate theory of film. The basic point Metz tries to confront is
that language—words, speech—is divorced from the real in ways that the
cinematographic image is not. As Rodowick explains it: ‘Even from a
 Film Theory | 239

semiological perspective, Metz’s bets for a new film theory, indeed for
modern theory as such, are placed on the real, or at least a certain image
of the real’ (p. 187). And the real of cinema rubs up against the semiotic
programme: in short: ‘The image is in conflict with language’ (p. 187).
Therefore, the other methodology that Metz insists on acknowledging is
that of phenomenology; it is the link with phenomenology that forever
keeps the cinema away from language. Even more emphatically:
‘Linguistics [. . .] points the way to showing what film is not,’ writes
Rodowick, but at the same time it also points the way to ‘what it is, a
language or discourse of art’ (p. 196).
Rodowick argues that Metz, in founding something called film theory, had
always conceived of that theoretical project as an open one devoted both to
innovation and critique. The remainder of Elegy for Theory then tries to
review the progress of film theory during the 1970s and 1980s, particularly
under the weight of the notion of ideology derived from Louis Althusser.
The sense of ‘theoretical practice’ derived from Althusser was central to the
film theoretical project, and such a practice was devoted to analysing the
world—and cinema—with the goal of transforming that world—and of
transforming the cinema along with it. If nothing else, Althusser emphasized
above all that theory matters. Rodowick is full of praise: ‘Althusser’s concept
of Theory remains strongly present, if often unrecognized as such, in almost
every instance of contemporary theory’ (p. 246).
Finally, then, what comes after theory (or after Theory)? Much of
the point of Rodowick’s book is to question the critics of theory—those
advocates of Post-Theory (for example, D. Bordwell and N. Carroll (eds),
Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (UWisconsinP [1995]))—while at the
same time offering up something of a prelude to his own conception of what
might come after theory. The hints Rodowick gives are that a gesture
towards philosophy might be one way to carve out a destiny for theory
after theory. For that, however, readers will need to wait for a follow-up
book, Philosophy’s Artful Conversation (HarvardUP [2015]).

3. The Soul of Film Theory

Audacious, surely, for Sarah Cooper to have come up with the idea of
investigating the uses of ‘soul’ in film theory. Any conception of the soul
can only be well past its use-by date, for no one rightly believes in such a
thing nowadays. Such was my scepticism in approaching Cooper’s book. And
that also sums up much of her point in The Soul of Film Theory, for Cooper
wants to investigate the stakes of what film studies might have repressed or
240 | Film Theory

forgotten by having buried and abandoned notions of soul. Quite extraor-

dinary to note is just how often notions of soul were crucial for theorizations
of film up until the 1960s, so Cooper promises to revisit such theories with
fresh eyes, not in order to then come up with a new theory of ‘filmic soul’,
but rather to think through some potential gaps and shortcomings in con-
temporary film theory that might benefit from some soulful reflection.
Driving Cooper’s arguments is the contention that film studies has been
too dependent on theories of the mind or consciousness, certainly since the
influences of semiotics and psychoanalysis from the 1960s onwards.
Furthermore, if there has been something of a turn towards theories of
the body and embodiment in recent theorizations of cinema, then perhaps
too these approaches have underplayed the importance of something spiritual
or immaterial in the cinematic experience. So the intervention of ‘soul’
marks, for Cooper, something of a mediation between mind and body. It
is here that Cooper hopes to make a mark on contemporary theories of film.
Much of The Soul of Film Theory is devoted to charting the history of the
uses of soul in writings about film, and to this degree Cooper crosses some
of the terrain also is covered by Rodowick’s Elegy for Theory, though from a
markedly different perspective. Cooper moves from the spiritualism and
‘inner life’ of Hugo Münsterberg’s The Photoplay (1915), through the fore-
grounding of soul in conceptions like photogénie in the writings (and films) of
the French Impressionists (Epstein, Dulac, Gance), while also investigating
German writers on silent cinema such as Sigfried Kracauer. Cooper also
introduces other less familiar writers like Émile Vuillermoz in France, whose
reflections on film were very much indebted to the philosophy of Henri
Bergson, as well as Walter S. Bloem in Germany, who privileged notions of
emotion and feeling as indicators of soul (though Cooper also admits to the
possibility of an underlying fascism in such conceptions). Other prominent
theorists tackled notions of cinematic soul, and Cooper duly acknowledges
the contributions of Canudo and Balázs, with especial emphasis on the
latter’s equation between the soul and the cinematic close-up, all the
while stopping occasionally at specific films—with Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul
(1926) of particular interest.
Cooper also notes the specifically religious turn taken by certain phe-
nomenologists during the 1940s and 1950s, and a good deal of space is
granted to the writings of Amédée Ayfre and Henri Agel. These theories
unfolded within the context of the film criticism of André Bazin, on the one
hand, and the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, on the other. The
claims here are strong ones, so that Ayfre argues for a conception of cine-
matic soul that is a combination of idealism and materialism insofar as the
 Film Theory | 241

