Film studies has proven itself to be a fully established member of the contemporary academic community. However, it is folly to assume that the legitimacy, present fecundity, or general institutional security of the discipline was in any way historically guaranteed. Unlike the objects of study in many other disciplines in the humanities and fine arts, film developed long after the establishment of the modern university. Film lacked parallels in classical and early modern scholarship and education. There was no immediate consensus on pedagogical approaches for the medium or the purpose of educating students in film studies. As a newly and continuously forming medium, there was no demonstrable sequence or progression from convention to transgression or from mundane to masterpiece. Indeed, for the first decades of its existence it was questionable whether film would be considered as a lasting addition to human cultural expression or would become marginalised as an interesting but intellectually irrelevant public diversion not truly worthy of scholarly attention for the articulation of its merits. For some critics, the evolution of film studies as a discipline parallels developments in the university and more broadly within society. Articles by Dana Polan, Haidee Wasson, and Michael Zryd examine the institutional development of film studies both within and exterior to the university. Polan and Zryd examine the institutionalisation of the discipline within the academic context, while Wasson elaborates on the success of the Museum of Modern Art in establishing itself as a film archive, distribution, and exhibition centre. For the purposes of this present review and to limit itself to the scope of the articles under examination, the maturation of film studies within America will be isolated from a wider narrative of film studies in other national contexts. Furthermore, this review will extrapolate from the above articles in order to tersely articulate a conception of the ‘object’ of disciplinary study, namely the archive or canon from which institutionalised critical practise can define itself.
The principal manner in which a discipline creates and circumscribes itself involves the establishment of a canon of cultural objects and critical texts around which a common discourse can circulate. For obvious reasons, the establishment of a list of cultural objects deemed worthy of critical scrutiny and academic rigour allows a common interpretive foundation to be established – the ontology of the medium as well as the precise nature of what can be deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad’ within it. Canonisation also serves foundational to the pedagogical strategies employed by educators. Furthermore, a canon allows the development of a body of critical literature specific to the study of a particular medium and which can be readily made to converse with itself and other disciplines. As Derrida elaborates in Archive Fever, the ontology of the archive involves the inscription of the archivist’s pleasure as guardian and as a censor. The principle motivating agent for the process of archiving according to Derrida is the Freudian conception of death drive, which for the purposes of this short review can be summarised as an organism’s pleasure response contingent with the exportation of entropy from a system.
As Polan and Wasson outline, film presents numerous difficulties in this context, many of which are related to the physicality of its existence. Principally, it is impossible to avoid the fact that the study of film must centre itself upon an object which enjoyed a relatively limited accessibility until the development of digital technologies and a technological infrastructure supporting home viewership. Film study requires a fairly advanced technological and logistical infrastructure – an adequate projection room, film licensing and distribution costs – which demands financial investments not always available to a scholar or educational facility. More importantly however, the commercial nature of the medium hindered the establishment of an archive of films. Film stocks are not stable archival resources. In addition to the cost of a physical space for the storage of films, there are additional expenses associated with their preservation and restoration. For the early commercial film industry, there was little incentive to engage with such costs except perhaps for the purpose of indexing stock footage which could be used for future productions. Wasson points out that viewing films even a second time often proved difficult, as many silent-era films were recycled for their constituent metals and chemicals. In this context, she traces the development of the archival and exhibition program for film at the Museum of Modern Art, which was the first large-scale project of its kind in North America. Of principle significance was the fact that MOMA intended films to be of equal merit with the other art objects on display. This institutional support “served as a catalyst for facilitating and legitimating a whole range of films (shaping a particular canon)” (124), and also served to legitimise film as a medium. Films were professionally archived along with production and publicity materials, and the archive itself was rationalised by classifying films into categories and topics and along national lines. The institutional process at MOMA ultimately allowed films to be more widely viewed “at one remove from commodity structures” (135). This abstraction of films from their commercial origins was deemed to be of crucial importance in establishing film studies as a legitimate discipline independent of any market forces which might curtail or determine its activities. Of course, due to the above-mentioned financial requirements for the viewing of film, this idealised conception of the market independence of the critical community ironically ignores the market forces which act on the institute itself. As all three articles under review state, it is impossible to discuss the evolution of film studies within institutions without conceiving of the economics of film viewership, at least until the development of digital media for the efficient and inexpensive distribution of film.
