ABSTRACT
The historicity of individual films is readily acknowledged by all. In fact, it was never disputed. The consensus is that a film relates closely to the economic, social, political and cultural circumstances that presided over its making. The same consideration was extended to the reading-viewing of films, provided that we first agreed to reduce ourselves to the status of consumers of discrete objects. Whereas the protocols deployed to perform a reading have been referred to a more or less sophisticated notion of the contemporary context, the historicity of the theoretical discourse that tries to construct the intelligibility systems of those films is rarely taken equally seriously. When such theoretical constructs are discussed at all, it tends to be in a Tom-and-Jerry fashion as academics try to hit each other over the head with one theoretical paradigm or another, each one being
presented as bigger and better than the other. In that practice, theories of cinema are, just like the films, treated as discrete objects examined, in this case, exclusively in terms of their internal logic, omitting to consider what problem(s) the theories are supposed to solve for whom. Rarely are these theories examined as historical constructs closely related to the socialhistorical conditions that presided over their formulation.
