Australian Film Theory and Criticism

Volume 3: Documents

Deane Williams, Constantine Verevis, Deane Williams, Constantine Verevis

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781783208371
• eBook ISBN: 9781783208395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The third part of a three-volume work devoted to mapping the transnational history of Australian film studies, Volume 3: Documents concludes the project by gathering together the documents that were produced during the rise of film studies in Australian academia from 1975–85. Through these sources we see the development of the particularities of Australian film theory and criticism, its relationship to its international counterparts and the establishment of key positions and the directions in which they develop. Editors Deane Williams and Constantine Verevis here collect key articles, including the works of Paul Willemen, Sam Rohdie, Ross Gibson and Meaghan Morris, among many others, in order to conclude this pioneering historiographic account of Australian film studies.

Southern Review, July 1983, pp. 292–311

Remarks on Screen: Introductory Notes for a History of Contexts

Paul Willemen

Perhaps the most accurate description of the role of semiology in Screen’s work would be to characterize it as the transition from problems of textual analysis to problems of a discursive practice, from a consideration of film-as-system to cinema-as-process. And as with all processes of transition, there is no clearly demarcated ‘before’ and ‘after’, but only a series of operations and determinations simultaneously at work, gradually shifting the focus of interest from one area to another. The force-lines of the process can be indicated very schematically as a trajectory marked by three ‘special’ issues of the journal: the LEF issue contained in Screen Reader 1, the Metz issue opening Screen Reader 2 and the issue devoted to the Brecht event held at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1975, to be reprinted in Screen Reader 3.³⁴ It is tempting to put these three special issues in a row and to claim them as evidence of Screen’s relentless search for theoretical refinement and progress. However, this trajectory is by no means a linear one, for it involved – and produced – contradictions and bifurcations according to the pull exerted on the magazine by the different practices such engagements required. One prime example of this process is that the series of ‘special’ issues did in fact continue, but not in Screen. The Brecht event (organized mainly by members of the Society for Education in Film and Television [SEFT] who has been involved with the Edinburgh Film Festival for a number of years) initiated a brief series of Edinburgh conferences accompanied by special publications, the Edinburgh’76 and ’77 magazines.³⁵ The first of these was devoted to an extended discussion of psychoanalysis and avant-garde cinema, and coincided with Screen’s intermittent but increasing attention to psychoanalysis. The second one was entitled History/Memory/Production, and examined the implications of psychoanalytical concepts and notions of discursive practices for historical materialism, especially in the context of feminist politics. Seen in this context, a curious, spiral-like trajectory can be discerned. First came the methodological and therefore political challenge to the ideologies of film reviewers, posed by the introduction of a linguistics-based structuralism as an analytical method to recast auteur theory and genre theory. This was reworked in terms of an analysis of the political moment of Soviet Formalism and the politics of realism as an aesthetic category. There was then a detour by way of an introduction to semiology and a return to a reformulation of the conventions and politics of realism, but this time in terms of a discussion of Brechtian practices. The third ‘turn’ was provided by a closer attention to the implications of psychoanalysis’s account of the effectivity of unconscious processes; and it returned to politics yet again in the form of an analysis of discursive practices and the notion of subject-production. However, the latter conception of politics bore very little resemblance to the historical materialism that had informed Screen’s discussion of Formalism and part of the discussion of Brecht. Indeed, by this time Screen’s commitment to Marxism had become debatable, not to say questionable.

What these remarks seek to make clear is that Screen’s taking up of semiology cannot be understood as an isolated moment, nor as a discrete step forward in an unbroken process of linear progress towards ‘the theoretical foundation for the development of film studies’, to quote John Ellis’ apt summary of Screen’s initial policy formulations (‘Introduction’ v). On the contrary, as a transitional process, Screen’s discussion of early Metzian semiology was caught up in (and determined by) many different practices and institutions. These open out potentially on to different strands of development, and different positions regarding the implications of (and requirements for) struggle in the area of film culture and its diverse institutions. Some of these positions and implications have been followed up in the magazine, but others haven’t. The point to notice here is by no means exhausted, nor could it be said that subsequent developments have been inevitable.

