Excesses and Resistances: the Matter of Film

Andrew Gibson

To begin contentiously: it seems to me that one of the defining instances of contemporary English culture - possibly even of its postmodernity - has been the failure, collapse, or evident bankruptcy of the Screen project. By the Screen project, in the first instance, I mean a mode of film theory and criticism associated with the British journal Screen from the early 70s to the early 80s whose principal points of reference were French theory, chiefly Althusser and Lacan, though also Barthes, to a limited extent; Brecht, and certain avant-garde film-makers (Godard, Straub, Oshima et al.); and Marxism, or, at least, a radical politics not far removed from that of Tel Quel in Paris; plus at least an admixture of feminist politics that was to grow more important as the work of Screen progressed. The sense of how adventurous and exciting a project Screen really was is now beginning to fade, so I shall take a historical turn for a moment: it is easy by now to forget that in the early seventies, by and large, what one might strain to call intellectual life in most of the English departments in the UK was very dull. The dominant methodologies were still either traditional-scholarly or those of a Leavisism and new criticism that had grown old and weary with repeating themselves. At the same time, something known as structuralism and chiefly associated with the names of Barthes, Genette and Todorov was beginning to filter across the channel. Before very long, this invasive presence was being called theory and linked with Althusser, Lacan and others, too. What is now for the more part forgotten is that this foreign import found no immediate home in English departments or any other official place in UK universities. As the structuralist controversy at Cambridge was soon to demonstrate, the incursions of theory into the English academy would be fiercely and repeatedly opposed. Indeed, theory would win its foothold only after a protracted struggle. Given the entrenchment of powerful interests in English departments, it was easier for theorists to establish themselves elsewhere, in emergent disciplines that had hardly begun to form, that were still themselves very largely `unofficial'. In fact, the focus for theoretical work in the 1970s was not English, let alone philosophy or any of the disciplines on which theory has had a more recent impact, like geography or law, but film, and the mainstay of such work was precisely Screen. Screen was possibly the only truly serious intellectual - as opposed to scholarly and critical - journal to flourish in the field of what we would now call literary and cultural studies in the UK in the seventies. Screen and the conferences it ran acted as something of a magnet for a new generation of intellectuals who were increasingly looking outside the Anglo-American tradition for their intellectual inspiration: Laura Mulvey, Paul Willemen, Peter Wollen, to some extent Jacqueline Rose and, above all, Stephen Heath and Colin McCabe. Screen quickly became the most eminent and influential film journal in the English-speaking world. From what is now a historical perspective, it was also crucially important as a point of transmission for ideas from a European philosophical and theoretical tradition into English culture, and as a vehicle for sustaining those ideas in alien soil. In short, throughout the seventies, Screen became the most radical, distinctive, innovative and challenging publication to emerge in English intellectual and cultural life for at least two decades. The Screen critics aspired — at times, explicitly — to something like the historical, cultural and above all political status of the Russian formalists, and it is a tribute to them that one can almost think of them in such terms; revealing, also, that, to think of a comparable phenomenon in English intellectual life - to find a similar group likewise involved in a common enterprise - one would probably have to go as far back as the early Leavis and the Scrutiny critics.

 It might at once be objected that, in an obvious sense, Screen is not dead nor has it failed, in that the journal still continues, if the contributors are largely different, now. Yet it is nonetheless the case that, if there is a recognizable continuity in what I shall clumsily call attitude between the Screen of the past and the present journal, Screen today is nonetheless a very different product: more historical, more technical, increasingly professionalized, much more like any other specialist journal than was its former self. To put my point differently: it would now be possible to write a kind of Baudrillardian history of the journal Screen which precisely charted the steady, gravitational pull of postmodernity upon it. But in any case, by the Screen project, I want to indicate a phenomenon of larger and more general scope and force than the journal, past and\or present. In fact, I want to take the Screen project as paradigmatic of many of the dominant trends in film theory and criticism over the past three decades; and of a particular and perhaps above all British culture of radical demystification whose impact can be traced at least as far back as liberal humanist attacks on the consumer society in the England of the early and mid-sixties. Seen in this light, the Screen project becomes a representative instance of a political praxis, a radical left demystification of the media, particularly film and television. I would suggest that it is in this larger sense, too, that the Screen project has exhausted itself and now begins to appear as a historical phenomenon. If this is the case, however, it nonetheless clearly continues to have an existence that is forceful even as it is spectral. It is living on after its own death and will very likely do so for some time to come. Firstly, it has been instrumental in determining the agenda for film and television studies, notably in the UK but also to a large extent in the States, where its influence has been decisive. We get a precise sense of the persistence of this spectral power if we consider the question of the relationship between it and its principal competitor, as far back as the seventies, the work of Bordwell, Carroll, Thompson and the Wisconsin school, to which I shall return. Secondly, Screen's political project might seem to have mutated rather than died, in that much current work, not least in Screen itself, whilst inflected by a postmodern rather than a Marxist politics - a politics of difference, feminist, gay, postcolonial, multiculturalist etc. - nonetheless remains concerned with that key activity of the original Screen critics, demystification or unmasking, and continues to share many of the same assumptions and the same practices. Nonetheless: for all its ghostly afterlife, for all the many, many reports of continued hauntings and however sadly, the Screen project is dead, above all, politically. When Thatcher was elected in 1979, Colin McCabe spoke publicly of `the death of a nation'. In retrospect, it is evident that what he was really lamenting was the prospect of the demise of the Screen project. The advent in an increasingly media-dominated society of Thatcherism, and now its latest avatar, Blairism, have clearly delimited the achievements of the kind of intellectual culture represented by the Screen project. Whatever else, they were not political. In the end, then, the Screen project failed, decisively, and insofar as it continues to have a spectral existence, it also re-enacts its own failure. It may be that something quite different now needs to be thought in its wake, at a different speed, according to a different temporality, what I have called elsewhere an ethical or ethico-political as contrasted with a specifically political temporality. I want to focus this demand for a different kind of thought around the question of the materiality of film, and the obscure but apparently intransigent resistances of materiality as a determining feature of an ever more somatic contemporary culture. This is one way of understanding my topic here: the materiality of film as an excess or resistance which entirely escaped the attention of the Screen project.

