1. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice , trans. Richard Nere (New York: Cambridge University Press), p. 197.

2. For the 1982 list, see Sight and Sound 51, no. 4 (Autumn 1982): 243. In a 1978 survey of critics conducted by the Belgian Film Archives regarding important American films, Vertigo was ranked only eighteenth. See The Most Important and Misappreciated American Films Since the Beginning of Cinema (Brussels: Royal Film Archives of Belgium, 1978). This jump in popularity preceded Vertigo 's re-release in 1983.

3. Janet Staiger, "The Politics of Film Canons," Cinema Journal 24, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 4.

4. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks , ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 11.

5. Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Ballantine, 1983). The making of Vertigo is discussed on pp. 425-35.

6. See Bob Thomas, King Cohn: The Life and Times of Harry Cohn (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1967), pp. 325-31.

7. Christine Gledhill, "Developments in Feminist Film Criticism," Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism , ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984), pp. 18-48.

8. François Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), p. 227.

9. Michael Rogin, " Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies," Representations , no. 6 (Spring 1984): 1-36.

1. For detailed discussions of the conflict and contradictions involved in recent political and economic formulations of Chinese socialism see Bill Brugger, ed. Chinese Marxism in Flux: 1978-84, Essays on Epistemotogy, Ideology and Political Economy . New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1985.

2. In 1985, Yellow Earth won five festival prizes—in China, Hawaii, Nantes, Spain, and Locarno. This film's impact on filmmakers and critics in China and Hong Kong was documented in Talking About Huang Tudi , Chen Kaiyan, ed. Beijing: China Film Press, 1986. For an English discussion, refer to Tony Rayns's discussion of the dissident "Fifth Generation" of young PRC directors, and also his review of Yellow Earth in the BFI Monthly Film Bulletin , 10/1986.

3. A number of melodramatic and political clichés in the original essay Echoes of the Deep Ravine were dropped in Chen Kaige's adaptation into the screenplay titled Silent Is the Ancient Plain . The impressive color tones of the first work print inspired the film's final title, Yellow Earth .

4. According to director Chen Kaige, Cuiqiao's father in the film is close to a vérité version of a local peasant he met during the walking reconnaissance of Shaanxi Province, and the bachelor singer in the first marriage sequence was also a local recruit. Yet, according to official views, the film's representation of peasants was ethnocentric and derogatory. One may understand this disparity by noting that Chinese socialism has always favored a more progressive image of peasants.

5. "Xintianyou," the folk songs sung in the northern Shaanxi region, provide a rich form for metaphoric expressions and direct telling of the singers' sentiments.

6. The first film completed by a group of Beijing Film Academy '82 graduates, One and Eight (Yige He Bage , 1984), was directed by Zhang Junzhao. Cinematographer Zhang Yimou's contribution was already regarded as the major reason for the film's aesthetic excellence. However, the film's entire end- soft

ing was altered due to censorship and it was still banned from circulation. Yellow Earth also had several censorship problems but with its ambiguities it had better luck with the Film Bureau.

7. Examples from Xie Jin's most popular films include The Red Detachment of Women (1961), in which a serf girl reacted positively to a soldier's influence and turned herself into a brave red soldier, and The Legend of Tianyun Mountain (1978), in which two women were emotionally entangled with a persecuted rightist intellectual. Xie Jin has successfully dealt with topical issues in melodramatic form shot with classical style, which made most of his works tear-jerking successes in China.

8. According to Tony Rayns, the triumph of Yellow Earth in film festivals prompted the official accusation of its bad influence on local aspirations to "compete with the ideology of the bourgeoisie at foreign film festivals." On the other hand, it is the film's international reputation that silenced established film-makers and officials.

9. Originally from Lao Tzu's Daode Jing , this Taoist concept of representation was developed in two seminal discussions on Chinese aesthetics, "On the Origins and Bases of Chinese and Western Painting Techniques" (written in 1936), and "The Spatial Consciousness Expressed in Chinese Painting and Poetry" (written in 1949) by Zong Baihua and collected in Zong's A Stroll in Aesthetics . Shanghai: The People's Press, 1981, pp. 80-113.

10. Some of the principles of Chinese spatial representation have been taken up by the West for interrogation of its own norms, e.g., Beijing Opera by Brechtian theater, and hence what is classical for one cultural system can be appropriated for avant-gardist reasons in another. Here, I would quickly add (with reference to Edward Said's discussion on "Traveling Theory" in The World, the Text and the Critic ) that while critical consciousness is the issue, classical Chinese painting as the borrowed theory itself is not free of institutional limitations in the local context. On the other hand, the aestheticization of nature in Yellow Earth could also be quickly seized by Western audiences for sentimentalized retreats to a preindustrial corner of the world.

11. Culturalist or neo-Marxist criticisms of mass culture focus mostly on sign systems produced within bourgeois capitalism. In general, hardcore propaganda is taken to be characteristic of socialist sign systems, which is a gross simplification of the complicated mediations and processes at work in those economies and cultures. With reference to China, a more complicated view of socialist mass cultures is called for, and Bill Brugger's Chinese Marxism in Flux can be read along with Victor F. S. Sit, ed. Commercial Laws and Business Regulations of the PRC, 1949-1983 (London: Macmillan, 1983) to see that utilitarian individualism, for example, is functional within recent Chinese economic discourses.

12. For substantial discussions of the interweaving of Confucianism, socialism, and patriarchy in contemporary China, see Richard Madsen, Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) and Judith Stacey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

13. Refer to Said's discussion of Derrida's and Foucault's approach to texts in "Criticism Between Culture and System," The World, the Text and the Critic , pp. 183-225.

14. The largely asexual representation of revolutionary characters was a major practice in the Revolutionary Model Plays, the only films made during 1970-73. In the post-Cultural Revolution era, the hagiographic mode of representation was debated as suppression of "true human character" in literary and film circles.

15. Both Brian Henderson's " The Searchers: An American Dilemma" (Bill Nichols, ed. Movies and Methods Vol. II, pp. 429-49) and Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981) have informed the historicist reading of this essay. I am also thankful to Nick Browne of UCLA who introduced me to them and gave valuable advice, and to David James of Occidental College for his inspiring comments.

16. The term "Chinese westerns" was used recently in China to describe films that took to northwestern China for location shooting (e.g., Tian Zhuangzhuang's On the Hunting Ground , 1984). Yet, while the American frontier appealed to the immigrants' evolutionist expansion of social and political organization over inanimate nature (according to Frederick J. Turner), the Chinese west evoked a non-aggressive self-reflection; or according to Wang Wei, "The sage, harboring the Tao, responds to eternal objects; the wise man, purifying his emotions, savors the images of things."

17. While I agree with Heath's critique of Oudart-Dayan's definition of "suturing" in filmic discourse as "narrow," I still refer here, for the sake of convenience, to the privileged example of shot/reverse shot as the suturing approach to spatial articulation.

18. In this respect, Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" would not be relevant to many Chinese films, and especially not to those made during the Cultural Revolution, which prohibited erotic codes in its representation of women.

19. One may suggest, in terms of Teresa DeLauretis's "Desire in Narrative" in Alice Doesn't (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, pp. 139-46), that there are instances in which the girl in Yellow Earth moves as "mythical subject" in narrative while men became her topoi; the marriage sequence and the river-crossing sequence are arguable examples.

20. The four Chinese characters in the shot are "San Cong Si De," meaning "three obediences and four virtues." The "three obediences" for a Chinese woman are obedience to her father at home, to her husband after marriage, and to her son in her widowhood.

21. "Yin" the female element; "Yang," the male element. These two elements in Chinese cosmology involve symbolic systems and economies present both in the male and the female gender.

22. "Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art," Mao Zedong on Literature and Art . Beijing Foreign Language Press, 1977.

23. Recently, the citing of Mao's "Talks at the Yan'an Forum" as the standard of literary and artistic creation in China is usually indicative of a tightened literary policy. In 1987, with the "anti-bourgeois liberalization" movement, China celebrated the 45th anniversary of the "Talks."

24. This concept is taken from Gilles Deleuze's "A Quoi Reconnait-on le Structuralisme?" (1973). Hanhan's name in Chinese means simple and lacking the ability to talk well.

1. Robert Stam and Randal Johnson, Brazilian Cinema (East Brunswick: Associated University Press, 1982). Teshome Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982). Julianne Burton, Cinema and Social Change in Latin America: Conversations with Film-makers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). For the recent debates on Third Cinema see Julianne Burton, "Marginal Cinemas and Mainstream Critical Theory." Screen vol. 26, no. 3/4 (1985). Teshome Gabriel, "Colonialism and 'Law and Order' Criticism." Screen , vol. 27, no. 3/4 (1986). For an overall review, see Roy Armes, Third World Filmmaking and the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

2. "Le dit du cinéma africain" in Films éthnographiques sur l'Afrique Noire , by Jean Rouch. Paris: UNESCO (1967), pp. 1-9.

