The following introduction was published in 1991 in the book Explorations in Film Theory: Selected Essays from Cine-Tracts CINE-TRACTS began in 1976 with a burst of creative and collective activity. The idea of starting a Canadian based film journal was largely the work of four people and in some respects CINE-TRACTS could not have been created without the bonds of friendship, the emotional, philosophical and ideological ties which are the foundation upon which projects like CINE-TRACTS are built. More than just a magazine CINE-TRACTS was a project because we originally saw the journal as a tool for political debate, a context where a community of scholars, filmmakers and students could engage in a form of praxis somewhat alien to Canadian cultural life.

This idea, this ideal of a place where the artificial divisions between intellectual and practical work could be redrawn was only realised in a marginal way not because of a lack of desire but because the fundamental changes which we envisioned could not be created within the context of a journal. In the beginning CINE-TRACTS provoked more incredulity than faith among the members of the film community in Canada. After its first two issues it was ostracized by filmmakers, rejected by most of the people teaching in colleges and universities and looked upon with disdain by other publishers. At the same time the journal exploded in the rest of the world. Subscriptions, enquiries and manuscripts came pouring in from the United States, England, Italy, Germany, Australia, India, etc.. This rather strict division in support lasted for the life of the magazine and though we tried to 'locate' ourselves more fully within the community we most wanted to address it quickly became clear that the politics of Canadian culture operated in a very different way from what we had expected. In an ironic parallel to the way in which the cinema operates we were most fully present as an absence in Canada. As much as we attempted to resist it we were slotted (by funding agencies for example and by other media who rarely if ever examined what we published either critically or in a supportive manner - in fact when the journal stopped publishing it was a British magazine, FRAMEWORK, which wrote an emotional article about our demise) into that tiny and peripheral spot most fully expressed by the word "theoretical." As 'theorists' we were supposedly divorced from practice, in fact we were accused of perpetuating the very divisions which the magazine had been created to dispel.

This question, which still today haunts the teaching and creation of the cinema and television (in Canada and elsewhere), is perhaps the most artificial and politically suspect of debates and yet it remains tenaciously enshrined in the very curricula which should be disputing its premises. Many schools, all production houses, certainly most universities remain locked into a division between practical and theoretical and historical approaches to the mediums of film and television. Ironically, media professionals regard universities with distrust, rarely engage in debate, rarely believe that debate per se need be a serious part of their work. When they do get involved it is in the promotion and financing of schools where the 'craft' of filmmaking for example is taught from within the 'bowels' of the technology as if in some mysterious way the technology has transcended both its own history and the discourses which have enabled its practicioners to understand and use it. Universities and colleges share the same problems. There are an untold numbers of 'practical' courses now available to students. Their identity is dependent on their perceived difference from 'theoretical' or 'historical' courses. What is demeaned by these divisions is the discourse available to students with which to examine their own interests in the media, but what is undermined at a deeper level is the very notion of practice itself. It is as if the act of using a camera can be divorced from the user, since this kind of pedagogy relies on the mystification, if not the elision of discursive practices which underly the complex relationship between subjectivity and creativity.

Once CINE-TRACTS was identified as a 'theoretical' journal it was quickly accused of using a language which no one could understand and thus divorcing itself from the community. Symbolically it came to represent that division between theory and practice which the community itself was installing. I was astonished by the vitriol which was often directed our way, mostly by members of the Canadian film community. I was often taken aback by the lack of institutional and subscriber support in Canada. I still believe that it was of great value to struggle with these problems but what I didn't realise was that the journal was fragmenting from the inside because of them. As the pressure increased, many of the core members of the editorial staff began to look for a different intellectual and discursive model for the magazine. Ironically when our subscriptions zoomed over the one thousand mark they questioned the direction of the journal more and more. As the journal became increasingly well known throughout the world, as between ten and fifteen manuscripts began arriving every month, as suggestions for issues poured in from everywhere but Canada the group running the magazine disintegrated. I mention this here because CINE-TRACTS was conceived as a collective and political activity and once the former disappeared the latter weakened as well. If we are to understand the extraordinary success of CINE-TRACTS we must also understand how the pressures on the journal and on its editors finally succeeded. Those pressures were enframed by a profound anti-intellectualism, by the divisions mentioned above, and by preconceptions as to what role a journal should play in the community from which it springs.

