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Essays (book reviews) |
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The Structure of Complex Images |
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It
must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel … If we adapted Hollis Frampton’s idea and figured that a book is about what appears most frequently in it, then I would say that The Structure of Complex Images (the title is a play on William Empson) is about, above all, teaching, education, the classroom. That’s Ray’s central site where the struggle takes place, and where the victories (by and large) happen. He attempts – and, it seems from the terrific samples of classroom work offered here, richly succeeds – to nudge his students off the deadly track of rote learning, second-hand concepts and tick-a-box applications of theory-platitudes to duly flattened film-texts. In the process, Ray works back through recollections and summaries of his previous books: The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy (1995), How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies (2001), and The ABCs of Classic Hollywood (2008). In the intellectual company of comrades including Gregory Ulmer and Christian Keathley, Ray commits himself to encouraging and enabling creative writing in his courses. The goal, above all, is to get students not to work first from broad theories, concepts or contexts, but to notice particular things – moments, details, interactions, images – that grab, intrigue and stick with them, and to work outwards from there. Not science, but experimentation; not catechism, but novelty; not too-general history, but specific example or anecdote. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell (‘Americanism’ and all) are among the master-thinkers who light this path for Ray. (As David Bordwell once noted, there tends to be an ongoing tussle between an anti-authoritarian impulse and an almost obsessive genuflection to particular, chosen authorities in Ray’s work. But aren’t we all caught in some version of that tussle?) The Structure of Complex Images is a very repetitive book. I don’t mean that as a criticism; as for many of its most creative aspects, Ray provides a kind of reflexive key or internal justification for this. Names, quotes, major reference points come around again and again, in almost sing-song fashion; by the time I hit the third explication of Cavell’s “Capra Moment”, for instance, I was quite ready to howl out an exasperated moment of my own. But Ray anchors this obsessive repetition: as he affirms, it’s a sign that he cares, so that some problems really do stay with him – just as they should stay with us, whatever our individual fixation-points. A similar point could be made about the sorts of anecdotes that Ray marshalls – quasi-economic talk of the pressured job market, of “path-dependency” and so on. Memory theatre, via Francis Yates, is an important concept for Ray (he appears not to have read Bill Routt’s great essay on the subject in Screening the Past); and indeed, one crucial part of the novelistic texture of The Structure of Complex Images is the type of interconnected history – the spiritual sense of “home” – that it weaves from diverse, even avowedly contradictory strands. This is a mirror of the process Ray sees at work (in one of the book’s most captivating arguments) in the formation of the Nouvelle Vague: an unruly but generative mix of elements drawn willy-nilly from impressionism, surrealism and Sartrean existentialism. For Ray, the central link to be woven is between his own debt to surrealism (as evident in the Andy Hardy book), and his (belated?) discovery of the Movie tradition in the UK – a “comeback” on the world stage of film studies that deserves a study all its own. What do these two traditions have in common? Their exhortation to look closely, to notice, to imaginatively expand and process filmic details … From surrealist irrational enlargement to fine-grain, close analysis, the leap is not too far, I agree, even if Ray is evidently (like the Cahiers Wave-surfers) cherry-picking here: he blithely ignores the fact that Movie has, throughout its history, been 100% in favour of things that Ray generally likes to play down, like over-arching themes in film and their interpretation. On the other hand, Movie already had in its loose ‘60s cohort a certified surrealist, whom Ray never mentions: namely, Raymond Durgnat. Those kinds of fine details are not in Ray’s novelistic purview here. He prefers synoptic sweeps in time, leaps of affinity across vast oceans, melodramatic oppositions and last-minute rescues that snatch a blaze of revelation from the smouldering ashes of a tired doxa (that’s what’s going on in his classroom). For Movie serves another, grander purpose in Ray’s overall plot schema: it can be positioned “versus” Screen in a War of the World-Views. He even subtitles this part of his book “The Great Divide in Film Studies”. (In a moment that is curious and telling to me, Ray associates Lesley Stern with the Movie tradition, presumably because her superb essay on Killer of Sheep (1977) appears in Andrew Klevan & Alex Clayton’s book The Language and Style of Film Criticism – but Lesley more-or-less began her brilliant career firmly in the Screen camp, and indeed [as Ray would likely not be able to know] wrote a commissioned research report for the Australian Film Institute in the late ‘70s comparing Movie to Screen, with the latter definitely winning out!) Well: is that the Universe you live in, as cinephile reader? Is that Movie vs Screen conflictual habitus “relatable” to you? If so, The Structure of Complex Images is your book. It is not quite (as I’ll try to explain) mine, even as I can appreciate and applaud some stirring parts of it along the way. Hold