3. In Revue de Littérature Comparée , vol. 3, no. 4 (1974), p. 537.

4. For a recent discussion of codes that are specific to film language see Jacques Aumont et al., Esthétique du film . Paris: Editions Fernand Nathan (1983), pp. 138-143.

5. Jacques Binet, for example, argues that "The African traditions were not prone to an art of images: no fresco, no painting and no drawing." See "Les cultures africaines et les images" in CinémAction no. 26 (1982) (special issue: Cinémas noirs d'Afrique), p. 19.

6. Revue de Littérature Comparée , p. 549.

7. Mbye Cham, "Ousmane Sembene and the Aesthetics of African Oral Traditions," in Africana Journal (1982), p. 26.

8. In Technicians of the Sacred , ed. by Jerome Rothenberg. New York: Anchor Books (1969), pp. 184-191.

9. "Oral Literature and African Film: Narratology in Wend Kuuni ." Présence Africaine no. 142 (1987), pp. 36-49.

10. Christopher L. Miller, "Orality through Literacy: Mande Verbal Art after the Letter." The Southern Review , vol. 23, no. 1 (1987), p. 88.

11. Massa Makan Diabaté, Le Lion à l'Arc . Paris: Hatier (1986), p. 77.

1. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method , trans. Jane F. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980, pp. 113-117.

2. Brian Henderson, "Tense, Mood, and Voice in Film (Notes After Genette)," Film Quarterly , XXXVI, No. 4 (Summer 1983), 11-12.

3. Roland Barthes, "The Rhetoric of the Image," in Image, Music, Text , trans. by Stephen Heath. New York: Noonday Press, 1977, p. 40.

4. Edward Branigan develops this kind of argument in Point of View in the Cinema , where (explicitly echoing Genette) he observes that whereas "in a verbal narrative the temporal determinations of the narrating act are more salient than the spatial determinations. By contrast, this dissymmetry is exactly reversed in pictorial narration . . . The spatial properties of a picture are at least initially more important than other properties and hence may serve as a reference with which to measure the general activity of narration." Edward R. Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film . New York: Mouton Publishers, 1984, p. 45.

5. According to Laura Mulvey, "Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occuring in a linear time with a beginning and an end." ("Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen [Autumn 1975]). Teresa de Lauretis reverses the formulation, suggesting that all traditional male-dominated narrative demands sadism, figuring women only as obstacles that delay the male quest or as markers of the positions and settings through which the hero and his story move to reach their destination and to accomplish meaning. (Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, pp. 103-119.)

6. André Bazin, " Umberto D : A Great Work," in What Is Cinema ?, Vol. II, trans. and ed. by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971, p. 81.

7. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology , trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith. Boston: Beacon Press, 1970, p. 86. For an application of this principle to the narrative experimentation of Luis Buñuel, see also Susan Suleiman, "Freedom and Necessity: Narrative Structure in The Phantom of Liberty," Quarterly Review of Film Studies (Summer 1978), 277-295.

1. Ernest Jones, On the Nightmare (London: Liveright, 1971).

2. M. Katan claims that The Turn of the Screw also originated in a nightmare. See "A Causerie on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw " in Psychoanal. Stud. Child 17:473-493, 1962.

3. Jones, 78.

4. Frank McConnell, Spoken Seen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1975), 76.

5. Robin Wood, " Sisters ," in American Nightmare (Toronto: Festival of Festivals Publication, 1979), 60.

6. Jones, 79.

7. John Mack, Nightmares and Human Conflict (Boston: Little Brown, 1970).

8. Rage is always an important component in horror films. Nevertheless, in the present horror cycle—given its fascination with telekinesis and omnipotent, Satanic children (and including the "psychoplasmic" imagery of The Brood )—rage has an unparalleled salience. In the America of Nixon, Ford, and Carter, the recurring cine-fantasy seems to be of pent-up, channel-less anger, welling-up, exploding, overwhelming everything.

9. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1979). Both Lasch's and my concepts of narcissism are roughly based on Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (New York: Jason Aronston, 1975).

10. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1977), 140-151.

11. The use of mythic types of fantasies to justify the parental behavior is discussed in Dorothy Block, " So the Witch Won't Eat Me " (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1978).

12. The slave creatures in This Island Earth are examples of the fusion of inside/outside and insect/human while the last apparition of the monster in Alien —with its spring-mounted iron maw—is an example of the fusion of flesh and machine, as is the alien's stranded spaceship.

13. Robert Rogers, A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970).

14. I Married a Monster from Outer Space belongs to a subgenre of space-possession films including Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Conquered the World, They Came from Beyond Space, Creation of the Humanoids, Man from Planet X, Invaders from Mars, Phantom from Space, It Came from Outer Space, Killers from Space , etc. Depending on the specific context of the film, the possessed earthlings in these films can be examples of either spatial or temporal fission. For an interpretation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers , see my "You're Next" in The Soho Weekly News , Dec. 21, 1978.

15. Daniel Dervin, "The Primal Scene and the Technology of Perception in Theater and Film," in Psychoanal. Rev ., 62, no. 2, 278, 1975.

16. In regard to shape-changing figures, like werewolves, it is important to note that metamorphosis in and of itself does not indicate a fission figure. Vampires readily shed human form to become bats and wolves; yet vampires are not fission figures. They are allotropic, varying their physical properties while remaining the same in substance. But with werewolves the change in shape betokens a change in its nature.

Another, though connected, difference between werewolves and vampires hinges on the issue of will. Werewolves—most often futilely—resist their fate while vampires, especially Dracula, prefer theirs. This is a crucial reason for having the two different myths.

17. Sigmund Freud, The Problem of Anxiety (New York: Norton, 1963), 39.

18. The spider, of course, has polyvalent associations. It figures importantly as a phobic object because of its ruthlessness—i.e., its use of a trap, its oral sadism—it sucks its prey, and, for men, because of its sexual practices—some female spiders feast upon their mates. In much of the psychoanalytic literature the spider is correlated with the oral, sadistic mother; its body is associated with the vagina; its legs are sometimes glossed as the fantasized penis that the mother is believed to possess. Some references concerning spider imagery include: Karl Abraham, "The Spider as a Dream Symbol," in Selected Papers , trans. Douglas Bryand and Alix Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1927); Ralph Little, "Oral Aggression in Spider Legends," Amer. Imago 23: 169-180, 1966; R. Little, "Umbilical Cord Symbolism of the Spider's Dropline," Psychoanal. Quart .; Richard Sterba, "On Spiders, Hanging and Oral Sadism," Amer. Imago 7: 21-28. There is also an influential reading of "Little Miss Muffet. . . ." in Ella Freeman Sharpe, "Cautionary Tales," Int'nat. J. of Psychoanal . 24: 41-45. In the preceding text I have also connected spiders to masturbation. I have done this not simply because spiders somewhat resemble hands but because that resemblance itself is part of our literary culture. Recall the legend of Arachne, who was punished by Minerva by being reduced to a hand which becomes a spider. Bulfinch writes that Minerva sprinkled Arachne "with the juices ofaconite, and immediately her hair came off and ears likewise. Her form shrank up, and her head grew smaller yet; her fingers cleaved to her side and served for legs. All the rest of her is body, out of which she spins her thread, often hanging suspended from it, in the same attitude as when Minerva touched her and transformed her into a spider." Thomas Bulfinch, Mythology (N.Y.: Dell Publishing Co., 1959), 93.

19. Some typical science fiction plots are outlined in the opening of Susan Sontag's "The Imagination of Disaster" in Film Theory and Criticism (N.Y.: Oxford U. Press. 1979). Sontag's first model plot is like the Discovery Plot described in this paper. However, the problem with Sontag's variant is that she does not give enough emphasis to the drama of proving the existence of the monster over skeptical objections. This, I feel, is the crux of most horror/sci-fi films of the Discovery Plot variety.

20. The theme of knowing/not knowing is important to horror films along many different dimensions. In terms of cinematic technique, it can influence the director's choice of formal strategies. For example, in recent horror films, there is a great deal of use of what I call unassigned camera movement in the context of stories about demons, ghosts, and other unseen but all-seeing monsters. In The Changeling , the camera begins to move around George C. Scott in his study. It is not supplying new narrative information nor is its movement explicitly correlated within the scene to any specific character. It has no assignment either in terms of narrative or characterological function. But it does call attention to itself. The audience sees it. And the audience cannot help postulating that the camera movement might represent the presence of some unseen, supernatural force that is observing Scott for devilish purposes. The point of the camera movement is to provoke the spectator into a state of uncertainty in which he/she shifts between knowing and not knowing.

1. The Human Condition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 2.

2. Quoted by Stuart Kaminsky in Don Siegel: Director (New York: Curtis Books, 1974), p. 104.

3. For a more detailed discussion of this split between the rational and sensory or emotional aspects of man, see Vivian Sobchack's The Limits of Infinity (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1980), and Lane Roth's "The Rejection of Rationalism in Recent Science Fiction Films," Philosophy in Context , 11(1981), 42-55.

