The Representation Trap
How did we get here?
The trap of representation, “in cinema at large and in Hollywood in particular,” Elena Lazic wrote, “is usually understood to mean the way in which increased presence on screens does not necessarily translate into larger creative power or salaries in front of and behind the camera, and in fact may hurt the fight for these rights as it dulls the motivation to fight for them.” This both implies an idea and raises a question. First, the idea that by taking control of how people are represented in cinema, it is possible to enact change in not just the film industry, but society in general. Second, it questions the assumption that there is a direct correlation between cinematic representation and industry/societal change. Or, to put it differently: the chasm between signifying change and change itself. After all, when someone says, “I’m fine,” they’re almost certainly not fine. The fear is clear: the possibility of a moving image culture made up exclusively of positive representations could end up masking the very opposite, akin to mass gaslighting. Of course, we have been here before: almost ninety years ago, to be precise, when Gorky, Zdhanov and Radek outlined the tenets of what would be the official Soviet aesthetic across the arts for the next twenty-five years: socialist realism. If all the collective farm workers – in paintings, in sculptures, in literature, in musicals – are happy, shouldn’t you, dear collective farm worker, be happy too? Is there a danger that we are sleepwalking into a new epoch of kitsch? How did we even get here?
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According to Tarantino, when he was working at Video Archives in Los Angeles, a customer asking for Au revoir les enfants (1987) came out with something that sounded like ‘Reservoir Dogs.’ Louis Malle’s childhood memoir was shot in the medieval town of Provins, in the Seine-et-Marne department East of Paris. Not too far away from Provins is a village of about five hundred people, Mons-en-Montois. André Derain, the co-founder of Fauvism, used to escape Paris to paint landscapes of the surrounding fields there. Mons-en-Montois is also home to the smallest cinema in France. It is situated in a farmer’s barn, and is run by a retired filmmaker, Michel Le Clerc. Le Clerc is now in his 90s and has been a devoted cinephile since the 1950s. He knew Godard and Rohmer before either picked up a camera, and organised evenings dedicated to Isidore Isou, the co-founder of Lettrism and key inspiration for the Situationists, at Paris’ Tabou nightclub. Le Clerc’s programming, which benefits from generous CNC support, is impeccable. The Spring 2022 season ended with a screening of the new restoration of Jean Eustache’s legendary La Maman et la Putain (1973). The running time was broken up with a pause for wine and camembert in the field adjacent. There was talk before the screening of how one of the cast members had once lived in the village. During a break in the screening, Pringles were used to scoop up camembert, runny under the early evening sun – a gesture that would give Barthes a field day. To bastardise an essay in Mythologies (1957), does camembert ‘mean’ ‘Frenchness’ and Pringles ‘America’? Does the use of camembert on Pringles constitute an ‘acceptable system’ (according to Barthes’ 1964 assimilation of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics, Éléments de sémiologie)? If all this sounds like a self-indulgent waste of your time, please be patient: it is merely a preamble to the subject at hand. The shadow of the May 1968 events in Paris looms large in La Maman et la Putain. What some of the audience in Mons-en-Montois knew about, most had experienced. Was this gathering a requiem for cinema? What became of those students, their ideals, and the ideas that inspired them?
