THE THEORY OF FILM PRACTICE: THIRTY YEARS LATER

THE THEORY OF FILM PRACTICE: THIRTY YEARS LATER 

ROD STONEMAN

HUSTON SCHOOL OF FILM & DIGITAL MEDIA

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, GALWAY 

1. Preface: the role of the personal

Rerum cognoscere causas / To learn the causes of things

Jean-Luc Godard prefaced his exhibition Voyages en utopie with the explanation that it was an ��intimate voyage that is permeable to the world��s upheavals; it is from the tension between these two poles: autobiographical fiction and documentary report – that poetry is generated.��¹ A tenuous biographical trajectory is the starting point for this exposition which tries to understand the activity that is theory at the intersection of movements of ideas in the wider world and the narration of the personal. Pushing the boundaries of orthodox academic formats allows the inclusion of an autobiographical dimension which traces the accretion of age/history, not to mention History itself.

   Initiating the register of the personal in an essay like this may also be a delayed reaction to my first encounters with a version of theory which was couched in such ultra-rationalist terms that it completely excluded the first person singular, the pronoun ��I��. New film theory in the 1970s was so concerned to turn away from the lazy prevalence of loose and subjectivist articulations in previous writing about film that its discourse inhibited and effaced the ��I��; ironic for a theory that tried to account for the formation of the subject, exploring how ��that which thinks it is I�� came into being. Roland Barthes��s own formulation of the distinction between forms of narrative interpolation uses the terms histoire for the third person and discours for the first.² The movement between histoire and discours as two forms of thought encourages reflexivity and creativity, combining hybrid fusions of the autobiographical and the analytical; but even now ��I�� is so much harder to write than to read. 

2. Thesis: the moment of theory

Clarior e tenebris / The surrounding darkness emphasises the light.

This story begins for me in the 1970s with a formative moment at the time when the first  concerted film theory was being introduced to the Anglophone world; it was part of a geographical movement of thought – at this point French theory began to have an impact in Britain, and from there it spread to the United States. Although it quickly reached other domains like literature and the visual arts, new theory initially had a focal point in film and emanated from Screen, a small, scholarly journal which challenged the bases of interpretation and politics across a wide range of educational contexts. Described at the time as the ��felt effect of Screen,��³ the magazine posited the relevance of theoretical analysis and effected a paradigm shift by deploying cross-disciplinary ideas and methodologies as part of the understanding of film and (to a lesser extent) television, and popular culture in general. It created a new ��theoretical imperative,�� in which film was discussed through structural explanation which connected it to other cultural frameworks and social formations. Screen attempted to link cinema and film culture with a hugely ambitious project, a radical investigation of signification and the constitution of human subjectivity in history. From about 1970 to 1990 the magazine was fundamental to significant debate radiating from the development of cultural theory in the Anglophone domain.

    The commotion taking place around the new intellectual agenda was magnetic – it was at least one factor in my personal path which took me from English literature and literary theory at the University of Kent to the graduate study of film at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. I was drawn to the complex debates around film theory and became involved in Screen magazine at the end of the decade. Joining the Screen board,⁴ and beginning to write articles, I felt that I could make some modest contribution to the project of extending the discussion of the politics of representation by deploying avant garde work in the analysis of the dominant mode of industrial production. ⁵ The close political alliance between theory and independent filmmaking was discernable in the organisation of both SEFT (Society for Education in Film and Television) and the IFA (Independent Filmmakers�� Association) which shared a commitment to placing a discursive, ��thinking�� framework around film. This was manifest in filmmakers accompanying their films on regional tours, the programming of BFI film theatres and the initial Eleventh Hour programmes on Channel 4.⁶  Catching up with theoretical debates was perceived as an imperative for filmmakers; I remember the Four Corners film workshop in east London, imitating the Parisian students in Godard��s 1967 La Chinoise, setting off with a pile of copies of Screen for a weekend in a Welsh cottage to find illumination through immersion. Although short term concentration may not achieve sustained reflection it was evidence of a frame of reference, a set of ideas that had been established for practitioners as well as academics. A key element of this was a theoretical intervention which problematised realism and denaturalised the dominant mode of representation, this theoretically informed approach to the politics of form was manifest in many of the programmes on the Eleventh Hour. Accompanying films and discussing them with audiences consolidated an extended engagement with viewers and their understandings.

      The introduction of semiotics, psychoanalysis and Marxism to Anglophone film culture proved to be contentious and argumentative – it is difficult to imagine the emotional energy invested in intellectual controversies from the perspective of these tamer times. Althusser, Barthes and Lacan were understood as the successors of Marx, Saussure and Freud, a constellation of new thinking which traversed the cultural text. There was always a sense that this specific configuration of ideas might be short-lived, but it was a productive triangulation of tendencies in a field of force that would irreversibly open film to new angles of enquiry. It was clear that they could not lead to a neat resolution or proximate closure, as Foucault apocryphally remarked in an interview: ��Marx and Freud? Ah yes, they still have much harm to do one another.��

      One can understand the complaints that David Bordwell was making at the time about the ��philosophic imperialism��⁷ of some of the theory; for someone trying to constitute the parameters of academic film studies the interaction of complex theories made boundary definition very difficult, if not impossible. A stable and ��teachable�� discursive domain was institutionally necessary in order to constitute the discipline, draw up university syllabi, publish and sell student primers. This was a time when preliminary exploration deployed many speculative hypotheses and by easy osmosis the theory of cinema crossed into theory of the psyche; the human subject was to be embedded in the social formation; history and economics are never too far from language and power.