soul will always be cinematically expressed by the body: bodies are mirrors
of the soul. For Agel, in a similar manner, the cinema can show us the soul of
things because it can provide perceptual access to the delicate and hidden
details of everyday phenomena.
Such arguments are built upon from a far less religious perspective, and
thus in a more scientific spirit, by Edgar Morin in the 1950s—Morin is
another French writer of the period who makes ‘soul’ of central concern in
his writings on cinema. Morin takes the bold step of not merely concentrat-
ing on cinematic expression, but also on the relationship between the spec-
tator and the screen. Here, the transfer between the spectator’s soul and the
screen becomes paramount, and Morin’s rhetoric again stresses emotion and
feeling, with emanations of a ‘magico-affective zone’ (p. 91), ‘affective parti-
cipation’ (p. 93) and a ‘rational-affective system’ (p. 95) all drawn into the
theorization of cinematic soul. Christian Metz enters the discussion where
Morin exits and, although Cooper wants to claim that ‘Morin’s definition of
the soul bears a striking resemblance to the imaginary realm of Metz’s
account’ (p. 102)—noting, of course, the important influence of Morin’s
Cinema, or the Imaginary Man (1956) on Metz’s writings—she also wants to
mark the emergence of structuralism, semiotics and psychoanalysis in film
theory as marking a definitive end to explorations of cinematic soul.
Why did film theory abandon the soul? The main reason, argues Cooper,
is that it erased the body by privileging the mind and the psyche and by
foregrounding structures of meaning. By the 1990s, the body was brought
back in to film theory—Steven Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body (UMinnesotaP
[1993]), Vivian Sobchack’s Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience
(PrincetonUP [1992]), Laura Marks’s The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema,
Embodiment, and the Senses (DukeUP [2000])—but even here there was no
place for soul. Cooper thus ventures back to the phenomenology of
Merleau-Ponty and there she finds a very sympathetic approach to the
soul that has been removed from contemporary speculations on phenomen-
ology and film. The main enemy in these musings is rational thought, for the
soul, Cooper writes, is the enemy of rational thought and reflection, and,
against such mind-based rationalism Cooper finds in Merleau-Ponty the
possibility of a material, embodied encounter that suspends rational thought.
It is in this way that a novel conception of cinematic soul could potentially be
theorized.
The final chapter of Cooper’s book takes up this challenge in relation to
contemporary film theory, with her theoretical-philosophical markers being,
for the most part, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy. The former has,
of course, long been associated with the films of the Dardenne brothers,
242 | Film Theory

while the latter has been associated with Claire Denis’s films, and Cooper
explores these connections while trying also to figure out the relations
between body and soul at work there. Finally, there is a quite extraordinary
series of reflections on the writings of Henri Bergson—whom Cooper gets
to by way of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books—especially of an interview on
cinema with Bergson from 1914 and a lecture on ‘Body and Soul’ from
1912.
For all its attempts to concentrate on soul, The Soul of Film Theory must
nevertheless be positioned as a work that champions the body and phenom-
enological philosophy. Its clear enemy is rational thought and the psyche,
especially as these rose to prominence in film theory between the 1960s and
the 1980s. Of course, rather startlingly, Cooper overlooks the fact that
psyche is itself a conception of soul—‘soul’ is the most common way to
interpret the Greek term, psyche. And Cooper could look no further than
Freud himself for a complex and intricate theorization of soul, and perhaps
along with it, Julia Kristeva’s impressive New Maladies of the Soul (Fayard
[1993]), written very much from a psychoanalytic perspective. Cooper does
mention Freud’s use of Seele (pp. 12–13) and the Greek term psyche (p. 7) as
well as Kristeva’s book (p. 104), but somehow these are never considered
together in terms that might produce a theory of the soul. Cooper’s book
seems to eradicate all traces of psyche from the soul, and this might be its
greatest fault. Alongside such reservations is Cooper’s reluctance to ascribe
any sort of history to conceptions of the soul so that Michel Foucault’s
probing critique of the way that the meaning of soul was transferred from
a religious to a secular context in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is
absent from Cooper’s account. Foucault’s point, primarily in Discipline and
Punish (Gallimard [1975]), was that a new conception of soul as an interior
moral conscience was the harbinger of modern forms of self-discipline and
self-surveillance, forms of moral rectitude and self-denial. From such a
perspective, conceptions of soul might just be ones that offer only modes
of modern self-imprisonment and repression. Thus, there is a pretty strong
part of this reader that thinks perhaps conceptions of cinematic soul are best
treated with the utmost caution.

