Making Meaning
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"For every reader who has worked through the entirety of Mythologiques or For Marx or Lacan's Ecrits or The Order of Things there must be hundreds who know only Levi-Strauss's essay on the Oedipus myth, or Althusser's study of the Piccolo Teatro, or Lacan's seminar on "The Purloined Letter," or Foucault's discussion of Las Meninas."--Making Meaning (1989) by David Bordwell "Like their peers in literary and art theory, the Cahiers editors began to write texts pitched at a new level of elliptical abstraction. (Positif's most virulent polemicist, Robert Benayoun, dubbed the converted Cahiers crew "les enfants du paradigme.) Some of this work, such as Jean-Pierre Oudart's essays, has enjoyed continuing influence, and one theoretical manifesto, Comolli and Narboni's "Cinema/Ideology/ Criticism" of 1969, has become a canonized work."--Making Meaning (1989) by David Bordwell "Cahiers furnished still more applications of the symptomatic approach during the years 1970-1971 in a series of "collective texts": detailed studies, composed by members of the editorial board, of repressed meanings in Renoir's La Vie est à nous Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln Sternberg's Morocco and Kozintsev and Trauberg's New Babylon."--Making Meaning (1989) by David Bordwell "While such pragmatic interpretive activities continued in various arts over the next several centuries, a new theory of interpretation was emerging that promised, in contrast to church exegesis, a "scientific" basis for assigning meaning. This can be traced to Spinoza's Tractatus theologico-politicus of 1670. Spinoza insisted, against patristic exegesis, that hermeneutics must be concerned wholly with meaning, not with truth."--Making Meaning (1989) by David Bordwell "Viktor Shklovsky began his 1923 book The Knight's Move by announcing that his subject was the conventionality of art. It is probably a measure of the difference between his epoch and ours that I take as my subject the conventionality of criticism."--Making Meaning (1989) by David Bordwell "Roughly speaking, in its first phase academic film study was conceived as a domain parallel to the disciplines organized by objects of study-such as French literature or the visual arts. But with the rise of Grand Theory in the humanities during the 1970s and 1980s, cinema studies became a vanguard discipline, a place where people keen on theory could work more freely than in other fields."--Making Meaning (1989) by David Bordwell "Calls for an end to literary interpretation extend back at least to Irving Howe's "This Age of Conformity" (1954) and run through Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation" (1964), Geoffrey Hartman's "Beyond Formalism" (1966), and Jonathan Culler's "Beyond Interpretation" (1976)."--Making Meaning (1989) by David Bordwell "Auteurism could have led cinema studies to adopt a conservative, Arnoldian role (can it be an accident that the American director most studied by the auteurists-John Ford-was one who celebrated the mythology of American society, especially the victory of culture over anarchy?). Historical developments, however, prevented auteurism from becoming the dominant approach in film studies; the most important of these was the radicalization of French film/literary criticism which followed in the wake of the upheavals of 1968, a radicalization most obvious, perhaps, in the Cahiers circle itself (which published a long, collectively-authored piece on the ideology of Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln). Structuralist and post-structuralist theory and approaches, imports from France though importantly mediated by those writing for the British journal Screen) greatly influenced the work of American cinema scholars in the formative years of the early seventies. These scholars were more open to new ideas in part because of their marginalized position within academe. During the middle seventies film scholarship in this country became a heavily theorized Interpretation as Rhetoric enterprise, a complex intersection of Marxist (largely Althusserian), psychoanalytic (largely Lacanian), feminist, and traditional (mostly auteurist and genre) approaches."--R. Barton Palmer, "Editor's Introduction," Studies in the Literary Imagination 19, 1 (Spring 1986): 1-2, cited in Making Meaning (1989) by David Bordwell |
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Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (1989) is a book by David Bordwell.
It criticizes the Cahiers film critics who used French theorists Saussure, Lacan, Althusser and Barthes (SLAB) to interpret films.
Blurb:
Few books of film criticism are as daring and controversial as Making Meaning. In the tradition of Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction and Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious, David Bordwell looks back at the work done in his field, summarizes its strengths, criticizes its weaknesses, and proposes a new point of departure. The result is an arresting overview of contemporary film theory that also exposes its shortcomings. Bordwell concludes that most film criticism and theory is tied to the idea of making meaning, unpacking the overt or hidden messages that lie within the movie. Prophesying that a new era of analysis is before us, Bordwell calls for film scholarship that will both complement and transcend mere interpretation. --Amazon.com
Blurb:
David Bordwell’s new book is at once a history of film criticism, an analysis of how critics interpret film, and a proposal for an alternative program for film studies. It is an anatomy of film criticism meant to reset the agenda for film scholarship. As such Making Meaning should be a landmark book, a focus for debate from which future film study will evolve.
Bordwell systematically maps different strategies for interpreting films and making meaning, illustrating his points with a vast array of examples from Western film criticism. Following an introductory chapter that sets out the terms and scope of the argument, Bordwell goes on to show how critical institutions constrain and contain the very practices they promote, and how the interpretation of texts has become a central preoccupation of the humanities. He gives lucid accounts of the development of film criticism in France, Britain, and the United States since World War II; analyzes this development through two important types of criticism, thematic-explicatory and symptomatic; and shows that both types, usually seen as antithetical, in fact have much in common. These diverse and even warring schools of criticism share conventional, rhetorical, and problem-solving techniques—a point that has broad-ranging implications for the way critics practice their art. The book concludes with a survey of the alternatives to criticism based on interpretation and, finally, with the proposal that a historical poetics of cinema offers the most fruitful framework for film analysis.
See also
- Pierre Macherey
- Descriptive poetics
- Hermeneutics
- Linguistic film theory
- Philosophy of film
- Poetics
- Historical poetics
- Inference
- Rhetoric
