Introduction

In the 60s it was commonplace to say that the cinema had replaced the novel as the popular narrative art form. Today, the cinema itself, as an institution defined by a particular distribution and exhibition system, is on the decline. The social practice of “going to the movies” is being edged out by home consumption. This erosion of the social is in many ways regrettable. In particular, the shrinking of the movie audience has meant that studios have placed increasing emphasis on “blockbuster” films that look more and more alike every year. But there have been pluses as well. The widespread distribution and availability of films on videotape has radically changed their audience. Films can now be checked out of tape libraries like books, perused, studied, and viewed at leisure. As viewers we are in a position to fill in the gaps of our film literacy. Better still, we can go back and check our hunches and interpretations by seeing the films again.

The critic who writes about film now does so for a much wider audience. Since the experience of films is no longer limited to their short runs in movie theaters or occasional revivals in art houses, they have increasingly become the subject of discussions and private reflections among the general public. This has meant a growth in the readership of books about film as well. Along with historical studies or production stories, books that deal with broader cultural issues (such as Bill Nichols’s Ideology and the Image and Teresa de Lauretis’s Alice Doesn’t) have been especially well received. The idea that cinematic works have served as the medium of expression for some of the most important philosophical and humanist concerns of our time is by now widely accepted.

In the chapters that follow I have attempted to set down some of my own thoughts about the way films have spoken to major issues in contemporary criticism. The examples chosen come mainly from the French New Wave and after, although a few older Hollywood films are included. Naturally, I cannot claim to be exhaustive in content, or even to have developed a “system” for analyzing film. Instead, I have tried to remain open to many avenues of reflection stimulated by recent writing in the fields of literary theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and feminist studies. This book is meant not only for scholars of film, but for the wider readership of today’s “filmliterate” public who may enjoy exploring the theoretical and philosophical implications of films they have seen. It is meant to stimulate the imagination rather than cut off discussion by “authoritative” readings.

The common thread that unites these essays is a preoccupation with films that challenge accepted norms in both form and content. They literally break out of conventional frames—hence the title of this book. By this I mean that they upset our expectations about how films should look (the film frame) as well as how experience is to be organized in film (the psychological or cognitive frame).

In my discussions, I will often use the concept of the cognitive frame for the set of expectations that experienced viewers bring to their reading of a film. The frames we use in viewing films may either be derived from those we apply to real-world experience or may be specific to film conventions or film genres.¹

As we look at a film, perception occurs on many levels. On the one hand, the medium itself has a certain relation to reality. Except in animated and abstract films, the movie image is a photographic rendering of objects that have existed in the real world. To some extent, schemas which we apply to real-world perception carry over to the film image. Even narrative, or story-telling, is a way of structuring information that occurs in real life as well as in art.

On the other hand, a film spectator relies on his or her knowledge of other films when encountering a new work. The intertextual dimension of film can account for expectations about genre, authorial style, and language. Most spectators will walk into a movie theater already expecting a certain type of film. Film studios are well aware of the way that the familiar attributes of a genre can reassure a film audience, and they are adept at repeating the familiar themes of westerns in such films as Star Wars, or at reviving old forms such as the film noir in Prizzi’s Honor. In fact, the more original the world created by the film of fiction, the more conventional elements it must have in order to help the audience understand and enjoy it. As cognitive scientists have shown, people can’t cope with too much new information all at once.

In addition to large-scale genre classifications, film spectators use their knowledge of filmmaking conventions to construct a mental representation of such elements of the fictional world as its story time and space, or such emotional mind sets as suspenseful expectation, fear, sorrow, or romantic wish-fulfillment. Emotion a spectator feels while watching a film can be induced by music, by editing, or by devices of framing or shooting that serve to guide those reactions. For instance, in Citizen Kane low-angle shots are frequently used to portray, from the subjective point of view of one character, the threat posed by another. Kane appears to Susan Alexander in this way when he orders her to continue her singing career, as does the politician Gettys to Kane when he corners Kane in Susan’s apartment. Within the system of this film, then, low-angle shots are often used to connote one person’s power over another. These same shots carry even more intertextual significance when juxtaposed with the visual themes of German expressionism, however. For spectators familiar with expressionism, the looming low-angle figures convey an additional connotation of power allied with evil. Thus those viewers who are more visually “literate” will have a more complex experience while watching the film than those who are not aware of these historical associations.

