The visual sacrifice

 

Last night I went to the court theater for this show called Radio Macbeth. It was a disappointing experience. I was going to write something about it until I discovered a newspaper that had been on my table for weeks. In it I found a review of this play which I very much agree. I so like the review that I decide to quote it in length. Words in parentheses are mine.

“The real tragedy of this unconvincing production lies in the painfully obvious contrast between the overwhelming talent of the SITI company and what ends up being an underbaked adaptation of the Scottish play that isn’t quite “Macbeth” but firmly prevents itself from being anything else.”

(You can forget about the “talent” part, it is meant to be a nice compliment not supported by any evidence)

““Radio Macbeth” is literally a staged, painfully (yeah, we all feel the pain) condensed reading where actors play…actors, but the meta-theater immediately feels like a cheap trick: there are hints of relationships between characters, but nothing that holds attention for long, and there are almost no lines that aren’t Shakespeare’s. The show purports to be an actor’s rehearsal of “Macbeth” taking place in a late-night abandoned building, and focusing on the soundscape of the show—the strongest elements of the show are the striking sound effects created by a variety of microphones and the actors’ obvious mastery of their voices as they deftly plow through lines. It’s not clear, then, why the actors spend all their time during this rehearsal rearranging endless chairs for no apparent reason, putting on clothes, taking off clothes and circling each other in stilted, choreographed ways. (I guess there are some reasons for all this, but whatever they are, they fail to communicate) The visual element ends up being another tragic sacrifice…”

I would not go all the length to claim that theatrical art is a visual art, a narrative art (a risky business), but when these aspects fall short, the consequence is obvious; the insufficiency of the artwork becomes so intolerable. We normally don’t have much experience on this side, since averagely speaking a theatrical work does not show such a degree of lacking visual and narrative coherence. Therefore the error of Radio Macbeth is revealing. The show was inspired by a radio version recorded by Orson Welles but never broadcasted. The reviewer (Monica Westin) may not be aware of this connection. But nonetheless she notices immediately that the only place you can use the word “striking” in the present adaptation is the soundscape. It remains a radio play while it claims to be a “real” play. Being the latter we are obliged to watch where we are unfortunately distracted by the actors’ confusing stage activities. It would be nicer if these two have absolutely nothing to do with each other at all—for example, how about a couple feeding a baby? The reviewer mentions that the play is condensed in order to fit into the ninety minutes slot. And this condensation creates difficulty for the comprehension of the plot. But apparently neither Polanski nor Kurosawa has this sort of problem. The issue is not the condensation itself, which I believe is not done enough, but how to treat the original work, the lines of Shakespeare. If we want to create a distance where the original and the adapted can engage in a formal play, then we need a language that is in contrast with Shakespeare’s. Similarly, the power of a cinema of dialect comes not from simply using a dialect, but contrasting it with the language of the political unconsciousness.

Now a few words about Lulu, the opera. Despite the apparent irrelevance, I think opera generally suffers from the same problem of visual and narrative inadequacy. In order to compensate for this, they are often staged in exotic settings, lush costumes, and the singers are asked to “act”, instead of just singing. David Levin in his Unsettling Opera, makes the case that the staging is a significant aspect of our understanding of the work. Radio Macbeth is thus a poor staging which obliterates all the brilliance of Shakespeare. Instead of what the play is known for, the graphic violence, we see chairs and a Japanese girl running about (what personal perversion is this). We expect a banquet a la Greenaway, but we are served with unsalted potatoes in paper bags. Same problem for Chicago lyric opera’s production of Lulu. Although the use of a transparent/reflexive screen to cover/uncover the stage is a clever one, there is just not enough to look at. (in another entry, I hope I will show what is there to look at, even a movie!) I know some would claim an opera is not meant to be watched. These people can just stay at home and listen to their CDs—we are not talking about the same thing. In the same vein of argument, those who are intoxicated by the Bard’s lines and how an actor delivers them can just read the book or listen to recordings—we are not talking about the same thing. I talk to those who believe the staging is a major vehicle for opera. But unfortunately here in North America people are rather conventional in their taste. If you compare Met’s version of The Ring with European versions—the Bayreuth/Chereau version or the Kirchner version, the Audi version—it becomes clear that North American audience has a child-like fascination for surface realism, meaning, in a fable a monster has to look like a monster, not an old gentleman, and a dragon has to be a dragon. Proof? Lyric Opera’s eight productions of this season.

