Classical Hollywood cinema: Point of view and communication

By James Zborowski

A focused and well-written study of classic Hollywood films which zeroes in on close analysis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781784996154

James Zborowski

James Zborowski is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Hull

Book preview

Classical Hollywood cinema

Classical Hollywood cinema

Point of view and communication

James Zborowski

Manchester University Press

Copyright © James Zborowski 2016

The right of James Zborowski to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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ISBN 978 0 7190 8334 1

First published 2016

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Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction: point of view and communication

1   Point of view, consciousness and interaction

2   Distance, representation and criticism

3   Communication, love and death

Conclusion: categories and conversations

Postscript: education, communication and film studies

Select bibliography

Index

Preface

In the pursuit of its principal aims of engaging closely and critically with six masterpieces of the classical Hollywood cinema and metacritically with the phenomenon of filmic point of view, this book brings together and attempts to synthesise a range of material that does not often appear together in public. I have sought to make clear what I take to be the connections between these sources, and in certain of my notes, especially those in Chapter 1, I offer further justifications for the connections I make, to which the sceptical or interested reader is here directed. The success or failure of this attempt will need to be judged as it appears, by each reader. Nevertheless, it seems worthwhile for me to offer a brief account of the writing of this book as a biographical form of explanation to accompany (without being offered as a substitute for) the intellectual justification that is intended to be built into its main body. I trust that what follows avoids the purely personal, but some readers may still prefer to skip forward to the introduction.

This book has been written over a period of more than five years. Initially, it was conceived of as a study of filmic point of view, with a particular focus on fictional characters, adopting as its case studies five classical Hollywood directors (all the directors of the principal case study films in the account as it stands, minus John Ford). This was in turn a development of my doctoral dissertation, a comparative account of three directors which took as its point of departure Robin Wood’s suggestion that, ‘Equally removed from the audience-participation techniques of Hitchcock and the clinical objectivity and detachment of Preminger, Ophuls’s camera-work achieves a perfect balance – in terms of the spectator’s involvement – between sympathy and detachment.’¹ The scholarship I engaged with during the first phase of the book’s writing comprised criticism, metacriticism, narratology and studies of point of view from within film studies and, secondarily, literary studies. A turning point came as a result of my taking up a lecturing post whose responsibilities necessitated that I immerse myself more deeply in media studies than I had until then. What seemed at first to be at best a parallel path of teaching obligations very soon revealed itself as a source of new and exciting ways of approaching the book, which had the dual effect of deepening and diversifying my thinking on the topics I was already concerned with – point of view and distance – and suggesting to me that the addition of the topic of communication was what was required to complete and draw together the project. It is communication studies (of a particular kind) rather than media studies (in so far as such a distinction holds) that constitutes an important element of what follows. The link between the two, and a decisive encounter, came in my reading of Paddy Scannell’s Media and Communication (2007)² as part of my teaching preparation. My most direct debts to that book in what follows are its deepenings of my acquaintances with the work of the Frankfurt School (including Jürgen Habermas) and the Toronto School, but it has permeated my thought in numerous other important ways. My other principal debt to Scannell is that elsewhere, he presents an engagement with Martin Heidegger that is not only comprehensible to someone like me not blessed, to quote The Awful Truth (McCarey, 1937), with ‘a continental mind’, but also made me see why Heidegger matters as much as he does.³ My second decisive encounter, resulting (to the best of my recollection) from reading Media and Communication, was with John Durham Peters’s Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999).⁴ As Peters makes clear early in his account, his history of communication is a broadly construed and far-reaching one:

[S]uch figures as Socrates and Jesus … or Augustine and John Locke … might not have a demonstrable role in the history of the semantics of ‘communication’, but they are good to think with. With brilliance and articulateness, they lay out arguments and concerns that in current thinking are often muffled at best. Such thinkers as these make our own thoughts more fluent …

[T]he philosophically richest thinking about communication, taken as the problem of intersubjectivity or breakdowns in mutual understanding, is often found in those who make little use of the word.⁵

Peters’s influence on what follows is most apparent in the final chapter and the postscript, but again permeates the entire book.

A few further comments about the evolution of the purpose and the structure of this book over the course of its writing might be helpful to certain readers – that is, depending on the expectations they bring to the book, and what they hope to receive from it.

