Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video. - book reviews

Much recent scholarship in film and photography can be understood as a move from aesthetics and its concern for "the physical properties of the media themselves" to cultural studies and its regard for "theories of representation." Two recent anthologies, Fugitive Images, edited by Patrice Petro and drawn from a 1992 conference at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies and Fields of Vision, edited by Australian scholars Leslie Devereaux and Roger Hillman, assemble writings on the cutting edge of cultural studies. The collections provide critical overviews of a wide variety of imagery, both contemporary and historical, conventional and experimental, yet both collections also contain essays that display elitism and obfuscation. Nonetheless, there is much of value here, and both books offer a hint of the direction cultural studies may take, given the continuing emergence of critics with open minds and sharp focus.

Cultural studies as a whole has sought to shake up common assumptions about the way the past and the present are constructed. Many of the essays in Fugitive Images are concerned with issues surrounding the photograph's historical appropriation of "reality," although written in as obscure language as any conventional academic article. For example, John Tagg writes in his essay "The Pencil of History" that "(t)he photograph, like the name in [Francois] Lyotard's sense, pins the system to the ostensible fixity of an absolute singularity. But this singularity is an empty referent answering to a name that, by itself, cannot be 'a designator of reality.'" Certainly there was a simpler way to say that. Tagg's essay discusses many important issues surrounding objectivity and the construction of history via photography, but like several essays in the book, and as evidenced in the above quote, the lines of argument are often difficult to follow. Similarly confusing is Eduardo Cadarva's essay on Walter Benjamin - "Words of Light" - which becomes increasingly scattered, periodically returning to the topic of death, but wandering around a discussion of the ways history is constructed, the legacy of psychoanalysis, and the work of art in the age of reproduction. Regis Durand's essay, "How to See (Photographically)," is also unfocused, including an aimless digression concerning Roland Barthes and a half-baked critique of Andre Bazin.

A recent article in the neo-conservative Weekly Standard encouraged rightist intellectuals to take heart in the cultural war, since cultural studies' insistence on elitist language and its aversion to clarity assured its terminal irrelevance. Progressive intellectuals should take this observation seriously: essays like those of Cadarva, Durant and Tagg have a limited audience, and their lack of focus makes them seem self-indulgent. They do not, in short, assume an interested, intelligent reader; rather, they assume a "professional" reader, one steeped in the latest trends of academic, theoretical discourse. Their topics, admittedly, concern the fragmentation and instability of conventional modes of representation, but must their prose reflect this fragmentation? Rather, is it not the critic's role to elucidate, to explain, and to educate? All of the contributors but two are, after all, college teachers. Ironically, the clearest essays come from the two non-academics: Lynn Kirby's essay on photography and death, and Edward Buscombe's essay on the photographic construction of the West.

The humanities as a whole are in the process of re-defining the purpose of criticism, claiming an interest in engaging the world at large and not just the artifacts of high culture. Cadarva, Durand and Tagg each discuss the medium of photography in all its omnipresent manifestations, yet they do so only within a network of academic citations. Kirby, on the other hand, clearly frames her analysis of death and photography in terms of the way that governments suppress the costs of military adventures. Buscombe investigates the "imaginary" construction of the West not solely for the way that it relates to philosophic discourse that few outside the profession may be aware of, but also in its association with early twentieth-century capitalism and the "closing of the frontier."

Indeed, Petro has assembled many essays that contribute to and expand upon ongoing discussions in film and photography, discussions that are accessible to the non-specialist. Linda Williams and Tom Gunning, for example, contribute essays on Victorian era photography - Williams on pornography ("Corporealized Observers") and Gunning on spiritualist photography ("Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations"). Gunning illuminates the meanings and uses of such images by applying psychoanalysis with much greater specificity than many of his fellow contributors and by integrating cinematic examples such as early German cinema and the films of George Melies. Williams's essay examines mostly turn-of-the-century erotic imagery, moving up to periods as late as 1968. She draws parallels between what she calls "a new porno-erotics" and modernist sensibilities, tracing cinematic influences on pornographic photographs and the re-arranging of the placement of the gaze, challenging the notion that Victorian pornography was only for men. Her essay provides several persuasive models for looking at the "dirty little secret" of film and photography. Gunning, likewise, treats seriously what could easily be dismissed as an irrelevant turn-of-the-century novelty. They both take a deep, extended look at neglected expressions of Victorian culture and argue skillfully for their importance.

