Robert Stam & Toby Miller(eds.),
Film and Theory: An Anthology.
Blackwell, 2000.
ISBN 0 631 20625 6 (pb)
862pp
A$52.70
(Review copy supplied by Allen & Unwin)

Uploaded 1 December 2001
This dauntingly hefty anthology offers a selection of forty-four essays, organized into thirteen sections focusing on major issues in film theory (authorship, technology, realism), each preceded by an editorial introduction filling in the historical background and clarifying the current terms of debate. It is one of a trio of interrelated volumes which Stam and Miller have published with Blackwell over the past couple of years, along with their co-edited A Companion to Film Theory (a collection of original essays canvassing recent developments in the field) and Stam’s excellent historical survey, Film Theory: An Introduction. Clearly designed primarily as an undergraduate text, presumably Film and Theory is intended to offer a challenge to the market dominance of Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen’s Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (Oxford), now in its fifth edition, which has pretty much had the field to itself ever since it originally appeared back in 1974.

Although the two anthologies inevitably share a number of authors, and even a few selections (Rick Altman on genre, Noel Carroll on the specificity thesis, Christian Metz on the imaginary signifier, Laura Mulvey on the male gaze), the challenger differs from its competition in three respects. First, where Braudy and Cohen attempt to survey the entire history of writing on film, right back to Hugo Munsterberg’s The Photoplay: A Psychological Study in 1916, Stam and Miller confine themselves to the period since the mid-’70s. This tighter focus has both advatages and disadvantages. Although it allows for a much more thorough coverage of recent developments, it can sometimes leave the reader with the feeling of having come in halfway through a conversation – and sometimes one which seems to have unexpectedly changed direction. The section on realism, for instance, consists of just two pieces, Tom Gunning on the “cinema of attractions” and Manthia Diawara on Black American cinema, and while both of these do, indeed, extend the debate on realism in new directions, in the absence of the foundational texts in the debate (Bazin, Kracauer, Arnheim), the coverage of the issue is apt to seem oddly lop-sided. Second, as its title suggests, Stam and Miller confine themselves to more-or-less explicitly theoretical writing, defining “film theory” inclusively and pluralistically as “any generalized reflexion on the patterns and regularities (or significant irregularities) to be found in relation to film as a medium, to film language, to the cinematic apparatus or to the nature of the cinematic text, or to cinematic reception.” A few pieces in the anthology may still strike some readers less as theory than as criticism (James Naremore’s characteristically subtle account of Brando’s performance in On the Waterfront, for instance), sociology (an empirical study of the differing responses of Native-American and Anglo-American viewers to westerns), or polemic (a diatribe against the stereotyping of Native-Americans in Hollywood films), but most of the selections clearly have implications on a higher order of generality. If these are not always spelled out explicitly by the authors, they are drawn out by the editors in their introductions.

Finally, Stam and Miller offer much fuller treatment of a number of areas covered less thoroughly by Braudy and Cohen. In particular, they insist that the “patterns and regularities” appropriately examined under the rubric of “film theory” are social and cultural, as well as formal, including “patterns of gendered, racialized, sexualized, and culturally inflected representation.” Accordingly, issues of race are central to a half-dozen of the selections, issues of gender to possibly a third, while class, the most frequently neglected component of the race-gender-class triad, is allocated a section to itself. Given the diversity of materials sanctioned by so inclusive a definition of the subject, and the manner in which the editors’ “theoretical grids” (as they call them) necessarily criss-cross and overlap, decisions about just where particular selections belong are necessarily problematical. Is a piece on “Postmodern Bi-sexed Performance in film and video” most appropriately placed under “Stars and Performance,” “Permutations of Difference,” or “The Politics of Postmodernism”? (Stam and Miller opt for the first.)

For the most part, though, the overall organization of the volume is admirably clear. And the editors’ introductions are uniformly lucid even-handed, and often little miracles of condensation (in his introduction to the section on “The nature of the gaze”, for instance, Miller somehow manages to distill the essentials of psychoanalysis, classical and Lacanian, down to a dense but readable four pages). In the end, of course, a volume of this sort will be judged less on its organization and supplementary material than on the selections themselves. Inevitably, many readers will be able to think of particular theorists or theoretical schools that they think deserve fuller representation. It’s easy enough, in this instance, to list writers (Jean-Louis Baudry, Jean-Louis Comolli, Raymond Bellour, Noel Burch, Stephen Heath, Fredric Jameson, David Bordwell) frequently cited in both the introductions and the actual selections but left unrepresented by their own work. Or to think of more general theoretical developments (cognitivism, or the recent application to film theory of analytic philosophy) that are scarcely represented at all. Judged, however, in terms of what it does, rather than in terms of what it fails to do, this is an impressive, and certainly a very useful, volume. As a classroom text, despite the areas of overlap, it valuably supplements, rather than supplanting, Braudy and Cohen. And it certainly more than succeeds in its stated ambition to “trace out some of the major strands of the film and media theory of the last few decades”.

David Boyd