But I only told you that story about a single image to bring up two recent books on film I've read . . ..
My memory of this scene was one of the movie moments called up as I read through two books by Robert B. Ray: The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy, and How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies. They're intriguing and fresh looks at film studies, marred only slightly by Ray's tendency to repeat his key points and examples multiple times.
Ray argues that film studies have become stagnant, where "Cinema journals and conferences brim over with papers rounding up the usual suspects for hermeneutical interrogation"2 . Although Ray admits film studies may be "an enormously powerful theoretical machine," he claims it "now runs on automatic pilot, producing predictable essays and books on individual cases" (AH 7). Ray believes borrowing some lessons from past avant-garde movements could provide a much needed kick in the pants to the whole field.
Ray's suggestion is to look to the concept of flânerie, to the provocations of the Surrealists, and to Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, all as ways of not just shaking up the prevailing discourse, but to rediscover how to ask questions that might seem "improper" (AH 8) to it. Some of these can even be fundamental questions that we seem to have forgotten, such as considering why the projected image can be such a powerful source of delight. Reading this, I recalled Dalio's "limonaire moment" as my own illustration of the idea, a shot that invites you to muse upon it while losing the "proper" thread of the film's plot and themes.
I was reminded of Dalio's glow again as I began Ray's next book. In How a Film Theory Got Lost, Ray returns to the Impressionist and Surrealist approach to the fascination of the film image, the quality they called photogénie. Rather than offering the analytical approach of Eisenstein to montage, photogénie instead emphasizes the ineffability evoked by certain shots: perhaps an intriguing look in someone's eyes, or maybe just a detail in the background that seems unexpectedly significant. The French critic Jean Epstein refused to offer a precise definition of the term when he used it, and Ray argues that a later, but similarly infamous and tricky term, mise-en-scène, is really just a reawakening of this impulse to get at that quality of cinema where mystery resists theory.
For me, it might be crystallized in the "limonaire moment"; to Jean Epstein it was photogénie; for the Cahiers critics, it was mise-en-scène. Later I would stumble across an article on the whole phenomenon called "The Cinephiliac Moment," after a term used by Paul Willemen, which he defines as being when "'What is seen is in excess of what is being shown."3 And yet, one has to wonder: with the excesses of "what is being shown" in today's films, with all of their computerized graphics and animation, is there still room to perceive any further "excess" on top of all that?
And of course the objection can also be raised that a focus on the "limonaire moment" is just too random and subjective a way to think about film. It's almost as random as my linking Renoir to Robert Ray and the rest. Of course, Ray would claim it only follows Walter Benjamin's lead when he describes research as a kind of flânerie, which involved "the preference for drifting, the openness to chance encounters, the attentiveness to detail" (AH 43). It's all about the art of making interesting connections.
Next page: The Beatles Meet the Matrix
