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The Analysis of Film Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN Publication history and sources of English translations A Bit of History (originally "D'une histoire"), published in L'analyse du film, Raymond Bellour (Paris: Editions Albatros, 1979), translated by Mary Quaintance for Indiana University Press. The Unattainable Text (originally "Le texte introuvable"), published in L'analyse du film; originally published in <;a cinema, special Christian Metz issue (no. 7-8 [May 1975]); published in Screen (vol.16, no.3 [Fall 1975]) as "The Unattainable Text," translated by Ben Brewster. Reprinted by permission. System of a Fragment (originally "Systeme d'un fragment"), published in L'analyse du film; originally published in Cahiers du cinema (no. 216 [October 1969]) as "Les oiseaux: Analyse d'une sequence"; published (in mimeo) by BFI Education Department, March 1972, and reprinted January 1981 as "The Birds: Analysis of a Sequence," translated by Ben Brewster. Reprinted by permission. The Obvious and the Code (originally "L'evidence et le code"), published in L'analyse du film; originally published in Revue d'esthetique, special issue, Cinema: Theorie, lectures (1973); published in Screen (vol. 15, no.4 (Winter 1974n5]) as "The Obvious and the Code," translated by Diana Matias. Reprinted by permis- . s1on. Symbolic Blockage (originally "Le blocage symbolique"), published in L'analyse du film; originally published in Communications, special issue on Psychanalyse et cinema (no. 23 (1975]), translated by Mary Quaintance for Indiana University Press. To Segment/To Analyze (o riginally "Segmenter/Analyser"), published in L'analyse du film; originally published in Quarterly Review ofF ilm Studies (vol. 1, no. 3 [Au gust 1976]) as "To Segment, To Analyze," translated by Maureen Turim; revised translation by Diana Matias published in Genre: The Musical, ed. Rick Altman (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981); chapter 5 of The Analysis of Film is based on this latter version. To Enunciate (originally "Enoncer"), published in L'analyse du film; originally published in Camera Obscura (vol. 1, no. 2 [Fall 1977]) as "Hitchcock, the Enun ciator," translated by Bertrand Augst and Hillary Radner (revised by Constance Penley for this edition). Reprinted by permission. Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion (originally "Psychose, nevrose, perversion"), pub lished in L'analyse du film; originally published in <;a cinema (no.17 [ 1979]); pub lished in Camera Obscura (no. 3-4 [1979]) as "Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion," translated by Nancy Huston. Reprinted by permission. To Alternate/To Narrate (originally "Alterner/Raconter"), published in Le cinema americain: Analyses de film, ed. Raymond Bellour (Paris: Flammarion, 1980); pub of lished by Australian Journal Screen Theory (vol.15/16 [ 1983]), translated by Inge Pruks (revised by Roxanne Lapidus for this edition). Reprinted by permission. Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN alysis of Film e ■ Raymond Bellour ~ Edited by Constance Penley INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 9 g \ ;;).__ gC) d JI 7 5 ~ This book is a publication of l3rr Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street -t.. Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://www.indiana.edu/~iupress Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail [email protected] © 2000 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions consti tutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum require ments of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48- 1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bellour, Raymond. [Analyse du film. English] The analysis of film/Raymond Bellour; edited by Constance Penley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-33700-3 (alk. paper)-ISBN 0-253-21364-9 (pbk.: alk. paper) l. Hitchcock, Alfred, 1899- 2. Motion pictures-Production and direction. 3. Cinematography. I. Penley, Constance, 1948- 11. Title. PN1998.3.H58 B4513 2000 791.43'023 3'092- dc2l 99-045486 1 2 3 4 5 05 04 03 02 01 00 Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN To THIERRY KUNTZEL CHRISTIAN METZ Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN CONTENTS . Preface by Constance Penley IX A Bit of History I I . The Unattainable Text 21 2. System of a Fragment (on The Birds) 28 3. The Obvious and the Code (o n The Big Sleep) 69 4. Symbolic Blockage (o n North by Northwest) 77 5. To Segment/To Analyze (on Gigi) 193 6. To Enunciate (o n Mamie) 217 7. Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion (o n Psycho) 238 8. To Alternate/To Narrate (on The Lonedale Operator) 262 ~- 2~ Works by Raymond Bellour 295 Index 297 Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PREFACE Constance Penley Raymond Bellour's approach to scholarship and writing has been astonishingly con sistent over many years, especially given the broad range of nineteenth- and twenti eth-century images and texts that he has worked on, including film, photography, video, novels, interviews, diaries, and critical editions of writers from the Brontes to Michaux. He typically advances knowledge by following his own fascinations rather than the protocols of a set research program. He tends not to adopt technical lan guages wholesale but rather to borrow and recombine terms and concepts for the needs of the task at hand. He warrants his arguments through art as much as sci ence. He refuses to claim as definitive even his most exhaustive analyses. He relishes collaboration, as can be seen in the work he has done over the years with friends and colleages, most notably Christian Metz, Thierry Kuntzel, and Serge Daney. Al though never anyone's disciple, he created his own "book of others" (Le livre des autres) by inerviewing and writing about many of France's most important think ers, Merleau-Ponty and Blanchot from the fifties; then the "structuralists," Barthes, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, and Foucault; later and very importantly Deleuze; and always certain historians, in particular Aries. Finally, he understood the importance of situ ated knowledge long before it became de rigueur in academic discourse, as can be seen in the frank acknowledgment of his implication in the Western, male-domi nated stories and structures his work attempts to analyze. The Analysis of Film is based largely on L'analyse du film, first published in 1979 and reprinted in 1995. 