Interpreting Films

Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema

Janet Staiger

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691006161, 9780691047973
• eBook ISBN: 9780691216065
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Histoire et critique du cinéma

Employing a wide range of examples from Uncle Tom's Cabin and Birth of a Nation to Zelig and Personal Best, Janet Staiger argues that a historical examination of spectators' responses to films can make a valuable contribution to the history, criticism, and philosophy of cultural products. She maintains that as artifacts, films do not contain immanent meanings, that differences among interpretations have historical bases, and that these variations are due to social, political, and economic conditions as well as the viewers' constructed images of themselves. After proposing a theory of reception study, the author demonstrates its application mainly through analyzing the varying responses of audiences to certain films at specific moments in history. Staiger gives special attention to how questions of class, gender, sexual preference, race, and ethnicity enter into film viewers' interpretations. Her analysis reflects recent developments in post-structuralism, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies, and includes a discussion of current reader-response models in literary and film studies as well as an alternative approach for thinking about historical readers and spectators.

_________________ Part One__________________

THEORETICAL CONCERNS

____________________ CHAPTER ONE_____________________

The Use-Value of Reception Studies

... consumption is not only the concluding act through which the product becomes a product, but also the one through which the producer becomes a producer.

(Karl Marx, 1857)

THE PLEASURES and power of being the reader of a text or the spectator of a film are expressed in Karl Marx’s views about consuming products.¹ For without an audience, some would argue, no text or maker of that text exists. This intuitive dialectic is a commonplace assumption in scholarship today: the reader of a text or the spectator of a film ought to be a focal point of study. Over twenty years ago Roland Barthes published “The Death of the Author,” while forty years earlier I. A. Richards examined student interpretative strategies in Practical Criticism. Worried about “misreadings,” Richards subtitled his book A Study of Literary Judgment. Whether you take the position of Richards, that a hierarchy of appropriate interpretative activities exists, or that of Barthes, that a celebration “restoring] the place of the reader” is due, hardly anyone familiar with twentieth-century scholarly trends doubts the considerable theoretical implications of “reader-response” or “reception studies” work.²

Yet a trend can also be trendy. Consequently, I believe that it is important to start a book investigating the problems and value of applying reception studies to the history of moving pictures by suggesting the overall difference such an approach makes to the field of film studies. More particularly, I want to establish the use-value of this type of research.

In a rather simple dichotomy, reception studies might be placed in antithesis to a hermeneutics based on the authority of production (authorship). In fact, some individuals have gone so far as to claim that reception studies eliminates the need to examine production since, they believe, meaning*³ is produced by the reader. As will become apparent, I find such a proposition dangerous not merely for the reason that any radical historian might (it elides the incontestable force of the historical real to affect the reader) but because that inference only inverts fallacious binary oppositions: producer/consumer, author/reader. In his dialectical observation about constituting positions in the social order, Marx proposes that the act of consumption is an event constituting the product and the producer. In the case of art, an equivalent achievement occurs: an individual, in taking an object to be art, constitutes through that act the object, the individual as perceiver, and other individuals as producers. To declare that the reader is the site of the production of meaning is to miss the theoretical reverberations of that act of constituting meaning. Arthur Danto neatly summarizes this in his “The Artworld,” where he contends that something’s being an artwork requires a theory of what art “is”: “It is the role of artistic theories, these days as always, to make the artworld, and art, possible.”⁴ Such a proposition, however, can become a utopian fantasy of free will no longer grounded in material conditions if the question of how and why readers hold theory X, Y, or Z is not also part of the equation. Danto acknowledges this, as he includes not only a theory of the “artworld” but the “artworld’s history” as necessary conditions for the perception of an object as art.

The use-value of reception studies, it seems to me, is not to overthrow the author in favor of the reader. The event of the production of meaning is more complicated than a mere reversal of terms would imply. Reception studies raises questions of ontology and epistemology, just as Marx’s and Danto’s theses imply profound theories of existence, knowledge, and their interrelationships. However, while these questions will be raised, they will not be answered. Rather I intend to aim at proposing answers involving more concrete use-values than those of a fundamental philosophical nature, but those philosophical issues still subtend this research. Despite this disclaimer, the use-value of reception studies does include some weighty business for film philosophy, criticism, and history, and for political and social change.

