Cinemas
of the Mind: a Critical History of Film Theory
Nicolas Tredell,
ed.
Cambridge: Icon Books UK (Totem Books US), 2002.
£11.99 ($15.95), 287 pages, ISBN 1-84046-354-6.
Nicolas Magenham
Université de Paris X - Nanterre
Reading Cinemas of the Mind, one realizes that there is no
definitive film theory yet, that for a century, theorists have only
determined "what aspects of films [film theory] should aim to
cover and explain", as Tredell puts it. This uncertainty about
what film theory should be has led to the emergence of a hotchpotch
of ideas that can be confusing. Therefore, one of the main concerns
of Nicolas Tredell in this book was to "tidy up" this rich
history.
His desire for clarity manifests itself in many ways. For instance,
Tredell has peppered the texts that he has chosen with more or less
long notes, whose aim is to make such-and-such details as clear as
possible. Though merely functional, those notes are nevertheless precious
for anyone who is not familiar with film theory, or even with cinema.
They consist in biographical elements concerning filmmakers (dates,
films…), English translations of foreign terms, or precision
about evasive ideas or about former works by the same authors. The
book also contains a glossary of cinematic and critical terms that
is very useful, even though obviously neither exhaustive nor very
detailed.
Tredell's book contains significant extracts from the greatest texts
of film theory, but Cinemas of the Mind is far from being a
digest: the original texts are not only quoted almost integrally in
order not to betray the authors' thoughts, but Tredell always develops
his point of view on them too. In other words, Tredell is far from
being a run-of-the-mill editor, his personal involvement is interesting
and substantial. He does not hesitate to bring out the radical or
schematic aspect of some of those fundamental texts, qualifying or
even contradicting certain positions. For example, even though he
acknowledges that Colin MacCabe's psychoanalytic critique of classic
realism in the journal Screen is "lucid and forceful",
he also thinks that "there are a number of problems with MacCabe's
account" (Tredell points notably at his schematic analysis of
Alan J. Pakula's Klute (1971), a radical analysis that "leaves
little room for alternative interpretations"). Because of the
revolutionary context, many 1970s theories and reviews can be seen
as oversimplified, but some of them have nonetheless kept all their
strength. It is the case of Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema", for instance.
In chapter I, Tredell's critical distance is very sharp in this section
dealing with early film theories. He occasionally underlines the visionary
aspect of certain ideas, as when he evokes Rémy de Gourmont
who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was "interested
not so much in categorizing different kinds of films as in the general
effect of cinema on its audiences". In this respect, de Gourmont
"broache[d] what was to become a concern of cognitive film theorists
in the later 1980s and in the 1990s". In this chapter, Tredell
also refers to theorists whose predictions on cinema were to turn
out to be wrong (the German psychologist Hugo Münsterberg predicted
in 1916 that "the photoplay of the day after tomorrow will surely
be freed from all elements which are not really pictures"), or
whose utopian visions make us smile today (in 1911, the Italian writer
Ricciotto Canudo thought naïvely that cinema was going to create
a "revival of theatre and bring about a new sense of human community").
Questioning the texts, Nicolas Tredell implicitly evokes one of the
characteristics of film theory—and of criticism in general—,
that is, the fact that many fresh theories are built on former theories,
usually in reaction against them. For example, in the 1990s, cognitive
theory—which proposes to "understand the mechanisms, and
structures by which [language, visual phenomena, or behavior] are
processed by the human mind-brain" (Torben Grodal)—was directly
opposed to the psychoanalytic, post-structuralist and deconstructionist
approaches that were fashionable in the previous two decades. Besides,
Tredell seems to be attracted to cognitive science, since it is even
the subject of the fine cover of the book. It represents Anthony Perkins
in Psycho (1960), who is transformed here into an imaginary
viewer appalled by the well-known and terrifying image taken from
Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou (1928) and showing a
woman whose eye is severed.
In the history of film theory, there are other examples of theorists
who opposed the radical opinions that sometimes constitute a new theory,
even within the very movement that originated it. For instance, in
the 1950s, André Bazin was a dissident (and sensible) voice
among the Cahiers du Cinéma members, since he seriously
questioned the revered auteur idea. Auteur theory implies
that every film made by a filmmaker considered as an auteur
is inevitably interesting, which was a concept that Bazin could not
accept: "as soon as you state that the filmmaker and his films
are one, there can be no minor films, as the worst of them will always
be in the image of their creator". For him, some important creators
sometimes produce unconvincing works that do not necessarily deserve
to be looked into (Bazin evokes Voltaire's plays and Beaumarchais's
La Mère coupable). On the other hand, the Cahiers
du Cinéma unfairly neglected many films because their directors
were not labeled as auteurs, I'm thinking of films by such
French filmmakers as Julien Duvivier or Jean Grémillon, for
example.
So Cinemas of the Mind brings out the everlasting conflicting
visions that constitute the history of film theory, but unfortunately,
if Nicolas Tredell is aware that film theory has always been the staple
diet of theorists themselves, he never mentions that it has been the
staple diet of filmmakers too. For instance, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy
Wilder, and many other important directors learned a lot from such
Russian theorists and directors as Eisenstein or Pudovkin, and they
used to pay their respects to them as soon as the opportunity arose.
Wilder often said that he was fascinated by (and sometimes worried
about) the power of editing, of montage, as it was theorized
by Eisenstein in the late 1920s. Wilder even thought that the powerful
ideas created by such a clever juxtaposition of individual shots could
lead the conservative and capitalist viewers of a film like Battleship
Potemkin (1925) to be persuaded that communism was the good cause.
As for Hitchcock, if he was also very influenced by these early theories,
it is worth noting that his films were in turn the main inspiration
of recent film theorists: Vertigo (1958) is abundantly mentioned
by Mulvey in her article quoted above, Rear Window (1954) is
at the heart of Torben Grodal's work on cognition, etc.
So Nicolas Tredell's Cinemas of the Mind is an excellent introduction
to the rich history of film theory, especially for undergraduate students
in film studies. But its clarity makes it accessible for any non-specialist
who wants to become acquainted with the topic.