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The process of synthesising on-screen representation is reverse engineered from the process of analysing on-screen representation. In film theory, the analysis of representation can be traced back at least fifty years. The ideas used to analyse representation didn’t emerge from film theory. Rather, they were derived from linguistics, psychoanalysis, and sociology. This approach to the moving image radiated out from the epicentre of May 1968. In the annals of film theory, two works are rightly celebrated. One is Peter Wollen’s monograph Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (first published in 1969). The other is Laura Mulvey’s essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (first published in Screen in 1975). Wollen’s book offers not one, but three (not necessarily compatible) ‘avenues’ towards film theory: Eisenstein’s aesthetics (framing montage in both historical and political contexts), the auteur theory (drawing on the ideas of Bazin), and the semiotics of cinema (engaging with Barthes and Metz). Mulvey’s essay, possibly the most cited paper in film theory, did much to bring both psychoanalytic and feminist perspectives into film studies. Both Wollen and Mulvey were associated with the BFI educational Screen journal, and their respective contributions have shaped Screen theory. The emergence of Screen theory coincided with a shift in paradigms, to use Thomas Khun’s phrase, within Anglophone humanities in general. This is typified by an associate of Wollen and Mulvey, Colin MacCabe, who, as a young academic that had just received his doctorate at Cambridge University after a period of study at École Normale Superieure, became the face of a dispute in English studies (the Cambridge department was split on his proposed tenure on account of his linguistic-sociological theoretical methodology) that marked the turning away from both the approach and values typified by F.R. Leavis (who distinguished literary criticism from theory, advocating the former, frowning upon the latter). The ‘MacCabe Affair’ is often recounted, somewhat romantically, as a David and Goliath conflict, where a child of 68 took on the establishment, and won, if not the battle (MacCabe didn’t get his tenure), then the war (the methodology MacCabe championed came to dominate the humanities from the 1980s, he was appointed to Head of Production at the BFI from 1985 - 89, and was a commissioning editor at BFI publishing throughout the 90s, in addition to his academic postings in the UK and the US). Fifty years later, and the shoe is on the other foot. The academic establishment in the humanities is, confusingly, made up almost exclusively of those self-identifying as anti-establishment. This has given rise to the tabloid hysteria stoked by the likes of Jordan Peterson, that large swathes of the humanities have been taken hostage by Marxist rebels. Many academics treat the publication of an article in which they reference Žižek (whose writings MacCabe advocated), for example, as akin to lobbing a Molotov cocktail. To be fair, both Peterson and Žižek share common ground when it comes to their disdain for political correctness. However, Peterson and the subjects of his criticism are now locked in a perpetual game played out not in journals but social media, where both sides pretend that paper tigers are real (this would be harmless, if it wasn’t for both sides hunting with real bullets).
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Referring to several generations of pioneering theorists in the singular is both a major disservice and a gross simplification. Nevertheless, Screen theorists share several things in common. Specifically, they are both modernist and post-modernist when it comes to departing from ideas that could be considered defining characteristics of European modern thought: truth, the Self, and world. History, as the saying goes, is written by the victors. When speaking as or for a minority, the idea of rejecting the concept of truth, at least in an absolutist form, holds great appeal. In place of truth, power relationships can be substituted. Specifically, those power relationships between groups existing in a hierarchy – some are the oppressed, others are the oppressors.
From Rousseau through to Sartre, modern European philosophy was dominated by a notion of the Self and questions of subjectivity. The late philosopher Robert Solomon referred to this as ‘the transcendental pretence,’ an arrogant assumption that just because we (read white, European) think like that, others (as in everyone else) also do too. For example, historically, different modes of thought have been evaluated relative to white, European notions of ‘rationality.’ Take, for example, the original French title of Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s How Natives Think (Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures). From today’s standpoint, it sounds a truly terrifying work, but the book was published in 1910 – a different time, a different world. Half a century later, much of the same ground was covered very differently by another French anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss (although, like Levy-Bruhl, the label anthropology would imply he conducted more fieldwork than he actually did – both emerged from philosophical and sociological traditions). Levi-Strauss took on Sartre’s existentialist conception of agency, countering it with an alternative model derived from Saussure’s linguistics: structuralism. In place of the vacuum left behind by existentialism, during the next twenty years, whether it be in structuralist or post-structuralist iterations, a new idea of self-identity began to develop, one less concerned with class struggle (during the second half of the 1970s dissenting voices inside the New Left drew attention to internal discrimination along racial and gender lines), and more concerned with the groupings we identify with, as well as those ascribed to us by others.
When Wollen evoked Bazin, it was for his auteur theory. Bazin also advocated a film theory that hinged on a form of realism. Realism, however, is incompatible with a semiotic understanding of cinema developed by Barthes, Metz and Wollen, which, philosophically, could be characterised as a form of nominalism: the notion of an objective reality is done away with in favour of an understanding of concepts as signs without any corresponding reality. Instead, human consciousness is mediated through the production of meaning through a network of symbols.
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Screen theory is just that – theory. It is a set of ideas used to explain something, in this case the moving image, which also serves as the bedrock for principles upon which everything from film education to film production is based. Whether through Barthes’ semiotics, Lacan’s conception of the unconscious, Foucault’s notion of archaeology, Althusser’s understanding of ideology, Levi-Strauss’ structuralism or Derrida’s deconstruction, an understanding of film as language looms large across the various iterations of Screen theory. The moving image, something sensuous, predominantly visual, but also (mostly) audible and temporal, is treated as a ‘text.’ This differs from what came before in film theory, in that instead of positing film as a reflection on reality, it treated film as the product of meanings resulting from the processes in which the spectator interprets symbols, dyads made up of signifiers and things signified. It is these aggregations of symbols, or representations, that function not as correspondence between concept and reality, but a means of exerting power.