The following collection of essays brings together all of the strengths and reveals few of the weaknesses of CINE-TRACTS. History is present in the selection, represented by the obvious desire to both explore and articulate the conjuncture of politics and theory, the growing awareness of gender as a central issue, the profound influence of feminist thinking. History is absent because the process through which the journal decided on the publication of these articles cannot be rendered in anything but a skeletal form. The following remarks are somewhat personal which I feel is important, crucial. Hopefully EXPLORATIONS IN FILM THEORY adequately represents the legacy of CINE-TRACTS and also the legacy of one of the most important periods in the very recent history of the discipline of film studies. EXPLORATIONS IN FILM THEORY.

Plenty to See Everywhere by Bertolt Brecht (Reproduced by permission)
"What did you see, wanderer?
I saw a pleasant landscape; there was a grey hill against a clear sky, and the grass waved in the wind.
A house leaned against the hill like a woman leaning against a man.
What did you see, wanderer?
I saw a ridge good to position guns behind.
What did you see, wanderer?
I saw a house so tumbledown that it had to be propped up by a hill, which meant that it lay in shadow all day.
I passed it at various hours, and there was never smoke rising from the chimney as if food were being cooked.
And I saw people who were living there.
What did you see, wanderer?
I saw a parched field on rocky ground. Each blade of grass stood singly.
Stones lay on the turf. A hill cast too much shadow.
What did you see, wanderer?
I saw a rock raising its shoulder from the grassy soil like a giant that refuses to be beaten. And the grass standing up stiff and straight, proudly, on parched ground. And an indifferent sky.
What did you see, wanderer?
I saw a fold in the ground.
Thousands of years ago there must have been great upheavals of the earth's surface here. The granite lay exposed.
What did you see, wanderer? No bench to sit on. I was tired." (Bertolt Brecht) 1

I have lived in the same area of Montreal for over twenty years. My desks have always been in front of large bay windows facing onto one of the few parks in the east end of the city. Over time the habit of staring out of those windows, sometimes for minutes on end, became an everyday part of my work routine. Strangely, as the years have passed, the experience of observing the park has not led to any certitude about what is actually going on. I don't mean that I haven't taken notice of the many events in the park ranging from all manner of sports activities to people picnicking, to children playing, etc.. I mean that often, it is looking through the windows themselves more than the events outside which has fascinated me, leading to a rather strange sensation, full, yet empty, a sense that my knowledge was, is, and always will be very fragmentary. The events which I have observed don't lead in a 'natural' manner toward a synthesis, toward a preferred narrative, though I could always invoke some kind of broad cliché about the "passing parade." In other words, to tell the story of my relationship to the park more is needed. The events themselves raise questions about my own status as an observer. A history of that process will inevitably be a meta-discourse and it will in effect rewrite the past. The join between language and observation will thus be under stress, but it is precisely this tension which the act of looking, the activity of being a viewer, a spectator, brings into the foreground. Interestingly enough, the "more" that is needed is discourse which necessarily acts as an arbiter between my viewing and my efforts to reconstruct the history of what I have seen.

Continuously, repetitively, the act of looking through the windows raises questions about "what" I am seeing and there is an endless interplay between memory and vision. For example, did I see a tall man with long hair flying a kite? Were there one or two large dogs chasing each other at high speed past sunbathers and frightened squirrels? The effect is not dissimilar to the experience of viewing a film where the activity of viewing is perpetually enframed by the knowledge that something has already (before any realization about the act of viewing comes to consciousness) been viewed. It is this difficulty, the present slipping away into the past and the past into pastness, an endless regression through which images, for example (and our thoughts about them), exist within memory almost as quickly as they have existed in fact, which Bertolt Brecht's poem "Plenty To See Everywhere" explores and which is at the root of one of the major concerns of this book. Questions of subjectivity, sexual difference, identification and viewing, questions which go to the heart of how the cinema both produces meaning and is understood are a central theme of the essays which follow. Bertolt Brecht's poem was written during one of the darkest periods of his life and one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century (1938-1941).

