Kyle Conway began this series by wishing to explore that part of “our experience of a media object [that] exists prior to and outside of language.” In my contribution, I would like to take up the question of language from another angle.

Film and media critics tend to privilege the conceptual work of the moving image-maker when the visual image can be grounded in a linguistic or verbalized idea—an idea, so the reasoning goes, which the media artist used representational forms to express. This inferential process (fig. 1) in effect relies on a extended commutation test, whereby one imagines the images of a film or TV show (1) as philosophical words on a page—a representation of a system of ideas, an argument or a ponderous statement (2)—in order to ascertain the distinguishing features of moving image-maker’s motivating intentions (3).

Fig. 1. The verbal model of moving image intelligence.

The maker of moving images is taken as a writer. The caméra really does materialize as a stylo. But is this all there is to the image-maker’s intelligence?

What if media critics were to acknowledge that some of the intellectualizing that filmmakers and showrunners and video artists do results in pictorial concepts? Can moving images not be intelligent—abstract, puzzling, profound, astute, quick-witted—without acting as surrogates for a discursive intervention?

This would require us to revise our thinking about moving image intelligence—to reimagine the relationship between pictures and ideas. We might acknowledge that some media artists speak in images alone, directly in representational forms. In short, some moving image-makers may not make intellectual or conceptual contributions to the viewing experience by committing themselves to preformed verbal systems of thought prior to producing an image and then using the image to communicate it to the viewer. It might rather involve theorizing a prior verbalized puzzle or deep conundrum by making images, using light and shade, color and tone, varieties of movement and stasis, compositional line and depth.

This involves making some concessions. Principle among these is that we might want to consider how we program ourselves for verbalized notation when we call media objects “texts.” In Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (1994), the art historians Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall write of the Venetian painter: “…there is a sense in which painting like Tiepolo’s, in sharp contrast with what a text is able to do, lets us re-experience the process by which we first come to make sense of the world” (p.15). The authors skewer a dominant textual bias in Western aesthetics: “It has been a feature of European aesthetics…that painting does something roughly similar to what literature does.” Citing Lessing and others, they note that “the criteria of the comparison between painting and text have been textual ones” (p.2). The limits of the Lessing position are flaunted in Tiepolo, for he provides an example “of pictorial creativity from premises that are not literary” (p.3). “Instead of trying to tell,” they note, “Tiepolo shows” (p.40). One contribution to thought is the painter’s grand Treppenhaus ceiling, which makes a specifically pictorial “argument” about the “relation of the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional” (p.130) (fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Treppenhaus ceiling (Tiepolo, 1752-3).

We need not look to the fine arts for examples of the pictorial intelligence, of the penetrating image. It’s on display in the French blockbuster. The digitally composited two-minute long take that opens District 13 (Morel, 2004) might be read “textually” as a statement relaying the social problems that afflict the French banlieue (in 2004, or in 2010, when the film is set), the same problems the film’s protagonist, Lëito (David Belle), a master of parkour (fig. 3 and 4), wishes to combat.

Fig. 3 and 4. District 13 (Morel, 2004).

On some level, the roving camera of the opening shot analogizes the ghettoized space with the notion of an imploding prison system, where the exterior walls still manage to contain the inhabitants but the barriers within have crumbled, the legal and social order has collapsed into vagrancy, intoxication and gang violence (Fig. 5, 6 and 7).

Fig. 5, 6 and 7. District 13 (Morel, 2004).

From this standpoint, the film opens with a blunt statement, little more than a string of clichés.

But the image, by Pierre Morel, warns that this is merely a verbalized projection. There is pictorial intelligence here working on its own terms. Morel, trained as a cinematographer, doesn’t offer a list-like collage of cut-together, typical views. Conceived as a fluid movement along an axial trajectory, the shot mounts a pictorial argument, contrasting the sluggish, feckless, repetitive forms of ambulation, posture and rest with graceful and nimble mobility that remains possible even through the various frames and apertures—abandoned cars, bullet-riddled windows—of this decaying space (fig. 8 and 9). Through the moving image, parkour, itself a non-verbal, bodily form, is expanded as a directly pictorial concept of creative and improvisatorial motion.

