ABSTRACT

A clear trajectory takes us from the emphasis on realism, in the film theory of the 1950s and early 1960s, to a relativization and even attack on realism in the name of reflexivity and intertextuality in the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. This trajectory takes us from an “ontological” interest in cinema as the phenomenal depiction of real-life “existents,” to an analysis of filmic realism as a matter of aesthetic convention and choice. The emphasis shifted to art as REPRESENTATION, i.e. likeness, picture, copy, model, a word whose resonances were at once verbal/literary and visual, aesthetic, semiotic, theatrical and political. (All these meanings, as W.J.T.Mitchell points out (in Lentricchia 1990) have in common a triangular relationship whereby a representation is of something or someone, by something or someone, and to someone). Film theory thus gradually transformed itself from a meditation on the film object as the reproduction of pro-filmic phenomena into a critique of the very idea of mimetic reproduction. Film came to be seen as text, utterance, speech act, not the depiction of an event but rather an event in itself, one which participated in the production of a certain kind of subject.