John Mowitt,
Re-takes: Postcoloniality and Foreign Film Languages.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
ISBN: 0 8166 2891 2
246pp
US$23.50 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)

Those of us who lived through the heady heyday of high theory in film studies learned in various ways about the difficulties of communicating clearly. Personally, I remember Peter Brunette telling women his age or perhaps older to “do their homework” when they complained at MLA or SCS conferences about the difficulty of understanding contemporary film theory. And so I thought that, having taken such advice to heart – especially since I was in the throes of writing a doctoral dissertation on psychoanalysis, film theory, and spectatorship – I would always be able to steer clear of the need for such an injunction. Even idiolects, I thought, would yield their keys, if I just worked hard enough.

Excuse me. That paragraph was written under the influence. Let me start again.

Like John Mowitt, I like to ground what I have to say within discourses developed by others. And (presumably) like John Mowitt, I agree with Walter Benjamin’s sentiment that some thoughts are too complex to be expressed in simple sentences. However, it’s the urgency of meaning – rather than style – that compels me. And, urged on by other conference memories of the 1980s – these again involving women, but this time making a feminist protest against academic style of the day – I’ve long since striven to subordinate the names, personalities, and fashionable status of particular authors to their ideas when I write and speak. (Always, of course, giving acknowledgment where and as due.)

No. I’m still writing under the influence.

What I want to say is that I think the introduction to John Mowitt’s Re-takes is too hard to understand, and that it is unnecessarily too hard. Yet it is very hard to say so without falling into parody, sarcasm, or defensiveness. Let’s assume that I’m a reasonably intelligent, well-educated, well-trained reader with a willingness to listen to Mowitt’s argument. Clearly, he’s also intelligent and well educated, and passionate about his subject. His references to other writers are inclusive and extensive, which they should be, given that part of his subject is multiculturalism. Also, part of his subject is the relation between cinema studies as a discipline and the political arguments about Eurocentrism vs multiculturalism – certainly in the introduction. In fact, Re-takes seems to be motivated by the “hope that the cinema and its study can be made to matter to the repudiation and overcoming of Eurocentrism” (35). Given such a weighty subject, one can’t hope for boundaries on the references one is expected to catch simply through familiarity with one or two of the disciplines involved.

In fact, I suppose just this much summary alone proves one of Mowitt’s points: The discipline of film studies, qua discipline, is no longer what it was just a few decades ago when it was being established as an academic discipline. This, I should have thought, was a given since the mid-1980s, when an SCS annual meeting featured many panels on TV studies, and Jane Feuer among others called for SCS to acknowledge officially the need to expand its coverage – which, of course, it did eventually by becoming the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

But I’m still annoyed about all of those names Mowitt drops into his introduction in a way that I find as distracting as his habit of interrupting his own flow of thought with parenthetical phrases set apart with dashes – like this, for example – that make it hard to focus on the issues of importance. Take an early reference to Paul Virilio. As it happens, I don’t recall reading anything by Virilio himself (for which I was feeling guilty), but when Mowitt outlines the point of interest in Virilio’s work, it turns out that I’ve been teaching the stuff to my students for decades. How did that happen? I heard the ideas at a film conference in the 1980s in the U.S. (Virilio wasn’t there, as far as I know.) So a parenthetical note identifying Virilio as one source of the idea, with the idea itself laid out straightforwardly and concisely in the main text, would be more useful to me than an argument that requires me to translate “Virilio” into a description of an historical development (that I don’t associate with the name “Virilio”).

What have I been doing that I haven’t read work by these influential writers – all great men (when he does first refer to feminist theory within his main text, Mowitt does so obliquely – “a French feminism which was not one” [xxviii] – leaving it to a footnote to name Irigaray and de Beauvoir [fn 3, 176]) – to whom Mowitt refers? I’ve been teaching the cinema of Aotearoa New Zealand in Aotearoa New Zealand, writing on the subject in various small ways through reviews published in the Antipodes of books and films produced in the Antipodes. That means that I’ve had to engage with multiculturalism and the cinema on a regular basis. My degrees are all in comparative literature, reflecting an innate commitment to studying and understanding the interrelation of media, of cultures, and of media and culture.

So I looked forward to reading Re-takes with the idea that I might be the sort of reader the author had in mind. Instead I find myself wondering about how the community of readers whom Mowitt would seem to be addressing slots into the argument he makes about multiculturalism and elitism.

In other words, I still think what Mowitt seems to want to say about the relations among cinema, multiculturalism, international structures founded on politics and economics, aesthetics, and the associated issues of identity and value could be/is interesting. I just resent – and lament – the obfuscation – and mystification – that results from what seems to be stylistic self-indulgence. After reading his introduction, I wondered whether the set-up was just an excuse to publish the two chapters on two disparate directors as a single-author book. After all, singling out a Bolivian and a Senegalese director (Jorge Sangines and Ousmane Sembene) for attention makes them seem not so much like auteurs as like oddities – or perhaps the word is “tokens.” The pairing, however, comes from Roy Armes’ Third World Film Making and the West (1987). (And once Mowitt begins to deal with the directors’ work, he also – necessarily – refers to female film scholarship.)

Re-takes‘ back blurb calls it “an important intervention into ongoing discussions of the changing nature of film and media studies.” As someone working in an older film programme whose best hope is merger into a new school with a newer, better supported media studies programme, I suppose I should care. Somehow it just doesn’t seem too earth-shattering, one way or the other. And as someone whose residence and primary travels over the last decade have been more in Australasia and Asia itself than in Europe or the U.S., I have to wonder whether Eurocentrism won’t simply die a natural death, if left to get on with it.

