// r7)i i ///Jos//. THOMAS ELSAESSER For anyone following specialised film magazines like Cinema Journal, Wide Angle, Film Reader, Iris, Quarterly. Review of Film Studies or Screen, it hardly comes as a surprise that after the wave of film theory, one of the busiest areas of publishing recently has been in film history. TwoJyjpesof^res^peJm.v.e^ produced.^^^ew^Hm^ffistb^^a polemical dissatisfaction • wiS flic surveys aners_and fan magazines", even study Lloyds lusts of ships sunk during World War One to 53c3a^JewI^^^öOJ^IBMISfiSge exported_to_Eurqpejctuallyjeached its de^finäHsHr^fnVTa^eOTer of the old studios by multinational conglomerates in the 1960s and 70s meant that huge stocks of company files were dumped on j or donated to university libraries. One 1 Ät-i^ can now begin to write film history from j jpsa.^' both ends: from the top (David 0. ( S^ou/Seiznick's mejnos1_an^ mgm script con-! j\o ference. the entire'. United Artists i ^ company records), but also trom~ffie bottom upwards (the JJaiaban and Katz theatre chain, real estate values and the siting of local cinemas, the drive-in • *» Jeconomy). f'iim scholars are beginning 'Tto apply to the audio-visual culture of , \our century the sort of micro-history. ^■fVthat the 'Annähst School^m~^uice '^"^t^teveloped for medieval popular culture. Some of this spirit of discovery still breathes through the pages of Film History, but the textbook format and the need to cover all aspects tend to neutralise in the presentation what the argument is at pains to stress, 'that the force or causal power of generative mechanisms is unW-äfö in any particular historical event.' Which I take to mean "that in history one can rarely quantify by any statistically reliable method, but jias to remain as specific as possible and always attend to the actuai-dynamics-of-local phenomena. The authors' reason-able but non-committal pluralism is finally less satisfying than their own ■'' earlier investigations, which felt no need to conform to any abstract model. 'There are more than enough researchable.s topics in film history to keep scholars busy for the foreseeable future,' they persuasively suggest. But a ppssible sense of unease comes from the fact that they only intermittently reflect on why »they study film at all, rather than turning their formidable powers of , t . analysis to the motor industry or the ^'j1'" tobacco trade. F^hnhistorv's danger ;as a ' ?, r, discipline is that it becomes a kind of MHv^ intellectual challenge, whose., pleasure ^ ^"fr*- fies m the ever greater complexity of the method, compared with the relative simplicity of the data. 0oes film history need a theory, or is it ultimately a descriptive rather than an 248 analytical exercise, rearranging certain data in terms of their functioning and developing material for an interminable graduate research project? Allen and Gomery are weakest when they try to spell out the totality; strongest where they merely suggest it by attending to the specific. Can tecnnology explain style? Can technology expjain style? This is the question (Barry Sajp tries to answer. In the forthright manner of the first "five" chapters of Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, he might have voiced some of these objections to the New Film History's apparent indifference to 'actual films'. On the other hand, Salt would be the first to agree that, given the conflicting interpretations habitually produced by film critics, 'the response of anyone with any scientific inclination or training is to use some extra system of real knowledge to determine relative pertinence and validity of these different interpretations.' Which is itself a fair description of how Allen and Gomery would tackle the problem. features. He has an exhaustive list of what camera, what lighting eqmpmgnt or film stocJLjwas used for the firsttime wEere, in what film and~by whom. He hasTnacle it 'His business to ascertain when film-makers first_used 'correct' entrances and exits, 'correct' eyeline matches,~when tney got their scene-dissection 'right'. KiTt constructs the history of the cinema backwards, from the point of perfection of what he calls 'continuity cinema', but he is very much aware that the first application of a tedmique^oesjotj^ its general^ use. He might well be re-fucSant to admit it, but his own examples show that a strictly evolutionary history cannot be'wntten without also account-ing for the gaps and discontinuities, and tnat therefore the cinema involves cultural codes of intelligibility and meaning as well as scientifically established norms. For each period, Salt isolates what seem to him the most telljngucriteria hv^whjrh the nnrm_ran_he tested and deviation assessed. So, for 1900-06 it is? relation of close-up to general shot, the \ ■junction of inserts, different ways of ( handling shot _ transitions and, first j examples of analytical editing. For the early 1910s he concentrates on.composition ancf staging^ in depth. His} Salt's life work has been tojjuttdjip^ research on set design, on the use of «the elements for a comparative history^ of film stylesT"For instance, directorial ^style . analysis, he argues, has rarely igone beyond saying that Howard Hawks Ikeeps his camera at eye level. Salt offers fk 'commonsense' or functional explanatorily allows lor faster work, because it 'requires fewer changes to the lighting set-up. But Henry Hathaway, too, keeps the camera at eye level. 