   What connected the various enquiries in the different fields of knowledge was that, whilst epiphenomena on the surface might effervesce in seeming dissimilarity, there was a search for simpler underlying structures which would explain at least some of the determinations at play. The role of a set of leading ideas was paramount in identifying and making sense of both the principles of the incision and patterns that might be excavated. The approach was aptly described as a ��polyphony of structuralisms�� by Jean-Marie Benoist.⁸  The attention to representation that all structuralists shared had a distinct political drive, a sense that theoretical analysis, in conjunction with progressive artistic practice, could lead to enlightenment and emancipation. In the domain of film practice, as in other areas of cultural activity, the politics of representation was seen as transformatory. As Colin MacCabe wrote about T.S. Eliot: ��It is also to see modernism as a beginning, as the start of a long revolution that will not be finished until every existence is illuminated.��⁹

   Often the most relevant, productive versions of structural theory grew precisely from that interaction with filmmaking: Noel Burch��s Theory of Film Practice was translated and published in English in 1973.¹⁰ Whilst his delineation and rigorous articulation of the parameters of film form was clear, it was less obvious that his politicised formalism had been transposed from serial music theory. His was an impulse that moved from a starting point in French New Wave aesthetics through an excursion into Japanese cinema towards a re-discovery of early film.¹¹ Encounters which, together with the films of Godard, Makavejev, Straub and Huillet, helped to defamiliarise and challenge the dominant mode of representation. But in Burch��s case, analysis of other filmmakers and cinemas was underpinned by his own production – the short Noviciat was made with Annette Michelson in New York in 1964, Correction, Please: or, How We Got into the Pictures¹² in 1979 and the television series on early film What Do These Old Films Mean? in 1985;¹³ The Forgotten Space was made with Allan Sekula in 2010.

   Peter Wollen��s book Signs and Meaning in the Cinema¹⁴ was one of the first books to open these debates in England and caused a strong reaction; he co-wrote the script of Michelangelo Antonioni��s The Passenger (France / Italy, 1975) and co-directed several notable independent films such Pentisilea (UK, 1974) and Riddles of the Sphinx (UK,1979) with Laura Mulvey. Alongside her filmmaking Mulvey wrote a series of significant essays including the seminal and extensively anthologised ��Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema��; and experimental filmmakers Malcolm LeGrice and Peter Gidal wrote historically and polemically about structural materialist practice, and the theoretical and political basis for the work taking place at the London Filmmaker��s Co-op.¹⁵

   Although at the time many people reacted against the intrusion of what they perceived to be an alien pedagogical agenda that they felt was narrow and oppressive, the influx of new ideas was more pluralist, more open to new combinations of thinking than it has been depicted in the arguments of the period or the revisionist versions of film studies published since. Over-reactions to structural theory tended to initiate some kind of vicious circle – reinforcing the rejection that set in at the start... In 1965 Roland Barthes had experienced the full force of aggressive dismissal in a public reaction to his book Sur Racine;¹⁶ in Britain Kenneth Tynan denounced Peter Wollen��s book Signs and Meaning and there was an institutional attempt to contain and curtail the work of the British Film Institute Education Department. Screen was felt to be ��aggressively austere�� and was accused of ��terrorist theory��; this peremptory denunciation encouraged a symmetrical and defensive dismissal of its critics by many of those supportive of the magazine.

   The journal presented its articles with precision and attention to meticulous detail; this was a conscious pre-emptive strategy as it was important to ensure that the inevitable academic reproach could not be on the basis of inaccuracy in the footnotes! Meanwhile, in sad imitation of Left sectarianism, there were internal splits and ructions as the Screen board underwent continued convulsions. Those that approached film from a primarily Marxist standpoint became increasingly incompatible with those wishing to explore Lacanian accounts. This led to resignations from the magazine board and different factions organising slates of candidates for SEFT elections (the Society for Education in Film and Television published Screen).

   The reproach to new film theory often came from those who wished to enjoy cinema without the intrusion of philosophic conjecture in that activity or social effects per se. There was irritation from those who did not wish to embrace new forms of thought that demanded mental exertion. In the introduction to the South West Film Directory entitled ��Difficulty�� I quoted Theodor Adorno: ��They offer the shamelessly modest assertion that they do not understand – this eliminates even opposition, their last negative relationship with truth.��¹⁷ This 1980 regional arts organisation publication was an indication of the widespread institutional implementation of new film theory which was working its way through British culture, formal and informal educational courses, independent filmmaking workshops.

   The flurries around politicised new theory should be seen in the historical context of the time, this was an epoch where underlying Cold War tensions and a confrontational phrase of north / south relations framed our intellectual contentions – an anti-imperial war in Asia, armed political contestation in many parts of the world including Ireland, Latin America and parts of Africa, challenges to the repressive regimes in Eastern and Central Europe. Film theory was born into a time of significant political opening, the radical new agendas that had appeared after 1968 gave birth to the circulation of new ideas which were to play a vital argumentative role in a culture in flux.

      A plethora of far-reaching thoughts and theories began to question the complacency of the given starting points of our understandings, initiating what can be understood as second level reflexivity – thinking about how we think. The movement between the forms of thought challenged complacent assumptions and, questioning its own basis, threw new problems into relief: ��Intellectualisation: Process where the subject, in order to master his/her conflicts and emotions, attempts to couch them in a discursive form. The term usually has a pejorative ring to it and denotes the preponderance of abstract thought over the emergence and acknowledgement of affects and phantasies.��¹⁸ Perhaps, in our cultures, there is a disingenuous facility in the displacement of conflicts and emotions to abstract discourse as it is always easier to keep desire in its place by avoiding the honest excavation of feelings. 