4. Mise en Scène and Film Style

Adrian Martin’s Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New
Media Art brings with it the promise of reinventing the term mise en scène in
ways that will make it relevant and useful for the analysis of film style and for
discussions of the destiny of cinema more generally. Martin bemoans the fact
 Film Theory | 243

that discussions of mise en scène are mired either in a traditionalist stance that
foregrounds profilmic reality, the long take and depth of field à la Bazin, or
they are so confused and ambiguous that mise en scène ends up meaning both
nothing and everything. With such dilemmas in mind, Martin sets about
defining more clearly a range of options for mise en scène analysis which his
book then tries to make good on. Ultimately, Mise en Scène and Film Style can
be seen as something of a guide to the many and varied ways of thinking and
writing about mise en scène, and Martin admirably takes readers on a range of
journeys through the myriad possibilities, hopes and dreams of cinema from
the perspective of mise en scène.
What, then, is mise en scène for Martin? It is many things (perhaps too
many): style and stylistic patterns (p. 4), the materiality of film rather than
story or content or meaning (p. 4), affect (p. 18), spatio-temporal relation-
ships (p. 19); it encompasses editing (p. 55), it embraces textual analysis
(end of Chapter 2), the long take (p. 78), aspects of sound, speech and voice
(Chapter 6); it advocates links with the real world, of social and cultural
codes—what Martin dubs ‘social mise en scène’ (Chapter 7); it defends
audiovisual layering, especially as this pertains to contemporary television,
Reality TV and internet films (Chapter 8). Finally, in Chapter 9 of the book,
Martin theorizes a new notion of the dispositif, which he tries to distance
from earlier conceptions of apparatus, appareil and dispositif—especially that
of Jean-Louis Baudry from the early 1970s—in order to focus on a concep-
tion of the ‘contraption’. Martin claims that the dispositif is a key factor in
contemporary adventurous filmmaking and that it is a matter of conceiving of
the filmmaking process in terms of a game that has specific rules. In other
words, a filmmaker like Abbas Kiarostami will often set out to make a film
according to specific constraints in order to then see what will come of it—
for example, Ten (2000) is filmed entirely from digital cameras mounted in
front of a car’s windscreen, or Shirin (2008) is composed entirely of shots of
people (women) who are themselves watching a film (an imaginary film,
more to say). Martin’s point is that these kinds of films are very much
experiments in mise en scène: they play with, explore and push the boundaries
of film style.
Do I have reservations? Yes. Throughout Mise en Scène and Film Style an
opposition between ‘classical’ film style and its other—a more ‘adventurous’
style of filmmaking—is utilized in order to ensure film style is prioritized
over anything else it is that films might do. Especially and above all, film
style—and mise en scène analysis—is placed above anything in film that has to
do with merely ‘telling a story’. This is most clearly brought out in the
distinction between expressive and excessive that frames the book’s second
244 | Film Theory