4. Violence and the Sacred , trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977), p. 160. As Girard notes elsewhere, "mimetic desire cannot be let loose without breeding a midsummer night of jealousy and strife," "Myth and Ritual in Shakespeare," in Textual Strategies , ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), p. 192.

5. The Firmament of Time (New York: Atheneum, 1966), p. 72.

6. The Firmament of Time , p. 114.

7. In addition to Violence and the Sacred , see Girard's Deceit, Desire, and the Novel , trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1966).

8. The Dream and the Underworld (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 4.

9. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre , trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975), p. 167.

1. During my twenties and early thirties I would guess I went to porn films and/or arcades half a dozen times a year. In the past few years (I'm 40) I've gone less frequently; it probably works out to two or three times a year at most. I assume that some men frequent such places, while others go once or twice in a lifetime. I have no information on how often or seldom an "average" man pays to see pornography. I've not been conscious of specific changes in the situations presented in the films or the attitudes which are evident in them. I assume there has been some evolution in this regard, but my experiences have been too sporadic (and too surrounded by personal anxieties) for me to be able to formulate useful conclusions about this evolution.

2. In this sense, the porn narratives seem rather similar to those of Georges Méliès's films (the acting is roughly comparable, too!).

3. Once I've decided to go to a porn theater, I go immediately, without checking to see when the movies begin or end; as often as not, I arrive in the middle of a film. (This is true only when the theater in question runs shows continuously; when a theater runs only one or two shows a day, I usually postpone a decision about going until just long enough before the beginning of the show so that the decision can be followed by immediate action.) With very rare exceptions, I've always left before a show is over; after one film has led up to and past its most stimulating motifs, I've waited only long enough to calm down and not leave the theater with a visible erection. I've never sat all the way through a double feature of porn films.

4. Recent "trash" and "punk" films—John Waters' Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Desperate Living; Beth and Scott B's G-Man; Robert Ruot's Dr. Faustus' Foot Fetish , for example—have exploited a similar sense of aggressive amateurishness. In fact, since G-Man and Dr. Faustus' Foot Fetish are Super-8 films, they bring with them something of the feel of Super-8 porn loops.

5. The frequency of anal sex in porn films seems to confute this, at least if one assumes that anal sex is annoying and painful for most, or many, women. Yet, a decision not to press for fulfillment of such a desire because its fulfillment will cause pain doesn't necessarily eliminate the desire. I would guess that for many men the anal sex in porn films functions as a way of giving harmless vent to a desire they've decided not to pressure the real women in their lives about (harmless, that is, unless one assumes the women in the films feel they are being harmed, something I have no information about).

6. One recent attempt to assess porn's effects is Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant's "Pornography, Sexual Callousness, and the Trivialization of Rape," Journal of Communication (Autumn 1982). Unfortunately, this study's central finding—"our investigation focused on sexual callousness toward women, demonstrating that massive exposure to standard pornographic materials devoid of coercion and aggression seemed to promote . . . callousness (in particular, the trivialization of rape) . . ."—is based on testing procedures and supported by assumptions which raise nagging questions. The study's conclusions are based on a test of the impact of pornography on students exposed in groups, in a college setting, to "massive," "intermediate," and "no" amounts of conventional, nonviolent pornographic film. But in real life, porn films are seen in a very particular environment, at least in most instances I know of: in a public/private context outside the circle of one's friends and family, in places one is embarrassed about going into, and often in tiny toilet-like stalls. Wouldn't the meaning and impact of porn films be different given so different a context? Was there some reason for limiting those tested to students, and in particular to undergraduates "at a large eastern university"? Were these people users of pornography previously? What was their motivation for participating in such an experiment?

Bryant and Zillmann face some of the possible implications of their experimental procedures for their results, but they assume that, at most, students might have guessed the researchers were attempting to legitimize pornography and therefore would have distorted answers in the direction of a general social attitude which, the researchers contend, is strongly supportive of pornography, and implicitly legitimizes it by giving it legal status. My sense of the general attitude toward porn is the opposite of theirs. Certainly the legality of pornography doesn't prove that society approves of it: picking one's nose is legal, but hardly acceptable in society's eyes. My guess is that most people (including many or most of those who use porn and/or are supportive of its being available publicly to people of legal age) agree that porn is creepy and disgusting. And most people nowadays are well aware of the frequent conjecture that exposure to porn is an incentive to rape; even if we're dubious about the assumption of cause/effect in this instance, the contention creates concern. If the students tested were relatively new to porn, their massive exposure must have come as something of a shock, and if they were jolted—particularly by seeing such imagery in an institutional, unprivate context—might not some students have answered the rape questions posed later as a means of acceding to the widely held assumption that people who see porn films will be motivated by them to rape women?

1. The general assumptions about the basis of the neorealist aesthetic and particularly Bazin's version of what he believes to be Rossellini's practice has been recently challenged by Peter Brunette; see especially "Rossellini and Cinematic Realism," Cinema Journal , 25 (Fall 1985), 34-49. Brunette here and elsewhere in his view of Rossellini is specifically concerned with the way in which every discourse is constantly subject to erosive counter-discourses that ultimately threaten any classical sense of "unity" in the films, along with, it is implied, the conventionally moral implications of such unity. The connections I shall argue between the seemingly distinct aesthetic of the postwar neorealists and the "school" of Coppola, DePalma, and Scorsese complement some of Brunette's views, although from the angle of film history rather than that of critical theory. On the influence of Fellini's melodramatic style, see Naomi Greene, "Coppola, Cimino: The Operatics of History," Film Quarterly , 38 (Winter 1984-85), 28-37.

2. Connecting a particular style with a particular politics is tricky business at best, even though theater has traditionally been the mirror of social structure, and film to a certain extent follows in its ideological wake. But I still wonder why the Nazi tendency in propaganda (with the prime exception of Riefenstahl) was toward historical melodrama, while the Fascist was toward documentary. Perhaps it has to do with the relative positions of Nazism and Fascism on the Great Man/Everyman axis, and the way each defined its audience.

3. Michael Pye and Lynda Myles, The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took Over Hollywood (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979), 101.

4. Caul's mistake has been psychologically interpreted as caused by his paranoia. But to root the explanation exclusively in his character diverts at- soft

tention away from the aesthetic self-criticism of The Conversation . In art paranoia may be just another name for aesthetic unity.

5. The successful Ewok siege of the Death Star substation in Return of the Jedi contains the film's only energy because it arises from a similar tension in the imagination of George Lucas.

6. Compare the very un-Coppolan moment in The Conversation when we discover that Caul has hidden the crucial tape inside a hollow crucifix.

7. The relations between directors and stars can be arrayed on a spectrum from conflict to conspiracy. The basic question remains who is left inside the film and who is allowed to escape. With the examples mentioned above, compare Robert Altman's "erasure" of Paul Newman at the end of Quintet .

8. See Pye and Myles, 168.

9. The modernist and minimalist SoHo of After Hours of course geographically overlaps with the Little Italy of Mean Streets . Perhaps the title should appear as After (H)ours , to emphasize the denaturing of any ethnic characteristics in either its setting or its hero.

1. For the availability of this and other such tapes, see Meredith (1982). Similar material, which is sometimes advertised in magazines devoted to X-rated video, is referenced in Eder (1986).

2. For a humorous account of the stress of these demands on the pornographic film actor, see Gray (1985).

3. The possibility of imagining such a utopian promiscuity is, of course, severely circumscribed by external conditions; in this case, what developments in birth control in the late sixties made possible was abruptly terminated in the mid-eighties by AIDS.

4. Flipside Video Fanzines are available from PO Box 363, Whittier, California 90608. For a subsequent similar project, see Suburban Relapse Fanzine , POB 404825, Brooklyn, New York 11240. For an overview of punk fanzines in Los Angeles, see James (1984). For accounts of punk film-making, see Boddy (1981) and Buchsbaum (1981).

5. The violence of the Los Angeles Police Department is widely documented; see, for example, McCartney (1983) and Stark (1986). A collection of mid-eighties anti-police songs from Southern California was assembled as The Sound of Hollywood: 3: Copulation (Mystic Records, MLP 33128).

6. In their fundamental narcissism, their greater emphasis on the profilmic event and less on its subsequent observation by the spectator, these tapes document extreme instances of the first two components ( Partialtrieb ) within the sex instinct, the desire of making oneself seen and the desire of making oneself heard. Lacan (1977: 194-95) proposes that in the former the subject " looks at himself [sic] . . . in his erotic member " and that this delight is the "root" of the scopic drive as a whole.

7. This project has, however, been initiated in Houston (1984).

1. Many of the distinctive characteristics of documentary are examined broadly in Ideology and the Image (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), pp. 170-284. Here I shall concentrate on more recent films and some of the particular problems they pose.

