Haidee Wasson’s blog entry states what I believe we, at ARTHEMIS, all think: history and theory need not be antagonistic. And when Mark Betz looked at “reading against the grain” — a notion that has informed much theory since the late 60s — historically, he showed that there is a lot to be gained by looking at theory historically. And, of course, it is not rare for disciplines to look at its concepts historically. The some extend the old history of ideas did just that as well. The real questions, however, are: what sort of historiography to adopt? And, even more important, to what end, for what purpose?

In the post-Foucaudian era history in the humanities has often meant a form of relativizing that has aligned itself with a "hermeneutics of suspicion", to recall a phrase Ricoeur often used. It is is this relativizing historiography that has often been critical of theory and theory’s tendency to universalize. As we know this can lead straight to a certain trivialization of theory (Jeffrey Sconce’s talk was a good illustration of this attitude). In fact, history here often adopts a sort of  “meta”-level stance: “you ‘theorists’ think this (or that) now, but this can’t be true since what you think is necessarily determined by the zeitgeist, and when it’s over you’ll be thinking something else… so don’t you get all hot and bothered about the theory…”. But here, of course, the historian is theorizing… Foucault, of course, was theorizing. One problem with Foucault (whose name was invoked a few times during the conference – but nowhere as much as in Jeffrey Sconce’s talk), is that he did not wish to offer a principle guiding the change from one episteme to the next. He was unwilling to do so. In The Order of Things changes in episteme appear abritrary and involve discontinuity rather than continuity. And it is primarily this that led Foucault to his conception of "power". Indeed, when epistemic change appears arbitrary (“so and so is in the truth today, tomorrow it will be something else and the change from one to the other is arbitrary”), it opens itself to falling under the sway of power. So my question to Haidee Wasson is the following: what history(ies) doe we need – what conception of history and historiography? Certainly the mere accumulation of facts and dates is not sufficient.

 I don’t know the reasons behind the development of 16mm analytical projectors (I never claimed I did) – in fact, in my comment I made clear that I was quoting John Locke who, a few days before at FSAC, made the claim that they were developed for reviewing football games. I'm not a historian and have no formal training in historiography. I’m sure Haidee knows very well what she is talking about (she is, after all a specialist in the development of 16mm and a fine historian). But what are we to make of the fact that these projectors were developed instead for military use before opening up to other applications? Why does this matter for us who study films? What does this fact tell us – about the cinema, about the classroom, about film studies? And, more importantly -- in the eyes of the theoretician, at least -- what conception of historiography, what conceptual use of the past (seen from the present of history)  can best help us in finding answers to these questions?  If theory has a history, so does history and historiography. And historiography’s pretentions (to truth, to some part of the truth, to truth-aptness, to validity, etc.) are… well (for lack of a better word)… theoretical.