chapter. Classical cinema, Martin uncontroversially argues, favours organic

unity and a coherence which provides ‘the illusion of a given fictional world’
(p. 23). Hence, style in classical cinema is typically in the service of expres-
sion: style merely assists, helps, or emphasizes a film’s content. Martin wants
mise en scène to do more than this, however: he wants it to be excessive.
In other words, he wants films where style does not merely serve content or
story, but instead becomes an end in itself. The options therefore become
straightforward: if a film’s style merely expresses a story, then that film can
be regarded as ‘simple’—at any rate, such a film can be declared to be
pursuing strategies of containment and determination (p. 24). Against such
simple strategies of containment, Martin favours strategies that are open,
polysemic (p. 33). Thus, a discussion of Vivre sa vie (1962) emphasizes its
polysemic aspects, that it is impossible to reduce the film to this or that
particular meaning (pp. 35–6); or a discussion of Le Mépris (1963) declares
that it is about ‘disrupting the conventions of mise en scène’ (pp. 79–81).
Even when Martin comes face to face with classicism, he declares that it
works, yes, but that it does not have to, and that a mannerist option à la Tony
Scott provides an approach to mise en scène that is well in excess of story or
thematic meaning (p. 103ff).
By the time the end of the book is reached, readers have certainly been
taken on an exhilarating journey. Martin’s knowledge of films, film history
and film scholarship is extraordinary; his analyses are brimming with
nuanced, detailed observation and sophisticated commentary. The book
does end, however, with a range of binary oppositions that are well worn
in film studies: the future hope of cinema lies well away from the dark halls
of the public cinema space beyond the home (that space of ‘projection’ so
cherished by Jean-Luc Godard), for such spaces only provide what Martin
calls ‘pre-programmed assemblies’ (pp. 203–4). Instead hope lies in an
expanded cinema of multiple panels (p. 204), for such polysemic, open
space ‘frees the viewers’ minds and lets their emotions roam’, Martin
declares (p. 204). At stake in such an opposition is a range of distinctions
that structure Martin’s arguments throughout Mise en Scène and Film Style:
complexity is much better than simplicity; freedom is better than imprison-
ment (Martin reprises the denigration of cinema as a simile of the cave); the
multiple is better than the linear/singular; foregrounding or intransitivity is
better than narrative illusion. To put it somewhat starkly, we are very much
back to Peter Wollen’s seminal distinctions between cinema’s cardinal sins
and virtues, first expressed in 1972 in an article on Godard’s Vent d’Est
(1972) (Wollen, Peter. ‘Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d’Est’. In
B. Nichols, Movies and Methods Volume II. UCalP [1985] pp. 500–9). For all
 Film Theory | 245

its novelty—Martin’s book is full of a love of cinema and a delicacy of

thought rarely seen in film studies—the arguments proposed in Mise en
Scène and Film Style tend to repeat some long-standing oppositions in film
theory.

5. Spectacular Digital Effects

If Martin’s book seems to me rather too anxious to preserve a ‘style versus
story’ hierarchy, then perhaps what is so impressive about Kristen Whissel’s
Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema is the way she manages
to fully integrate a range of cinematic concerns in terms of style, content,
theme, story and character. ‘[D]igital visual effects,’ she writes early in the
book, ‘are deployed with greater integration into and involvement with
narrative, plot, setting, and development of character psychology’ (p. 5).
‘Rather than disrupt or arrest narrative,’ Whissel reiterates in the book’s
conclusion:
and rather than function in a mode of discontinuity, the spectacular
digital effects discussed in this book rely heavily on dialogue, nar-
rative, and characterization in order to function emblematically in the
films in which they appear. (p. 173)
Here, then, style is not subordinate to content or story—it is not merely
expressive; rather, style and content work together, coherently, and often in
complex ways.
Whissel organizes her arguments by way of what she calls ‘effects
emblems’. She gets the idea (and I admit this aspect of the book had me
baulking more than once) from a Renaissance book of emblems—Andrea
Alciati’s Emblematum Liber (1531)—in order to argue that the visual effects of
contemporary cinema function as ‘emblems’, that is, visual figures that
crystallize a problematic or theme of particular significance. An effects
emblem is a process of signification that gives allegorical expression to a
film’s key themes. From this starting point—and make no mistake, Whissel’s
gamble with ‘emblems’ succeeds—Spectacular Digital Effects works its way
through four significant tropes that go a long way towards defining the stakes
of contemporary cinematic special effects.
Chapter One details notions of verticality; that is, films that use extreme
heights and depths which either defy or exploit gravity (or both) to explore
and elaborate their thematic concerns. And for the most part, the vertical
axis is a marker of success, that is, of a protagonist’s upward mobility or
their fall from grace:
246 | Film Theory