1 It brings together Bellour's now classical analyses of classical Hollywood film, in a volume that consists of at least three books. The first book presents his pioneering methods for the close analysis of film. The second examines the work of Alfred Hitchcock, one of the greatest formal innovators in the history of cinema. The third offers original insights that are informed by a lifetime of research on American cinema. There is yet a fourth, more virtual, book that appears when reading Bellour's extensive comments on the role of the woman in Western representation alongside the lively feminist engagement with his film analyses. Feminist film scholar Judith Mayne, writing in 1990, claimed that "much feminist work of the last decade or so has been a response to the assumptions inherent in both [Laura] Mulvey's and Bellour's work."2 Even feminists who found his conclusions about female subjectiv ity in Hollywood film to be too pessimistic or totalizing nonetheless believed that his approach offered a powerful model of how to write about the complexities of film meaning and narrative, shot by shot, sequence by sequence, while addressing Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN x I Preface larger social and psychological issues of subjectivity, desire, and identification in Western culture. 3 of A key feature of The Analysis Film is the appearance for the first time in English of "Symbolic Blockage," Bellour's magisterial, monograph-length study of North by Northwest, which brilliantly demonstrates the intricate ways in which the multiple mirroring and interlocking systems of the film- micro- and macro-textual, hermeneutic, symbolic-resolve themselves in an Oedipally fueled fantasy of na tion and couple so typical of American cinema. This study complements a new chapter, "To Alternate/To Narrate" (chapter 8), on D. W. Griffith's The Lonedale Operator, which was written after the publication of L'analyse du film. This 1980 study is included here because it shows so convincingly that the dynamics of alter nation and t.he repetition-resolution effect that Bellour discovered to be the heart beat of Hollywood narrative film were already there in nascent form at the begin ning of cinema. The stakes of the argument of "To Alternate/To Narrate" can best be understood by placing the essay in its original context, Bellour's two-volume, still definitive collection on American cinema, Le cinema americain: Analyses de film ( 1980), which brought together the best of French and Anglo-American analyses of American films and their history.4 Bellour's contribution to the study of Ameri can film stretches back to at least 1966, the year in which his edited collection Le Western appeared. As Janet Bergstrom pointed out in her 1979 interview with him, while other contributors to that volume chose to write about such elements of the genre as "Indian attack," "sheriff's office," "fistfight," "gambler," or "ranch," Bellour chose "woman." Bergstrom also notes that even in this very early study of American cinema, Bellour closely links "an analysis of the woman's symbolic position as cru cial in determining the narrative structure, the system of fictional representation carried over from the nineteenth-century novel, and enunciation as the principe producteur of the narrative."5 Four short but seminal essays from L'analyse du film are regrettably missing here for reasons of space. (Bellour's introduction has been modified slightly to re flect these omissions and the addition of one new essay.) Even though they are from what the author refers to as his "pre-analytic" period, the degree to which these early essays prefigure-conceptually and practically-all of his later approaches to ana lyzing the system of classical Hollywood cinema, and beyond that, other national cinemas and other media as well, is striking. These four essays also show his early predilection for the work of directors who "embody the very possibility of cinema" and who state and restate through their direction-the mise-en-scene-the "pri macy of vision," as Bellour puts it in "On Fritz Lang," the only one of the essays published in English.6 In "Le monde et la distance," "Sur Fritz Lang," "Sur l'espace cinematographique," and "Ce que savait Hitchcock," it is clear that he was already concerned, from the mid-sixties on, with the necessity of understanding the mini mal signifying elements of filmic narration ( camera distance, framing, movements within the frame, etc.), enunciation and the director's role in enunciation, and the whole range of repetitions, oppositions, and variations between and across levels that gradually produce the film's volume and meaning.7 It was no simple auteurism that attracted Bellour first to Lang and then Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN -- ·-- ..,.t
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