'The real stylistic distinction' is that 'Hawks keeps his Average Shot Length a little longer than normal, whereas Hathaway uses faster cutting.' Salt's main qualification as a historian is a truly encyclopedic knowledge of films. He has, by his own claims, logged in detail not hundreds, but thousands, of studio interiors and exteriors, on matte work and trick photography is equally impressive, because he covers both the United States and Europe. His engrossing knowledge of equipment means that his 'stylistic' attention focuses mainly on the technical aspects, but anyone wanting to know how many painted sets there were in the German cinema before The Cabinet ofDr Caligari can be sure that Salt has found and listed them. The interest of this and other examples is ?cinema: most so-called inventions ofk G^fr?' technique resulted from a series' of,Ptcw>C| diverse and more or less successfiii rj> "applications, often in films no longer ^remembered. If crediting certain films fn^} In the beginning: La Sortie des Usincs turn/ere a Lyons < 1895). nd film-makers (such as Griffith) with f 'firsts' is a typical sign of the old film history, Salt is very much a representative of the new school: nM-Biased samples, criteria of relevanre~Tfoat_arg verifiable,quantifiaBIe and constant -—-----— - Where"Salt is in a class of his own is in his patented invention, statistical style analysis, the centrepiece oFwľ5č1rts'~tfae asl (Average Shot Length), a unit of cutting rate that Salt has tabulated in hundreds of films to pin down a director's personality ('Where does "(Sternberg's heart] beat? In the centre of the frame. How does it beat? Slowly. Is this just rhetorical hyperbole? No, I will explain'), or to measure the difference between American and German films (Germans use longer takes) or to plot changes from orie decade to the next (the asl, bar-charted at around nine seconds for the 1930s, shows a far shallower gráp!) for the period 1946-51). Other pertinent statistics for Salt's purposes are shot scale, reverse angle (not to be confused with poirTPof-view shots) and, finally, camerajttpvements. ~Tn~""search of variables that might characterise rilmš7~Salt thus takes up, ŕälíier surprisingly, much the same 9 stylistic features that Andrew Sams,, auteurism's American high priestpliad first seized on. They in turn are not so * dissimilar from the criteria that Salt'Sy bete noire, Raymond Bellour, used in his analysis of a sequenceTrom Hitchcock's pThe Birds. The cyfference_is_all in the application. WJiere^J^rns_ or" Victor Perkins" would_interpret editing style or camera movements-expressively" in relation" to %hé"niéVänd Bellour described the functioning of "jaJiim by organising its stylistic Jigures in pairs (static shof moving shotjTclojie_-§fettm-e3jyi?i..shpt; seeirigTieen) in_order to define the build-ing "BIócEs of^jtn internally coherent system". Salt's method is ohiecjjye to the pointjjf madness:^lthouj^he^iyes_us ail th¥data; onTvľheľliolds the keys to its ultimate^sigmfijc^ce. There are hints that eventually (when more work has been done) one will be able to correlate, say, the percentage of camera movements with the asl figure in a director's work, to arrive at a grid of mean average norms for a country or period or genre. For the moment, however, the play^of similarity and difference that Salt pursues wiťh" šuch dedication reads likev a structuralist's nightmare. Salt's work may be seen as a technological history of^the_ cmjemg: it Ts difficufi'to verify, since he is so very sparing with his sources. The ambition, though, clearly goes beyond providing a mere handbook of cameras, lenses, moviolas and sound equipment, with examples of stylistic effects resulting from their use. Because Film Style and Technology is wholly production-oriented (director, . cameraman, art f? director, sound engineer are the agents ľ of change through intention, originality $ and''influence), there is, however, a danger of mistaking technology for" technique, as though a_film-maker were simply Banded the tools, to select the ones most usefuTTor the job, or as if technology, constantly evolving towards some ultimate goal, merely had to be plucked like npe fruit from the tree of Eňowleôľgg. And although aalt does not tell the old adventure story of wizards, inventors and geniuses, he seems quite uninterested in Jiow far the _styjistic norms be describes are" dependent on the inďägtiŕy^''aRKty~ft)í staudardise~~fhe required technology or to regulate its use. Nor .does Jie_ ielL.uslw.h£rtj^rešsures "brought about thetechnology in the first place. 7 * The New History has an easy time proving that inventions are rarely a jmatter of individuals, and that côm-jmercial application and exploitation js a fcomplex process. For Allen and Gomery. 'there is some truth in the assertion that ^ outlets- or forces hinder technology in ite relent-less~forw"ard3hrust? Missing from_the idea of the^inejna _as_tec_hnoipgy2into-. style, as exemplified by Salt, is above Sirs. sense_of_the economic conditions througH^hifih_technologyjfevelops jn a capi_t3jis£^p.cjety. It has been clear for some time, for instance, that Jldispn, who inspired so much of the mythology of the inventor genius, contributed little to developing the ciaejraa buX.wuclL.Jtp controlling the patents^ necessary_ for its exploitation. A~s~the leading figure tertind trie Motion Picture Trust, he could be said to be the father not of cinema, but of the monopolistic practices tyrjical otlhe film industry. Technology in application is bounded on the one siqe By^conomic considerations (how costly Sit toHntfo^uce and~fiow profitable to apply?) and on the other byquestions of what resislance^it "encounters, and from wriom. Can economics explain technology? 