dossier Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/55/3/413/1624562 by University of Chicago Library user on 26 December 2023 The aesthetic discourse in classical film theory D. N. RODOWICK 1 Guido Aristarco, Storia delle teoriche del film (Turin: Einaudi, 1951). I thank Francesco Casetti for leading me to this reference. To my knowledge, the first synoptic account of aesthetic writing on film was Guido Aristarco’s Storia delle teoriche del film, published in 1951.1 Given the overlapping senses of the word storia in Italian, the title of Aristarco’s pioneering book could be translated as either the ‘story’ or the ‘history’ of film theory, but the appearance of ‘theory’ in the title is equally significant. Our contemporary sense of what theory means may not derive precisely from Aristarco’s work, but his particular usage was certainly representative of a broad shift in the immediate postwar period that involved a new set of criteria for identifying theory as a concept allied to a distinct set of institutional practices. The notion that there is a ‘story of film theory’ – a coherent and perhaps teleological historical narrative that could be retroactively superimposed on the unruly critical writing on film that emerged in cinema’s first fifty years – is coincident with similar shifts in the study of art and literature. This is especially true of the emergence in comparative literature of a new domain of inquiry – the survey of critical theory in a synoptic perspective whose inaugural gesture is René Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature (1949). To this general historical perspective we owe the practice of conceptualizing courses in film, art or literary theory as occupying a single term of study, or perhaps two successive semesters. In a course on aesthetics, which might begin with Plato and conclude with Derrida, this kind of decontextualized, ahistorical and often chronological approach implicitly assumes that there is a continuous, linear and more or less unified narrative to be told about aesthetic expression and judgments of value. 413 Screen 55:3 Autumn 2014 © The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved doi:10.1093/screen/hju031 dossier Béla Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), p. 12; my translation. See also the fascinating Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory. Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Oxford: Berghahn, 2010). 414 Screen 55:3 Autumn 2014 . D. N. Rodowick . The aesthetic discourse in classical film theory Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/55/3/413/1624562 by University of Chicago Library user on 26 December 2023 2 In retrospect, it is equally curious that early on in the twentieth century, film would become associated with theory. This association is neither natural nor self-evident. One of the earliest instances of the term occurs in 1924 in Der sichtbare Mensch (Visible Man), when Béla Balázs argues that ‘Theory is, if not the helm, then at least the compass of artistic development. And only when a concept sends you in the right direction can you speak of erring. This concept – film theory – you must make for yourself.’2 The idea of theory presented here is both wonderfully contemporary yet also expressive of a very specific moment in the philosophy of art. On one hand Balázs is suggesting that in order to develop or unfold its expressive possibilities, the new art of film needs critical reflection. Criticism guides film (away from literature or theatre, perhaps) towards something like a heightened self-understanding, not only of its internal formal possibilities but also of its external cultural presentation of ‘visible humanity’. In many ways Balázs’s book can be read as a founding text of visual cultural studies, one that gives pride of place to film not simply as the art most characteristic of modernity but as a new scriptural form through which humanity comprehends itself in a post-alphabetic culture, and where literacy now means close attention to the physiognomy of things as well as people, and social as well as natural space. At the same time die Theorie des Films is not something discovered ‘from’ or ‘in’ cinema, as if there were facts there to be uncovered or brought to light. Rather it is a practice of the construction of concepts that is already curiously close to Gilles Deleuze’s observation sixty years later, in the conclusion to Cinema 2: the TimeImage, that theory is made or crafted no less than artistic expression itself. On the other hand Balázs’s text may appear contemporary to us only as the retrojection of a picture that is far too familiar, and this image may not align precisely with the one he intends. Theory seems always to have accompanied film study on its long march towards academic acceptance, which still seems barely achieved even in the twenty-first century. It is a word, concept and practice that we have taken for granted since at least the 1950s. But if we step back further from this picture or try to see it in a different light, what is now called theory might not be legible as such to someone of Balázs’s historical place and culture. In 1924, a writer with Balázs’s education and experience might well have defended film in the context and vocabulary of the philosophy of art or aesthetics. Here we need a frame or context in which theory seems alien or strange to us as a usage that is neither obvious nor self-evident. Indeed Balázs’s particular appeal to theory in 1924 was probably exceptional, and the word itself surprising in this