There are a number of positive things to say about Re-takes. Superficially, it has a very clever cover. Chapter one has a very challenging summary and then extension of arguments on the applicability of concepts of énonciation/enunciation to the cinema, which makes a good takeaway on its own. Here Mowitt engages with the ideas of various theorists in depth, and so a juxtaposing of Guattari with Bhabha begins to make intriguing sense. Chapter two, entitled “Foreignness and Language in Western Cinema,” is a readable history of the origins of the Academy Award for best foreign language film, and what this award refers to, that is, how “foreign” is delimited. Mowitt asks, “Are foreign pictures things one encounters through the eyes or through the ears?” (51).

Mowitt has a running critique of Bordwell and Carroll for their rejection of theory. One specific point of attack is Bordwell’s dismissal of enunciation as a potentially useful component of film analysis. Where, for example, Bordwell refers to “style,” Mowitt would refer to a “visual vocabulary” (fn 5, 183). “The appeal made by Bordwell and Carroll to cognitive science or neoformalism is equally implicated in oculocentrism, not only because their works have tended to concentrate analytically on the image track but because their repudiation of the concept of language as a modeling tool, as a way to approach the cinema, is consistent with oculocentrism’s subordination of sound to sights and, within this gesture, the reduction of language (as both phenomenon and concept) to spoken dialogue or speech” (64). This sort of thinking, Mowitt argues, connects Bordwell and Carroll to the mindset “within which the AMPAS [Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences] constructed the concept of the foreign language film” (ibid.). Yet Mowitt himself seems to emphasize visual over aural components through descriptions of the films in question that focus on story, shot composition, and transitions from shot to shot.

In the last two chapters, Mowitt connects the visual syntax of the films he considers with the syntax of indigenous languages in which those films are grounded. He looks for cinematographically specific characteristics of the films in question that correspond with the language in question, e.g., Sanjines’ use of zoom in a film involving the Aymara language of the people featured in that film. Mowitt asserts that the zoom parallels Aymara’s “agglutinative quality” (160). Could one find parallels that would distinguish Kiwi from Aussie films on the basis of linguistic differences? Or, to make it easier, British from U.S. English? Not, apparently, a subject of interest to Mowitt.

Mowitt’s discussion of the zoom reminds me of Barry Barclay’s use of the telephoto lens in his groundbreaking directorial work on the Tangata Whenua series, aired on New Zealand television in 1974. As Barclay wrote in Our Own Image, he used the telephoto lens as part of what he refers to as Maori filmmaking (because it follows marae practices – indigenous protocol). Specifically, in order not to interrupt his subjects as they spoke, he developed various techniques contrary to usual (read Western, or – as Mowitt might put it – Eurocentric) filmmaking practices. Among these techniques is the specific way in which he used the telephoto lens for his specific purpose.

Not having seen Sanjines’ films nor being familiar with Aymara, I can’t say whether the Bolivian and New Zealand filmmakers use the zoom in an exactly parallel way, but I wonder whether the similarities and differences in the two cases do more to support or undermine Mowitt’s argument. I honestly can’t tell. But Mowitt seems more willing to generalize on the basis of particular examples of language than I am. Despite which, I take pleasure in his conclusion that “. . . the Spanish dialogue is filmically enunciated in a language that . . . is properly bilingual. Both tongues are filming” (161-62).

Setting up his discussion of Sanjines through an analysis of work by J. Jorge Klor de Alva, Mowitt makes it clear that he’s aware of the pitfall of sounding like a Eurocentric imperialist himself. Mowitt quotes Sanjines on the difficulties of speaking to a peasant audience (“peasant,” Mowitt tells us, is Sanjines’ own word) that the filmmaker wishes to attract. Mowitt then proceeds to analyze Sanjines’ films in a way that no peasant would be expected to in order to reach the conclusion that Mowitt needs.

So, as much as I want to admire this carefully researched and well-intentioned defense of film theory that wants “to elaborate a postcolonial poetics of the cinema” (1), I think it’s a seriously flawed collection of disparate bits. As self-reflexive as it is, it trips itself up in its attempt to connect the genealogy of enunciation, film language as “bilingual enunciation” (xxv), the origins of the Academy Awards’ foreign language film award, Bordwell and Carroll’s attack on film theory, the viability of film studies as an ongoing, working discipline, the work of Sembene and Sanjines, the status of the U.S. as a colonial – or not – nation or state, and globalization.

Mowitt is fond of beginning sentences with phrases such as “Appealing to a text to which I will return” (xv), “As I will argue” (85), and “For reasons whose elaboration strikes me as premature” (fn2, 175), and promises that things “will become clear in what follows” (16). So perhaps I may be forgiven for wondering whether I was dealing with another wizard behind his curtain. John Mowitt and I went through academic training at roughly the same time, so we studied many of the same texts that were de rigueur for film scholars then. It’s therefore a blast to walk down memory lane with him as he discourses on enunciation and brings me up to date on Sembene scholarship. But I still wonder whether he’s produced a new approach to film analysis – and I’d love to see someone successfully apply his key concept to “Hollywood” films. And I can’t imagine recommending Re-takes to any of my students – I just don’t deal with any that elite.

Harriet Margolis
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Created on: Friday, 10 November 2006