The interplay between the film industry and the academy in America also proved to be significantly deterministic to the establishment of film studies. Dana Polan’s “Young Art, Old Colleges” tracks this relationship over the 1920s and 1930s. Polan argues that the film industry sought to align with the university system in order to legitimate itself. However, she stresses that the legitimating benefits of association were conferred on both parties. The popular press as well as the university’s own publicity materials referenced the association between the industry and academia as a positive trend which indicated not only the university’s desire to modernize and stay relevant, but also the maturation of film appreciation by the general public. The initial dialogue with industry was undertaken at Harvard University in terms of both the business and the appreciation of film. In addition to the desire by university administrators to be publically perceived as intellectually relevant, the Harvard School of Business film series pacified institutional insecurities about the inclusion of the vocational principles of business studies, another emerging academic discipline, alongside the more traditional humanist enterprises within the academy. The lecture series emphasized the artistic nature of cinema and presented the medium as unique among market commodities in that it was “distinguished by qualities of aesthetic uplift” (110). As film was heavily dependent on business practises and organizational logistics, film study could be used to instrumentalise a classical education and make it practical for the professional demands of the 20th century economy.
Of further consideration to the establishment of a discipline is the manner in which it can be made to reproduce itself, namely through pedagogical and institutional structures which intend the training of new generations of scholars and filmmakers. Wasson stresses that MOMA intended for its film program to serve educational purposes through the creation of interpretive communities and a library of travelling films. In addition to establishing itself as an exhibition and archival site, the museum consciously sought to deploy its films to educational facilities and non-profit organizations in order to alter “the manner in which people watched and understood movies, seeking to engender discrimination in film viewing” (129-30). Much like the film industry itself, MOMA emphasized its connections with universities to legitimise its mandate. Indeed, MOMA’s film archive and pedagogical materials constituted many film courses. The notes which accompanied library films shaped “the discursive context in which a particular film ... would be presented” (133) by seeking to recognise film as “an aesthetic form entangled in dynamic social, legal, and governmental phenomena” (134). It is evident that the mandate of MOMA was not simply to show films but to create a certain kind of viewing subject. Wasson’s study highlights the fact that early cinema viewers were not consistent or peaceful in their viewing habits. The carnival and chaos of the public sphere rendered film and its spectators dangerous, irrational (driven by impulse rather than reason) and volatile, while the process of institutionalising film study within the museum walls was one of reason, circumscription, and containment.
Much like popular theatre and musical performance in the 19th and early 20th centuries, early film exhibitions were public spectacles in the participatory sense of the term. The contemporary mode of viewership – silent, in a darkened room, public but subjectively isolated to an individual viewer in front of a screen – had not yet been formalised. It is therefore not difficult to conceive Wasson’s narration of the efforts undertaken by the first curator of the film program to ensure ‘proper’ viewing conditions as aligned with Derrida’s figuration of the pleasure function of the archival process. Divorced from its status as an entertainment commodity, film could be used as a pedagogical and culturally refining agent and “as a nexus for specialized publics and civic intervention” (130). In this capacity, it is possible to figure MOMA’s film curatorial program in terms of Derrida’s archon as public steward. Wasson stresses that this pedagogical enterprise was a principal concern of the Rockefeller Foundation, which was one of the key investors in the Museum and which sought to promote a “culture of the general mind” (129). In a rather simplistic sense, the MOMA program can be interpreted as being an institution for both the establishment of a film studies discipline as well as a project of cultural hygiene.
A final consideration in the establishment of a discipline is the degree of inclusion and exclusion of particular cultural objects from normative values. While the precise manner of the canonisation of those characteristics of film deemed normative or exemplary of the medium is largely outside of the scope of the articles under review, Michael Zryd demonstrates that the establishment of a conception of what is ‘mainstream’ in film and the exceptions which transgresses the conventional was a crucial element in the maturation of the discipline. As he points out in “Experimental Film and the Development of Film Study in America”, the panoply of films which can be categorised as experimental proved to be of proportionally greater significance to the development of film studies than did the output of mainstream cinema. Focussing on the relation between experimental cinema and university culture, he associates the practicalities of film with its institutionalisation. Campus film societies had emerged as a means of viewing and critiquing films which were outside of the traditional distribution channels – older films no longer marketable, foreign films, and the avant-garde. Indeed, these film groups were crucial both for establishing a demand for officially-recognised film courses and for disseminating alternative cinema outside of the large urban centres whose populations could support the rep cinemas catering to tastes outside of the Hollywood distribution system. Furthermore, many established academics began to involve themselves in film studies due to their own cinephilia or involvement in campus viewing societies. Zryd also links the institutionalisation of experimental cinema with the broadly transgressive nature of youth culture in the 1960s. Pursuant to the larger movement for civil rights, the youth of the 1960s wanted an increasingly democratic inclusion in the operation and administration of universities, including curriculum development and the establishment of places in the university for new disciplines such as gender and ethnicity studies as well as film. In terms of the practicalities of institutionalisation as well as the fostering of particular cinematic tastes, “film study was sparked by youth culture in the 1960s and its drive for relevance, innovation, and experimentation” (190). Experimental cinema, as a low-budget enterprise which could be accomplished by an individual artist outside of the demands of financial investment, was contingent with this conception of youth culture, principally for the fact that engaging in mainstream cinematic production was prohibitively expensive. For this reason, in addition to the influence of exterior forces in the film industry, production courses often focussed on documentary and experimental cinema. Throughout his article, Zryd highlights that the acceptance of film production courses at the university level was instrumental in the establishment of film studies as a discipline; indeed, this association was “reflected in the history of professional associations” (185). Many experimental filmmakers were hired to teach at universities for the simple fact that they commanded lower salaries than their mainstream peers, and in this regard the academy allowed these artists to support and continue their work. Perhaps even more fundamentally, “the intellectual excitement of the formation of film studies as a discipline ... lay in the modernist investigation of the nature of the medium, a project with which the avant garde was explicitly engaged” (202).