Sounds in Chicago - I

I just can’t help it. I love any unconventional way of doing things. Whenever possible, I try to go by new route, even if it is an old destination.
So we have heard about the 20th century modern music. So we have heard they are quite different from the 19th century master pieces. These days I got more chances to go to modern performances and I start to realize something is missing there. The Instrument. Yes, despite the very unconventional musical language, the instruments via which this language is spoken, externalized, remain largely the same. Or maybe I should not exaggerate. Have I forgotten Russolo, Antheil and Varèse? Did not Thereminvox and Ondes Martenot play strong roles even in Hollywood compositions? There does exist a corner that stubbornly refuses any change. That is how traditional instruments are meant to be played. And now it came to my knowledge that indeed innovations exist even here.
Last night I attended a performance by this Chicago-born, Europe-residing cellist Frances-Marie Uitti. As a newspaper article says, "for starters, she plays with two bows." This, I understand, is her invention. During the performance, she demonstrated twice how this technique can be used. The first time is a composition by Jonathan Harvey (who sent her this little “gem” a whole year after seeing her performance) and the second time her own. The polyphony, especially in the second piece, is quite striking, despite the fact that I definitely lack the proper terminology to describe it. I know absolutely nothing about string instruments. But I would imagine this kind of effect is not duplicable on two cellos—hence contrary to some reviews, this technique is not aiming at a one-woman-quartet. It is rather aimed at—something she said herself—“the need for explicit rather than implied harmony”.

The solo performance last night was also meant to showcase her new invention—an electronic cello with no strings. But we were told this piece of magic prop is still in Berkley. It was snowing when I came out the Bond Chapel.

Here is more info on her (you can read a poem by Paul Griffith)

http://www.uitti.org/

Eisenstein, Griffith and the film class today

In the essay “Dickens, Griffith and the film today”, Eisenstein’s conception of montage can be resumed as follows:
First, the montage is the “expansion of intra-shot conflict” (236). When a filmmaker juxtaposes two montage cells, he is concerned with the intensity of the conflict.
Second, a montage gathers its cells to form a new “organic unity”, a “qualitative fusion”, which is not merely a “contrast between the haves and the have-nots”. (234)
Third, a montage should liberates itself from the “limits of situation” in order to arrive at an “ideological conception.” (239)
It is especially upon the third point that Eisenstein believes that Intolerance signifies a heroic yet failed attempt on the part of Griffith. Incontestably, there is in Intolerance, “a desire to get away from the limits of story towards the region of generalization and metaphorical allegory” (241). The reason of this failure, Eisenstein believes, lies in Griffith’s misunderstanding of an essential principle that “the region of metaphorical and imagist writing appears in the sphere of montage juxtaposition, not of representational montage pieces.” (241) To evaluate Eisenstein’s critique on Griffith, I will first take the example Eisenstein gives, Lilian Gish rocking a cradle, which is probably the most important shot of the film. This shot, which appears in manner of refrain throughout the film, shows that Griffith tries to establish an abstract idea from an “isolated” image (if isolate means non-diegetic). According to Eisenstein, this is impossible because without montage, a catalyzing effect, an isolated image remains a lifelike representation. What Eisenstein means by “lifelike”? It seems to me that Eisenstein’s montage can be regarded, at least at this stage, as an effort to analogize a maximum cinema to language, to make image work like word. In order to do so, he needs to narrativize the image, and reduces it to abstraction, which is a condensation of its possible meanings. What is important is that, Eisenstein’s montage trope, when it works in a way like a sentence does—it is intended to work this way, as Eisenstein purposefully selects a rhetoric term to illustrate its effect—tries to eliminate as much as possible the inherent multiplicity of the image. In this sense an Eisensteinian montage is closer to prose than poetic writing. Eisenstein’s criticism of The Earth is such a case. He argues that instead of showing the peasant woman in a long shot, a human being in all his natural surroundings, we should use a close-up of her body, where the notion of “life” can spring up effortlessly, juxtaposing with that of the “death”. In a similar line of argument, Eisenstein would believe, it seems to me, that Griffith’s image of woman-rocking-the-cradle is wrong because not only it has no conceptual opposition, but also it uses a long shot where a close up is more desirable. But would a close up of the baby, the cradle, or the face of Gish be better off? It will, to a certain extent, reduce the multiplicity of the original image (Maternity? Innocence? Vulnerability?). But it will probably never arrive at a univocal quality that Eisenstein had wanted. In this sense, such an image will remain ineffective to its audience.
While this criticism points to ways in which Eisenstein would have moved in order to make Intolerance work, I do believe there is a little misunderstanding. Griffith, after all, could not have subscribed to Eisenstein’s idea of montage. This is not only a chronological impossibility, but also implies that there are other ways to conceive montage than Eisenstein. In Eisenstein’s mind, montage shapes the images that constitute it. But do these images have to be arranged in a consecutive order? Is there any reason to believe that images won’t affect each other if they are not in an immediate proximity? And besides being transformed by its adjacent element, could an image be transformed by our understanding of the plot, of the character, or anything else in the filmic world? If the image of rocking cradle appears only once, we may say, with full confidence, that it is indeed an isolated image. But when it is repeated as in Intolerance, many times, punctuating the narrative, it is hardly isolated at all. I concede that this image is problematic: it does not do what it should do. But what is problematic is rather the way this image is composed of: in order to weave the parallel narratives together, this image ought to have some sort of associations with them. There should be recognizable echoes in this image, so to speak, for all the stories unfolded. This image, then, will become THE image of the film, and establishes a “region of generalization and metaphorical allegory.” In other words, while Eisenstein argues that this image is too complex, or “lifelike” to be effective, I would say it is too simple, or too “conceptual” to be effective. The situation demands that I produce an example, and here it is. In an early paragraph of the very same article, Eisenstein passionately describes his memory of “Griffith’s inimitable bit-characters who seem to have run straight from life onto the screen.” He writes,

