Film Criticism, Film Theory

The present collection spans almost forty years of writing about the cinema. At first, I was just filling notebooks in the dark and copying intellectual postures and critical stances from my peers. But returning to England from Paris in September 1968, where for the preceding twelve months I had more or less slept, dreamt and lived under the looming presence of Henri Langlois at his Cinémathèque inside the Palais de Chaillot, it was easy to believe that maybe a mission awaited me. In the heady days of French cinephilia and Parisian politics the idea that the cinema was worth devoting one’s life to,1 did not seem at all absurd, in spite of (or because of) not possessing either the arrogance or the confidence to think of making films oneself. For the subsequent twenty years, I dedicated myself to this mission of making the cinema the most important measure of (my) life. But all the while, I was acutely aware of a split in practice: that between being a film critic — proffering value judgments to an (imagined) audience of my peers—and being a teacher, formulating a project for “film studies” as a university discipline. It began innocently and polemically in 1964, when I started to write for a student newspaper and went on to found a university film magazine in 1968, followed by a short-lived, but surprisingly well-remembered successor, Monogram, begun in 1971.2

When Monogram ceased publication in 1975, I began to write for other journals and newspapers, for Framework, Screen and Positif, even New Society and once or twice for the Guardian. From the mid-1980s I continued reviewing irregularly, first for the Monthly Film Bulletin and then for Sight & Sound. To those familiar with the film culture in Great Britain at the time, this may seem an odd career move, since my natural home would have been Movie, rather than its sworn enemy, Sight & Sound. But already from 1972 onwards, I did not have to make a living from reviewing, which absolved me from certain existential worries and perhaps for that reason, gave me a different outlook on the house journal of the institution whose mission it was to serve film culture at the intersection of education and the general public: the British Film Institute. The BFI — in the shape of the Education Department — had supported us intellectually and financially in the days of Monogram, and when I chose to write for the Monthly Film Bulletin, at the invitation of Richard Combs, it was because I liked the idea of being published in a trade supplement whose main purpose was to furnish accurate credits and reliable plot synopses for current releases. The opinion pieces I did for the MFB on Hans Jürgen Syberberg or Peter Greenaway were low-key, which gave me a chance to develop my ideas or champion marginal directors like Ruy Guerra or Raoul Ruiz in the protective shadow of relative obscurity. When the Monthly Film Bulletin was merged with Sight & Sound, I began to write longer pieces, but these have, on the whole, been more selective — and often also more retrospective — in their choice of films, topics or filmmakers: for successive editors of Sight & Sound, from Penelope Houston and John Pym, to Philip Dodd and Nick Thomas I was mostly their man for German cinema and European art films.

As a teacher of film studies my role has been much more ambiguous: in Great Britain, courses in film for undergraduates and graduates only date back some thirty years, and I cannot avoid taking responsibility for having been one of those younger academics (in my case, with a PhD in English and Comparative literature) who came to a university position on the back of the second wave of Higher Education expansion in the early 1970s. In tune with the students, but a Trojan horse for the institution, I helped give a home in academia to something which several of my senior colleagues in the English department abominated, and many of my fellow critics considered a joke: the academic study of the cinema. Since 1975, then, I have been fighting various institutional battles and journalistic skirmishes that first disguised, then defined, and several times since redefined and reconstructed “film studies” as a field to be researched and a subject to be taught at university.

Being part of a university, one often has a very reified relation to one’s subject, seeing it in the (un) holy trinity of a “methodology” (a set of rules, routines and procedures), a “body of knowledge” (a finite number of more or less secured empirical facts or data), and finally, a collection of canonical “works” or “texts” (of individual films to be classified into seminal and masterpieces, and more recently, into classics and cult-films). Since by definition, the task of a university teacher is to instruct the young by making a problem out of something that to them seems obvious, there is perhaps no need to dwell at length on the fact that this reified object known as a discipline, becomes, when taken outside the university, largely stripped of its legitimating purpose and to those outside, in the “real world,” seems very nearly meaningless.