To me the poem is about the precariousness of seeing and the inseparability of the act of viewing from thought. While this may seem obvious, it is precisely the hidden ambiguities of the obvious which Brecht's poem explores. A fold in the ground cannot be seen for what it is without also investigating its history. History cannot be explored without overcoming the temptation to equate the act of viewing with knowledge. For every landscape or object or person the wanderer sees there is inevitably a story, and the story develops into a metaphor about the "scene" as well as a statement about the viewer, about the wanderer and what is inevitably questioned is the manner in which the metaphor replaces the event and comes to represent the act of viewing, the moment of experience. Following on from this argument, I could create a story about the events in front of my window. I could hypothesize a whole series of things about the people I have seen and with time fit those elements together into a narrative. Limited only by my imagination, this narrative would come to "stand" for my knowledge of the park. Its meaning would be derived in part from my experience, but only in part; yet, depending on the manner in which I chose to communicate the narrative, it could develop into a replacement for the experience. The dilemma would always be; was there some finite moment when the narrative was not there? Or does the act of looking inevitably generate narrativity - the ongoing creation of a story? Does the window stand for a perpetual activity of replacement where what is seen is being continuously altered by a plethora of processes that are never "out there" or simply in my head? Substitution, (ranging from the construction of narratives to the act of writing to the creation of a painting) is an inevitable and perhaps desired outcome of the activity of viewing, but what are the boundaries between the "replacement" and what I have observed? Does the narrative necessarily depend on the experience of observation?

In Brecht's poem a ridge, part of a "pleasant landscape" is transformed into an emplacement for guns. Initially, a house in this pleasant landscape is shown to be a shack propped up by the ridge. That the house never has smoke rising from it, suggests that the people who live in it can't afford food or fuel. As the poem develops the landscape changes into a parched field. Increasingly the poem focuses on the deterioration of the environment until it is only the rocks standing above the soil which resist the dry emptiness, which resist the obvious fact that these are killing fields. They hold the dust of the soldiers who have died. The field is covered by an "indifferent sky" and it hides the history which has determined its look. For it is not natural forces which have created the landscape, but human beings. Yet that history is not part of the "visuals," suggesting that it is metaphor which will allow us to grasp and perhaps understand what has happened. It is the capacity of language to break down the visual, to "break into" the screen of images which will determine how much of the history can be reconstructed. But it is also the capacity of language to subvert the very terms of its own enunciation which brings the poem closer and closer to a rewriting of history. The windows have now become a screen. It is the very arbitrariness of the events in the park which has allowed me to define their usefulness for this introduction. If, to some degree, arbitrariness is at the heart of the process of substitution, then the windows have shown that substitution, per se, need not be an unproductive outcome of viewing.

Given that this book is appearing during a time of intense discussion about postmodernist theories, I would like to initially situate some of its emphases by examining what is "different" about this collection, what distinguishes it from and perhaps puts it in opposition to many of the concerns of postmodern theorists and cultural analysts. Substitution (which should not in this instance be equated with representation but without which the latter would not be able to communicate meaning) suggests how language and seeing, for example, are inseparable, how narrativity and knowledge are indivisible, how what Jean Baudrillard describes as "simulacra" are merely the continuing torrent of sign-systems which arise with every act of interaction with the world. In a more hysterical yet derivative vein, Arthur Kroker, by now a "classical" postmodernist, virtually equates the process of substitution with death, the death of culture, the viewer, and the possibility of social change. But if it were that simple, if for example the bay windows were my only contact with the park, or, by extension, if the media were my only contact with reality, or if images were my only vehicle for understanding the world around me, then processes of substitution would indeed represent the danger which Kroker, Baudrillard and Jean-Louis Lyotard have suggested.2 Clearly, as Brecht's poem so beautifully points out, the ability to narrativize what one sees (among many possible strategies) transforms the seen into one of a number of fragments in a continuous chain of signifiers. The danger is not that these signifiers initially stand for the real and then in an endlessly regressive sense lose contact with the reality upon which they depend. Their link to reality (the word 'real' on its own is a 'sign' of this) as Umberto Eco has often pointed out is through the activity of semiosis.3 Sign systems don't produce meaning outside of the social and cultural context from which they have developed.

