Sam B. Girgus.
America on Film: Modernism, Documentary and a Changing America.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
ISBN: 0521 009316.
226 pp
Au$49.95
(Review copy supplied by Cambridge University Press)

Film studies is awash with contesting theories regarding the definition, characteristics, purpose, ethics, ideology and comprehension of the range of films that we sometimes problematically categorise as documentaries. Sam Girgus’ contribution to the field is not largely concerned with elaborating upon the difficult philosophical questions that occupy the centre of these debates. Operating with the guiding tenet that “a fiction film invariably becomes its own documentary” (5), Girgus interprets the thematic and iconographic elements of several classical and contemporary fiction films in order to understand how the cinema has represented, and ostensibly caused, transformations in various systems of American experience and meaning.

Following the work of Bill Nichols in particular, Girgus wishes to deconstruct the epistemological distinction between fiction and nonfiction films. All films, he argues, are a dialectic of oppositional essentialisms: since film material is fragmentary, films are abstract aesthetic works, but since the camera mechanically captures an imprint of pro-filmic reality, films are also documentary recordings. It is through this dualism that Girgus compares, for example, Body and Soul (US, 1947), Spartacus (US, 1960), Raging Bull (US, 1980) and When We Were Kings (US, 1996) for evidence of how the embodied representation of ethnicity, race and masculinity has changed in different contexts of American history and ideology.

The organisation of this book tacitly acknowledges that Girgus does not intend to devise a comprehensive topography of the rather elusive patterns of change he negotiates. He segments his analysis into eight chapters. Each presents a case study of a specific film that represents a set of American ideas and moral values. Girgus positions his analysis in relation to similar subject matter in films from the past and to wider discourses about nation and identity. Accordingly, the strength of this arrangement is the space devoted to close and prolonged thematic interpretation of individual films.

Girgus is comfortable with semiotic and psychoanalytic approaches to narrative analysis, which he usefully corresponds to concrete moments within his chosen texts. He is also adept at relating a performer’s or an auteur’s personal biographical details to distinct qualities embodied or expressed on screen. Sometimes this strategy generates interesting propositions, such as Girgus’ perception of Denzel Washington’s acting career as a social document of “the changing significance of the black actor in America” (200). Less convincing, however, is the reasoning that Jake La Motta’s quest to resolve a split-psyche, as recounted in his autobiography, “involves a parallel process” integrated in the fusion of abstract and realist styles in Raging Bull (73-74). Unfortunately, this type of hyperbole is indicative of the limited vocabulary employed for formal analysis throughout the book. Girgus favours elaborate symbolic description and subjective commentary over precise aesthetic scrutiny. For instance, Girgus claims that a scene from Raging Bull “demonstrates (Martin) Scorsese’s penchant for countercinematic self-reflexivity within classic cinema” (80-81) because, beautifully timed slow motion, sound, and editing involve the viewer in Jake’s lonely sensibility while self-reflexively bringing attention to the materiality of the filmic process and concomitantly propelling the narrative. Nondiegetic jazz suggests Jake’s mood … A brilliant shot catches Jake looking down the stairs and captures his abandonment by switching to slow motion … In slow motion a burning cigarette butt forms a flying arch as it is flicked out of the departing convertible, beautifully conveying Jake’s emotions: a blonde and flying butt signal the emptiness of his life and the yearning for meaning. The self-reflexive camera, sound and editing unmistakably bring attention to themselves. However, even with this self-conscious countercinema, the film’s narrative thrust incorporates classic American cinema. (81)

Re-interpreting countercinema aesthetics in these psychologically rather than ideologically motivated contexts allows Girgus to advocate Raging Bull’s system of narration in the terms that he favours: as a synthetic relation between the modernist expression of an auteur and the documentation of actual events in American history. This questionable application of formal analysis failed to persuade me to think likewise.

A further weakness in the book is the absence of clear and ongoing clarification and reinforcement concerning Girgus’ principal contentions and objectives. The addition of a conclusion may have helped alleviate or affirm some of the mystifications surrounding Girgus’ unpredictable analogous treatment of modernism and realism. Since the author seems to believe that “conviction and uncertainty” (15) are the variables of a dialectical discourse that in itself is the stuff of meaning, this book’s ultimate value is I suppose measured by its moderate success as a reflexive indicator and instigator of the ambiguous changes in American ideology that it seeks to elucidate.

James Brown,
Flinders University, South Australia.

Created on: Tuesday, 4 May 2004 | Last Updated: 4-May-04