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August 2000, Week 2

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Subject:
From:
Leo Enticknap <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sat, 12 Aug 2000 16:07:02 +0100
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Dan Humphrey writes:

>  Finally, on to Leo's remarks, which tend to betray a
>  curiously strong animus against film academics.  (He refers
>  to Stephen Heath's rigorous work as "laughable" and to the
>  great Robin Wood's writings as "pontifications".)

I certainly don't have an animus against film academics per se.  I do have
a problem with those film academics who, to my mind, deliberately use ideas
and terminology borrowed from a combination of literary theory and cultural
studies (i) either to dress up arguments which don't need them, or (ii) to
produce conclusions which are invalidated by straightforward facts or an
empiricist analysis.  I call it the 'post-ism' syndrome.  I would continue
to maintain that historians have achieved a lot more in understanding the
value of cinema as a record of human expression and experience (or,
acknowledging a certain level of subjectivity on my part, the sort of
understanding which I find valuable) than any other sort of humanities
academic could ever hope to.

Indeed your references to Heath's 'rigourous' work and 'the great' Robin
Wood demonstrates an equally partisan approach, albeit in the other
direction.  I personally hold the work of Barry Salt and Raymond Fielding
in a similarly high regard, but that does not mean that it is immune to
questions or challenges.  The reasons I find Heath's article ('Narrative
Space', Screen, vol. 17, no. 3 (1976)) laughable are that, to quote Salt,
'it perpetuates some common misunderstandings about the nature of
photographic reproduction, and buttresses what it says on this and other
topics with a large number of factually incorrect statements' (Film Style &
Technology, 2nd ed., London, 1992, p. 20).  In particular, his conclusions
about the function of the 180-degree line in relation to the viewer, which
derive mainly from the work of a number of trendy 1970s 'theorists', are
flatly contradicted by the evidence available in hundreds of widely-shown
feature films.

>  You know, Leo, just because those of us who consider
>  ourselves academics don't begin every article we write by
>  mentioning a film's color process and its screen shape,
>  that doesn't mean we're technically illiterate.

Granted.  My experience is that a significant proportion of film academics
are technically illiterate, which makes me a bit paranoid on the subject,
and probably unfair to those who are not.  Example (which, having been a
projectionist, I hope you'll appreciate): some years ago I showed a
recently-released French film to a reviewer from a British journal which I
would describe as semi-academic, in a London preview theatre.  She was a
university professor.  Her subsequent review praised the brilliance of a
technique used in one 10-minute section of the film, 'in which the image is
divided in two by a vertical line, the top and bottom sections of the
picture being inverted'.  She thought it was a though-provoking and
innovative way to illustrate the split personality of the leading
character, and typical of the director's experimental streak which was so
lacking in the French film industry in general.  I wonder if, to this day,
Bertrand Tavernier is aware that I 'improved' one of his films by
accidently making a join two perforations out of rack?

>  coming back to get a Ph.D. and teach film, financed my own
>  former career as an experimental filmmaker by working
>  (quite successfully) as a projectionist.  As a film*maker*,
>  I carefully chose my film stocks, often lit and shot my own
>  scenes, cut and glue-spliced my own negatives and filled
>  out my own lab reports.  Obviously those decisions (and the
>  complex craft of film projection) are important; the
>  knowledge I learned in these endeavors very much informs my
>  work in academia.

So why this animus against those who believe that technical issues should
go a lot higher up the research agenda than you do, and your
characterisation of such people as fetishists?

>  Oh, and that reminds me, a propos the Stephen Heath comment
>  I should add (as has already been pointed out) that ever
>  since Donald Spoto's disastrous analysis of MARNIE (which
>  Spoto later apologized for), I don't think anyone I know in
>  film theory or analysis would be naive enough to speculate
>  on the conscious "intentions" of a director at the time a
>  film was shot.  Most film theorists, having read Roland
>  Barthes, prefer to talk about texts as they exist in
>  interaction with a spectator, independent of unknowable
>  notions of intentionality on the part of a now-"dead"
>  author...

OK, choosing an article written 24 years ago to make a general point was
probably a bad idea.  I did so because, to my mind, the Heath paper is a
particularly blatent illustration of that point.  But of course, like any
area of academic research, a journal article published in 1976 is not going
to represent state-of-the-art thinking in film theory - it was cited simply
to illustrate how unhelpful I regard that particluar art as being.

L
------------------------------------
Leo Enticknap
Technical Manager
City Screen Cinemas (York) Ltd..
13-17 Coney St., York YO1 9QL.
United Kingdom
Telephone: 01904 612940 (work); 01904 625823 (home); 07710 417383 (mobile)
e-mail: [log in to unmask] (work); [log in to unmask] (home)

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