1
Making Filius Mean
For better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.
-Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
"I do not know," remarks Roland Barthes, "if reading is not, constitutively,
a plural field of scattered practices, of irreducible effects, and
if, consequently, the reading of reading, meta-reading, is not itself
merely a burst ofideas, offears, ofdesires, ofdelights, ofoppressions."l
Barthes's doubt seems to me too strong; a systematic metacriticism of
interpretation is a plausible project. Nonetheless, the task does require
some ground-clearing.
Interpretation as Construction
To speak of"interpretation" invites misunderstanding from the outset.
The Latin interpretatio means "explanation" and derives from interpres)
a negotiator or translator or go-between. Interpretation is then a kind
of explanation inserted between one text or agent and another. Originally,
interpretation was conceived as wholly a verbal process, but in
current usage the term can denote just about any act that· makes or
transmits meaning. A computer interprets instructions, a conductor
interprets a score. A divinator interprets the will of the gods, while
at the United Nations an interpreter translates between languages. In
the criticism of the arts, interpretation may be counterposed to description
or analysis; alternatively, criticism as a whole is sometimes
identified with interpretation. A perceptual psychologist may describe
the simplest act of hearing or seeing as an interpretation of sensory
data, while a philosopher may speak of interpretation as a high-level
act of judgment. Our first problem, then, is to interpret "interpreta-
tion."
I start by stipulating some exclusions. Some writers take "interpretation"
to be synonymous with all production ofmeaning.2 The chief
2 Making Films Mean
notion behind this broad usage is that any act of understanding is
mediated; even the simplest act of perceptual recognition is "interpretive"
in that it is more than a simple recording of sensory data. If no
knowledge is direct, all knowledge derives from "interpretation." I
agree with the premise- but see no reason to advance the conclusion.
Psychologically aIld socially, knowledge involves inferences. In the
chapters that follow I shall use the term'interpretation to denote only
certain kinds ofinferences about meaning. For much the same reason,
I shall not be using reading as a synonym for all inferences about
meaning, or even for those interpretive inferences about films' meanings.
I reserve the term reading for interpretation of literary texts.3
Introducing the concept of inference enables us to flesh out a common
conceptual distinction. Most critics distinguish between comprehending
a film and interpreting it, though they would often disagree
about where the boundary line is to be drawn. This distinction follows
the classic hermeneutic division between ars intelligendiJ the art of
understanding, and, ars explicandiJ the art of explaining.4
Roughly
speaking, one can understand the plot of a James Bond film while
remaining wholly oblivious to its more abstract mythic, religious,
ideological, or psychosexual significance. On the basis of the comprehension/interpretation
distinction, tradition identifies two sorts of
meaning, summed up in Paul Ricoeur's definition of interpretation:
"the work ofthought which consists in deciphering the hidden meaning
in the apparent meaning, in unfolding the levels of meaning
implied in the literal meaning."5 Thus comprehension is concerned
with apparent, manifest, or direct meanings, while interpretation is
concerned with revealing hidden, nonobvious meanings.6
To speak ofhidden meanings, levels ofmeaning, and revealing meanings
evokes the dominant framework within which critics understaJ;ld
interpretation. The artwork or text is taken to be a container into
which the artist has stuffed meanings for the perceiver to pull out.
Alternatively, an archaeological analogy treats the text as having strata,
with layers or deposits of meaning that must be excavated. In either
case, comprehension and interpretation are assumed to open up the
text, penetrate its surfaces, and bring meanings to light. As Frank
Kermode puts it: ''The modern critical tradition, for all its variety, has
one continuous element, the' search for occulted sense in texts of
whatever period."7
Yet to assume that sense is "in" the text is to reify what can only
be the result of a process. Comprehending and interpreting a literary
Making Films Mean 3
text, a painting, a play, or a film constitutes an activity in which the
perceiver plays a central role. The text is inert until a reader or listener
or spectator does something to and with it. Moreover, in any act of
perception, the effects are ''underdetermined'' by the data: what E. H.
Gombrich calls "the beholder's share" consists in selecting and structuring
the perceptual field. Understanding is mediated by transformative
acts, both "bottom-up"-mandatory, automatic ·psychological
processes-and "top-down"-conceptual, strategic ones. The sensory
data of the film at hand furnish the materials out of which inferential
processes of perception and cognition build meanings. Meanings are
not found but made.8
Comprehension and interpretation thus involve the construction of
meaning out of textual cues. In this respect, meaning-making is a
psychological and social activity fundamentally akin to other cognitive
processes. The perceiver is nota passive receiver of data but an active
mobilizer of structures and processes (either "hard-wired" or learned)
which enable· her to search for information relevant to the task and
data at hand. In watching a film, the perceiver identifies certain cues
which prompt her to execute many inferential activities-ranging from
the mandatory and very fast activity of perceiving apparent motion,
through the. more "cognitively penetrable" process of constructing,
say, links between scenes, to the still more open process of ascribing
abstract meanings to the film. In most cases, the spectator applies
knowledge structures to cues which she identifies within the film.
Taking meaning-making to be a constructive process does not enta~
sheer relativism or an infinite diversity of interpretation. I take the
informing metaphor seriously. Construction is not ex nihilo creation;
there must be prior materials which undergo transformation.9 Those
materials include not only the perceptual output furnished by mandatory
and universal bottom-up processes but also the higher-level
textual data upon which various interpreters base their inferences.10 A
composition, a camera movement, or a line ofdiaiogue may be ignored
by one critic and highlighted by another, but each datum remains an
intersubjectivelydiscriminable aspect of the film. While critics build
up meanings by applying institutional protocols and normalized psychological
strategies, we shall see that they typically agree upon what
textual cues are "there," even if they interpret the cues in differing
ways. Indeed, in Chapter 11 I shall argue that one virtue of a poetics
ofcinema is that it offers middle-level theoretical concepts that capture
intersubjectively significant cues.
4 Making Films Mean
Both comprehension and interpretation, then, require the spectator
to apply conceptual schemes to data picked out in the film. What sorts
of conceptual schemes might be used?
