“People love Mary Pickford because of a certain aspect of her face in her highest mood” wrote the American poet and critic Vachel Lindsay in The Art of the Moving Picture (1915), perhaps anticipating a well‐known essay Roland Barthes (1973) wrote about Greta Garbo 40 years later. Near the beginning of Film Theory: An Introduction Robert Stam discusses Lindsay’s work as an interesting example of a kind of “ad hoc, unsystematic theorizing” that flourished during the early years of cinema. “Systematic” work seems to have got under way in 1916, with The Photoplay: A Psychological Study by Hugo Munsterberg, a Harvard‐based psychologist influenced by Kant. According to Professor Stam, Munsterberg’s pioneering work focused on a small number of films, because he was “ashamed to be seen at the movies”.
This book aims to provide “a kind of ‘user’s guide’ to film theory”. It consists of a continuous sequence of 42 unnumbered chapters, running from “The antecedents of film theory” to “Post‐cinema: digital theory and the new media” and “The pluralization of film theory”. In between there are chapters entitled “The Soviet montage‐theorists”, “Russian formalism and the Bakhtin school”, “The cult of the auteur”, “The advent of structuralism”, “1968 and the leftist turn”, “The feminist intervention”, “The poststructuralist mutation”, “The coming out of queer theory”, and “Film and the postcolonial”.
A select bibliography extends to 27 pages. In Le Théatre et son Double (1964) Antonin Artaud expressed admiration for the “boiling anarchy” of the Marx Brothers in Animal Crackers (“The search for alternative aesthetics”). Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947) may have inspired Susan Sontag to find an affinity between Triumph of the Will and the musicals of Busby Berkeley (“The phenomenology of realism”). A theorist called Slavoj Zizek, who has edited a work entitled Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock (1992), sees Hitchcock’s films as being about “the void at the center of being”. In Making Meaning (1989) David Bordwell attacked the whole business of “reading” films through lenses supplied by what he called “SLAB” theory (Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, Barthes). The starting point of J.‐F. Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1984) was “the epistemology of the natural sciences in the academy, a subject about which Lyotard confessed that he knew very little” (“The poetics and politics of postmodernism”).
In the introduction the author writes that “a book of this type must deal with a dizzying array of chronologies and concerns”; his general attitude towards all the divergent approaches is ecumenical. Professor James Neremore of Indiana University has described the book as “a remarkable synthesis”, and I would certainly go along with that. I noticed that at the beginning of a chapter on “The rise of cultural studies” the title of Richard Hoggart’s famous book The Uses of Literacy (1957) is given as The Uses of History. A remark on page 186 implies that Pauline Kael does not take the film medium seriously, which I think she would dispute (“Textual analysis”). Against Bordwell, Professor Stam defends the place of interpretation in the analysis of film, citing approvingly Theodor Adorno’s view that “aesthetic comprehension requires interpretative value judgments” (“Interpretation and its discontents”).
The current state of film theory is one of “pluralization” or “re‐historicization”, in reaction to “the elision of history by the Saussurean and Freudian‐Lacanian models” and in response to “the multiculturalist call to place film theory within larger histories of colonialism and racism”. In reflecting on auteurism Professor Stam suggests that this approach “clearly represented an improvement over antecedent critical methodological theories, notably Impressionism”, which was “a kind of neuro‐glandular response to flms based solely on the critic’s sensibilities and tastes”. I actually like reading some people’s neuro‐glandular responses to films (Philip French’s, for example).