During roughly the same period, the function of film criticism underwent changes, as did the fortunes of film magazines and film journals. The major complaint was that reviewing had become indistinguishable from advertising.3 What struck me, however, as a film historian as well as a critic, was how much film reviewing had always been a service industry. Being a service is its “first nature,” so to speak: a fact which—after years as the editor and chief author of Monogram and contributor to the Monthly Film Bulletin — I came to accept not without a certain perverse satisfaction. As a film historian I also noticed, not without a certain surprise, that many of the main questions and key concepts of the evolving discipline were first posed and formulated by film critics. In the past, this had had much to do with the general hostility of universities (but also shared by the “serious” cultural establishment) towards sustained reflections on the cinema. Nonetheless, the impact made by working critics on the agenda of film studies in the 1960s and 1970s is, in retrospect, astonishing. As an example I could cite one of my fields of research, the German cinema: its history and interpretation has until recently been almost exclusively shaped by two working critics, Siegfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner.4 Neo-realism and auteurism are other examples: it was mainly thanks to the reviews and essays of André Bazin that Italian neo-realism advanced to one of the most enduring paradigms of the aesthetics not only of the European cinema, but of the cinema, cementing a hegemony of realism, against which Christian Metz entered into a polemical dialogue, the very dialogue between “realism” and “constructivism” to which film studies owes its first entry into the university, under the name of semiology of the cinema. Similarly, our understanding of Hollywood, its canonical directors and cinematic masterpieces, also comes from critics: François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jean Douchet and those filmmaker-critics (Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Chris Marker) who wrote for Cahiers du cinema in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as Andrew Sarris in New York, who popularized la politique des auteurs by turning it into the auteur theory, and Pauline Kael, who fought it. Finally, film noir and melodrama — standard topics of the theoretical discourse of film studies — are genres originally named by critics, often in the midst of more or less polemical trench warfare.

Cinephilia: Love, Nostalgia and Disenchantment

This book, then, is in its first part about the British version of the phenomenon of cinephilia, the love of cinema. But it is also about the history of what has happened to cinephilia, as it migrated from little film magazines into university film classes. For after starting as a French-inspired preference for Hollywood movies, this passion for and persistence of Hollywood began to split into the “paradigm wars” of film theory for us teachers, and into various forms of cultism and fandom for subsequent generations of students, before it became all but absorbed by some of the varieties of cultural studies, only to re-emerge, since the 1990s on the Internet in blogs, list-servers and social networks.

Love of cinema, as an emotion that blurs the boundaries between movies and life, blending critical partisanship with melancholy regret, has existed, in one form or another, since the 1920s. But at the limit, when it makes one believe that the latter — life — can only be endured by a sustained involvement with the former — movies — it can also be more precisely located in history and more circumscribed geographically. In the essays that follow, cinephilia is inseparable from auteurism, as promoted by the French auteur-critics around Cahiers du cinema of the 1950s and early 1960s, becoming muted while Hollywood was under attack during the 1970s, before it mutated into a carefully balanced ambivalence during the battles around the different definitions of “classical (narrative) cinema.”

The term classical cinema, although also borrowed from André Bazin, emerged in the critical vocabulary at first in Britain in the late 1960s and then in the US in the 1970s, at a moment in time, in other words, when both the existence of the auteur and the reality of classical Hollywood (almost by definition, if one accepts that “a theory is often the funeral of a practice”) were rapidly becoming obsolete, part of the past, and poised for a nostalgic embrace: by then it had become a cinephilia not without a touch of necrophilia.5

Nonetheless, the discussions around classical cinema were often conducted with great passion and even animosity, signs of the affective investment essential to cinephilia. What made the affectivity even more ambivalent was that partisanship took place against the background of bidding (painful, triumphant?) farewell to the idea of the cinema as (traditional) art form, promoted after 1945 through neo-realism and the (mainly European) auteur directors from Jean Renoir, Luchino Visconti and Roberto Rossellini to Ingmar Bergman, Max Ophuls and Andrzej Wajda. What replaced it was the sense of the cinema as in some ways a synthetic, but at the same time symptomatic (that is to say, typically modern) mythology, an idea first suggested by Edgar Morin in France and Parker Tyler in New York, but made respectable through Claude Lévi-Strauss and, above all, Roland Barthes.

