ABSTRACT
Film studies in the United States, Britain, and their white-settler colonies (Canada, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Israel, and Australia) is condemned to nearirrelevancy in the public sphere of popular criticism, state and commercial policy, and social-movement critique. The common-sense rationalities of consumer sovereignty engage journalists, filmmakers, and most people who express opinions on the topic. They subscribe to the view that films and film industries succeed or fail through pure market dynamics-audiences like them and pay for them, or they do not. Film studies’ mistake was to set up a series of nostra early on about what counted as knowledge, then police the borders. A standard disciplinary tactic, such rent-seeking conduct is effective as a form of gatekeeping, but ineffective as a means of dialogue. Two forms of theory predominate as a consequence. One analyzes cinema texts, the other cinema audiences. Understanding texts means either apolitical formalism or ideology critique that deploys a hermeneutics of suspicion via counter-indicative interpretation. The individual close reading remains hegemonic, along with its concatenation into impressionistic generic claims. No one seems to undertake content analysis, which provides a systematic
means of establishing patterns across texts and genres. Understanding audiences means using psychoanalysis (with no technical training and no empirical back-up other than autobiography) or cognitivism (with no technical training and no empirical back-up other than reciting research done by others). No one seems to use focus groups or undertake ethno - graphy, other than staring at their children. Analyzing other issues (the division of labor and screen distribution, for instance) somehow or other is not deemed theoretical. The dominant données barely need rehearsal, but Table 7.1 illustrates the binary of film studies’ good and bad objects.