I can’t recall who speaks with whom in one of the street scenes of the modern story of Intolerance. But I shall never forget the mask of the passer-by with nose pointed forward between spectacles and straggly beard, walking with hands behind his back as if he were manacled. As he passes he interrupts the most pathetic moment in the conversation of the suffering boy and girl. I can remember next to nothing of the couple, but this passer-by, who is visible in the shot for only a flashing of glimpse, stands alive before me now—and I haven’t seen the film for twenty years! (Eisenstein 199)

Here “life” does not appear to have a derogative sense. Inadvertently contradicting himself (we know Eisenstein’s preference of typage), this paragraph has a definite Bazinian smell. If we concede that what makes this image so memorable is not montage, let us at least acknowledge that montage is not the only way to make an image memorable. I agree with Eisenstein when he believes that an image has to be simple to read in order to have an immediate impact. But I cannot agree with Eisenstein the cine-agitor who believes that an image has to amount to an ideological highland in order to be effective. In fact, in Eisenstein’s own practice, whenever he tries to convey a simple expression such as “wonder” or “joy” (e.g., the “cream separator sequence” in The General Line ), he is perfectly legible; but whenever it comes to an abstract notion as vague as intolerance (the “god and country” sequence in October ), Eisenstein has not done better than Griffith. According to Eisenstein, the sequence is meant to discredit the idea of God and to demonstrate the futility of the concept. How does he do it? By showing successively a Baroque Christ, ancient Greek Gods, Hindu, Mexican, African etc. he argued,

While idea and image appear to accord completely in the first statue shown, the two elements move further from each other with each successive image. Maintaining the denotation of ‘God’, the image increasingly disagrees with our concept of God, inevitably leading to individual conclusions about the true nature of all deities.

The discrepancy between his intention and the actual effect (it is fair to say that few would be able to decipher this message upon first viewing) lies on the fact that in spite of Eisenstein’s belief that an image of God (no matter which) is singular in its meaning, and thus can be manipulated as such, it is in fact highly ambiguous. As a matter of fact, an image of Christ on the cross does not invoke the general notion of God, but instead, calls for various digressive notions such as suffering, redemption, personal guilt, or even sexuality. As for pagan gods, I wonder if for a western viewer these deities are immediately recognizable at all, let alone to calculate a conceptual distance there. The sequence is more likely to be perceived as a showcase of statuettes contained in a diegetic space or in an imaginary museum.
Eisenstein’s essay echoes a prevailing notion that Intolerance is a “magnificent failure”. Yet it would be wrong to assume that the film totally fails in its montage. In fact, some are of the opinion that it is otherwise. Miriam Hansen describes the end of the film as “a visionary epilogue of about twenty shots presenting images of warfare and oppression that dissolve into images of harmony, bliss, and millennial peace.” (Hansen 134) Christian Metz also remarks that “the rapid unfolding of the four images gives one the feeling of an almost physical interpenetration among the four different historical epochs, and the acceleration in the periodicity of the visual breaks slowly exalts this interpenetration to the point of conferring upon it the affective status of a fusion,[…]” (Metz 107-8) From these two descriptions, one can sense that Griffith almost successfully created the effect that Eisenstein had envisioned: isn’t “physical interpenetration” or ‘fusion” an ideal transformation of montage cells? Isn’t “oppression”, “harmony” or “millennial peace” in the “region of generalization and metaphorical allegory”?
Eisenstein made further effort in the latter part of the essay not only in explaining what is a better definition/usage of montage, on which point he constantly improvises and improves himself, but also, why the great Griffith failed to see it. It could be said that Dickens, who inspired Griffith, ultimately restrained Griffith to a Victorian sensibility that is not suitable to our modern age. But maybe provinciality is not the best word to describe this fatal weakness in both Dickens and Griffith. According to Eisenstein’s understanding of historical materialism, Griffith has such a naïve and “dualistic picture of the world, running in two parallel lines of poor and rich towards some hypothetical ‘reconciliation’ where the parallel lines would cross, that is, in that infinity, just as inaccessible as that ‘reconciliation’”. (235) In other words, Griffith’s view of the society, as well as that of Dickens, stays unfortunately in a rather primitive stage before the advent of Marxism, which happens to be a rather scientific knowledge, or proposition, of the social evolution. Dickens and Griffith believe in, perhaps because they want to, a class reconciliation. Griffith’s type of montage, therefore, forever oscillates between a de facto duality and its final, imaginary reconciliation. Similarly, Pudovkin conceives montage as a sort of linkage. Eisenstein, on the other hand, always values conflict more. If Eisenstein’s method of tracing Griffith’s aesthetics back to his ideological stance is a plausible practice, then probably we can do the same to him. Is the montage of conflict a result of Eisenstein’s total subscription to class struggle theory?
Works Cited
Eisenstein, S. (1949). Film Form. New York: Harcourt.
Hansen, M. (1991). Babel and Babylon. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Metz, C. (1974). Language and Cinema. The Hague: Mouton.

My blue ray nite

 

Earlier this week, in professor Gunning’s class, we missed an opportunity to see how Technicolor fares in a blue-ray transfer—Hawks’ Rio Bravo. It turns out that the Film Studies Center, somehow proudly presented as a sacred place for us cinerats, does not yet feel the need to add to its admirable facilities a blue-ray player. Yes, of course, it is not a matter of rushing into a Sony store and purchasing one. What are the titles available at the moment?

We have heard the story of Godfather and I personally own a 2001. But today I learnt that BFI had begun a series of blue-ray transfers that means business—vigorous and meticulous digital transfer, essays written by specialists, lavish booklets, extras, etc. The first two released are Salo and Red Desert. A review of the latter can be found here: http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/movies.php?id=1727&show=review.

According to an announcement, criterion collection is already taking steps towards embracing the new medium. The first batch of available titles are:

The Third Man
Bottle Rocket
Chungking Express
The Man Who Fell to Earth
The Last Emperor
El Norte (the above already listed in the coming soon section)
The 400 Blows
Gimme Shelter
The Complete Monterey Pop
Contempt
Walkabout
For All Mankind
The Wages of Fear

In fact, if we take blue-ray as just a medium that can accommodate a MPEG4-AVC encoding of 1080p images and 5.1 LPCM soundtracks in the same time, the criterion collection does not have to make a giant effort to re-release some of its existing titles. I presume that when they did the transfer, that is, telecine, they stored the digitized film in a sort of uncompressed format—not sure which one. So there is no need to repeat the most money-time-consuming process of negative cleaning, image stabilization and color correction. They of course can throw in more featurettes, which will be all the more reason to upgrade.

Now what are the titles that can benefit the most from this new technology? Looking at the cc list I have to say, it is definitely going to be sound films, and most probably color films, although we do have three B&W titles—they belong to what I call international best-selling B&W.

Finally, let us not forget the shitty issue of region code. As of writing I am not aware of any official multi-region blue-ray player. For standalone the only option is to have it modded, which means added cost and potential instability. As for PS3, better forget it. For BD drive owners, though, the problem is much easier in nature and practically solved.