 Insofar as I am considering the Screen project as a paradigm, as I have said, I am conflating it with much contemporary film theory. In its dominant manifestations, which might be described as post-Metzian — Screen and after — film theory has been a resolutely modern form of theory. It has been modern in its presumptions (the possibility and desirability of knowledge\power), in its mode (critique) and in the position it has regularly produced for the theorist (transcendental or, at least, a position of classic exteriority). All this was bound up in a seventies- and eighties-style commitment — in many ways important and necessary, particularly in the cultural climate of the Cold War — to the hermeneutics of suspicion. So much was exemplified above all in the Screen project. The legacy of all this has been a particular double-bind: on the one hand, the great demolition work accomplished by film theory — above all, by Screen — was powerfully anti-idealist. Metz wrote specifically of putting an end to `idealist discourses' on film, and Screen precisely followed him in this: a radical, modern film theory would relinquish or dispatch to the rubbish-bin a range of idealist constructions: the auteur of the Cahiers critics, realism à la Bazin, the world as story (effectively pulled apart by structuralist narratology) and so on. With hindsight, however — and this is crucial to my argument — it is now apparent that, in all the headiness of the plaisir de rompre, however, the new theory was quietly installing a set of idealisms of its own: firstly, an idealism or a metaphysics of the sign. There was apparently no innocent little concretion nestling quietly in the corner of a frame of a film that could not be dragooned into service as a sign. What happened, of course, in the very comprehensiveness of this semiotic project was that film itself, understood as `a signifying system', was converted wholesale into the terms of a different order or regime, what Lyotard would have called the order of the discursive at the expense of its (film's) `figurality'. Secondly, a more or less subtle idealism of the subject, summed up in the concept, so crucial to the Screen methodology, of `the construction of the subject'. This concept, above all, is the one that, in retrospect, now looks to have been extremely vulnerable: what subject, exactly, was involved, here? Not this empirical subject, who can fairly confidently say that, whatever the effect any given film may have had on him, it has not been one of `construction'. In fact, I would suggest, the subject deemed by the theorist to undergo `construction' was not the theorist him- or herself, but actually itself an abstract construction, the `naive spectator' from whose naivety the theorist, it was implied, had been rescued by theory. The subject in question was in no sense a material subject, a description of whom is strictly unavailable or impossible. It was actually a subject constructed by theory; the other of the theorist, the imaginary dupe, a category I shall presumptuously call the ordinary or the other cinemagoer. `They go all by themselves,' wrote Stephen Heath of such dupes, `like so many automata'. The dupe was deemed to be caught up in a process of misrecognition, a process from which the intellectual could be protected by his or her theoretical knowledge, above all, perhaps, by Lacan. Like innumerable theorists after him, Metz, for instance, turned to Lacan for an account of the misrecognition or what he (Metz) called the `radical delusion' of the cinematic subject. E. Ann Kaplan — to give a single instance — even argued that it is was in fact less easy for the fiction reader to believe that he/she was creating the text than it was for the cinema spectator to believe that he/she is producing the image on the screen. I refer to her, here, because there could hardly be a better illustration of the irredeemable naivety film theorists have repeatedly attributed to the subject as constructed by film; and, at the same time, of theory's extreme, idealist denial of film as material instance.  So, 1) the sign; 2) the construction of the subject; and 3) ideology: what lay hidden away in the nooks and crannies of film, like a subtle and pernicious virus, was ideology; ideology understood as a system belonging elsewhere, outside the film in itself, whether in what Metz and Heath would call the `film system', or in the historical and social subject, as Willemen argued, for instance; but ideology also incarnated in the particular film in question, not least as a function of industrial production, and detectable under surfaces that the naive spectator would be too innocent properly to distrust. The function of theory was therefore more or less explicitly designated as penetration, a platonic seeing through and beyond appearances, a revelation of the true purpose of hidden practices and oblique strategies; an exposure of the deep below the surface structure, of the latent within the manifest signification; a drawing back of the specious or beguiling veil, to show the dark presence behind it.

