Summer Reading. 6.

Both Perez and Bordwell have a quarrel with "theory," and Perez has an additional quarrel with the quarrel. Film theory became just Theory in the Seventies, Bordwell suggests, a major excursion into a combination of semiotics, feminism, Marxism and psychoanalysis. By the Eighties, "history had come to be more intriguing than the minuet of Grand Theory," but this didn't stop people from theorising.... "This is a book of film criticism consistently drawn to theory but as consistently sceptical of what these days is called 'theory.'" Bordwell is always sharp and often funny; Perez is always subtle. But it isn't enough to mark off what you don't like by satire or punctuation, by upper-case letters and quotation-marks. All you're doing is refusing to argue, evoking other views as monolithically foolish and faddish, saying that what you don't like about them is that you don't like them. What if theory, as Brecht thought, is another name for curiosity? What if there are theoretical questions to be asked about models? What if you read the Frankfurt School and also crank through microfilm? This in fact is what both Bordwell and Perez do. What's mildly worrying is not their practice but their rhetoric of disavowal, their willingness to sound like the intellectual philistines they are not.

In "Cheerfully Chopping up the World," Michael Wood opens with a close reading of the opening sequence of Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas and then proceeds to review the following books for the July 2, 1998 issue of the London Review of Books: The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium by Gilberto Perez, On the History of Film Style by David Bordwell, Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine by D.N. Rodowick, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema by Jean Mitry and Signs and Meaning in the Cinema by Peter Wollen.



Posted by dwhudson at July 24, 2003 5:39 PM