That the debate around cinephilia played itself out across a complex cultural matrix, at a particular historical conjunction, is evident also when one contextualizes topographically the fact that it was Paris where the terms of the vocabulary and the canonical works were established, as well as the stances and attitudes rehearsed. For many of the younger generation in Britain and the US, pilgrimages to Paris were de rigueur; it became a case of “playing at being French,” while the French themselves, a decade earlier—through jazz in St Germain des Prés, the Gallimard serie noire, Gide, Sartre and Camus’ admiration for William Faulkner, Dashiell Hammett and Ernest Hemingway—had been “playing at being American.” This, at least, is part of the history that an early essay of mine, “Two Decades in Another Country” (1975), wanted to present about the migration of French love for Hollywood in the 1950s and 1960s. 6 The companion piece, thirty years on, is the essay on “Cinephilia,” included in the present volume, which recapitulates some of the personal details of this story, but also tries to give a more theoretical turn to the developments in and beyond the 1970s. It tracks the persistence of cinephilia in the formations that (on the face of it) seem to be its opposite, the cinephobic strand of French film theory, inaugurated—in the pages of the very same Cahiers du cinema, no less—with essays, such as the one on John Ford’s YOUNG MR LINCOLN or those other brilliant “deconstructions” of Hollywood ideology,7 which so profoundly marked “Screen theory” in Britain,8 and continued to influence the way film studies was taught in the United States well into the 1990s.9

Why Hollywood?

If I return to my own involvement in these debates, the critical rather than meta-critical essays that I published between 1967 and 1975 reflect a double agenda. On the one hand, writing for a public rather than for myself began with a more or less mimetic adoption of the unalloyed auteurism of Cahiers du cinema and Movie, in the articles I published in the Brighton Film Review, two samples of which are the essay on Nicholas Ray (written, flushed with excitement, from seeing his films and meeting Ray after his lecture at the National Film Theatre) and on Sam Fuller. The latter I had also met in London in 1968, whereupon I persuaded my collaborators on the BFR to do a special issue on Fuller (graciously acknowledged by the director in a letter sent to us from Los Angeles). The essay on Shock Corridor reprinted here was commissioned by Peter Wollen for the Edinburgh Retrospective booklet of 1969.

By the time the Fuller and Ray essays were published, I had already tried to extend auteurism to include questions of genre and ideology. I was particularly interested in the complementary-compensatory function that genres have for Hollywood,10 and how this related to an overall cultural-ideological project that appeared unique to the American cinema, namely to reshape the nation, after WWII, in the image of its mass media. It gave it a quasi-anthropological function neither captured by the extreme aesthetic value suddenly placed on Hollywood genre films by auteurism and cinephilia, nor acknowledged by an also quite extreme ideological critique and deconstruction of Hollywood. The result was a number of hybrid pieces, one of which I devoted to Vincente Minnelli (1970), whom I saw putting forth a complementary, but unified “vision” by alternating between making musical comedies and melodramas, much the same way Peter Wollen had shown the auteur “Howard Hawks” to be made up of binary pairs, in which comedies and Western, seemingly antithetical genres, conditioned and necessitated each other.11 My own post-auteurist essays did not follow a strict structuralist agenda, as inaugurated by Wollen and subsequently laid out by Screen, but rather initiated a more general reflection about the American cinema (in the pages of Monogram), where we tried to understand how Hollywood worked as an integrated, but flexible system, which led to some first specifications (and more unsecured speculations) about what the term “classical cinema” could signify.