 By the same token, however — and this is what may start to seem astonishing, now — to interest oneself in the theory of film meant no longer to see or to hear, to put something else in the place of sound and vision. I shall come back to this point later, not least, in a brief discussion of the Kantian conception of the sensorium and its legacy. Film theory actually operated — was bound to operate — as a kind of puritan resistance to the senses, even to the very multiplicity and movement that might seem to be cardinal to film itself. This latter resistance is well demonstrated in Jameson's work on film. I cite Jameson, here, of course, not as someone who has ever written for Screen, but as a theorist and critic whose work on film may to a very large extent be identified with what I have just called the Screen project in its larger sense. For what characterizes Jameson's film criticism is a marked uneasiness — an uneasiness repeatedly evident in the work of the Screen critics — with regard to film as dangerous temptation, what Jameson himself calls the `rapt, mindless fascination' of image and sound. The desire to put an end to the `mindless fascination' induced by the media - a fascination, Jameson implies, from the grip of which the plebeian spectator will not be able to wrest himself free - or, at the very least, the desire to hold fascination stoutly at bay, is amply evident, for example, in Jameson's appropriately titled Signatures of the Visible. The mandarin Marxist superstar becomes the Red Cross Knight in cinema's Bower of Bliss (and a striking specimen of postmodern hybridity; though part of what is so admirable about Jameson is his ability always to be tempted, half-seduced, to acknowledge the extent of his own seduction; unlike Eagleton, who is always Savanarola, intent on hounding the sinners and recidivists). In a way, the Jamesonian resistance in writing about film to film itself is most perfectly captured in the olympian hauteur of his declaration that `I have no desire to see again a movie about which I have written well.' To produce the sufficient commentary — to attain to a sufficient systematization and abstraction — is finally to kill the film as sensual lure and material snare, to bring to a conclusive end the long and difficult struggle with the demon.

 In fact, in its dominant forms, film theory has always seemed vulnerable to the force of Baudrillard's critique of Marxism: that it puts meaning everywhere (pins its faith wholly on what Baudrillard calls the religion of meaning) and thereby becomes another means whereby the theological drive is actually accomplished by a modernity that claims to have overcome it. In this respect, it remains what Baudrillard calls a `godly order'. In the terms of Baudrillard's Seduction, film theory in general and the Screen project in particular have sought to maintain the order of truth and depth as opposed to the material play of surfaces or appearances, and have thereby been complicit with the very humanism against which the Screen critics initially established themselves. Not only that: in another aspect, the Screen critics fit smoothly into and consolidate a culture dominated by what Baudrillard calls `occidental realistics' and obsessed with `the desublimation of appearances', a culture in which `everything is materialized in accord with the most objective categories' . The Screen imaginary seeks intently to maintain the distinction between authenticity and artifice which it is precisely Baudrillard's commitment to call in question. The critical practice of demystification as it is characteristic of the Screen project is very exactly what Baudrillard calls a `hallucination of [a] back-world' . It understands the film of film as a kind of patina over truth, a mere superficies, and the screen as screening meaning from the spectator; a meaning, however, that the theoretically informed spectator will discover `behind the screen' and will precisely bring to light. The source of that light is not the projection room and it is apprehended, not by the bodily eye, but by the immaterial eye of the knowing subject. In that respect, the question is partly whether the very critics claiming to expose the `true' mechanisms of film have not actually been inoculating themselves against what might still be problematic in film itself; the respect in which, already and from the very outset, film might appear to have outstripped the theorist. Indeed, by an obscurely ironic twist, one might think of the Screen critics and those who continue or extend their project today as the political equivalent of what Baudrillard calls `those green spaces that substitute their chlorophyll effects for a defunct nature' .

 This is not to dismiss the political meanings and effects of film, nor deny that they may be retrograde. It is rather to raise questions about the ease with which it is possible to think those meanings and effects; to pose the question of the mode of insertion of political effects within films. Is it not possible that the meanings and effects in question are so wholly imbricated with the materiality of the medium as to be much more obscure to us than terms like `ideology' or `the construction of the subject' can suggest? As Rosi Braidotti might say, has the relevant materialism simply not been within the scope of what Constance Penley once called the `bachelor machines' of film theory? And along with that goes another question: does it always help to think film in terms of politics first, as has commonly been the case with the Screen project? Might there not be something else to think? Might it not be helpful to try to think that `something else', and see how the attempt might inflect the effort to think the politics of film? It has been of course precisely the film theorist's scrupulous, puritan, tacit rebuke to the other cinemagoer that he or she does not think politics first. But might it not be time precisely to close the gap - between the theorist and his or her other - by trying to think the materiality of film, what it might be in film that seduces the other cinemagoer, if only as a problem or question, and not to assume that we know the character of cinematic seduction beforehand, in all its insidiousness, as ideology? Might it not be more useful to try to think the materiality of film first, and perhaps to think the politics of film again, at length, after a renewed meditation on a specific materiality which possibly inflects politics - as it possibly does everything else - in a different way? Might it not be time to break decisively with the idealism of the Screen project?