'the: state of technology at any given moment imposes certain limits on_lilm production.fr~but-would a ^historian not Have30^s& Total self-expression? Tj3taj_ jreahjm? TofauTSusiorasm?^ factors A Iittlf iutor: women workers in tin* Putin-color print room. Gomery's articles, two of which are reprinted in Film Sound, developed his general argument out of specific researches into the history_of_ the coming of sound. Within the overall logic of capitalism, the balance between the different variables involved in technological innovation is struck by a single objective, the 'long term maximisation of profits.' Gomery' is able to show that because sound films were an immediate success, all other problems—improvement to the equipment, cost of installation, training personnel, refurbishing production facilities and exhibition were overcome in record time. Yet although the hero of his narrative is neither Edison or De Forest, nor e\^en the brothers Warner, there is a central character: Waddill Catchings, Warner Brothers' business manager and financial adviser. Are we back to a great man theory? ' ■ \ If we take maximisation of profits as the underlying dynamic of technological change, we have not explained very much. Edward; Buscombe once argued that there were many different ways for a capitalist enterprise to make money, and therefore innovations like sound and colour could not be derived simply from the profit (or supply and demand) motive. Given the monopolistic organisation of the film industry, certain competitive strategies, like price cuts or increasing market share, are usually not available to the producer. The only competitive advantage is enjoyed by those who create a new kind of product. Sound film in this perspective was precisely that: a new kind of product. The implication is that the pursuit of profit always requires a weighing of different factors to attain the same goal,, and Gomery's emphasis on business management in his account of Warner Brothers means that, however plural his model purports to be, it is framed within the 249 / 7 ■'/terms of perhaps too narrow an economic determinism. If the economist's approach of Allen and Gomery gives no active rote to social forces or to the films themselves, and if the stylistics of Salt leave no room for economic determinants, could any form of history explain why change took one direction rather than another, or why audiences were attracted to the cinema at all, to make it such a powerful entertainment medium? A certain line of inquiry, usually associated with Jean-Louis ComolU, proceeded from the assumption that we owe the existence of the cinema to two mutually reinforcing social demands: 'to see life as it is' combining with the desire to make this a source of profit. An ideological priority joins_ an„ economic one, and it isT;he interplay between the two that regulates both the technological and the stylistic developments. Yet during the relatively short history of the cinema, what strikes the observer is also the slowness of change. For instance, it is now accepted that as a universally intelligible system of visual representation, mainstream cinema has not changed since roughly 1917. The addition of sound and colour had little effect on the 'basic cinematic apparatus'. Rick Altman and Mary Anne Doane make the point forcefully in Film Sound, showing how inaudible sound editing paralleled invisible image editing. In an article on 'Colour and Cinema', 1 Edward Branigan had similarly argued that colour related to deep focus, which in turn depended on coated lens technology. Resistance to change is therefore just as important and just as much in | need of explanation.-Historians such as I Allen and Gomery conclude from this | that the cinema, instead of responding to (some ideological demand such as the ^perfection of realism, actually functions ^according to the checks and balances of ■Self-regulation, whether on the economic -^feve^-ef-as-a-sSery-telling medium. Such notions as the maintenance of stability_ .between different elements are themselves historically determined. Edison's first sound apparatus. Can the audience explain the cinema? fr These potentially 'structuralist' tendencies among the New Historians are echoed in the pessimism of another French theorist, Jean-Louis Baudry, whose influence (along with that of Christian Metz and Comolli) gives Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Colour what might be called ananthrgr-, pological slant. Starting esserrtSrf^r&n^ The'space "film viewing creates for trie spectator—placed between screen arid projector, light source and image, seeing but not being seen—Baudry conceives of the cinema first and foremost as ;a certain type of experience, in one sen^e as old as Plato's parable of the cavfe, in another typically modern, because representing an unmediated collision between technology and non-productive, regressive fantasy. The cinema's history, its implicit goal, is determined not by a striving after realism, not by narrative (which is simply its motivating support), nor even illusionism and the magic of effects without cause, but the always already realised duplication of life, a mirroring of the self, and with it an anticipation of the self's own disappearance. To provide a kind of anthology of the cinema's involvement with 'vision, life, reality, movement—and death' seems to have been one of the less overt objectives of Cinema and Technology. Steve Neale has divided his subject into three chapters—Image, Sound, Colour—and in each he discusses a complex of questions ■ ranging from a rehearsal of names and dates to metaphysical speculation. 