To conclude this brief review, a few suppositions for further projects will be sketched in relation not simply to the establishment of a critical discipline but also to the constituency of the artefacts of cultural production themselves. The first project is certainly the more methodologically ambitious and problematic, for it involves hypothesising about the ontology of film if it had continued to mature outside of institutional discipline. Many scholars have noted that the process of institutionalisation altered the content and forms of many art practises. Most obvious is the manner in which the visual and plastic arts of the modern period were often themselves responses to the institutionalisation and intellectual gentrification of the art world. Modern art, which like film had entered the academy as both an artisanal and a critical discipline, began to move away from traditional representations of subjects to the ontology of representation itself being the subject. To many public observers, modern art grew increasingly obtuse and self-referential over the course of the 20th century. Arguably, it is this exclusionary principle which determined the ‘archontic pleasures’, as well as the more practical matter of the aggrandizement of market value, within the art community. Likewise, the content of music changed drastically as musical reception was institutionalised through a market system which solidified production and distribution through particular hierarchies and power structures such as commercial radio and television. The critical disciplines which established around these mediums were significantly influenced by these developments, to the point where a contemporary work in either medium is always-already judged by the manner in which it dialogues with the rest of that medium’s critical canon. A second project, related to the secondary theme teased out of the articles under review, would examine how the economics of film distribution by means of digital communications technologies is changing the archival process, principally by means of allowing a distributed network of films digitally accessible to the home viewer.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Film Studies and Critical Disciplinarity (Notes)
Film studies has proven itself to be a fully established member of the contemporary academic community. However, it is folly to assume that the legitimacy, present fecundity, or general institutional security of the discipline was in any way historically guaranteed. Unlike the objects of study in many other disciplines in the humanities and fine arts, film developed long after the establishment of the modern university. Film lacked parallels in classical and early modern scholarship and education. There was no immediate consensus on pedagogical approaches for the medium or the purpose of educating students in film studies. As a newly and continuously forming medium, there was no demonstrable sequence or progression from convention to transgression or from mundane to masterpiece. Indeed, for the first decades of its existence it was questionable whether film would be considered as a lasting addition to human cultural expression or would become marginalised as an interesting but intellectually irrelevant public diversion not truly worthy of scholarly attention for the articulation of its merits. For some critics, the evolution of film studies as a discipline parallels developments in the university and more broadly within society. Articles by Dana Polan, Haidee Wasson, and Michael Zryd examine the institutional development of film studies both within and exterior to the university. Polan and Zryd examine the institutionalisation of the discipline within the academic context, while Wasson elaborates on the success of the Museum of Modern Art in establishing itself as a film archive, distribution, and exhibition centre. For the purposes of this present review and to limit itself to the scope of the articles under examination, the maturation of film studies within America will be isolated from a wider narrative of film studies in other national contexts. Furthermore, this review will extrapolate from the above articles in order to tersely articulate a conception of the ‘object’ of disciplinary study, namely the archive or canon from which institutionalised critical practise can define itself.
The principal manner in which a discipline creates and circumscribes itself involves the establishment of a canon of cultural objects and critical texts around which a common discourse can circulate. For obvious reasons, the establishment of a list of cultural objects deemed worthy of critical scrutiny and academic rigour allows a common interpretive foundation to be established – the ontology of the medium as well as the precise nature of what can be deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad’ within it. Canonisation also serves foundational to the pedagogical strategies employed by educators. Furthermore, a canon allows the development of a body of critical literature specific to the study of a particular medium and which can be readily made to converse with itself and other disciplines. As Derrida elaborates in Archive Fever, the ontology of the archive involves the inscription of the archivist’s pleasure as guardian and as a censor. The principle motivating agent for the process of archiving according to Derrida is the Freudian conception of death drive, which for the purposes of this short review can be summarised as an organism’s pleasure response contingent with the exportation of entropy from a system.