If I was therefore in the late 1960s/early 1970s—somewhat fortuitously, but as it turned out, also Fortunately — involved in the formulation of one of the several versions of what is now generally referred to as “classical Hollywood” cinema, the underlying interest was as much ethnographic-anthropological as it was aesthetic and political. In the 1990s I was intrigued to find myself figure occasionally as witness for both the defense and the prosecution, as it were, in the so-called “paradigm wars” (Jane Gaines) or “form wars” (Bill Nichols).12 Film studies had its most creative period in the 1980s, leading to a lively polemic between Screen theory (notably represented by Laura Mulvey, Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe) and positions (headed by David Bordwell, Noël Carroll) that later were gathered together under the title of Post-Theory. Without directly entering into the debate, I did “respond” to an invitation to contribute to a special issue of Film Criticism, where I tried to re-assess my position about the cinema, in the face of a general paradigm shift, tilting the profession towards cultural studies, while also acknowledging the need to engage openly with the changes that had transformed Hollywood in the 1980s and 1990s.13 For the present volume I expanded these thoughts into a partly autobiographical essay, paying a special tribute to Peter Wollen, and trying to put the London scene around Screen and the emergence of cultural studies in context (“Film Studies in Britain: Cinephilia, Screen Theory and Cultural Studies”).

The shift of my cinephile horizon was also occasioned by a change of location from the University of Sussex in Brighton to bohemian West London, and the re-founding of the Brighton Film Review as Monogram, encouraged by my first contacts (besides Peter Wollen) with Laura Mulvey, Jon Halliday, Sam Rohdie and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, most of whom were my seniors by a few years, and especially in matters political, far more sophisticated and erudite. The first programmatic statement of this encounter, where I mapped a position both distinct from that of Screen, but — as I hoped — open to exchange and debate, was “Why Hollywood?” where I tried to spell out some of the principles behind our continued interest in studying the classical cinema systematically, and how we intended to do it in a historical-critical context. I highlighted the drive-oriented (male) hero, the linear narrative trajectory in the form of a journey or a quest, the strong character-centered motivation and the interlocking causal chain of actions. But what was also important to me was to identify a psycho-social element of affect, energy and emotion, which at first I attributed to the directors’ world view: Sam Fuller’s paranoid/violent heroes, Nicholas Ray’s romantic protagonists with their Dionysian energies, but also destructiveness, Minnelli’s more aestheticized psychic drive and emotional joie de vivre, but also often taken to the point of excess, delirium and even death—and therefore akin to the jouissance that Roland Barthes had identified in modernist texts. I saw in these directors and their work an immanent critique of American ideology, which finally seemed to me more interesting than merely to apply the standard (European) ideological critique from outside the films and from outside the culture that produced and sustained them.

Subsequently, I extended this immanent critique and my sense of these films as limit experiences which, I realized, I had projected onto my favorite Hollywood auteurs, partly no doubt in order to rescue the “good (Hollywood) object” from the withering critiques by my peers. Depersonalizing the good object somewhat, I turned the diagnostics around, looking towards the audience, trying to analyze the emotional-bodily force field — the psychic matrix of reception, as I called it — into which the spectator is immersed by the “cinema experience.” It was the other side of cinephilia: a state of mind sensitive to the place, the space, the time, the big screen, the darkened auditorium. The result was “Narrative Cinema and Audience-Aesthetics,” presented initially to one of the BFI Education Department’s evening seminars in the early 1970s, where it fell somewhat flat, or rather, it fell between several reigning or emerging orthodoxies: an experience which strengthened my resolve to chart a path in dialogue with but nonetheless also distinct from that of Screen.

Film studies in Britain, from the mid-1970s onwards, and increasingly through the 1980s, began to develop along somewhat divergent trajectories. At the center was Screen magazine, which had turned to psycho-semiotics, with a series of remarkable and hugely influential articles, published in quick succession by Colin MacCabe on the “classic realist text,”14 Stephen Heath’s major articles on narrative,15 and especially Laura Mulvey’s article which practically founded feminist film theory,16 all of them vigorously continuing the critical engagement with Hollywood. Although taking off from a different vantage point, one has to add here the analyses of entertainment forms, commissioned and researched by members of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. While Screen theory relied heavily on Althusser’s interpretation of Lacan, the Birmingham School extended and made productive the theoretical bases of Gramscian Marxism, impervious and generally hostile to psychoanalysis. The subjects broached by cultural studies tended to include the cinema, but also marginalized it, turning more towards other media, artifacts and objects of popular culture, such as television, soap opera, women’s magazines, popular music, spectator sports or fashion.