 Not, of course, that Screen or film theory would recognize itself in this description. Precisely the reverse: film theory has insistently given itself out as a materialism. Semiotics as a materialism, the materialism of the signifier; historical materialism on the technological, economic and political determinations of film as commodity; in the seventies, in particular, Althusserian `materialism', insisting on the supposed materiality of ideology. Heath even described the Althusser- and Lacan-based theories of subject construction as a `materialism of the subject'. Equally, in their promotion of the avant-garde - or, at least, of a certain kind of avant-garde - Wollen, McCabe et al. wrote of one of its cardinal functions as a self-reflexive laying bare of filmic materiality. But what they meant by this was not a concern with the matter of film as, say, the work of Hans Richter or Robert Breer or Michael Snow's Wavelength or Stan Brakhage's Mothlight are concerned with the matter of film. For film to pay attention to its own materiality was rather for it to concern itself with the `processes' or `codes' underlying it. In that respect - indeed, in the case of all the supposed `materialisms' I have just itemized - theory has insistently worked in terms of a surface-and-depth or appearance-and-reality model - sign-and-meaning, image-and-code or syntagm, etc. The whole point about a so-called `historical materialism' of film, in Terry Lovell's account of it, for example, is that it sees beyond the film itself to determining structures and forces. Thus the theorist's eye is not the eye of the spectator. It is not the eye that sees. It is rather the severe eye of Hawthorne's puritan fathers, an eye that sees through the deceitful show, the specious, trivial masquerade, the mere physics of film to the profounder truth underlying it. By and large, in fact, film theory has actually been less interested in the sensible than the insensible, the visible than the invisible, the audible than the inaudible. Or rather, it might be better to say, for the film theorist as for the puritan father, matter is matter insofar as it does not exist in its own right, insofar as it exhibits no resistance, has no alterity, no proper materiality of its own. Matter is matter insofar as it signifies.

 There are of course, exceptions to my description of film theory: the work of Brunette and Wills, Mary Anne Doane, Steven Shaviro, Guy Rosolato, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuillemier, for instance. I'm also aware of how far film theory has been shifting in the eighties and nineties. But I'd need to be convinced that the shifts in question have been significant shifts in the intrinsic character of film theory; that the epistemology of film theory as I have described it is not still substantially in place. Indeed, in some respects, the epistemological premises of established film theory have actually secured themselves and been consolidated, not least in the case of historical and other so-called `materialisms.' But I am not about to veer from the Scylla of the Screen project to the Charybdis of Wisconsin: I am not a closet Wisconsinite. Many of my doubts about post-Metzian theory can indeed be found coming from the Wisconsin school and their allies, as represented in the massive collection of essays called Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, edited by Bordwell and Carroll, often in more hostile form; and there are some good essays in the volume. Nonetheless, in theoretical terms, it is a pretty dismal affair. As in other fields, the injunction to `reconstruct' is actually an injunction swiftly to forget. As in other areas in which I have worked (narrative theory, literature and ethics), the covert project of what gives itself out as `post-theory' is actually a clandestine return to a prelapsarian state of willed, pre-theoretical innocence, as though that were now legitimized by the imminent exhaustion of pure theory. Hence essay after essay surreptitiously tries to smuggle back in one or other of a whole rack of terms that you might have thought that theory had at least insistently bracketed off: plot, character, universals, transcultural truths, the prioritization of rational cognition, sympathy and empathy, realism, Aristoteleanism, the supreme value of the imagination: the kit and caboodle of the humanist stock-in-trade.

