ABSTRACT
Film history can be clarified, or at least usefully estranged, by period theory; in other words, by the proposition that its formal and aesthetic tendencies are governed by the historic logic of the three fundamental stages in secular bourgeois or capitalist culture as a whole. These stages, which can be identified as realism, modernism, and postmodernism respectively, are not to be grasped exclusively in terms of the stylistic descriptions from which they have been appropriated; rather, their nomenclature sets us the technical problem of constructing a mediation between a formal or aesthetic concept and a periodizing or historiographic one. Such mediatory operations are not unusual : Spengler's periods are a notorious, and probably unjustly discredited example, while Jurii Lotrnan's characterization of historical epochs in terms of the patterning of this or that trope (metaphor, metonymy) is clearly a related experiment.' But this refunctioning of cultural terminology for historiographic and periodizing purposes runs crucial risks, which may finally be insuperable: in particular, the borrowed aesthetic terms must have the force and willfulness of an estrangement, and not lapse or weaken into yet another form of idealistic history. The cultural component, in other words (borrowed from the Althusserians), must be conceived as a "dominant" but not a "determinant"; it must be grasped, not as a set of stylistic features alone, but as a designation of culture, and its logic as a whole (including the proposition that culture itself and its sphere and social function undergo radical and dialectical modifications from one historical moment to another). Finally, the conception of a period proposed here must include the economic in the largest and most varied senses (the labor process, technology, organization of the firm, social relations of
production and class dynamics, and rate of reification, including money and exchange forms).