Fig. 8 and 9. District 13 (Morel, 2004).

An image like this accommodates projections of verbal paraphrase even as its specifically visual concept recommends that we taken some distance from them.

Whatever the limitations of this new twist on auteurism—and some find that it evinces few if any virtues—it at least raises questions about “the vulgar” in the appreciation of auteurs. Is this a recent story?

To contextualize this trend, Girish Shambu proposes that we distinguish between what he calls classical (i.e., postwar French) and vulgar auteurism. His portrait of French criticism is a familiar one—call it the Sarris Version, elaborated in the famous essay, “Towards a Theory of Film History,” in The American Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1968)—in which Cahiers du cinéma is said to have created a “first wave auteurism” that canonized both artsy directors like Robert Bresson and Jean Renoir and “vulgar” filmmakers like John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. Classical auteurism praised popular auteurs for marking their movies with distinctive stylistic signatures despite the constraints imposed by industrial production. For Shambu, not only does vulgar auteurism focus solely on “vernacular” genres and styles, but it ultimately lacks the polemical thrust of Cahiers criticism. Unlike François Truffaut who celebrated these auteurs while pouring scorn on the so-called “Tradition of Quality,” contemporary auteurists don’t polemicize against another, odious cinematic form.

But let us not overlook an important fact: French auteurism was always vulgar. While some now view postwar auteurism as elitist, it in fact aimed to popularize good taste in a popular artistic medium and to blur the lines between high and low, the vanguard and the popular. Auteurists espoused a “classical liberal” view of the power of education in the arts, and boldly moved to overturn cultural norms by spreading its sensibility to a new public—to cinephiles—that would, as a result, feel empowered to give voice to its passions. It should come as no surprise that André Bazin was asked to found a “center for cinematographic initiation” at Travail et culture, an institution allied with the French Communist Party that tried to “seize that ancient dream of ‘art for everyone’” (cited in Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, 86)).

These aspects of French taste culture encourage us to create more concrete, but also more ambitious, challenges for today’s auteurism.

The strain of “vulgarity” in postwar auteurism reaches as far back as the late 1940s. In 1948, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, André Bazin, Alexandre Astruc, and others founded Objectif 49, a ciné-club that sought to redeem recent films and filmmakers that were “accursed,” that had been misunderstood by middlebrow filmgoers, producers and distributors. The club showed a range of underappreciated movies—ones that represented the best of current cinema, but that had been ignored for being too pretentious or too popular for serious consideration, among other faults—like Sturges’s Christmas in July (1940), Ford’s They Were Expendable (1945) and Welles’s Lady From Shanghai (1947), but also Bresson’s Les dames du bois de Boulogne (1945), Malraux’s Espoir (1945), and Visconti’s Ossessione (1943). As one of the first ciné-clubs devoted to current and future cinema, its screenings and special events didn’t distinguish between “commercial” and “art” films. Both were equally vulnerable for their accursedness, for their variant of vulgarity (popular or pretentious).

The club’s inaugural festival—the aptly named Festival du film maudit (Festival of Accursed Films, 29 July-5 August 1949)—also raised awareness about the plight of the auteur in the French industry. In a 26 April 1949 press conference broadcast on French radio, Robert Bresson, who hadn’t made a film in four years, lamented the “film maudit” as one “full of remarkable things, though rarely remarked.” The catalogue for the 1949 Festival included an essay by Jean Grémillon on the “Maledictions of Style,” which explored the challenges faced by the auteur whose search for an innovative style was too often met with scorn by distributors who favored less challenging works. Attended by Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette and Truffaut, the festival might be seen as one among several events that shaped the Cahiers sensibility.

The important point is that the ciné-club built a canon; but canon building was not its primary ambition. It aimed to intervene in the careers of the French filmmakers it defended. Objectif 49, as the name suggests, had a mission, an objective: to brazenly challenge an entire industry by cultivating a critical eye for the ways that these and other movies challenged convention. In doing so, it could create an audience—a culture—for a new avant-garde in French cinema. But for these cinephiles the avant-garde was not an experimental non-narrative genre for elites; it was a visionary narrative cinema for a broad public, and thus one that ought to interest producers and distributors. Objectif 49 shaped the period’s vulgate, adding the expression nouvelle avant-garde to the cinephile’s lexicon.

