Film as Film in the twenty-first century: the function and evaluation of diegesis and disruption

Abstract

The recent death of V.F. Perkins will bring renewed attention to his body of work, including his seminal text (and only full-length book), Film as Film.1 His work first came to attention via his contributions to Movie, a journal he cofounded in 1962 with Ian Cameron, Mark Shivas and Paul Mayersberg (and soon to be joined by Robin Wood), yet it was only with Film as Film, originally published in 1972, that Perkins fully set out his philosophy and methodology of film criticism. Although he reviewed and refined some of the positions taken in that book over the years that followed – some important revisions are contained in his 2005 piece ‘Where is the world?’ – he never deviated from its central vision. That vision involved a passionate commitment to a method of interpretation that combined vivid imagining of the fictional world with close attention to artistic techniques of signification. A single sentence from an article originally published in Movie will perhaps serve to demonstrate this vision in microcosm: ‘Much of the meaning of [Nicholas Ray’s] King of Kings is contained in its intricate pattern of looking, glancing and staring’.2 We cannot, according to Perkins, fully appreciate the meaning (either as noun, in the sense of that which a film conveys, or as participle, as in how a film goes about being meaningful) of a fictional film without both imaginatively inhabiting its fictional world and paying close attention to its formal patterning.