Whereas a protagonist’s upward verticality is frequently associated

with a (rebellious) leap toward a new future, the downward verti-
cality of the long fall is inseparable from the rapid approach of an
inevitable end. (p. 27)
The vertical extremes are also tied to the past and future in various ways,
and so too are they related to the economic polarizations of contemporary
life (‘high’ and ‘low’ incomes), but also to military or religious extremes
(the World Trade Center as an ideological high). Whissel convincingly argues
her case in relation to Titanic (1997), The Matrix (1999), Avatar (2009),
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and several other films.
Chapter Two focuses on what Whissel calls the ‘digital multitude’; that is,
the digital reproduction of huge crowds of people or swarms of creatures, boats,
spaceships, and so on. These multitudes are most often ‘emblems of apocalypse’
(p. 70), for they are typically composed of creatures that have entirely lost all
traces of individuality, that work as an entirely unified One, the aim of which is
to bring about the end of the world of the destruction of humankind. In order
to combat the multitude, humans must band together in one way or another—
‘the protagonists must temporarily prioritize the collective over the individual’
(p. 85)—in order to preserve the future of the planet.
Chapter Three investigates the dividing line between the animate and
inanimate, the living and the dead, that is foregrounded by digital animation
effects. Such effects bring to light contemporary anxieties over genetic
coding that have emerged hand-in-hand with computer coding over the
past several decades. Whissel argues that digitally animated creatures are
most often excessively lifelike, full of energy and life-force that seems to
endow them with more vivacity than ‘ordinary’ living creatures—think
of the velociraptors in Jurassic Park (1993) or the mummy, Imhotep, in
The Mummy (1999), the latter literally ingesting his life-force from the
flesh of others. And yet, at the same time, these excessively alive creatures
are also magnificently deadly. Such creatures are effects emblems for con-
temporary anxieties about the status of ‘life’ in an age of genetic and
technological manipulation.
Chapter Four turns to the ‘digital morphing’ prominent in special effects
films. Much of this is a celebration of the digital capacities of the medium, but
Whissel contends that such effects date back to cinema’s earliest years (with
Méliès, for example) and its classical years—Whissel devotes a great deal of
space to a discussion of Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931). The
morph works in complex ways in the digital age, for it signifies a freedom
from the constraints of biology that could promise a post-human
 Film Theory | 247

emancipation, while at the same time the morph also seems to signal a
crippling, robotic sense of constraint and control. The T-1000 character
from Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) provides an excellent example: the
T-1000 can shift and morph into any kind of substance (a promise of freedom)
but at the same time is constrained to the most one-dimensionally specific
command—to kill John Connor. Thus, the digital morph is an emblem that
gives expression to contemporary anxieties of freedom and control, human
bodies and identities, as well as those between humans and machines.
Whissel concludes Spectacular Digital Effects with a brief consideration of
how some non-blockbuster films have also used digital effects emblems, most
notably Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2010). The book’s concluding state-
ments ring true:
Effects emblems are stunning (and often computer-generated or
digitally enhanced) visual effects that give spectacular expression to
the major conceits, themes, anxieties, and desires both of the films in
which they appear and of the historical moments in which they were
produced and exhibited. (p. 171)
‘While many critical works,’ Whissel adds, ‘have defined elaborate visual
effects as either discontinuous or empty spectacle devoid of meaning [. . .],
‘‘effects emblems’’ in fact function as spectacular sites of intense and often
complex signification’ (p. 172). Spectacular Digital Effects is the finest account
I have read of cinema’s digital age.

Books Reviewed
Cooper, Sarah. The Soul of Film Theory. Palgrave. [2013] pp. 224. hb £50 ISBN 9 7802
3036 5131.
Martin, Adrian. Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New
Media Art. Palgrave. [2014] pp. 272. hb £60 ISBN 9 7811 3726 9942.
Morgan, Daniel. Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema. UCalP. [2013] pp. 304.
pb £19.95 ISBN 9 7805 2027 3337.
Rodowick, D.N. Elegy for Theory. HarvardUP. [2014] pp. 304. hb £29.95 ISBN 9 7806
7404 6696.
Whissel, Kristen. Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema.
DukeUP. [2014] pp. 213. pb £16.99 ISBN 9 7808 2235 5885.
Witt, Michael. Jean-Luc Godard: Cinema Historian. IndianaUP. [2013] pp. 288. 261
illustrations. pb $35 ISBN 9 7802 5300 7285.
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