As Polan and Wasson outline, film presents numerous difficulties in this context, many of which are related to the physicality of its existence. Principally, it is impossible to avoid the fact that the study of film must centre itself upon an object which enjoyed a relatively limited accessibility until the development of digital technologies and a technological infrastructure supporting home viewership. Film study requires a fairly advanced technological and logistical infrastructure – an adequate projection room, film licensing and distribution costs – which demands financial investments not always available to a scholar or educational facility. More importantly however, the commercial nature of the medium hindered the establishment of an archive of films. Film stocks are not stable archival resources. In addition to the cost of a physical space for the storage of films, there are additional expenses associated with their preservation and restoration. For the early commercial film industry, there was little incentive to engage with such costs except perhaps for the purpose of indexing stock footage which could be used for future productions. Wasson points out that viewing films even a second time often proved difficult, as many silent-era films were recycled for their constituent metals and chemicals. In this context, she traces the development of the archival and exhibition program for film at the Museum of Modern Art, which was the first large-scale project of its kind in North America. Of principle significance was the fact that MOMA intended films to be of equal merit with the other art objects on display. This institutional support “served as a catalyst for facilitating and legitimating a whole range of films (shaping a particular canon)” (124), and also served to legitimise film as a medium. Films were professionally archived along with production and publicity materials, and the archive itself was rationalised by classifying films into categories and topics and along national lines. The institutional process at MOMA ultimately allowed films to be more widely viewed “at one remove from commodity structures” (135). This abstraction of films from their commercial origins was deemed to be of crucial importance in establishing film studies as a legitimate discipline independent of any market forces which might curtail or determine its activities. Of course, due to the above-mentioned financial requirements for the viewing of film, this idealised conception of the market independence of the critical community ironically ignores the market forces which act on the institute itself. As all three articles under review state, it is impossible to discuss the evolution of film studies within institutions without conceiving of the economics of film viewership, at least until the development of digital media for the efficient and inexpensive distribution of film.
The interplay between the film industry and the academy in America also proved to be significantly deterministic to the establishment of film studies. Dana Polan’s “Young Art, Old Colleges” tracks this relationship over the 1920s and 1930s. Polan argues that the film industry sought to align with the university system in order to legitimate itself. However, she stresses that the legitimating benefits of association were conferred on both parties. The popular press as well as the university’s own publicity materials referenced the association between the industry and academia as a positive trend which indicated not only the university’s desire to modernize and stay relevant, but also the maturation of film appreciation by the general public. The initial dialogue with industry was undertaken at Harvard University in terms of both the business and the appreciation of film. In addition to the desire by university administrators to be publically perceived as intellectually relevant, the Harvard School of Business film series pacified institutional insecurities about the inclusion of the vocational principles of business studies, another emerging academic discipline, alongside the more traditional humanist enterprises within the academy. The lecture series emphasized the artistic nature of cinema and presented the medium as unique among market commodities in that it was “distinguished by qualities of aesthetic uplift” (110). As film was heavily dependent on business practises and organizational logistics, film study could be used to instrumentalise a classical education and make it practical for the professional demands of the 20th century economy.
Of further consideration to the establishment of a discipline is the manner in which it can be made to reproduce itself, namely through pedagogical and institutional structures which intend the training of new generations of scholars and filmmakers. Wasson stresses that MOMA intended for its film program to serve educational purposes through the creation of interpretive communities and a library of travelling films. In addition to establishing itself as an exhibition and archival site, the museum consciously sought to deploy its films to educational facilities and non-profit organizations in order to alter “the manner in which people watched and understood movies, seeking to engender discrimination in film viewing” (129-30). Much like the film industry itself, MOMA emphasized its connections with universities to legitimise its mandate. Indeed, MOMA’s film archive and pedagogical materials constituted many film courses. The notes which accompanied library films shaped “the discursive context in which a particular film ... would be presented” (133) by seeking to recognise film as “an aesthetic form entangled in dynamic social, legal, and governmental phenomena” (134). It is evident that the mandate of MOMA was not simply to show films but to create a certain kind of viewing subject. Wasson’s study highlights the fact that early cinema viewers were not consistent or peaceful in their viewing habits. The carnival and chaos of the public sphere rendered film and its spectators dangerous, irrational (driven by impulse rather than reason) and volatile, while the process of institutionalising film study within the museum walls was one of reason, circumscription, and containment. Much like popular theatre and musical performance in the 19th and early 20th centuries, early film exhibitions were public spectacles in the participatory sense of the term. The contemporary mode of viewership – silent, in a darkened room, public but subjectively isolated to an individual viewer in front of a screen – had not yet been formalised. It is therefore not difficult to conceive Wasson’s narration of the efforts undertaken by the first curator of the film program to ensure ‘proper’ viewing conditions as aligned with Derrida’s figuration of the pleasure function of the archival process. Divorced from its status as an entertainment commodity, film could be used as a pedagogical and culturally refining agent and “as a nexus for specialized publics and civic intervention” (130). In this capacity, it is possible to figure MOMA’s film curatorial program in terms of Derrida’s archon as public steward. Wasson stresses that this pedagogical enterprise was a principal concern of the Rockefeller Foundation, which was one of the key investors in the Museum and which sought to promote a “culture of the general mind” (129). In a rather simplistic sense, the MOMA program can be interpreted as being an institution for both the establishment of a film studies discipline as well as a project of cultural hygiene.
