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

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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.