However, throughout the 1970s (1972–79) there was at least a third strand of inquiry linking British writing to popular cinema, perhaps more an accidental conjuncture of three individual essays, each author pursuing more or less his own interests, rather than forming a school, but each continuing an engagement with Hollywood, notably around genre, which with hindsight seem to have features in common. Three authors produced widely quoted articles outside the Screen orbit, two appearing in Movie and one in Monogram. My own essay on melodrama “Tales of Sound and Fury,” from 1972 was followed by Richard Dyer’s Movie essay on the musical, “Entertainment and Utopia,” from 197717 and Robin Wood published “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” in 1979.18 All three essays looked at the deviant, non-conformist or excessive genres of Hollywood symptomatically, that is, in order to read from them a dynamic, critical engagement with big issues in US-American society, gender and the family. Each essay, while certainly affected by structuralist method, eschewed grand theory, concentrating instead on a close analysis of a particular corpus of films, and treating seriously, as the auteurists had done, films with stereotypical plots and often despised generic forms.

Film Analysis as System

During the 1980s, my essays and lectures tended to take up the tenets of Screen theory only to the extent that I adopted and tried to make my own the analyses of Raymond Bellour, inspired by a personal encounter, by his essays on THE BIG SLEEP, on GIGI and THE LONEDALE OPERATOR, but less so by his better-known work on Hitchcock. My brief section on the opening of THE BIG SLEEP, and the longer analysis of THE PUBLIC ENEMY are an oblique tribute to Lévi-Strauss’ influence on his work, especially in the way Bellour framed the question of classical cinema as one of (mythological) extension and (textual) volume. For me, he lucidly formulated an essential (formal, but also ideological) tension in Hollywood cinema between the linear, goal and drive-oriented surface structure, which sustains a conscious, motivational engagement with the protagonist, and a “depth” structure, following a quite different logic, with richer extensions in symbolic and emotional space. Bellour allowed me to retain from auteurism an immanently critical, reflexive and self-referential dimension, while also keeping in focus the question of genre, star and studio, which is to say, the “systemic” features of Hollywood’s self-organization and self-regulation; and finally, even as he devoted more of his critical energies to video and installation art, Bellour proved a valuable reference in my efforts to define — formally, but especially anthropologically, in the way American cinema speaks to America and through America to the world—what retroactively became classical Hollywood, as the studio-era was re-assessed, during the (second) phase of “New Hollywood,” starting around 1975, when the American film industry itself underwent its most momentous changes for thirty or forty years.

The differences between my early essays on Hollywood as a coherent set of rules, patterns and practices, written as these changes were taking place and the rules were broken, and “Film as System” reflect above all the division between critic and teacher. For the sake of my students and pedagogy, I needed to formalize my more intuitive insights, leading to an extended statement of how to read Hollywood films closely within the routines of academic study. In “Film as System” I concentrated on openings, in order to show how carefully crafted these foreshadowing and retrospective effects are that give the classical Hollywood film its “body,” its memory of itself, as well as its many effects of “realism” as coherence, its dense semantic texture and reliably pleasurable self-consistency. The essay is expository and thus the one most directly indebted to structuralism (and to Thierry Kuntzel, himself a video-artist and a friend of Bellour’s), but I took care to enlist and compare several different methodological entry points (including those provided by David Bordwell, Peter Wollen, Edward Branigan), pairing them off against each other, seeing them as complementary, and assessing the consequences of their methodological choices for the practice of close textual analysis. A more contextual approach is taken in the two-part chapter that gives the book its title, The Persistence of Hollywood, where I lay out the general frameworks within which I think one needs to understand the formal features as well as the historical dynamics that allow Hollywood to be in constant change and yet stay the same, to be the most adaptive and the most conservative, the most revolutionary and the most reactionary force in global culture: a perplexing and paradoxical anthropological phenomenon that will never have been studied enough.

