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DRAFT PAPER

[This is the long draft of a paper I gave at the Film-Philosophy Conference 2015, University

of Oxford – it still needs a lot of work, but any comments or suggestions gratefully received]

Achievement and Appreciation in V.F. Perkins, or, The Thing We See on the Screen, or,

Film as Film as Film as Film-Philosophy

David Sorfa

University of Edinburgh

david.sorfa@ed.ac.uk

On V.F. Perkins (1972/1993) Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies. New York:

Da Capo Press. In which I give a close reading of Perkins’s book.

There is an accompanying video essay: https://vimeo.com/133571107

In the fist chapter of Film as Film, “The Sins of the Pioneers”, Perkins begins by arguing that

the early writing on film attempts to prove that film as a medium is a serious art form in order

to justify not only writing about film, but going to films in the first place: “Movie-going was

to be vindicated as a respectable activity for men of intellect and refinement” (p. 9). The main

tactic of these “pioneers” (such as Vachel Lindsay, Rudolf Arnheim, Paul Rotha) was to claim

for the cinema an equivalence with, and Perkins here quotes from Lindsay, “the established

dogmas of Art” (quoted p. 11). For Perkins this attempt to establish the credibility of film

ignored the specificity of the cinema and the “concern with prestige severely limited the

freedom to investigate and speculate on the nature of the movies” (p. 11). Perkins identifies

two basic problems with this approach: (1) it assumes that there are similar criteria for all

different sorts of established art forms and (2) it takes for granted that “the theory of art is not

itself problematic” (p. 12). So not only is it not clear that a theory of art covers all the different

arts in the same way, but, at an even more basic level, there is no unproblematic theory of art

in the first place.

Perkins then goes on to chart the change in the acceptance of non-figurative painting in the first

couple of decades of the 20th century. The understanding of the aim of painting changed

quickly from imitation or mimetic representation to a sense that the subject of painting was

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now the medium itself and not what it might represent (pp. 12-13). Photography, in fact,

following Clive Bell’s argument in Art (1924), had freed painting from the necessity of

imitation. The claim for cinema then becomes the one formulated by V.I. Pudovkin: “Between

the natural event and its appearance on screen there is a marked difference. It is exactly this

difference that makes the film an art” (Film Technique and Film Acting, 1958, quoted and

italics in Perkins, p. 14). It is everything in cinema that is not “natural” or imitative that is the

art of film, or “difference-from-reality” (p. 14). Perkins argues against this “isolating impulse”

(p. 15) which led towards a celebration in some rarefied critical circles of the “abstract movie”

(p. 16) and an equation of good film with its closeness to then current (in the 1920s) ideas of

what constituted the visual fine arts. Following the fine art emphasis on medium, Perkins says

that the “important concern [for film theory] was with the way in which the act or process of

cinematography could be show to impose a pattern on that reality” (p. 17). We can see here, of

course, the development of the aesthetic value of “self-reflexivity” in the arts as an important

criteria that would soon be codified as the “postmodern” in the 1970s and 80s. Perkins sums

up:

The orthodoxy defines the medium as “film”, meaning the stuff that goes through the

camera [or, I would argue, the digital processes at work in contemporary

cinematography], whereas the subject of criticism is actually the movie, the thing we

see on the screen. (p. 17)

This leads Perkins to critique the reification of film theory of the “twin mystiques” of “image”

(Rotha) and of “montage” (Eisenstein/Pudovkin) (p. 17). For Perkins, “Established theory

commands the camera to create and denies its right to observe” (p. 19) and so films were

celebrated either for the innovation of imagery (I suppose we could call this “special effects”)

or for their use of obtrusive editing. Isolating any one component, according to Perkins,

“unbalances our view of the movies by concentrating attention on the one process which is held

to be creative” (p. 22). Perkins wants to understand films in their totality and so crude measures

like the timing of shots inevitably lose track of what he calls the “rhythmic counterpoint” of an

entire film. Thus we should pay attention to:

the movements of the actors, the shape of the setting, the movement of the camera, and

variations of light and shade [as well as the editing structure, since] each of them derives

its value from it relationship with the others. (p. 23)

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Perkins sees the greatest value in the “complexity of organization which film-makers like

Hitchcock, Keaton, Murnau, and Welles have achieved within the sustained shot” (p. 24). This

is Perkins’s first use of the word “achieve” in the book and so we see that achievement is linked

to individual auteurs and their ability to present a “complexity of organization”. The emphasis

on editing leads the theorist to insist that the recorded reality of the image is merely real, and

here we can see why Perkins is particularly interested in acting, and so to miss the way in which

the reality in front of the camera has been organised. Taking this argument to its conclusion,

Perkins says that this sort of film theory ultimately rejects narrative itself as an “alien form” (p.

24).

Perkins places “story-telling, the representation of imagined action” (p. 24) as that which is

specifically non-alien to many forms of art. The technical criteria of these theorists lead towards

the imposition of “rules on the film-maker” (p. 25) and that this “false definition of film makes

the demand for the filmic a critical catastrophe” (p. 25) and that “established theory finds

artistic excellence in expressive devices rather than significant style” (p. 26). And so we come

to another of Perkins’s criteria for value: “significant style”. Another key term for Perkins here

is “subtlety” (p. 26) the ignoring of which, alongside “complexity”, leads to a preference for

“works of propaganda”. This leads, according to Perkins, a valuing of films like Leni

Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will (1936) because of its technical features. He also argues

that many of the films that such critics value, in fact contradict the principles of their theory

because they are too subtle and complex.