The first candidate might be a theory. A film theory consists of a
system of propositions that claims to explain the nature' and functions
of cinema. Many critics today would assert that, consciously or unconsciously,
the interpreter employs some theory in order to pick out
relevant cues in the film, organize them into significant patterns, and
arrive at an interpretation. For example, to execute a Freudian interpretation
ofa film is to utilize a theory about, say, how cinema channels
desire, and this will affect the selection of data and the inferences
which the critic draws from them. Less obviously, many critics would
go on to assert that even the critic who claims to subscribe to no
theory but seeks only to understand the .film "in itself" can be shown
to have a tacit theory (humanist, organicist, or whatever) that shapes
the interpretive act.
In several respects, I think, theories do play a role in conceptual
schemes, particularly in contemporary criticism. There seems little
doubt, for instance, that psychoanalytic theories of cinema do assist
many critics in making meaning. But we must ask how this assistance
takes place. In what sense does the interpretation follow from the
theory?
Perhaps the critic's interpretation tests a theory. That is, a critical
exegesis, judged acceptable on grounds ofinterpretive propriety, functions
to confirm, revise, or reject a theoretical argument. This makes
the interpretation roughly analogous to the scientific experiment that
tests a hypothesis, while the conventional procedures across theoretical
schools become something like an accepted scientific method.
In the ~ourse of this book I shall be.trying to show that no such
pure separation of theory and method obtains within film criticism.
For now, I simply suggest that film interpretations do not conform
to the "testing" model. Unlike a scientific experiment, no interpretation
can fail to confirm the theory, at least in the hands ofthe practiced
critic. Criticism uses ordinary (that is, nonformalized) language, encourages
metaphorical and punning redescription, emphasizes rhetorical
appeals, and refuses to set definite bounds on relevant data-all
in the name of novelty and imaginative insight. These protocols give
the critic enough leeway to claim any master theory as proven by the
case at hand.
Merely finding confirming instances does not suffice as a rigorous
Making Films Mean 5
test of a theory in any event. This is the error of "enumerative inductivism."
A confirmed scientific hypothesis must also pass the test of
"eliminative inductivism": it must be a better candidate than itsrivals.II
At any given time, a scientific claim is tested.against a background of
alternative theoretical explanations. But this condition is usually not
met within the interpretive institution. Even interpretations which
tacitly claim to be the most adequate do not characteristically present
themselves as confirming one theory at the· expense of others.
Instead ofpositing an inductivist separation oftheory and criticism,
perhaps we should think of the critic's interpretation as deductively
deriving from the theory. According to this line of argument, no
description of anything is conceptually innocent; it is shot through
with presuppositions and received categories. Therefore every critical
interpretation presllpposes a theory offilm, ofart,·ofsociety, ofgender,
and so on. Stanley Fish pushes this notion toward a thoroughgoing
"coherentist" account, whereby every interpretation necessarily confirms
.some underlying theory; there is no Archimedean point outside
the theory on which the interpreter can stand.12
On conceptual grounds, the deductivist conception is far from cogent.
A theory has conceptual coherence, and it is designed to analyze
or explain some particular phenomenon. Assumptions, presuppositions,
opinions, and half-baked beliefs do not add up to a theory. My
conviction that credit sequences come at the beginning and end of
movies, that the film's star is likely to portray the protagonist, and
that Technicolor is aesthetically superior to Eastmancolor does not
constitute a theory of film. Nor can a theory be inferred from my
entire (very large) stock of such beliefs-a stock which, incidentally,
contains fuzzy, slack, and contradictory formulations.
Even ifevery interpreter tacitly harbored a full-blown theory offilm,
it would not necessarily determine the details ofany given interpretive
outcome. Two psychoanalytic critics might agree on every tenet of
abstract doctrine and still produce disparate interpretations. In any
event, no critic acts as if every theory automatically extruded an interpretation
that is challeng~able only in terms of that theory. Critic B
can· agree with Critic A's putative theory but suggest that certain
aspects of the film still need explaining. Or Critic B can accept the
interpretation as valuable and enlightening.while proceeding to dispute
the theory. Neither critic assumes that the theory dictates the
interpretation.
So might we simply say that the critic's interpretation illustrates a
6 Making Films Me~
theory? Jacques Lacan opens his seminar on Poe's "Purloined Letter"
by announcing: "We have decided to illustrate for you today the truth
which may be drawn from that moment in Freud's thought under
study-namely, that it is the symbolic order which is constitutive for
the subject-by demonstrating in a story the decisive orientation
which the subject receives from the itinerary of the signifier."13 In a
similar fashion, some theoretically inflected criticism has used films to
illustrate the theories proposed.14
This is a much weaker claim than the inductive and deductive
conceptions. To make an interpretation a parable of a theory is not to
undertake to establish the truth of the theory. Any doctrine, be it
psychoanalysis or Scientology, can be illustrated by artworks. Moreover,
this proposition runs into a problem already mentioned. If not
every set of beliefs relevant to the interpretive act counts as a theory
of cinema, then the interpretation may illustrate the beliefs but will
not illustrate a theory.
Perhaps, then, a theory merely offers insights which can guide the
critic's interpretation. This formulation sounds appealing, and many
practicing critics would probably accept it. Once again, though, this
makes the relation oftheory to the work only contingent. An unusually
wise critic, wholly innocent of theory, might be brimful of insights
which could yield intriguing interpretations. And once again, this view
surrenders any concern for the theory's claims to truth. From this
perspective, a critic could use the I Ching, numerology, astrology, or
any fanciful system as long as it generated hunches that led to acceptable
interpretations. In fact, the critical institution does not permit
such wide-ranging research methods. Only certain theories count as
worth mining, and those are assumed to be valid or accurate on
grounds other than their applicability to the film at hand. (Psychoanalytic
theory furnishes obvious examples.) "Insight" does not suffice
as a criterion to guide critics' choice and use of theories.
I have tried to show that the critic's interpretation does not follow
from a theory in any strong sense. Some other sort of conceptual
scheme must playa role. Since Jonathan Culler's pathbreaking Structuralist
Poetics) several theorists have proposed that critics produce
interpretations by following rules.IS Despite the significant results of
this line of research, the concept of rules upon which it rests remains
somewhat yague.16 In most cases, the term rule is largely synonymous
with "norm" or "convention."
Being a little fussy here will help clarify the argument to come.