Postwar auteurism was in effect a form of activism—of community- and institution-building that was, quite fittingly, strategically fluid in the auteurs and movies it advocated. It takes more than pantheons and polemics to wield influence over taste culture.

While growing up in suburban Montreal, my British grandmother often told me stories about “real” wrestling in Québec during the 1960s, not that she was ever a fan. In these stories, she was merely recalling with pride the stars admired by my late grandfather after they had emigrated to Canada. Among them was Édouard Carpentier—“a real athlete,” she’d boast—who passed away this past Saturday, October 30th, at the age of 84. “He was a real wrestler,” she repeated with almost nauseating frequency. But while the idea irked me at the time because I thought she was taking a shot at the wrestlers I loved—“Macho Man” Randy Savage, “The Model” Rick Martel, “Mr. Perfect” Curt Hennig, among others—I never quite managed to fully doubt her. Maybe wrestling was real at one time, and maybe Carpentier was a star.

Media scholars have two reasons to remember Carpentier. He came into his own during wrestling’s transition to an entertainment industry led by three companies, known as “the Big Three,” each taking advantage of the medium of television in its own ways. He was also featured in a wonderful Québécois documentary film, La Lutte/ Wrestling (1961), made by Michel Brault during the cinéma direct era with consultation by Roland Barthes.

Born Édouard Ignacz Weiczorkiewicz to a Russian father and Polish mother in Roanne, Loire, France on 16 July 1926, Carpentier became a member of the French Resistance during the Occupation, for which he was awarded two medals by the French government. He moved to Canada in 1956, becoming one of the biggest stars in North America.

His career highlight came in 1957, when at the age of 26 he wrested the NWA World Heavyweight championship from Lou Thesz, one of the greatest wrestlers in the history of the industry. The title win was not without controversy. This was a period when the wrestling industry consisted of regional firms, or “territories.” The National Wrestling Alliance, or NWA, was formed by several regional promoters in 1948, and was henceforth regarded as a national governing body in the U.S. One world champion was crowned, the second being Thesz himself. The title would only change hands via a vote among the promoters. On 14 June 1957 in Chicago, Carpentier got the nod, in a way. He faced champion Thesz in a best-of-three battle. The wrestlers split the first two falls, with Carpentier winning the third on a disqualification. Titles then as now only change on a pinfall or submission. Still, the official raised Carpentier’s hand in victory and awarded him the title.

A complex storyline was supposed to follow, where Carpentier and Thesz would each claim rights to the title. Instead, a legitimate controversy was stirred. Carpentier left the NWA to help launch the upstart AWA (American Wrestling Association), which then competed with the NWA for dominance in American wrestling.

Carpentier would never win another world crown, but he was a crucial player as the industry was slowly revolutionized—over the next 40 years trading in dark, smoke-filled arenas for broadcast television and later pay-per-view and cable, all of which made it a billion-dollar, international business. He was also an accomplished trainer, serving as mentor to some of wrestling’s biggest names, including André the Giant, a key player in the 1980s boom period in the WWF (World Wrestling Federation).

A mere 5’ 9 ½” tall and weighing in at 220 lbs., Carpentier would be considered a light heavyweight by current standards. But his athleticism was that of a gymnast, which promoters were eager to market as wrestling focused more on showmanship and less on legitimate grappling. Michel Brault captures this aspect of his appeal in La Lutte, where Carpentier makes a grand entrance by completing a flawless somersault dive into a pool during a workout session. He’s the only wrestler in the film who gets a title card.

Shot in Montreal’s legendary Forum, Brault’s documentary is as much about fan reaction as it is about the wrestling action. Still, it shows Carpentier at his best, with his trademark smile (and cauliflower ears!) as he greets an admiring fan on his way to the ring for a match.

On this occasion, Carpentier teamed with Dominic DeNucci to face the dreaded combination of the Fabulous Kangaroos, who, late in the bout, clasp on Carpentier a vicious clawhold.