A final consideration in the establishment of a discipline is the degree of inclusion and exclusion of particular cultural objects from normative values. While the precise manner of the canonisation of those characteristics of film deemed normative or exemplary of the medium is largely outside of the scope of the articles under review, Michael Zryd demonstrates that the establishment of a conception of what is ‘mainstream’ in film and the exceptions which transgresses the conventional was a crucial element in the maturation of the discipline. As he points out in “Experimental Film and the Development of Film Study in America”, the panoply of films which can be categorised as experimental proved to be of proportionally greater significance to the development of film studies than did the output of mainstream cinema. Focussing on the relation between experimental cinema and university culture, he associates the practicalities of film with its institutionalisation. Campus film societies had emerged as a means of viewing and critiquing films which were outside of the traditional distribution channels – older films no longer marketable, foreign films, and the avant-garde. Indeed, these film groups were crucial both for establishing a demand for officially-recognised film courses and for disseminating alternative cinema outside of the large urban centres whose populations could support the rep cinemas catering to tastes outside of the Hollywood distribution system. Furthermore, many established academics began to involve themselves in film studies due to their own cinephilia or involvement in campus viewing societies. Zryd also links the institutionalisation of experimental cinema with the broadly transgressive nature of youth culture in the 1960s. Pursuant to the larger movement for civil rights, the youth of the 1960s wanted an increasingly democratic inclusion in the operation and administration of universities, including curriculum development and the establishment of places in the university for new disciplines such as gender and ethnicity studies as well as film. In terms of the practicalities of institutionalisation as well as the fostering of particular cinematic tastes, “film study was sparked by youth culture in the 1960s and its drive for relevance, innovation, and experimentation” (190). Experimental cinema, as a low-budget enterprise which could be accomplished by an individual artist outside of the demands of financial investment, was contingent with this conception of youth culture, principally for the fact that engaging in mainstream cinematic production was prohibitively expensive. For this reason, in addition to the influence of exterior forces in the film industry, production courses often focussed on documentary and experimental cinema. Throughout his article, Zryd highlights that the acceptance of film production courses at the university level was instrumental in the establishment of film studies as a discipline; indeed, this association was “reflected in the history of professional associations” (185). Many experimental filmmakers were hired to teach at universities for the simple fact that they commanded lower salaries than their mainstream peers, and in this regard the academy allowed these artists to support and continue their work. Perhaps even more fundamentally, “the intellectual excitement of the formation of film studies as a discipline ... lay in the modernist investigation of the nature of the medium, a project with which the avant garde was explicitly engaged” (202).
To conclude this brief review, a few suppositions for further projects will be sketched in relation not simply to the establishment of a critical discipline but also to the constituency of the artefacts of cultural production themselves. The first project is certainly the more methodologically ambitious and problematic, for it involves hypothesising about the ontology of film if it had continued to mature outside of institutional discipline. Many scholars have noted that the process of institutionalisation altered the content and forms of many art practises. Most obvious is the manner in which the visual and plastic arts of the modern period were often themselves responses to the institutionalisation and intellectual gentrification of the art world. Modern art, which like film had entered the academy as both an artisanal and a critical discipline, began to move away from traditional representations of subjects to the ontology of representation itself being the subject. To many public observers, modern art grew increasingly obtuse and self-referential over the course of the 20th century. Arguably, it is this exclusionary principle which determined the ‘archontic pleasures’, as well as the more practical matter of the aggrandizement of market value, within the art community. Likewise, the content of music changed drastically as musical reception was institutionalised through a market system which solidified production and distribution through particular hierarchies and power structures such as commercial radio and television. The critical disciplines which established around these mediums were significantly influenced by these developments, to the point where a contemporary work in either medium is always-already judged by the manner in which it dialogues with the rest of that medium’s critical canon. A second project, related to the secondary theme teased out of the articles under review, would examine how the economics of film distribution by means of digital communications technologies is changing the archival process, principally by means of allowing a distributed network of films digitally accessible to the home viewer.