Theory enters the emotional / libidinal domain¹⁹ 
 

3 Antithesis: industrial practice

Caelo usque ad centrum. / From the sky to the centre.

1. Television

After freelance activity teaching independent film and running an art house cinema I worked for SEFT and made several programmes for television. Employed in funding new films and programmes for ten years in Channel 4 and then another ten years in The Irish Film Board, I found the complex structural theories I had encountered as a student and in the milieu of the Screen board helpful in trying to understand the process of film commissioning. The circumstance of Screen theory had opened a new schema of relevant knowledge which seemed to be pertinent and productive for the various innovative versions of film and television in which I was engaged. It offered necessary analytical tools in the close encounter with the underlying power structures of the media and ensured that entering a powerful  institution like a television station was not too intimidating or inhibiting.

   Carrying the unwieldy framework of 1970s�� Screen theory into the practice of British broadcasting involved a curious journey leading to some strange connections, manifest, for example, in the unlikely experience of reading two magazines entitled Iris: one the scholarly journal of film theory published in French and English by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson already referred to; the other an irregularly circulated Irish Republican magazine featuring a section entitled ��War News�� – the direct speech of the IRA carrying on its armed insurrection against the British state at that time. The unusual intersection of otherwise discrete discourses led to an ironic and relativist distance between the various ��worlds�� at play and a momentary displacement of the self from the actual field of engagement.

From its inception in 1983 I worked for Channel 4 as an assistant, then deputy, commissioning editor: this was a radical new version of public service television which sought to innovate in content and form, to reach niche audiences with new forms of broadcasting. One of the novel aspects of the channel was its deliberate decision to employ editorial people from outside the television industry; it was only in this unusual context that the gates of fortress television opened to someone like me from experimental filmmaking and Screen theory. I brought with me elements of a theoretically informed politique that framed the work in a wider context than many in the station who just saw television as an opportunity for an individual career path. The attempt to develop a structural interpretation of everything had to be carried forward to a new stage – ��the point is to change it.��²⁰ The idea that radical film could be used to promote an agenda for change fitted within the overall remit to ��innovate in the form and content of programmes�� that had been set in legislation for the new channel in 1982. This legislation and the cultural context at that time meant that the ground was prepared for a intrepid encounter with ideas and it was easier to introduce programmes which explored conceptualisation in innovative ways. This was a significant paradigm change and ran counter to the anti-intellectual assumptions which had dominated British television up to that point. The contextualising debates around films or the open-ended arguments in a late night chat show like After Dark created an unprecedented climate which encouraged spaces where the process of thinking was explicit.

      We worked with Jean-Luc Godard²¹ and I was involved in the transmission of the first completed episodes of his Histoire(s) du Cinema (Switzerland, 1988-98), a remarkable work in which his conception of film as ��une forme qui pense�� is enacted. As the text becomes ��a thinking machine��, it calls for a different process of active reading from viewers.²² Pervasive expectations of normative narrative process mean that radical polysemy, like the mental exertion of theory itself, can be perceived as ��difficult��. Introducing what might be called ��theoretical film�� with its significant combination of radical form and unfamiliar content to a wider public was both exciting and demanding. The encounter with experimental and polysemic work is inevitably framed by habitual expectations derived from industrially produced genres, the understandings (and the pleasures) of which may sometimes be complex and sophisticated; there is no reason to underestimate viewers�� abilities to reread and reflect. Although any anticipation that radical texts would instantly recalibrate subject formation and transform the social would have been naive and unrealistic, wide and enthusiastic audiences for demanding work were created and sustained.

      Though Channel 4 alone could not build and maintain a popular audience for theory in the culture, it did open some spaces for taking ideas to the public domain, reaching significantly wider audiences with them. For example Talking Liberties was a series of six interviews with contemporary philosophers (Derrida, Said, Kristeva, Eagleton, Cixous, Ricoeur) which I had commissioned in 1992. A more extreme instance was the subtitled, intellectually opaque series of programmes with Jacques Lacan which brought the unpatronising presentation of theoretical conjecture to the fore; transmitted at midnight they were watched by 250,000 people. These are small incursions in the doxa of common sense but, in relation to the persistent timidity and the normal exclusion of ideas from British television, they constitute a huge advance.

Television before and since the initial incursions of Channel 4. 

      There was also an attempt to bring greater mentality to the concatenation of the related programmes we transmitted and the way they could work together as a group  – we began structuring and broadcasting short seasons of films in an approach that was novel at the time: trying to rearticulate the grammar of television in combinations of fiction and documentary, clusters of material that was related, but disparate.²³

      For example, after I had attended the 1984 film festival in Gdansk we assembled a season called ��Pictures of Poland.��²⁴ I saw and bought Feliks Falk��s 1983 feature film And All that  Jazz;²⁵ this was connected with a documentary made in England by Maxim Ford called The Road to Gdansk and followed by an inventive film, Far from Poland, directed by Jill Godmilow, an American independent working in New York.