The "appearance" of autonomy is just that, and, though signifying systems often seem to take on a life of their own, that "illusion" persistently breaks down through historical activity. Substitution, representation, and signification are inherent to the activity of communication and are never, singly or as a whole, imported into reality, nor do they come to determine or overpower the real. The division, for example, between reality and representation is more a matter of degree with neither the former nor the latter in a privileged position, since they are inseparable to begin with. In the world of Jean Baudrillard the viewer of a film becomes the screen as an effect of the screen itself. The driver of a car becomes an effect of the car. Objects signify in order to manipulate and overpower subjects. Signification creates a world beyond the control of those who, so to speak, bathe in its waters. "Harrisburg, Watergate, and NETWORK form the trilogy of THE CHINA SYNDROME -- an inextricable trilogy in which we cannot tell which is the effect or the symptom of the others: is the ideological argument (the Watergate effect) only the symptom of the nuclear (the Harrisburg effect) or the informational model (the NETWORK effect)? -- is the real (Harrisburg) only the symptom of the imaginary (NETWORK, THE CHINA SYNDROME) or vice versa? Marvellous indistinguishability, ideal constellation of simulation."4 The world of simulation precedes the real, and thus history, in a paradoxical and undialectical twist, has already been written. It is as if the future has overpowered the present, rendering all human activity, praxis, into an overwhelming and oppressive pattern of predictability.

"What else does the media dream of if not raising up events by its very presence? Everyone deplores it, but everyone is secretly fascinated by this eventuality. Such is the logic of simulacra: no longer divine predestination, but the precession of models, which is no less inexorable. And it is for this reason that events no longer have any meaning: not because they are insignificant in themselves, but because they have been preceded by models with which their own process can only coincide." 5 As Robert Hughes has so eloquently put it, "The machinery of "communication" communicates little except itself. Baudrillard is something of a McLuhanite; not only is the medium the message, but the sheer amount of traffic has usurped meaning." 6 It is the usurption of meaning, the emptying out of the vessel in favor of the vessel itself, which leads toward the mystification of media control, media effect. Outside of human praxis, unaffected by histories which have, so to speak, already been written, the universe of the simulacra becomes a place without subjectivity, unchangeable, unattainable, truly the universe of the Gods, a restatement and reinstatement of an all-powerful patriarchy. "What did you see, wanderer?" It seems that in the case of images, very little. For it is an altogether extraordinary paradox that as more and more images have spread their way through our culture, as more and different types of stories have been told through images, the antipathy to the world of images has actually grown. This is particularly the case with postmodernists who would somehow like to proclaim the death of meaning in much the same manner as surrealists in the 1920s proclaimed the death of language.

Surrealism, however, was a strategy to language, a way of rebelling against the use to which language was being put in an increasingly bankrupt culture, while postmodernism, most fully represented by Jean Baudrillard, sees the death of meaning as an inherent and inevitable part of cultural processes in late twentieth-century society. In contrast, in regard to the spectator, I would argue that viewing is a creative act, never just consumption, rarely passive. This is because there is no absolute moment without signs, without language, without, in other words, a whole host of mediations between seeing, experience, and knowledge. The mediators can take many forms, can act in many different ways, but they remain, as do signs, part of a multi-tiered process. For analytical purposes it may be necessary to isolate the sign, to de-contextualize its role and placement in the construction of meaning, but at no point does the sign transcend context or create a world independent of the material reality within which it plays so definitive a part. This would be like saying that language did not develop through, and as a result of, human history or that the images which surround us have somehow come from outside the social and cultural processes which made them possible in the first place.