Notes
1. Wasson discusses an unsuccessful attempt by the Museum of Modern Art to establish a travelling theatre to counter this issue.
2. “The shift to synchronized sound during the late 1920s further spurred the recycling industry, which flourished in the wake of the uncountable silent films deemed more valuable for their silver content than for their stories, styles, or stars” (127).
3. “The HSB could maintain its image as a training ground for cool-headed professionalism while accruing an important veneer of cultural sophistication” (111). See also Zryd, p. 187.
4. Of course, one must remain conscious of the fact that music, literature, and the visual arts are also commodities with such emotionally resonant qualities.
5. As an example, Frances Trollope published Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) as a travelogue of her negative experiences with American audiences. Her description of theatrical audiences is informative: “The noises...were perpetual, and of the most unpleasant kind.... The spitting was incessant; and not one in ten of the male part of the illustrious legislative audience sat according to the usual custom of human beings”.
6. Some critics highlight that many of the technologies and communication practises which developed simultaneous to film established, in combination, a mode of public decorum predicated on the notion that one’s private space was no longer rooted to a specific domestic location, but rather was portable and could merge and cross-fertilise with public spaces. For example, see Raymond Williams’s Television: Technology and Cultural Form, wherein he terms this process ‘mobile privatisation’.
7. The MOMA audience was known to engage “in shouting matches punctuated periodically by objects thrown in the auditorium” (126).
8. It is possible to hypothesize that many of these academics sought the excitement, the professional novelty, and the intellectual freedom of working establishing and working within an emerging discipline.
9. Zryd outlines the manner in which film graduates were being excluded from the industry due to market contraction and union stipulations; see pp. 188-90.
10. See, for example, Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art.
The principal manner in which a discipline creates and circumscribes itself involves the establishment of a canon of cultural objects and critical texts around which a common discourse can circulate. For obvious reasons, the establishment of a list of cultural objects deemed worthy of critical scrutiny and academic rigour allows a common interpretive foundation to be established – the ontology of the medium as well as the precise nature of what can be deemed ‘good’ or ‘bad’ within it. Canonisation also serves foundational to the pedagogical strategies employed by educators. Furthermore, a canon allows the development of a body of critical literature specific to the study of a particular medium and which can be readily made to converse with itself and other disciplines. As Derrida elaborates in Archive Fever, the ontology of the archive involves the inscription of the archivist’s pleasure as guardian and as a censor. The principle motivating agent for the process of archiving according to Derrida is the Freudian conception of death drive, which for the purposes of this short review can be summarised as an organism’s pleasure response contingent with the exportation of entropy from a system.
As Polan and Wasson outline, film presents numerous difficulties in this context, many of which are related to the physicality of its existence. Principally, it is impossible to avoid the fact that the study of film must centre itself upon an object which enjoyed a relatively limited accessibility until the development of digital technologies and a technological infrastructure supporting home viewership. Film study requires a fairly advanced technological and logistical infrastructure – an adequate projection room, film licensing and distribution costs – which demands financial investments not always available to a scholar or educational facility. More importantly however, the commercial nature of the medium hindered the establishment of an archive of films. Film stocks are not stable archival resources. In addition to the cost of a physical space for the storage of films, there are additional expenses associated with their preservation and restoration. For the early commercial film industry, there was little incentive to engage with such costs except perhaps for the purpose of indexing stock footage which could be used for future productions. Wasson points out that viewing films even a second time often proved difficult, as many silent-era films were recycled for their constituent metals and chemicals. In this context, she traces the development of the archival and exhibition program for film at the Museum of Modern Art, which was the first large-scale project of its kind in North America. Of principle significance was the fact that MOMA intended films to be of equal merit with the other art objects on display. This institutional support “served as a catalyst for facilitating and legitimating a whole range of films (shaping a particular canon)” (124), and also served to legitimise film as a medium. Films were professionally archived along with production and publicity materials, and the archive itself was rationalised by classifying films into categories and topics and along national lines. The institutional process at MOMA ultimately allowed films to be more widely viewed “at one remove from commodity structures” (135). This abstraction of films from their commercial origins was deemed to be of crucial importance in establishing film studies as a legitimate discipline independent of any market forces which might curtail or determine its activities. Of course, due to the above-mentioned financial requirements for the viewing of film, this idealised conception of the market independence of the critical community ironically ignores the market forces which act on the institute itself. As all three articles under review state, it is impossible to discuss the evolution of film studies within institutions without conceiving of the economics of film viewership, at least until the development of digital media for the efficient and inexpensive distribution of film.
