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Engaging the Moving Image Yale Series in the Philosophy and Theory of Art Engaging the Moving Image Noël Carroll Yale University Press New Haven & London Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of , Yale College. Copyright © by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections and of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Adobe Garamond and Stone Sans type by The Composing Room of Michigan, Inc. Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carroll, Noël (Noël E.) Engaging the moving image / Noël Carroll. p. cm. — (Yale series in the philosophy and theory of art) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN --- (alk. paper) . Motion pictures—Philosophy. Motion pictures. I. Title. II. Series. PN.C .Ј—dc A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Once again and as always dedicated to my beloved wife, Sally Banes, who returned to me from the dead. Contents Foreword by George Wilson, ix Introduction, xxi 1 Forget the Medium! 2 Film, Attention, and Communication: A Naturalistic Account, 3 Film, Emotion, and Genre, 4 Ethnicity, Race, and Monstrosity: The Rhetorics of Horror and Humor, 5 Is the Medium a (Moral) Message? 6 Film Form: An Argument for a Functional Theory of Style in the Individual Film, 7 Introducing Film Evaluation, 8 Nonfiction Film and Postmodernist Skepticism, vii viii Contents 9 Fiction, Nonfiction, and the Film of Presumptive Assertion: Conceptual Analyses, 10 Photographic Traces and Documentary Films: Comments for Gregory Currie, 11 Toward a Definition of Moving-Picture Dance, 12 The Essence of Cinema? 13 TV and Film: A Philosophical Perspective, 14 Kracauer’s Theory of Film, 15 Cinematic Nation Building: Eisenstein’s The Old and the New, 16 The Professional Western: South of the Border, 17 Moving and Moving: From Minimalism to Lives of Performers, 18 Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment, Credits, Index, Foreword [The following exchange occurs after the screening of Sullivan’s new movie.] Mr. Hadrian: It died in Pittsburgh. Mr. LeBrand: Like a dog. Mr. Sullivan (contemptuously): What do they know in Pittsburgh? Mr. LeBrand (mildly): They know what they like. Mr. Sullivan (sneeringly): If they knew what they liked, they wouldn’t live in Pittsburgh. Preston Sturges, Sullivan’s Travels I suppose that Noël Carroll is best known within film studies as the unremitting arch nemesis of Big Theory, and certainly his book Mystifying Movies is a devastating systematic attack on the sweeping pretensions of the film theory that dominated the s and s. Potentially enhancing his grim reputation is the fact that Carroll in- troduced the philosophy of horror as a systematic topic in contempo- rary aesthetics. Anyone who knows Carroll personally, however, will have trouble sustaining an image of him derived from Dr. Mabuse or the Creeper or some other monster of mayhem and subversion. Car- ix x Foreword roll is a funny, affable, and gregarious individual who is much more likely to in- fect you with his many enthusiasms in philosophy and art than with a deadly, traceless tropical disease. Having known Carroll for more than twenty-five years, I am especially well placed to testify to his sunny disposition and benign character. He entered the graduate program in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh in the late s. I was a new assistant professor at the time, and I was his teacher in two courses. Neither of these were film classes—movie courses had not been estab- lished at the university at that time. I think one of these classes was a graduate seminar in the philosophy of mind and the other a course in logic. The salient fact, however, was that Carroll and I were both nuts about movies. Although I have no idea what we did in the courses, I certainly remember that we were the founders (with another friend, Bob Schultz) of the Pittsburgh Philosophy De- partment Film Club. Once a month, we showed a movie over the mantelpiece in my attic apartment, and many members of the philosophy department would show up for these cultural events. Carroll has claimed in print (well actually, on the Internet!) that I, being a faculty member, was the president of the club and that he, being a graduate stu- dent, was the vice president. He also affirms that the president made the vice president bring the projector and carry it up the three flights of stairs to the presidential apartment. Now, in fact, I doubt that there was enough democracy in the film club to allow for the existence of these elected offices, but I’m afraid it is likely that I did make Carroll carry the projector up the stairs. Assistant professors will grasp at any wisp of power and influence that happens to come their way. After all, if I had formed the film club with some tenured member of the department—with Wilfrid Sellars, for example—then I’m sure that I would have been the one who had to transport the projector. Sometimes there is a natural ordering of these affairs. Carroll and I also have different memories of what movies were shown at the sessions of the club. We agree that we had extremely limited funds and that we rented the cheaper offerings from an outfit known as “Budget Films” in Los Angeles. It is my impression that we showed such classics as And Then There Were None, Meet John Doe, and The Spiral Staircase, although Carroll remem- bers the lineup rather differently. Most of the film club audience was made up of philosophers who had no particular interest in movies. They showed up in a departmental spirit of social solidarity and, I suppose, the expectation of smok- ing dope in a darkened room. It was a little unfortunate that the vague idea had circulated among members of the group that movies, especially American Foreword xi movies, were to be taken very seriously and analyzed in depth as an expression of the spirit of the relevant auteur. Thus, when the lights came on after the eve- ning’s film—The Prisoner of Zenda (), as it might be—the audience would just sit for some time in a stunned and embarrassed silence, hoping that some- one would say something pithy about the mise-en-scène of middle period John Cromwell. It is hardly surprising that, in such an uninspiring cinematic milieu, Carroll decided to leave Pittsburgh and pursue graduate work in film studies at NYU. I can’t remember if the Pitt film club survived his departure, and, if it did, I don’t remember who brought the projector in subsequent years. I would like to be able to claim that this was the historical setting that gave birth to Carroll as the Monroe Beardsley Professor of the Silver Screen, but he informs me that he had already been carrying projectors to a film club he had co-founded at his un- dergraduate college. Nevertheless, I think that these flickering memories of s movie infatuation emblemize something significant for both of us. They invoke a time in which many nascent academics, from various academic areas, first discerned the exciting possibility of a systematic discipline of film theory and interpretation, comparable in scope and ambition to literary studies. Cer- tainly, Carroll and I were both caught up with such a vision, but it was he who decisively acted upon it by heading for NYU. However, we were in for a shock. It wasn’t long before Big Theory had ex- ploded on the intellectual scene and became the crucial shaping force within film studies for well over a decade. And yet this hardly represented the kind of theoretical enterprise that we had hoped for and anticipated. In fact, what passed for theory of film under the new regime was hardly recognizable to us as the genuine elaboration of any sort of theory at all. Frequently it was extremely unclear just what sensible issues about motion pictures these “theoretical” for- mulations were supposed to explain. A theory, in any serious discipline, is not a cluster of murky, general postulates to which one registers an allegiance by pro- mulgating the vocabulary in which they are framed. It is, in the first instance, a set of proposed answers to a range of questions that have arisen out of the more puzzling aspects of the phenomena under scrutiny. If a person were to an- nounce that he had developed a theory of rutabagas but could not plausibly specify the questions about rutabagas (raising them? selling them? cooking them?) his theory purported to answer, then his pretensions to rutabaga exper- tise would rightly be dismissed. Moreover, his credentials would not be sub- stantially improved if he claimed that the chief questions his theory addressed were, for example, “Why are rutabagas routinely subjected to a form of ‘object xii Foreword construction’ that marginalizes the continuing possibility of mashed rutabaga?” or “Why is it that the Edible Complex is a condition of rutabagas, universal in the modern period?” Big Theory of Film in the s had a certain kinship with my hypothetical Big Theory of Rutabagas, and, as I say, both Carroll and I were exposed to the shock of the sudden ascendancy of theoretical work constructed in this grand but elusive manner.
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