Martin

 In 1977 Paul Ricoeur published an essay in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association entitled "The Question of Proof in Freud's Psychoanalytic Writings" where he describes what constitutes a fact in Freudian psychoanalysis. His claim is that what is relevant as a fact in psychoanalysis is of a different nature than what counts as a fact in the natural sciences -- which is not an outrageous conception since what counts as a fact and as an observation in mathematics is also of a different nature than what counts as a fact in the natural sciences. Thus Ricoeur considers 4 criteria for what counts as a fact in psychoanalysis: (a) it must be a part of experience such that it is capable of being said. This means that facts in psychoanalysis are not observable behaviors, rather they are reports. Indeed, even symptoms (though they are partly observable) enter the field of analysis only in as much as they are in relation to other factors that are verbalized in the "report". This, explains Ricoeur, forces us to situate the facts of psychoanalysis inside a sphere of motivations and meaning. (b) What constitutes a fact in psychoanalysis is not only that it is something "sayable"-- according to Ricoeur's reading of Freud, it is also that it is said to another person. This other, he tells us, can be someone who responds, who refuses to respond, who gratifies, who threatens. This person may be a real existent person or a fantasy, spmeone present or lost, a source of anguish or the object of successful mourning. (c) Psychoanalytic facts concern a "coherent field of resistance that constitutes a psychic reality in contrast to material reality". Ricoeur recalls that, for Freud, in the world of neurosis it is psychical reality which is the decisive kind of reality. According to Ricoeur, the epistemological consequences of the distinction are considerable: "while academic psychology does not question the difference between what is real and what is imaginary -- insamuch as its theoretical entities are all said to refer to observable facts and , ultimately, to real [existing] movements in space and time, psychoanalysis -- on the other hand -- deals with psychical reality and not with material reality". In the end, the criterion is no longer the physically observable world, but the fact that it presents a coherence and a resistance comparable to that of material reality. Finally, (d) concerns the fact that the analytic situation selects from a subject's experience that which is capable of entering a story or narrative [whence the role of memory in psychoanalysis]. If there is truth in psychoanalysis, according to Ricoeur, it relates to psychoanalysis' ability to represent and explain such facts. Ricoeur goes through a long development (it's an interesting read), but his theoretical point (this is what we ought to keep in mind, much more so than the above) is that the degree of exactitude that is to be expected from psychoanalytic statements depends on the sort of truth that can be expected in this domain (in the representation or account of facts such as they have been described above,  for instance). As Ricoeur writes, "for lack of an exact view of the qualitative diversity of types of truth in relation to types of facts, verificational criteria appropriate to the natural sciences, in which facts are empirically observable by one or more enquirers, have been repeatedly applied to psychoanalysis. The obvious conclusion has been that either that psychoanalysis does not in any way satisfy these criteria or that it satisfies them only if they are weakened. What is needed by the consideration of the types of facts psychoanalysis is concerned with is thus another form of "verification", one which Ricoeur goes on to spell out -- for instance, a distinction between "saying-true" and "being true". And in "saying-true" one finds the idea of constructing (or reconstructing) a coherent story or account from the "tattered remains of experience". (This implies understanding what makes a narration a good explanation -- in the psychoanalytic sense of the term).

Analogous forms of argumentation are found in the later Wittgenstein. You witness a schoolboy raise his hand in class. You ask someone what just happened. The person starts explaining the physiological process that starts with the brain sending a message down the spinal cord and leads to muscle action. The whole theory of physiology can be laid out. But none of this will explain that the boy wanted to answer a question (or why he would want to do that) [by the way, must his motivation be reduced to the survival of the fittest in the classroom?] or get his teacher's attention since he needs to leave class to go to the washroom. The simple "fact" of arm raising is not so simple after all -- and many different facts may be involved.

I'll agree that much work (a tremendous amount in fact)  is still ahead with regards to the various forms reality can take, though it seems obvious that reality goes beyond the single domain of the sensuous (perception and sensation should be distinguished, and one can be an empiricist without being a sensualist -- the failure to recognize this distinction is a major drawback of logical positivism).

Peirce (and Peircean pragmatists) agree that simplicity is better in the economy of research (in science). However, one should not refer to it as a way to block the road to inquiry. It may well be that in certain cases (if the nature of the fact actually overlaps) a cognitive account may prove to be a better account. But it seems to me that in most discussions in film studies the facts accounted by cognitivism and psychoanalysis don't actually overlap. (This is not to say that psychoanalytic film criticism is necessarily right -- not at all; nor that it is always done properly -- far from it). Moreover there is the entire issue of whether what most of us do in film studies can properly be called "science" if, as I put it in my talk, one has in mind the purpose and methods associated with the natural science. Wittgenstein, for one, saw Freud as a wrong headed scientist, but as an interesting philosopher -- one capable of explaining the human condition (or giving reasons) by way of apt images or metaphors. Think, for instance, of Thierry Kuntzel's famous study of the credit sequence of The Most Dangerous Game. Here, psychoanalysis helped Kuntzel "see" and "account" for aspects of the film that I believe are truly "there" to be seen in the film. It may be, however, that psychoanalysis is not the best account possible of these "qualities" -- though that remains to be seen.