  What the rack of familiar, Wisconsinite terms and, equally, what the counter-terms of the Screen project might be thought of as missing is something that is much more directly before me and\or above me on the screen and behind me and\or around me in the cinema: something that is very powerfully borne in upon me, that invades or indeed penetrates me (and it does so, literally, as the literary or the philosophical effect does not): the matter of film. The science of the critic is a much more radical departure, perhaps, even, a categorically different departure from the `matter' in question than that involved in the case of a literary text. But theory has hardly begun to reflect on, let alone get the measure of the crucial fact and extent of that categorical difference.  A few examples of what I mean: to begin with a film that, after Heath's brilliant essay on it, became something of a locus classicus for the Screen project: in the wonderful opening sequence to Touch of Evil, as Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh run towards the explosion, a figure runs behind them and out of frame, to their right, then reappears from the right, in the foreground, runs out of frame again, then reappears again, and runs across screen, ending up on the couple's left, in the foreground. For a few seconds, this crazy, frenetic, looming figure - crazily out of tune, too, with the ideological conformity that Heath detects in the film, or perhaps just of a different order to it - this figure dominates Touch of Evil, or rather, his movement does. But what is he, or it? A signifier for excitement, commotion? No doubt. But to say that does not exhaust him. And what is in excess of his semiotic value is precisely his materiality: his material force and material specificity, the fact that he and his movement are themselves and not other. It is in that excess, in that materiality, that the film happens in its obscurity and power before it is construed in terms of codes, syntagms or ideologies, and from which - in a remarkable askesis - film theory has chastely turned away. Or take that classic film noir, Build My Gallows High. The extraordinary redundancy of chiaroscuro in that film, of the play of light and dark, is superfluous to any effects of signification (eg `moral ambivalence') to which it can be reduced. It does not naturalize the ideological, reinforce the realist delusion or lay bare the filmic device. It is, quite simply, the material particularity of the film, which is also its irreducibility to terms that are other than its own. Or take David Lynch: it may be that the abiding obsessions in Lynch's films, from the early, partly abstract work (The Alphabet, The Grandmother and so on) onwards are, in the first instance, material obsessions: obsessions, too, that are not with objects, nor even with codifiable sounds and images, but - in a sense - formless: with amorphous shapes, lines, trajectories, vectors, curves, movements, in correspondence, perhaps, with Lynch's preoccupation with the obscurity of the body, the viscera, physical processes and functions. In this respect, it might conceivably be possible to think in terms of a Lynchian materialism, the laws of which - self-evidently in Eraserhead, for example - are quite particular to it. If Lynch's films share a specificity, it has possibly less to do with generic markers or ideological constraints than with material particularities. One of the more distinctively Lynchian signatures is arguably a sound - eerily, mutely industrial. So too - to cut across auteurism but to keep an author in mind - one distinctively Brechtian signature on films with which Brecht was associated is, again, a sound, a sound which, strikingly, persists in spite of different directors (Pabst in The Threepenny Opera, Dudow in Kuhle Wampe) and even different composers of the soundtrack (Weill on the one hand, Eisler on the other). Sergio Leone's signature has been a sound; so, too, is Scorsese's, though with the soundtracks of Mean Streets and Good Fellas as the norm, After Hours and Raging Bull as variations, and The Age of Innocence as exception. The work of the great Polish animator, Walerian Borowcyzk, too, has a sound as its signature and I go to a Borowcyzk film desiring, seduced in anticipation, by that sound. What draws one upriver and into madness in Apocalypse Now is partly the hypnotic power of the voice of Martin Sheen. What is riveting in Robocop or Gus van Sant's To Die For - amongst many other features - is a certain combination of two kinds of differently textured images; and so on.

 It might appear as though my concern is with the simple things in film: certainly, by implication, at least, that is how theory has designated them, and, as such, consigned them to the other cinemagoer, or identified them as belonging to the realm of the other cinemagoer. My argument, however, is that the turn away from that realm has been aesthetically as indeed it has been politically problematic, and that it may now be time to try to struggle back towards it again. If I do not want to deafen myself to the Sirens' song with the old cotton wool of Wisconsinite humanism, nor do I want to keep it out with the firm, hard, modern but almost prosthetically waxen earplugs of the Screen critics. I want to get up close enough to it to be bewitched by it - or to remember that I have been bewitched by it - and see how that might inflect my discourse about it. In other words, I am interested in how and how far, without taking the Wisconsin turn, it might be possible to consider film in terms of a vocabulary and discourse of affect. Or, to put it differently, resorting to a phrase of Isobel Armstrong's that I like very much, what interests me is how far, relative to film, it may be possible to think `the power of affect within a cognitive space'. It may be helpful here, again, to return to the Baudrillardian concept of seduction. It has been film as seduction that the Screen project has sought to hold stoutly at bay, to resist, to demystify without being itself seduced. But it is time, says Baudrillard himself, to think in terms of the seduction rather than the production of images. Baudrillard, of course, takes an obsession with production as what most commonly muffles all thought of seduction, and it is precisely production that the Screen project sees everywhere in film: not just film as industrial production, the circumstances of the making of film, but film as a production of truth, of meaning, of the cinematic subject him- or herself. In Baudrillardian terms, the order of production is an order of the presencing of everything, its being brought to intelligibility. Seduction, by contrast, removes or subtracts things from the order of the intelligible. Seduction's whole mechanism, writes Baudrillard, is to be-there\not-there, and thereby he adds, adopting a metaphor that is relevant here, to produce a sort of flickering, a hypnotic mechanism that crystallizes attention outside all concern with meaning. Baudrillard identifies seduction with Virilio's `aesthetics of disappearance'. Seduction deflects discourse from its truth, or rather, opens up a breach between sense and truth and thereby overturns or exorcizes a form of power. It deflects the seduced spectator from his or her truth. It refuses the distinction between latent and manifest, which always turns discourse towards the supposed `truth' as a latency. It insists on the priority of the charms and illusions of the manifest, on the opacity of the material rather than the transparency of the image. As such, it is opposed above all to interpretation, as what most damages `the domain of appearances' , as a mechanism that cannot acknowledge `the instantaneous and panicky surface of the exchange and rivalry of signs' , cannot tolerate the play of signs as reversible appearances. And if seduction resists the presumption of depth, it also resists the architecture, the coherence of the great `edifices', Freudian, Marxist, Saussurean and so on. Seduction designates the absorption rather than the production of meaning, the attraction of meaning to the abyss. To think this absorption in the case of film would be to regard opposites as seducing each other, turning each other's truth, in conformity with the logic of reversibility and in contradistinction to `every conventional semiology' but in a movement towards what Baudrillard calls a `non-diacritical semiology' . If `beneath meaning', as Baudrillard writes, lie `the secret circulation' of seductive processes, the `diagonals or traversals' of seduction itself, then in attending to such processes, theory might return film, at length, to what Baudrillard would call its esotericism. In the Baudrillardian sense, the term denotes the source of the fascination of any given system, its distance from or independence of all external logics or forms of sense. Paradoxically, perhaps, the concept of esotericism might be precisely what begins to release the theorist and critic from the weary polarity of intellectual and masses which was so pervasive in the Screen project. For to admit the esotericism of film is precisely to admit the priority of something that, historically, the ordinary film-viewer may seem to have understood better than the theorist.

