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) ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu