From Antz to Titanic

Reinventing Film Analysis

Martin Barker, Thomas Austin

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781783719020
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

Everybody analyses films. Ordinary viewers, chatting on the way home afterwards. Reviewers, telling us just enough to tempt or put off. Critics, 'situating' films for us. Moralists, hunting for the (harmful) message. So what exactly is it that film academics do that's different? Martin Barker and Thomas Austin provide a jargon-free, accessible and student-friendly introduction to film analysis. They begin with a discussion about audience and a detailed case-study on four conflicting analyses of Capra's It's A Wonderful Life. The authors examine a range of popular Hollywood films in a variety of genres, including Titanic, Deep Impact, Sleepless in Seattle, The Lion King, Starship Troopers and The Usual Suspects, and provide vivid demonstrations of what can and can't be achieved with close textual analysis. The book ends by proposing a list of measures for assessing the adequacy of film analyses: measures intended to lay the basis of a way of doing film analysis which goes beyond theoretically predetermined and often obscurantist assertions. Explicitly rejecting much of the theoretical baggage that dogs contemporary film analysis, Barker and Austin strip the subject down to its bare essentials. The result is a provocative and timely re-examination of many of the basic tenets in film theory and analysis.

1

Films, Audiences and Analyses

Everybody analyses films. People walking out of cinemas turn to each other and say: ‘What did you make of that, then?’ And as soon as they go past simply recording likes and dislikes, pleasures and disappointments, their answers start dealing in the coinage of analysis: talking about characters and their motivations, about acting, its convincingness and contribution to the film, about the story (did it make sense? what sense did it make? what gaps, puzzling bits, incoherences were experienced?). The more people chat about a film afterwards, the more they make analyses, collaboratively.

Journalists do it, too, and all reviewers. They offer versions of each film they write about. Because they do it within a genre of writing – reviews have a job to do, telling you enough about a film to let you think about whether it is for you, without so telling it that you feel pre-empted – they have developed typical ways of recounting the narrative of movies, but often with a degree of conscious withholding. In this they are helped by the film companies who, in press packs and publicity materials, analyse their own movies.

Really clever reviewers enter a new category, they become film critics – people who can place a film in a tradition for you, who will tell you about the director, the cinematography, the special effects. They will point you to continuities, and offer a sense of the significance of a particular film. These people are also analysing films. A number of them make an additional living out of writing books about directors, actors, studios, and the making of particular films.

Politicians, pundits and moral campaigners do it. From time to time, they pick up on a film that affronts them. Affront is more than dislike – it signals that they are worried by a film, or – perhaps more often – feel that they ought to be worried by it. To give voice to their worries, they search the film for ‘messages’ which they can see, but others unfortunately won’t – but that will be a mark of their weakness, that they are being corrupted and just don’t realise it.

So what is it that academic analysts of films can claim to do, that others – all those ordinary viewers, fans, reviewers, critics, politicians, pundits – don’t, or can’t? What knowledge or understanding can we claim to produce that is different from, or even in some ways superior to, what others produce? This book attempts to answer these questions, and at the same time to challenge some worrying answers that are current, indeed fashionable, within film studies.

Why Bother Analysing Films?

There is an unlimited number of questions you can ask of films, each of which will lead you to investigate and analyse them with different priorities. But if you are doing it properly, of course, the results must be in some broad way compatible with each other. It’s a useful imaginative exercise to ask, of any films you are interested in: what questions are worth asking here? And then to follow that with some consequential ones: what kind of interest in the film(s) does each question raise, and what sort of object does it presume the films to be? How would each question lead you to investigate your films, what main characteristics would you have to attend to? And, what would be exemplary cases – which films ought most to command your attention, and test the adequacy of your answers?

Here is a sample list of questions that could in principle be asked of films:

1	How does African cinema differ from American cinema?
2	What is the function of point-of-view shots in films, and what are the main kinds of such shots?
3	What are the common characteristics, and the evolving stylistics, of Paul Verhoeven’s films?
4	How have star personae been enacted on screen in different periods?
5	How has 1980s Hollywood reflected (on) American politics?
6	What influences are evident in the construction of underground horror films? How do these relate to subcultural uses of these films?

