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THE MAJOR FILM THEORIES: AN INTRODUCTION By J. DUDLEY ANDREW Oxford University Press, New York 1976; softcover $3.95; 278 pages; Notes, bibliography, index, illustrated.
REVIEWED BY ROGER COPELAND
In America the film theory most well known is the auteur theory which properly speaking, is not a theory at all but a critical method," writes J. Dudley Andrew in his introduction to The Major Film Theories. Here Andrew is doing much more than merely taking a few pot shots at the innately empirical bias of most Anglo-American film study. He is announcing loud and clear and without apologies that The Major Film Theories will be a book about theory in the purest and most rigorous sense. The fact that Andrew Sarris insisted on translating la politique des auteurs as "the auteur theory" is insufficient grounds for treating it as such.
Auteurism and its blood-brother genre criticism, Andrew is quick to add, do manage to "avoid the dangers of impressionistic connoisseurship which haunt the unsystematic critic . . . But even this is not theory in its pure sense, for its goal is an appreciation of the value of individual works of cinema, not a comprehension of cinematic capability."
Cinematic capability-an attempt to uncover the underlying nature of the medium itself-that's what Andrew has in mind when he speaks of theory. And although he makes no such claim for himself, I think it's correct to say that The Major Film Theories is the first book in English devoted exclusively to the work of theorists (as opposed to critics and historians as well). Peter Wollen's Signs and Meaning in the Cinema and Andrew Tudor's Theories of Film are both splendid books; but they provide a more general overview of serious film scholarship rather than a study of theory per se. For example, a sizeable chunk of both books is devoted to la politique des auteurs; and Tudor, in his hortatory conclusion, even goes so far as to say, "in theorizing we would be better advised to try to explore what IS for a while instead of arguing about what ought to be." Andrew by contrast, insists outright that, "The goal . . . of film theory is to formulate a schematic notion of the capacity of film."
The...