Battling back, Carpentier pounds his opponent into a corner, and then in an amazing move—one that, 50 years later, modern stars like Shawn Michaels would claim as their own—…

…completes a clean back flip from the top rope into the ring, landing squarely on his feet. In the closing moments of the bout, Carpentier gets set….

…. and executes a mid-air somersault, landing on his hapless foe with a textbook senton back splash to earn the pinfall.

A pioneering high flyer, a Montreal institution, a trainer of the next generation and a classy entertainer who became a bankable star in an industry gaining greater exposure through various media.

A real wrestler? It’s not difficult to see why my grandmother believed it.

But, as a Bond lover, I feel obligated to offer an objection or two, and to attempt to counter Bordwell’s analysis with one of my own.  The point of engaging in this action-scene debate is not to argue that 1990s Bond trumps 1990s Hong Kong action.  All I aim to show is how a defense of the artistry of Bond-style action might go—to defend an aspect of Bond that critics other than Bordwell now rather hastily caricature.

The premise of Bordwell’s analysis is that the action scene he’s selected from Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) is ho-hum and unclear in terms of the action depicted.  I don’t have space to contest the first claim, but this much can be shown: the scene is perfectly clear, even efficient, in its action and storytelling.

The action appears unclear only if the scene is viewed in an acoustic vacuum.  And that is not the assumption of the filmmakers.  Sound is as much a part of their storytelling and action-sequence toolbox as cutting and staging.  Here, director Roger Spottiswoode and his sound editors, Peter Bond and Peter Baldock, use sound efficiently to replace what would have been superfluous matter on the visual track.  When the first security guard tackles Bond on the catwalk and chokes him on the edge, Bond retaliates with one slug…

… and then another.

A close-up shows that Bond is shocked that his nemesis hasn’t succumbed.

Still in the same shot, Bond winds up—we hear Brosnan’s voice ggrrmmm as he builds up strength—

…and he punches the henchman for a third time.  Cut to the guard, who, as he lets go of Bond, is sent for a spin and drops below the frame.

Bordwell seems to suggest that when this happens, we lose our bearings on the action, because we don’t see the guard fall to the floor and roll out of sight.  But we do hear him.  The smack of the guard crumbling onto the catwalk is carefully cued just as he drops below the frame.  This, combined with a shot of Bond looking down at his defeated opponent (with the second guard leaping into the scene from behind), confirms for us that henchman number one is down and out.

So, no real doubt remains about whether he’ll make a comeback.

This scene is a tidy example of efficiency of staging, editing and sound design in action cinema.  French auteur Robert Bresson once shocked cinephiles by lauding the 1981 Bond film, For Your Eyes Only, as an example of le cinématographe.  For Bresson, le cinématographe is a form of writing with the medium of film that is antithetical to the theatrical arts from which filmmakers tend to borrow, like staging.  Bresson, an advocate of stylistic restraint, argued that if cinema is to distinguish itself as a unique art form, it must govern its theatrical excesses.  One way to do this is to use the soundtrack to its full potential. He famously wrote in his 1975 book, Notes sur le cinématographe:

One does not create by adding, but by taking away.

Also:

The eye (in general) superficial, the ear profound and inventive.  A locomotive’s whistle imprints in us a whole railroad station.

Finally:

When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it.  The ear goes more toward the within, the eye towards the outer.

Perhaps Bresson would have appreciated the visual economy on display in Roger Spottiswoode’s handling of action.  The Tomorrow Never Dies director showed only what he needed to show, and where he could, he astutely replaced the visual depiction of an action—the guard hitting the floor—with a sound effect, thus trusting that the viewer would “complete” the action in her mind.  He cleverly omitted a shot that, in retrospect, seems utterly unnecessary to create a clear sense of the ongoing action.

Not all action directors adhere to the school of thought that says that stimulating action consists of widely framed displays of virtuosic gymnastics.  For some, tight, intense framings and strategically timed sound cues are more important.

For them, less is more.

