How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies

by Robert B. Ray

How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies
Robert B. Ray
Foreword by James Naremore

Challenges accepted ideas about film and cultural studies.

In the 1920s, when film criticism was as new as the cinema itself, a particular way of thinking about the movies developed in Paris. The cinema, this theory suggested, turns on photography's automatism, the revolutionary fact that for the first time in human history a perfect representation of the world can be produced by accident. Moreover, the camera's gaze has the potential to transform ordinary objects―a telephone, a letter on a desk, a woman's face―into spellbinding images, swarming with details whose precise appeal remains unpredictable. By the 1930s, this theory of photogénie (photogenia) had vanished from most serious writing about film. Why did this disappearance occur? In this collection of essays, Robert B. Ray discusses this disappearance and other mysteries like Why did photography and the detective story originate at exactly the same time? Why has some of the most prominent academic writing about the cinema resisted anything but "scientific" accounts of the movies? What counts as "knowledge" in film studies or any intellectual discipline? What do the French Impressionists have in common with the Sex Pistols? How did Douglas Sirk's critically ignored melodramas become "subversive critiques of bourgeois ideology"? How did the fate of Sirk's movies help us understand postmodernism and the avant-garde? In taking up these questions, Ray's essays challenge certain ideas about film and cultural studies, while arguing for a mode of writing about the movies and experimental art that would respect the abidingly mysterious effect of their images and sounds.

Robert B. Ray, Director of Film and Media Studies and Professor of English at the University of Florida, is author of A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema 1930–1980 and The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy. He is also a member of The Vulgar Boatmen, whose records include You and Your Sister, Please Panic, and Opposite Sex.

Contents
Foreword by James Naremore
Impressionism, Surrealism, and Film Path Dependence, or How a Tradition in Film Theory Gets Lost
The Bordwell Regime and the Stakes of Knowledge
The Beginnings of Photography
Tracking
How to Start and Avant-Garde
How to Teach Cultural Studies
The Best Way to Understand Postmodernism
The Mystery of Edward Hopper
Film and Literature
Conclusion

Genres: Film, Nonfiction

184 pages, Paperback

First published April 22, 2001

Reviews

[Carlos Valladares · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most exciting book of film theory and possibility I’ve read in a long time. Now is the time to stretch the imagination into the realm of reality more than it has, more than it wants to.

[Michele Nordlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked this book up second-hand. I am familiar with Dr. Ray's work but had never read anything of his; I was happily surprised at how astute Dr. Ray tackles the tangle of cultural studies threads that have been developing since the 70's. It is very accessible, meaning that you can be a lay researcher in the area of film and/or cultural studies and still understand what is being talked about (disclosure: i am an alumnus of Dr. Ray's English Department at the University of Florida, and can attest to the fact that, while there are many brilliant thinkers out there in academia, very few know how to translate their brilliance into narratives that everyone can benefit from, not just graduate students or professors. It is my contention that Dr. Ray had this in mind while compiling the series of short-and-sweet essays about film and acting. They dove-tail well together as Dr. Ray builds on ideas and concepts (and he never leaves the lay reader in lingo-limbo, explaining beginning and intermediate theoretical concepts), but this series of essays can easily be read in bite-size bursts, which is how I've been reading it.

Enjoying it greatly. You should, too.