The Structuralist Incursion

by Amos Vogel

Since this is a column on independent cinema, it appears necessary to discuss the emergence of an ‘independent’ new approach to film analysis which, a trickle at first, has now so seriously invaded the field internationally that it has become impossible to read or do research without being acquainted with its aims, analytic procedures, and vocabulary. I refer to formal or structuralist analysis of film.

Depending on your age, length, and type of previous formation in film, academic or professional stake, or nature of your concern with the medium, you will be either appalled, enthusiastic, indifferent, or non-knowing. This article — while accepting the possibility of the first three reactions — contends that the fourth has become unacceptable for any serious film person: the body of significant writing in this new language can now be disregarded only at the price of being a provincial.

All of us are acquainted with the usual sociological, psychological, historical, and literary approaches to film criticism — not to speak of content analysis, auteurism, philosophies of montage, or other systems that emphasize as primary, analytic elements, the star system, the narrative, the camerawork or decor. We also know of film ‘appreciation,’ that many-tongued monster specializing in adjectives and impressionism, its revelations further adumbrated by puns, knife-throwing, stylistic finesse, gossip, esoteric dates or names of supporting players in B-films.

Unbeknownst to many of the adherents of the above tendencies, film magazines and film circles here and (primarily) abroad are beginning to stir uneasily (as if torn from heavy sleep) with the philosophical-aesthetic ruminations of the new breed of structuralists, drawing on the insights of pioneers such as de Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Jakobson, and the Russian Formalists. They are introducing new names and, more important, a new vocabulary and methodology into film analysis. Metz, Eco, Barthes, Koch, Rohdie, Burch, Michelson, Bettetini, Wollen: who, a few years ago, would have known them? And how many are today acquainted with Mouton, the Dutch publishing house, with its catalog of books, journals, and monography in semiotics and linguistics?

The new vocabulary – as always, tool of analysis as well as protective shield of radical new approaches – creates particular difficulties for minds steeped in familiar, more comfortable terminology. Mise-en-scène, camera movement, close-ups, jump cuts (even tonal montage or references to the cubist influence in cinema) are easier to take than the sudden incursion of terms such as diegesis and heurism, the signifier and the significate, syntagmic relations and diachrony, reification, synesthesia, isomorphism, the eidetic, or even the elevation of the ‘invisible film space’ existing beyond the frame and behind the camera into an integral component of the film itself and hence of its analysis.

Such vocabulary indeed often hides – in its hermetic elitism – the inner emptiness or fatuousness of many of these analyses, their talmudic splitting of hairs either invisible or irrelevant, their torturous and ‘scientific’ exegeses that – after fifty pages – reveal, with considerable difficulty, tiny, hard pellets of constipated excrement; their existence is indubitable but the exertion simply was not worth the outcome, and a feeling of having been cheated is inevitable.

Yet there can, in 1975, be no further doubt that their new tendency has also brought with it some of the more perceptive, more stimulating new insights into film; film as such and film as seen in individual examples. In their best creations, these writers appear to offer possibilities of analysis and cognition previously unavailable or never as concisely generalized. It is significant that their strength is concentrated particularly among the younger generation; that they primarily consist – in their top echelons – of people of relatively wider than just cinematic culture; that their roots are often in other disciplines (linguistics, art history, psychology, anthropology) and that, at least abroad, they are associated with neo-Marxism. They have begun to contribute to or even take over film magazines, film schools, film organizations; they have started their own centers. They have become inescapable.

Many adherents of previous methodologies (or what have been passing for such) would prefer to see the new crowd go away and pronounce them a passing fancy for reasons of conviction or self-protection. The element of faddism – particularly in inexperienced or untalented hands – is undeniable. More important, however, are the theoretical results achieved by the best minds, and the fact that the movement is a clear extension into cinema of an international phenomenon of first magnitude: the rise of structuralism as a new methodology in an ever increasing number of disciplines.

This brief introduction to a large new development quite intentionally stays away from the substance of the structuralist argument itself, instead positioning the movement within contemporary cinema to draw the attention of practitioners and theorists of independent film. Subsequent pieces will enter into its ideology and offer bibliographies. Lurking in the background is a confrontation also with the entire question of structural, minimal, anti-illusionist, anti-narrative, conceptual, formal cinema. As this movement is a significant part of the avant-garde, the circle will be closed and we shall have truly returned to the exploration of independent cinema, the purpose of this column.

Film Comment (1975)