I don't want to champion psychoanalysis (I'm happy to let the psychoanalysts deal with their epistemological problems), however I think we need to review the strategies used to pooh-pooh* it in film studies (indeed this is what Grunbaum did in reviewing Popper's argument against psychoanalysis).**

* According to Peirce: “The first order of induction, which I will call Rudimentary Induction,or the Pooh-pooh argument, proceeds from the premiss that the reasoner has no evidence of the existence of any fact of a given description and concludes that there never was, is not, and never will be any such thing.” And elsewhere: “A Pooh-pooh Argument is a method which consists in denying that a general kind of event ever will occur on the ground that it never has occurred. Its justification is that if it be persistently applied on every occasion, it must ultimately be corrected in case it should be wrong, and thus will ultimately reach the true conclusion.”

** Note that I will be away travelling as of Saturday and won't be able to answer the blog until my return in July.

Martin Lefebvre's recent reply suggests that he might agree with Stephen Jay Gould when he calls religion and science "non-overlapping magisteria."  Citing Ricoeur, Lefebvre argues that psychoanalysis and cognitive science are non-overlapping; the former makes claims or refers to facts about phenomena that the latter does not.  Neither Gould nor Ricoeur has persuaded me on this matter.  Which is to say, I am open to persuasion, but need a more developed argument that adequately considers objections.  (In response to Gould, I refer the reader to Richard Dawkins, who argues against Gould that claims about the existence of a god qualify as scientific claims.)  

Of course, I recall Lefebvre's response to Carroll.  My point in stating that Lefebvre did not reply to Carroll on the point of explanatory parsimony in my reply to Matthew Ogonoski was to suggest that the argument is underdeveloped.  I think Lefebvre's work is still ahead of him to show that these two theories, or groups of theories, about human psychology and its mechanisms and functions are non-overlapping.  That they refer to two different sets of facts.  

But do they in practice?  Are we certain that psychoanalytic film theorists and cognitive theorists don't view their views and, indeed, "facts" as competing for the same terrain?

It all depends on what Ricoeur, and Lefebvre, mean by "refer to different sets of facts."  In the Q&A after his talk, a member of the audience, Meraj Dhir of Harvard University, pointed out to Lefebvre that the psychoanalytic suture theory explaining our response to the shot-reverse shot figure competes with cognitive explanations of the same figure.  In this case, the two theories at least appear to "refer" to the same "set" of "facts."  (Lefebvre's response to Dhir escapes me.)  If Lefebvre argues that they do not, then he needs to clarify what Ricoeur means by "refer" and "facts" in this case, and then to show how the Ricoeurian model is compatible with his Peirceanism.  These are not objections as much as they are requests for clarification.

On the matter of Ockham's razor, Lefebvre has cited an authority, rather than presented an argument, so in response all that is demanded of me is an acknowledgement that I have "chewed" on Peirce's musings, and promise that when these musings are reformulated as an argument that is pertinent to an actual film studies research question, I will be the first to listen.  The question is whether simplicity (in logical and other terms) is preferable in film studies.  I believe it is.  But if Peircean 'pragmaticists' don't (and the multi-syllabic label itself suggests that they may not in some cases), then I await an examination of cases where unnecessary complexity is preferable.  

Again, I am happy to listen to and learn from a more developed explanation.  

 Ockham's maxim is spelled: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. The meaning of which being that it is bad scientific method to introduce, at once, independent hypotheses to explain the same facts of observation. In this regard, I did respond to Noel Carroll's question about parsimony (Ockham's razor) in calling forth Ricoeur's point that the facts that psychoanalysis seeks to explain are different from those that cognitive science or neuroscience seek to explain. They are simply not the same facts. According to principle of parsimony, as Peirce reminds us: "Before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well."