Self-divided not only between critic and scholar, but also between formalism and historical analysis, I also continued with my other tradition of contextualization, derived from Siegfried Kracauer’s socio-psychological model of “modernity and the mass-media,” which I tried to combine with Edgar Morin’s more explicitly socio-anthropological model of the cinema. The result was a series of articles, which returned to the question of genre and the studio-system, but now as a more complex set of historical determinants. These included censorship, national politics, the representative hero, while also paying attention to the formal constraints or stylistic pressures bearing upon the classical mode in the 1930s and 1940s. In this sense, several essays highlight the history of Warner Bros., focusing on its gangster films and the biopics as typical formations/deformations of a historical imaginary and its public sphere, and thus are attempts to both place and displace the terms of the debate around the classical. Placing classical cinema formally and displacing it historically, the notion of genre comes back as something that regulates norms and deviance (in matters of ethnic, class and gender identities) for a particular community at a particular point in time. While genre seems to loom large, almost as an anthropological category, the essays try to ground the definition of genre also in the narratological work that came out of structuralism, especially Propp and Greimas. These considerations around the gangster film and the William Dieterle biopics from the 1930s, with their male stars as focal points (James Cagney, Paul Muni) were originally preceded by a collaborative piece written with a colleague during the summer of 1975 in Berlin, featuring another Warner Bros. film, The Roaring Twenties, starring both Cagney and Humphrey Bogart.(footnotes: 19) Also relevant in this context is the most “extra-territorial” director to have ever worked with and for Warner Bros., Stanley Kubrick. The prototypical role his films were to play in the transition from classical “in-house” studio films to post-classical “outsourcing” is evaluated at the end of the section on auteurs maudits and mavericks.

In the 1960s and 1970s, we used to think of the cinema as the last creative, individual art form, as an expressive medium, and we celebrated its heroes, the auteurs. In this respect, the gap between Hollywood, the European art cinema and the political and formal avant-garde cinemas was not as wide as it often seemed. But in the course of the final decades of the 20th century we realized more and more that the cinema — all of cinema — had been like an invisible film, a material immaterial substance, in which the century had been captured or had inscribed itself. Likeness, trace, imprint, cast, script or Turin shroud: we know it is legible, even if we don’t always know how to decipher or translate it. The “image” the century has left: is it thanks to, or in spite of the work of the auteurs? The question poses itself, since so much of our collective and individual memory is made up of photographic and filmic images whose authorship is, for all intents and purposes “anonymous.” If Andy Warhol was one of the first to recognize this,20 it was Jean Luc Godard who was able to give this sense of the cinema as the “veritable history” of the 20th century its most definitive form and documentation, in his Histoire(s) du cinema (1988–98).21 His collision-compilation of a hundred years of cinema still relies on and endorses the auteurs*, drawing on Hitchcock, Renoir, Dreyer, Rossellini, Lang, Murnau as well as George Stevens and Sidney Lumet, but the discourse is that history speaks through them, their “individual vision” more a vehicle for the historical unconscious—or the historical imaginary—of cinema. Perhaps this is what Godard finally meant when, twenty years earlier, he proposed a counter-cinema.22

Such conclusions suggest that the more impersonal theories of the cinema — say the sociological one of a Siegfried Kracauer, or the anthropological one of an Edgar Morin, and even the formalist case for classical cinema—have proven more prophetic. Will they be more productive for the 21st century than the auteurist studies we were conducting in the 1960s? Will they prove more relevant than even the anti-auteurist psycho-analytical and semiotic analyses of the classical American cinema? The verdict is not yet in, but the chances are that the director as auteur-entrepreneur will flourish in the digital era, even if auteurism as we have known and debated it will become a nostalgic memory before being revived as a “cult” interest.

What, then, do we make of these abandoned sites of film scholarship, or how to account for their revival and persistence? In other words: what was the function of authorship studies and what their status today? I can only answer in a personal manner: I started my life as a critic with essays on Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller and Vincente Minnelli — two outsiders of the Hollywood system, and one an aesthete who for a long time was considered a mere metteur en scene rather than an auteur.23 What interested me (but not only me) was how these filmmakers had been able to create a world, “their” world in this impersonal medium, and even more in this impersonal industry, which was the Hollywood studio system. The model was that of antagonism and “critique,” the individual artist pitted against the system.