Bordwell's little secrets

Even if you don’t agree with David Bordwell, or you simply hate him, for obvious or unspeakable reasons, one thing we must admit is, his academic output is well above the average, and it is this, more than anything else, gives him the indestructible status of being one of the major figures of film studies. How did he do this? There must be, I mean, highly probable, something we need to learn about his method. The following article, which I only discovered lately, can be useful to this purpose. What is also of interest to grad students is what to read, what not to read, although I guess we cannot fully follow his example, not right now. All underlines mine.

The full article, which is an interview by cinemascope, can be accessed through:

http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs26/int_stephens_bordwell.htm

(I hope nobody will sue me for quoting it)

Scope: Though the “publish or perish” imperative still holds sway over academic careers everywhere, the extremely prolific nature of your own publishing—some 15 full-length volumes (both as author and co-author) on a wide range of film-related topics, along with countless articles in books and periodicals the planet over—goes well beyond that of the average academic. How have you managed, especially when you where still teaching on a full-time basis, to produce so many books?

Bordwell: I wanted to be a writer when I was in high school and wrote several stories and a lame, unfinished novel. (Some of my critics think I’ve been writing fiction ever since.) I’ve been lucky to have an energetic temperament, and teaching never really interfered with my writing. I would come home from a day in the classroom or in meetings and still want to write something. I worked weekends and vacations too, as all my colleagues do. As I published more, I did get some time off teaching through grants, although even during leaves I tried to stay involved with my department.

Scope: Can you give us a little insight into your writing habits? From start to finish, how long does it typically take you to complete a new book?

Bordwell: Sometimes I’m writing an article and that will seem to need more fleshing out. The idea of On the History of Film Style came out of an article I wrote on the historiography of film style for a journal. It seemed obvious to expand that piece to three chapters, to add an introduction and an update, and then a case study. That case study, on the history of depth staging, in turn led me to do articles on two directors who have distinctive depth strategies, Feuillade and Angelopoulos. Once I had those articles, I realized I could make a book by exploring other directors, and Mizoguchi and Hou seemed like natural examples. That was how Figures Traced in Light came about. But more often I think in book-sized chunks, mapping the whole thing out beforehand, as with the collaborative project Classical Hollywood Cinema and the book I wrote at about the same time as that, Narration in the Fiction Film.

As for time: there’s time writing and time researching. Most of the books have been written over about two-three years, but that doesn’t count the research time, which adds another two-three years. I wrote The Way Hollywood Tells It in about four months, but it drew on research I’d been doing over about ten years. Often I’m researching a couple of books at the same time, or some of the same research will yield two books.

Scope: How, generally, do you begin each new book-length project? Do you have a broad of sense of things that you feel need to be more carefully thought and written about—certain areas/topics that you’re certain could reward a more sustained and systematic focus? Is new book an attempt to fill some gap that you’ve identified and have become determined to ameliorate? How organic is the process?

Bordwell: I think of a book as a cluster of questions or problems I want to illuminate, and usually those are ones I think have been neglected by other scholars. Fortunately or unfortunately, not many people are interested in most of the topics I write about, so I always have fresh material. Even subjects that people have written a lot about, like Eisenstein or Hou or Hong Kong cinema, haven’t been studied from the angle I favour, so I always seem to have a lot to study. For example, in The Way Hollywood Tells It, I try to talk about script structure and visual style in ways congruent with the way the creative people seem to handle those matters, even if I also try to maintain some critical distance on their conceptions of their craft. This is something that most academics just aren’t interested in. Same thing with the CinemaScope talk you heard; there’s been a lot written about Scope, but academics haven’t much tried to figure out the various approaches directors and crews took toward Scope composition.

One way to frame this more broadly is to say that most film scholars aren’t interested in film as a creative art. I know it sounds odd to say that, but I think it’s true. Most scholars are interested in film as an expression of cultural trends, interests, processes, etc. or of political moods, tendencies, etc. More specifically, those who are interested in film as an art seldom try to find out the craft traditions—the work processes, the technologies, etc.—that give artists the menus they work with. The approach I try to develop is commonplace in art history and the history of music, but not very developed in film studies.