Faced with a piece like this recent one from The Guardian, one can’t help but ask whether claims about filmmakers “working from” the styles of painters have any explanatory value. What kind of causal weight does one grant to a remark like Martin Scorsese’s that in the visual style of his debut feature Mean Streets (1973) he had Caravaggio in mind? Or consider the effort among some critics (here and here) to determine whether Pedro Costa’s visual style in In Vanda’s Room (2000) or Colossal Youth (2006) owes more to Rembrandt or Vermeer. A skeptic will insist that a distinction or two needs to be made.

For critics looking to provide the curious viewer with a helpful frame of reference to initially encounter a work, or to create associations between various artists (and even arts) in order to legitimize a filmmaker in the marketplace, language comparing painting and cinema might be useful. The expression “strategic discourse” comes to mind.

But the move “from painting to cinema” becomes an issue when the aim is to isolate and clarify the causes of a filmmaker’s art—that is, when one wishes to explain a film or a group of films. Claims like, “Costa developed this look by working from principles and techniques borrowed from Rembrandt,” should raise doubts.

On the surface of it, there doesn’t appear to be a problem. Yet, if we accept that the aesthetic history of cinema amounts to a series of artistic solutions to specific problems that arise (as art historians E.H. Gombrich, George Kubler and Michael Baxandall might), then to what extent can a filmmaker’s art “be like” or “draw on” a painter’s? Both a painter and a filmmaker work with two-dimensional surfaces, and therefore share problems associated with creating the impression of three dimensions on a flat plane. Even 3-D films have to address these problems. Filmmakers, for their part, have the added problem that their pictures move (however one wishes to construe this process). How to create a sense of time and space in individual takes linked through editing leads to a whole array of tensions and difficulties that painters never address directly. In the case of a Pedro Costa, this means editing together separately composed takes, and considering the relations between them. And what of sound-image relations? Certainly, one might strain to link something a painter does or something a viewer of painting perceives (like sounds evoked through visual representation) to what a film viewer perceives, but this would fall short of accounting for the problem-solutions arrived at by a filmmaker.

What value, then, is there in positing that filmmakers inherit the same problems as painters? At best, they might share, first, a set of quite general interests or principles and, second, lighting solutions. However, in order to explain a movie, we need more than this. After all, with lighting solutions “borrowed” from painters, filmmakers still have to deal with the limitations and “quirks” of their own tools, which are not the same as those of painters. Even where filmmakers borrow such solutions there is a translation process that intervenes. They don’t use the same solutions as much as they approximate them. So, painters and filmmakers, in cases like this, deal with similar, but ultimately distinct, problem situations. To argue differently is to lose details critical to one’s explanations.

Still, the question is tantalizing: can painters be sources for ideas about editing and staging in successive shots? Appeals to painters may not give historians of film style a set of proximate causes qua problem-solutions, but they may well furnish some slightly more distant explanatory matter.

When Susan Sontag published her “A Century of Cinema” (aka, “Decay of Cinema”) article 15 years ago, I scoffed. I quickly resigned myself to the idea that Sontag had simply lost touch with contemporary filmgoing. Recall, after all, that the article is not so much about the death of cinema as about the death of a certain kind of cinephilia.

Since then, I have come to understand what she may have meant. In the intervening years, film scholars have underscored that writing about movies in a certain way (but also watching, rewatching and debating them) is a crucial aspect of a robust cinephilic culture. See for instance Antoine de Baecque’s seminal study, La cinéphilie: Invention d’un regard, histoire d’une culture, 1944-1968 (2003). Feeling the need to put one’s thoughts into print– as critics, and perhaps now as bloggers– is central to the intensity that characterizes cinephilia.

Sontag seems to have noticed the waning of this dimension of cinephilia even then. In fact, her career is evidence of it: she wrote less and less about movies. (I survey her film writing here.)