context. This was certainly not the way in which writing on film or art was usually characterized in the 1910s (though Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel is an interesting exception). For example, in 1912 Lukács, then one of Balázs’s closest friends, published a short text entitled, ‘Gedanken zu einer Äisthetik des “Kino”’, which translates as ‘Thoughts towards a cinema aesthetics’. Reviewing Balázs’s book in 1926, Andor Kraszna-Krausz describes it as a contribution to ‘aesthetic philosophy’, and the title of his 3 Béla Balázs, ‘Der sichtbare Mensch: eine Filmdramaturgie’, Film Technik, no. 21, 16 October 1926; reprinted in Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch, p. 168. This rapprochement of ‘theory’ (Goethe’s Farbenlehre as colour theory or Schlegel’s Kunstlehre as theory of art), in an aesthetic context the term is closer to doctrine or, more accurately, a systematic poetic guiding or clarifying expression. 415 Screen 55:3 Autumn 2014 . D. N. Rodowick . The aesthetic discourse in classical film theory dossier senses of Lehre. Often translated as Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/55/3/413/1624562 by University of Chicago Library user on 26 December 2023 theory to dramaturgy also suggests a slippage with one of the German review characterizes the book as eine Filmdramaturgie.3 This terminology resonates in compelling ways with other fundamental texts of the period, such as Sergei Eisenstein’s 1929 statement, ‘A dramaturgy of film form’. In his first preface to Der sichtbare Mensch, Balázs portrays his arguments as a ‘philosophy of the art of film’ that explores questions of meaning by way of a critical account of the medium’s distinctive aesthetic features. And finally, Balázs’s best-known book in English, Theory of the Film, a collection and synthesis of texts spanning his entire career as a writer, seems never to have borne that title except in English translation. Published first in Russian in 1945 as Iskusstvo Kino (The Art of Film), in 1948 the book appeared in German as Der Film: Werden und Wesen einer neuen Kunst (Film: Growth and Character of a New Art). Yet more significantly, the Hungarian title given to this work was Filmkultúra: a film müvészetfilozófiájá (Film Culture: a Film Philosophy of Art). To complicate this picture or, alternatively, to show that a new usage of a concept of theory was setting in by 1950, it is interesting to note that the first chapter of the German version of Balázs’s book argues in its title for eine Filmästhetik (a film aesthetic), while the Hungarian version begins Az elmélet dicsérete (in praise of theory). My point here is that what we call theory today was characterized very differently throughout the long and complex history of writing on film before the end of World War II – as dramaturgy, aesthetic philosophy and the philosophy of art, if the writers bothered to characterize their work at all. Indeed the adoption of the English title Theory of Film in 1952 is already indicative of a reflex to superimpose retroactively the notion of theory on a complex range of conceptual activities that might not have characterized themselves as such. No doubt many of the best-known writers on film in the 1910s and 1920s did not think of themselves as theorists at all, at least not in the contemporary sense. Like Balázs or Lukács, students of the great nineteenth-century German tradition of aesthetics, they placed themselves, and were trying to place film, in a conceptual domain occupied by the philosophy of art. The appearance of the word ‘theory’ in 1924, then, must evoke a special case, and one that is already in tension with philosophy or the philosophy of art. At the same time, we still do not know what ‘theory’ meant in 1924 or why it should be evoked as a special case. In calling for theory as the guiding compass for the aesthetic direction of a new art form, what language-game was Balázs playing? To grapple with the genealogy of this concept does not mean erasing differences and restoring continuities, but rather making the word ‘theory’ unfamiliar again by peeling back its palimpsests of meaning. It may be useful to picture the emergence of film aesthetics in the twentieth century from the perspective of three, more or less discontinuous and open, genres. It is tempting to think of the history of film aesthetics as a sequence of thirty-year periods –1915 to 1947 for classical, 1947 to 1968 for modern, 1968 to 1996 for contemporary film theory. But this approach disregards the important overlaps, retentions and returns, the irregular continuities, and all the dotted lines, straight and curving, that thread 416 Screen 55:3 Autumn 2014 . D. N. Rodowick . The aesthetic discourse in classical film theory dossier Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/55/3/413/1624562 by University of Chicago Library user on 26 December 2023 through these three discursive series. For reasons that should soon be apparent, I shall recast this formulation as the emergence and persistence of aesthetic, structural and cultural modes of aesthetic writing on film. These are less chronological periods than distinct, though sometimes interpenetrating, enunciative modalities whose internal regularities are defined by commonalities of concept formation, institutional contexts and rhetorical strategies. Blossoming out of Hegel’s organic and typological categories, the aesthetic discourse is concerned with questions of artistic value and the delimitation of aesthetic a prioris through which film’s singularity as an art