      Poltel, the (government controlled) Polish television agency, also showed me a strange programme that I decided to purchase: Shipyard Confrontation was made in 1983, it simply recorded the Deputy Prime Minister, Mieczyslaw Rakowski, visiting the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk at the 3rd anniversary of Solidarity to address and argue with the workers there. We found there was a difference between two versions, the VHS which had been supplied for previewing by Poltel and the copy on 1 inch tape which they eventually supplied at the higher technical standard required for broadcast. I was disconcerted to find that the TX (transmission) copy was 1 minute 30 seconds shorter than the original preview version. Looking at them side by side it became evident that a succession of minuscule cuts had removed all adverse audience reactions; the minister��s exposition was retained, but the irreverent laughter and occasional heckling by the shipyard workers had been carefully edited out.  Needless to say we reconstituted the earlier version by inserting the excised fragments from the VHS and transmitted that.

      Such an exceptional piece of manipulative dishonesty from a government in situ perhaps should not have been such a surprise. Apart from glimpsing something of the 40 years of madness that Stalinism had inflicted on Poland and other central European countries, I was aware that, from a local perspective, there was a way in which the image of oppressive and imposed authoritarian regimes was also undermining efforts to open new and more equitable social agendas in the Western part of Europe. At their best the gaps between these programmes induced active response and reflection. The Polish season included some programmed elements which incorporated reflexive form and independent critique, these were very different from indigenous fiction or a political debate in situ. The distances between elements demanded viewers draw their views and their ideas into focus by connecting and thinking through themselves. The differentiations of disparate programme conjunctions demanded debate and argument, invoking the ideas we call theory. Benjamin��s Arcades Project indicated how fragmentation and quotation can illuminate the image system and foreground the way that meaning is made between texts. Carefully chosen juxtapositions of components were a far cry from the arbitrary coincidence of most programming or channel hopping between different stations.

      The way the combination of diverse programmes worked together as an ensemble exemplified the philosophy of radical pluralism in early Channel 4; this created extensive spaces for alternative and argumentative views in various areas of programming throughout the station: current affairs included a more radical range of views; unlike other soap operas Brookside was filmed in a real suburban housing estate in Liverpool not a studio, Channel 4 sport included American football, sumo wrestling and cycling and educational programming was defined in more accessible modern terms. Even areas of the television schedule like sport could be relativised by wider global representations which implicitly question Eurocentric forms.

      An integral accompaniment to my unanticipated journey through media institutions was the ancillary activity of occasional writing, attempting to use the analytical and reflexive tools of theory in an understanding of the image system I was working within. There was an attempt to grasp ideas in their materiality – Foucault suggested that that texts, words and images produce institutions and forms of conduct; power and the relations of domination and exploitation work through every aspect of programme making, political preoccupations run through every analysis.²⁶ Of course psychoanalysis and Marxism were not explicitly summoned for individual programme decisions, but these ways of thinking stood behind wider policy debates which brought questions of gender, class and race into play. There were constant references to this theoretical framework as a conceptual agenda in which commissioning and programming choices were made, a novel use of ideas and different from the normal and unconsciously adopted ��professional�� practices of television.²⁷

      Semiotics enlightened the detailed analysis of meaning production that was often necessary for viewing the rough cuts of new programmes and films. Barthes��s S/Z could also be understood as a more rigorous, theoretically informed equivalent to the New Criticism of I.A. Richards, William Empson and F.R. Leavis in literary studies. Close textual analysis was essential in the examination of the ways in which meaning is made when viewing early edited versions of new films. The elements of theory stood behind the intricacies of interpretation, as discussions with filmmakers often arrived at a focus on how a film would be ��read��. Viewing a rough cut of Tin Pis Run (Pengau Nengo, 1991), which was the first indigenous feature film made in New Guinea, it was clear pivotal narrative articulations could not be ��read�� by a non Papuan audience. I had to bring semiotic analysis as a microscope which enabled me to rehearse, as a premonition of the British television audience, how the film would be misunderstood. This was part of a dialogue with the filmmakers not a financier��s imposition. Often this process was a presentiment of the audience response and some of the thinking behind reception theory was relevant to the anticipation of the viewers�� process during transmission.

      Television always has to manoeuvre in the force fields of power and politics. Even in the context of the radical aspirations of early Channel 4 we had to be careful not to go too far, too fast: ��Different, but not too different�� had been Jeremy Isaacs��, the founding Chief Executive, original guiding phrase – first  used in his speech (effectively a public job application) at the Edinburgh Television Festival in 1979. However, despite strategic caution, our department��s small scale incursions were eventually swept away with the shifts in policy within the Channel as a whole and the adverse climate change that befell European public service television in the 1990s.  

2. Cinema

Caelum, non animum, mutant / They change their sky or horizon, not their mind.

I left Channel 4 in 1993, and spent the next ten years setting up Bord Scann��n na hÉireann / the Irish Film Board, a national film agency that had been newly re-constituted to support indigenous fictions, documentaries, shorts and animation. The policies we embarked on echoed Channel 4 in their commitment to pluralism and diversity – something of the same approach in a rather different situation.²⁸ Thinking through a politique for a national cinema in a small English-speaking country involved the provision of a wider framework to understand our endeavours with tools provided by theoretical analysis. Enabling the production of very different forms of film displaces the debate about the priorities of a national cinema into the wider cultural domain; the means of interaction become apparent as forms and ideas of films offer different models. In Ireland the belated realisation of a valid cultural space for indigenous cinema production was only realised 70 years after independence. However the implications of theory cut across simplistic idea of national cinema – we sought to allow the other co-ordinates of gender, age, the urban and rural and class to have a presence within the contesting arguments. Developing theories of national cinema were relevant to the enactment of specific policies, Screen had enunciated theoretical debate and perpetuated a presupposition that there were underlying structural explanations of superficial phenomena. Cultural diversity for the imaginary communities of Europe in the increasingly centripetal framework of global monoculture was also a clear imperative at that point.