The first – and not inconsequential – thing to note about all these questions is the way each presumes that there is a coherent object that can indeed be investigated. Is there a meaningful object called ‘African cinema’? Why should we presume that point-of-view shots perform a delimited set of jobs? Did Paul Verhoeven have sufficient control over all his films, including his earliest ones, for there to be a thread of continuous style? And so on. The acceptance that there is an object to be researched is vital, as we will see when we consider the still-dominant ‘effects’ tradition. What’s notable, next, is that all these questions make claims about things external to the films they address. This is obvious in some cases. Question 3 will necessarily involve a consideration of Verhoeven’s life, and his relations with those he worked with (producers, scriptwriters, cinematographers) since we will need to know that a particular feature was the result of his influence. Question 5, for instance, presumes a knowledge of 1980s American politics – but then seeks not only to add to that, but perhaps to amend it in the light of learning about the ways filmic representations of events may themselves have played a role, for example, in the conduct of political campaigns. Question 6 looks in two directions – at the factors shaping makers of films, and at the users of films. But it offers, potentially, to close the loop by seeing these as a live circuit in which fans of these horror movies follow the cues of the makers, and in turn cue them as to their interests: blurring the lines between makers and audiences. Question 1 involves us in creating categories, whose significances we will then have to explore: is there a typical kind of film made in Africa, and America, are there not for example directors who have moved from one continent to the other, and are there implied differences in the uses to which cinema is put in the two continents? Once again, we have left the purely cinematic. Question 4 is more complicated, but once we take note of, for instance, Richard Dyer’s classic works on stars, we realise that these personae are as much produced off screen as on it,¹ and that an important issue is how these were kept in touch and co-ordinated with each other.

The remaining questions get more complicated, the longer you look at them. Question 2 sounds as though it only concerns the mechanics of films – and sometimes authors write as if this was the case. But in fact, to explain the function of point-of-view shots in a film, you would inevitably have to deal with such things as how this contributes to the construction of positions from which an audience can participate in a film, who or what is in control of showing us things, and so on – or, what is sometimes called ‘extra-diegetic constructs’. And so the ‘audience’ creeps into our film analyses.

In all six cases, then, the questions lead us to examine the relations between the cinematic and the extra-cinematic. And this is where the trouble starts. For we need a theory of how these are related in general. Question 3, about Verhoeven, for instance: answered from within the approach known as ‘auteurism’, which puts centre-stage the issue of film-makers’ style and associates this with meaning and quality, the approach will be markedly different than if it is answered from within a political economy approach, which stresses the structural conditions within which films are made. Question 2, looked at by someone who believes that films work by creating ‘identification’, will get quite a different answer than when it is examined by someone like myself, who doubts the case for that concept. Putting this generally, before we can begin to answer questions such as these, there has to be some general idea about how films relate to the world beyond them: the world of politics, the wider world of culture, ideas, ideologies, the films’ makers, and their audiences. It is this last which, more than the others, this book is interested in.

For behind these many, and perfectly valid, questions lies one which is harder to answer, but which these particular questions in the end all assume – the question how films mean. All these questions presume that a film is, at least potentially, more than a passing of 1

hours (or however much it happens to be) in front of a large or small screen. Every time films come under scrutiny, for morals, causing crime, being politically-charged or whatever, the first response has commonly been: ‘But it’s only a piece of entertainment.’ The ‘only’ is a boundary fence, designed to guard against any argument that seeing a film was anything beyond a self-enclosed experience: finished, without connections, implications, consequences. ‘Just a piece of fun.’ Again, hear that gate shutting. ‘Simply a film.’ Slam. But every kind of film theory is an attempt to say that something more is at stake. What it is, is – and has to be – argued over.

•	It may be that film is significant – ‘means’ – by virtue of its educational capacity.^2 Do films in some way broaden people’s ability to perceive and understand their world? Is there a connection between film literacy and other kinds of literacy?
•	Films may matter (‘mean’) by virtue of their ability to deliver aesthetic experiences. In that case, some working distinctions between ‘quality’ and other movies would need to be put in place.
•	All the arguments about the possible ‘harmfulness’ of certain kinds of film, in particular those which presume that visual materials have greater inherent persuasiveness, are another kind of implication of ‘meaningfulness’, where films outrun their experiential immediacy.
•	Films may resonate significantly with their social, cultural, political environs. The weakest version of this is the claim that films ‘reflect’ the world – in which case they are only a kind of second-hand evidence of what is going on elsewhere. But in other versions, films participate in the social and political process, and are seen as carriers of ideas and ideologies – in extreme versions counting among the most important carriers in the last century.
•	Films may work to produce communities of experience: shared perceptions of the world, a joyous sense of belonging and common culture.

All these and potentially many more are claims about the ways films’ meaning-making capacities run beyond, or have consequences beyond, the time of actually watching. And of course a number of them may be true together. What matters here is that each claim is simultaneously a claim about the nature of films – their nature, organisation and capacity to do more than be watched; a claim about how films can work on and with their context to play their larger role; and also a claim about that context – how it works, in its relation to films. The part that interests this book, not because it is the only or most important but because a lot of awful claims are made about it, is that part which considers films in relation to their audiences. How may we understand films’ potential to engage their audiences in ideas, understandings, images, ideologies, dreams, fantasies, hopes and fears such that the films make a distinguishable contribution to their wider relations to the world?