Now here's something for Colin to chew on regarding Occamism (from Peirce's "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God"):

"Modern science has been builded after the model of Galileo, who founded it, on il lume naturale. That truly inspired prophet had said that, of two hypotheses, the simpler is to be preferred; but I was formerly one of those who, in our dull self-conceit fancying ourselves more sly than he, twisted the maxim to mean the logically simpler, the one that adds the least to what has been observed, in spite of three obvious objections: first, that so there was no support for any hypothesis; secondly, that by the same token we ought to content ourselves with simply formulating the special observations actually made; and thirdly, that every advance of science that further opens the truth to our view discloses a world of unexpected complications. It was not until long experience forced me to realize that subsequent discoveries were every time showing I had been wrong, while those who understood the maxim as Galileo had done, early unlocked the secret, that the scales fell from my eyes and my mind awoke to the broad and flaming daylight that it is the simpler Hypothesis in the sense of the more facile and natural, the one that instinct suggests, that must be preferred; for the reason that, unless man have a natural bent in accordance with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all. Many tests of this principal and positive fact, relating as well to my own studies as to the researches of others, have confirmed me in this opinion; and when I shall come to set them forth in a book, their array will convince everybody. Oh, no! I am forgetting that armour, impenetrable by accurate thought, in which the rank and file of minds are clad! They may, for example, get the notion that my proposition involves a denial of the rigidity of the laws of association: it would be quite on a par with much that is current. I do not mean that logical simplicity is a consideration of no value at all, but only that its value is badly secondary to that of simplicity in the other sense.

If, however, the maxim is correct in Galileo's sense, whence it follows that man has, in some degree, a divinatory power, primary or derived, like that of a wasp or a bird, then instances swarm to show that a certain altogether peculiar confidence in a hypothesis, not to be confounded with rash cocksureness, has a very appreciable value as a sign of the truth of the hypothesis."

Martin

field_image_conference_blog: 

Thank you to Matthew for his generous feedback in another post.  I'd like to reply to the claim that cinephilia is "missing" from my argument. 

Matthew judges that if "excess" is not part of an author's discussion of cinephilia, whatever that discussion is, then the author is faulty in calling the phenomenon under study "cinephilia."  In other words, the assumption is that "excess" is a necessary condition for identifying cinephilia and, indeed, any and all cinephilias.  I find this reasoning overly prescriptive in a number of ways. 

First, as a researcher, I am always leery of what might be termed theoretical excess.  This is when a theoretical model is adopted without due consideration for the ways the theory can block the theorized phenomenon from view in one respect or another.  Theory here becomes 'overgrown,' as it were, developing so many presuppositions and prescriptions and postulates as to asphyxiate the object it is meant to explain or describe or clarify.  

During his talk at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in mid April, cultural studies scholar David Morley reminded those in attendance that theorizing involves ethical decision-making.  In developing a theory, one must weigh what is gained in terms of understanding through one's theoretical generalization against what is lost in terms of nuance in the particulars under scrutiny.  Is the theory worth it?  

If I theorize that all movies require actors, then my theory is lacking, for it fails to consider salient counter-examples-- i.e., movies for which this does not apply.  Persisting with the idea that all movies must have actors would do violence to the phenomenon I set out to explain and describe because my theory results in a relatively substantial loss of nuance.  Thus, in developing a theory about the medium specificity of movies, one must simultaneously perform a theoretical cost-benefit analysis.

My point is that the theoretical identification of cinephilia with excess has developed momentum, perhaps now itself becoming excessive and overgrown, in the hands of some (like Matthew) not facilitating further research into the varieties of cinephilia but rather impeding it.  This theoretical generalization needs some trimming.  Specifically, we need to acknowledge that while the 'cinephilia qua excess' model explains or describes many or even most instantiations of cinephilic culture, it may not be powerful enough as a theory to cover all such cultures.  The theory becomes a hinderance if some cultures or communities self-identify as cinephiliac, but align themselves to different sets of values and operations.  Such cases suggest that we need not a theoretical defense of the necessary and sufficient conditions for confirming a culture's cinephiliac status, but a cluster analysis of the various usages of the term "cinephilia" and their overlapping and even incompatible senses.    

Now, that's a point about the limits and ethics of theorization.  I think it remains an open question whether all cinephilias can be defined through the concept of excess.  We need to keep an eye out for cinephilias that do not bear this out.  Part of the ethics of theorization involves the obligation of considering what a 'non-excess' cinephilia would look like.  That's the burden one faces in accepting any theory: one must develop litmus tests for exceptions and be aware of how these exceptions might challenge the core tenets of the theory.  Unlike Martin Lefebvre, I do believe that film theories need to be falsifiable, or at least, we need to aim to make them that.  If only because this kind of thinking about theories encourages us to be aware of counter-examples which may or may not require a revised theory.

We also need to keep an eye out for banality, here.  Matthew seems to recommend that I needed to give a nod to cinephilia as exhibiting a certain quality in its engagement with movies.  But what would this add in my argument?  Some scholars, like myself, prefer to conduct inquiries according to research questions.  My research question was plainly stated: where does this precompositional commitment in Bresson come from? Claiming that Leenhardt's writing shows excess, or that the debate between Bazin and Sadoul shows excess, or that this proliferation of writings on the avant-garde or rhythm shows a postwar French kind of excess, would at best be banal and at worst superfluous and even distracting to the task at hand.  

The principle of Ockham's razor states that one should not multiply entities beyond necessity when accounting for a phenomenon.  An explicit theory of cinephilia qua excess would not lead to a different answer to my research question, so I feel justified in shaving it off, as it were.  My findings would remain exactly as they are with or without this theory.  Given my research question, I therefore have the luxury of being agnostic about the role of excess in cinephilic culture.  De Baecque's framing of cinephilia, on the other hand, as a way of looking at and writing about movies to the extent that cinephiles seek engagement with filmmakers, is just what I need to answer the question of Bresson's style (in terms of his relationship with a sub-community of cinephilic critics).  

When Noel Carroll responded to Martin's paper, he stated that psychoanalytic film theory should be rejected on the grounds of explanatory parsimony.  The simplest explanation is usually the best explanation, and psychoanalysis doesn't cut the mustard because it creates a large apparatus to explain human psychology vis-a-vis film spectatorship when simpler explanations are available.  (Martin did not respond to this, and should.)  The best response I've heard to the principle of parsimony in explanation or to Ockham's razor is Einstein's: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."  As I understand it, the idea is that some things (in this case, explanations) demand a certain level of complexity, so there is no absolute standard of simplicity.  Perhaps Matthew would respond by saying that 'cinephilia qua excess' IS simple, and as simple as it needs to be to account for a certain kind of spectatorship.  And he may be right.  But the goal posts shift when cinephilia is not a theoretical object one is trying to understand, but only one term in the historical study of an entirely different object.  Our theoretical constructs should not shut down historical possibilities.  In historical accounts that take cinephilia as a proximate mechanism, one retains this idea of excess only to the extent that it's a pertinent factor in the question one seeks to answer.  In such cases, 'cinephilia qua excess' is perhaps more complicated than it needs to be.

This is partly a continuation of my last entry on Burnett's presentation, but I wanted to separate the two because my concern is for a concept within (some) cinema studies that is greatly susceptible to misuse:

Cinephilia.

Right now, cinephilia is something being considered as a way to access (to some degree) the subjective experience of cinematic pleasure. In these terms, cinephilia is relevant to the discipline and can prove very useful as a concept.

However, as the concept gains popularity, it begins to transform and lose its sense of stability. I am not here discussing the stability of cinephilia itself - cinephilia is necessarily unstable because of its subjective disposition - but am instead discussing the instability of using the term in incommensurable ways within the discipline of film studies.

I acknowledge that cinephilia was used as an organizing principle for the reasons of thematically scheduling a coherent final day of the conference. However, not only was the theme grossly misused, but this drew attention to the potential misuse within the discipline overall. This was further supported by the multitudinous ways in which both the roundtable and the audience situated cinephilia within film studies.

There are multiple reasons for my concern:

First of all, and as mentioned in my previous post, the concept of excess is essential to a discussion and use of cinephilia. Burnett did not take this into account. The other three presentations that engaged with cinephilia either explicitly utilized the concept of excess (Maule) or, at the very least, implied it (Russell, Pidduck). Excess must always be considered when discussing cinephilia. Cinephilia without the acknowledgment of excess can simply be called "watching movies." We all watch movies in particular ways and enjoy them for various reasons. However, cinephilia is a specific conceptual model that must be distinguished from all other modes of viewing.

This brings me to my second concern. The term cinephilia is being used more and more as a way of justifying why we watch movies. But not only is it not the only reason we watch movies, but the importance of the concept is invested in how we watch. Tonight I will most likely watch some terrible piece of shlock just to give my brain a rest after an intensive and intellectually stimulating three-day conference. I will watch the film because it will not demand anything of me, because I feel like relaxing, because I haven't watched a film in over a week, because it is Tuesday night and there's little else to do for entertainment, etc. How I watch it is yet to be determined. However, my enjoyment comes from how I watch it, and not simply because I do watch it.

This reveals the ontological significance of the phenomenon of cinephilia. I do indeed invest in a concept of cinephilia that somehow affectively impresses and engages the viewer. And this is the point of using the term in the first place: to distinguish it from the fact that people simply watch films.

I'm reminded of a question that Haidee Wasson raised at the Arthemis sponsored guest lecture by Paula Amad last October at Concordia University. Though my memory is not good enough to quote the exact words used, the question asked why a particular concept was being used (archivolgy) when there were already other similar reception models (memory) in use. Ultimately, the question was concerned with deciphering how this new concept was different from other concepts and why. And this is what any work on cinephilia needs to address in order to be successful. Otherwise it will become another buzzword that will garner much investment before being thrown to the curb when adopting the next, popular concept.

Cinephilia has an incredibly powerful appeal because of its potential to provide a stable ground from which to examine the intricacies of reception and making meaning. Any lover of the cinema who watches a lot of films and somehow creates a response to that experience is a cinephile. The question is how those different people create, how those creations differ, and what this means to the cinema and its study overall.
 

I thought I'd include my notes of the final roundtable for anyone who missed it or for those who want to recall specific points. What is written bellow is part quotation, part paraphrase. Please exuse any gaps or mischaracterizations. Not being a stenographer, I did the best I could to keep up with the discussion and write what I heard, or thought I heard. If there are any major mistakes, please include a comment to clarify.

Also, I invite you to use the comment function on this post to start a conversation about these last remarks and summaries.

Enjoy!

Roundtable discussion on ATHEMIS conference presentations, June 7, 2010

Martin Lefebvre: In the call for papers, we asked for contributions on epistemology, history, institutions, technologies, and cinephilia. We moved from more philosophical to material conditions as the conference progressed. Klinger, Chateau, and Cassetti will reflect on what we did.

Barbara Klinger: Here is an outline of some of the themes and variations I saw in this conference: the place of the avant-garde in contemporary moving image studies, the place of science and philosophy in cinema studies (what science are we speculating about? Its relationship to the empirical and a sense of rigor seems to be a desire); cinema’s relationship to other media and other places (prisons, education, non-theatrical sites); the relationship between film theory and film history (not worked out, not sure how they are bridged); the apparatus; the return of 70s film theory (its place); and the place that gender studies and identity politics have in all of this. Those who work in cultural studies may presume that identity politics is always front and center but that might not always be the case. The questions are asked under epistemology on the website. But, how is film to be approached aesthetically, ethically, and logically? There’s a multifariousness about what’s going on in the field that is, on the one hand, exhilarating, and one the other hand, leads to questions, and an identity crisis.