Setting aside de Baecque’s claim that cinephilia of a certain kind ended in 1968, I wonder if this “letting go of criticism” applies to France, or even to Canada or Britain. (I limit this list to those countries whose criticism I know best, although we could certainly cast a wider net to include criticism from other European, Middle Eastern, Asian and Central and South American countries, among others.  In fact, Amaya’s work on Cuban film criticism may illuminate precisely this question.) Perhaps the troubles of American film criticism are unique— the exception. In this sense, the question is not how much money there is to be made from criticism, but how much money is used to support it. In France, Canada and elsewhere, state subsidy permits film criticism to live on. Grants allow magazines to keep publishing. The Québécois film journal 24 Images, to cite but one example, benefits from Canada Council for the Arts moneys to produce its publication and website, which can be found here.

Perhaps this decline in American criticism is yet another reminder of the hard-fought battles other national film cultures have undergone– in France, during the late 40s and early 1950s– to protect their national cinemas from American penetration into their markets. Hollywood’s aggressive approach may have led to policies that now inoculate other film cultures against this decline in criticism.

In a word, perhaps we shouldn’t be talking about “letting go of criticism.” But rather, “letting go of criticism in America.” While American popular criticism may be on life support, is that true elsewhere?  It remains an open question; still, there’s evidence to suggest ‘exceptionalism’ in this case.

The first Monday Night War began on September 4, 1995, when rival company World Championship Wrestling (WCW), having acquired the sport’s biggest draw, Hulk Hogan, launched the live show Monday Nitro on TNT.  For the first time in television history, two companies ran pay-per-view quality programming head-to-head every week at 9pm. Underwritten by Ted Turner, WCW aggressively challenged WWE’s flagship program Raw on USA (and then Spike).  WCW used the fact that Raw aired ‘live’ only once a month to gain an edge. WCW started airing at 8:57pm—before Raw—whereupon WCW president Eric Bischoff would reveal Raw’s results for that night, reminding viewers that WWE was ‘taped’ while Nitro was fresh and new and anything could happen.  Nitro defeated Raw for 84 consecutive weeks in cable ratings in 1996-8.

While WCW led during a crucial phase of this war, direct competition eventually drove up pay-per-view buyrates and television ratings for both leagues, and the quality of matches and angles was at an all-time high.  But it didn’t last.  In 2001, WCW, mired in financial woes and managerial incompetence, closed its doors and sold its assets to WWE, thus giving McMahon a monopoly over the market.  Since then, many have hoped that a new rival would emerge.

Total Nonstop Action (TNA) may be as just that.  Since TNA owner Dixie Carter hired Hulk Hogan to run creative operations in October 2009, the Nashville-based firm has been preparing for battle.  Recently, it has declared a second Monday Night War, and last Monday, March 8, TNA’s Impact aired on Spike head-to-head with Raw on USA.

But what are the prospects for this second Monday Night War?

Crucial to the enthusiasm that fans felt during the Monday Night Wars was pressing the ‘recall’ button on the remote, and watching WCW and WWE react to one another’s programming on the fly.  A nimble channel-flipping viewer emerged for wrestling in the late 1990s, and these shows appealed to this habit by creating what Jeremy Butler calls “liveness” in his recent book, Television Style.  Raw and Nitro often burst into orchestrated bedlam—as when anti-hero “Stone Cold” Steve Austin stormed the ring on a zamboni during one episode of Raw live from Detroit.  The zamboni temporarily took out the show’s audio while Austin dove over security and hammered the villainous Mr. McMahon.

Over the last decade, such eruptions of ‘live’ pandemonium have become increasingly rare.  If Impact can recreate this feel, it may be able to compete with Raw.

But if there is one constant in WWE’s history, it is the blind eye it turns to all competition until it can benefit from acknowledging it.  The problem for TNA is that WWE has no reason to do so in its case.  TNA currently lacks the mainstream visibly needed to encourage Raw viewers to channel flip.  Last Monday’s ratings seem to reflect this: Impact scored a 1.0 cable rating (1.4 million viewers) while Raw’s rating remained consistent with current trends: 3.4 (5.1 million viewers).  Unfortunately for TNA brass, Impact’s performance shows no improvement over its previous Thursday slot, suggesting that the show simply drew its committed viewers.

If the Monday Night Wars are to resume, TNA must recreate the ‘liveness’ that Raw shows only intermittently these days, and draw away enough viewers so that WWE is forced to break its blind eye principle, and react to TNA’s programming.

Let the die be cast!