Nitzan Ben-Shaul,
Film: The Key Concepts.
Oxford: Berg, 2007
ISBN-13: 978-1845203665
US$19.95 (pb)
192pp
(Review copy supplied by Berg Publishers)

Nitzan Ben-Shaul’s Film: The Key Concepts is part of a “Key Concepts” series from Berg that “aims to cover the core disciplines and the key cross-disciplinary ideas across the Humanities and Social Sciences.” Given its purpose, Film: The Key Concepts succeeds admirably.

Divided into four sections, the book covers foundational ideas and questions of film theory, including (1) “From the Photogenic to the Simulacrum,” (2) “Film Constructs,” (3) “Dialectic Film Montage,” and (4) “Imaginary Signifiers/Voyeuristic Pleasures.” While this leads to a familiar setup and punch line, moving over the course of the whole book from debates about realism versus formalism to post-feminist and queer theories, Ben-Shaul’s treatment of the familiar is surprisingly fresh. One advantage of this particular book lies in its apparent refusal to privilege either the past or the present of film theory. In fact, the organization of the four sections here allows for broad differences of approach but also for real continuity over time, wherein early questions about the nature of the medium vis-à-vis art and reality are germane to (rather than rendered obsolete by) later questions about the ideological potential of cinema and the power or powerlessness of film audiences.

This sense of theoretical continuity across the four sections (which, by the way, I think is real rather than something imagined for the convenience of the history of ideas being charted) is reinforced by the fact that each of the four sections becomes a microcosm of the larger debates, with each section moving from foundationalist concerns about material reality and formal manipulation thereof to the anti-foundationalist challenges posed by poststructuralism and postmodernism, and to the re-imagining of form and audience through cognitive theory, post-Marxism, and/or third cinema. For example, in the third section, “Dialectic Film Montage,” Soviet “constructivist” strategies introduced in the first section reappear as tools used by filmmakers like Godard to “deconstruct” the medium’s uses as an ideological apparatus (pp. 81, 90-93). And then the author interrogates this revolutionary potential through the lens of postcolonialism and the challenges to postmodernism raised by “First World post-Marxists such as Frederic Jameson and David Harvey” (p. 98). None of these discussions are new, of course – neither the debates over the artistic and realist potentials of the medium nor the debates described above nor the transition from psychoanalysis to feminist and post-feminist film theory described in the fourth section – but this is precisely the point of the book, i.e., to chart “the key concepts” as part of a historical and consistently relevant discussion about what movies do. In the end, Nitzan Ben-Shaul does so with clarity and intelligence.

Indeed, given the care with which the author lucidly articulates the theories and concisely reads individual films, his occasional errors are surprising, as when he apparently confuses The Birth of a Nation (USA 1915) with The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (USA 1913) (p. 37) or when he refers to Spike Jonze as “Spike Lonze” (p. 96). Of greater seriousness are his anti-climactic “Questions for Essays and Class Discussion,” which occupy only two pages at the end of the book and indulge in the rather uninteresting anti-elitist trend in recent film books of privileging mainstream movies less than a decade old (pp. 131-132). This said, however, an application of Noel Carroll’s “question-and-answer” model to Christopher Nolan’s Memento (USA 2000) or of queer theory’s re-visioning of spectatorship to Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (Canada/USA 2005) might yield interesting student writing, and the obviously deliberate privilege afforded newer films in these essay and class discussion questions is balanced against a number of international, canonical, and unusual films in boxed mini-essays scattered throughout the book.

Film: The Key Concepts is well-titled. The book is as inclusive as I would expect a book of this length to be. More importantly, Ben-Shaul overviews the critical terrain with a combination of depth and clarity rarely achieved in secondary sources on theory, which generally tend either to get lost in inevitable digressions encouraged by the thicket of film studies jargon or to offer oversimplifications of the theory signposted by boldfaced vocabulary words and augmented by useless screen captures updated every couple of years, apparently for the crassly commercial purposes of repaginating a newer edition.

Compared with many film textbooks, this one focuses on its theoretical concepts and organization thereof with exceptional discipline unfettered by most of the nonsense of the textbook industry. This book would work well with introductory film students in a graduate program or with more advanced undergraduates studying critical theory. Also, because of its conciseness and easy to excerpt four-part structure, the book could be taught alongside other books. For example, the theoretical works to which this book refers are now canonical in film studies, so one could easily teach this introductory book with a collection like Barry Keith Grant’s Film Genre Reader II (1995), Bill Nichols’s two Movies and Methods books (1976, 1985), or Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen’s Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (2004) in the same way that literary theory classes have frequently taught Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction (1996) alongside longer anthologies of original essays.
There are textbooks more accessible for beginning film students; however, there are few introductions to the discipline of film studies that explore the major theories with this book’s depth and attention to context without sacrificing readability for all but the most advanced audiences. Nitzan Ben-Shaul’s book is an exciting addition to the increasing body of sources about the sources of film theory.

Matt Wanat,
Ohio University, USA.

Created on: Sunday, 30 August 2009