To use a contemporary example, take Kate Clanchy’s infamous reference to the “almond shaped eyes” of one of her pupils in Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me (2019). For Clanchy, she deployed a simile to describe the eyes of an individual girl. For Clanchy’s detractors, however, almond shaped eyes function as a signifier, one signifying not an individual, but a group, specifically a minority, the Hazara people. It is not a question of whether it is ‘true’ that the pupil in question has almond shaped eyes, but rather how the description (read representation), functions as a means of exerting power of one group (white, European, middle class) over another (non-white, non-European, female, dependant etc.). For her detractors, even if Clanchy did not consciously intend to reinforce a hierarchical distinction between these two groups through a simple description, unconsciously she did so, and her unwillingness to acknowledge this undermines her liberal pretensions.
It is necessary to point out that at the very heart of the representation debate, is an understanding of culture that operates in codes, not just one that functions like a language, but one which follows laws postulated by the Swiss linguist Saussure (whose ideas were, in turn, integrated into the ideas of not just Barthes, but also Lacan, Levi-Strauss and Althusser). Saussure’s ideas are of great interest and are of profound historic significance in terms of their influence on the course of twentieth century intellectual history. Nevertheless, those who maintain an unwavering, dogmatic faith in these linguistic based theories to the point where they are beyond contest in the minds of their adherents, risk the possibility that, far from expanding horizons, they restrict them by refracting through a single, theoretical prism.
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To exclusively refract not just film, but culture in general, through the same, theoretical paradigm-prism also risks boredom in its predictability. So much so that it is easy to parody. Does, for example, using French typographer Roger Excoffon’s choc font make you a racist? Does the lettering, that mimics brush strokes, signify ‘Asian-ness’? Is this, unconsciously, a remnant of French colonialism in Indochina? It is easy to predict and parody because the rules of the game are fixed, and there is only ever a single possible outcome.
Take for example, a generic scenario from hardcore pornography: ‘hot female student aces professor’s oral exam.’ Step one: put aside questions of realism, in favour of representation. Step two: identify groupings organised along the lines of identity (male / female) as well as the relationships between these groupings in terms of power (male oppressor / female oppressed). Step three: consider how the group that produced the pornographic work in question oppresses the group that is the subject of the work through representation: e.g. sexualisation in terms of costume (or lack of) signification; dialogue (or lack of); action (female passivity vs. male agency); framing (i.e., as a means of rendering female as object of male gaze). Such an approach towards this hypothetical but familiar scenario from pornography can be used as proof of the patriarchy in action, how women are objectified and subjugated, etc. In short, the moving image can be treated as a medium through which, using tools derived from linguistics, psychoanalysis and sociology, ideological inferences can be made. This, for example, is what Žižek (often very entertainingly) does. We must, however, be equally conscious of what this approach does not do.
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Such approaches treat the process of both making and watching films as akin to both writing and reading a language. Film can function like a language. However, to make the jump from the simile ‘film is like language’ to the assertion ‘film is language’ comes at a high price. It restricts, rather than expands our vision of the moving image, blinkering us to all the non-language-like aspects of filmmaking and filmgoing. When, for example, Barthes writes about Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in ‘The Third Meaning’ (translated into English by another pillar of Screen theory, Stephen Heath), he writes about stills, i.e., static images. He purposely omits the very ‘movieness’ of movies. Or, to use another word, the cinematic – those qualities present in cinema but absent from related media – photography, literature, theatre, music, and dance etc. Photographs are images but they don’t move (even La Jetée [1962] moves). Theatre and dance performances move, and while they can be composed or blocked for the benefit of the spectator, they are not images, like those, for example, that make up Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948) or The Tales of Hoffmann (1951). As for literature, there is a gap between words on paper and moving images on the screen. That’s not to mention those things that only exist in cinema, like cuts. An ellipse in literature doesn’t quite work the same way in terms of space and time (see either the famous match cut in Lawrence of Arabia [1962], or the jump cut in 2001 – A Space Odyssey [1968]). We imagine time and space in the former, while we imagine, perceive and experience time and space in the latter (the respective cuts of Lean and Kubrick are ‘shocking’ both intellectually [they are about ideas] and emotionally [watching or rather experiencing them constitutes a physical ‘jolt’]). That’s not to mention things like slow motion (the Pink Floyd climax of Zabriskie Point [1970]), or even reverse motion (Cocteau’s Orphée [1950]). Film theory tends to address some form of realism (Bazin) or nominalism (Screen theory). Both tend to avoid the fantastic or the abstract, and when they do, they usually import ideas devised for other media, like psychoanalysis or folklore studies. Take, for example, the man in the moon in Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902). What exactly is the moon in Méliès’ film a representation of? If one, for example, subscribes to the idea that there is no truth, just power relations, that there is no Self as such, just our relationships with identity groups both self-ascribed and ascribed by others, and that there is no direct correspondence between symbols (i.e. image, music, text) and reality (whatever that is), just our constant construction and deconstruction of symbolic representations (Screen theory in a nutshell), then it must represent something. However, to be preoccupied with such a question misses what makes the moving image unique. Articulating what exactly that is requires critical apparatus outside the realm of the linguistic, psychoanalytic and the sociological.