'Over and above the technology, on the one hand, and the films themselves, on the other, what was important, with the move, towards cinema projection and the elaboration of the relation between spectator, projector and screen, was the experience of cinema, and the insti-tutionalisation of that experience across society.' Much of what Neale has to say is, in the best as well as the worst sense, technical: clear as writing, but uncertain whom it addresses. One sometimes wonders why the novice should be required to know in so much detail what for the specialist is presented in quite an elementary manner. Like Allen and Gomery, Neale wants to impress upon his readers the materiality and heterogeneous elements that make up the cinematic apparatus. Like Salt, he is fascinated by the intricacy of the machines themselves. But among the collage of illustrations and quotations, the upbeat technological story and the downbeat philosophical; reflections perform a rather delicate balancing act. The" jthesis 1 take to be this: that the develop- -iments of the cinema towards illusionist l' substitution and duplication necessarily nvolve an ever greater predominance of he technological aspect over the craft ^nd bricoleur spirit of the cinema's origins, which in turn demands an ever more complex organisation of the industrial base. Nothing could be further from the minds of the editors of Film Sound Theory arid * Practice than global pessimism. This anthology convincingly suggests that an exciting new field has been opened up, one that may well come to determine the way we look at the cinema as a whole-—-and this for precise historical reasons. Sound for a long time has been the neglected field of film studies, for reasons Rick Altman explains in his 'Evolution of Sound Technology'. Because writers treated first the image and then sound, they committed the 'historical fallacy'. 'Instead of treating sound and image as simultaneous arid co-existent, the historical fallacy orders them chronologically, thus implicitly hierarchising them.' | Altman's essay deserves special mention, as a bold and original recasting of many traditional questions. He makes it clear that the turn to sound also comes * from a problem in film theory, namely the unsatisfactory explanations of whitt it is that makes the cinema attractive to the viewer in the first place. Without a theory of pleasure—and the possibility that this may have changed its nature over time—it is difficult to see how one could write a history of the cinema. The traditional explanation has always been the public's craving for realism; but on closer inspection, as we saw, this is kt variance with the facts.: Sound films were, popular not because^Efiey..JggTIEIL. particujariy realistic,^.b^ut_bec,aus^_one xould-see-an£hear-at^e^ame^ta attractivffn~lay ^ seTjgg^perc^Hgn^^s^^ig with colour; ~ wjiicrl^ai^fir-sfe—was—felt—to—be—highly-^ unrealistic. ......„„......... "ThlT'notibn that colour was more suitable for fantasy subjects persisted 250 Laying the soundtrack for Apocnlypst* Sow. Stills from Cinoum und Tvclutohitfy. well into the 1940s; it was only the advent of colour television that eventually 'naturalised' its use in the cinema. With television having the edge on realism, the movies have returned, especially since the reorganisation of the industry in the 1970s, to the controlled environment of the studios and the sound stages. Rather than effacing itself, technology in the form of special effects has become the cinema's major attraction. History, in this respect, has come full circle: the cinema first wooed patrons with the novelty of its technological marvels, before stars and story-telling became its chief selling points. The position taken by historians such as David Bordwell is that technology or technique cannot be isolated from other processes, chief among them being the development of narrative. Barry Salt would not quarrel with this, since for him the 'job' of movies is 'putting across the story*. Yet even if one replaces the idea of realism-as-pleasure with that of narrative-as-pleasure, the question does not quite resolve itself. Few historians fully address the question of why narrative became the driving force of cinema, and whether this may itself be subject to change. Today, the success of , science fiction as a genre, or of directors like Steven Spielberg whose narratives are simply anthology pieces from basic movie plots, suggests that narrative has to some extent become an excuse for the pyrotechnics of Industrial Light and Magic. The material gathered in Film Sound affords a good opportunity to compare the state-of-theory on sound (represented by Aitman, Mary Anne Doane, Alan Williams) not only with \ its economic history but with current practice and the attitudes of sound engineers to