Making Films Mean 7
Critics arrive at interpretations, I suggest, by using certain conventions
of reasoning and language. Criticism is conventional in that broad
sense identified by David Lewis: it creates regularities in behavior by
coordinating the actions ofagents who have expectations that common
goals will be met.17 But critics do not obey stringent rules, like the
one that directs drivers to stop for a red light. Critical interpretation,
it seems to me, chiefly consists of a "covert" or tacit conventionality.
In such cases people are largely unaware ofthe conventions they obey.
Imitation and habit lead agents to expect coordinated action from
others but without any particular awareness of an underlying rule.IS
The concept oftacit convention seeks to capture both psychological
and social dimensions of the interpretive activity. Psychologically, interpretive
conventions rely upon reasoning practices. Most generally,
human beings possess broad inductive skills which govern everyday
sense-making, and these play a large role in interpreting artworks.
Critics also possess skills which are attuned to specialized domains.
Together, all such reasoning practices constitute interpretive expertise.
The rules involved are primarily rules ofthumb. Like an artisan using
strategies derived from experience, the critic draws upon a repertory
of options and adjusts them to the particular task. And this skill no
more constitutes a theory ofcinema than a good bicyclist's know-how
amounts to a physics of moving bodies or a soci910gy of recreation.
From a social perspective, conventions can be seen as coordinating
agents' patterns of action for the benefit of the goals of a group. To
perform the· role of film interpreter is to accept certain aims of the
interpretive institution and to act in accordance with norms that enable
those aims to be reached. Here again, goal-achieving strategies need
not consist of theories in any rigorous sense. Indeed, if the critic is
like an artisan, she will tend to "dwell within" the standard practices:
abstract theoretical knowledge will fade into the background, tacit
procedures will govern her inferences, and attention will focus on the
minutiae of the task at hand.I9
A constructivist account of"the beholder's share," then, has the task
of explaining how pragmatic reasoning practices guide the critic's act
ofassumption, expectation, and exploration; how cues are highlighted,
arranged, and worked into the basis of critical inferences; how the
film flashing on the screen is reconstructed into a meaningful whole
by the perceiver's perceptual and cognitive activity. Chapter 2 will
seek to show how institutional norms and reasoning strategies shape
the conventions of critical interpretation. Before. we consider them,
8 Making Films Mean
though, I want to introduce some distinctIons that are fundamental
to this book's argument. It is time to say more about meaning.
Meaning Made
I suggest that when spectators or critics make sense of a film, the
meanings they construct are of only four possible types.
1. The perceiver may construct a concrete ''world,'' be it avowedly
fictional or putatively real. In making sense of a narrative film, the
spectator builds up some version of the diegesis) or spatio-temporal
world, and creates an ongoing story (fabula) occurring within it.20
The spectator may construe nonnarrative forms, such as rhetorical or
taxonomic ones, as proposing a world that manifests structures of an
argumentative or categorical nature.21 In constructing the film's world,
the spectator draws not only on knowledge of filmic and extrafilmic
conventions but also on conceptions of causality, space, and time and
on concrete items of information (for example, what the Empire State
Building looks like). This very extensive process eventuates in what I
shall call referential meaning, with the referents taken as either imaginary
or real. We can speak of both Oz and Kansas as aspects of
referential meaning in The Wizard ofOz.' Oz is an intratextual referent,
Kansas an extratextual one.22
2. The perceiver may move up a level of abstraction and assign a
conceptual meaning or "point" to the fabula and .diegesis she constructs.
She may seek out explicit cues of various sorts for this, assuming
that the film "intentionally" indicates how it is to be taken. The
film is assumed to "speak directly." A verbal indication such as the
line ''There's no place like home" at the end of The Wizard ofOz) or
a stereotyped visual image such as the scales of Justice, could be said
to furnish such cues. When the viewer or critic takes the film to be,
in one way or .another, "stating" abstract meanings, he is constructing
what I shall call explicit meaning.23 Referential and explicit meaning
make up what are usually considered "literal" meanings.
3. The perceiver may also construct covert, symbolic, or implicit
meanings. The film is now assumed to "speak indirectly."24 For example,
you might assume that Psycho's referential meaning consists of
its fabula and diegesis (the trip of Marion Crane from Phoenix to
Fairvale, and what happens there), and you might. take its explicit
Making'Films Mean 9
meaning to be the idea that madness can overcome sanity. You might
then go on to argue that Psycho's implicit meaning is that sanity and
madness cannot be easily distinguished. Units ofimplicit meaning are
commonly called "themes," though they may also be identified as
"problems," "issues," or "questions."25
The spectator may seek to construct implicit meanings when she
cannot find a way to reconcile an anomalous element with a referential
or explicit aspect of the work; or the "symbolic impulse" may be
brought in to warrant the hypothesis that any element, anomalous or
not, may serve as the basis of implicit meanings. Furthermore, the
critic may take implicit meanings to be consistent, at some level, with
the referential and explicit meanings assigned to the work. Or, as in
the process ofirony, implicit meanings may be posited as contradicting
other sorts. For example, ifyou posit that the psychiatrist's final speech
in Psycho explicitly draws a line between sanity and madness, you might
see the film's implicit denial ofsuch a demarcation as creating an ironic
effect.
4. In constructing meanings of types 1-3, the viewer assumes that
the film "knows" more or less what it is doing. But the perceiver may
also construct repressed or symptomatic meanings that the work divulges
"involuntarily." Moreover, such meanings are assumed to be at odds
with referential, explicit, or implicit ones. If explicit meaning is like a
transparent garment, and implicit meaning is like a semiopaque veil,
symptomatic meaning is like a disguise. Taken as individual expression,
symptomatic meaning may be treated as the consequence ofthe artist's
obsessions (for example, Psycho as a worked-over version ofa fantasy
of Hitchcock's). Taken as part of a social dynamic, it may be traced
to economic, political, or ideological processes (for example, Psycho as
concealing the male fear of woman's sexuality).
