How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies: [Paperback]

Robert B. Ray (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2001

How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies
Robert B. Ray
Foreword by James Naremore

Challenges accepted ideas about film and cultural studies.

In the 1920s, when film criticism was as new as the cinema itself, a particular way of thinking about the movies developed in Paris. The cinema, this theory suggested, turns on photography's automatism, the revolutionary fact that for the first time in human history a perfect representation of the world can be produced by accident. Moreover, the camera's gaze has the potential to transform ordinary objects—a telephone, a letter on a desk, a woman's face—into spellbinding images, swarming with details whose precise appeal remains unpredictable. By the 1930s, this theory of photogénie (photogenia) had vanished from most serious writing about film. Why did this disappearance occur? In this collection of essays, Robert B. Ray discusses this disappearance and other mysteries like it: Why did photography and the detective story originate at exactly the same time? Why has some of the most prominent academic writing about the cinema resisted anything but "scientific" accounts of the movies? What counts as "knowledge" in film studies or any intellectual discipline? What do the French Impressionists have in common with the Sex Pistols? How did Douglas Sirk's critically ignored melodramas become "subversive critiques of bourgeois ideology"? How did the fate of Sirk's movies help us understand postmodernism and the avant-garde? In taking up these questions, Ray's essays challenge certain ideas about film and cultural studies, while arguing for a mode of writing about the movies and experimental art that would respect the abidingly mysterious effect of their images and sounds.

Robert B. Ray, Director of Film and Media Studies and Professor of English at the University of Florida, is author of A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema 1930–1980 and The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy. He is also a member of The Vulgar Boatmen, whose records include You and Your Sister, Please Panic, and Opposite Sex.

Contents
Foreword by James Naremore
Impressionism, Surrealism, and Film Theory: Path Dependence, or How a Tradition in Film Theory Gets Lost
The Bordwell Regime and the Stakes of Knowledge
Snapshots: The Beginnings of Photography
Tracking
How to Start and Avant-Garde
How to Teach Cultural Studies
The Best Way to Understand Postmodernism
The Mystery of Edward Hopper
Film and Literature
Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Robert B. Ray, Director of Film and Media Studies and Professor of English at the University of Florida, is author of A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema 1930-1980 and The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy. He is also a member of The Vulgar Boatmen, whose records include You and Your Sister, Please Panic, and Opposite Sex.

Product Details

• Paperback: 184 pages
• Publisher: Indiana University Press (June 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0253214386
• ISBN-13: 978-0253214386
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,094,332 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing Redefinition of Film and Cultural Theory Scholarship, January 7, 2008

By 

M. Parlamento "50sprof" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies: (Paperback)

It's amazing to me that I am the first person to write a review of this important collection by one of the U.S.'s most daring film scholars. "How a Film Theory Got Lost" investigates the problematic between film studies and cultural studies scholarship, both of which pay special attention to the visual image. Ray's book does not offer a reading of individual movies, thankfully. Rather, he invents, surreptitously, a new way of writing and thinking about movies and popular culture; he does so by using form as a methodology for writing. Each essay is its own gem.

For instance, in his essay "Snapshots: the Beginning of Photography," Ray moves from the beginnings of photography and the detective novel to a discussion of narrative film's predilection to uncover/detect visual clues. Ray's writing makes the read all the more enjoyable. In lovely prose, he summarizes: "In the origins of photography, therefore, lies an intersection of related problems: the legibility of the surrounding world, the status of the detail, the relationship between image and language." As this passage suggests, this essay beautifully complicates a teleological (linear) view of film historicism by focusing on the still image as a "shapshot" onto a history that yearns for a caption. Along the way, he performs some phenomenal readings of film stills, each of which becomes an archive of film history. Truly, a fun read!

In the end, Ray wishes to recover the thing we love most about movies: the ineffable, that thing we can't explain. As such, his collection becomes a manifesto against the kind of cultural knowledge built upon accretion. We, each one of us, have an entry-point onto/into the movies and other popular culture forms, if only we look and investigate that which intrerests us. Ray's book asks us to create an archive of details, both historical and formal, to create a new kind of cultural history. Rethinking my own relationship to film history, I began to ask questions about the details of the most ambiguous of genres, film noir: what about the anklet caressing Phyllis Dietrich's mobile tendon in "Double Indemnity?" Or the black sweetheart dress incinerated by Norah Larkin in Fritz Lang's "The Blue Gardenia" -- a synechdoche for her, and, by extension, the 1950s naivete? Or, that background setting (a kind of economic deep focus) of a ceasless and menacing oil derrick in Welles' "Touch of Evil?"

After reading Ray's collection, I realize that such details are not "background" but rather apertures onto a world of history that lies just outside of the film's frame. The book is a treat, an insightful contribution to film scholarhip.