The interplay between the film industry and the academy in America also proved to be significantly deterministic to the establishment of film studies. Dana Polan’s “Young Art, Old Colleges” tracks this relationship over the 1920s and 1930s. Polan argues that the film industry sought to align with the university system in order to legitimate itself. However, she stresses that the legitimating benefits of association were conferred on both parties. The popular press as well as the university’s own publicity materials referenced the association between the industry and academia as a positive trend which indicated not only the university’s desire to modernize and stay relevant, but also the maturation of film appreciation by the general public. The initial dialogue with industry was undertaken at Harvard University in terms of both the business and the appreciation of film. In addition to the desire by university administrators to be publically perceived as intellectually relevant, the Harvard School of Business film series pacified institutional insecurities about the inclusion of the vocational principles of business studies, another emerging academic discipline, alongside the more traditional humanist enterprises within the academy. The lecture series emphasized the artistic nature of cinema and presented the medium as unique among market commodities in that it was “distinguished by qualities of aesthetic uplift” (110). As film was heavily dependent on business practises and organizational logistics, film study could be used to instrumentalise a classical education and make it practical for the professional demands of the 20th century economy.
Of further consideration to the establishment of a discipline is the manner in which it can be made to reproduce itself, namely through pedagogical and institutional structures which intend the training of new generations of scholars and filmmakers. Wasson stresses that MOMA intended for its film program to serve educational purposes through the creation of interpretive communities and a library of travelling films. In addition to establishing itself as an exhibition and archival site, the museum consciously sought to deploy its films to educational facilities and non-profit organizations in order to alter “the manner in which people watched and understood movies, seeking to engender discrimination in film viewing” (129-30). Much like the film industry itself, MOMA emphasized its connections with universities to legitimise its mandate. Indeed, MOMA’s film archive and pedagogical materials constituted many film courses. The notes which accompanied library films shaped “the discursive context in which a particular film ... would be presented” (133) by seeking to recognise film as “an aesthetic form entangled in dynamic social, legal, and governmental phenomena” (134). It is evident that the mandate of MOMA was not simply to show films but to create a certain kind of viewing subject. Wasson’s study highlights the fact that early cinema viewers were not consistent or peaceful in their viewing habits. The carnival and chaos of the public sphere rendered film and its spectators dangerous, irrational (driven by impulse rather than reason) and volatile, while the process of institutionalising film study within the museum walls was one of reason, circumscription, and containment. Much like popular theatre and musical performance in the 19th and early 20th centuries, early film exhibitions were public spectacles in the participatory sense of the term. The contemporary mode of viewership – silent, in a darkened room, public but subjectively isolated to an individual viewer in front of a screen – had not yet been formalised. It is therefore not difficult to conceive Wasson’s narration of the efforts undertaken by the first curator of the film program to ensure ‘proper’ viewing conditions as aligned with Derrida’s figuration of the pleasure function of the archival process. Divorced from its status as an entertainment commodity, film could be used as a pedagogical and culturally refining agent and “as a nexus for specialized publics and civic intervention” (130). In this capacity, it is possible to figure MOMA’s film curatorial program in terms of Derrida’s archon as public steward. Wasson stresses that this pedagogical enterprise was a principal concern of the Rockefeller Foundation, which was one of the key investors in the Museum and which sought to promote a “culture of the general mind” (129). In a rather simplistic sense, the MOMA program can be interpreted as being an institution for both the establishment of a film studies discipline as well as a project of cultural hygiene.