In what follows, I shall assume that the activity of comprehension
constructs referential and explicit meanings, while the process of interpretation
constructs implicit and symptomatic meanings. But I do
not intend the comprehension/interpretation couplet to correspond to
a distinction between the naive viewer's "innocent viewing" and the
trained viewer's "active" or "creative" reading. A first-time viewer of
a film under "normal" conditions may well seek to construct implicit
and symptomatic meanings, while the interpretive critic reflecting on
the film after the fact will still find referential and explicit meanings
10 Making Films Mean
relevant. Still, in this book I will not be much concerned with comprehension.26
My stress here falls on interpretation, conceived as a
cognitive activity taking place within particular institutions.27
Barthes's pessimism about a metacriticism of reading is probably
based on the fact that interpreters can ascribe an indefinitely large
range of meanings to a textual element. If I am right, however, each
such meaning will function as one of the four sorts I have indicated.
The taxonomy makes it possible to study-socially, psychologically,
rhetorically-the principles and procedures of meaning-making, independent
of the particular meanings that are made.
What must be stressed is that these four categories of meaningconstruction
are functional and heuristic) not substantive. Used in the
processes of comprehension and interpretation, they constitute distinctions
with which perceivers approach films; they are assumptions
which can generate hypotheses about particular meanings. To the same
textual element, different critics assign not only different meanings
but also different sorts ofmeaning. The sexual meaning ofthe skyscrapers
and drills in The Fountainhead may be considered explicit or implicit
or symptomatic, depending on the rationale of the critic's
argument.
This is one reason why interpretation can generate a cycle ofmeaning-production.
Critic A can take certain referential and explicit meanings
as literal and seek to interpret the film as having other, implicit
meanings. Critic B can take the same implicit meanings as a point of
departure and build a symptomatic interpretation of what they, and
the referential and explicit meanings, repress. But the next interpretation
can swallow up Critic B's. Critic C may offer a new set of
symptomatic meanings, perhaps by treating Critic B's interpretation
as repressing the real dynamic of the text. Or Critic C may treat the
entire configuration of meanings as implicit, so that the work deliberately
symbolizes the relation of the repressed to the manifest con-
tent.2S
Consider a controversy that arose in 1955 around Lindsay Anderson's
critique of the ending of On the Wateifront. Although the opening
title announces the film as showing how a ''vital democracy" can
defeat "self-appointed tyrants," Anderson contends that the film actually
celebrates undemocratic action. He suggests that throughout
the movie Terry acts wholly on his own, spurred on by selfishness and
revenge. Anderson also proposes that the final scene of the beaten
Terry leading the dockmen back to work harbors a fascist meaning,
that of the need to follow a strong leader. Anderson is constructing
Making Films Mean 11
an explicit meaning (the democratic moral), which he attributes to the
film's "consciousness," and a repressed meaning (the totalitarian faith
in a superman) that works against this. The latter meaning emerges
in the final image ofthe lowering portcullis shutting the men offfrom
the mob. ''Whether intentional or not," Anderson notes, "the symbolism
is unmistakable": the men are locked in a dark world of toil,
and Terry's sacrifice has won them no real liberation.29
Several Sight and Sound readers wrote in to dispute Anderson's
symptomatic interpretation. Some recast his data in referential terms:
the workers follow Terry because they recognize his right to ~ job;
they acknowledge him to be their surrogate and let him go forward
as "a matter ofcourtesy and respect." Others proposed implicit meanings:
Terry's walk symbolizes his moral rebirth or recalls Christ's Via
Dolorosa.3o The most extensive rebuttal was offered by Robert
Hughes, who posits a psychological development in Terry that leads
him to cut himself off from both Johnny Friendly's gang and his
fellow workers. Hughes points out that before the climactic fight Terry
replies to the gang's taunts with: "I'm standin' over here right now."
Hughes adds: "His standpoint has changed." That is, Hughes puns
on the word standpoint to make Terry's physical separation imply
psychological independence.31 Thus Terry's fil1al walk becomes not
the march of a herd's leader but a signal that he has ·repudiated the
gang, a decision that impels the dockers to·cluster around him. Hughes
counters Anderson's symptomatic interpretation with one that relies
on implicit meanings. We have long known that critics can shift their
interpretive focus fromdaturn to datum (here, from the portcullis
image to a significant line of dialogue); we ought to recognize that
they can also shift among types of meaning.
Nor should we assume that the four sorts of meanings constitute
levels which the critic must traverse in a given sequence. The. interpreter
need not analyze referential or explicit me~ing in detail. There
is evidence that whereas beginning interpreters of poetry do read
referentially and have trouble making the thematic leap, skilled interpreters
try out implicit meanings from the start and often neglect the
"literal" level, or summon it up only to help the interpretation along.32
Teaching cinema in college furnishes plenty of occasions to watch
people plunge into interpretations of shots whose diegetic status has
not yet been established. I once attended a conference at which a
British film theorist confidently offered symbolic interpretations of
frame enlargements from movies which he had never seen.
At times, of course, a critic can try to halt the play of meaning by
12 Making Films Mean
dismissing implicit or symptomatic possibilities and tying the film
more closely to the referential and explicit levels. This is what some
of the Sight and Sound readers tried to do with Anderson's symptomatic
interpretation~ Another example would be Dwight MacDonald's
claim that Fellini's 8112 expresses its theme of aging "not in Bergmanesque
symbols or narcissistic musings but in episodes that arise naturally
out of the drama." The film is "nothing but a pleasurable work
of art ... a worldly film, all on the surface ... delightfully obvious."33
Yet another critic can always claim that sticking to the literal level
ignores the intriguing possibilities ofmeaning offered by the text, and
that one is entided, perhaps compelled, to look more closely.
Furthermore, as the On the Waterfront instance suggests, there is
not always a consensus about the film's explicit and referential meanings.Most
viewers seem to agree that Invasion of the Body Snatchers
offers a "message," but there is considerable dispute about exacdy
whether it is anticommunist, anti-American, or anticonformist. Worse,
viewers may also disagree about ''what happens" in the diegesisabout
the concrete actions, the characters' motives, the definiteness of
the resolution, and many other aspects. The critic can back up his
construal either by seeking out extratextual information, such as interviews
with the director, or by looking for more evidence at the
referential level. Neither course will inevitably yield firm results. A
moviegoer writes in to a columnist:
Dear Pat: I almost had a heart attack when the writer in the movie
Stand by Me) played by Richard Dreyfuss, turned off his word processor
without pushing the key to "save" the story. Now a friend
insists this was meant to be symbolic, that he was putting the past
behind him. What are the facts?
