Concepts in Film Theory by Andrew J. Dudley;

Author:Andrew, J. Dudley;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780195034288
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-03-10T10:11:03+00:00

HIERARCHIES: INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE SYSTEM

In our century, a major strain of aesthetics has refused to evaluate artworks, instead prizing description and explanation. Assuming that evaluation is a matter of mere taste, contemporary theorists have assiduously avoided entering the marketplace where artistic capital rises and falls in value. They have on the contrary sought to analyze that economy and sketch out the network of that marketplace.

But since, as we have seen, the products consumed in this economy are valued for their distinctiveness, and since the system, when fully described, must include not just the network but the events disturbing that network, and since, finally, the voice of ideology is really a chorus, even a babble, of competing voices and projects, discriminations in fact must be made if only to sort out the historical mutations of “the movies.” In fact all periods and types of film theory have implicitly or explicitly evaluated the films they treat just by choosing to treat them and to treat them in such and such a manner.

The range of views we have already surveyed regarding the voice or authority of a film may be replicated in a survey of assessments of films themselves. In the first years of film scholarship, priority was predictably accorded those rare films deemed capable of standing alongside important works of literature or music, films most often signed by Murnau, Antonioni, Bergman, Fellini, or Dreyer. The second generation of scholars, the auteurists, were really humanists of the same sort, only brought up on the movies rather than on high culture. Thus they did not feel compelled to extol the great works of the art cinema but rather to reveal the unappreciated films of lesser known directors who, in workmanlike fashion, displayed notable styles, and, through style, consistent world views.

The chosen auteurs were treated with the seriousness accorded art directors even if they primarily worked in trivial genres or with insignificant scripts and ideas. For the auteurists the only worthwhile ideas were ideas of the cinema, but the cinema conceived in such a way that ideas of the cinema were equally and essentially ideas about the world. This is their humanism and it is against this that the materialists reacted.

Film theory since 1968 has been suspicious of all these hierarchies of films and filmmakers. Belief in the power of the system (together with the voice of ideology behind that system) has led materialists to amalgamate the varieties of films and genres into the standardization of “the movies.” This single category does have the strength of industrial practice behind it, for it is “movies” that are customarily advertised, bought, and sold, not “unique artworks” made in celluloid, nor “visions of the world.”

How can modern theory operate without a hierarchy of film values? How can it treat every film as just another instance of the same system? In fact it cannot. Standard cinema has been homogenized by these theorists for polemical reasons; it has been raised as a rigged backdrop against which they hope to

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