Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T07:47:21.507Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Phantom Discipline

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Rey Chow
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

In the academic study of cinema, as in other kinds of academic discourses, one of the most commonly encountered questions these days tends to be some version of the following: Where in this discipline am I? How come I am not represented? What does it mean for me and my group to be represented in this manner? What does it mean for me and my group to have been made invisible? These questions pertain, of course, to the urgency and prevalence of the politics of identification, to the relation between representational forms and their articulation of subjective histories and locations. This is one reason the study of cinema, like the study of literature and history, has become increasingly caught up in the study of group cultures: every group (be it defined by nation, class, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation), it seems, produces a local variant of the universal that is cinema, requiring critics thus to engage with the specificities of particular collectivities even as they talk about the generalities of the filmic apparatus. According to one report, for instance, at the Society of Cinema Studies Annual Conference of 1998, “nearly half the over four hundred papers (read from morning to night in nine rooms) treated the politics of representing ethnicity, gender, and sexuality” (Andrew 348).' Western film studies, as Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams write, currently faces its own “impending dissolution […] in […] transnational theorization” (Introduction 1). How did this state of affairs arise?

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 116 , Issue 5 , October 2001 , pp. 1386 - 1395
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2001

References

Works Cited

Andrew, Dudley. “The ‘Three Ages’ of Cinema Studies and the Age to Come.” PMLA 115 (2000): 341–51.Google Scholar
Andrew, Dudley, with Shafto, Sally, eds. The Image in Dispute. Austin: U of Texas P, 1997.Google Scholar
Armstrong, Nancy. “Who's Afraid of the Cultural Turn?” Differences 12.1 (2001): 17–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baudry, Jean-Louis. “The Apparatus.” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader. Ed. Rosen, Philip. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 299–319.Google Scholar
Bazin, André. “The Stalin Myth in Soviet Cinema.” Introd. Dudley Andrew. Trans. Georgia Gurrieri. Movies and Methods. Ed. Nichols, Bill. Vol. 2. Berkeley: U of California P. 1985.29–40.Google Scholar
Bazin, André. What Is Cinema? Essays Selected and Translated by Hugh Gray. Vol. 1. Fwd. Jean Renoir. Berkeley: U of California P, 1967.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. 'The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. and introd. Arendt, Hannah. Trans. Zolin, Harry. New York: Schocken, 1969.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Benjamin, Illuminations 155–200.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. Understanding Brecht. Trans. Anna Bostock. Introd. Stanley Mitchell. London: New Left, 1973.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “What Is the Epic Theatre?” Benjamin, Illuminations 147–54.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin, Illuminations 217–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Vol. 1. Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Cambridge: MIT P. 1986.Google Scholar
Bordwell, David. Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Charney, Leo. “In a Moment: Film and the Philosophy of Modernity.” Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Ed. Charney, and Schwarz, Vanessa R. Berkeley: U of California P. 1995.279–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 1984.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 1987.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erlich, Linda C., and Desser, David, eds. Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan. Austin: U of Texas P. 1994.Google Scholar
Evans, Jessica, and Hall, Stuart, eds. Visual Culture: The Reader. London: Sage. 1999.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978.Google Scholar
Gaines, Jane M. “Dream/Factory.” Gledhill and Williams, Reinventing 100–13.Google Scholar
Gledhill, Christine, and Williams, Linda. Introduction. Gledhill and Williams. Reinventing 1–4.Google Scholar
Gledhill, Christine, and Williams, Linda, eds. Reinventing Film Studies. London: Arnold, 2000.Google Scholar
Gunning, Tom. “‘Animated Pictures’: Tales of Cinema's Forgotten Future, after 100 Years of Films.” Gledhill and Williams, Reinventing 316–31.Google Scholar
Heath, Stephen. “Narrative Space.” Screen 17.3 (1976): 68–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heath, Stephen. Questions of Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hill, John, and Gibson, Pamela Church, eds. The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Humm, Maggie. Feminism and Film. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Modern French Thought. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kehr, Dave. “In Theaters Now: The Asian Alternative.” New York Times 14 Jan. 2001, sec. 2: 1+.Google Scholar
Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1960.Google Scholar
Metz, Christian. Film Language: A Semiotics of Cinema. Trans. Michael Taylor. New York: Oxford UP, 1974.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Trans. Celia Britton et al. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Metz, Christian. Language and Cinema. Trans. Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok. The Hague: Mouton, 1974.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mulvey, Laura. “Changes: Thoughts on Myth, Narrative, and Historical Experience.” Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. 159–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. 14–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nichols, Bill. “Film Theory and the Revolt against Master Narratives.” Gledhill and Williams, Reinventing 34–52.Google Scholar
Petro, Patrice, ed. Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Shohat, Ella, and Stam, Robert, eds. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New York: Routledge, 1994.Google Scholar
Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 1988.Google Scholar
Tesson, Charles. “L'Asie majeure.” Cahiers du cinéma Jan. 2001:5.Google Scholar
Tinkcom, Matthew, and Villarejo, Amy, eds. Keyframes: Popular Film and Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Willemen, Paul. Looks and Frictions: Essays on Cultural Studies and Film Theory. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible.” Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.Google Scholar
Yau, Esther C. M., ed. At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001.Google Scholar
Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro. Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar