Editorial

Abstract

Editorial Drake Stutesman What does a journal today do? This is Framework's 50th issue, merging numbers 1 and 2 into a single 2009 volume. The journal started in 1974, over thirty years ago, in England, as a small publication. Its trail-blazing, far-reaching exploration of international film, its publication of directors' own writing on cinema and on each other, and its reprints of early film theories are fundamental aspects of cinema studies today. There are articles from early issues that impress me still with their desire to look at something anew, such as Werner Herzog's 1976 story "Why Being Rather Than Nothing?"; Laura Mulvey's reanalysis of "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1981); Nguyen Khac Vien's take on Apocalypse Now (1981); or Sunila Abeysekera's examination of women in Sri Lankan cinema (1989). Framework 50 reflects less on film than on its huge diaspora: film has left its old country (of being a film) and now appears in cut-up resemblances of itself, video art remakes, or computer PowerPoints, screened in restaurants (as wallpaper), on iPods, and in galleries. Also scattered are the critiques: most journals, e-zines, blogs, websites, and magazines now hazily combine culture and politics, often blurring definitions of expert opinion. Our zeitgeist has a polarizing dynamic. Its almost obsessive return to the past (especially the last fifty years), which can be rigid in its "reassessment" of what it finds there, is offset by the twenty-first century's hard-won open-mindedness about individual rights, allowing what is real just to be itself. In this issue these contradictions are seen through a number of topics: journal editing, cinephilia, feminism, video installation, photography, and [End Page 5] the art of recycling art, such as the technique of "reenactment" found in work as diverse as that of Pithy Rahn, Australian Aboriginal tribes, or Pierre Huyghe. Has cinephilia's potency passed? In what way has film helped feminist thinking, or the thinking of any repressed group, and how has that thinking been coded in films? Does it still need to be coded to survive? What does video art's parasitism of movies and documentaries do (or not do) for film or for art? Why is an old technique such as reenactment, a method used before cinema even began, so currently revitalized? In "Edward Said's Nazareth," Susan Slyomovics, a professor of anthropology, pieces together a photo journey of Said and Nazareth, making a remarkable picture of what can no longer be pictured. E. Ann Kaplan returns to 1970s and 1980s international feminism and the tropes that women covertly and overtly used in their art to analyze their part in society. She places two films side by side, one by Susan Sontag (Brother Carl, SE, 1970) and one by Marguerite Duras (Nathalie Granger, FR, 1972), to see how these two women coincide rather than depart from each other, despite different, almost opposing, intellectual constructs. Donna Casella does something similar in her gloss of scholarly perspectives on the "women's picture" films of Dorothy Arzner. Casella finds that Arzner intended an even greater subversion of the genre than has been previously argued. Bitter and sympathetic, Arzner both despaired of the convention and used it to lay bare women's lives where, Casella argues, little comfort is found. Dudley Andrew's cogent interview with Cahiers du cinéma's then chief editor, Emmanuel Burdeau, combs over the legacy of Bazin and Cahiers and the joys and difficulties, as Burdeau puts it, of "translating the screen." Nevertheless, much as he loves words, Burdeau advocates activism beyond them. He pointed out, in the 2008 New York Film Festival panel on criticism, that Cahiers could be a "dinosaur" if it only remained in the field of writing. Finally, the issue contains two dossiers, on Reenactment and on Cinephilia. In the first dossier, guest editor Jonathan Kahana poses the operative question—"What now?"—showing, through six pieces, how reenactment's old trick has become new. What can it do for us? The same can be asked of cinephilia—What can it do? In the second dossier, guest editors Elena Gorfinkel and Jonathan Buchsbaum ask twelve critics what is at stake in cinephilia...