Page 204 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

Film theory into the nineties: beyond Marxist modernism and populist
postmodernism?
Richard L.Kaplan
■ Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 1993) 187pp.
ISBN 0-415-03416-7 $17.95 Pbk, ISBN 0-415-03415-9 $49.95 Hbk.
Early American cinema developed in tandem with a crisis of social control. Turn
of the century intellectuals, fraught with worries over the ever-growing ‘dangerous
classes’, asked how could American institutions pacify the threatening mass of
alien immigrants, feebleminded criminals, and anarchistic workers? At the same
time and in response to these perceived dangers, America’s political and social
élite adopted a multitude of new measures for control and containment, such as:
immigration quotas, the institutionalization and sterilization of the feebleminded,
Americanization campaigns to teach the newcomers proper American habits,
deportation of ‘Bolshevik’ aliens, and reformatory schools for sexually
promiscuous young women. The cinema, too, was one more arena for the acting
out of these fears and trepidations. Social reformers variously condemned movies
for promoting the vices of undisciplined masses, especially sexual misbehavior
and desire. Or, alternatively, movies were viewed as a novel, efficacious tool for
indoctrinating and Americanizing the mass viewer. Jane Addams, for instance,
believed that film could ‘make over the minds of our urban population’, and she
appreciated that the ‘good in it is too splendid…to allow the little evil to control
and destroy it. In this context, the first sociological studies of the movies arose
1
and were intimately connected with queries over the power of film and its capacity
to support social control. 2
Fifty years later, practitioners of film theory again took up these fears and the
desire for social control via the cinema, but from the opposite viewpoint,
Radicalized by the movements of the 1960s, they saw the cinema as a prime cultural
institution of indoctrination of the ruling-class’s ideology. With its concern over
power, 1970s film analysis moved from the realm of purely formal or aesthetic
considerations to an investigation of the social implications of cinema.
This theoretical turn is the starting point of Judith Mayne’s informative survey and
critique of the development of film theory from 1970 to 1990. The first half of
Cinema and Spectatorship largely describes the fascinating theoretical innovations
of these writers as they repeatedly probe the issues of power and ideology in a mass
cultural institution. The second half is a series of case studies meant to test Mayne’s
theoretical conclusions.
In the early 1970s, film studies were invigorated by a heady theoretical mix of
Freudian psychoanalysis, structuralist Marxism and semiotic literary theory. This
perspective, which Mayne labels ‘apparatus theory’, was variously invoked,
criticized, and elaborated upon in the ensuing twenty years. Over these two
decades, as Mayne observes, film analysis in particular and cultural theory in
general moved from assigning all power to the cultural text, with the audience a
mere passive recipient, to giving all power to the audience, while the cultural text