As a historian, I also felt obliged—and frankly, attracted—to study this Hollywood “system” in more detail, from within its own logic, rather than as merely the negative foil of the auteur’s struggle for autonomy. The socio-historical and anthropological approaches interested me more than the political-polemical ones, but I never abandoned the auteurist bias, except perhaps to extend it into a historical, as well as aesthetic inquiry, with a weakness for European directors working in Hollywood. Wanting to document the efforts required to maintain integrity and a personal vision among strangers, I transferred the old Cahiers du cinema preference for the Hollywood outsider to mainly German-speaking directors at the margins, concentrating on refugees, self-exiles, displaced persons in one form or another—from Ernst Lubitsch, F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, to Joe May, E.A. Dupont and Robert Siodmak, then to William Dieterle, Walter Reisch and Douglas Sirk. But I was also fascinated by the English Hitchcock in the Californian sun, and Roman Polanski, the Pole with French connections, surrounded by tragedy and scandal in L.A., and I became intrigued by Americans displaced in Europe, notably Orson Welles, Joseph Losey and Stanley Kubrick.

The auteurs were thus only one polarity of the dialectic: the other was the effort to read the American cinema as symptomatic, taking the pulse of the Zeitgeist, registering the shifts in the cultural history, rendering palpable the mass-media unconscious already alluded to when I mentioned Kracauer and Morin. The more critical I became of Kracauer in relation to Weimar Germany and its cinema, the more Kracauerian I remained in my estimation of the Hollywood cinema. For years I could do little more than either ignore this contradiction, or at best register the tension between the two positions. I consoled myself by thinking of Raymond Bellour, whose symptomatic readings of Hollywood across especially the work of Hitchcock seemed to me to display a similar oscillation — between describing Hollywood as a “complete world,” and making Hitchcock — surely the most eccentric and unrepresentative representative of what Hollywood stood for and still stands for — the embodiment and symbol of these closed worlds or mythologies.

Hollywood Defined Through Its Outsiders

In my teaching I kept alive the debate around the “classical,” but increasingly I found myself looking at Hollywood classicism as also the product of its non-American, immigrant, self-exiled directors, so that the classical—after the exploration of genre—finds itself in each case folded back into a discussion of an auteur-director also trailing another national tradition and being part of an international history. Among several possible papers I have selected a study of one of the least recognized auteurs across the Europe-Hollywood-Europe axis: William Dieterle, both Warner Bros. studio hack and eminent European. I follow it with chapters on Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang.

Each essay is less concerned to establish their auteurist credentials, that is the thematic coherence of their work (which — in contrast to Minnelli, Fuller, Ray — has always been incontestable, even where it was challenged, as in Pauline Kael’s book on Citizen Kane).24 Rather, the chapters situate these figures in a multi-layered cultural history of Europe and Hollywood, exploring the personal as well as stylistic signifiers of the national character-(mask) they felt themselves called upon to put on and represent. This positioned their work within and at the margins of the classical, and opened it up to various kinds of non-classical styles or the historical deviations (Baroque, Expressionist or Edwardian). The section also raises issues of continuity and discontinuity in the critical-evaluative paradigm, further taken up in an essay that marks the beginning of the transitional phase starting in the 1970s and ending in the early 1990s. Devoted to Robert Altman’s pioneering, multi-track and multi-strand narrative ensemble film Nashville (1975), it tries to show how creatively aware but also divided this director was, regarding the different “crises”: his work pointed in a direction that Hollywood did not take. The Kubrick essay has been placed here, because Kubrick is not only extraterritorial, but also “too late/too soon” in relation to the classical/post-classical shifts in 1960s/1970s Hollywood. It is around Altman and Kubrick that one can track once more a critique “from within” of the classical, and show how these directors each develop their version(s) of the post-classical by pathologizing the classical, by “prototyping” it, or by re-“turning” the classical against itself.

