Make Making Meaning Mean

The following arguments are presented in a rather coarse form. I expect from you guys some creative input.

Martin Lefebvre’s arguments against Making Meaning (according to my class notes)

1. Bordwell’s approach to cognitive psychology is coarse. It is yet another application of Theory. There is no ground for Bordwell to criticize others with himself doing the same thing.
2. Bordwell refuses to consider interpretation, or symptomatic reading, as a legitimate candidate for possible truth in regard to films.
3. The very process where semantic fields are applied to cues and patterns shows that these fields are indeed applicable—they have grounds in the film, and is not completely extra. For example, image is constantly used as representation of a class, besides being a mere token. To interpret this kind of image, therefore, is not to ascribe generalizations entirely alien to the image, but rather, is to point out to which class the token belongs. The class is therefore intrinsic to the token.
4. Bordwell criticized the production of ordinary symptomatic readings, accusing them blindly apply an already discredited or yet-to-verify theory categorically to a film text, while acknowledging the existence of exemplars. However, ordinary practices exist to support, to fortify the discoveries of exemplars, which is a scientific norm explained by Kuhn.
5. In the tradition of hermeneutics, film is essentially a human experience carried out in temporality. This cannot be reduced to the description of style and technique. Also, an interpretation uses metaphor instead of explanation to account for the narrativity. A metaphor is perhaps a falsehood, but it can reveal a truth.
6. Bordwell does not distinguish various kinds of interpretation. He should go read Schusterman.

No.1 If Bordwell is indeed perceived as doing so, there is a huge difference in the way he “applies” the theory to films. First, in Bordwell, cognitivism is rather an implicit belief, not a series of terms that can be filled in prominent positions of the rhetoric. One can believe in cognitivism without knowing the term, or the desire to use any established terms related to this school of thought. Because cognitivism can simply mean take films as the object of construction (technical and stylistic), perception, meaning-making, in that strict order. One can also sense that Bordwell does not take cognitivism in wholeheartedly. Historical poetics, for instance, is a concept that cannot be accounted for in cognitivism. In a nutshell, what account for Bordwell as cognitivism, as he has explained elsewhere (mostly in Post-Theory), is its bottom-up or data-driven nature. Ultimately, if Bordwell reads a film, he is not practicing a cognitivism reading of the film, because there is no such thing as a cognitivism reading.

No. 2 In Bordwell’s mind, not only should have an ideal film scholar seen many films, and acquired sufficient knowledge on both the history of film and how films are made, but he should mobilize this specific knowledge in his reading of the film. A scientist, for example, talks about science and shows his professional expertise in a scholarly journal, instead of his other interests, life, death, our society, my dog, etc.—although these interests may be nutritious and illuminating, they ultimately do not contribute to his professional expertise. In this sense, although many interpreters are qualified film scholars, sometimes an interpretation relies almost entirely on something that is not generated by their professional expertise. A philosopher goes to Bring up Baby on a Saturday night, and he comes back writing a thesis about a particular impression of his on this flick. However interesting this impression is, does it contribute to our knowledge of the film? If we take that it may, this means a) don’t go to film schools, it is waster of time, instead, study philosophy; b) you don’t have to know anything about film in order to write about film, if you are a good writer. This is indeed a very peculiar situation. So let me reiterate the point: if we take any interpretation as contributive to our knowledge of film, we cannot claim it as knowledge at all. What makes my opinion/interpretation on a medieval painting less notable than that of, say, Erwin Panofsky? A film is seen by millions, can any one of these spectators, given a good rhetoric (he might have well studied philosophy in his leisure time), contribute to our knowledge in film studies? If yes, then film studies as a academic discipline doesn’t really exist.

No.3 refers directly to Bordwell’s claim such as “there is thus no such thing as a strictly intrinsic interpretation.” (106) Bordwell may have gone too far saying “no such thing,” and as far as I am willing to believe in his sincerity, this assertion puts him in a dangerous position. On the other hand, the following observation seems to be well-founded:

As far as interpretation is concerned, there are no “cinematic” meanings as distinct from “noncinematic” ones. (106)

What Bordwell asks us (as Metz does, once), then, is to first distinguish these two categories, and then work from the first to the second. Contrary to what many may believe, Bordwell is not necessarily against noncinematic meaning-makings. What he does hope, though, is to see these meanings based on cinematic ones. Hence wherever they are not, Bordwell finds them not convincing.

No.4 It is true that science makes progress this way. But when we claim that in film studies things work the same way, are we admitting film studies should be a science, after all? Nevertheless, the situation is a little bit different. In humanities, although ordinary practices work to confirm the new road opened up by exemplars, one exemplar does not constitute a progress towards another exemplar. In other words, they are completely independent of each other. Nietzsche did not throw all philosophers before him into oblivion, although he would have very much liked the idea. In science, on the other hand, heliocentrism does substitute geocentrism because Copernicus provides a better mathematic model to calculate the orbits of the planet than Ptolemy. And in modern times, Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, in their turn, are found guilty of confusing the solar system with the universe.

No.5 I believe film as experience is an important and fruitful approach. But I don’t see how this contradicts what Bordwell is proposing. Is Bordwell not a human being himself and therefore experiences films in a mechanic way?

No.6 This, I think, is the real problem of the book. Bordwell identifies rhetoric as something that comes between semantic fields and the film text, but it remains to identify the subtleties of this very rhetoric—descriptive, prescriptive, performative, etc. A performative reading, for example, can be filling the gaps in a text—in this sense, it is indeed not found in the text, but it is nevertheless faithful to its inner trajectory.