on! Does it seem like I am about to defend Screen – and, in general, the legacy of High Theory in film culture –
from a rearguard attack comprising an unholy alliance of irrational
surrealists and remote-control-wielding textual empiricists? No, I am
not. In our lively Cineaste exchange, Ray mistook me for a species of Academic Cop, patrolling
the borders of “the discourse”. Let me instead declare, in my own
pre-emptive defence, that I myself have polemically opposed Movie to Screen,
over many pages, with the former winning the contest. I am no
stranger to these polemics, or to the sympathies (on either side)
they can engender. Then again, that
piece I wrote was originally from
1980 … Time
passes slowly … Is all this for real? If you see it that way, if you’ve lived it in that spirit, then yes, it’s real. The flipping-page time-montages in Ray’s text are striking: in passing, he evokes 20 years of his classes fighting to be free, or 30 interminable years of SCMS conferences under the same grey theory-cloud … But, mark it, he’s talking about a span of 52 years since that very precise date of rupture he gives more than once: 1968. (Let’s set aside the suspicious reference to the “gold standard” of “leftist politics” ushered in by the événements of ’68: politics is not Ray’s strongest suit.) And, truly, a lot of water has flowed under the film studies bridge, in many spots, since ’68. Screen, for instance, has been through at least half a dozen major reorientations since then (and Cahiers even more); Ray presumably knows that like any of us in the field know it, but he may find it unnecessary to mention or process the fact. It would kind-of spoil the novel he is writing. These days, Screen has much less to do with the Battalion of B’s that Ray cites (Bataille, Brecht, Bakhtin, Baudrillard, Barthes, Benjamin and Bourdieu) or even the Marauding M’s (MacCabe, Mulvey, etc). OK, the “male gaze” coined fleetingly by the latter is still well and truly afoot and causing methodological problems in the culture at large; but the crushing “repressive classical narrative” wielded by the former is positively cited by nobody that I am aware of. Stephen Heath (named in one chapter as a Bad Guy by Ray, unnamed but anecdotally smeared in another) hardly rates a mention in Screen today, while articles sympathetically re-evaluating V.F. Perkins, for god’s sake, have started to appear there! And indeed, the bridge-work between Screen and Movie began to knit itself decades ago in the real world, or at least the real world with which I identify: not only in university departments where representatives of the different camps inevitably mingled and collaborated (Mulvey and Perkins worked together and were friends), but also via the writing and teaching of such an influential figure as Richard Dyer. I could go on and on. Wait – I, too, am now having a Capra Moment! For the Walls of Jericho between Movie and Screen collapsed long ago. What’s the point of rehashing that ancient division today, 41 years after Andrew Britton’s then-just-still-timely takedown, “The Ideology of Screen” (a searing masterpiece of like-for-like critique that Ray, oddly, does not cite)? (2) I say then-just-still-timely because many things swiftly changed in the UK cultural configuration at the start of the ‘80s, as some of Screen’s major players (MacCabe included) headed off for Channel 4, and “theory” bent itself in new directions, such as historiography and, by the ‘90s, film-philosophy. Aside: It seems a general tendency for Ray to avoid referring to the more openly leftist members of Movie – Britton and Robin Wood – while embracing the seemingly apolitical aesthetic explorations of Perkins or Ian Cameron. Then again, to meet Victor Perkins in the flesh was to instantly discover how feistily political he really was … Only once does Ray flash-forward to a world – no better, in his view – of queer theory, post-coloniality, urban cultural studies, and everything else that takes the place where the male gaze, suture and interpellation once used to thrive. Ray appears to disparage “leftism” in film studies – or, more exactly, he sees it as a posturing politics forced by the academic job market’s pressure to conform and play the trendiest game. He has a point there; we’ve all seen that in practice – just as we’ve all seen evidence of a lot of rote teaching and learning going on in the dreaded PowerPoint Age. In
truth, it’s a big world out there. Our more-or-less shared habitus,
as cinephiles, also includes the Internet, and its vast regions of
film-creative writing (and beyond-writing, in digital video,
Keathley-style) that Ray literally never mentions. It’s as if he
can’t break out of the womb-like bubble of his own, novelistic
creation, with the warm placenta of his own, lulling repetitions, and
manage to see that, in fact, there are many people around today (and
not just in dear old USA or its mirrored-bits in UK) with whom he
could claim an affinity – even, god forbid, a parentage! Ages