form could be identified and assessed, as well as compared with the other arts of space and of time. The structural or semiological discourse is dominated by problems of meaning or signification in relation to the image. Beginning with the filmology movement in postwar France, it is marked by the introduction of film studies to the university in the context of the human sciences, and is dominated by the influence of formalism and structuralism in the 1960s. Finally, the cultural discourse is defined by the psychoanalytic challenge to structuralism, the predominance of theories of the subject, and the problem of ideology. Periodizing the aesthetic investigation of film as classical, modern and contemporary is doubtless familiar to most students of cinema and, at first glance, may seem commonsensical. However, it is precisely the sources of this commonsense that interest me here, for there are good reasons to challenge them. To maintain productively our disorientation with respect to theory, the discontinuities of these genres of discourse must be understood from the standpoint of their institutional contexts and rhetorical strategies. But more specifically they must also be understood as distinct conceptual shifts in which the practice and activities of explanation and evaluation – ways of asking questions and anticipating answers, adapting and transforming terminology, rewriting precedent debates or repressing them – subtly but decisively shift meaning. The earliest emblematic works of the aesthetic discourse are Vachel Lindsay’s 1915 The Art of the Moving Picture and Hugo Münsterberg’s 1916 The Photoplay: a Psychological Study. During what was undoubtedly the richest and most complex period of writing on film, this discursive territory ranges from North America to France, Germany and the former Soviet Union, before returning to the USA in the last works, written in English, of Siegfried Kracauer. It includes all the dominant figures of the first fifty years of thought about film: not only Lindsay and Münsterberg, but also Ricciotto Canudo, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac, the French impressionist and surrealist writings on film, the Soviet montage schools with Lev Kuleshov, V. I. Pudovkin, Dziga Vertov, the Poetika Kino, and all of Sergei Eisenstein’s writings through his magnificent NonIndifferent Nature, Béla Balázs, Rudolf Arnheim, Erwin Panofsky, Hans Richter, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, among other important figures. Chronologically, the genre is brought to a close by the postwar writings of André Bazin (probably still the most influential texts in the University Press, 2007). 5 See in particular the discussion of genre in Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: the Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 26–34, Contesting Tears: the Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 3–14, and ‘The fact of television’, in Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), pp. 59–85. 417 Screen 55:3 Autumn 2014 . D. N. Rodowick . The aesthetic discourse in classical film theory dossier D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/55/3/413/1624562 by University of Chicago Library user on 26 December 2023 4 history of film aesthetics) and Kracauer’s Theory of Film. It is tempting to date the end of the aesthetic discourse with Bazin’s death in 1958 and the publication of Theory of Film in 1960. (Curiously, Kracauer mentions Bazin nowhere in this book despite its enormous bibliography, which nonetheless includes other important sources in French from the era of filmology.) However, this argument ignores the place of the 1971 publication of Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed, still one of the most misunderstood books, both conceptually and historically, in writing on the cinema. But as I have suggested elsewhere,4 Kracauer’s Theory of Film and Cavell’s The World Viewed stand together in their very different ways as the grand closing gestures of a certain way of thinking about film. And part of their richness, and why they remain such compelling works today, is that they represent both the closure of a certain kind of thought and the opening up of new philosophical vistas to which we still have not properly adjusted our vision. They remain, in many ways, untimely works. A period spanning nearly fifty years and two continents: which criteria would justify bringing so many diverse figures and so many conceptually rich texts together on a single territory of such geographical, linguistic and historical diversity? To begin with, this territory, and the set of criteria populating it, must be considered as open and variable. In this respect the different discursive modalities of aesthetic writing on film, individually and together, are best considered as open sets, indeed something like a genre in Cavell’s logical characterization of that concept.5 A genre, of course, must contain a definable and delimitable set of criteria according to which membership in the set can be discussed, accounted for and debated. Membership in the set does not require that each text exhibits, or conforms to, all the criteria; rather, it suffices that all members have some significant number of elements in common. The salient features of a genre, and candidacy for membership of individual texts, are therefore open-ended: new conceptual features, definitions and questions are not limitable in advance of critical evaluation. Characterizing a genre does not mean identifying a set that has been closed off in the past, nor is it about establishing a rigid typology. It requires attentiveness to both repetition and change as well as to contradiction, for genres are future-oriented, seeking change and mutation. The trick, then, is to assess and evaluate commonalities and family resemblances that persist across that repetition, which produces new members of the set until the salient elements change and recombine in such a way that a new genre emerges. The recognition of a new genre – in my example, a new discursive modality of film theorizing – equally requires tests of negation. These contests are not historically linear; the time of repetition and contestation can be lateral, moving backwards or forwards across related groups of texts or arguments. A new genre thus emerges through a process of derivation where there is no a priori standing or necessary set of features that an instance must exhibit to qualify as a member of the set. Indeed, members will emphasize or exhibit different or further 418 Screen 55:3 Autumn 2014 . D. N. Rodowick . The aesthetic discourse in classical film theory dossier Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/55/3/413/1624562 by University of Chicago Library user on 26 December 2023 features of the discursive set, and some features will inevitably sit uncomfortably within the set formed by the other members. One last feature, especially characteristic of discourses of theory and the generic transformations of aesthetic writing on film, bears mention. The emergence of a new discursive modality often suppresses its discontinuities with earlier genres by retrojecting its logic, vocabulary and conceptual structure onto earlier genres and discourses. This would be another way of characterizing generic contestation or tests of negation. For example, in his essay ‘The evolution of the language of cinema’, Bazin resituates the history of film style not as a break between the silent and sound periods but rather as a contest between ‘faith in the image’ or ‘faith in reality’. Rather than defining the technological history of cinema as a break between the silent and sound periods, one finds the ebb and flow of a constant evolution towards deep focus cinematography. Expressionism or montage are here in contest with composition in depth as a persistent stylistic option. In a founding work of the structural discourse, ‘Cinema: language or language system’, Christian Metz remaps the conceptual history of the aesthetic mode with respect to the problem of language, thus transforming the unruly preceding debates on film art as a continuous debate on the question of signification or meaning. When the cultural discourse emerges after 1968, Eisenstein or Benjamin are reread in the context of a materialist and ideological discourse that wants to recover or reconstruct a continuous history of Left aesthetics in film, thus rendering the history of film theory as a Marxist theory and history. Very often, these retrojections involve conceptual remappings and replacements of the idea of theory itself. In this respect, attention to discontinuities in the set is as important as attention to its continuities. This is crucial for understanding so-called classical film theory. Before 1950, with some few very notable exceptions, it is rare to find writing on cinema that characterizes itself as theory or theoretical. In the great variety of texts produced in this period, what might be recognized today as film history, criticism or dramaturgy blends with the conceptual innovation or invention that is more characteristic of the activities and rhetorical strategies of film theory or aesthetics. This observation still leaves unresolved, of course, the question of how to characterize logically a theory of art, or of an art form like film? Indeed, the idea of theory, and what constitutes a theory in the aesthetic, structural or cultural modes, is something of a moving target. Nevertheless, as I suggested earlier, the aesthetic discourse confronts film as a problem, above all because the new medium is perceived as sitting uncomfortably within the then current philosophical discourse of art or the aesthetic. Indeed, in the first forty years of its existence, film is testing, even negating, the ‘genre’ of art itself; its very existence and evolution throw up questions of how to settle the identity of a medium or art form, and how to value, or not, the subjective aesthetic experiences it inspires. The insistence of the questions – what is film, what is cinema? – thus demonstrate the difficulty of making film visible and intelligible as an object of explanation and evaluation, and therefore, as the object of a theory. At the same time, the Screen 55:3 Autumn 2014 . D. N. Rodowick . The aesthetic discourse in classical film theory dossier 419 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/55/3/413/1624562 by University of Chicago Library user on 26 December 2023 persistence of these ontological questions undermines confidence, as did modernism in general, in the concepts that previously assured the identity of art forms and categories of aesthetic judgment. In this manner theory, whether in film or in art, first emerges as a form of explanation in confrontation with a problem, and this problem arises because of the variability or ephemerality of the objects that writers are trying to frame or picture. What can be learned from the variety and contentiousness of writing on film, especially in the silent and early sound periods, is that here theory is less a form of unifying and systematizing a body of knowledge