The first complete draft of this book addressed one director in each of its main chapters, and those chapters were organised around an exploration of the particular use of film style of the director in question. As my focus became more conceptual and metacritical, there came a point where my aims were better served by a structure in which each main chapter placed two of my case study directors and (more specifically) one of their films each alongside one another (a structure I discuss a little further in the introduction). Style is no longer one of the key explicit terms or structuring concepts of my account, but it remains fundamental to what follows. For someone who takes it as axiomatic, as I do, that style is not the icing on the cake of an artwork, but one name we might give to its meaningful organisation, it could not be otherwise.

One reader of a near-final version of the manuscript, whilst appreciative of the close readings offered in the book’s main chapters, declared himself less convinced of the vitality and virtues of some of the material that frames the main chapters, and some within those chapters where I chance my arm offering thumbnail readings of philosophers and other thinkers – that is, much of the material that is the newest and therefore the most exciting to me personally – often unburdened by the libraries-full of discussion and critique that many of them carry in their wake. It is true that I still know Hitchcock much better than I know Heidegger, and while I offer my book in the hope of bringing readers to new insights about the films and directors I explore, I do not expect to achieve the same effect with respect to many of the philosophers and theorists I discuss, whom others will know, along with the disciplinary conversations that surround them, much better than I. I am not able, nor would I wish, to control which parts of what follows any given reader takes as more or less valuable; a book’s communicative mode of dissemination does not allow for such control, and readers (especially academic readers) hardly need to be invited to take what they find most useful and disregard the rest. And, like any writer, I am probably not the best judge of the distribution of strength and value in what I have written. I can only declare that everything I include here warrants its place for one reason or another. Some of the material in Chapter 1 especially is offered as a way of acknowledging a debt or rehearsing a train of thought that furnished me with particular ways of thinking or vocabularies, or delivered me to certain destinations. Perhaps I should have simply pulled the ladder up behind me and stowed it away, but perhaps also there are other readers who would benefit from being offered the same ladder.

One further comment about the book’s content and remit seems to be in order. Although it appears in the title, the phrase ‘classical Hollywood cinema’ is not used much in the text, nor explicitly reflected upon as a category. Given that, if we employ a suitably broad (but still, I think, meaningful) definition of the term, all of my case study films constitute instances of ‘classical Hollywood cinema’, it seemed more informative, and more honest, to indicate this in the book’s title, rather than call it, say, Point of view and communication in film. This said, I would maintain nevertheless that the points I make are for the most part applicable to the broader sub-category of film which we might term the ‘narrative fiction film’ (perhaps prefacing that label with the term ‘mainstream’ or ‘realist’ if we feel so inclined). I would not wish to downplay the singularity or what I see as the near-magical achievements that belong particularly to classical Hollywood cinema, but, for the purposes of this project, such things do not, it seems to me, demand to become a matter of sustained scrutiny.

Having said this, I acknowledge that the extension of my corpus beyond the classical Hollywood cinema might steer the conversation in different directions. If I were called upon to defend the limits of my corpus, I do not think I could do so more eloquently than George M. Wilson does in a book which makes no reference to classical Hollywood cinema in its title but focuses exclusively on films belonging to that category (and covers a historical span very similar to mine):

It is essential that we cultivate a lively sense of the subtlety, complexity, and variety which classical narrative and narrational strategies allow … [I]f we lack a satisfactory conception of the possibilities that the more conventional forms allow, we are likely to become disoriented when theory is supposed to encompass narrative and quasi-narrative films that overtly make a sharp break with established canons of exposition in film … It is hard to make out the premises of an alternative mode of narration if the assumptions it means to repudiate are themselves not understood.⁶

Rather than place the classical Hollywood cinema as a zero-degree style whose outworn principles and staid conventions other filmmaking styles heroically bend or break, I have let the close reading of a handful of the great achievements of whatever we want to call this era of filmmaking⁷ fill my entire account, so that a minute fraction of its richness and diversity is what is demonstrated.

Notes

1  R. Wood, Personal Views: Explorations in Film (London: Gordon Fraser, 1976), p. 126.

2  P. Scannell, Media and Communication (London: Sage, 2007).

3  Scannell’s first lengthy engagement with Heidegger is in Radio, Television and Modern Life: A Phenomenological Approach (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). A second book-length engagement is offered in Television and the Meaning of Live: An Enquiry into the Human Situation (Cambridge: Polity, 2014).

4  J. D. Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (London: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

5  Peters, Speaking into the Air, pp. 4–7.

6  G. M. Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 11–12.

7  For two critiques of the label ‘classical Hollywood cinema’ (aimed specifically at David Bordwell), see D. Pye, ‘Bordwell and Hollywood’, Movie 33 (1989), p. 46 and A. Britton, Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton, ed. B. K. Grant (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), pp. 451–7.