The Post-Classical as Classical-Plus

Section IV concentrates on post-classical Hollywood, in the gradual, but not always peaceful self-invention from “New” Hollywood to Global Hollywood, and from the on-location filmmaking by directors like Bob Rafelson and Monte Hellman, to the digital post-production work of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. The tension is between the centrifugal forces of globalization, money and the different delivery systems for Hollywood “product” (as “the industry” or “the business” not only encompasses film and television production, but becomes interlaced with the music business, advertising and the military) and the centripetal forces of cultural and high-tech “clustering,” which shows that place and location still matter, when it comes to having a skill-base, as well as requiring the flow of “information” that only circulates among “tribal” communities. Equally contradictory is the pull towards outsourcing, sub-contracting and specialization on the one hand, and the “winner-takes-all” logic, which finally keeps so much economic power and cultural capital in the hands of so few.

It was as a way of encouraging myself to once more participate directly in the debates around the after-life of the “classical cinema” (and what it might mean to speak of a post-classical cinema, now applied to Hollywood since the 1980s rather than to the New Hollywood of the early 1970s) that in 2002 I co-wrote a book on the distinction between classical and post-classical cinema when applied to typical special effects “action-films” like DIE HARD , on “time travel films” like Back to the Future.25 Earlier I had published an essay on the relation of classical cinema to television series, to ride films and studio-tours, which aligns a certain textual-temporal logic (that of seriality, of the sequel and the prequel) with an economic and marketing logic, each becoming allegorized versions of the other.26 Although not included, it should be seen as a companion piece to “New Economy Hollywood,” which in turn is a “sequel” to “The Pathos of Failure,” first published in 1975, in that it tries to analyze, thirty years after, what might have been the several kinds of industrial logics underlying the “New Hollywood” and its transformation into the blockbuster culture of the 1980s and beyond.

By invoking once more the Hollywood-Europe-Hollywood dialectic, but also by a more specific application to Hollywood of the idea of post-Fordist industrial production, I want to offer an explanatory model that is both specific enough and capacious or “flexible” enough to understand the personal auteurist element of the change from “New Wave” to “New Economy” Hollywood, while taking account of the industrial changes usually referred to as the package unit system and the corresponding shift in emphasis from production to post-production, and from post-production to marketing. A key figure in these transitions, and an auteur who himself is only too (self-)conscious of “embodying” several paradigms of American film history, including those of its mavericks, auteurs maudits and misfits is Francis Ford Coppola. It is with an analysis of his BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA and its multi-layered references to both literature and cinema, to the national and the international, to Hollywood as intensely obsessed with “America” and increasingly multi-national and global that I try to make the transition to the entrepreneurial auteur —first to Steven Spielberg’s transformation of the blockbuster into a kind of time-machine and memory-generator, and second, with an analysis of James Cameron (and his blockbuster hit AVATAR), who rather than being opposed to the system, embodies and represents it, though in an intriguingly (self-) contradictory way.

The collection is brought to a close with two attempts to understand the “persistence of Hollywood” in the digital age. The first tries to account for the rapid adoption of the new digital production and post-production methods not through focusing on the new technology, but in relation to different regimes of knowledge, belief and trust, while the final chapter — my most synthesizing effort to date — extends this analysis into more encompassing historical frameworks of the “American century,” economic models of “creative destruction” and anthropological schemata, affecting the body and the senses, but ultimately turning on self-regulation as self-reference, providing access for all and keeping the system “open,” while tightly controlling both access and openness.

All five sections of this collection have a double focus, as it were: the way they engage with time and time-shifting, not in the sense of science fiction, but as they try to grapple with the seeming paradox of Hollywood’s continuity and change, its ability to appear to remain the same “fantasy island,” while constantly revolutionizing key areas of its engagement with the “real world” of finance, labor, management, technology and global trade. The fact that the essays span the period from the late 1960s to the present, with an emphasis on the 1970s and 1990s, makes them symptomatic of these periods of accelerated change.