2. Films referred to in the article or instrumental in formulating the issues of self-reflexive documentary form include: The Atomic Cafe (USA, Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, Pierce Rafferty, 1982), Controlling Interest (USA, SF Newsreel, 1978), The Day After Trinity (USA, Jon Else, 1980), Harlan County, USA (USA, Barbara Kopple, 1976), Hollywood on Trial (USA, David Halpern, Jr., 1976), Models (USA, Fred Wiseman, 1981), Nuove Frontiera ( Looking for Better Dreams ) (Switzerland, Remo Legnazzi, 1981), On Company Business (USA, Allan Francovich, 1981), Prison for Women (Canada, Janice Cole, Holly Dale, 1981), Rape (USA, JoAnn Elam, 1977), A Respectable Life (Sweden, Stefan Jarl, 1980), Rosie the Riveter (USA, Connie Field, 1980); The Sad Song of Yellow Skin (Canada, NFB, Michael Rubbo, 1970), Soldier Girls (USA, Nick Broomfield, Joan Churchill, 1981); They Call Us Misfits (Sweden, Jan Lindquist, Stefan Jarl, c. 1969), Not a Love Story (Canada, NFB, Bonnie Klein, 1981), The Trials of Alger Hiss (USA, John Lowenthal, 1980), Union Maids (USA, Jim Klein, Julia Reichert, Miles Mogulescu, 1976), Who Killed the Fourth Ward? (USA, James Blue, 1978), The Wilmar 8 (USA, Lee Grant, 1980), With Babies and Banners (USA, Women's Labor History Film Project, 1978), A Wive's Tale (Canada, Sophie Bissonnette, Martin Duckworth, Joyce Rock, 1980), The Wobblies (USA, Stuart Bird, Deborah Shaffer, 1979), World Is Out (USA, Mariposa Collective, 1977).

3. Perhaps the farthest extremes of evidence and argument occur with pornography and propaganda: what would pornography be without its evidence, what would propaganda be without its arguments?

4. Without models of documentary strategy that invite us to reflect on the construction of social reality, we have only a corrective act of negation ("this is not reality, it is neither omniscient nor objective") rather than an affirmative act of comprehension ("this is a text, these are its assumptions, this is the meaning it produces"). The lack of an invitation to assume a positive stance handicaps us in our efforts to understand the position we occupy; refusing a position proffered to us is far from affirming a position we actively construct. It is similar to the difference between refusing to "buy" the messages conveyed by advertising, at least entirely, while still lacking any alternative non-fetishistic presentation of commodities that can help us gain a different "purchase" on their relative use-and exchange-value. In many ways, this problem of moving from refusal to affirmation, from protest at the way things are to the construction of durable alternatives, is precisely the problem of the American left. Modernist strategies have something to contribute to the resolution of this problem.

5. After completing this article, I read Jeffrey Youdelman's "Narration, Invention and History" ( Cineaste , 12:2, pp. 8-15), which makes a similar point with a somewhat different set of examples. His discussion of imaginative, lyrical uses of commentary in the thirties and forties is particularly instructive.

6. Details of de Antonio's approach are explored in Tom Waugh's "Emile de Antonio and the New Documentary of the Seventies," Jump Cut , no. 10/11 (1976), pp. 33-39, and of Wiseman's in my Ideology and the Image , pp. 208-236.

7. An informative discussion of the contradiction between character witnesses with unusual abilities and the rhetorical attempt to make them signifiers of ordinary workers, particularly in Union Maids , occurs in Noel King's "Recent 'Political' Documentary—Notes on Union Maids and Harlan County USA," Screen , vol. 22, no. 2(1981), pp. 7-18.

8. In this vein, Noel King comments, "So in the case of these documentaries ( Union Maids, With Babies and Banners, Harlan County, USA ) we might notice the way a discourse of morals or ethics suppresses one of politics and the way a discourse of a subject's individual responsibility suppresses any notion of a discourse on the social and linguistic formation of subjects" ("Recent 'Political' Documentary," p. 11). But we might also say, as the filmmakers seem to, "This is how the participants saw their struggle and it is well-worth preserving" even though we may wish they did not do so slavishly. There is a difference between criticizing films because they fail to demonstrate the theoretical sophistication of certain analytic methodologies and criticizing them because their textual organization is inadequate to the phenomena they describe.

1. From a series of interviews with Newsreel members in Film Quarterly 20, No. 2 (Winter 1968-69), 47-48.

2. Author's interview with Larry Daressa, 22 December 1983.

3. See Bill Nichols, Newsreel: Film and Revolution , unpublished master's thesis, UCLA, 1972. Nichols has, to date, produced the most valuable and extensive scholarship on Newsreel. In addition to the fine master's thesis cited here, see his Newsreel: Documentary Filmmaking on the American Left (New York: Arno Press, 1980).

4. Newsreel was but one of many Movement manifestations of the "Great Refusal." Identifying with the dispossessed, the relatively affluent first-generation Newsreelers cast their lot with those systematically excluded from privilege. By the end of the decade, the lumpen ranks were swelled by middle-class youth who rejected their birthright in order to effect meaningful social change.

5. Interview with Norm Fruchter in Film Quarterly , 44.

6. Author's interview with Deborah Shaffer, 19 August 1986.

7. A particularly striking index of the shift of organizing focus and radical sensibility from 1965 to 1969 is provided by contrasting two films by Norman Fruchter, one of the central figures of Newsreel's "first generation." Troublemakers (Fruchter and Robert Machover, 1966) chronicles an SDS organizing effort (the Newark Community Union Project led by Tom Hayden) that brought the skills and energy of middle-class college students to a black ghetto of the urban north. The film's brilliance lies in its willingness to consider the Movement's shortcomings and limitations in the period preceding the outbreaks of violence and confrontation. For further discussion of this phase of New Left realpolitik, see Wini Breines, The Great Refusal: Community and Organization in the New Left: 1962-69 (New York: Praeger, 1982). The second film, Summer '68 (Fruchter and John Douglas, 1969), focuses on the several facets of cultural and political struggle within the ranks of a foundering New Left coalition (the G.I. coffee-house movement, the underground press, draft resistance organizing) which culminated in the August 1968 confrontation on the streets of Chicago at the Democratic National Convention. The shift is from community organizing to mass agitation, from fighting small battles using non-violent tactics to waging mass-mediated war with Daley's shock troops.

8. Interviews with two founding New York Newsreel members, Allan Siegel and Norm Fruchter.

9. This political/aesthetic bifurcation, though significant, obscures the relative homogeneity of the class, race, and gender composition of both factions. Neither women nor people of color tended to occupy positions of leadership in the organization prior to 1971.

10. Nichols, Newsreel: Film and Revolution , 73.

11. Interview with Marilyn Buck and Karen Ross in Film Quarterly , 44.

12. Rat (October 29-November 12, 1969), 8.

13. Interview with Robert Kramer in Film Quarterly , 46.

14. Interview with Marilyn Buck and Karen Ross in Film Quarterly , 44.

15. Author's interview with Norm Fruchter, 18 June 1985.

16. Author's interview with Allan Siegel, 18 June 1985.

17. Author's interview with Fruchter. In addition to the ideologues and the underground film-makers, another smaller faction of Newsreel producers existed—still primarily male—composed of those who raised funds necessary for production through illicit activities, principally drug-dealing. Pot was the ritual cornerstone of the counterculture; funds generated by its sale, when turned to the public good, were viewed as a fully legitimate source of income. The fallout from that method of fund-raising was a small but painful rate of attrition as Newsreelers were sent to prison on drug charges.

18. Author's interview with Christine Choy, 20 August 1986. Choy noted that her first Newsreel paycheck was not drawn until 1981, a full ten years after her arrival. A two-year CETA grant, welfare, and unemployment compensation furnished her means of survival for a decade.

19. See my "The Imaging of Analysis: Newsreel's Re-Search for a Radical Film Practice," Wide Angle 6, No. 3 (1984), 76-84.

20. Author's interview with Siegel.

21. Author's interview with Ada Gay Griffin, 8 August 1986.

22. See in particular Herbert Marcuse's An Essay on Liberation (1969), which contains the following succinct formulation of the "aesthetic ethos" of the sixties, a theoretical position that validated the realm of the creative imagination independent of quotidian (and frequently neglected) efforts toward mass base-building: ". . . the development of the productive forces beyond their capitalist organization suggests the possibility of freedom within the realm of necessity. The quantitative reduction of necessary labor could turn into quality (freedom) . . . But the construction of such a society presupposes a type of man with a different sensitivity as well as consciousness: men who would speak a different language, have different gestures, follow different impulses . . . The imagination of such men and women would fashion their reason and tend to make the process of production a process of creation." Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 21.

23. Fredric Jameson, "Periodizing the 60's," in The 60's Without Apology , 208-209.

1. Photo Wallahs (1991), directed by David and Judith MacDougall, Fieldwork Films, Australia.

2. Christopher Pinney, "The Lexical Spaces of Eye-Spy," in Peter I. Crawford and David Turton (eds.), Film as Ethnography (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1992), p. 27.

3. Ibid., p. 28.

4. Dai Vaughan, "Notes on the Ascent of a Fictitious Mountain," in John Corner (ed.), Documentary and the Mass Media (London: Edward Arnold, 1986), p. 162.

5. Ibid., p. 163.

6. See Barry Salt, "Statistical Style Analysis of Motion Pictures," Film Quarterly , vol. 28, no. 1 (Fall 1974).

7. Raul Ruiz, ignoring the taboo, jokes about this in his film about documentary, Of Great Events and Ordinary People (1979). As the camera pans slowly along a wall after an interview, a voice remarks: "The narrator should say something in this pause."

8. Brian Henderson, "The Long Take," Film Comment , vol. 7, no. 2 (Summer 1971), p. 9.

9. Israel Rosenfeld, "Seeing Through the Brain," New York Review of Books , vol. 31, no. 15 (October 11, 1984).

10. Roger Cardinal, "Pausing over Peripheral Detail," Framework , vol. 30-31 (1986), pp. 112-133.

11. Nick Browne, "The Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach," Film Quarterly , vol. 29, no. 2 (Winter 1975-76), pp. 34-35.

12. Howard Gardner, The Mind's New Science (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 273.

13. One can get an idea of this by recalling a game which many of us played as children. When we repeated a familiar word over and over again—a word like "hippopotamus"—sign and referent began to separate until the sign became an unrecognizable phonetic pattern. It then became subject to the mispronunciations that occur with tongue twisters. A kind of verbal searching led to a play on alternative stress patterns (hippopo ta mus), picking out new signs previously hidden in the word— hip and pot , for example. Part of the pleasure of such a game for children, of course, is precisely this subversion of the linguistic codes of adults.

14. See George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

15. Alan Rosenthal, The Documentary Conscience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 179.

16. Henderson, op. cit. pp. 10-11.

17. Brian Henderson, "Towards a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style," Film Quarterly , vol. 24, no. 2 (Winter 1970-71), p. 5.

18. John Berger, "Uses of Photography," in About Looking (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1980).

19. E. H. Gombrich, "The Mask and the Face: The Perception of Physiognomic Likeness," in E. H. Gombrich et al. (eds.), Art, Perception and Reality (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), p. 17.

20. See E. Richard Sorenson and Allison Jablonko, "Research Filming of Naturally Occurring Phenomena: Basic Strategies," in Paul Hockings (ed.), Principles of Visual Anthropology (The Hague: Mouton, 1975).

1. See, for example: Janet Maslin, "Oliver Stone Manipulates His Puppet," New York Times (Sunday, January 5, 1992), p. 13: "Twisted History," Newsweek (December 23, 1991), pp. 4-54; Alexander Cockburn, "J.F.K. and J.F.K.," The Nation (January 6-13, 1992), pp. 6-8.

2. Livingston's own film is an excellent example of the irony she cites, not so much in her directorial attitude toward her subject—drag-queen ball competitions—but in her subjects' attitudes toward the construction of the illusion of gender.

3. In this article I will not discuss Who Killed Vincent Chin? or Roger and Me at much length. Although both of these films resemble The Thin Blue Line and Shoah in their urge to reveal truths about crimes, I do not believe these films succeeded as spectacularly as Lanzmann's and Morris's in respecting the complexity of these truths. In Vincent Chin , the truth pursued is the racial motives animating Roger Ebans, a disgruntled, unemployed auto worker who killed Vincent Chin in a fight following a brawl in a strip joint. Ebans was convicted of manslaughter but only paid a small fine. He was then acquitted of a subsequent civil rights charge that failed to convince a jury of his racial motives. The film, however, convincingly pursues evidence that Ebans' animosity towards Chin was motivated by his anger at the Japanese for stealing jobs from Americans (Ebans assumed Chin was Japanese). In recounting the two trials, the story of the "Justice for Vincent" Committee, and the suffering of Vincent's mother, the film attempts to retry the case showing evidence of Ebans' racial motives.

Film-makers Choy and Tajima gamble that their camera will capture, in interviews with Ebans, what the civil rights case did not capture for the jury: the racist attitudes that motivated the crime. They seek, in a way, what all of these documentaries seek: evidence of the truth of past events through their repetition in the present. This is also, in a more satirical vein, what Michael Moore seeks when he repeatedly attempts to interview the elusive Roger Smith, head of General Motors, about the layoffs in Flint, Michigan: Smith's avoidance of Moore repeats this avoidance of responsibility toward the town of Flint. This is also what Claude Lanzmann seeks when he interviews the ex-Nazis and witnesses of the Holocaust, and it is what Errol Morris seeks when he interviews David Harris, the boy who put Randall Adams on death row. Each of these films succeeds in its goal to a certain extent. But the singlemindedness of Vincent Chin 's pursuit of the singular truth of Ebans' guilt, and his culture's resentment of Asians, limits the film. Since Ebans never does show himself in the present to be a blatant racist, but only an insensitive working-class guy, the film interestingly fails on its own terms, though it is eloquent testimony to the pain and suffering of the scapegoated Chin's mother.

4. Shamus, Musser, and I delivered papers on The Thin Blue Line at a panel devoted to the film at a conference sponsored by New York University, "The State of Representation: Representation and the State," October 26-28, 1990. B. Ruby Rich was a respondent. Musser's paper argued the point, seconded by Rich's comments, that the prosecution and the police saw Adams as a homosexual. Their eagerness to prosecute Adams, rather than the underage Harris, seems to have much to do with this perception, entirely suppressed by the film.

5. Consider, for example, the way Ross McElwee's Sherman's March , on one level a narcissistic self-portrait of an eccentric Southerner's rambling attempts to discover his identity while traveling through the South, also plays off against the historical General Sherman's devastating march. Or consider the way Ken Burns' "The Civil War" is as much about what the Civil War is to us today as it is about the objective truth of the past.

6. Laurence Jarvik, for example, argued that Moore's self-portrayal of himself as a "naïve, quixotic 'rebel with a mike'" is not an authentic image but one Moore has promoted as a fiction (quoted in Tajima, 30).

7. I have quoted this dialogue from the published version of the Shoah script but I have added the attribution of who is speaking in brackets. It is important to note, however, that the script is a condensation of a prolonged scene that appears to be constructed out of two different interviews with Lanzmann, the Poles, and Simon Srebnik before the church. In the first segment, Mr. Kantarowski is not present; in the second he is. When the old woman says, "So Pilate washed his hands . . ." Mr. Kantarowski makes the gesture of washing his hands.

1. See André Bazin, "The Myth of Total Cinema," What Is Cinema? vol. 1. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, 17-21. Mitry's position, often lumped with Bazin's, puts the "advance" technology allows differently: new technology gives film-makers ever-greater means to manipulate images of reality. Mitry defended his position in virtually monthly columns in the French journal Cinématographe until at least 1984. Though attacks on his position often are printed in English, his defenses and counterattacks were far more interesting than the attacks. Often Mitry argued that his semiotics-trained attackers knew very little about cinema.

2. For a general put-down of technological determinism see Brian Winston, Misunderstanding Media . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. More specific attacks on the perspective in film history are undertaken by Barry Salt in Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis . London: Starword, 1983.

3. For example, Stephen Heath, in Questions of Cinema , attempts an attack on Liz-Anne Bawden's comment, in the Oxford Companion to Film , "It is technical advances which underlie stylistic innovations like handheld techniques . . ." Heath writes: "Arriflex cameras were available in Hollywood in the late 1940s but there was no particular turn to handheld sequences in response to the technical advance (nor in France at the same period in response to the Eclair Cameflex)." (230) Heath's example is silly. The old Arri and CM3 Cameflex were good handheld cameras but neither was pin-registered or self-silenced. Until recently, American professional film-makers rarely regarded a non-pin-registered camera as reliable enough for feature use. And without a blimp the Arri and Eclair could not be used for dialogue shooting; the Eclair, with its ratchet drive, was especially noisy. Blimps added between 85 and 110 lbs. to either camera's weight and made the cameras useless for hand-holding. The Arri and Cameflex caught on slowly as "wild" cameras and for European low-budget productions where dubbing-in of dialogue was the norm. But they were technically unsuited for the mainstream industry. Bawden, in fact, is correct if one adds "self-silenced" to her "handheld" comment. The 16mm Eclair NRP and ACL and the Auricon conversions of the early 1960s did allow the cinema vérité movement to exist. The interplay between tools and tool-users is far more complicated than many academics such as Heath would like to admit. Even Comolli—who as a filmmaker should know better—in his essay "Machines of the Visible," attacks Mitry's defense of orthochromatic stock by defending panchromatic film (quoted from Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, eds. The Cinematic Apparatus . New York: St. Martin's, 1980): "A further advantage . . . the replacement of orthochromatic by panchromatic stock depends again on the greater sensitivity of the latter. Not only did the gain in sensitivity permit the realignment of the 'realism' of the cinematic image with that of the photographic image, it also compensated for the loss of light due to the change from a shutter speed of 16 or 18 frames per second to the speed of 24 frames a second necessitated by sound." (131)

The only way such compensation could occur is if the overall film speed (ASA) of panchromatic film were higher. As Barry Salt points out (p. 222), panchromatic and ortho stock were about the same speed (20-25 ASA), and Kodak introduced a superspeed ortho film (ASA 40-50) in 1926. Thus there was no speed advantage in panchromatic stock. Comolli apparently does not know the difference between red sensitivity and overall film speed. One hopes he has someone else do his light readings and shoot his films.

4. See Heath, Questions of Cinema , 226-229.

5. George Lellis, "Perception in the Cinema: A Fourfold Confusion" in Intermedia , ed. Gary Gumpert and Robert Cathcart. New York: Oxford, 1979, p. 388.

6. I am indebted to Gorham Kindem's unpublished paper, "Theories of Film Technology: The Case of Color Film," for the insight that Foucault's theories could be applied to specific issues within film's technical history.

7. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

8. I am indebted to James Langwell, Lanco Sound, Inc., Atlanta, GA, for theoretical and practical instruction in insert re-recording techniques and for contacts with ADR specialists.

9. See Peter Wollen, "Cinema and Technology: A Historical Overview," in de Lauretis and Heath, eds., The Cinematic Apparatus , 14-22. Wollen correctly asserts that the most important breakthroughs throughout film history have been in film stock—in chemistry, not mechanics. Information on film stocks in my essay are from American Cinematographer, J.S.M.P.T.E ., and manufacturers' technical representatives.

10. See David W. Leitner, "A Look at Color Negative," The Independent Vol. 4, Number 10, February 1982, 5-6, for a description of six-layer negative film-stock technology.

11. Ron Magid, " Full Metal Jacket: Cynic's Choice," American Cinematographer September 1987, 74-84.

12. See George Turner, " Out of Africa: David Watkin," American Cinematographer April 1986, 84-86. Watkin used Agfa for exteriors, Kodak for interiors. Watkin claims he liked Agfa's wide latitude and soft colors; one wonders, however, if the reason might have been that with Eastman stock, shooting outside in bright light, black and Caucasian faces are difficult to expose in the same frame; with Agfa or Fuji it's no problem. Eastman's technical representatives admit it's best to use a "Half Double Fog" filter in front of the lens when filming very dark-skinned blacks and light-skinned whites under harsh sunlight. There is a case to be made for issues of skin color being built into even film-stock specifications.

13. Jean-Pierre Grasset of Les Films du Soir first informed me of DeNiro's sub-recordable sound levels; a crewmember on Angel Heart confirmed it. In Once Upon a Time in America , however, DeNiro's location dialogue was mostly usable, despite its low volume; the soundman mixed inputs from a number of hidden microphones to get usable takes.

14. See Stig Bjorkman, Torsten Manns, and Jonas Sima, Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman , trans. Paul Britten Austin. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973, 257-258. When exactly Bergman began "matching" dialogue in post-production is vague. Vilgot Sjoman reports in L136 that Bergman was having location sound troubles on Winter Light . A truism in low-budget film-making is that one can hear a film's budget problems before you see them. Bergman's films, like most European films, traditionally had minuscule budgets. To cover the budget and location shooting problems they "matched" sound in post-production, even before ADR.

1. Consider this note on the back of 20th Century-Fox videodisc packages: "Special Wide Screen Edition. The film contained on this laserdisc is being presented for your enjoyment in the wide screen format, or 'letterbox,' allowing you to experience the film at home as closely to the original version as possible." All the major video publishers have some variation on this note, stressing the disc's fidelity to the theatrical original and the normality of the shape of the letterboxed image.

2. Though still far fewer than are available on tape. Neither medium has really made a dent in the library of available film titles. Who, what, and why decides which titles are available on video is a subject unto itself.

3. Super VHS, Hi-Band Video 8, and ED-Beta offer the same number of lines of horizontal resolution as videodiscs. However, all of these magnetic media suffer from an immediate wear and tear not true of discs.

4. This particular limitation is not only frustrating for anyone interested in sound/image relationships, it's downright odd. CD players, which are designed for audio only , allow us to hear samples of the music as we scan. Why is there no equivalent for film listening?

5. Brightness range is the difference between the brightest and darkest parts of the shot. Contrast is the brightness range between any two given spots in the shot. For a concise description of the technical inequities of the two media, see Dominic J. Case, "Telecine-Compatible Prints," SMPTE Journal , June 1989, pp. 415-54. For a discussion of color sensitometry, see H. J. Bello, "An Introduction to the Technology of Color Films (Film Colorimetry)—A Tutorial Paper," SMPTE Journal , November 1979.

6. See Graham Carter, "Mastering of Dolby Stereo Film Material for Videocassette Release," Audio Plus , March 1991.

7. Some videodisc players are capable of playing two sides, but the disruption remains since the viewer has to wait as the laser repositions at the beginning of the second side.

8. The Criterion Collection frequently provides literal "voices from outside the text" by recording audio commentary running with the film. Obviously, these commentaries encourage an alternative perception as well.

9. For a short discussion of the early reaction to videodiscs, see Barry Fox, "Video discs—too late for the gravy train?" New Scientist , vol. 91, no. 1260, pp. 277-80. Videodiscs, in fact, were the parent technology of CDs; the latter's success has given videodiscs their second market life.

10. Daniel Dayan, "The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema," Film Quarterly , vol. 28, no. 1, p. 28.

11. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings , ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 686.

12. Charles Barr, "CinemaScope: Before and After," Film Quarterly , vol. 16, no. 4, p. 9.

13. Edward Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film (Berlin and New York: Mouton Publishers, 1984), p. 65.

14. Consider the following comment: "Note that in 1971 an ANSI specification was published to limit the projector aperture to a height of 0.700" (instead of the 0.715" previously specified) to limit the screen appearance of splices." Fred H. Detmers, "Photograph Systems," American Cinematographer Manual , ed. and comp. Charles G. Clarke, 5th ed. (Hollywood: American Society of Cinematographers, 1980), p. 44.

15. Even if an HDTV standard is introduced that produces a ratio wide enough to accommodate Panavision and CinemaScope, there will still be a need for vertical masking of films (and videos?) shot in the 1.33 ratio. May I propose we call this vertical matting "keyholing"?

16. Barr, op. cit.

17. Benjamin, op. cit., p. 678.

18. Epicurus: The Extant Remains , trans. Cyril Bailey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), p. 99.

1. This attack was made twice by directors of photography during the "New Perspectives" seminar sponsored by the American Society of Cinematographers and Eastman Kodak Worldwide Student Program at the University of Southern California on February 18, 1995. Although the charge might have been exaggerated for the sake of effect, no one on the panel bothered to soften it.

2. Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," trans. William Lovitt, in Basic Writings , ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper-Collins, 1977), pp. 283-317.

3. Heidegger, p. 294.

4. Andrew Feenberg, The Critical Theory of Technology (New York: Oxford University Press), p. v.

5. Herbert Marcuse, Negations , trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 224.

6. I am very grateful to Wesley Lambert, who showed me his marvelous collection of antique cameras and spent much time pointing out the different viewing devices in use.

7. Gib., "Close-Ups: Guy Bennett: Operative Cameraman," International Photographer , vol. 11, no. 3 (April 1939), p. 5.

8. The effect I am describing in this essay is unique to cameras equipped with a mirrored shutter. The look through the lens is certainly less fascinating when shooting with a camera designed with a partial mirror that splits the light before it reaches the shutter, thus providing an uninterrupted flow to the operator.

As for operators shooting with their other eye closed, an informal survey with camera instructors at USC (Woody Omens and John Morrill, among others) revealed an operating difference between fiction and documentary work. Most operators prefer to shoot narratives with the other eye shut so as to concentrate on the scene in the viewfinder with, from time to time, a quick check toward an actor about to enter the frame, a car that may be getting too close, or the bustling of the focus puller. In documentaries, however, the consensus is that an operator should keep the other eye open so as to be aware of what is happening in the field at all times.

9. Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 134.

10. Ron G. Williams and James W. Boyd, Ritual Art and Knowledge: Aesthetic Theory and Zoroastrian Ritual (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), p. 70.

11. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image , trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 7.

12. In A. William Bluem, Documentary in American Television (New York: Hastings House, 1965), p. 194.

13. For Heidegger's full argument, see "The Question Concerning Technology," in Basic Writings , pp. 287-317.

14. In Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1962), chap. 4.

15. For Emmanuel Levinas's ideas, check his Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority , trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969).

16. See Stan Meredith, "The Electronic-Cam System," American Cinematographer , vol. 49, no. 4 (April 1968).

17. In David Samuelson, "Electronic Aids to Film Making," American Cinematographer , vol. 50, no. 8 (August 1969).

18. I am indebted to Lindsay Hill of Hill Production Services for information about his father and his research.

19. I am truly grateful to Terry Clairmont of Clairmont Camera for sharing with me his knowledge of the industry's reaction to the introduction of video assist technology.

20. Garrett Brown, "The Steadicam and The Shining," American Cinematographer , vol. 61, no. 8 (August 1980), p. 853.

21. In James B. Brandt, "Video Assist: Past, Present and Future," American Cinematographer , vol. 72, no. 6 (June 1991).

22. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the 17th Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 31.

23. In Daniel A. Fink, "Vermeer's Use of the Camera Obscura—A Comparative Study," The Art Bulletin , vol. 53, no. 4 (December 1971), pp. 493-505.

24. Vivian Sobchack, "The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic 'Presence,'" in Materialities of Communication , ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 100.

25. Charles Eidsvik, "Machines of the Invisible: Changes in Film Technology in the Age of Video," Film Quarterly , vol. 42, no. 2 (Winter 1988-89), p. 21.

26. See Milton J. Nadworny, Scientific Management and the Unions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), pp. 54 ff.

27. Feenberg, p. 27.

28. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 41.

29. Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations , trans. Don Ihde (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 236.

30. William Barrett, The Illusion of Technology: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978), p. 191.

31. Thomas Brown, "The Electronic Camera Experiment," in American Cinematographer , vol. 63, no. 1 (January 1982), p. 76.

32. Brown, p. 79.

33. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception , trans. Carleton Dallery (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 181.

34. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense , trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 48.

35. The Portable Nietzsche , ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 519.

36. David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 145.

37. Eidsvik, p. 22.

38. Eidsvik, p. 22.

39. On the subject of the Steadicam, see my article "Visuality and Power: The Work of the Steadicam," Film Quarterly , vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 8-17.

40. Feenberg, p. 14.

1. Telephone interview with the author, October 19, 1994.

2. Quoted in Peter Wollen, Signs and Meanings in the Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976), pp. 123-24.

3. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography , trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 5.

4. Ibid., p. 76.

5. Ibid., p. 87.

6. André Bazin, What Is Cinema? vol. 1, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), p. 14.

7. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. ix.

8. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 16-23.

9. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), note 2, p. 268.

10. The design and creation of these ads are profiled in detail in Christopher W. Baker, How Did They Do lt? Computer Illusion in Film and TV (Indianapolis, IN: Alpha Books, 1994).

11. See Ming C. Lin and Dinesh Manocha, "Interference Detection Between Curved Objects for Computer Animation," in Models and Techniques in Computer Animation , ed. Nadia Magnenat Thalmann and Daniel Thalmann (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993), pp. 43-57.

12. Ron Magid, "ILM's Digital Dinosaurs Tear Up Effects Jungle," American Cinematographer , vol. 74, no. 12 (December 1993), p. 56.

13. Stephen Pizello, " True Lies Tests Cinema's Limits," American Cinematographer , vol. 75, no. 9 (September 1994), p. 44.

14. Telephone interview with the author, October 25, 1994.

15. Telephone interview with the author, October 25, 1994.

16. Ron Magid, "ILM Breaks New Digital Ground for Gump ," American Cinematographer , vol. 75, no. 10 (October 1994), p. 52.

17. I do not wish to imply that photography was ever a mere mechanical recording of the visual world. During shooting, printing, and developing, photographers found ways of creating their own special effects. Despite this, theorists have insisted upon the medium's fundamental indexicality.

18. Noël Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

19. Jean-Louis Baudry, "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus," in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology , ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 287.

20. Colin McCabe, "Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure," in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology , p. 182.

21. Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 25.

22. Telephone interview with the author, October 25, 1994.

23. Noël Carroll has urged film theory in this direction by recommending smaller-scale, piece-meal theorizing about selected aspects of cinema rather than cinema in toto and on a grand scale. See Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory , p. 255, and Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 23-34.

24. For a fuller discussion of this literature, see my essays "The Discourse of Pictures: Iconicity and Film Studies," Film Quarterly , vol. 47, no. 1 (Fall 1993), pp. 16-28 and "Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Problem of the Missing Spectator," in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies , ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).

25. See Uta Frith and Jocelyn E. Robson, "Perceiving the Language of Films," Perception , vol. 4 (1975), pp. 97-103; Renee Hobbs, Richard Frost, Arthur Davis, and John Stauffer, "How First-Time Viewers Comprehend Editing Conventions," Journal of Communication , no. 38 (1988), pp. 50-60; Julian Hochberg and Virginia Brooks, "Picture Perception as an Unlearned Ability: A Study of One Child's Performance," American Journal of Psychology , vol. 74, no. 4 (December 1962), pp. 624-28; Robert N. Kraft, "Rules and Strategies of Visual Narratives," Perceptual and Motor Skills no. 64 (1987), pp. 3-14; Robert N. Kraft, Phillip Cantor, and Charles Gottdiener, "The Coherence of Visual Narratives," Communication Research , vol. 18, no. 5 (October 1991), pp. 601-16; Robin Smith, Daniel R. Anderson, and Catherine Fischer, "Young Children's Comprehension of Montage," Child Development no. 56 (1985), pp. 962-71.

26. See Austin S. Babrow, Barbara J. O'Keefe, David L. Swanson, Renee A. Myers, and Mary A. Murphy, "Person Perception and Children's Impression of Television and Real Peers," Communication Research , vol. 15, no. 6 (December 1988), pp. 680-98; Thomas J. Berndt and Emily G. Berndt, "Children's Use of Motives and Intentionality in Person Perception and Moral Judgement," Child Development no. 46 (1975), pp. 904-12; Aimee Dorr, "How Children Make Sense of Television," in Reader in Public Opinion and Mass Communication , ed. Morris Janowitz and Paul M. Hirsch (New York: Free Press, 1981), pp. 363-85; Cynthia Hoffner and Joanne Cantor, "Developmental Differences in Response to a Television Character's Appearance and Behavior," Developmental Psychology , vol. 21, no. 6 (1985), pp. 1065-74; Paul Messaris and Larry Gross, "Interpretations of a Photographic Narrative by Viewers in Four Age Groups," Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication no. 4 (1977), pp. 99-111.

27. Elizabeth M. Perse and Rebecca B. Rubin, "Attribution in Social and Parasocial Relationships," Communication Research , vol. 16, no. 1 (February 1989), pp. 59-77.

28. I am indebted to Carl Plantinga for clarification of some of these distinctions.

29. Telephone interviews with the author, October 25, 1994.

30. Stuart Feldman, "Rendering Techniques for Computer-Aided Design," SMPTE Journal , vol. 103, no. 1 (January 1994), pp. 7-12.

31. With respect to digital-imaging practices, rendering is distinct from the phases of model-building and animation and refers to the provision of texture, light, and color cues within a simulated environment.

32. Texture-mapping is a process whereby a flat surface is detailed with texture, such as skin wrinkles, and can then be wrapped around a three-dimensional model visualized in computer space. Some surfaces texture-map more easily than others. Pat Byrne, at Post Effects, points out that spherical objects are problematic because the top and bottom tend to look pinched. Telephone interview with the author, October 25, 1994.

33. Telephone interview with the author.

34. Author's interview with Kevin Mack. See also Tsuneya Kurihara, Ken-ichi Anjyo, and Daniel Thalmann, "Hair Animation with Collision Detection," in Models and Techniques in Computer Animation , pp. 128-38.

35. See Stephania Loizidou and Gordon J. Clapworthy, "Legged Locomotion Using HIDDS," in Models and Techniques in Computer Animation , pp. 257-69.

36. Ibid., p. 258.

37. Nichols, Representing Reality , p. 5.

38. Ibid., p. 268.

39. Christopher Williams, "After the Classic, the Classical and Ideology: the Differences of Realism," Screen , vol. 35, no. 3 (Autumn 1994), p. 282.

40. Ibid., p. 289.

1. At least ten years ago, Stanley Crouch, then of Pomona College, now of the Village Voice , called me up in the middle of the night to discuss some Welles films we had recently seen. Then, as now, the urgency of a 3 a.m. phone call on this subject seemed perfectly reasonable, and our conversation began to move my thoughts in their present direction.

2. Orson Welles (New York: Viking Press, 1972), p. 43.

3. Freud sees this characteristic as signalling an infantile fixation in the "'cannibalistic' or 'oral' phase, during which the original attachment of sexuality to the nutritional instincts still dominates the scene." "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (The Wolf Man)," Three Case Histories (New York: Macmillan, Collier Books, 1963), p. 299.

4. In his analysis of "The Wolf Man," Freud notes that "a father is the prototype . . . of the caricatures that are drawn to bring derision upon someone." Three Case Histories , p. 256.

5. Jean-Louis Baudry, "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus," Film Quarterly (Winter 1974-75), p. 45.

6. "Ellipsis on Dread and the Specular Seduction," Wide Angle , Vol. 3, no. 3 (1979), pp. 42-47.

7. For a discussion of Welles's films in terms of realism, however, see André Bazin, Orson Welles (New York: Harper & Row, 1978). For further discussion of all aspects of Welles's work and biography, see: Joseph McBride (see note 2); Ronald Gottesman, ed., Focus on Orson Welles (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1976); James Naremore, The Magic World of Orson Welles (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978); Charles Higham, The Films of Orson Welles (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1970); Pauline Kael, The CITIZEN KANE Book (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Peter Cowie, A Ribbon of Dreams: The Cinema of Orson Welles (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1973); Peter Bogdanovich, The Cinema of Orson Welles (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961); Robert Carringer, "Rosebud Dead or Alive: Narrative and Symbolic Structure in Citizen Kane," PMLA (March 1976).

1. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier . Indiana University Press, 1982, p. 13.

2. Ibid., p. 15.

3. Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema , Indiana University Press, 1981. Particularly the essay "The Question Oshima."

4. "We wanted to re-read Ford, not Huston, to dissect Bresson and not René Clair, to psychoanalyze Bazin and not Pauline Kael," T. L. French, " Les Cahiers du Cinéma 1968-1977, Interview with Serge Daney," The Thousand Eyes #2.

5. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film , University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

6. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen Volume 15, Number 3, Autumn 1975.

7. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema , Indiana University Press, 1984.

8. "What interests me . . . in Lizabeth Scott films," Alloway writes, "are those properties specific to popular movies which can be validated by comparison with other films and other mass media." Lawrence Alloway, Violent America: The Movies 1946-1964 , The Museum of Modern Art, 1971.

9. "A still from a 40's movie called Shockproof had a fascination that I spent some time analyzing. Everything in the photograph converged on a girl in a 'new look' coat who stared out slightly to the right of the camera. A very wide-angle lens must have been used because the perspective seemed distorted, but the disquiet of the scene was due to other factors. It was a film set, not a real room, so wall surfaces were not explicitly conjoined; and the lighting came from several different sources. Since the scale of the room had not been unreasonably enlarged, as one might expect from the use of a wide-angle lens, it could be assumed that false perspective had been introduced to counteract its effect . . ., yet the foreground remained emphatically close and the reces- soft

sion extreme. All this contributed more to the foreboding atmosphere than the casually observed body lying on the floor, partially concealed by a desk. The three collages . . . are about this image of an interior space—ominous, provocative, ambiguous; with the lingering residues of decorative style that any inhabited space collects. A confrontation with which the spectator is familiar yet not at ease." ( Richard Hamilton , The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1973, page 46.) "I've been looking at the catalogue. There is a wonderful clarity in Hamilton's work. And looking at these pictures some things have come back to me—Pat Knight's rather angular handsomeness, the pale lipstick face, with eyes trying to hide something, and an attitude of sameness about her against the changing backgrounds and melodramatic action." ( Sirk On Sirk by Jon Halliday, The Viking Press, New York, 1972, page 79.)

10. "Pop! Go the Movies," Moviegoer #2, Spring, 1964.

11. Leonard Maltin's TV Movies and Video Guide , 1987 Edition, Signet Books.

12. In his video presentation L'Image du Cinéma , Raymond Bellour provocatively describes the cinema as a "machine that produces couples."

13. See John O. Thompson, "Screen Acting and the Commutation Test," Screen , Volume 19, Number 2, Summer, 1978.

14. And even this plateau is in a sense provisional, for Scott and Lancaster—dressed in their costumes from Desert Fury —make an appearance in Variety Girl , another 1947 Paramount release. Directed by George Marshall, Variety Girl is a revue-style musical—ostensibly about the charitable organization "The Variety Clubs of America,"—thrown together much along the lines of such wartime musical reviews as Thank Your Lucky Stars, Stage Door Canteen , or Star Spangled Rhythm . A slim plot (coscripted by Frank Tashlin) follows the adventures of Olga San Juan and Mary Hatcher in Hollywood as an excuse to showcase Paramount stars and personalities (among those making cameos: Ray Milland, Paulette Goddard, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, Alan Ladd, Dorothy Lamour). The film's finale is a nightclub show with a carnival motif. Ringmaster William Demerest takes us to one exhibit featuring "Buffalo Burt Lancaster and Lizabeth 'Texas' Scott." Lancaster is to shoot a pair of cigarettes out of Scott's mouth from over his shoulder, using a mirror. "Stop breathing," he tells her. "Who's breathing?" she asks. The camera is on Lancaster when he shoots. He turns about looking disappointed. He walks over to where Scott was standing. The space is empty. He looks down indicating he has felled her. He takes a card and places it on a post nearby. It reads "Girl Wanted."

15. Paramount News , September 23, 1946.

16. Paramount News , November 11, 1946.

17. "No, My Desert Daughter," Newsweek , September 15, 1947.

18. Running Away from Myself: A Dream Portrait of America Drawn from the Films of the 40's , Grossman Publishers, 1969.

19. "We've been begging them on our knees—I mentioned previously women analysts—to try to tell us, well, not a word! Never been able to get anything out of them," Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire Volume XX, Encore , Editions du Seuil, 1975, page 69.

20. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier , Indiana University Press, 1982, page 5.

21. Paul Smith, "Our Written Experience of the Cinema: An Interview with Jean-Louis Schefer," Enclitic Volume VI, Number 2, Fall, 1982.

1. Richard Whitehall, "Interview with Bruce Baillie," Film Culture , No. 47, pp. 17-18.

2. Bruce Baillie, Program for Castro Street . File: Museum of Modern Art.

3. Bruce Baillie in P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 208.

4. Bruce Baillie, Notebook entry, May 22, 1966.

5. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1949), p. 48.

6. Bruce Baillie, MOMA Cineprobe Tape, April 7, 1970.

7. Richard Corliss, "Bruce Baillie: An Interview," Film Comment , Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring 1971), p. 25.

8. Whitehall, op. cit ., p. 7.

9. Bruce Baillie, MOMA Cineprobe Tape, April 7, 1970.

10. Ibid .

11. Corliss, op. cit ., p. 26.

12. Bruce Baillie, MOMA Cineprobe Tape, April 7, 1970.

13. Bruce Baillie, in Harbinger , Vol. 1, No. 1 (July 1967), p. 32.

14. R. L. Gregory, Eye and Brain (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 119.

15. Corliss, op. cit ., p. 31.

16. Rudolf Arnheim, Film As Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), pp. 131-32.

17. Sitney, op. cit ., p. 208.

18. Bruce Baillie in Harbinger , Vol. 1, No. 1 (July 1967), p. 34.

19. Sitney, Museum of Modern Art Circular #66.

20. Eisenstein, Film Sense (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1947), p. 93.

1. "Respond Dance," in P. Adams Sitney, ed., Film Culture Reader (New York: Praeger, 1970), pp. 239-40.

2. Experimental Cinema (New York: Universe Books, 1971), p. 132. "Song V," a third childbirth film, cannot be divorced from the aesthetic context of the complete Songs and is therefore omitted from this discussion.

3. "The Birth Film," in FCR , p. 231.

4. "Interview with Stan Brakhage," FCR , pp. 208-10.

5. See, for example, Sheldon Renan, An Introduction to the American Underground Film (New York: Dutton Paperbacks, 1967), p. 122; and Sitney, Visionary Film (New York: Oxford U.P., 1974), p. 191.

6. "Interview with Stan Brakhage," pp. 202-03.

7. Ibid ., pp. 208-09.

8. Just so, Carol Emshwiller pointed out to me that the beauty of "The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes" ("Autopsy"), the third segment of The Pittsburgh Trilogy , derives from the pattened rituals of dissection opposed to the nearly intolerable vision of humans reduced to meat.

9. Sitney, Visionary Film , p. 189. Subsequent references to this edition will be included in the text (as VF ).

10. "The Birth Film," pp. 232-33.

11. "Interview with Stan Brakhage," p. 225.

12. Ibid ., p. 225. See also Film-Makers' Cooperative Catalogue No. 6 (New York: Harry Gantt, 1975), p. 27.

1. See my earlier critique of Star Trek in "In Search of Spock: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry," Journal of Popular Film and Television , vol.12 (1984), pp. 52-65; and Douglas Kellner's work along these lines in " Blade Runner : A Diagnostic Critique," Jump Cut , no. 29 (1984), pp. 6-8, and Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

1. The film cuts back and forth between the women's rooms here, as it did between their preparations to leave at the beginning of the film; otherwise they are shown together. A partial exception is Thelma's robbery of the convenience store. The camera holds on the waiting Louise while it is occurring, but later we see the event on the videotape from the store's camera that the police and Darryl are watching. In the police narrative strand, the viewing of Thelma in action is a present scene. In relation to the Thelma-Louise narrative strand, however, it is the filling-in of what Gérard Genette calls a lateral ellipsis (or paralipsis), in which a narrative does not skip over a moment in time but sidesteps an element of it. Thus the robbery scene has a dual status—a present scene in the police narrative and a filling-in of a lateral ellipsis in the narrative of Thelma and Louise.

2. Thelma and Louise's destination changes several times in the course of the film: to get away from the scene of the crime; to get out of the state; to reach Oklahoma City where Louise's money is; to escape to Mexico without crossing Texas; then, with the police on their trail and their Mexican plan known, heading further west, and north, to what turns out to be the Grand Canyon.

1. See Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).

1. The following description of Messidor is influenced by Beverle Houston's essay " Messidor : A Post-Structuralist Reading," Women and Literature (Fall 1984).