ABSTRACT
When I began teaching fi lm theory it was 1986 in Australia and the most compelling framework was the mix of semiotics, feminism, psychoanalysis
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and ideology-critique that had appeared over a period of ten years in the British journal Screen. At that moment, the dominance of Screen was already over, but its manner of conceptualizing cinema, spectatorship and subjectivity still made the most sense to me, and to many people teaching in the fi eld: it was, for us, “European fi lm theory.” For the guiding fi gures in the Screen pantheon-Metz, Heath, Mulvey, Wollen-André Bazin represented a classical and conservative fi lm criticism. His canon wasn’t theirs; despite the catholicity of his taste, he baulked at Hitchcock and was skeptical toward Gance, Vertov and Eisenstein. And his adherence to a philosophic realism anchored in the physical presence of the profi lmic object sounded naïve, politically oblivious in an age of semiotics. It seemed to betray a fetishism of the indexical, at the very least to assume an empiricist epistemology and psychology for which continental theorists, semioticians and Lacanians had little time. Further, there was something anomalous and diffi cult to overlook about Bazin’s religious faith and, indeed, his moral passion: his enthusiasm for a certain transparency in fi lm-making was expressed in the language of theology, his aesthetic terms of value were words like “innocence,” “fi delity” and “grace,” and, perhaps least palatable, “revolutionary humanism.”