about an object than it is a mode of activity or conceptual engagement, a manner of interrogating one’s self and debating with others the nature of what counts as a medium, or a new medium, and how to describe its subjective effects and cultural significance. There is also the question of responding to larger historical pressures being brought to bear on the concept of art in general, as Benjamin was so well aware. In my account, this observation turns the aesthetic discourse neither towards theory nor away from it. These writings are neither pretheoretical nor another kind of theory or alternative to theory. Could the early experience of film have been accounted for otherwise? My concern, rather, is to outline how the ontological force of the new medium confronts writers struggling to comprehend the experience of modernity through their experience of film. The wild inventiveness of the aesthetic discourse was a continuing and contradictory response to the perceptual and conceptual vertigo elicited not only by the novelty of the medium but also by the velocity with which it was continually reinventing itself and responding dynamically to larger historical and cultural forces. At the same time we need to be attentive to the deeper and more complex genealogical network of concepts that thread through these writings philosophically, linking them in direct or indirect lines, if not errant displacements, to wider debates in the philosophy of art. It is important, firstly, to recognize in the aesthetic mode the conceptual and rhetorical form of the systematic aesthetics of the nineteenth century, especially in German philosophy, that would have formed the philosophical background of most of the writers. Here definitions of the medium or genre of art are motivated by criteria that delimit and typify major artistic forms such as poetry, music, dance, painting, sculpture and architecture, often in ways that reproduce, explicitly or implicitly, the idealist system of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetic and its promulgation in the late nineteenth century in the works of Bernard Bosanquet and others. In most characteristic accounts, the aesthetic, or what counts as an instance or medium of art, is thus framed by enunciative a prioris that define the horizon of all that can be said or thought within this discursive register. These are the conceptual grounds of the discourse, which include: the criterion of self-identity (that the existence of a medium of art must be typified as a pure genre); the criterion of substantial selfsimilarity (that each genre of art is produced from a medium, here defined as a single substance or a closed set of qualities); and the definition of unique 6 See, for example, D. N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 30–44, and The Virtual Life of dossier an ‘injunctive argument’, whereby the definition of media requires an exclusiveness – deriving from their substantial similarities and aesthetic a prioris – that discourages or prohibits uses contrary to those criteria. In my account, the injunctive criterion was not as widespread or consistent as Carroll seems to believe, and it is contrary to my characterization of both discursive and artistic genres as open and variable. This essay is adapted from D. N. Rodowick, Elegy for Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 420 Screen 55:3 Autumn 2014 . D. N. Rodowick . The aesthetic discourse in classical film theory Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/55/3/413/1624562 by University of Chicago Library user on 26 December 2023 Film, pp. 31–41. Noël Carroll also adds what I have characterized as aesthetic a prioris for each medium (sets of formal or stylistic options that are solely characteristic of the genre and its medium).6 These enunciative a prioris define the horizon on which the aesthetic discourse curves back upon itself. Conversely, the openness of the genre is assured, paradoxically, by the historical persistence of a discourse on aesthetics as a conceptual vocabulary that is challenged and undermined by the very object(s) it is trying to define or construct. From Canudo to Benjamin, the more one tries to defend film as art through the conceptual vocabulary of system aesthetics, the more film, as Benjamin so eloquently expresses it, redefines the question of ‘What is Art?’ What continues to fascinate about prewar writing on film is that it poses problems without ‘solutions’ – it is a discourse that raises more questions than answers. The wild proliferation of ‘aesthetic a prioris’ throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s – photogénie, cinégraphie, closeup, montage, rhythm, pure film, and so on – is best characterized as akin to the generation of concepts in openended series of explanations or accounts that vary positively in their failure to come to terms with defining art, or film, in the framework of a systematic aesthetics. In fact the success or failure of a ‘theory’ is irrelevant here; what is at stake, and what the authors strive for, is conceptual invention and innovation commensurable with the newness, the modernity or contemporaneity of film as a means of expression. A new genre of discourse thus emerges through the gradual erosion and contestation of historically preceding concepts. Indeed one might say that what characterizes the historic period of modernism is that ‘theory’ emerges from the confrontation with and transformation of ‘aesthetics’. It becomes the sign, as it were, of an opening on the discursive horizon towards a new territory.