 As theorists say again and again, practice is not the other of theory, for practice is always theory-laden. It may be, rather, that the true other of theory, what most definitively eludes it, is what is most powerful in film as in so much contemporary cultural production: material specificity, which is also a film's power of seduction. The question then becomes: must theory always construct film as a reflection of theory itself? Must film always indicate the limits to the possibilities available to theory? If so, how might theory better register the traces of its own exclusions, of the impossibility of the theoretical reduction? I am not suggesting a return to formalist analysis (which is emphatically not what I mean by materialism). Nor am I suggesting that the theoretical project in film studies should be abandoned. What has actually crossed my mind is the thought of a sensual proliferation of theory, a multiplication of the theoretical imagination for film. But whatever the possibilities in that direction, it may be that theory could at least start better to mark its own distance from the material, mark the gap, the nostalgia for the material that begins with the very inception of theoretical work itself. It may be that theory could start to attend more fully to the manner in which that gap or distance is replicated within film, in the indeterminable non-coincidences between the signifying and the non-signifying in any given film. (I'm thinking in particular, here, of the rift between the extraordinary material density of some of Ridley Scott's films -The Duellists, Blade Runner, Black Rain - and the thinness of what any `interpretation' is likely to make of them). At all events, I think we might return to the question of what film makes available to apprehension and\or cognition that was more often raised by a phenomenologically oriented theory existing prior to Metz, as in the work of Mitry and Morin. To ask this question again, may once more be to problematize the relationship between film and theoretical discourse.

 I have tried to sketch in a larger imperative for film theory with the help of Baudrillard. But what particular lines of enquiry might make themselves available? I shall look briefly at three possible avenues, then close with an example. Firstly, Lyotard's concept of the figural, as developed in Discours, Figure and intermittently evident in later work, and as deployed by Thomas Docherty, notably in Alterities, and by Andrew Benjamin. For Lyotard, ours as a culture in which an obsessively discursive aesthetics is dominant and pervasively represses what he calls the `figural' - the libidinal and sensuous, the material and substantial - in which, indeed, we have no language for the somatic that does not nullify the somatic in seeking to articulate it. For Lyotard, there is a constitutive density in the seen that is simply not congruent with or expressible in the terms of the orders of signification. In his chapter on film in Alterities, Docherty follows Lyotard in this, but usefully problematizes Lyotard's arguments in insisting that there is a structure that runs parallel to the one diganosed by Lyotard in film theory and in much film itself. Within this structure, a congruency is assumed between visibility and signification at the expense of the aural, at the expense of film as an aural medium. the aural is thereby relegated to secondary status. It should be obvious that I owe a good deal to the Lyotardian position. The difficulty with it is that, in Lyotard and in Docherty (and in Benjamin, too) its consequence is a polarization of an avant-garde or `minoritarian' cinema and a mainstream cinema and a privileging of the avant-garde or `minoritarian' that is by now throughly familiar and is very close to a similar manoeuvre in the work of Wollen, Heath and other Screen theorists, even if the avant-garde in question is rather different. From a Lyotardian point of view, it is precisely in the work of the avant-garde that the figural appears to disrupt the discursive, that film declares its own proper materiality. In mainstream cinema, by contrast, the material is rigorously the immaterial (narrative codes, signifying systems and so on). Given work I have done in the past, it would ill become me to ask too many awkward questions about awarding pride of place to the avant-garde. But, to paraphrase Samuel Beckett in a radically different context, I wonder, all the same, if there is really very much more to be squeezed out of that old chestnut. I'm not sure that both the structure and the terms of the mainstream\avant-garde dualism don't threaten to reintroduce the very idealist presumptions against which Lyotard and Docherty are concerned to struggle. True, the avant-garde is likely more rigorously to operate a peremptory check on any impulse to flee the materiality its films produce for us. There are important films about which the principal point is that there may be little or nothing significant to say about them: the work of Maya Deren, Len Lye, Bruce Baillie, Oskar Fischinger, Jan Lenica and so on. Nonetheless, might it not be possible to think the materiality of film itself as a radical and indeed symptomatic or paradigmatic break with the order of discursive culture? Pace Lyotard, might it not be the continuing resistance of the vestigial remnants of the latter - now largely safely nestling in the academy - to the materialities of contemporary culture that have led directly to the divorce between theory and the other cinemagoer, Heath's so-called `automata?' Again, without sacrificing thought itself, might it not be helpful to try to rethink or, better, think across this gap?