“DOUBLE-ENTENDRE” AND THE MEANING OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

In a 1984 review of the film Danton⁵ (directed by Andrzej Wajda), Robert Darnton constructs what I consider to be an exemplary analysis of the historical reception of a moving picture.⁶ Darnton begins his inquiry, “Danton and Double-Entendre,” by noting that François Mitterrand had selected as the starter course for his fall 1983 political menu a criticism of the French educational system. As Darnton writes, “No doubt the president had other worries. But the crisis that he placed at the top of his agenda was the inability of the electorate to sort out the themes of its past,”⁷ which Mitterrand and his colleagues attributed to the impoverished state of the French curriculum. As a social and cultural historian, Darnton connects this event with a controversy then raging among French politicians over Danton's representation of the central figures of the French Revolution. The previous year witnessed French leftists, including Mitterrand, disapproving of the film’s version of Danton, while French Gaullists “gloated.” Damton astutely observes,

Such vehemence may seem puzzling to the American viewers of Danton. We know that the French take their history seriously and that it doesn’t do to tamper with their Revolution. But why should the Socialists disavow a version of the feud between Danton and Robespierre that puts Danton in a favorable light? Could not Danton’s attempts to stop the Terror be seen as a heroic foreshadowing of the resistance to Stalinism? Is not Wajda a hero of Solidarity? And shouldn’t Wajda’s Danton be expected to appeal to the moderate left in France, the champions of socialism with a human face, the party that covered billboards during Mitterrand’s campaign with pictures of a rose extending from a fist?⁸

In fact, Darnton ponders, what would Wajda’s Polish audience have assumed the message of the film to be?

Darnton answers his questions by drawing astutely upon the histories of both countries and statements of participants in the debates. However, Darnton is also careful to point out that disputes over the appropriate interpretation of the historical individuals and the French Revolution were certainly not settled by appeal to any facts, nor were the dialogues valuefree. Instead, Darnton foregrounds the political implications of the differing positions: “To control the myth [of the French Revolution] is to exert political power, to stake out a position as the authentic representative of the left.”⁹

Although Darnton’s observations are more fully developed, much of the controversy can be narrowed down to how Danton is characterized. In particular, “Danton” might produce various connotations, depending on how the viewer understands the body movements of the actor (Gerard Depardieu), the character’s activities, and other characters responding to or being compared with him. What is already known about events of the French Revolution and believed about its cast of heroes and villains is also important. For the Polish people, Darnton speculates that Danton would be loosely read as an allegory about thought control and Stalinist indoctrination and historiography, with Danton a substitute for the Polish people and Walesa against a repressive Robespierre (the Polish government and Jaruzelski). The point of the film comes down to attacking those who assert the dogma that the means justify the ends, that “tyranny in the service of democracy” is acceptable. In fact, Darnton observes that reading a film as an allegory is a significant tradition in a country in which “the Poles have learned to live with veiled meanings and ambiguous protests.”¹⁰

For the French, the representation of the Revolution has taken a different tack. Rather than emphasize political questions about pragmatism and ethics, French historians and educators have produced interpretations of the Revolution that concentrate on and evaluate people and actions based upon who and what permitted “in the year of the Terror, a republican France [to stand up] against the combined forces of a feudal Europe and [defeat] them.”¹¹ A leftist orthodoxy credits the causality to Robespierre. Consequently, even if Robespierre is not a hero in any popular sense, invoking claim to succession in his policies is a symbolic act referencing what is France and French. (Apparendy, this is something equivalent to an American’s choosing Washington over King George III.) In Darnton’s view, everyone seems to believe that the film comes out in favor of Danton, hence the uproar among French intellectuals: for French socialists, Robespierre, the savior of France, was being discredited.*¹² The interpretive conflict was not about the denotative meaning of Danton; it was about what Danton implied about history, and French history in particular.

On the one hand, you might argue that this study of the reception of Danton in Poland and France could be easily settled by reference to some set of facts internal or external to the film. But, on the other hand, although facts were marshaled by the multiple discussants, facts failed to settle the disputes. For it was the meaning of those facts over which debates occurred. Darnton’s “double-entendre” is signally appropriate for underlining the flexible, ambiguous, but political nature of language in social use.