Dominique Chateau: Difficult to summarize the conference because there are such a great variety of POVs. There were lectures asking old questions about new objects, and vice versa. No old questions about old object, thankfully. We might consider if we can find some bridges. Can we go from cinephilia to cinephilo? The main difference between our lectures is the state of mind from which they develop. By state of mind I mean something precise. We, in academic conditions, are designed for that. Three ways: the development of objects nourished by information, the develoment of theories nourished by argument, and a combination of the two (?).  I am interested by the fact that lectures are often on the second degree (self-reflexive?) of study about film studies. Two features: an encounter of information and concept, and a discipline with theory of this discipline.

Francesco Casetti: Three movements: 1. The attempt to give sense to the theory through rationality, concepts, etc. To define the sense of unity or not. We could go back to the experience of the spectator's experience. I’m impressed by Gunning’s work on this. 2. The attempt to trace and do archaeology. The concern to discover our past, and different pasts until today. As Benjamin advocates in The Arcades Project, we have to improve our sense of history. We have to start from a dialectical image of today to start an archaeology. 3. Where is cinema today? Again, I want to look at dialectical movements. Where is the iconoclasm today? Where is the cinephobie today? To go back to experience as a starting point…

Audience response

Michael Zyrd: Can you expand on how our histories need to start from today? Do we always need to do our histories in such an explicitly self-motivated way? [Responding to Casetti's comment that the screen he is closet to these days is his I-phone and that we could start from there to talk about how screens of the past matter.]

Francesco Casetti: I suspect that we have defined the past of the cinema because now we are dealing with the end. Any historical identity is posthumous, even the cinema. The more I read this section of Benjamin, the more I understand we have to be conscious that the drives are not so evident.

Eric Prince: I would like to know Dr. Carroll’s point of view.

Noël Carroll: Thank you. What struck me as interesting. I should remind you that I teach mostly in the philosophy department. I did see a kind of bifurcation, a kind of old and new. Some of the material I lived through in the 70s and 80s, revivals, theory wars, but then there were ideas less accessable to me, projection, institution, education, things that were not art centered and film centered in the way that I’m familiar with. That emphasis on the institution and technology was something that was new to my experience. I was familiar with half and unfamiliar with the other half.

Martin Lefebvre: When we formed the research team, we were interested in some of the conditions of possibility for studying this object, film. Institutions have also played a role. Accessing a film always requires some form of technology, these different devices have an idea of what the film is. So when the dvd and vcr comes into being, you can stop, you look at films differently. These different ways of looking all pertain to the ways of studying film.

Tom Gunning: A friend of mine was living under one of the last Stalinest regimes, in Romania, and he said, “The future’s the only thing I can count on because the past is so unstable.” History is not just an accumulation of events. People often quote Lumiere that "film is an invention without a future," and Frampton said, "no, he is right, you can’t have a future without a past."

Francesco Casetti: If we go back to Benjamin’s dialectic image. Cinema is right now in a dialectical situation. It’s not a problem of subjectivity or objectivity, but understanding our reality.

Tom Gunning: Yes, Benjamin said that dialectics emerge from a moment of peril and we should remember that.

John Caldwell : The degree of complexity in some of these projects is intense. Zyrd’s work on the avant-garde made me think. As for [Colin] Burnett, why don’t you give the agency to the system, why do you give it to the individual? Latour's (sp?) actor network theory might be helpful. [To Burnett] Your paper helped me distill the past few days, because you are trying to juggle these complicated histories we’re dealing with. I love the fact that you’re diving into a cultural economy. This theoretical need to explain things generally.

Rosanna Maule: I appreciate the variety of perspectives. This is a conference about film studies as it has consolidated itself, not from a transnational perspective. Who are the users? We talk about media, intermediality, users of media, but as a self-criticism, I do auteur theory. I was formed in a traditional film studies context. I’m wondering how to open up a little bit in a transcultural context.

Noël Carroll: One thing that is also missing, partly my fault, there was no representation in there area of cognitive science. They probably invited me to talk about that. If we are looking to the future there should be some focus on that. There are some studies of Indian cinema in this regard.