Paul Willemen's essay in Fields of Vision, titled simply "The National," sets out with a distinct and necessary goal: the diversification of the film studies canon. The object here is to take what has been dismissed by the establishment and argue for its introduction to a wider public, which is what writing in cultural studies often strives for. His task in this essay seems twofold: to point out not only theoretical deficiencies in film studies but content-based ones as well. Film studies has been extremely slow to accept non-European film and video as historically important, preferring to discuss this work in classes such as "African Cinema" but not in their "Film History" courses. It's quite rare to find a professor who teaches Josef Von Sternberg alongside Ousmane Sembene. Addressing such Eurocentric assumptions, Willemen writes

[I]t must be acknowledged that comparative studies in cinema do not as yet exist. What is worse, given the current insufferably ethnocentric bias of film theory, it may well be a while before this urgently needed discipline of comparative cinema studies will displace the kind of film studies currently being inflicted on university and college students.

There is much rumination in Fields of Vision on the future of ethnographic film, or film produced by anthropologists for "scientific" purposes. An obvious alternative to the production of media by anthropologists is being produced by members of indigenous communities themselves. This is the topic of film scholar Faye Ginsburg's essay "Mediating Culture." Echoing Willeman's concerns about Eurocentrism in film studies, and advocating a utilitarian, anti-formalist strategy, she insists that these works do not fit easily into traditional European-based models of aesthetics or communications. Indeed, Ginsburg notes that "Aboriginal people are not only creating their own media, but are integrating it into their own theories and ideas about communication and information networks." This is a more radical critique of anthropology than found in the book's essays (written by professional anthropologists).

David MacDougall, in "The Subjective Voice in Ethnographic Film," and Peter Loizos, in "Robert Gardner's Rivers of Sand: Towards a Re-Appraisal," in part answer questions surrounding "objectivity" and "outsiders" by arguing for alternatives not simply to ethnographic film as such but to traditions of "scientific realism" (a term that crops up in this collection with great regularity). MacDougall uses, among others, Argentinean expatriate Jorge Preloran's work as an example of such an alternative practice, noting that it constitutes "ethnobiography." This term is a useful one, but it is the description that Peter Loizos bestows upon ethnographic filmmaker Robert Gardner that would fit better: "a painter with a film camera." it is Preloran who has consistently made films that re-define notions of portraiture, while Preloran's Imaginero (1969), the source of the film still that graces the book's cover, certainly has a biographical tact to it - it reads most of all like a work of ethnographic impressionism. Gardner's work, on the other hand, tends to literally put words into the mouths of his subjects, and is far less visually adventurous or immediate than Preloran's, which at its best is remarkably intimate and revealing. Cultural studies has in many cases brought scientific or anthropological methods to bear on subjects typically reserved for aesthetic inquiry. These two essays, as well as Ginsburg's, have as their project the converse: to bring aesthetic considerations to bear on work thought of as being "scientific" and therefore above flighty methods. In all of these instances the outcome is the same, however: images are shown to be complex commodities, able to be understood on many levels, not just those set aside by academic convention.

There are also several essays that, in this context, seem like more conventional treatments of cinematic and photographic topics, but that nonetheless explore emerging notions of representation across different media. Among such company, Susan Dermody's "The Pressure of the Unconscious Upon the Image," stands out among the film studies essays in her quest "to try to identify something about a mode of film that is not quite documentary nor yet quite fiction, not essay, not poetry, not anything satisfying described by a single word." She discusses Alexander Dovzhenko's Arsenal (1929), Chris Marker's Sunless (1982) and Alexander Kluge's The Patriot (1979) in this light, and her searching (although focused), willfully tentative tone is one that reflects the skepticism towards scientific rationalism that pervades the anthropological essays but that seems to escape so many in film scholarship. Her discussion of the fluidity of realism and fiction has equal value for criticism of film, photography and imaging in general. Dermody tries to bring the reader to a new understanding of the visual, an extremely important aspect of postmodern life and the defining subject of contemporary cultural studies.

Both Fields of Vision and Fugitive Images are extremely valuable anthologies, if for no other reason than because they have as a common project the elimination of barriers between film, TV and photography criticism, insisting upon simultaneous consideration of the incredibly diverse array of images that define life in our era. Both books, however, display the problems of inaccessibility that plagues much academic writing, especially in the visual arts. If cultural studies is to fulfill its "populist" promise, it must speak more clearly.

JERRY WHITE is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta, Canada, where he also teaches Film Studies.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Visual Studies Workshop
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group