Abstract
For over four decades, film studies has found itself divided between two distinct camps, an opposition represented by the different goals, methods, and interests of the British film journals, Screen and Movie. If Screen has stood for critical theory and Movie for aesthetic evaluation, their quarrels have often replicated those between Continental and Analytic philosophers, which, as Richard Rorty noted, profoundly affected the shape of academic careers. How did Screen manage to supplant Movie? What institutional factors encouraged film studies to embrace theory? Why did the work of V.F. Perkins, Movie’s most important writer, get neglected, especially in the United States? How can Wittgenstein writing help us understand what Perkins and the Movie group were up to?
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Notes
- 1.
On this point, see Andrew Klevan, “Guessing the Unseen from the Seen: Stanley Cavell and Film Interpretation,” in Contending with Stanley Cavell, ed. Russell B. Goodman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 118–139.
- 2.
Douglas Pye usefully observes that “A key factor here was availability. Initially, the Movie writers sought out films in cinemas all over London: they had no other access to them. Earlier cinema was largely unavailable to them. Under these circumstances, the accuracy of reference in Movie is amazing.” While I would not dispute Pye’s argument (after all, he was there), I would point out that long after VHS and DVDs made everything available, V.F. Perkins continued to write about Sirk, Welles, Ophuls, and Lang. Tastes form early.
- 3.
Douglas Pye responds to the first question by saying, “Not the cinema in general but perhaps some ways in which many movies might be approached.” To the second question, he proposes that while “another movie would be different, at least some aspects of the approach should be transferable.” My experience with American undergraduates, steeped in theory, makes me less sanguine about the ready transferability of his (and John Gibbs’s) approach.
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Ray, R.B. (2020). Screen vs. Movie: The Great Divide in Film Studies. In: The Structure of Complex Images. Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40631-8_2
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