Interpretation and Film Studies

Movie Made Meanings

Phillip Novak

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030447380
• eBook ISBN: 9783030447397
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book argues that the sustained interpretation of individual movies has, contrary to conventional wisdom, never been a major preoccupation of film studies—that, indeed, the field is marked by a dearth of effective, engaging, and enlightening critical analyses of single films. The book makes this case by surveying what has been written about four historically important and well-known movies (D. W. Griffith's Way Down East, Marcel Carné's Port of Shadows, Mike Nichols's The Graduate, and Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert ), none of which has been the focus of sustained critical attention, and by exhaustively examining the kinds of work published in four influential film journals ( Cinema Journal, Screen, Wide Angle, and Movie ). The book goes on to argue for the value of the work of interpretation, illustrating this value through extended analyses of Roman Polanski's Chinatown and Christopher Nolan's Memento, both of which thematize interpretation. Novak demonstrates the causes and consequences of reading poorly and the importance of reading well.

© The Author(s) 2020

P. NovakInterpretation and Film Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44739-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The (Non)Intersections of Film and Literary Studies

Phillip Novak¹

(1)

Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY, USA

Phillip Novak

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Fifteen to twenty years ago the center of gravity in my professional life began to shift from focusing on literature to focusing on film. For years, I had been including film texts in courses where they seemed appropriate or at least plausible—expository writing courses, for example, where the concern was process, not content, and where I could use whatever I wanted as prompts for essays, or introductory literature courses, where I could sneak film in under the auspices of genre. Then, purely coincidentally, at a point when I was starting to imagine what it might be like to devote whole semesters to film, I found myself in an English department that had lost its sole film studies specialist. There were courses in the catalog that needed to be taught or dropped; there was a certain level of steady demand for such courses: a vacuum had been created; and there I was, again purely coincidentally, to help fill it. And so I started, rather haphazardly, and at the rate of perhaps one or two courses a year, teaching film—courses on film history and film genre; courses on the work of individual directors and on the idea of the director as author (an idea that could be both deployed and deconstructed); introductory film studies courses that included discussion of film rhetoric and film poetics. I learned the field as I taught in it, of course, because there was no good alternative to doing so, and I have often been only half a step ahead of my students. The process—slow, desultory, ongoing—has been engaging and inefficient, arduous and enlightening. On the one hand, it has troubled the trajectory of my career; on the other, it has allowed me to play at being a student well past middle age.

Of course, my personal experience—the experience, that is, of drifting into film studies from a specialization in literature—is not unique and wouldn’t be worth mentioning, really, except that it bears on the positions that I want to pursue here—both in the sense that the experience served as the grounds out of which the current project emerged and in the sense that it informed the particulars of the arguments I want to develop. In what follows, I will spend a not incidental amount of time comparing film and literary studies. So, briefly summarizing the history of my coming to the teaching and studying of film will provide a route into the issues that I most want to address.

In my case, the shift in disciplinary focus was not a punctual event: I didn’t simply switch, in a given year (or even over the course of several), from one field to the other. Although my interests as a scholar now center on film I continue to teach literature courses. Indeed, my current position is split between the English department and the department of communication and film studies in the small, liberal arts college where I work. So, it is not simply that I have made this transition from literature to film in a broad, overarching sense, but that regularly, on an almost daily basis, I toggle back and forth between the two fields in the work I do as a teacher. Both the larger, overarching movement in terms of my scholarship and all those daily smaller ones related to teaching have served over time to make me aware of, sensitive to, differences in the two terrains that seem to me worth noting.

One of these has to do with the students’ general level of preparation—in each instance—for the work of the course. In college literature classes, however introductory they may be, students always enter having had some experience analyzing literary texts. They have been reading poems and plays and novels in English classes since at least sixth grade. And they know that these products can be processed in a variety of ways. Most have, for example, at least some sense of rhetoric: they can identify the strategies Iago uses to ensnare Othello, for example; they can say why—if the issue is brought to their attention—the unnamed narrator of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” repeatedly refers to John Jacob Astor when he introduces himself. Most have a rudimentary sense of poetics and narratology (although few would be able to define those terms): given the opening paragraphs of Bambara’s “The Lesson,” they can characterize the narrator based on the language she uses to describe her environment and experience; they can locate the tone of the concluding passage of Joyce’s “Araby.” Most importantly for my purposes, all of them know that one thing we can do with literary texts is to read them for meaning. They arrive expecting to be asked to do just that. While they often struggle in various ways in their efforts at interpretation—jumping to wildly implausible symbolic or allegorical meanings in the case of poetry (before having made any attempt at dealing with the surface sense of the poem), or insisting on responding to the behavior of characters in fictional narratives as if the characters were real (and thus missing potential symbolic significances in these characters’ actions)—they come in predisposed to work at hermeneutics, and they have at least some elementary sense of what such work entails.