-Hacker, Marina del Rey, California
Dear Hacker: It was ignorance, not philosophical. Neither director
Rob Reiner nor Dreyfuss uses home computers-nor apparently did
anyone else connected with the picture.34
Hacker's friend follows the critic's rule ofthumb that referential anomalies
furnish good cues for implicit meaning. In an equally common
countermove, Pat looks for extratextual sources to explain the referential
uncertainty. The first tactic encourages the critic to ask, ''What
does the referential anomaly contribute to the text?" (Is it, for instance,
inviting "symbolic" or "philosophical" reflection? Does it create an
ambiguity?) The second tactic invites the critic to ask, "How did this
Making Films Mean 13
anomalyget in the text?" (Did the artist make a mistake? Did censors
interfere?) The disparity is that between functionalist and causal explanations
and, more notoriously, between a "formalist" criticism and
a "historical" one.
Taking meaning-making as a constructive activity leads us to a fresh
model of interpreting films. The critic does not burrow into the text,
probe it, get behind its facade, dig to reveal its hidden meanings; the
surface/depth metaphor does not capture the inferential process of
interpretation. On the constructivist account, the critic starts with
aspects of the film ("cues") to which certain meanings are ascribed.
An interpretation is built upward, as it were, gaining solidity and scale
as other textual materials and appropriate supports (analogies, extrinsic
evidence, theoretical doctrines) are introduced. Another critic may
come along and add a wing or story to the interpretation, or detach
portions for use in a different project, or build a larger· edifice that
aims to include the earlier one, or knock the first one down and start
again. Yet every critic, as I shall try to show, draws on craft traditions
that dictate how proper interpretations are built.
Interpretive Doctrines
The types of meaning-making I have described are clearly discernible
across many centuries of literary interpretation. A thumbnail history,
however schematic, can usefully remind us that film criticism carries
on the routines of a remarkably coherent tradition.
In antiquity, pre-Socratic writers made Homer the vehicle of symbolic
meanings. Anaxagoras identified Penelope's web with the process
ofthe syllogism, while the Sophists and the Stoics interpreted Homer's
gods as representating natural cosmic forces. Such significance, often
labeled "allegory" or hyponoia ("under-meanings"), is a cle"ar instance
of implicit meaning. For Plato, however, implicit meanings could not
redeem poetry: "A child is not able to judge which [works] have
hidden meanings and which do not."35 Therefore, Plato argued, only
those works with accurate and morally correct meanings (specifically,
ofreferential and explicit sorts) ought to be producedin the Republic.
For Aristotle, however, poetry necessarily treats the universal qualities
of human behavior.36 Although the Poetics notably avoids discussing
interpretation, the claim that poetry is "more philosophical and serious"
than history furnished Renaissance writers with a rationale for
disclosing implicit meanings in a literary work. Similar possibilities
14 Making Films Mean
were opened to eighteenth-century thinkers by Longinus' remark that
in a great passage of literature, "more is meant than meets the ear."37
By the second century A.D., the Bible had replaced Homer as the
chiefspur to interpretive activity. In the Roman period, the Hellenistic
Jew Philo of Alexandria borrowed the Stoics' allegorical method in
order to produce implicit meanings, as in this account of Samuel:
"Probably there was an actual man called Samuel, but we conceive of
the Samuel ofthe scripture not as a living compound ofsoul and body
but as a mind which rejoices in the service and worship of God and
that only."38 In- rabbinical commentaries on- the Bible, peshat ("plain
sense") focused on explicit meanings, while midrash consisted offilling
in referential gaps (for example, what Cain said to Abel) and producing
symbolic interpretations (for example, in planting a seed a biblical
personage is imitating God, who created Eden).39 With the spread of
Christianity, the church fathers needed to make the Gospel coherent
and comprehensive for the sake of winning converts and combatting
heresy. Pauline exegesis developed the doctrine of typological meaning,
whereby a person or event in the Old Testament was said to
prefigure one in the New. This required an implicit analogy, or what
Paul, borrowing from the Greeks, called "allegory."40 Now explicit
meanings in one portion of Scripture could furnish the basis for
discovering implicit meaning in another.
The Alexandrian interpreter Origen, who was the first person to
teach theology under church auspices, devised an interpretive method
that eventually became Augustine's famous doctrine ofthe four senses
of biblical texts. According to this, any passage could be read historically,
allegorically (or typologically), morally (that is, as presenting
how we should live now), and anagogically (as prophesying the heavenly
glory to come). In our jargon, the historical meaning is referential,
while the other 'three may be either explicit or implicit, depending on
the passage. The doctrine of the four senses was imported into the
reading of secular works as well, as can be seen in the celebrated
1319 letter, possibly by Dante, that suggests that The Divine. Comedy
is "polysemous,. that is, having many meanings."41·Such operations of
meaning-tnaking were not confined to texts. The twelfth-century Abbot
Suger described his bejeweled altar panels as shining "with the
radiance of delightful allegories" and leading· the mind to heaven "in
an anagogical manner."42
Interpretive thought in th.e Renaissance continued to appeal to the
sorts of lueanings r· have described. With pagall mythology and the
Making Films Mean 15
Bible as their basis, commentators and historians assigned referentially
based historical and cosmological meanings to obscure passages, ascribed
.explicit morals to fables, and explicated tales and icons as
edifying allegories of the moral life.43 Renaissance mythographers
produced detailed symbolic readings ofHomer,.Virgil, Ovid, and even
ancient Egyptian texts.44 A dance could be taken as an allegory of the
planets' celestial course.45 The northern humanists of the sixteenth
century composed emblem books and mythographic encyclopedias
aiding the public in deciphering symbolic images and serving as manuals
for practicing artists.46 Within a century, Vermeer's paintings of
everyday interiors could bear implicit meanings.47 Literary theory had
arrived at the formulation that poetry both teaches and pleases, and
Renaissance theorists linked poetry's didactic function to its power to
deliver knowledge of ethical activity. In the hands of humanists like
Sidney, verbal art became an allegory of right conduct.