      A major part of my time at the Irish Film Board involved keeping neoliberal ideologies and economies at bay. There was unrelenting pressure to ��professionalise�� film on imported business models. This was highly problematic as the degree of domination of the American industry meant that the idea of commercially successful Irish, or indeed any other European ��industries�� was a mere mirage, a delusory chimera in a global commodity culture.²⁹  We had to operate in the field of ��voodoo economics�� where arguments were made on the increasingly specious basis of industrial stimulus and jobs created. However, continuing support for a wide range of production including lower budget independent film, more artisanal than industrial, could be defended as part of a diversity of creative and progressive practices. In 2003 I drafted the Board��s mission statement: ��We intend to encourage bravery and embrace creative risk. Paradoxically, in cinema, the further you push artistically the more genuinely commercial you can be.��³⁰ Uttering these ��neither/nor�� verbalizations and myriad other oxymoronic policy formulations seemed to be indispensable discursive manoeuvres and the only way to absorb and deflect the implacable pressures of increasingly economistic discourses. These are questions of strategy not theory, but the theoretical validation of the aesthetics and politics of modernism was important to the defense of diversity. 

             A sense that what I had known as cinema was now passing. 

      There was constant interaction between a sense of economic determination and the work of the image in psychoanalysis and semiotics which informed a concrete analysis of the politics of representation. This was inevitably influenced by the direct observation of human agency I gained from involvement in the apparatus of media production, the processes of power that effect the manufacture, distribution and reception of the image. The indelible critique of Screen magazine constituted a productive starting point and it was through the long process of close engagement with television and cinema that I understood that many of those seemingly obscure 1970s�� theoretical debates were applicable and vindicated in practice.  

4. Synthesis: a return to the academy

Aliquid stat pro aliquot / Something stands for something else.

I left the Irish Film Board in 2003 in order to set up the Huston School of Film & Digital Media as part of the National University of Ireland, Galway. Perhaps my twenty year detour working in the film and television industries before a return to the academia, a domain that I had left as a graduate student twenty years earlier, explains my disconcertion at hearing belatedly that ��the theoretical moment has now passed�� from a Polish university.³¹  If theory could still seem relevant to me while navigating the turbulent currents of the media industries I assumed it would surely be alive and well in the calmer and more protected structures of universities around the world. Could this be a result of differences between the role of theory in the disciplines of film studies and literature or disparate development in different cultures? After the formative experience of modernism and theory and twenty years of fieldwork I had not been part of the slow encroachment of institutionally determined attempts to set these frameworks aside. Maybe it was just one of those salutary shocks where one realises that an assumption that one believed to be well-founded, universal and objective is in fact based on one��s own very partial perspective.

      We should still be wary and examine the way in which those occasional declarations that we are in a new epoch which is beyond or ��post�� some moment or movement – post-feminism, post-modernism, or in the case of Fukuyama, ��the end of History,�� post-communism – may in fact be a premature triumphalism on the part of persons who had consistently fought against the original impulse. It can sometimes be a marketing manoeuvre by those who hope to displace a set of values that they never accepted in the first place. We should be suspicious when the desire for a paradigm change leads to the pre-emptive pronouncement that one has already taken place and can perhaps begin by asking ��Cui bono?�� (Who benefits?) What is at stake in those assertions that the theoretical endeavour has passed?³² It is never just a question of what is said – it is always also how the saying of it functions; enunciations are not made into abstraction but into the spaces of contention, material clashes. An account of the world that understands its processes through the conflictual determinations of material forces on discourse and power is predicated on reflexive praxis. In specific sectors, theory offers a tool box for use at those precise points of stasis, when we encounter the familiar inertia which ensures the perpetuation of the conditions of life and work, ��Thinking is actually and above all the force of resistance,�� as Theodor Adorno wrote.³³

      Misconstruing a phrase of ��post-theory�� is often linked to a revisionist history which projects a unitary version of theory that can then be dismissed as monolithic and dogmatic – ripe to be replaced by a new generation of micro-theories. The theory that I had encountered had always been more diverse and dynamic; the underlying foundations for new structural theories were in an active argument with each other and existed within an ethos of curiosity and pluralism which welcomed eclectic addition and variation. Renewals and extensions of theoretical activity that have taken place around writers such as Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek in the last decades are relatively open to inflection and critique. They occasionally touch wider public domains, Zizek presented a Lacanian view of film in The Pervert��s Guide to Cinema, three programmes broadcast on Channel 4 in July 2006.

      The occasional persistence of resistance to theory, in my experience, focuses on psychoanalysis and comes from predictable established academic sources. In most cases young people and students have fewer preconceptions or phobias than their teachers – they are generally more open to new approaches and speculations than many of the teachers who were veterans of older cultural battles. The dismissal of theory often emanates from the desire for certitude encouraged by the habits of working with the tools of empiricism. Older academic perspectives dismiss theory as too ethereal and speculative; it is too abstract and indefinite to be categorised as scholarship. Research work can then be limited to the fetish impulse to accumulate meanings which can be categorised as what Mr Gradgrind would call ��facts��.³⁴ But novel ideas and interpretations are no less valid through being formulated outside the authority of selective data-based evidence. The operations of empiricism are disingenuous and efface perspective and selectivity, often contributing to a retreat from critical engagement.