Although the second Reader contains material that extends Screen’s work of the previous two years and announces things to come, the overall impression is likely to be one of a thematic unity provided by the quantity of articles bearing on semiology – that is to say, work bearing on the investigation of how meanings are articulated in a film, and of the implications of the metaphor of ‘cinema-as-language’. These notions had been present in the magazine before the special Metz issue, but it was the weight of that issue that constituted the pole of attraction around which other material could most readily be organized.³⁶ However, questions of the relations of politics and signification were being pursued simultaneously, although momentarily displaced. This feature was to become more important towards the end of 1974 and culminate in the special issue devoted to the Edinburgh-Brecht event in 1975.³⁷ The attraction exerted by these two points of gravity largely determined why articles were pulled into either the second or the third Screen Reader. However, as indicated earlier, the fact that these two Readers present the appearance of both a temporal succession and a thematic coherence is liable to imply a clear demarcation between successive ‘phases’ of Screen’s work, where no such demarcation existed, or at least not in the way these Readers would suggest. Nevertheless, the pull between Metz and Brecht produced one significant casualty. The realism debate – initiated in 1971 and 1972 in terms of the examination of ideological contradictions either within realist texts or between texts and the dominant ideologies surrounding them – worked through into the discussion of ‘Brechtian’ cinema by way of a detour through the work of Roberto Rossellini.³⁸ And it is Screen’s passing through intense glance at Rossellini that provides both the link with and the measure of the displacement that occurred between the special issue on Douglas Sirk in 1971 and the Brecht issue in 1974.³⁹ The signifiers of this displacement are the translation of the Cahiers du Cinéma analysis of Young Mr Lincoln and the translation/taking up of the work of Christian Metz. And it is this displacement ‘in operation’ that made it difficult, even impossible, to integrate the Rossellini material in either the second or third Reader. This was not because that material was unimportant or constituted a guilty symptom of Screen’s residual attachment to its auteurist prehistory; rather, the absence of Rossellini can be seen as marking a hiatus separating early Metz from Brecht, formal semiology from the politics of signification, even though Screen’s readings of Metz or Brecht do not acknowledge such a hiatus. Indeed, those readings are often directed precisely against such a separation, as for instance in Stephen Heath’s critical account of ‘The Work of Christian Metz’ and (in the Brecht-related material) the reading by Claire Johnston and me of The Nightcleaners, an article that argues in favour of a political activation of the cinematic and filmic codes, in order to achieve a filmmaking practice that can be understood as the provision for a political analysis in and through cinema (‘Brecht in Britain’).

In a way, it is misleading to describe the Rossellini material as a detour. It was rather that the discursive trajectory of the journal (for a variety of reasons) had veered off, while the impetus of Screen’s previous work had carried part of the journal on, making it miss the turn. Rossellini constituted neither a bridge nor a dead-end, but merely an abandoned road that could have been extended but wasn’t. With hindsight, it is possible to see this lack-of-fit, this problem of the Rossellini material, as marking an extremely important turning-point for Screen, in so far as it signals a shift towards the different conception of cultural politics that came to dominate the journal. To be sure this opened up new spaces, but it also closed off options that, in many ways, the magazine had to pursue if it was to maintain contact with oppositional practices within exhibition and distribution contexts, as well as in secondary and tertiary education institutions. The figure of ‘Rossellini’, as produced in Screen, comprised many of the motifs characteristic of the journal’s first two years: the realism debate; the notion of the contradictory text; the problem of the authorial structure or system; the relations between text and history; and the way it was introduced into Great Britain (via New Left Review’s film criticism rather than via Movie’s version of auteurism).⁴⁰ Work on Rossellini also prefigured Screen’s later attention to the work of Oshima, Straub/Huillet and Mulvey/Wollen.⁴¹ Screen’s reading and critical use of semiology led to the effective dissolution of the authorial figure and the conventionally acknowledged boundaries of any given text or group of texts. Semiology as taken up in Screen posed the question of the intelligibility of cinema as a signifying system, or, more precisely, the question of the conditions of that intelligibility. The authorial figure that was returned (in the electoral sense) after the intervention of semiology in 1973–74 no longer referred to a pre-given unity to be analysed, but to a signifier marking an unstable site, a ‘fan of elements’ (as Stephen Heath called it), a play of assemblage and dispersion in the activity of writingreading that constituted one ‘space of the process of sense and subject’ in history (‘Comment’ 91). The authorial figure thus became an instance of the regulation of textual processes, of the delimitation and circumscription of a potentially infinite polysemic process, a regularized regime of sense and subject to be specified and ‘produced’ in each separate case.