In theorizing communication, V. N. Vološinov suggests that language and “the ideological sign” are central to historical processes.¹³ Just as Ferdinand de Saussure recognizes the social life of language,¹⁴ Vološinov insists that “the sign may not be divorced from the concrete forms of social intercourse.”¹⁵ Taking this observation further, Vološinov theorizes that the centrality of signs, their “accent,” is a region not only for ideological debate but, consequently, for class struggle:

Various different classes will use one and the same language. As a result, differently oriented accents intersect in every ideological sign. Sign becomes an arena of the class struggle.

This social multiaccentuality of the ideological sign is a very crucial aspect. By and large, it is thanks to this intersecting of accents that a sign maintains its vitality and dynamism and the capacity for further development....

The very same thing that makes the ideological sign vital and mutable is also, however, that which makes it a refracting and distorting medium. The ruling class strives to impart a supraclass, eternal character to the ideological sign, to extinguish or drive inward the struggle between social value judgments which occurs in it, to make the sign uniaccentual.

In actual fact, each living ideological sign has two faces, like Janus. Any current curse word can become a word of praise, any current truth must inevitably sound to many other people as the greatest lie. This inner dialectic quality of the sign comes out fully in the open only in times of social crises or revolutionary change.¹⁶

For example, in African-American language, “bad” can be accented so as to mean the opposite of what it means in hegemonic language.

Although Darnton does not directly explore the Danton debates as displacements from other social troubles, he provides information that suggests he makes a connection between a discursive struggle and the social formation. He writes that Mitterrand chose knowledge of French history and curriculum reform as an alternative agenda to “a declining franc, an escalating arms race, a crisis in the Middle East, and trouble everywhere on the home front.”¹⁷ Thus, “Danton” and “history” become ideological signs that Mitterand’s party wishes to preserve as uniaccentual, the past becomes eternal, while attention to present problems is averted. Obviously, however, what may serve the interests of one opponent does not insure that the foes will acquiesce, as they apparently did not in this case.

The value to me of Darnton’s essay is multiple and implies the use-value of reception studies to the history of moving pictures. Darnton does not consider the film as a container, holding immanent meaning. He recognizes the multiaccentuality of ideological signs. He locates variations in reception to individuals actively constituting Danton's meaning. He constructs a comparative historical analysis that illuminates reception by contrast. Finally, he assumes a complex cultural, social, and political context structuring what specific groups of people did. In recognizing variation, he also remembers ideology.

SOME QUALIFICATIONS

Although intellectual focus on the reader has a history as long as that on the author, several scholarly pursuits have been foregrounded recently under the tags of reader-response criticism, reception aesthetics, and reception theory. I am choosing to use the label “reception studies” for this area of research in part to link it to, but also to disengage it from, certain features of these other groups. In the next chapters I will try to survey some of the significant characteristics and contributions of writers grouped within those approaches. Thus, here I want only to define briefly what “reception studies” is and is not. I should indicate as well that this definition will be motivated and is not derived from abstracting properties of other works which might also call themselves reception studies.

First of all, reception studies has as its object researching the history of the interactions between real readers and texts, actual spectators and films. Consequendy, it is not a philosophy of reception, although it would need to consider various philosophical propositions about readers and texts in its analyses. Yet, as history, it does have implicit and explicit propositions, which should certainly be considered as theoretical as any philosophy.

As history, and not philosophy, reception studies is interested in what has actually occurred in the material world. Reception studies might speculate about what did not happen, and why that was; in fact, part of its project is to explain the appearance and disappearance of various forms of interaction. But, overall, reception studies does not attempt to construct a generalized, systematic explanation of how individuals might have comprehended texts, and possibly someday will, but rather how they actually have understood them. Additionally, and consequently, reception studies criticizes the notion of the ideal reader as ahistorical.

Related as it is to reader-response criticism, reception aesthetics, and reception theory, reception studies is engaged in understanding the relations between readers/viewers and texts/ films. Since chapters 2 and 3 will survey some of this research, I want only to foreshadow it here. Because of reception studies’ stress on the reader as having a privileged relation with the cultural object, philosophical assertions about meaning, knowledge, and effect (ontologies, epistemologies, and effectivities) are in the process of a major paradigmatic transformation.*¹⁸ Various writers hold differing schemas of the reader-text dynamic, but a binding thread among the scholars is overthrowing the notion that the producer-text dynamic determines (in the strong sense) critical conclusions about meaning. Such a position does not deny, and, in fact,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Sources
• Preface
• Part One: Theoretical Concerns
• Part Two: Studies In The History Of The Reception Of American Films
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index