      A diagnosis of the ways in which theory can still encounter replications of the old repudiations in contemporary academic contexts begins with the normal performance of institutional power. Understandably disputation sees groups and individuals displace discourse to a framework where they can play their strongest hand; discursive goal posts are shifted on a tilted field in which the person making the argument can score and dominate. The very idea of debating ideas may pose a threat to those who feel uneasy in that domain and prefer to displace conversation to a more comfortable discursive space.

      Theory offers the freedom to maintain an insubordinate naivety in order to ask questions that undermine the terms of the existent symbolic and social orders that mutually reinforce one another. There is no cause for defensiveness – theorists should open not close debate, espousing the ingenuousness of curiosity not the disavowal and fixity of the fetish.³⁵ Students and researchers should continue to inhabit a pluralist environment where they remain receptive, welcoming the interaction of all ideas and many disciplines; sceptical of everything, questioning the very categorisation and separation of knowledge. This does not mean finally retreating to a passive relativism! To argue for a theoretical framework may involve building one around a conjunction of totalising assertions and elements of continued enquiry or uncertainty, a perspective which is part of the advance of enlightened theories of knowledge.

      The articulations of theory navigate around enough doubt and complexity to remain open and enough clarity to make an incision in the world. ³⁶ As Lindsay Anderson suggested in an elegant and dialectical formulation shortly after making the 1968 feature film If��: ��The older you grow, the more you are conscious of and believe in and have to accept the ambiguities of existence . . . and you know that in every truth the opposite is also true. The very important thing is to perceive that truth, and yet hold the opposite of that truth, which is that there is a truth.��³⁷

      The institutional experience of the courses and contexts in which students encounter debates about theory has changed significantly. Contemporary mass tertiary education in Europe has proliferated many new disciplines and sub-disciplines;³⁸ the massive expansion of the proportion of the population coming to colleges and universities in the last decades fulfils a democratic impulse, but it has been achieved without even a fractional increase of matching resources. The recent emphases on professional and vocational programmes have focused on craft-based industrial skills; in many cases this leads to programmes which explicitly exclude ideas or critical reflection. The UK Film Council��s 2003 policy document A Bigger Future: The UK Film Skills Strategy insists on ��a clear distinction between academic study and vocational provision�� in order to dismiss the former and commit resources to the latter.³⁹ Even preliminary academic work allows a more rigorous basis for historical knowledge of cinema and television, posing a wider range of choices and alternatives as a starting point for critical practitioners. The question of encouraging analytical thinking in combination with craft skills clearly depends on the perspective one has about existent versions of the media industry.  It can be simply put: if you think the vista of contemporary  television and cinema seems sensible and supportable, then the imperative for critical theory recedes.   

      On the other hand, traditional academic approaches defined by their divorce from practice display the limitations of a purely scholastic process with its micro focus, tunnel vision and solipsism in isolation from wider audiences. The self-justifying apparatus of current versions of academic scholarship in Britain and the US lead to management by metrics, where conferences are constructed from parallel sessions, unread publications depend on notional peer-reviews, where citations are counted, footnotes fetishised. The problems of contemporary tertiary education arise as the forms of the academic are distanced from contact with the immediate audience and the social context.

      But there are innovative possibilities for institutions to explore new ways in which theory can return to its interaction with practice in new hybrid forms of research in film and the other arts. Practice-based research leads to new forms of systematic enquiry that make their own processes manifest. Filmmaking takes place in conjunction with traditional written exposition and begins to challenge and dissolve rigid boundaries between interpretation and production, the theoretical and the creative. Divisions between text and commentary, theory and practice begin to dissolve and breakdown. Inevitably we will continue to utilise these binary divisions; but they are less firm or watertight than they appear and they become potentially resistant to the confines of institution and discipline.⁴⁰ For instance practice-based research refuses a traditional or fixed, linear or chronological order between the making of an artistic text and its analysis. It combines disparate forms of signifying practice in a reflective context.

      This process is visible in independent art practice like The Phoenix Tapes (Matthias Muller and Christoph Giradet, Germany, 1999), where creative play reveals the psychic structure that lies under the surface of superficially very different Hitchcock films. The specificity of film is used as a form for creating new knowledge, and its difference from traditional academic writing with its apparatus of footnotes and references does not invalidate or demote its status. Experiments combine theory and creative / imaginative work in complex and unpredictable ways; in their contradictions, they indicate the possibility of the achievement of a new version of praxis.

      The processes of creativity and reflexivity offer some means to penetrate and counter unconscious assumptions and ideological suppositions to be found in many critical practices. Theory remains an essential basis for re-examining conscious and unconscious interpretative procedures; we should consistently put our own forms of utterance into question, examine our own mode of discourse.⁴¹ This may also help us see our place in history and the continuous calamity of the present with detachment, displacement.  

Thinking is actually and above all the force of resistance. 

5. Coda

   Abusus non tollit usum / Just because something has been misused does not mean that it cannot be used correctly.

   Theodor Adorno, in exile from Nazism in Los Angeles, wrote ��Every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse.��⁴² Debilitated production sectors and weakened reception structures mean that what we have understood as European cinema is almost no more. The global audience is 100 times more likely to view a Hollywood than a European film.⁴³ Reception structures have been damaged as marketing, across time, has effected taste. The forces of repetition are evident – during the last ten years 93 of the 100 most popular films have been sequels, remakes or parts of a trilogy.