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Analysing cinematic representation is one thing but treating it as a springboard for production is something else. This stems from reverse engineering the very idea that underpins the analysis of representations. If, for example, negative representations are used in the aforementioned hypothetical but familiar example from hardcore pornography, either consciously or unconsciously, by the majority group to oppress the minority, couldn’t the minority use representations to emancipate themselves? (In the hierarchy of identity groups, one must always punch ‘up’, never ‘down’). For example, could the same basic premise be represented in such a way that was, conversely, liberating? Instead of the ‘student’ passively accepting male sexual desire of her ‘professor,’ could she be represented as the victim of sexual violence? Could she, instead of being seen through the male gaze, be seen through a female gaze, where the female was the subject, the male the object —where male objectification could be considered the subversion of a genre trope? Isn’t this, essentially, Promising Young Woman (2020), as well as its general, critical response? Politics is one thing, aesthetics something else. A film about the holocaust doesn’t necessarily have to be taken seriously because of its serious subject. Writing badly of, for example, Agnieszka Holland’s middling holocaust drama In Darkness (2011) doesn’t necessarily make you an antisemite. Nevertheless, politics and aesthetics, as Benjamin elegantly wrote about, are very much related.
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Film theorists dedicate themselves to the moving image. Nevertheless, perhaps there is a tendency, if not to over emphasise its social influence, then to misunderstand it. Take, for example, the various policies designed to encourage fairer representation. The motivation driving such incentives is laudable. As for their effectiveness as a means of enacting social change… well, one only must consider the case of socialist realism. It is necessary to remember that socialist realism was a teleological aesthetic, which is to say that it posited art as related to and a means of explaining something in terms of the purpose it served, rather than being ‘caused’ by something. Socialist realist art wasn’t ‘about’ class struggle, it posited itself as playing a part in that struggle. By making socialist realism official, and by suppressing art that was not directly part of the struggle, artists assumed the role of, to use a phrase borrowed by Stalin, the ‘engineers of human souls.’ The kitsch aspect of socialist realism was best articulated by Milan Kundera (whose reputation has been eclipsed by his own literary representations of women), who characterised kitsch in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) as the denial of shit in the world: “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch. The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible on a basis of kitsch.” Socialist realism was abandoned during the second half of the 1950s, after Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s speech denouncing both his crimes and cult of personality. It was an ineffectual tool for social engineering and of little interest aesthetically outside of the historical. Two related questions come to mind: did anyone ‘buy’ into socialist realism; did those who commissioned and produced it ever believe in it? Was it merely about signalling virtuous intentions? Necessary ideological-aesthetic hoop jumping to get the next gig? Or was it a diversionary tactic? After all, today’s progressive talk of socially ‘harmful’ media has its greatest parallel with the ‘video nasties’ scandal, in which a Tory government dumped the blame of the social turmoil resulting from the first five years of Thatcherism onto fifty, laughable zombie cannibal movies. Is our preoccupation with inclusive representation a positive variation of the same stunt, in which we risk, either by design or default, taking our eye off the ball when it comes to addressing real world discrimination? These are all questions to be asked by writers, filmmakers and commissioners concerned with either writing about or reverse engineering representations.
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Almost a hundred years ago, the Polish writer and occasional film theorist Karol Irzykowski wrote in his X Muza (The Tenth Muse: Aesthetic Considerations of Cinema): “The growth of the art of cinema can be compared with the growth of a plant buried under stones. The stones are Industry and Commerce which impose their own ways and means upon it. Cinema, to be born again, must withdraw for a moment into solitude, silence, into the very souls of those individuals who really do need it to express themselves… Cinema must be given a breath of fresh air – become disinterested.” Similarly, perhaps it is time for writers to ignore charges of ‘silence as complicity,’ become disinterested with the representation debate which is now inextricably part of both the industry and the commerce that underpins it, and re-conceive of cinema’s theoretical relationship with both realism and the imagination, much like the Lumière Brothers and Méliès did at its very beginning. Perhaps in a barn, in the countryside, with real people, eating cheese and drinking wine.
