Nicolas Tredell (ed),
Cinemas of the Mind.
Cambridge, Icon Books, 2002.
ISBN: 1 840 46354 6
287pp
Au$35.00 (hb)
(Review copy supplied by Cambridge books)

Nicolas Tredell’s Cinemas of the Mind is a critical history of film theory that delineates its subject from the first two decades of the last century till the beginning of this century. The film medium itself has provoked the critical attention of film directors, writers and thinkers to engage in critical debates about the medium’s highly complex relationship to art, culture, language, philosophy, psychology, morality and politics. Cinemas of the Mind endeavours to actively intervene in these debates by presenting a far-ranging selection of key extracts from the well-known major film theories of the last century, with detailed commentary and rigorous critique. In essence, Tredell’s main thesis, of this resourceful and stimulating study of classical and recent film theory. is the necessity for a new revitalised approach to the elaborate relationship between film and reality in the context of postmodernism.

Tredell starts with Plato’s famous cave analogy that sees all of us being chained in a cave mistaking the shadows flickering against a cave wall by a fire as the substance of reality, as a key metaphor for the classical cinematic experience. He goes on to argue that it is Plato’s founding image of Western philosophy that has lead many film theorists to create “Cinemas of the Mind”, in other words, philosophical models of the character and operations of film. This book looks at a number of these models of varying theoretical sophistication that are still of interest for film theory because of the different concepts and insights they continue to produce.

One of the guiding assumptions of this critical history of film theory is that the development of film theory is akin to the development of philosophy – basic paradigm shifts occur but they do not, ipso facto, render earlier theories obsolete. Thus, Tredelll insists, all key film theories of the last one hundred years must be given their respective due and opened up to critical scrutiny. This means that classical film theory (Rudolf Arnheim, Sergei Eisenstein, Bela Balazs, Andre Bazin, Sergei Eisenstin )has not been superseded by psychoanalytic or semiotic theory, nor have the cognitive theories of the 1990s have replaced psychoanalytic theory.

Cinemas of the Mind is structured into six chapters which clearly delineate the continuing narrative of modern film theory, starting from its early days of the last century, when as Tredell puts it, it could aptly be defined as an era of “theory before theory”, where in France filmmakers and critics like Ricciotto Canundo and others, became interested in understanding the complexities of the new medium of kinetic images, shadows and silence. From there it deals with the early canon of classical film theory: Hugo Munsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Bela Balazs and Sergei Eisenstein. All four film theorists, in their respective ways, argued for a film as a dynamic and artistic medium that structures reality for fundamental aesthetic and, sometimes, political objectives. Chapter two deals with the two seminal figures of Andre Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, who are more concerned with the overall relationship between film and everyday reality.

Whilst chapters three and four focus on the two most influential film journals in the Anglo- European world to shape the future directions of film theory: Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s in France, and in the 1970s in England, Screen. Both chapters deal respectively with auteur theory and semiotics, post-structuralist and psychoanalytical film theory. Chapter five specifically delineates the different critical gender and feminist responses to Laura Mulvey’s highly influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema ” and, in the case of Noel Carroll, a general critique ( from a cognitive film theory perspective) of psychoanalytical film theory in general. Finally, chapter six focuses on recent developments in cognitive film theory (Torben Grodal), postcolonial cinema ( Oliver Bartlett) , and analytical philosophy and film theory ( Gregory Currie).

Cinemas of the Mind also has a helpful glossary of cinematic and critical terms that clearly explain some of the more characteristic ideas and technical vocabularies of modern film theory, feminism, post-structuralism, semiotics and psychoanalysis.

Tredell is not only interested in creating a persuasive and resourceful “road map” to the ongoing complexities and directions of classical and contemporary film theory, but he is also concerned that film theory should make its relevant contribution to the comprehension of our present digital technoculture. What animates Tredell’s conceptual drive in evaluating all the different film theories that make up this critical history is his underlying conviction that film theory is vividly illustrated by the image of Plato’s cave (what he astutely calls ” one of the oldest philosophical movies” that we have ) : the dynamic and multifaceted relation of representation to reality. It is precisely this significant issue that connects us to the other important questions of cinema – art, auteurism, cognition, genre, gender, mise-en-scene, signification and spectatorship.

Though Tredell acknowledges the primary importance of formalist and semiotic film theories to the overall development of modern film theory, he asserts that they are only of critical value as long as they scrutinise the problem of reality. Also, as indicated before, Tredell suggests that what is of increasing significance to the study of the classical cinematic experience is the massive shift we are witnessing from an analogue to a digital culture. This means a theoretical willingness to appreciate that this shift denotes that when once still and moving images emanated from an indexical likeness in reality, today we have a world of simulacra (elaborately theorised by Jean Baudrillard) and, as we are so familiar by now, moving images can now be reconstructed without any direct reference to a real world. But this is not only a critical issue for theory, as Tredell correctly emphasises, for it is the way we exist now in our everyday culture.

Concomitantly, anyone creating film theory today is also obliged to recognise that what we once referred to as “the cinematic image”, nowadays we have to accommodate in our thinking about cinema’s moving images: that they are immensely shaped by new technological tools, and the medium’s interface with the real as much as with the simulated. To conclude, Tredell’s Cinemas of the Mind is an invaluable work that wisely keeps its clear eye focussed on film theory’s past, present and future, grounded in the “wordly circumstances” ( Edward Said) of its own production.

John Conomos
University of Technology, Sydney.

Created on: Monday, 6 December 2004 | Last Updated: 6-Dec-04