Martin Lefebvre: Two years from now we will look at technology.

Cinephilia does not have a place in Burnett's argument as it currently stands. Though his presentation was impressive, and the breadth of his research and conceptually complex analysis is most admirable, the question of excess, a major characteristic of much cinephilia scholarship, is not present.

Contemporary theorists of cinephilia Christian Keathley and Paul Willemen discuss excess as an essential characteristic of the phenomenon. In Burnett's defense, he begins with a concept of cinephilia derived from de Baecque, and I cannot say with certainty that de Baecque believed excess a characteristic of cinephilia. However, Keathley and Willemen's work has definitively established the characteristic as a part of cinephilia, even though Willemen is hesitant to make any definitive statements as such. In fact, excess is one of only two characteristics that Willemen is comfortable identifying.

Perhaps de Baecque innovated a tentative conception of cinephilia, but it is indeed just that: tentative. In retrospect, it took many decades of writing on cinephilia to identify excess as a necessary characteristic to this way of watching.

However, I'm not sure that cinephilia would not work for Burnett's argument overall. As his work was unfolding, I guessed at a potential claim he would make: Bresson was developing his own method of implementing moments of excess within his films by establishing a rhythm that he could then breach. At first I was hesitant to accept this, but I was willing to listen to the argument because it seemed very intriguing. However, this was not in fact the case, and Burnett never really questioned de Baecque's definition.

I would suggest one of two things: either work this above proposition into the study and try to justify it, or drop cinephilia altogether.

Regardless, I should say that Burnett's was one of the most engaging presentations of the conference and I very much so look forward to reading his work in the future.

 

A brief comment on Zryd's presentation.

I appreciate Zryd's approach and his emphasis on the importance of the experiential quality of experimental texts (I also agree with his preference of the term Experimental Media rather than Avant Garde). However, I'm unsure as to whether the reasoning that these texts are worth studying - "they are good objects of study" - was justified accordingly within his presentation.

I must qualify my position before I continue. Like Dru Jeffries' response, I will also draw attention to my lack of engagement with experimental media (I was also one of the few people who outed themselves as having not experienced Snow's Wavelength. Why this is considered such an embarrassing thing to admit is unclear to me, but that is a discussion for another time). But my problem with the presentation does not regard Zryd's defense of experimental media itself, but the motivation of such a presentation.

My question is, which film departments are not offering avant garde or experimental media courses? Zryd's presentation may have benefited from a brief survey of the different universities across North America, and the content of their film programs. I would be amazed to learn that there were not at least a few avant garde courses being offered in each example.

I know in my personal experience I have proposed a contemporary Hollywood cinema course to fill an area of study completely absent from Concordia's undergrad in film studies. Though considered, the proposal was unsuccessful. The only course that comes close to filling this void is Film History since 1959 - a largely ambiguous and unfocused way of referring to a whole period of cinema - whereas there is a specific course offered in experimental film. Though I'm not arguing for one over the other, the lack of a current Hollywood cinema course seems a more immediate and substantial problem. I do not argue this simply because my interest is popular cinema, but because popular cinema is sometime avoided like the plague due to antiquated notions of what cinema is.

Regardless, I have one other slight qualm with Zryd's presentation, and this may simply result from my ignorance. I was unconvinced by the example of Les LeVeque's 4 Vertigo. Discovering how colour shifts throughout Vertigo by watching LeVeque's film, as stated by Zryd, seems to me a unique example without great implications for experimental media at large. When this was proposed, the first thought that came to mind was Cinemetrics, and I know how hesitant the conference attendees feel about this tool. Furthermore, the example does not say so much about experimental film as it does about a popular film. I think this example may have fit more comfortably in a discussion of archivology, though perhaps not Katie Russell's presentation.

To conclude, though Zryd's presentation was interesting and much appreciated, I'm unsure as to whether it was warranted accordingly to his concerns.