The collection of essays in this book originated in CINE-TRACTS FILM MAGAZINE and it seems approprate to quote some of the central aims of the journal from its first editorial, " [CINE-TRACTS will try and link] . . . together the issues of self-reflexivity, subjective positioning and hegemonic social structures, [and] propose the outline of a possible theory of culture which embraces both the critique of ideology and the problematic of praxis." 7 This was a rather broad if not pretentious goal, but one which nevertheless guided the magazine for many years. It grew out of a desire among the first group of editors associated with the journal to publish a "political" magazine and to bind (if not to "suture") theory with practice, not only as a way of critiquing dominant ideologies, but also as a prelude to altering the way in which film institutions functioned in our society. In our second issue Teresa de Lauretis and David Allen continued this line of thought: "Within the general problematic of positioning the subject in relation to a hegemonic social structure operative in the institution of cinema in general and in the cinematic apparatus in particular, the papers presented here examine the perceptual and conceptual codes established by that apparatus, including self-reflexivity, excess, and the relation of image and sound-tracks. Explicit or implicit in these discussions is the critical awareness of the irreducible, insuppressible dimension of the socio-historical context in the film text, i.e., the social foundation of the most "personal" or "original" work.

These problems are addressed in both general and specific terms, and examined in the perspectives of cinema as institution, of the codes established by a particular genre, or of the textual strategy of a single film." 8 In large measure as the essays in EXPLORATIONS IN FILM THEORY detail, the journal remained faithful to the direction suggested by the above editorials. The division of this book into four chapters along thematic lines was arranged not only for clarity but to properly represent the main ideas which the magazine pursued. By the time we reached out tenth issue we had published authors like John Berger, Saul Landau, Peter Harcourt, Barbara Leaming, Jean-Louis Comolli, Sandy Flitterman, Anthony Wilden, Bill Nichols, Michael Silverman, Laurence Benequist, Douglas Gomery, Kristin Thompson, among many others. None of the above writers are in this collection not because they didn't deserve a place but because from an editorial point of view the selection was designed to highlight those debates which most fully suffused the journal during its seven year existence. EXPLORATIONS IN FILM THEORY opens with an essay by Patricia Mellencamp on the way in which the classical Hollywood cinema codifies meaning in order to design a particular position for the viewer of narrative films. Her far-reaching discussion examines the many different techniques through which the 'look' of the spectator coincides with the process of identification. She examines the work of Stephen Heath, Christian Metz and Jacques Lacan all with the aim of explaining how narratives, in this case musicals, create a context for viewing and in a reciprocal manner how spectatorship is contained within the very look of one character to another. Many of the questions which she raises are at the center of modern debates in film theory but in particular she suggests further research in sound-image relationships as a necessary base for understanding viewer position. This essay both supports and pre-figures later research in feminist film theory. Mary Ann Doane then deepens the discussion of identification through an historical overview of the way in which film theory has appropriated notions of identification from psychoanalysis. She discusses sexual difference and spectatorship in the cinema, the way in which the classical Hollywood cinema is, in a sense, a mirror for the male viewer, a privileged port of entry for the male which restricts and prevents women from gaining the mastery over the image which men have. Her conclusion, that identification is not an ideologically neutral term foregrounds the difficulty which psychoanalysis itself, as well as film theory has had in coming to grips with the relationship between sexual difference and processes of representation.

INTRODUCTION CONTINUES

Critical Approaches to Culture, Communications + Hypermedia is a set of resources on the World Wide Web developed by Ron Burnett in Vancouver, Canada. All rights reserved. ©Ron Burnett 2009