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POST-THEORY: RECONSTRUCTING FILM STUDIES, ed. David Bordwell and Noel Carroll. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996, xvii + 564 pp., $45.00, $17.95 paper.
In this newest instalment of an epic battle, Bordwell and Carroll once more take the field against the forces of darkness, that is, against structuralism and poststructuralism in the domain of film studies. This contest dates back to the heyday of the film journal Screen and has already motivated Bordwell's Making Meaning (Harvard, 1989) and Carroll's Mystifying Movies (Columbia, 1988). Those who are familiar with these works will not be surprised to learn that, in Post-Theory, cognitivism has again been cast in the role of the Hero, while the Villain is being played by Grand Theory. The demon Theory has allegedly caused us to worship the false gods of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusserian Marxism, and deconstructivist poststructuralism, not to mention their progeny-postmodernism, postcolonialism, and other variations on the themes of culturalism.
Bordwell and Carroll insist that the most unsavory aspect of Theory is its allegiance to psychoanalysis, especially the Lacanian version that gripped the collective imagination of the film-theory set in the seventies and eighties. Psychoanalytically inspired film theory has introduced a disturbing irrationalism into the scholarship and research practices of film studies. Bordwell diagnoses its unfortunate tendency to promote associational reasoning patterns (pp. 22-24), and Carroll justifiably complains about cookiecutter applications of Theoretical apercus to any film text that comes to hand. More damagingly, Theory has substituted misguided, totalizing accounts of subjectivity, ideology, and power for hard-nosed questions about humbler topics such as point-of-view editing, ways of arousing emotions in film spectators, and the narrative structures and conventions specific to individual genres (see, i.e., p. 29). And it has licensed a lot of published work that has taken on canonical status despite weak argumentation and questionable methodology.
The general line of these complaints is justified, and Bordwell and Carroll's previous work has encouraged many, including me, to reassess critically the extravagant claims of Theory. But one might be forgiven for wondering whether Post-Theory's renewed proselytizing for cognitivism and its animadversions against Theory advance us much farther than our warriors have already managed to get us in their earlier works. Culturalism-Bordwell's rather inclusive term gathering together race/class/ gender heuristics-has, as he admits, set...