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Engaging the Moving Image

Yale University Press

Chapter One

The notion of the film medium has played a central role in the intellectual history of cinema. It has been a major focus of film theory from early in the twentieth century through the writings of Christian Metz. In a great number of cases, the idea has performed a legitimizing function. The case for film as art was made by arguing that film is a distinctive medium, one with its own range of properties and effects such that it warrants a place of its own in the system of the arts. Film, in other words, was not merely theater in a can. Film, in virtue of its distinctive medium, afforded the possibility of a discrete aesthetic system, one with its own unprecedented capacities and laws. For many, the task of film theory became that of identifying the nature of the film medium and calculating its laws. But this, of course, was not a completely disinterested enterprise, since in the background of this research was a motive-namely, if one could show that the film medium supported a unique artform, then film deserved an equal place among the arts.

This discussion, furthermore, segued into another, more recent one. As film departments were established in the United States, the notion that the film medium wasunique and possessed of its own laws resurfaced as a premise in the argument for the formation of film programs. For if film was a unique artform with its own laws, then it required its own aestheticians. If film is a unique artform, then it is a unique object of study. Film would neither be appreciated nor understood properly if it were left up to English teachers, art historians or theater departments to teach it. As a unique artform, it called for its own specialists. So much was made clear to me in 1970 in my first film theory class at New York University with George Amberg, who, of course, was at the time involved in arguing for the creation of a graduate department of cinema studies.

By the late sixties and early seventies, the need to prove that film is an art was no longer pressing. History and taste have secured that much; film had produced uncontroversial masterpieces. However, the question of whether film was an autonomous area of inquiry, worthy of departmental status, was still an issue. And the straightforward way to meet that challenge, especially given the resources of film theory already in place, seemed to be the philosophical assertion that the film medium was unique and, as such, called for the development of scholarly expertise suitable to it. This was a central ideological tenet upon which the emergence of film studies depended. There were others, of course, such as the observation that film was socially important. However, inasmuch as that would not differentiate film studies from sociology, it appeared to call for philosophical back-up from claims about the uniqueness of the medium.

Needless to say, by referring to the conviction of medium uniqueness as "ideological," I do not mean to suggest that the friends of film studies did not believe the doctrine. Their faith in the uniqueness of the medium was sincere. Those were the days when we still spoke about "the cinematic." And, indeed, the legacy of their polemics is still with us. So many programs are still called Film Departments or Departments of Cinema Studies. And, as those labels indicate, the autonomy of the departments in question continues to rest on the philosophical presumption that what distinguishes this area from other areas of inquiry is that its object of study is a unique medium.

However, in light of recent developments-both theoretical and technological-this no longer seems the best way in which to conceptualize our field of study. What I would like to show in this brief article is that it never was the right way to go. It has always been a philosophical error to attempt to base the case for both film as art and for film studies on the notion that film is a unique medium. The evolution of video, TV, and computer processing has only served to make this error more evident.

As I have already indicated, film theorists have long believed that the notion of the uniqueness of the medium should be central to our thinking about film. Of course, they did not invent this idea; they inherited it, in large part, from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aestheticians. For before the invention of film, the idea was already widely abroad that each artform had its own distinctive medium, a medium that distinguishes it from other artforms and that determines the laws of the artform in question. This was a general theory of the arts; film theorists basically applied it to the case of cinema. Undoubtedly, this theoretical route was attractive to film theorists because it appeared to provide them with a way in which to attempt to defeat accusations that film was destined to be merely a subspecies of theater.

Furthermore, the notion of a unique medium did not only supply theorists with a way to establish a special status for film. With the idea that film was a unique medium also came the supposition that it had unique laws. A weak version of this conviction was that the medium had certain limitations, which should not be trespassed. A stronger alternative maintained that the nature of the medium dictates what will function best-in terms of style and/or content-in the medium. Call these the positive and negative laws of the medium. Film theorists embraced a philosophical framework that presupposed that each artform had a distinctive medium, which, in turn, possessed a set of subtending positive and/or negative laws.