of innocence This is not a criticism on my part, just a slightly quizzical observation. On the wholly positive side, Ray loves American cinema of the 1930s and ‘40s, George Cukor, Astaire-Rogers musicals (the subject of one of the book’s best chapters), Humphrey Bogart, plus Vertigo (1958): I have no problem with any of that. But, just as often, Ray swings his blows from a polemical position that he deems to be unsung, unpopular, unheeded, in the absolute minority (which is no doubt part of his imaginary identification with the Movie crew past and present). This deeming is, once again, odd: his course on “The Untaught Canon” includes films by Frank Borzage, Powell-Pressburger and Mitchell Leisen that have been taught far and wide since the ‘70s (and not simply to ideologically upbraid them, either), including in countries like Spain and Australia that don’t register on Ray’s film-world map. He
thinks that Vincente Minnelli’s Meet
Me in St Louis (1944) has never been a scholastic
favourite – when it was literally the first film I saw broken down
(in a good sense) and analysed in a classroom, by Tom Ryan, at the
tender age of 17. At other times, Ray takes a game shot at what he
considers the reigning Titans of polite, respectable film taste. Not
just Battleship Potemkin (1925) or Citizen
Kane (1941), but also Rome,
Open City (1945), which he judges to be
full of “melodramatic claptrap”; or Otto Preminger, who “often
made bad films” and was not “particularly smart”. Oh, mercy! “Education
doesn’t work” This is one of the reasons we can sense that Ray repeats himself so much, not only within the space of a book, but across at least three separate books by now – his rhetoric forever depends on this alluring, coming attraction of the new, this tantalising step that is still, and always, just out of our reach. Once more, the classroom experience favours this sort of perpetual holdback, a perpetual spin cycle: start it, fine-tune it, get only so far with it … and then start all over again. Ray often appeals to the “new knowledge” sparked by the teaching and writing methods he prefers. (I presume he’s unaware that, in places including UK and Australia, the demand for ‘new knowledge’ at all costs has effectively become a nightmarish, Kafkaesque policy enforced by university management.) Yet what is the substance of this fine, new knowledge, exactly? Some of the examples yield fairly modest results. One of the most interesting passages of the book (p. 52) is by a student; it concerns the use of clocks in The Maltese Falcon (1941). It’s good stuff, no doubt about it. By fixing on and studying very closely the various clear and obscure time temporal references in the film, the student ponders a solution to “narrative filmmaking’s basic problem: how in 90 minutes do you represent events whose actual duration would be much longer?” Now, there happens to be a narratological theory, or at least a methodological pair of terms, for just that phenomenon (and surely Ray knows it): fabula and syuzhet, narrative time as constructed versus imaginable story time covered. Is it really the case that a student will learn this general idea about the forms of film time better by randomly discovering and following a pattern of watches and clocks in a movie, than by beginning with the narratological principle and then heading off to look for examples? Maybe the student experience is more satisfying in the former case. Ray certainly believes so: he argues, in that section of the book, that we must “yield the initiative to images and sounds”, and that if you do, “you will understand [problems involved in filmmaking] better than someone who has simply heard them stated”. But how is a curriculum to be structured out of that sort of randomness? Something else, another detail nags at me in this “Clocks” passage: the student serves up to her or his teacher a rallying slogan that happens to appear earlier in The Structure of Complex Images itself, that film criticism’s ideal goal is “to penetrate the veil while retaining its [i.e., film’s] hallucinatory quality” – which then (and this is a clever correlation) “finds its analogue in Classical Hollywood’s own project: to attain coherence without surrendering the cinema’s mysterious spell”. Well, it’s quite clear from this passage that Ray has fed his class all manner of incontrovertibly theoretical cues (or clues) – concerning cinema as hallucination, criticism as piercing the veil, and so on – before sending them off to the trenches to do their analytical work. There’s something a little disingenuous here: it’s a way of “doing theory” without calling it theory – and then publishing books that oppose theorising. It has the air of an intellectual pose. These “problems involved in filmmaking” that emerge in Ray’s book are often of a craft nature. I have no problem with that per se – and neither did Alexander Mackendrick, who had no qualms, in his filmmaking instruction at CalArts over a quarter of a century, about stating craft problems and what he took (from experience) to be their best solutions. (By the way, apart from the splendid compilation On Film-Making by him, many further volumes of Mackendrick’s teaching practice are in the pipeline from Paul Cronin’s The Sticking Place publishing venture.) What’s intriguing and also frustrating about Ray’s project is that it often arrives only either at superfluous, excessive details – of the kind that the surrealist and/or latter-day-Barthesian sensibility celebrates – or at rather basic matters of craft. Forbidding “interpretation” or “explanation” at the outset truncates many other roads, and Ray himself seems reluctant or afraid to wander down them. Take the final chapter, which is among the best in the book. At last, something that is not Bogart or Grant, Cukor or