         The convergence of theory around film should be rethought at a point when, arguably, the time of cinema itself has now passed. This may encourage its premature academicisation as it can be better studied at the point at which its prospects as an agent of change in the world are reduced and eliminated. Looking back at the industries I worked in I cannot help but feel that the radical aspects of public service television have now relapsed into a culture of complacency and deception. The electronic progeny of the celluloid image is a medium which never stops talking and yet nothing is ever said.

         Theory will always interact with and be inflected by both individual and general histories and those subjective dimensions to our reflections should be brought into the open. The sketch of a personal narrative invoked in this essay is an attempt to indicate how theoretical frameworks and creative practices interacted with the process of my experience and developed the space for reflection.

         That tenuous personal trajectory that took me to the domains of television and cinema happened within an historical process that has reduced the opportunities for many forms of praxis at this time. But the dynamic domain of ideas, of theory, offers a possible reconnection with that social and political moment when the aspiration to creative change can be rethought and remade. The best examples of previous theory and praxis indicate the way that writers, intellectuals, artists can contribute, not as masters of Truth, but by feeding a more dynamic, democratic creativity, each one of us acting for ourselves and as part of the ensemble. ⁴⁴ The only supercession of the aspiration of theory is its enactment in practice: ��The longer you wait for utopia, the better it gets.��⁴⁵ 
    
    
   

   References

   Adorno, Theodor ��Resignation��, The Culture Industry, London: Routledge, 1991, pp. 198-203.  
   

   —. Minima Moralia, London: NLB, 1974. 
   

   Barthes, Roland. ��Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives��, Image-Music-Text, Glasgow: Collins, 1977. 
   

   —.  S/Z, New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.

   —. Grain of the Voice, London: Jonathan Cape, 1985.

   —. The Neutral, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

   —. Mourning Diary, London: Notting Hill, 2011.

   Benjamin, Walter. Arcades Project, Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1999.

   Benoist, Jean-Marie. ��The end of structuralism��, 20^th Century Studies, n3, May 1970, pp.31-54.

   Bordwell, David. ��Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory��, Bordwell and Carroll, Noel (eds.) Post-Theory, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996, pp. 3-36. 
   

   Bordwell, David. ��Lowering the Stakes: Prospects for a Historical Poetics of Cinema��, Iris, Revue de Th��orie de l��image et du son / A Journal of Theory on Image and Sound, Editions Analeph, vol.1, no.1, 1983, pp. 5-18. 
   

   Burch, Noel. Theory of Film Practice, London: Secker and Warburg, 1973.  
   

   —. To the Distant Observer, London: Scholar Press, 1979.

   —. Life to these Shadows, London: British Film Institute, 1990.

   Debord, Guy. Panegyric, London: Verso, 2004.

   Dickens, Charles. Hard Times, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. 
   

   Foucault, Michel. Michel Foucault Power, Truth Strategy, Morris, Meaghan and Patton, Paul (eds.), Sydney: Feral Publications, 1979.  
   

   Gidal, Peter. Materialist Film, London: Routledge, 1989. 
   

   Godard, Jean-Luc, Histoire(s) du Cin��ma (3a), Munich: ECM, 1999. 
   

   Hall, Stuart. ��Encoding/Decoding��, The Routledge Critical and Cultural Theory Reader, Neil Badmington and Julia Thomas (eds.), London: Routledge, 2008, pp. 234-244.  
   

   Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.B. The Language of Psycho-Analysis, London: The Hogarth Press, 1980. 
   

   LeGrice, Malcolm.  Abstract Film and Beyond, London: Studio Vista, 1977. 
   

   MacCabe, Colin. Eliot, Tavistock: Northcote House, 2006. 
   

   Marx, Karl. ��Thesis XI��, Theses on Feuerbach, in The German Ideology,  New York: Prometheus, 1998, pp. 572-574.  
   

   Mulvey, Laura. ��Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,�� Screen 1975 v16 n3, pp. 6-18.

   —. Fetishism and Curiosity, London: BFI, 1996.

   Olson, Scott Robert. Hollywood Planet, Global Media and the Competitive Advantage of Narrative Transparency. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999.

   Picard, Raymond. New Criticism or New Charlatanism? Trans. Frank Towne, Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1969. 
    
   

   Rodrigues, Chris and Stoneman, Rod. ��The Use of Independent Film in Education��, The New Social Function of Cinema. Catalogue: BFI Productions '79/80, London: BFI, 1981, pp. 130-135.

   Stoneman, Rod. ��Film-related Practice and the Avant-Garde��, Screen 20, no 3/4, Winter 1979/80, pp. 40-57.

   —. (ed.), South West Film Directory, Torquay: South West Arts, 1980, pp. 124-129.

   —. ��Perspective Correction��, Afterimage, 8/9, Spring 1981, pp. 50-63.

   —. ��Sins of Commission��, Screen, v33 n2, Summer 1992, pp. 127-144; republished in Rogue Reels, Oppositional Film in Britain, 1945-90, Margaret Dickinson (ed.), London: BFI, 1999.      
   

   —. ��Under the Shadow of Hollywood: the Industrial Versus the Artisanal��, The Irish Review, n24, Autumn 1999, pp. 96-103.  
   

   —. Review/Athbhreithniu 2000, Galway: Irish Film Board, 2000.      
   

   —. ��Soft and Hard: Indications Intimations Implications�� Jean-Luc Godard Documents, Nicole Brenez and Michael Witt (eds.), Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 2006, pp. 316-323; republished in Kinema, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Fall 2006. 
   