While such pragmatic interpretive activities continued in various
arts over the next several centuries, a new theory ofinterpretation was
emerging that promised, in contrast to church exegesis, a "scientific"
basis for assigning meaning. This can be traced to Spinoza's Traetatus
theologico-politicus of 1670. Spinoza insisted, against patristic exegesis,
that hermeneutics must be concerned wholly with meaning, not with
truth. He proposed that the interpreter's construction of meaning be
constrained by the grammatical rules of the text's language, by the
coherence of its parts, and by the historical context of its epoch.48
Spinoza's tenets came to inform what has been called the "philological"
tradition of hermeneutics in the nineteenth century. According to
F. A. Wolf, the interpreter must grasp the author's thoughts, and this
can be done by filling in referential background.49 Friedrich Ast took
a more comprehensive view, arguing that the interpreter must grasp
not only the letter (that is, the referential meaning) and the "sense"
(what is assumed to be the explicit meaning) but also the "spirit" (the
implicit meaning).50 F. D. E. Schleiermacher revised the philological
tradition by shifting the emphasis from textual features to the psychological
process of comprehension, conceived as an identification with
the author.51 In founding hermeneutics as "the art of understanding,"
Schliermacher took it out of the provinces of law, linguistics, and
religion and made it a central domain ofthe human sciences-a project
which Wilhelm Dilthey was to continue in his development· of l1ermeneutics
as a psychological, comparative, and historical discipline.52
The philological tradition resurfaced in literary studies at the end
16 Making Films Mean
of· the nineteenth century under the aegis of Gustave Lanson, the
founder of literary explication de texte. Like the hermeneutic thinkers,
Lanson sought to interpret the text historically. The interpreter starts
with the text's literal orgrammatical sense and supplements that with
social and biographical background. Both activities involve what I
have called the construction of referential meaning. Then the interpreter
explicates the literary sources of the text, as determined by
contemporary models of language or genre. Finally the interpreter
moves to the moral meaning of the text.53 Since the latter two stages
reveal what Lanson called the text's "secret,"54 they produce what I
have called implicit meanings. Like other philologists, Lanson· constrained
his interpretation by a principle of fidelity to authorial intention,
arrived at through scrupulous positivist research.55
Lanson's Viennese contemporary Sigmund Freud proposed a far
more radical conception of interpretive activity. Some historians hold
that psychoanalytic interpretation derives from the rhetorical, ecclesiastical,
and philological traditions.56 Others consider psychoanalysis
to be allied with that "hermeneutics of suspicion" practiced by Marx
and Nietzsche.57 Michel Foucault sees psychoanalysis as providing "a
perpetual principle of dissatisfaction" in that it points "not toward
that which must be rendered gradually more explicit by the progressive
illumination of the implicit but towards what is there and yet is
hidden."58 Certainly, in many respects Freud did not go beyond revealing
what I have called implicit meanings. (His later approach to
symbolism supplies the most obvious examples.) Yet he also made an
original contribution to the interpretive tradition by demonstrating
the force of repressed meaning. Explicit or implicit meaning could be
a decoy. Freudian psychoan~ysis posits not discrete layers to be peeled
away but a dynamic struggle between "rational" pressures and the
upswellings of more ·primal forces. Worked on by the unconscious,
repressed wishes and memories return in cryptic and highly mediated
forms, drawing on all the resources of figurative language and visual
symbolism in order to find a compromised, and compromising, ex-
pression.59
By and large, twentieth-century interpretive activity has refined all
these conceptions. In art-historical research, Erwin Panofsky sought
to synthesize the description of subject matter (referential and explicit
meanings), the analysis of "images, stories, allegories" (explicit meanings),
and the interpretation of a culture's symbolic values (implicit
and symptomatic meanings).6o Anglo-American New Criticism reacted
Making Films Mean 17
against the· philological tradition by emphasizing intratextual unity,
rejecting authorial intention as a guide to exegesis, and concentrating
on implicit meanings. Northrop Frye's archetypal criticism can be seen
as reviving allegorical translation, while the Geneva school ofphenomenological
criticism constitutes a new version of the philologists' reconstruction
of authorial vision. Although it is common to set
contemporary hermeneutics in opposition to structuralism, in fact
structuralist theory has a strong interpretive bent. Claude Uvi-Strauss,
for instance, ascribes implicit or symptomatic significance to customs
and myths. More recently, a Marxist critic has recast Augustine's
doctrine of four senses.61 Lacan, Althusser, and Derrida have charted
new domains of symptomatic reading: what is repressed becomes
desire, ideological contradiction, or the subversive force of writing.
Now more than ever,· scholars take the construction of implicit and
symptomatic meanings to be central to understanding the arts and the
human sciences.
This search has shaped the history of film theory and criticism in
important ways. When film study broke away from journalism on the
one side and fandom on the other-when, that is, it became academic-it
could have become a subdivision of sociology or mass
communication studies. It was instead ushered into the academy by
humanists, chiefly teachers of literature, drama, and art. As a result,
cinema was naturally subsumed within the interpretive frames of referencethat
rule those disciplines.
More specifically, the growth of film studies attests to the powerful
role of literature departments in transmitting interpretive values and
skills. Academic humanism's omnivorous appetite for interpretation
rendered cinema a plausible "text." (Advertising and television would
later become texts too.) Moreover, literary criticism continued its
expansionist phase in the 1960s, when-New Criticism and its derivatives
having become solidly entrenched-the popularity of film
courses made cinema a prime candidate for inclusion in a critical-skills
curriculum. By this time, literary studies had embraced the ideology
of multiple "approaches"-intrinsic, myth-centered, psychoanalytic,
cultural-contextual, and so· on. Film could be ·studied from all the
critical perspectives that could be mobilized around a poem. The
liberal pluralism that absorbed filtn studies (admittedly not without
friction) would also eventually accommodate black and ethnic studies,
women's studies, and literary theory by adding departmental unitsareas,
programs, courses-that brought in new interpretation-based
18 Making Fihns Mean
subjects and methodologies.62 Film also proved highly assimilable to
the existing schedule of teaching novels and plays: a film or two per
week, lectures and discussions interpreting the film, assigned papers
to probe further. These concrete historical factors led film studies to
follow the interpretive path, constructing implicit or symptomatic
meanings along lines already laid down in other humanistic disciplines.
Such historical forces cast doubt on any hypothesis that interpretation
is merely an assortment of diverse practices. Throughout its
history, interpretation has been a social activity, a process ofthinking,
writing, and speaking within institutions governed by norms. Biblical
interpretation was overseen by Jewish and Christian communities.