Huston, in black-and-white, and not Vertigo either: the Abbas Kiarostami episode of the anthology-on-a-train film, Tickets (2005). Nothing has prepared us for such a wide deviation from Ray’s usual canon (classic or untaught!), so it’s a nice surprise. (Fun Fact: Ray’s analysis quotes reams of dialogue as per the subtitles, but doesn’t actually tell us what language the episode is spoken in – which is, mainly, Italian.) This case study emerges from “an undergraduate course on storytelling in literature and film”, with this Kiarostami segment chosen, at the outset, as a minimalistic “limit case testing just how little story a writer can get away with”. The surprise factor intervened for Ray when the students “turned out to be very interested” in the “story and characters, about which they had a lot of questions”. Ray’s analysis of this film (the most detailed in the book) is devoted essentially to its organisation or découpage of shots – although I would myself call it mise en scène, since it involves matters of staging (especially on a moving train!) as well as editing. Two observations: 1. découpage has become an absurdly inflated, misunderstood and misused term in recent years; and 2. Ray betrays a nostalgia – with which I can identify! – for a particular model of shot-consciousness that avowedly owes a lot to Noël Burch circa ’67, and is unavowedly not far from some of Bordwell’s analyses. Be that as it may, Ray makes many good, revealing points here about Kiarostami’s framing, the way he shapes and patterns events of interaction, inventive uses of off-screen space, POV, shot/reverse shot volleys, and more. But where is he going with this? What’s the pay-off? What does it all mean? Because if a Kiarostami fan knows anything upfront, it’s that all his best work is saturated with an aura of meaningfulness, sometimes obvious and sometimes cryptic. Ray works around to only this: Kiarostami’s formal agility – “the visual rhymes, the recurring characters, the narrative coincidences, the subtle foreshadowings” – “all keep us engaged by a story”. What!? Critic-scholars that Ray cites and (I assume) respects – George Toles, Gilberto Perez, the Movie crew – would and could never stop at that simple statement of undoubted craft achievement. Where’s the expressivity, the eloquence? Engaged by a story, indeed! That’s pure Hollywood-studio, script-manual lingo. But don’t get me wrong. There’s plenty of stirring material in The Structure of Complex Images worth our appreciation and applause: beyond the Astaire and Kiarostami sections there is, for instance, an intriguing meditation on the camera’s automatism as one key to cinema’s hallucinatory magic. And there’s a candidness about the whole book that’s disarming. When Ray boldly confesses the cinephile heresy that, one fine day and thanks to the malign influence of Stan the Man Cavell, he felt “absolved” of his failure to “learn anything from movies starring Anthony Quinn or Robert Mitchum or Ava Gardner”, I had to think: wow, this guy really did ‘lose it at the movies’! At least he’s honest about it. But
that’s what books should, at least sometimes, be about: grappling
with a sensibility that isn’t the mirror of one’s own. For that
reason, among many others, I recommend a close reading of The
Structure of Complex Images. 1. It’s a great pity that Ray did not consult the re-translation of and commentary upon “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism” provided by Daniel Fairfax in 2015 for the English edition of Jean-Louis Comolli’s Cinema Against Spectacle (Amsterdam University Press). For contra what Ray repeatedly asserts, the “first two words” of that piece are not “scientific criticism”, indeed those words appear nowhere at all in their text – this serious error in the original Screen translation mangled what Comolli & Narboni described as critique conséquente, which can be orderly, principled or systematic criticism, but it’s definitely not “scientific” in the sense closely associated, in that period, with Louis Althusser! Of course, that initial translation did circulate widely enough to wreak its own historic damage, which is part of Ray’s argument … Likewise, the point that the Cahiers duo make about André Bazin (and this is clearer in Fairfax’s rendition) is more complex than a simple dismissal or relegation of his work to the disdained, belles lettres pre-history of Theory; indeed, they respectfully hail him as the forerunner of close, detailed, material analysis. (By the way, just to be precise myself, I’m aware that while Comolli is indeed Jeckell [sic] in Godard’s Alphaville [1965], Heckell [ditto] is the no-less illustrious Jean-André Fieschi, who had departed from Cahiers for other adventures by August ‘68.) back 2.
The essay is reprinted in Britton on
Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton (Wayne State University Press, 2008). I shall here tell a tale ‘out
of school’: in Melbourne circa 1980, Colin MacCabe (then
guest-teaching in Queensland) gave a talk at the State Film Centre.
Tom Ryan rose from the audience at discussion time to ask: “What is
your opinion of Andrew Britton’s recent critique of Screen,
and of your work specifically?” MacCabe puffed up his chest and
replied haughtily: “Well, first you would have to tell me what is worth responding to in that piece?” Tom, stymied by this rather large
demand, let the matter drop. Another Tom, O’Regan,
by my side in the crowd, then leaned over to me and whispered: “That
means: Colin hasn’t read it”. back
© Adrian Martin 10 December 2020 |