This dissolving of the industrially and ideologically imposed boundaries of the text, of the single film as it is circulated by the industry and journalism, was necessary and productive in terms of Screen’s theory of cinema as process, cinema as a signifying practice. However, it also seriously impeded Screen’s ability to maintain contact with the dominant practices and institutions of cinema and of film studies; that is to say, the theoretical ‘advances’ were brought at the price of a tendency towards institutional isolation. That such dangers were perceived at the time, however vaguely, and that the political consequences of this development were thought to be undesirable, can be seen from the introduction to the journal, between 1974 and 1977, of a special Film Culture section in which Screen’s engagement with the current conjuncture would be acted out. Later on, it was decided to drop this separation of ‘Film Culture’ from ‘Theory’ on the grounds that all the articles published in the journal – and not just the shorter reviews and discussion pieces contained in the Film Culture section – should be regarded as constituting an engagement with and an intervention in film culture. Theoretically correct as this decision may have been, it in fact failed to cope with (or arguably, suppressed or trivialized) the very real problem that the setting up of a Film Culture section had attempted to deal with, however inadequately, in the first place. In effect the dropping of the Film Culture section accelerated Screen’s trajectory towards the deep space of academia because no new and more effective way was devised of maintaining contact with developments in most institutions of film culture. Nor indeed could it have been, given the determinations at work both within and upon the journal, regardless of the efforts to find one by way of the readers’ meetings and weekend schools. It could be argued, I think convincingly, that the main institutions and forces shaping film culture were maintained outside (and to some extent in spite of) Screen by individual members of the editorial board, while contact with the more explicitly educational sector was delegated to Screen Education.

What is revealed by both the difficulty of the Rossellini material and the gradual process whereby the problems within the Film Culture section is the gradual process whereby the theory of cinema as a signifying process (always embedded in specific institutions and practices) lost its political edge and deteriorated into a speculation about the status of discourse and, by extension, about the status of ‘specialists’ in matters of discourse. Whereas at one point theoretical work had been regarded as part of any cultural struggle, in the second half of the decade Screen came to regard theory a self-sufficient activity. In due course it began to be suggested in the journal of that its theoretical work should address the conditions of existence of political struggle thus implying an acceptance of its positions constituted a pre-condition for the assessment of any form of cultural politics. In this way, the journal set itself up as a Laboratory of Pure Theory, disinterestedly producing knowledge about this, that and the other, which knowledge was then ‘available’ to those who wished to avail themselves of it. A radical rhetoric was maintained while the journal in fact denied any responsibility for the politics it represented. It was in this context that Screen took up feminism, as a move to legitimate politically this drift into opportunism. Since feminism had pointed to some serious problems inherent in attempts to theorize in conventio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction: ‘Notes for a History of Contexts’
• 1972
• Experimentalists
• 1974
• Francis Birtles: Cyclist, Explorer, Kodaker
• 1975
• Feminist Critique
• 1976
• Corsetway to Heaven: Looking Back at Picnic at Hanging Rock
• Editorial Article
• 1978
• Gilda: Images of Women – Notes for Discussion
• 1979
• Fetishism in Film ‘Theory’ and ‘Practice’
• Towards Decolonization: Some Problems and Issues for Film History in Australia
• The Australian Journal of Screen Theory
• Independent Feminist Filmmaking in Australia
• Oedipal Opera: The Restless Years
• 1980
• Editorial
• 1981
• Stock Shock and Schlock
• Film and History: Canberra Conference
• Recent ‘Political’ Documentary: Notes on Union Ma>Noel King
• The Second Australian Film Conference: Theory Weary
• The Second Australian Film Conference, or A Long Way from Lana Turner
• Editorial
• On Screen
• 1982
• Feminist Film Theory: Reading the Text
• ‘The Public Wants Features!’: The (Creative?) Underdevelopment of Australian Independent Film Since the 1960s
• 1983
• Super 8: The Phenomenon Turned Eventful
• Independent Feminist Filmmaking and the Black Hole
• Pornography and Pleasure: The Female Spectator
• The Australian Film Industry and the Holy Roman Empire
• Camera Natura: Landscape in Australian Feature Films
• Changing the Curriculum: The Place of Film in a Department of English
• Australian Documentary Cinema
• The Practice of Reviewing
• Australian Filmmaking: Its Public Circulation
• A National Cinema: The Role of the State
• ‘Murder, Murder, Dangerous Crime’
• Remarks on Screen: Introductory Notes for a History of Contexts
• 1984
• ‘National>Ina Bertrand
• The Australian Journal of Screen Theory
• After Futur◊Fall
• Second History and Film Conference Report
• 1985
• Glimpses of the Present
• Don Ranvaud: Of Framework and Festivals
• Yondering: A Reading of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
• 1987
• Charles Chauvel: The Last Decade
• About the Editors
• Back Cover