Questions of value.
Wood, Robert Paul
As our subscribers and regular readers must have gathered, the five
editors of CineAction work as a collective, but independent issues are
not edited collectively, one editor (occasionally two) being responsible
for each. We never interfere with each other's issues, each of
which is marked with the individual stamp of its particular editor and
his/her specific interests and concerns. This editorial, then, does not
necessarily reflect the views of the collective, though I shall be
surprised if any of my colleagues object to it.
In announcing this issue as 'Questions of Value' I
intended a challenge to what has been for the past few decades the
dominant modes and concerns of academic film study, specifically its
overwhelming emphasis on theory. I believe that our primary concern
should be with the specific work, its meaning, the kind and degree of
its achievement, its place within the history of our culture, in short
its value. If theory can help us towards this end, well and good, but it
should accept its role as relatively humble and supportive. One
consequence of its dominance has been in my view disastrous: it has been
responsible for finally destroying the always precarious continuity
between academia and a more general readership, a wider public with a
serious interest in the arts and specifically in film. In effect it has
left criticism to the weekly reviewers.
My title was intended of course to evoke the work and spirit of F.
R. Leavis, that great and still impressive figure who every year seems
to become more problematic, to demand more reservations (today it is
virtually impossible to find any of his works in the bookstores). And in
many respects Leavis now belongs to the past (in my opinion to the
present's great loss): his position depended upon the existence of
a university as 'the creative centre of culture', a university
that no longer exists, at least in North America, and there seems no
present hope of its restoration. The contemporary, so called,
university, with its 'Business' schools, its emphasis on
technology, its apparently systematic marginalization of Arts
programmes, its capitulation (without even a struggle) to the worst and
currently most powerful developments of western culture, has become
essentially yet another aspect of 'the enemy', though we have
to continue to work in it as best we can.
The basis of Leavis's position was that the function of the
Arts was to confront us with the great questions of existence: What do
people live for? What should they live for? What might they live
for?--questions for which there can be no final, simple, clearcut
answer, any more than you can 'prove' the correctness of a
value judgement. Today, and urgently, the position has become more
complicated, to include politics as well as metaphysics, as no less than
the future of life on our planet is at stake. Somehow, today, it seems
to me that any book, magazine or university course devoted to the arts
has a twofold duty: the preservation of continuity with all that is
finest in our human, cultural past, together with a commitment to the
overthrow of corporate capitalism, 'by all means necessary'.
The essays in the present issue respond to the former of these
obligations, and I hope (taking as inspiration Joel Bakan's
brilliant book The Corporation, together with the TV/film version) to
dedicate the next issue I edit to 'Film, Protest and
Revolution'. As today's university has, overall, committed
itself to corporate capitalism (how else can it get funding?), we cannot
expect much help from it, nor can we expect (for the same reason) any
effective support from our present western governments.
The response to this issue has been extremely encouraging: more
submissions (I believe) than we have ever received before, most of them
of remarkably high quality. Choice (considering that our very limited
budget does not allow for an increase in space) has been painful and
difficult. I was forced to take into account factors other than quality
(where choice would have become impossible), one of which was my
commitment to covering a very wide range of cinema past and present. For
example, I received five articles on Hitchcock and (not wanting this to
develop into another Hitchcock issue) felt forced to reject four of
them. Some of the unused articles will appear in future issues.