A final consideration in the establishment of a discipline is the degree of inclusion and exclusion of particular cultural objects from normative values. While the precise manner of the canonisation of those characteristics of film deemed normative or exemplary of the medium is largely outside of the scope of the articles under review, Michael Zryd demonstrates that the establishment of a conception of what is ‘mainstream’ in film and the exceptions which transgresses the conventional was a crucial element in the maturation of the discipline. As he points out in “Experimental Film and the Development of Film Study in America”, the panoply of films which can be categorised as experimental proved to be of proportionally greater significance to the development of film studies than did the output of mainstream cinema. Focussing on the relation between experimental cinema and university culture, he associates the practicalities of film with its institutionalisation. Campus film societies had emerged as a means of viewing and critiquing films which were outside of the traditional distribution channels – older films no longer marketable, foreign films, and the avant-garde. Indeed, these film groups were crucial both for establishing a demand for officially-recognised film courses and for disseminating alternative cinema outside of the large urban centres whose populations could support the rep cinemas catering to tastes outside of the Hollywood distribution system. Furthermore, many established academics began to involve themselves in film studies due to their own cinephilia or involvement in campus viewing societies. Zryd also links the institutionalisation of experimental cinema with the broadly transgressive nature of youth culture in the 1960s. Pursuant to the larger movement for civil rights, the youth of the 1960s wanted an increasingly democratic inclusion in the operation and administration of universities, including curriculum development and the establishment of places in the university for new disciplines such as gender and ethnicity studies as well as film. In terms of the practicalities of institutionalisation as well as the fostering of particular cinematic tastes, “film study was sparked by youth culture in the 1960s and its drive for relevance, innovation, and experimentation” (190). Experimental cinema, as a low-budget enterprise which could be accomplished by an individual artist outside of the demands of financial investment, was contingent with this conception of youth culture, principally for the fact that engaging in mainstream cinematic production was prohibitively expensive. For this reason, in addition to the influence of exterior forces in the film industry, production courses often focussed on documentary and experimental cinema. Throughout his article, Zryd highlights that the acceptance of film production courses at the university level was instrumental in the establishment of film studies as a discipline; indeed, this association was “reflected in the history of professional associations” (185). Many experimental filmmakers were hired to teach at universities for the simple fact that they commanded lower salaries than their mainstream peers, and in this regard the academy allowed these artists to support and continue their work. Perhaps even more fundamentally, “the intellectual excitement of the formation of film studies as a discipline ... lay in the modernist investigation of the nature of the medium, a project with which the avant garde was explicitly engaged” (202).
To conclude this brief review, a few suppositions for further projects will be sketched in relation not simply to the establishment of a critical discipline but also to the constituency of the artefacts of cultural production themselves. The first project is certainly the more methodologically ambitious and problematic, for it involves hypothesising about the ontology of film if it had continued to mature outside of institutional discipline. Many scholars have noted that the process of institutionalisation altered the content and forms of many art practises. Most obvious is the manner in which the visual and plastic arts of the modern period were often themselves responses to the institutionalisation and intellectual gentrification of the art world. Modern art, which like film had entered the academy as both an artisanal and a critical discipline, began to move away from traditional representations of subjects to the ontology of representation itself being the subject. To many public observers, modern art grew increasingly obtuse and self-referential over the course of the 20th century. Arguably, it is this exclusionary principle which determined the ‘archontic pleasures’, as well as the more practical matter of the aggrandizement of market value, within the art community. Likewise, the content of music changed drastically as musical reception was institutionalised through a market system which solidified production and distribution through particular hierarchies and power structures such as commercial radio and television. The critical disciplines which established around these mediums were significantly influenced by these developments, to the point where a contemporary work in either medium is always-already judged by the manner in which it dialogues with the rest of that medium’s critical canon. A second project, related to the secondary theme teased out of the articles under review, would examine how the economics of film distribution by means of digital communications technologies is changing the archival process, principally by means of allowing a distributed network of films digitally accessible to the home viewer.
Notes
1. Wasson discusses an unsuccessful attempt by the Museum of Modern Art to establish a travelling theatre to counter this issue.
2. “The shift to synchronized sound during the late 1920s further spurred the recycling industry, which flourished in the wake of the uncountable silent films deemed more valuable for their silver content than for their stories, styles, or stars” (127).
3. “The HSB could maintain its image as a training ground for cool-headed professionalism while accruing an important veneer of cultural sophistication” (111). See also Zryd, p. 187.
4. Of course, one must remain conscious of the fact that music, literature, and the visual arts are also commodities with such emotionally resonant qualities.
5. As an example, Frances Trollope published Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) as a travelogue of her negative experiences with American audiences. Her description of theatrical audiences is informative: “The noises...were perpetual, and of the most unpleasant kind.... The spitting was incessant; and not one in ten of the male part of the illustrious legislative audience sat according to the usual custom of human beings”.
6. Some critics highlight that many of the technologies and communication practises which developed simultaneous to film established, in combination, a mode of public decorum predicated on the notion that one’s private space was no longer rooted to a specific domestic location, but rather was portable and could merge and cross-fertilise with public spaces. For example, see Raymond Williams’s Television: Technology and Cultural Form, wherein he terms this process ‘mobile privatisation’.
7. The MOMA audience was known to engage “in shouting matches punctuated periodically by objects thrown in the auditorium” (126).
8. It is possible to hypothesize that many of these academics sought the excitement, the professional novelty, and the intellectual freedom of working establishing and working within an emerging discipline.
9. Zryd outlines the manner in which film graduates were being excluded from the industry due to market contraction and union stipulations; see pp. 188-90.
10. See, for example, Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art.
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