   Sussex, Elizabeth. Lindsay Anderson, London: Studio Vista, 1969. 
   

   Wollen, Peter. Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, London: Secker & Warburg, 1972.

   Wood, Robin. Personal Views, Explorations in Film, London: Gordon Fraser, 1976.  
    
    
    
   

   
   

   ¹ Booklet issued to accompany exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Spring 2006.

   ² Barthes, ��Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,�� 107-114.

   ³ Robin Wood��s phrase; he elaborated his critical position in relation to the ��formidable and sustained challenge to traditional aesthetics�� posed by Screen both in extended exchanges with the magazine (v10 n2, v10 n3, v11 n4/5, v12 n3) and in the first chapters of his Personal Views, Explorations in Film.

   ⁴ I was a member of the editorial board from 1980 to 1985.

   ⁵ Stoneman, ��Film-Related Practice and the Avant-Garde.��

   ⁶ Stoneman, South West Film Directory; Rodrigues and Stoneman ��The Use of Independent Film in Education.��

   ⁷ Bordwell, ��Lowering the Stakes: Prospects for a Historical Poetics of Cinema��, 5. Bordwell��s careful expositions of the development of film form had a defensive aspect as he seemed to feel an implicit rivalry with Noel Burch��s politicised formalism.

   ⁸ Benoist, ��The end of structuralism,�� 38.

   ⁹ MacCabe, Eliot, 78.

   ¹⁰ Burch, Theory of Film Practice. It had originally been written as a series of articles for Cahiers du Cinema in 1967.

   ¹¹ Burch, To the Distant Observer and Life to these Shadows.

   ¹² Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979.

   ¹³ Six 26 minute programmes were made for Channel 4 and French television in 1985.

   ¹⁴ Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, anticipated by his essay ��Cinema and Semiology: Some Points of Contact�� in Form (Cambridge) n7, March 1968, pp 9-15.

   ¹⁵ LeGrice, Abstract Film and Beyond; Gidal, Materialist Film.

   ¹⁶ Cf Picard, New Criticism or New Charlatanism?

   ¹⁷ Stoneman, South West Film Directory, 18-19.

   ¹⁸ Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, 224.

   ¹⁹ All illustrations are from postcards made by, with or from Norma Doesnt in 1982.

    

   ²⁰ Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, Thesis XI, 574.

   ²¹ Stoneman, ��Soft and Hard: Indications Intimations Implications.��

   ²² Godard, Histoire(s) du Cinema, 33.

   ²³ It followed the structured programming of regional film theatres initiated by Colin McArthur in the BFI and was further developed by the continental station Arte programming in ��theme days.��

   ²⁴ The season was transmitted on 11, 12, 18 and 25 February 1985.

   ²⁵ This eventually led to the acquisition and transmission of Andrzej Fidyk��s subtle and satirical documentary about North Korea, The Parade (Poland, 1989).

   ²⁶ Foucault, Power, Truth Strategy, 24.

   ²⁷ Stoneman, ��Sins of Commission��, 129.

   ²⁸ Although, as Stuart Hall has pointed out, pluralism should not be confused with polysemy. Cf Stuart Hall, ��Encoding/Decoding��, 240. 

   ²⁹ Cf. Stoneman, ��Under the Shadow of Hollywood: the Industrial Versus the Artisanal��, 101.

   ³⁰ Irish Film Board, Review/Athbhreithniu 2000, 1.

   ³¹  Proposal for the ��Theory that Matters�� conference arranged by the Department of American Literature and Culture at the University of Lodz, 7-9 April 2010. When the same conference information suggested that theory could somehow ��deplete the energy of the text�� – I wondered why theory should be considered a diversion, digression or depletion? Theory can also energise! We should be careful about the employment of the word ��energy�� anyway as it is subject to loose use, constantly over-extending its connotations.

   ³² The critique constructs itself as challenging a notionally dominant ��Grand Theory�� and proposing to replace it with modest ��middle-level research��; the US academic apparatus re-asserts hegemony over European ideas in Bordwell, ��Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory��, 26-29.

   ³³ Adorno, ��Resignation,�� 202.

   ³⁴ Dickens, Hard Times.

   ³⁵ Cf. Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity, xi.

   ³⁶ Some earlier certainties are not longer available; I can recall watching with awe the way that, when Herbert Marcuse was asked incredulously by Labour Member of Parliament Brian Magee in an interview on BBC television in 1960s ��Why are you still a Marxist?�� He replied politely but firmly ��Because it is correct!��. Herbert Marcuse on the Frankfurt School, BBC programme in the Modern Philosophy series posted onYouTube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pzfy2izu44 accessed June 17, 2012.

   ³⁷ Quoted in Sussex, Lindsay Anderson, 75.

   ³⁸ Film Studies has reproduced rapidly and now moves across foci on documentary studies, third cinema, memory studies, sound and music, adaptation studies etc.

   ³⁹ The UK Film Council was abolished by the British government in July 2010.

   ⁴⁰ See Barthes, The Neutral.

   ⁴¹ Cf. Barthes, Grain of the Voice, 212.

   ⁴² Adorno, Minima Moralia, 25.

   ⁴³ Olson, Hollywood Planet, 30.

   ⁴⁴ Diverse examples of this creativity can be found in Adorno Minima Moralia; Barthes Mourning Diary; Debord Panegyric;or in Jean-Luc Godard��s later films.

   ⁴⁵ As Alexander Kluge suggested in his film Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos /Artists at the Top of the Big Top: Disoriented (Germany, 1967).