The Embedded Audience

Consider the following descriptions of a group of films: ‘paranoid, claustrophobic, hopeless, doomed, predetermined by the past, without clear moral or personal identity’. Leave aside for a moment what films this was said to be true of, and by whom. Ask instead: if true, what would this say about the people who chose to see such films? If someone whose judgement we trusted told us that a film we were wondering about seeing was paranoid, claustrophobic, etc., chances are we would stay away – unless of course we were the kind of viewer who is into ‘sicko’ films. If a film publicised itself in these terms, it would surely be regarded as, at least, taking a great risk of alienating audiences. Why would a person ever choose to see a film with such characteristics – or if they found themselves in a cinema showing such a film, why would they not leave or just reject the whole horrible experience?

Why indeed? Yet film analysts frequently make claims of this kind. The above words could have come from any number of moralising analyses of films, worrying about the dangers of ‘violent’ or ‘pornographic’ movies and their ‘effects’ on people. And if asked why people then choose to see such films, the answer, explicitly or implicitly, tends to be of one of these kinds: films like this offer cheap thrills and pleasures, to disguise their rotten messages; these are vulnerable audiences, they do not know what they are doing; the fact that they enjoy these things is evidence of how damaged, or degraded, they already are. Without such additions, the account of the films themselves becomes effectively incomprehensible.

The words are in fact taken from an essay on film noir by Janey Place, which argues that noir films such as Double Indemnity (1944) are an expression of male fantasies, ‘as is most of our art’.³ Why, then, did many women enjoy watching them? Place does offer an explanation. Her argument is that these films have a double trajectory: overall they are patriarchal, in that the women – who have endangered male dominance by asserting themselves socially and sexually – mostly have to die by the end of the film. But the films have an ‘excess’. In showing these strong, assertive women, the films outdo themselves, and undo some of their own ideological intentions:

Visually, film noir is fluid, sensual, extraordinarily expressive, making the sexually expressive woman, which is its dominant usage of women, extremely powerful. It is not their inevitable demise we remember but rather their strong, dangerous, and above all, exciting sexuality. In film noir we observe both the social action of myth which damns the sexual woman and all who become enmeshed by her, and a particularly potent stylistic presentation of the sexual strength of women which man fears. This operation of myth is so highly stylised and conventionalised that the final ‘lesson’ of the myth often fades into the background and we retain the image of the erotic, strong, unrepressed (if destructive) woman.⁴

I am not concerned here with the correctness of this analysis, but with the way it (necessarily) incorporates and builds upon an image of the audience, their reasons for and the manner of their involvement in the film. Notice the repeated ‘we’ which Place has to intrude. These have surely to be women, not men, or these films are failing badly in their claimed ideological mission. That mission, as commonly stated by work of this ilk, is to give expression to men’s supposed fears of the ‘castrating woman’ who is then punished for the threat she posed. So, men go to see films of this kind because of an endlessly recurrent lack/need in themselves to deal with a fear they are claimed to have. A film is ‘good’ if it arouses but then swiftly assuages those fears, by punishing the woman. Thus, a man may say that he has gone to see, and enjoyed, such a movie because he likes the director, fancies the star, enjoys a good narrative, was keeping his partner company, etc. But these are discountable explanations. His male ‘lack’ ‘explains’ the meaning of the film and its role. But not for women. Women enjoying such a film must either be deeply masochistic (as famously Laura Mulvey claimed, and decried⁵) or they must get something different out of it. Either way, what is crucial is that all such arguments are simultaneously making claims about three things: (1) how films work to make meanings, (2) how they work on their audiences, and thus (3) what an implied audience is doing with the film.

All film analysis makes claims about ‘the audience’. Some approaches to analysis admit it and openly declare their premises. Others don’t. Very few have been willing to take the step and look for evidence, let alone conduct research, to find out the truth or otherwise of their claims. This problem is so endemic it is worth pausing on. Suppose a doctor made claims that a drug which s/he had discovered had special properties – s/he analysed the drug’s chemistry, and from the basis of that offered a proposition as to the way it would operate on a human body, and thus asserted on which people it would be effective in which ways (curing this, damaging that, having these side-effects). This is a fair analogy, given the number of accounts of films which use medical metaphors (think how often attacks on the media talk about them as ‘drug-like’, ‘addictive’, and so on). What would be the response, if it was discovered that no clinical trials had been conducted, and everything was claimed on the basis of a laboratory analysis?

Take a case in point. Here is Douglas Kellner talking about the film Top Gun (1986), a film which he claims to be the arch-embodiment of ‘Reaganite fantasies’:

The film opens with titles indicating that in 1969 the Navy Air Corps set up a school to train elite aerial fighters, and in a later training session, it is announced that the US needs to maintain its ratio of expert aerial fighter pilots in the contemporary world. The message is that even in a hi...