Acknowledgements

Many of a writer’s principal debts will be owed to other writers he or she has never met. I will allow the conventions of academic referencing to take care of most of these debts, but I wish to pay particular tribute to Robin Wood (1931–2009), who, as already mentioned, provided in his writing the point of departure for the earlier project out of which this book emerges, and who stands as a model of engaged, humanistic criticism, and of beautiful writing. Even though he lived in Canada and I live in the UK, I always expected that I would one day meet him, and I am sad that this never occurred.

The doctoral research which preceded this book and the master’s study which preceded that was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to whom I am extremely grateful. Before that I was supported in a much more comprehensive manner by my parents, Andrew and Joanne Zborowski. I cannot thank them enough.

Throughout my undergraduate, taught postgraduate and doctoral studies, I enjoyed the privilege of being guided by the wonderful staff of the Department of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. That department possesses all the vigour one would expect of such a prestigious unit, but also creates the room for creativity and individual attention and nurture that are all too rare in contemporary higher education. Before I proceed to thank individual members, I would like to thank all the staff, both academic and administrative, and all of the students with whom I interacted during my time there.

Victor Perkins supervised the first year of my doctoral research. Beyond this, his presence in the department and his great generosity with his time and intellectual resources have been of immeasurable help to me. Victor provides a constant and formidable model of critical writing. A second, equally formidable model for me has been Charlotte Brunsdon. From no other teacher have I learned as much about the importance of methodology and reflection upon it. Ed Gallafent supervised my doctoral research in its second and third years. Ed’s engagement with my thinking and writing, besides being a model of thoroughness, was always insightful, and often unpredictable (in the best possible way). During his doctoral supervision, our shared teaching commitments, and beyond, Ed was unfailingly generous, intuitive and supportive. Catherine Constable did more than anyone else to guide me in what I needed to do as I emerged, blinking, into the post-Ph.D. world. She prodded and guided me through procedures including book proposals and job applications. Every post-postgraduate should have a career mentor who is so generous with her time and attention, and so direct in her guidance. Fellow film studies postgraduates I would especially like to acknowledge are Paul Cuff, Stuart Henderson, Tom Hughes, Claire Jenkins, Wujung Ju, Chris Meir, Michael Pigott, Nicolas Pillai, Laura Sava, Jaakko Seppälä, Jason Simpkins, Anna C. Sloan, Tom Steward and Timotheus Vermeulen.

At the University of Hull, I have benefited from the collegiality of my most immediate teaching colleagues, past and present: James Aston, Alan Burton, Denise Carter, Charlie Cordeaux, Amy Davis, David Eldridge, Barnaby Haran, Athina Karatzogianni, Iris Kleinecke-Bates, Jo Metcalf, John Osborne, Jenel Virden and Simon Willmetts. Thank you to Amy for being my most reliable interlocutor, and to Athina for all her provocations and stimulations. Various colleagues at Hull, past and present, read versions of this book at different stages in its development: Alan Burton, Ann Heilmann, John Osborne and Neil Sinyard. John in particular provided detailed and direct comments which prompted valuable revisions. Further afield, Andrew Klevan, although he only read a small portion of a near-final version of the manuscript, offered comments that led to significant redrafting. He also, at an earlier stage, recommended Gilbert Ryle to me at exactly the right time. Thanks also to Lucy Fife Donaldson, John Gibbs and Douglas Pye, who all influenced the thinking and work that led to this book in important ways.

Thank you to all the staff at Manchester University Press for their commitment to the book throughout its various versions, and to the anonymous readers they employed, each of whom offered helpful advice and feedback.

For intellectual stimulation and companionship beyond the academy, thanks to Richard George, Rachel Mann, Leo Robson and Pete Thomas.

Pete Falconer became a great friend, a stunning source of cultural knowledge and an indispensable intellectual companion to me during my postgraduate studies, and he has remained so. In Pete’s company one feels acutely and in a particular way one of the key tenets of this book: that conversation is a form of education.

James MacDowell, another fellow Warwick film studies postgraduate, is the one person with whom I have lived and talked film studies the most, and with his help I have arrived at clearer or deeper articulations and understandings of various works of film studies, and of film art. James has also been this book’s most steadfast champion (at times defending its value even in the face of its author’s doubts and dismissals), and has attended to and helped to shape its development and details more than any other reader, by scrutinising multiple drafts and engaging in long, long exchanges about the words and arguments on the page. The imagined or implied