In works of art, the point is often to present new insights to the perceiver and to break away from what is expected. The impression of newness may be intended by the artist to influence the spectator in some carefully planned fashion. If we imagine a mental construct as a “frame,” then the presentation of novel material that encourages the perceiver to modify those constructs may be seen as a kind of “frame-breaking.” Whatever its form, frame-breaking goes against the expectation of the perceiver. The concept of “frames” provides a schema within which one can begin to explain the shifts in perception that many art works seek to achieve.

Our perception of reality is conditioned by the language we use. Benjamin Whorf, in Language, Thought, and Reality, first published in 1956, showed that thinking is “in a language”; the language that we think in subtly controls the patterns of our thoughts.² Some of his most impressive examples have to do with the way notions of time are expressed in language. For the Hopi culture, for instance, time is not motion in space (as it is for us) but a “getting later” of everything that has ever happened. The idea of “saving time” is meaningless in the context of that culture.³ More recently, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in Metaphors We Live By, posit that “the most fundamental values in a culture will be coherent with the metaphorical structure of the most fundamental concepts in a culture.” Their study focuses on so-called dead metaphors which form the basis for our speech—we are not even aware of the metaphors concealed in most of the expressions they analyze. For instance, they cite numerous examples to show that time is seen in our culture either as a moving object (“The time will come when . . . ”) or as something stationary that we move through (“As we move into the 21st Century . . . ”).⁴

The term “film language” has come to designate the conventions according to which cinematic works are made in such a way that their audiences can comprehend them. Like the spoken or written language described by linguists, the visual language of film exercises limitations as well as offering possibilities for expression. The style of editing developed in Hollywood in the 30s and 40s and which came to be known as “seamless” editing brought with it subtle forces of control. For example, the concept of a cohesive narrative space for the purpose of telling a story left out whatever reality might lie beyond that space—the cameras filming it, for one. In addition, the medium of cinema has not been immune to the suspicion of language that has characterized the latter half of our century—the desire to move outside of its “thought control.” The first section focuses on some of the ways that filmmakers have raised these issues in their films.

Conventions of representation in a society (including those that govern a concept like “realism”) are as culturally conditioned as conventions of language. The two chapters in the second section take up the question of the artist’s relation to the cinema as an art of representation and the issue of changing frames of representation in different historical epochs.

“Seamless editing” was considered by its practitioners to be a form of realism: the idea was to avoid distracting the audience from the story by calling attention to the film apparatus. But the question of what constitutes cinematic realism has been a contested one in film. The French critic Andre Bazin wrote that the objective nature of photography forces us to “accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space.”⁵ Bazin argues that the cinema mummifies the past, preserves things by fixing the image of their duration. The idea that film can somehow reproduce objective reality separately from the subjective consciousness of the artist is no longer accepted today. A camera, after all, always films from somewhere, always leaves out more of the world than it can fit in. The selectivity involved in the editing process is a further manipulation of the image.

Even if we grant that the reality shown on film is subtly altered, how effective is the cinema in representing subjective states of mind? Some of the earliest writers on film held that the photographic image was limited to reproducing the surfaces of things. Yet the experience of German expressionism and French surrealism, which gave rise to important cinematic works in the 20s, argues against this view. In both cases, the film medium proved very effective in expressing inner reality. Expressionism modeled the external world into a representation of inner states of mind; surrealism operated a transformation of reality by a juxtaposition of images that reflected the logic of a dream. In the third section, I show that even mainstream narrative films have ways of showing the inner thoughts of the characters. Despite this, the portrayal of the inner lives of women characters remains a relatively rare occurrence in film. The films discussed are ones that achieve this, either through a sophisticated use of narrators or by letting us get to know the character by showing how she relates to the space surrounding her.

In the final section, I discuss how the film spectator is addressed by cinematic works in ways that are gender-specific. There is no more important aspect of a person’s relation to reality than his or her conception of self as a gendered self. Most films reinforce received definitions of masculinity and femininity. Children’s films, I argue, are among the most conservative; in contradistinction to many of the films discussed in the first three sections, it is hard to find films made for children that “break the frame” of received attitudes toward gender. No matter that women have made significant progress in the workplace in the latter half of the twentieth century; children’s films still shy away from making a girl the central, active character. Or if they do, they still represent her in roles that exemplify all the negative characteristics of “femininity”: passivity, fragility, and subservience to the male sex. The final chapter expands the argument to show how these problems are exacerbated in the film “star,” who becomes the repository as well as the motor force for the machinery of sexual politics in the cinema. In the conclusion I offer some suggestions for a frame-breaking cinema that would constructively address the question of gender. By approaching the question of gender in a more thoughtful way, such films would creatively engage the spectator in a process of transformation. Ultimately, this would bring about new expressions of film language, representation, and subjectivity.