Aoyama, close ups, detached style

[Joanne Izbicki]

Re Birgit's initial message and Aaron's comments that
1) "Film devices or styles can still be seen as ideological, but only in
the sense that: they are already contradictory; they only have a meaning
through a complex interaction with other elements that produces a
preferred, though not inevitable reading; and the reader has been
prepared to read the text that way (though the possibility of another
reading always exists)."

and 2) [I am interested]  "...in understanding the precise articulations
of this style in practice within a historical situation, something which
involves a lot of close textual analysis and consideration of the
reception context.  Only then can one get a sense of what kinds of
different meanings can be applied to long takes, etc."

These comments succinctly zero in on the importance of engaging the
issue of technique + meaning production within the historical context of
a film's production and screening.  I agree that the life experiences
and overall ideological situation of a spectator can strongly 'prepare'
a viewer to read the film text along a particular vein, something which
every film professor is probably aware of from discussing  contemporary
movies with students.   Mainstream feature film's narrative technique
constructs  cause & effect relations that are very difficult to
resist--which is not to say that they can't be resisted.  I think the
essentialist theories of a film apparatus/ technique emerged within
historical, political contexts--local and international--which those
theories engaged or resisted, using cinema as the arena of struggle.
Within a particular context and concerning a film or films strongly
sharing similar patterns, those theories have been very powerful for
examining and contesting issues that concern society at large.
Psychoanalytic film theory, for instance, is a strong tool for analyzing
gender and power relations for certain films.  That being said, the
theory still comes up short for engaging the specific historical viewing
context of, say, 1940s "women's films" or 1950s musicals, even in terms
of gender and power.  Just as no film technique can be seen as
absolutely wedded to a particular meaning, so too, film theories need to
be seen in the historical context from which they emerge.

For film scholars this can be a thorny problem when studying movies
produced in a bygone time since the visceral response to a film can be
so radically different when viewed in a different context (but it's
similar for literature or other cultural productions as well).  How many
of you fellow baby boomers out there remember being scared silly as a
child when watching "Creature from the Black Lagoon"?  (I was sure the
creature was in my bedroom closet for days after).  But watching it
today, it's easy to respond to the movie as ludicrous, jaded as we might
be to the old special effects and costuming compared to today's
hyper-tech effects.  So how can we possibly know how persons now dead
responded to movies in the past?  I'm not suggesting relinquishing the
effort, but rather striving for a logarithmic increase in understanding
(hmm, is that the right mathematical trope?--I mean that our grasp can
increase and increase but never reach 100%).  The potential of any
technique to produce meaning is never entirely contained within the
technique, but the technique can shape the life experience of the viewer
as the film becomes part of that experience; and as Aaron put it, the
overall historical context can predispose the viewer to follow a
'preferred,'  dominant meaning; but that's as far as it goes.

I  pursue film study (usually) as a historian (but notparticularly as a
film historian ), approaching individual movies as historical
documents--or artifacts, if you will.  Depending on the issues at hand,
I find some film theories have more explanatory effect than others, but
that doesn't mean that if I look at the same film regarding a different
issue that another theoretical approach might not be more semantically
powerful.  I try to think of theories as relatively essentialist--an
oxymoron but for me useful; that is, within a certain query and
regarding both the historical context of the movie's productions and  my
own ideological and historical context, one theory might promote fuller
understanding; or to put it more post-post-modernistically, might
provide a fuller discourse in which to recognize the breadth or
narrowness within which meaning might have been produced by its earlier
spectators.

Joanne Izbicki