their craft. What is most instructive is to see how, under a certain angle, the theoretical and practical: discourses mirror each other. Aitman and Doane {and, from a related perspective, the contributions of Noel Burch, Noel Carroll and Alan Williams) underline the discontinuity between sound and image, their wholly constructed nature, and the tendencies of classical sound practice to efface that sound/image separation. The difference between a 'structural' (Burch's term), 'contrapuntal' (Lucy Fischer's analysis of Vertov), 'silent' use of sound (Carroll's description for Fritz Lang's AO and the Illusionist' practice typical of commercial feature films, has often served to distinguish European film-makers (Clair, Renoir) from Hollywood, and politically avant-garde directors (Straub, Godard) from 'bourgeois ideology'. —/ Hollywood practice depends on strict synchronisation. The spectator's pleasure in classical narrative film demands not only being 'centred' by the image and the story, but that the aural space should have 'presence'. Technology, however, creates a 'fantasmatic body, which offers a support as well as a point of identification for the subject addressed by the film' (Doane). Precisely because sound is fundamentally disembodied and illusionist, in the sense that its source is only by convention recognised as located in the image, anti-illusionist directors tend to foreground the integrity of their soundtrack. Jean-Marie Straub's total rejection of dubbing implies that aural space dominates visual space. Jean-Luc Godard, by contrast, recognises no hierarchies: he multiplies sound sources within a single image; he makes the spectator both viewer and listener, and no attempt is made to unify the two. Yet as Aitman (Rick, discussing Robert) points out, sound practice is a challenge to film theorists, because contemporary film-making at the industrial level is moving rather in the direction of giving sound precedence over the image. Avant-garde positions, such as that of Noel Burch, are being outflanked by commercial directors who take their cue from the technology and techniques of the record business. Developments in recording are concerned with what Aitman calls 'the splitting of the subject' —that is to say, giving the ear the thrills of divided pleasure, of sound densities and sound perspectives which, if translated into images, would not only be extremely avant-garde to the eye but positively threatening to that sense of coherence which is assumed to govern Hollywood ideology. One of the con- _ tributors to Film Sound speaks of a Second" Sound "T^oTutidir"'anTquoter-Michael Cimino," for whom Dolby sound 'can demolish the wall separating the viewer from the film. You can come close to demolishing the screen.' The goal, however, seems to be the creation of a sound space that is entirely in the listener's head. Walter Murch, 'sound designer' on Apocalypse Now: 'You try to get the audience to a point, somehow, where they can imagine the sound. They hear the sound in their minds, and it Jiy isn't on the track at all. That's the ideal sound, the one that exists totally in the mind.' If special effects work, where the image is composed and layered in analogy to the soundtrack of an iv, is to become the model of film-making, this can only intensify the 'imaginary' status of the cinema and its form of representation. And if sound as a system of subject effects is to determine the logic of the image, then one can expect to see changes in the relation of cinema to narrative as well, and some of the objectives that have inspired the New Film History may have to be revised. Economic and technological histories have shifted the emphasis from text to context. But a study of sound in relation to image would mean a return to the film text and the imaginary space in which it places the spectator. For film theory has long recognised that one of the major sources of audience pleasure is the splitting f of the subject in representation. This becomes more evident once jfilm texts are no longer unified by narrative but by the effects technology can produce, and the divisions and multiplications it imposes on sound and image. It is at this point that what I have described as the history of the cinema might reconcile itself with the concerns of film theory. And the new history stands back to back with, television, of which it is beginning to look like theipre-history: the predominance of economic factors, or the direct impact of technology and institutional constraints on narrative, are even more significant for television than for cinema. And at; the same time television, in spite of appearing to be all about the 'outside', thejreal world, is, like sound, happening "inside'. The individual tv slot or programme becomes almost impossible to analyse in isolation, except as a system of cues] and stimuli for the distracted viewer/Iiste;ner. What in this respect is missing from Allen and Gomery, from Salt and Neale, is a more direct awareness of the ■ historical changes underlying their own perspective: none of these books, except^ Film Sound, pays attention to the jnev technologies as they affect hot only the^ cinema but how we come to view its^ history. The New History, depending on the one hand on archivists and restorers and on the other on video and television} may well be the phoenix that rises fron the ashes of the cinema we once knew. 251