In the introductory level film studies courses I teach, by contrast, the vast majority of students I see have had no experience analyzing films before they take the class. From time to time, a student will report having discussed a movie or two in high school, but typically the experience has been too isolated and too superficial to have served in any meaningful sense as training. To the extent that the students I see have been taught to respond to films—by which I mean narrative fiction films, my primary concern here and throughout¹—they have been taught, by the culture and by the film industry, to respond to them purely as commodities, and their immediate instinct is, thus, not to analyze or interpret but to evaluate. Was the film any good? By which is meant mainly: were the sensations produced by watching this movie of a kind and of an intensity sufficient to justify the costs (calculated in terms of the time, effort, and, occasionally even, money spent acquiring the sensations)? That’s the central question. “This game is stupid.” “Great burger.” “Dumb film.” The primary problem, of course, with the immediate recourse to evaluation is that most students lack the knowledge and range of reference necessary to make informed judgments. My students have all seen a fair number of movies and a few, I imagine, consider themselves to be film buffs; but the vast majority of the films they have seen fall within a narrow band of possibilities. What they know is contemporary, mainstream, American cinema. What they have seen are hundreds and hundreds of iterations of three or four films. They are in a good position to say whether The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) is more engrossing than The Wolverine (2013) . But they are not well situated by their experience to compare the quality of either of these films with that of Modern Times (1936) or Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, 1953) or The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943) . They are not familiar with the conventions within, and against, which the latter films operate, so these films inevitably feel to them stilted; they don’t recognize that the contemporary films they admire also maneuver in relation to sets of conventions, and since they don’t register the conventionality, the action in these films, however outrageous, feels natural. They invariably complain, for example, about the rapidity with which characters in 1940s era Hollywood films fall in love, finding the immediacy of the emotion to be unrealistic. But seeing a character—say, Daniel Craig’s James Bond—riding a motorcycle on the top of a moving train doesn’t, for them, raise any concerns about plausibility. That spectacle is just the kind of thing one sees in films.

My students, in short, are not ordinarily prepared to do well the one thing they are taught by their experience to do with movies—that is, judge them. Some small few—the one or two cinephiles I see in any given year—will have watched not only a lot of movies, but they will have watched a handful of films very closely, even obsessively. Some will know a genre—horror, for example—very intimately. They will have read—and perhaps weighed in on—web-based debates about the plots of these films: they will know how dream states function in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010); they will have an opinion on whether the main character in that movie is still dreaming when it ends; they will elaborate convoluted hypotheses about the relation of Neo and Agent Smith to the prophecy of the One in The Matrix franchise films. But the capacity of these students to comment on a film text never gets too far beyond basic explication, and that capacity is possessed, as I’ve said, by relatively few students. I have thus grown to expect the students in my film classes to arrive as fairly blank slates where film studies is concerned—to expect them to have no knowledge of film history, to have no experience, in particular, watching silent films or films made outside of the United States (the relatively few fans of anime that I run into excluded); to have no awareness of film rhetoric (they will not have been taught to notice lighting, framing, shot duration, editing techniques, mise-en-scene); to have no familiarity with any form of film theory; and to have no sense at all of what it might mean to analyze a movie for its meaning.

Again, I want, for reasons that will be made clear, to contrast this situation with that which prevails in introductory literature classes. There, students will come in knowing what we are talking about when we talk about grammatical point of view. None is likely to know how to define metonymy, or synecdoche, or chiasmus, but they will be able to explain the difference between a metaphor and a simile. They will be able to identify personification and hyperbole. They will understand the terms setting and tone and will have heard some conversation (in fact, probably too much) about tragic heroes and tragic flaws. A few will know how to translate the phrase carpe diem; a few more will have discussed the idea of the epiphany. They get satire and verbal irony. The same set of students, brought down the hall to an introductory film class, will have to be taught all the terminology used to make sense of movies and all the ideas to which those terms refer. They will have to be taught the conventions of continuity editing. They will have to be shown the flattening effect that comes from shooting with a telephoto lens. They will have to learn the distinctions between a straight cut and a lap dissolve.

But learning the terminology is easy enough for most of my students. Most are, in fact, good at absorbing information. That’s a skill almost all possess coming in, and one they hone throughout their college experience—in almost all the courses that they take. So I feel pretty confident going in that I can give them the language they will need to be able to crack open the movies they will watch. More importantly, because they are adept at processing information, I know too that, while most have little sense of the history of cinema before they take my classes, they will emerge from those classes—especially those specifically designed to cover some aspect of film history—better informed than they were when they arrived: they will have some sense of how film culture emerged in the context of, and in concert with, other forms of visual spectacle in the late nineteenth century; they will come to understand the technology of film—learning about various forms of film stock and film speeds, about early film cameras and camera analogues, about Maltese cross gears and Latham loops; they will learn something of the mechanics of motion pictures by looking at Muybridge photo series and by playing with a hand-held Zoetrope; they will study the development of continuity editing and watch films by the Lumières and Méliès, by Porter and Pastrone; they will come to know what we mean when we talk about surrealism, German expressionism, and Italian neo-realism.

Most can also be led, quickly enough, to respond, with a reasonable degree of sensitivity, to film rhetoric. They can be pretty readily taught, that is, to see more and see better in individual shots, individual scenes, shot sequences, and scene transitions. Having learned the term mise-en-scene, they will—on their own—notice the way the Lili Taylor character in Nancy Savoca’s Dogfight (1991) is framed when she is introduced, small and hunched over her guitar in the distance, ultimately to be overshadowed by the River Phoenix character in the foreground (Image 1.1).

Image 1.1

Taking note of mise-en-scene

They will mark the transition, in Citizen Kane (1941), from the first half of the movie, when Kane dominates the spaces he moves through, to the second half, where he is mostly engulfed by his surroundings. Having come to understand the basic principles of continuity editing, they will perceive the breakdown—or flouting—of that system in the cop-killing sequence early on in Breathless (À Bout de souffle, 1960). Knowing to think about rhythm while they watch, they will note the longueurs of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) or the later version of his The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), the deliberate pacing of the scenes in Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin, 1925) covering Vakulinchuk’s death and wake as compared to the kinetic, staccato cutting of the Odessa steps sequence. With some coaxing, they can be brought to recognize the tonal counterpointing that takes place between sound and image in Days of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: The (Non)Intersections of Film and Literary Studies
• Part I. The Difference a Reading Makes: Interpretation as Absent Center
• Part II. Watching the Detective: Readings
• 9. Conclusion: Interpretation and the New Cinephilia
• Back Matter