 This is not to say, however, that Lyotard's and Docherty's terms might not be a fertile source of new ideas. This is still more the case with my second source of possible inspiration, Deleuze's two great books on cinema. Indeed, more than anything else, it is those two volumes that have inspired my own thought on the subject. To work through the full implications of Deleuze's work in the context of my arguments deserves a paper in itself, and is quite beyond the scope of this one. What seems to me to be so very important in Deleuze's work is his unique determination to rethink film itself, the character of what is seen and heard, in a way that takes him quite beyond the familiar confines of theory, the Screen and Wisconsin traditions, Lyotard's discursive culture, and so on. Deleuze appears to have seen the same films as ourselves, but in a different age or a different world. And yet, three brief but major caveats: for all his insistence on the materiality of film, for all his wonderful insistence that film is not to be taken as an object for theory or philosophy, that it is philosophy in itself, at its largest, Deleuze's conception of film is immaterialist. He says as much himself, close to the beginning of Cinema 1, when he describes the time of film as that of aion, immeasurable time, pure becoming, `the unlimited past and future of incorporeals'. This is the time of emergence, the point at which, in terms Deleuze partly borrows from Péguy, the possible or virtual intersects with the actual. This is the time of cinema as an always `acentred' condition, a time of constant metamorphosis, transformations, new possibilities. Secondly, and partly because of my first point, it is hard to see how Deleuze's understanding of film emerges unscathed from the question Alain Badiou puts to the philosophy as a whole: is it not itself finally unitary and idealist, in that it thinks in terms precisely of a `pure becoming' prior to the event, prior to any particular manifestation or materialization? Does not Deleuze offer us, not a theory of the immanent materiality of film, but rather a theory of film as an instance of a transcendental principle of matter, understood - as indeed, is clear to anyone reading widely in Deleuze - as existing prior to film itself? Is not film an instance of becoming as theorized by Deleuze, or Deleuze via Bergson? Thirdly, it is clear that Deleuze, too, must resort to the old mainstream\avant-garde polarity, most evidently in the magisterial sixth and seventh chapters of Cinema 2, where what Deleuze argues is that the cinema of aion or the time-image is really always a cinema of shock - as from the start, in Eisenstein, Dziga-Vertov, Gance - that must be distinguished from what Deleuze calls `the commercial configurations of sex and blood'; which presumably only Heathian automata take seriously. In that respect, Deleuze actually ends up saying that most cinema is a `nullity'.

 Deleuze, then, points in two contradictory directions: on the one hand, there is no finer attempt to think decisively beyond the established categories of film theory. On the other hand, his own categories, if they do not derive from film theory, nonetheless stem, for all his protestations, from outside film itself. Is the idea of an immanent materialism of film thus finally a dream and a delusion? I will turn to the third of my three possible avenues of enquiry. In The Critique of Practical Reason, Kant formulates a concept of the sensorium which institutes (or partly confirms) a violent hierarchy of the sense. On the one hand, there are the transcendental senses, hearing and, above all, vision. In particular, says Kant, vision produces an ideal relation with an object, which relation can be perceived in the absence of the material object itself. (Consider the similarities with the situation of the film theorist, who has always written his or her work in a situation determined by the material absence of the object, and has equally asserted an implicit faith in the ideal relation). With vision as with hearing, sensory experience can thus be properly objectified, held at a distance. For Kant, vision and hearing are therefore the noble senses - objective, impartial, unaffected, maintaining an emphatic exteriority from their object. At the other end of the spectrum come the `base' senses, taste and smell, which do not rise above affect, which are cannot be sublimated into cognitive processes, which are always, as it were, invaded, for which the world is always uncomfortably close. On the one hand, then, the grand, dignified, masculine senses, the senses concerned with scope and distance; and on the other, the small, domestic, feminine senses, embroiled in the proximate. Touch, for Kant, the most problematic sense, comes midway between the two. Two contentions, here: firstly, in this respect, film theory, even of the most radical kind, even feminist film theory, has commonly been and remains Kantian in all its ways. It has taken vision and hearing for senses - as it were - that are also intelligences, in what Derrida would call a `movement of idealization' in which seeing in particular becomes knowledge in `a displacement of sensible origin' and `a forgetting of the metaphor'. My second contention is that, while film theory has  remained steadfastly within the Kantian conception of the sensorium, at the same time, the Kantian sensorium has been steadily falling into disarray in our culture, not least, as the very texture and scope of what technology has made available to seeing and hearing has changed so dramatically. The most obvious instance, of course, would be of course the widespread interrogation of the privileging of vision as knowledge within Western tradition, of what Derrida calls `the entire history of our philosophy as a photology': Heidegger, for example, raising hearing above seeing; Levinas, too, privileging touch (the `caress') over seeing.