Scope: I first began to develop an awareness of your writing as grad student in the Cinema Studies department at NYU, where your Film Art: An Introduction (co-authored by your longtime partner, Kristin Thompson) was the basic text in all Intro to Film Studies courses. At the time, I shared (quite prematurely) with the undergrads I was instructing the feeling that your approach to film (from a writer’s perspective) was an extremely dry one—though I’ve come to feel entirely differently about your writing today. The strange thing is, I’m not really sure if my changed impression is mainly a result of changes in your writing, or changes in my reading of it. How would you plot the evolution of your style as a writer—perhaps taking Film Art, your book on Ozu, your book on Hong Kong cinema, and your newest book, The Way Hollywood Sees It, as the major milestones?

Bordwell: Film Art presented unique writing problems. We envisioned it as a comprehensive look at the expressive possibilities of the film medium, and I do think we largely got that right. It was the first wide-ranging aesthetic survey of what film could do. But we were aware that most of the previous surveys, even by very great thinkers like Rudolf Arnheim, were biased by the preferences and value judgments of the theorist. Bazin, for instance, opened up a huge area of inquiry into how directors could use the long take, but his account was somewhat one-sided, not really exploring the possibilities that montage offered. I think that some of the dryness of our survey came from our suspending our judgments about what the best uses of film techniques were, or what the essence of cinema was. We’ve tried to make Film Art more lively in successive editions, but I think that some of the dryness you note comes from the textbook genre, and some from our decision not to be very evaluative.

As for other books, I try to find a style for each project. I write an academic style at bottom—I don’t think I could write any other way—but I’ve try to vary the tone sometimes. I suppose Planet Hong Kong and The Way Hollywood Tells It have the jauntiest tone, and the others are less so. Across time, I’ve also tried to loosen up my style, though I’m so averse to glibness and the offhand cuteness of post-structuralism that I probably will never develop a really conversational voice.

Scope: Was Planet Hong Kong a conscious effort on your part to expand your readership, and to publish what seems to be the closest you’ve ever come to a mainstream work of film history? How did your interest in HK cinema develop—and why HK, rather than, say, India or Indonesia ?

Bordwell: To take the second part: I loved HK film when I first saw the early ‘70s imports to America , and I watched what films I could in the ‘70s and ‘80s. When we got 35mm equipment in my department, I began booking films like The Killer (1989) and some Jackie Chan titles, and students found them enjoyable, and so I started to read and watch more. I went to the HK Film Festival in spring of 1995 when I was on leave, and seeing more films and meeting some filmmakers made me realize that one could study this filmmaking community as similar to and different from Hollywood. So it was a combination of personal taste and opportunity.

Scope: One of the signature components across so much of your work—which is, in general, nothing if not extremely methodical, painstaking, and carefully organized on all levels—is the concept of the ASL, or “average shot length,” of feature films. How did you come to rely on this unit of measure, and why? Did you “invent” this methodology? And how do you obtain it—by watching films with stopwatch and calculator in hand? On the face of it, such a methodology suggests an extremely chilly approach to what so many recognize as one our most emotion-charged art forms, and yet the specificities and historical consistencies your insistence on keeping ASLs in mind have revealed have challenged, and toppled, a number of intuitive and erroneous assumptions about, among other things, the so-called hyper-acceleration of the medium in the post-MTV age.

Bordwell: The ASL as a measure was devised by a British film historian, Barry Salt, in the ‘70s. Like him, I count the shots (I use a hand-clicker) and then divide that total into the total running time of the film. Yuri Tsivian has set up a website about these matters, including a piece of software that helps us to count ASLs: www.cinemetrics.lv. I think ASL is a useful instrument, if sometimes a fairly blunt one. I do think that it has to be supplemented by other, more qualitative dimensions, such as elements of narrative construction, etc. For instance, if films are being cut fast before the advent of MTV, we’re left with the question of why that speedy cutting went largely unnoticed by viewers and critics. I have a hunch it’s because MTV-style cutting isn’t just fast but it’s also quite discontinuous, emphasizing graphic contrasts and sudden spatial breakups. A more ordinary shot/reverse-shot handling of a conversation can be edited very fast, but we don’t notice it so much because it’s quite standardized. Most of the films with short ASLs achieve their rapid rate by accelerating the pace of fairly standard editing. So the ASL measure has to be supplemented by matters of context, the sort of other techniques the filmmakers use, etc.