Now it should have been clear from the very outset that this philosophical framework was wrong. For example, it should have been clear that not every artform has a distinctive medium. Literature, for instance, does not appear to have a medium at all. This may sound strange to you. You may be tempted to regard words as the distinctive medium of literature. And yet, are words the right sort of thing to constitute a medium? Aren't media, in the most clear-cut sense, physical, and are words physical in any aesthetically interesting way?

But put that issue aside for the moment. Suppose that words do constitute the medium of literature. They could hardly amount to a distinctive artistic medium. For words are shared with all types of speech and writing, on the one hand, and by all sorts of artforms, including theater, opera, song, and even some painting and sculpture, on the other hand. In the same vein, if one says that the medium of literature is human events, actions, and feelings, that, for similar reasons, would scarcely be distinctive.

So the general theory of medium uniqueness seems false from the start. Why then did it remain so doggedly entrenched? I suspect that this was due to a confusion about the status of the doctrine. Proponents of the view thought that it was an empirical theory with a great deal of power. That is, the theory seemed to have a great deal of empirical evidence behind it. The theory supposes that each medium has a unique nature and that with that nature goes an accompanying series of laws. Success in a given medium could be either explained or predicted on the basis of demonstrating that successful works in the medium abided by those laws; failures could likewise be explained or predicted in terms of violations of those laws.

Each film theorist not only identified the nature and laws of the medium, but then went on to cite cinematic successes and failures that respectively corresponded to or violated the relevant laws, tendencies or inclinations that the theorists prognosticated. Thus, the medium uniqueness framework has frequently struck people as a very exciting and rich idea. It not only promises a way of differentiating artforms and, thereby, of legitimizing the appearance of new ones (like film), but also for explaining why some artworks fail and others succeed.

However, as is well known, no proposal concerning the uniqueness of any medium has been immune from counterexamples. No sooner are the nature of the medium and its laws hypothesized, than someone points out that there are some works in the artform that are generally regarded-from an informed, nontheoretically contaminated viewpoint-to be successful, but that do not accord with the putative laws of the medium.

At this point in the dialectic, the medium uniqueness theorist is then tempted to respond that the candidate in question is not really cinematically successful-how could it be, given the theory?-but is only thought to be so by cinematic philistines.

Nevertheless, once the theorist makes this move, as so many film theorists have, he is no longer taking his claims about the medium to be empirical hypotheses. Rather, he is treating his own account of the medium as if it were a conceptual truth-that is, his account of the medium is taken to be definitional of what is cinematic in the medium. The use of montage, or, alternatively, the use of deep-focus, long-take cinematography defines analytically, it is supposed, what it is to count as cinematic. Or so the theorist suggests. Apparent counterexamples, no matter how effective they are taken to be by common consensus, are ruled out of bounds by definition.

Thus, though what is attractive about the notion of medium uniqueness seems to be that it is a powerful empirical hypothesis, more often than not, the view comes to be defended as an analytic proposition or definition. This gambit may be enticing, but it is surely indefensible. One cannot define in advance what will or will not be successful. One has to wait and see. To say of a work that it is unsuccessful on the basis of a film theory begs the question. Successful films should test the theory, not vice-versa.

So the friend of the view that the uniqueness of the medium determines what will succeed and fail is caught in a dilemma. Either he must regard his theory as empirical, in which case it is easily falsified, or he must treat the theory as defining success, in which case he has begged the question. Film theories have repeatedly foundered on this dilemma, though theorists have not been generally aware of this, because they have not distinguished the empirical reach of their theories from their analytic or definitional presuppositions. Or, to state the problem somewhat differently, they have advanced their theories ambiguously as both empirical propositions and analytic propositions, whereas, in fact, they are not defensible as either.

That film theorists have equivocated on the status of their theories alternatively as empirical hypotheses or analytic definitions has led them, confusedly, to defend their theories on the basis of what can be readily reconstrued to be a damning dilemma. So confused are they that they have perhaps taken this unacknowledged ambiguity as an attraction of their theory-in that it makes the theory appear to be so invulnerable. But once this appearance is unmasked, the equivocation actually constitutes a lethal flaw in the medium uniqueness position.

Maybe an even greater shortcoming in the view that each artform possesses a uniquely distinctive medium is the fact that, of the artforms that do possess specifiable media, the media that correlate with the relevant artforms are not singular, but multiple. That is, the view that each and every artform must correlate to a single medium that is distinctively and uniquely its own must be erroneous, since artforms generally involve a number of media, including frequently overlapping ones.

For example, if we think of the medium as the material stuff out of which artworks are made, then painting comprises several media: oil paints, watercolors, tempera, acrylic, and others. Also, in this rather unambiguous sense of media, sculpture comprises a wide range of media, including at least: bronze, gold, silver, wood, marble, granite, clay, celluloid, acrylic (again), and so on.

On the other hand, if we think of a medium as an implement used to produce an artwork, painting can be made by brushes, palette knives, fingers, and even bodies and blowtorches (remember Yves Klein); while sculptures can be made by chisels, blowtorches (again), casts, and, among other things, fingers. Perhaps, in this sense, every musical instrument is a discrete musical medium, but, then, so is the human voice and, once again, fingers.

Thus, it cannot be the case that every artform has its own distinctive medium since many (most? all?) artforms possess more than one medium, and many of these media themselves have divergent and nonconverging potentials. Nor, as these examples should suggest, are these media always distinctive of one and only one artform. Plastic acrylic figures in painting and sculpture; celluloid in film and sculpture; bodies in painting, sculpture, dance, and theater; and fingers, in one way or another, show up everywhere. Further, if we try to think of the medium of an artform nonphysicalistically in terms of its characteristic formal elements, then the cause is altogether lost. For features like line, color, volume, shape, motion, juxtaposition, and so on are fundamental across various artforms and unique to none.

Obviously what is meant by the phrase "artistic medium" is very vague, referring sometimes to the physical materials out of which artworks are constructed, sometimes to the implements that are used to do the constructing, and sometimes to formal elements of design that are available to artists in a given practice. This ambiguity alone might discourage us from relying on the notion of the medium as a theoretically useful concept. In fact, I think that we might fruitfully dispense with it completely, at least in terms of the ways in which it is standardly deployed by aestheticians. But be that as it may, it should be clear that most artforms cannot be identified on the basis of a single distinctive medium, since most artforms correlate with more than one medium.

Film is certainly like this. If we think of the medium on the basis of the materials from which cinema images are made, our first impulse might be to say that the medium is obviously a film strip bearing certain photographic emulsions. But flicker films, like Kubelka's Arnulf Rainer, can be made by alternating clear and opaque leader, sans photographic emulsion. And one can paint on a clear film strip and project it. Moreover, in principle, video may be developed to the point where in terms of high-definition, it may be indiscernible from film, or, at least, to the point where most of us would have little trouble calling a commercial narrative feature made in fully high definition video a film. And, of course, if films can be made from magnetized tape, film would share a medium with music.

If we think of the film medium in terms of the implements typically employed to make cinema, cameras undoubtedly come to mind. But as the previous examples of flicker films and painted films indicate, cinema can be made without cameras, a point reinforced by the existence of scratch films. And one could imagine films constructed completely within the providence of CD-ROM; while, at the same time, formal features of film-such as line, shape, space, motion, juxtaposition, and temporal and narrative structures-are things that film shares with many other arts. Consequently, it should be clear that, strictly speaking, there is no single and/or distinctive medium of film from which the film theorist can extrapolate stylistic directives; at best there are film media, some of which perhaps await invention even now.

It may seem counterintuitive to urge that we think of media where heretofore we have referred to the medium. But it shouldn't. There can be little question that photography is comprised of many media-such as the daguerreo-type and the tintype, on the one hand, and the Polaroid, on the other. How fine-grained we should be in individuating media may be problematic. Are nitrate and acetate both the same medium? Is the fish-eye lens a different medium than the so-called normal lens? One can imagine respectable arguments on both sides of these questions. But such disputes notwithstanding, the observation that artforms involve multiple media, which, in turn, may be frequently mixed, is incontrovertible.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Engaging the Moving Image by Noël Carroll Copyright © 2003 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission.
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