Theory of Film Practice NOEL BURCH TRANSLATED BY HELEN R. LANE PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY Copyright © 196<) by Editions Gallimar.d, Paris, France English translation copyright © 1973 by Praeger Publishers, Inc. Foreword copyright © 1981 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey ALL RIGHTS RESERVED LCC: 8o-8676 ISBN o-691-03962-3 ISBN o-691-oop9-7 pbk. First Princeton Paperback edition, 1981 Originally published in French as Praxis du cinema. English translation published by arrangement with Praeger Publishers, Inc. Printed by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey Contents Foreword ( 1980) v Part I Basic Elements l Spatial and Temporal Articulations 3 2 Nana, or the Two Kinds of Space 17 3 Editing as a Plastic Art 32 Part II Dialectics 4 The Repertory of Simple Structures 51 5 Absence of Dialectic and Complex Dialectics 70 6 On the Structural Use of Sound 90 Part III Perturbing Factors 7 Chance and Its Functions 105 8 Structures of Aggression 122 Part IV Reflections on the Film Subject 9 Fictional Subjects 1 39 lO Nonfictional Subjects 156 Index 168 iii 1oreword "I" am not the author of this book. The name on the cover is the same, but the "I" writing this foreword is in so many ways not the "I" who wrote the book four­ teen years ago that he feels compelled to dissociate the two. That other "I" was an American expatriate of thirty-five who, fifteen years earlier, had decided to make his home in Paris, largely because of a fascination with what he knew of French film culture (he had seen le Diable au Corps some fifteen times) , who had at­ tended the French national film school ( ID HEC) , who had tried to the best of his ability to carve a niche for himself in the industry and who had failed ...mainly because he was subjectively un­ equipped to cope with the values, the mores, the personalities of show business, however "cultural" its veneer in Paris. This book, then, was a fantasy-creation, a set of prescriptions for film-making, laid down by someone who had (almost) never made a film. It stood in lieu of those unmade films. v vi FOR EWOR D This book also determined a somewhat misbegotten vocation: teaching, writing, "theorizing," translations into half a dozen lan­ guages, two more books, an International Reputation ... very little film-making, however, with the exception of a number of television programs, and eventually the (temporary) abandonment of hope in that direction.Paradox ically, however, the reputation as a theoretician seems to have made film-making possible again, for which the present "I" is extremely grateful since, when all is said and done, that is what he does best. For several years now, this book has been a great source of embar­ rassment to me. So too, in many ways, has my career as a "theore­ tician," largely founded on insight and speculation, rather than on any sound grasp of modern theoretical disciplines. I have had no university education to speak of and have never rea11y done the homework that might have made up for this lack. Consequently, for ten years at least, I have been standing on tiptoes, which can grow to be very tiring. Yet it has also been brought home to me, often enough, that this book in particular has been found extremely useful by some educators, extremely stimulating by some film-makers. It is impossible for me simply to dismiss such "testimonials," which presumably justify the present reprint. The source of embarrassment here is simple enough to name: formalism. A formalism of the worst kind, which might also be called "musicalism" or, perhaps most precisely, flight from mean­ ing. The book is shot through with a paradox: on the one hand, a neurotic rejection of "content" (a rejection which, autobiographical­ ly, may be seen to have stemmed from a studied ignorance and fear of the political), and, on the other, an equally neurotic insist­ ence on finding abstract, quasi-musical values in .. mainstream cinema. For indeed, at the time of writing, I was almost wholly unfamiliar with the New American Cinema (some of the most im­ portant productions of which, I might add, were yet to come) and felt sympathetic towards only some of the more tradition-related aspects of it. Today, although my familiarity with that cinema is greater, and I recognize the considerable importance of a move­ ment now apparently deceased, I am not at all sure today that this was the book's most serious blind spot. FOREWORD vii The "I" of the 196os had a "vision" of cinema and was im­ patient with what appeared to be just about everyone else's blind­ ness to the Truth: that, for example, the films of Eisenstein, Resnais, Antonioni, Bergman and others-a certain, rather ingenuous, eclec­ ticism was, perhaps, a virtue here-"stood out above the pack" not because of the stories they told-everybody told stories, and theirs were not fundamentally different-but because of Something Else, because of the way in which they organized the formal parameters of their discourse. Today, having learned a few concepts from semiology, though I am no semiotician and wish that even less informed authors would stop saying that I am-I would identify this difference as having to do with the work of the signifier. These films, then, "stood out above the pack." ... Here, of course, is the other glaring blind spot in my thinking at that time: an un­ abashed elitism. Unconcern.ed as I was with the material and mental life of society as a whole, I was equally unconcerned with the films that it saw, with the ways in which it saw or was made to see them. Now that these are almost my only concern, I have difficulty in looking back with much sympathy on a writer obsessed with singling out from among the vast corpus of world film production only those small areas of cultural respectability wherein film rose to the heights of Great Art-a writer for whom the "purity" of classical music was an intangible, absolute model. Actually, of course, this was not a critical or a theoretical stance at all. I was simply describing-and illustrating-a methodology which I wished to use in my own work, and which at that time involved only an extension of the classical narrative system rather than a rejection or "deconstruction" of it, as I have since at times envisioned for myself, advocated for others. I had already applied this methodology in bits and pieces-the unfinished le Bleu du Ciel, Noviciat, my contributions to Cineastes de Notre Temps and I would say that even today, in planning or making films, I still tend to call upon its tenets. This is what is "left" of the book for me. And it is not that I think, today, that the approach to be found in these pages was "wrong," that the descriptions and analyses set forth here are purely fantasmatic. \Vhat I "saw" in these films, with perhaps a few minor exceptions, "is there." But this approach was singularly narrow and incomplete, leading, for example, to the Vlll FOREWORD contemplation of a master such as Hitchcock, of whom I had no real understanding, through the wrong end of the telescope. Had I bothered to re-view such an incomparable masterpiece as Shadow of a Doubt, it is unlikely that I would have even understood its com­ plexities. What was lacking were the concepts of textuality, of polysemia, of the multiplicity and ambivalence of film-work, of cineina as institution. I wanted narrative filmto have what I saw as the "purity" of opera. But of course that purity was just one more fantasy, woven by someone who was content to listen to or even watch opera with only the haziest knowledge of the libretto, who read Mallarme and Finnegan's Wake aloud "for the sound." Today, I am sorry to observe that this formalist approach to cinema-albeit in slightly more sophisticated guises-has gained considerable following in the country of my birth, where the political culture which has forestalled such foolishness in Italy, France and even England, is sadly lacking. And although it would be excessively masochistic of me to take all the blame for this state of affairs­ which is due also to the extreme compartmentalization of this coun­ try's intellectual and artistic community-it is clear to me that I have a not inconsiderable share of it to live down. And yet in spite of all this, the practical virtues of such an ap­ proach in my work and others'-especially as regards the initiation of, young people whose film experience is limited to institutional productions-appear to be real enough. To the mass of filmgoers, after all, what is in focus is, indeed, the diegesis, the illusory "world­ experience" of film. The work of the signifier, however sophisticated, so long as it "keeps a low profile," so lqng as it does not draw a curtain of semantic noise between that "world beyond the screen" and the "average spectator," is invariably so "out of focus" as to be indeed quite invisible. Thus, to the extent that this book, espe­ cially in its first two sections, does operate a sort of "focus-pull," encouraging the reader/viewer to look at what camera, editing, etc. are doing too, it has had, I take it, a corrosive, salutary effect in many instances. But I do suggest that readers take with a large spoonful of salt many of the value judgements expressed herein.