(my comment: so the quantitative approach does not account for yet another big thing: the spatial orientation)

Scope: Correct me if I’m mistaken in this, but weren’t you at some point involved in challenging copyright laws regarding the use of frame enlargements from films in your publications? Historically, the use of studio production stills from films has been zealously guarded by those studios, making the use of illustrations in film studies books a costly and complicated matter. You eventually found a way around this, by using the “fair use” exceptions in copyright laws to “quote” from films by grabbing frames and enlarging them, rather than by using production stills and the like. Could you briefly you discuss this issue, the history of this battle, and the various vagaries involved?

Bordwell: Kristin was the leader in this. A committee of our professional organization inquired into the legality of frame enlargements and, aided by a Washington copyright attorney, concluded that academic use of them constituted fair use. Kristin wrote the committee’s report. Most academic publishers have accepted the committee’s findings. There hasn’t been, so far as I’m aware, any effort on the part of the film industry to contest such usage, so there hasn’t really been any battle.

Scope: Which of your books do you personally value the most, and why? Are there books that you began but never finished?

Bordwell: I’ve never started a book that I didn’t finish. It’s hard for me to appraise my work, because I very seldom reread the books, and when I do I’m struck mostly by gaucheries, missed opportunities, and things I no longer agree with. I think that the book on which I thought longest and hardest is Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema; it’s also my tribute to my favourite filmmaker. If I’d done no other book but this, I’d feel satisfied. Though it’s now out of print, I hope to bring it back to life on the web.

Scope: The book that most changed my perception of your work, and to which I’ve returned most often, is Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema, in which you take a hard look at the state of film criticism (in the broadest sense of the term), and argued for a new “meta-poetics” of film interpretation in both popular and specialist discourses. Could you briefly explain what such a “meta-poetical” film criticism might consist of—and do you think, some 15 years after that book was published, we’re any closer to seeing it at work in film criticism today?

Bordwell: This book is an orphan, meant to challenge the way my profession conducts business as usual. It met with, by and large, silence. I think it tried to do too much—offer a brief history of academic film criticism, show how a cognitive perspective could explain why critics reason as they do, and polemicize for a different kind of criticism. I do think that what it pointed toward, a “poetics” of film, has emerged as a distinct, if minority, research tradition in film studies.

Maybe this is the place to say something about the research program I work within. Basically, I want to know how films work and work upon audiences. I focus on film form (mostly narrative form) and style (mostly visual style). So the point of departure is critical analysis of features of narrative form and visual style that characterize the movie. Then I try to reconstruct, as best I can, the place of a film or group of films in their historical tradition—what proximate factors shaped the movies’ form and style. These factors include not only the director, who is quite important as a shaping force, but also the institutional context that the filmmaker works in—the technology available, the mode of film production in force, the state of play in the filmmaking community, the place of cinema in relation to the other arts.

I’m also interested in how movies are “engineered” to have effects on audiences. Filmmakers are first of all film viewers, and they often have an intuitive idea of how others will react to what they’ve done. So I’m interested in how films are designed in ways that try to affect audiences. That also leads me to think about what skills audiences have that enable them to understand and respond to films. I tackle this most explicitly in Narration in the Fiction Film.

This amounts, I think, to a poetics of film—a systematic study of the principles by which films are made and experienced. It sounds very abstract and theoretical, but I think that it can shed light on particular films and filmmakers if we bring the categories down to earth. Going back to the 1910s, how did Feuillade and his contemporaries seem to think of staging, and what craft practices sustained the tradition they developed? How does Mizoguchi innovate within the Japanese cinema’s rich array of stylistic options? How does someone who comes late to a tradition, like Angelopoulos, synthesize staging strategies available to him? What are Hou Hsiao-hsien’s characteristic staging strategies, and how can we explain them in the light of the traditions he inherits—or rediscovers? These are the sorts of questions I try to answer in Figures Traced in Light. But we can study traditions, craft practices, the role of technology, and so on in contemporary US feature filmmaking too; that’s what The Way Hollywood Tells It is up to.

Scope: Which writers, if any—academic or otherwise—do you currently enjoy reading on film?

Bordwell: It may sound odd, but I don’t really read film essays or books regularly. For film subjects I’m studying, I read relevant articles and books, both academic and non-academic, but if I have free time I’m unlikely to pick up a film book. For general edification, I mostly read nonfiction on current affairs, the history of the arts, and debates in the sciences (Darwinian biology, psychology, social science). The film books I read for pleasure tend to be biographies, especially of moguls or stars (e.g., the new bio of Peter Lorre, or McBride’s book on Ford).