 Neither of these straightforward reversals of the Kantian hierarchy might seem very helpful to film theory, however. A more fruitful departure from the Kantian scheme - at least, in this context, is evident in a rather different line of thought that I would see as represented in Merleau-Ponty and culminating in Irigaray. This is the third and last of my three fresh avenues, and here I am very much indebted to Cathryn Vasseleu's recent book on Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Irigaray, Textures of Light. What is important about this line of thought is that it abandons the Kantian hierarchy without definitively instituting a new one. The point, for instance, is that vision and hearing drift nearer to the place allocated to taste and smell by Kant, become close up and personal; and it's worth noting, here, that one thing that is not available to vision and hearing in the cinema is distance, above all, unaffected, contemplative distance. Thus Vasseleu points out that, for Merleau-Ponty (particularly in The Visible and Invisible), vision is neither unified nor panoptic, but rather tactile as well as visible. For the post- Kantian Merleau-Ponty, there is no intelligible, bodiless or immaterial as opposed to visible light. All sensory experience - including diverse experiences of light - are embodied, and thus have an fleshly obscurity as also a clarity. The relationship with the seen is thus not a distant but an intimate one: `It is as though our vision were formed in the heart of the visible', writes Merleau- Ponty, or as though there were between it and us an intimacy as close as between the sea and the strand' . It is partly this emphasis on the intimacy of perception, and, equally, on the intimacy, the interconnectedness of the senses, that so attracts Irigaray to Merleau-Ponty, particularly in the Ethics of Sexual Difference. But Irigaray takes the argument further in seeking to theorize seeing, not as detachment, as a mode of production of the intelligible - to return to Baudrillard's terms - but as voluptuousness as in a caress, a `birth into a world where the look itself remains tactile - open to the light'. As Vasseleu points out, here, it is limiting categorically to associate Irigaray's work with a feminist critique of masculine ocularcentrism. What rather interests her is a conception of sight as close to and partaking in the qualities of touch. Sight becomes, not an active grasping or possesion of the world, but, like touch, `the principle through which the world appears', `the body's vulnerability to th impingement of the world'. Vision is not transcendent to affect: rather, it, too, means `being moved', abandoning all previous scemas, as does the response to the caress. Illumination, writes Irigaray, in touch, the caress, in erotic experience and in sight too, `is a never-to-be-grasped carnal beginning, an encounter of wonder not knowledge, a source of animation, a movement in one's being' and `an opening of affection'. In this respect, Irigaray's is an argument for photosensitivity as opposed to photology, in which the apotheosis of vision actually always also means the anaesthetizing of seeing itself.

 In this context, cinema arguably springs forward again as crucial instance if not paradigmatic. For in cinema, seeing cannot be deliberation,. In the cinema, you cannot help but see. From the start, eye and ear are made vulnerable, opened to affect, susceptible to what Irigaray calls impingement. Here, precisely, in Irigaray's phrase, light is always experienced as `a non-rational subjection to feelings such as being penetrated, dazzlement, ecstasy or pain.' Seen in this light, cinema actually begins to spell the end of reflexive vision of precisely the kind that the Screen theorists endeavoured to prolong and sustain. For cinema gives us the irreducible and untransmutable visible, the visible that is always moved and moves on, that cannot be `held' or `possessed', that, by virtue of its mobility, becomes the tactile, becomes a caress. Vision as impingement, the invasions of light, film as invaded by light: I'll end with my example: one Remembrance Sunday, I caught up again with Kubrick's first world war film, Paths of Glory. There is a moment in the film when the three-man patrol is out on night-time reconnaissance and heading towards the German lines. Abruptly, the men take cover: in what is, visually, the most striking and distinctive moment in the film, a flare follows unique, individual, random, jagged, zigzag arc through the sky, and then dies. Here, if anywhere, light invades both the eye and the film: there is no moment like it in a film composed not of chiaroscuro but shaded blocks of grey. The flare breaks radically with the solidities of the film, its monumentality, its composition in homogeneous blocks, visually and aurally as much as in terms of its structures of signification. (The same effect in reverse, as it sere, may be found in The Great Lebowski, where the beautiful, flowing, rhythmic title sequence which has the men running up to bowl in the bowling alley finds precisely no correspondence in the untidiness and mayhem that follows in the rest of the film). Kubrick's flare does not make his film self-reflexive. Nor is it what Barthes would have called a `reality effect'. The same might be said of the infantry charge, a little later, which looks very much like an early dry run for the wonderful run-take-cover routines in Full Metal Jacket. These are moments in which film is openly available to us in its sheer materiality, as a radical and irreducible impingement which cannot be condensed back, even notionally, into the realm of the semiotic, where it manifests itself clearly as seduction not signification. In this respect, finally, it may even be that film itself is caught up in a kind of self-resistance, that film itself always dramatizes the resistance of materiality to signification as for Merleau-Ponty - what cannot be experienced as thought or reduced to the theoretical; which, please note, is not exactly the same as saying that film deconstructs itself; but may also be to say that film has always defeated or outstripped the Screen project beforehand, and any project like it.