Film Cultures Reader (review)

Abstract

The influence of cultural studies on film analysis has been considered, in certain disciplinary circles, something akin to the sociological barbarians at the aesthetic gates. The articles collected in Graeme Turner's Film Cultures Reader illustrate, to the contrary, that film studies has largely been enriched by the contributions of new disciplines. Indeed, this collection stresses the advantage of a plurality of approaches. As Turner argues in the preface, "recent shifts" in the direction of film studies "reveal the benefit of some relatively new disciplinary influences from cultural studies, television studies, audience studies or ethnography, and social history" (xix). The vari- ety of methodologies afforded by these disciplines multiplies the terms of investigation, building on crucial questions and techniques of analysis offered by more formalist approaches without imagin- ing the text as a mere excuse for talking politics. Unlike the more polemical dismissals of screen theory (such as those of the cognitivists), Turner and his contributors recognize the important questions opened up by psychosemiotics and earlier approaches to the complex set of relations obtaining between texts, contexts, and effects. But certainly, while we can somewhat sanguinely assume that no one in this second century of film criticism would deny either the imprint of the social on art or the imprint of art on the social, the complex nature of this interaction has yet to be settled.