Film and Film

Román Gubern

To state the existence of a scientific methodology for the critic of film texts automatically implies that if such methodology existed, it would be the only one valid, and in consequence it would exclude all others. Let us leave aside the so called intuitive or ¨sensitive critic¨, which is at present the most extended method of cinematographic comment , raises the subjective opinion of the spectator-writer to the category of evaluation system and turns the critical review practice into a pure autonomous literature work. Going beyond this impressionist sate of opinion, many intellectuals from the early twenties, stated the need for scientific evaluation of cinematographic texts, based on scientific disciplines already existing and born outside the cinematographic environment. The Marxist tradition, for example, supplied the basis for the first essays written in order to establish a statute of cinema, considered the maker of cultural industry of the dominant classes. The contributions of Béla Balázs from Hungary, since 1924; the School of Frankfurt –in particular Walter Benjamin and Sigfried Kracauer- and the less important one of Leon Moussinac in France, gave the cinema the characteristic of an ideological instrument controlled by upper middle-class, and its products as superstructure phenomena.

From a very different perspective, and according to the studies of psychology of perception, Hugo Münsterberg in 1916 and Rudolf Arnheim in 1932 tried to establish the statute of cinema as a phenomenon of sensory perception based on certain structures of visual perception. The reading of the cinematographic text with techniques coming from psychoanalysis was suggested since 1925 by the intuitions of Jean Goudal, who in his pioneer article Surréalisme et Cinema (at Hebdomadaire review) defined cinema as a ¨conscience hallucination¨; the same year Pabst prepared his project Secrets of a Soul, film than in collaboration with Dr. Karl Abraham, developed in images the analysis of a real psychopathologic case and its process of cure. As from this moment, the comparison between a film text and a dream flux, as well as its condition or manifestation of the collective subconscious, became common places for part of the illustrated critics, that following Sigmund Freud´s terminology, referred to the manifest content and latent content as if they were dreams displayed on a film/screen. Edgar Morin has presented very interesting texts of anthropology and sociology filmmaking, tributary of this methodology.

All methodologies of critical evaluation already mentioned in this text manifested a monographic interest in stressing, for example, the colonization or ideological manipulation of the dominant classes through cinema or detect the unnatural procedures of structuring audiovisual representations in a film, or discover the unconscious elements underlying in an apparently conventional cinematographic story. None of the mentioned strategies was exclusive or incompatible with the others in its goal of appreciating a film text, since all of them referred to the same object, but contemplated it from different perspectives and following different objectives, although complementary.

The works of André Bazin after the war renewed the interest –already manifested by certain Soviet classic theorists- towards a specific evaluation of the cinematographic language or, more precisely, towards the analysis of the esthetic and dramatic consequences derived from the technical options and the stage organized by the director. With this method, that obtained its most original results in the style analysis of William Wyler and Orson Wells, as well as the role of the shot-sequence, the next explosion of semiotic investigations in the field of cinematographic expression was timidly announced. Continuing with an uninterrupted tradition, manifested mainly in the texts of Russian formalists and Einstein, semiotic and structuralism tried to establish a methodology since the early sixties, to analyze the procedures applied to give sense -typical of the film rhetoric- making theirs concepts extracted from the science of language. Christian Metz was the one who tried a more systematic development of this discipline, but his excessive dependence on the language applied to cinema, led him to a pause towards 1975 and a change of direction, to become oriented according to Lacan´s psychoanalysis in the study of the cinematographic phenomenon, which might have pointed a crisis in this critic project and the expectations regarding the operative efficiency of this method.

Having come to this point, we should ask ourselves if it is possible to integrate all the methodologies named hitherto (and others, eventually productive) in the essential structuring of a true transdisciplinary critic founded in all the contributions of human science.

Naturally, this ambitious transdisciplinar and omnicomprehensive critic could have an annoying consequence: to produce a reasonably complete and satisfactory review of a film an hour and a half long, 300 to 400 pages of thorough analysis should be written. It is interesting to note that as from a few years now, books are starting to appear (some really thick) on how to study a specific film. This implies the paradox that the time and intellectual effort demanded by the critic commentary largely surpass the ones required by the reading of the text object of the critic. In the monumental reviews of exhaustive and transdisciplinary vocation, we frequently detect the anguish of the critic, forced to manipulate with words an object of audiovisual nature –audioiconic- that does not admit the transcodification to a different means of expression, nor the reduction of its meaning to mere words. In true, the iconic nature of the cinematographic language is verbally illegible due to the different substance of its expression (Saussure) or matter of expression (Hjelmslev). This impossibility to examine minutely or reproduce through verbal procedures the object of study, frequently leads the critic to the strategy of pretense, to try the theoretical construction on paper of a model that stands as "double" -conceptual and imaginary- of the studied object, and which does not allow its reproduction by non cinematographic means.

The conclusion of all this is simple: films constitute texts that are irreplaceable matrices, that no critic or descriptive discourse can substitute. Our priority task as cinema historians resides therefore in the demand of the preservation of the existing film texts in optimum security conditions. The productivity of the unilateral readings of the film (psychoanalytical, political, structural, etc.) show the virtues generated by the systematic conceptual concentration. And we finally have the modest but very interesting monographic critic of certain technical aspects of the film text; complex object in which different codes of various languages participate. There is no doubt about the interest that the analysis of the stage design has for specialists, or the actors and actresses´ performances, or the light and photography of a film or a group of films belonging to an author, a genre or a national school, to catalogue the esthetic constant or difference and establish conclusions. The partial and specialized analysis, whose interest derives precisely from the esthetic complexity and semiotic of the film text, must be considered as necessary investigations to ultimately unable the development of a critic history of stage design, interpretation, or photography, regarding cinema, an author, a genre or a national school. The first ones interested in an investigation of this kind are cinematographic specialists: historians, conservationists, cinema professionals, who could thanks to this information, have a better knowledge and comprehension of the evolution of the cinematographic expression and the nature of its technical problems.