Philology developed largely out of a pressure to reconcile academic
and religious approaches to Scripture. Psychoanalytical interpretation
was conducted within the confines of a movement characterized by a
firm hierarchical structure of master, disciples, and excommunicants.
Studies in art history, literature, and allied fields are conducted according.
to protocols of academic inquiry. Interpreters may celebrate
the unique insights of particular interpretations (the "humanistic"
move) or gain comfort from the way practice appears to confirm
theory (the "scientific" approach). Yet both attitudes usually ignore
the extent to which social factors shape not only ·the interpretive
outcome but the very notion of what shall count as an illuminating
essay or a powerful theoretical demonstration. The institution sets the
goals. The next chapter suggests some ways in which it does so, and
what the consequences are for making films mean.
Notes
1. Making Films Mean
1. Roland Barthes, "On Reading," in The Rustle ofLanguage, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), p. 33.
2. See, for example, John Reichert, Making Sense of Literature (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 114-115. Cf. Paul Kiparsky,
"On Theory and Interpretation," in Nigel Fabb et al., eds., The Linguistics
of Writing: At;guments between Language and Literature (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1987), p." 195.
3. I will, though, continue to refer to the object ofinterpretation as a "text,"
whether it be a piece of writing, a painting, or a film. I would prefer to
call it the "work," but this is often too ambiguous, evoking the idea of
task or labor. The last chapter tries at one point to make something useful
of the overlapping senses of "work." .
4. See, for an explanation, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., The Aims of Interpretation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 19.
5. Paul Ricoeur, "Existence and Hermeneutics," in Josef Bleicher, ed., Contemporary
Henneneutics: Henneneutics as Method, Philosophy, and Critique
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 245.
6. A contemporary instance of this dichotomy is Dudley Andrew's contrast
between a film's structured and "grammatical" transmission ofa "message"
(literal meaning) and the transgressive "derailing" of clear meaning (figuration).
See Concepts in Film Theory (New York: Oxford University Press,
1984),pp. 158,167-169,188.
7. Frank Kermode, The Art ofTelling: Essays on Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1983), p. 24.
8. What follows is discussed at a little more length in my Narration in the
Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 30-
40.
9. This version of constructivism assumes that it is possible to arrive at
inferences which are ·at least approximately true; it is thus compatible
with a critical realist epistemology. For a defense of "constructivist real-
278 Notes to Pages 3-8
ism," see Ronald N. Giere, Explaining Science: A.Cognitive Critique (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988).
10. Gerald Graff calls this "given and unrefusable" aspect of perceptual construction
the "Godfather effect." See Literature againstItself: LiteraryIdeas
in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 202.
11. Marshall Edelson, Hypothesis and Evidence in Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, ·1984), p. 46.
12. See Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority ofInterpretive
Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), especially pp.
268-292, 338-371.
13. Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" 'Yale French Studies
48 (1972): 40.
14. See, for example, Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 146-148.
15. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the
Study ofLiterature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), especially pp.
117-118, 225; Peter J. Rabinowitz, BeforeReading: Narrative Conventions
and the Politics ofInterpretation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987),
chaps. 2-5.
16. For example, Culler models his notion of "literary competence" upon
Chomsky's notion of linguistic competence; Structuralist Poetics, pp. 25-
26, 122. But Chomsky's Transformational Generative Grammar conceives
ofrules as defining correct expressions and inference steps in a constitutive
fashion, whereas the interpretive rules proposed by Culler are regulative,
strategic ones. For a discussion of this distinction, see Renate Bartsch,
Nonns ofLanguage (London: Longman, 1987), pp. 160-163. For Transformational
Generative Grammar, syntactic rules define the very notion
of what will count as a sentence in a natural language. Culler's rules, by
contrast, express probabilistic expectations about textual structure. Most
recently, Chomsky has suggested that knowledge oflanguage consists not
of rules but of "principles." See Noam Chomsky, I(nowledge ofLanguage:
Its Nature, Origin, and Use (New York: Praeger, 1986), pp. 145-160.
17. This derives from David Lewis, Convention: A Philosophical Study (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 58, 78.
18. On the notion of overt versus covert conventions, see Robert M. Martin,
The Meaning ofLanguage (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 79-81.
19. See, for a relevant discussion, Barry Smith, "Knowing How vs. Knowing
That," in J. C. Nyiri and Barry Smith, eds., Practical Knowledge: Outlines
ofa Theory ofTraditions and Skills (London: Croom Helm, 1988), pp. 8-9.
20. For a discussion of these concepts, see Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction
Film, pp. 48-62.
21. These types ofform are discussed in David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson,
Film Art: An Introduction (New York: Knopf, 1985), pp. 44-81.
22. My double-edged usage of the term-including both intratextual and
extratextual referring-conforms to current thinking in linguistics and
literary semantics. See Keith Allan, Linguistic Meaning, vol. 1 (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 68, and the essays in Anna White-
Notes to Pages 8-14 279
side and Michael Issacharoff, eds., On Reft17ing in Literature (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987).
23. For a discussion of how explicit meaning can be derived from referential
meaning, see Gerald Prince, "Narrative Pragmatics, Message, and Point,"
Poetics 12 (1983): 530-532.
24. For detailed and wide-ranging discussions of implicit meaning (from
different theoretical perspectives), see Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni,
L)Implicite (Paris: Colin, 1986), and Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson,
Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1986).
25. It may be that only with explicit meanings as a model can we build up
notions of implicit meaning. Thus in the life history of the individual,
learning to see the moral of a fable or the point of a fairy tale may be a
necessary step to learning how to find an implied theme in "high" art.
26. I sketch a model. of comprehension for fictional cinema in Na17ation in
the Fiction Film)· pp. 29-47.
27. Other interpretive institutions do not fall within my purview, but it seems
likely that they could be studied using the same categories of meaning.
For instance, censorship as an interpretive activity would appear to aim
at definitively determining a film's referential and explicit meanings while
having a difficult time pinning down its implicit and symptomatic ones.
28. As in this claim about Godard's Sauve qui peut (la vie): ''The incidents of
abuse are clearly presented as ritual humiliations, symptomatic instances
of a general malaise." Robert Stam,"Jean-Luc Godard's Sauve qui peut
(la vie))" Millennium Film Journal 10/11 (1981): 197.