Of the film essayists, I read anything by Tony Rayns and Donald Richie. Of the daily and weekly critics, I enjoy Ebert, Hoberman, David Chute, Manohla Dargis, and a few others. Probably the writer I read most regularly is Todd McCarthy. In fact, although I’ve dropped my subscriptions to virtually all academic and quasi-academic journals, I read weekly Variety cover to cover. I find Variety’s critics sensitive and subtle writers.

Scope: After a long and extremely distinguished career in academia, you’ve recently retired from your teaching position at Madison . Could you comment generally on what you see as the state of Film Studies today, specifically in relation to the state of Film Studies when you began your teaching career? And more broadly, how would you characterize the evolution of Film Studies over the last 25 years generally? Did you leave the discipline (to the extent that you have) healthier than you found it? Or is it currently beset by challenges on all sides, or in a state of atrophy—or somewhere in between?

Bordwell: I think that Film Studies has made progress on many fronts toward becoming a mature academic discipline. I think particularly of the work of film historians, working in all periods and on many national cinemas. We are much better informed now about the shape of world cinema history than we have been. Early cinema has been a triumph of historical research, as is shown by first-rate reference books like Richard Abel’s Encyclopedia of Early Cinema. I’m less impressed by most of the research in cultural studies, which seems to me rather weak theoretically, and I worry—as usual—that film as an art form gets short shrift. Nevertheless, on the whole Film Studies is in much better shape than it was in the ‘70s.

Scope: At the beginning of this interview, I asked, not entirely without ulterior motive, if perhaps you had studied film production at any stage in your early education, since while your books contain a wide range of engagements with, and resistances to, the “deep academics” of classical and post-classical Film Theory, there is also an expressly practical and practicable aspect to many of them. Even in as academically inclined and formally elegant a book as your recent Figures Traced In Light, you asserted that a part of your aim in writing it was “to coax young filmmakers into exploring” modes of cinematic staging outside those typically utilized by the vast majority of today’s young American filmmaking professionals. Two related follow-up questions: (1) Do you really think, or perhaps hope, that young film production students will pay sufficient attention to Film Studies volumes such yours as to alter their future aesthetic decisions? (2) Do you, or did you, ever think of yourself—regardless of the slur typically implicit in such an appellation—as a wanna-be filmmaker? Indeed, have you ever made films yourself?

Bordwell: (2) I made amateur films in high school and college, then shot a little 16mm in grad school, but my work was uniformly terrible. I have no filmmaking talent. Once I realized that, I’ve never had an urge to be a filmmaker. (1) I think that academic film study is too divorced from the realities of production, and that’s why we begin our book Film Art by introducing students to the mechanics and production processes of filmmaking—just as we might study the tools and techniques of painting or music-making. The idea of film poetics, as I conceive it, tries to find out the practices that create films and to discover a tacit logic in those practices, so I do want to make explicit the kinds of practical choices that filmmakers face. While it’s unlikely that many young filmmakers will stumble over my books, a few have; I get emails occasionally from production students all over the world who have gotten ideas from my writing, and some of our Wisconsin students have been influenced by ideas I’ve discussed with them.

Scope: What can we expect from the post-retirement David Bordwell? Even more books, at an even greater rate of production? Personally speaking, I can only hope you’ve got more in-depth studies of specific filmmakers waiting in the wings—and in particular, knowing your particular enthusiasm for his work, a neo-post-formalist account of the aesthetics of Dragnet creator Jack Webb. What’s next?

Bordwell: I might do more work on particular filmmakers, perhaps another book on Hong Kong directors. I’d like to write more on Lau Kar-leong, Tsui Hark, and Johnnie To. Right now I’m working on a collection of essays, some revised from their publication format, others—like one on CinemaScope—that will be new. After that, my immediate hope is to spruce up my website and start a blog. I’m considering publishing my next book, whatever the subject, on the web directly. The prospect of having lots of pictures, free access, and readers all over the world is very tempting, and it’s not like you make so much money from a university press book. Probably most academic books should be published on the web, with print on-demand copies available for a small fee.

As for Jack Webb, a director we share an admiration for, I think he could be considered in relation to Fuller (The D.I. [1957] is distinctly Fullerian, and -30- [1959] would be interesting to compare with Park Row). Both are aggressive, nearly self-parodying stylists, carried by their laconic conviction. But I think you’re the man for that job!