29. Lindsay Anderson, ''The Last Sequence of On the Wateifront)" Sight and
Sound 24,3 (January-March 1955): 128.
30. "On the Wateifront: Points from Letters," Sight and Sound 24, 4 (Spring
1955): 216.
31. Robert Hughes, "On the Wateifront: A Defense," Sight and Sound 24, 4
(Spring 1955): 215.
32. See Irene R. Fairley, ''The Reader's Need for Conventions: When Is a
Mushroom Not a Mushroom?" Style 20, 1 (Spring 1986): 12.
33. Dwight MacDonald, On Movies (New York: Berkley, 1971), pp. 47, 54,
56.
34. Pat Hilton, "Ask Pat," TV Week) Wisconsin State Journal) 16 November
1986,35.
35. "The Republic (selections)," in Allan H. Gilbert, ed., Literary Criticism:
Plato to Dryden (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1961), p. 25.
36. Aristotle, Poetics) trans. Gerald F. Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1967), p. 33.
37. Longinus, "On Literary Excellence," in Gilbert, Literary Criticism) p. 153.
38. Quoted in Beryl Smalley, The Study ofthe Bible in the MiddleAges (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1952), p. 3.
39. Frank Kermode, ''The Plain Sense of Things," in Geoffrey H. Hartman
and Sanford Budick, eds., Midrash and Literature (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1986), pp. 179-191; Barry W. Holtz, "Midrash," in
280 Notes to Pages 14-16
Holtz, ed., Back to the Sources: Reading the ClassicJewish Texts (New York:
SUmmit Books, 1984), pp. 180-182, 201.
40. Robert M. Grant with David Tracy, A Short History ofthe Interpretation
ofthe Bible, rev. ed. (London: SCM, 1984), pp. 19-20.
41. "Letter to Can Grande della Stella," in Gilbert, Literary Criticism, p. 202.
42. Excerpts from The BookofSuger, Abbot ofSt.-Denis, in Elizabeth G. Holt,
ed., A Documentary History ofArt, vol. 1, The Middle Ages and the Renaissance
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), pp. 29, 30.'
43. Jean Seznec, The Survival ofthe Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition
and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art (Princeton: Prince~on
University Press, 1953), pp. 11-121.
44. See Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan
Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation .in the Renaissance (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970).
45. Susan Leigh Foster, Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary
American Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 109.
46. Moshe Barasch, Theories ofArt: From Plato to Winckelmann (New York:
New York University Press, 1985), pp. 263-269.
47. Mark Roskill, What Is Art History? (New York: Harper and Row, 1976),
pp. 139-144.
48. See .Tzvetan Todorov, Symbolism and Interpretation, trans. Catherine Porter
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 131-143.
49. Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University
Press, 1969), pp. 81-83.
50. Ibid., pp. 78-79.
51. Ibid., pp. 84-97.
52. See RudolfA. Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher oftheHuman Sciences (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 267-272, and Edgar V.
McKnight, Meanings in Texts: The Historical Shaping ofa Narrative Hermeneutics
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), pp. 12-32.
53. Michel Charles, "La Lecture critique," Poetique 34 (April 1978): 144-
146.
54. Ibid., p. 141
55. Gustav Lanson, "La Methode de l'histoire litteraire," in Lanson, Essais de
. methode, de critique, et d)histoire litteraire, ed. Henri Peyre (Paris: Hachette,
1965), p. 44.
56.. See, ·for example, Emile Benveniste, "Remarques sur la fonction du langage
dans la decouverte freudienne," in Problemes de linguistiquegenerale,
vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 86; David Bakan, Sigmund Freud and
theJewish Mystical Tradition (New York: Van Nostrand, 1958), pp. 246-
270; and Tzvetan Todorov, Theories ofthe Symbol, trans. Catherine Porter
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 248-249.
57. See Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery ofthe Unconscious: The History and
Evolution ofDynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970), p. 537.
58. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 373, 374.
59. Useful summaries of this process are provided in Ellenberger, Discovery,
Notes to Pages 16-24 281
pp. 474-534; Richard Wollheim, Sigmund Freud (New York: Viking,
1971), pp. 59-Ill.
60. Erwin Partofsky, "Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the
Study of Renaissance Art," in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and
on Art History (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1955), pp~ 40-
41.
61. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic
Act (Ithaca: ,Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 30-31.
62. See Gerald Graff, Proftssing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 247-262.
2. Routines and Practices
1. See C. J. van Rees, "Advances in the Empirical Sociology of Literature
and the Arts: The Institutional Approach," Poetics 12 (1983): 285-310.
Other social groups which practice film criticism include censorship agencies
and fandom. Neither lies within my purview, but a study of each
one's interpretive norms would be worthwhile.
2. Janet Staiger discusses the rise of the academic canon in film study in her
article ''The Politics of Film Canons," Cinema Journal 24, 3 (Spring
1985): 4-23.
3. James Monaco, How to Read a Film (New York: Oxford University Press,
1977).
4. See Steven Mailloux, "Rhetorical Hermeneutics," Critical Inquiry 11, 4
(June 1985): 634-637, and Vincent B. Leitch, American Literary Criticismfrom
the 30s to the 80s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988),
pp. 109-114, 150-151.
5. Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 1986), p. 112.
6. See Jonathan Culler, "Beyond Interpretation," in The Pursuit of Signs:
Semiotics, Deconstruction, Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1981), pp. 3-11; Gerald Graff, Literature against Itself: Literary Ideas in
Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 5-7,
129-149.
7. See, for example, Richard Levin, New Readings vs. OldPlays: Recent Trends
in the Reinterpretation ofEnglish Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University
ofChicago Press, 1979); Grant Webster, The Republic ofLetters: A History
ofPostwar American Literary Opinion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1979); William E. Cain, The Crisis in Criticism: Theory, Literature,
andReform in English Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1984); Gerald Graff and Reginald Gibbons, eds., Criticism in the
University (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1985); Gerald
Graff, Proftssing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1987).
8. These tenets are drawn, selectively, from Levin, New Readings, pp. 2-5.
9. See Cain, Crisis in Criticism, p. 106.
10. Douglas, How Institutions Think, p. 112.