So, Perkins ends by saying that theory should never impose “obligations on the artist” (p. 26)

and that:

A useful theory will have to redirect attention to the movie as it is seen, by shifting the

emphasis back from creation to perception. In order to arrive at a more accurate and

inclusive definition of film as it exists for the spectator, it will need to concentrate not

on the viewfinder and the cutting bench but on the screen. (p. 27)

Perkins, to all intents and purposes, proposes a phenomenological approach to film analysis

which may also be understood as an extension of Leavisite New Criticism.

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Chapter 2: Minority Reports

Here Perkins engages with Bazin and the photographic nature of cinema, the ignoring of which

fact result in the “defects of orthodox theory” (p. 28). For Perkins, via Bazin, cinema is crucially

the “revelation of reality” (p. 29). Adding in Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film: The

Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), Perkins identifies “respect for reality” as their criterion

for judging film (p. 31). For Bazin and Kracauer, since reality is itself “ambiguous” (p. 32)

then cinema should itself be ambiguous and montage is a method of cutting down on ambiguity.

Ambiguity, of course, is a central term for the New Critics.

The position of the spectator is crucial here since it is the “lazy or the stupid spectator” who

does not wish to engage actively with the film but merely wants to consume the message or

meaning of the film without adding anything to the process themselves. This is a version of

Roland Barthes’s distinction between the “readerly” and the “writerly” reader in “The Death

of the Author”. For Perkins, after Bazin and Kracauer, the good film demands a writerly

spectator. This is also a tendency in filmmaking and not just in film theory: “Directors like Jean

Renois, Orson Welles, and William Wyler had to a large extent renounced editing effects in

order to explore the dramatic possibilities of an uninterrupted continuity in space and time” (p.

33). Through Bazin, Perkins argues, an “appreciation of Stroheim, Renoir, and Wells, among

others, was given a rational basis” (p. 38). What is to be appreciated in these films and

filmmakers is their revelation, not representation, of reality and the success of this revelation

must be seen in a film’s ambiguity. However Perkins sees that there is a problem with Bazin

whose various analyses do not “amount to a satisfactory theory” because they “provide no basis

for many of his tastes and sympathies as a critic” (p. 38). While the theory is fine, there is a

discrepancy between that theory and the sorts of films that Bazin admires.

However, Perkins also praises Bazin as a critic (rather than a theorist) and says that one of

Bazin’s articles on Jean Renoir (Cahiers du cinéma, no. 8, January, 1952) “must be one of the

finest achievements of film criticism” (p. 38). What exactly is it that criticism can

“achieve”? Leaving this question to one side for the moment, let us follow Perkins to the end

of this chapter where he says that Bazin’s theory falls foul of the same problem as that of

montage film, that is, he identifies “a single aspect of film” (p. 39) and “both theories [image

dogma and object dogma] discriminate in favour of certain kinds of cinematic effect, in other

words certain kinds of attitude given cinematic form” (p. 39). For Perkins both of these

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approaches encroach on the territory of the film-maker who should remain free to present their

own “philosophy”, “temperament” and “vision” (p. 39). Whatever a film theory does, it should

not in any way dictate either form or subject to the film-maker.

Chapter 3: Technology and Technique

In this section Perkins charts the technological development history of cinema and argues that

the history of film style is determined by technological limitations as well as individual

innovations in response to these limitations. Perkins seems to vaguely agree that the aim of

cinema, technologically, is to present a “total cinema”, a cinema which would be absolutely

virtual and not distinguishable from everyday reality. He does not imagine that this will be

possible in the conceivable future and so puts aside the question of whether this is in fact the

case. I wonder whether Perkins does so too easily. If the teleology of cinema is not full

verisimilitude, surely something else needs to be said here: either that teleology as such is

incorrect, or that the “aim” of cinema is something else. Perhaps something like “total fiction”

rather than “total cinema”?

Perkins identifies some of silent film as achieving “perfection” since these films presented

“pure action” and so could not be in any way improved. He writes:

The medium was most manageable where plot, theme and genre combined to encourage

elaboration at the level of pure action, as in the comedies of Chaplin, Keaton, and Laurel

and Hardy or the melodramas of Feuillade and Fritz Lang. At their best, these films had

nothing missing and nothing superfluous. They were neither undernourished nor

overweight but derived all they needed from the resources of the speechless image.

They achieved something like perfection within the available range. (p. 51)

Is this different from Noël Carroll’s notion of judgment within genre? I presume that Perkins

means the “available [technological] range” (and we may think of this a sort of genre) but

“achievement” is only achieved when this is combined with a more traditional understanding

of genre (as a set of semantic and syntactic conventions) as well “theme” and “plot”. The

criteria for judging “something like perfection” is a certain coherent unity between

technological possibility and narrative. To put this in Edward Branigan’s terms, Perkins is

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looking for a unity between narrative (the story) and narration (the way in which this story is

told). But how does one recognise such a unity? That is the question under discussion here.

Perkins addresses this question negatively when he says that the silent cinema failed (or

“laboured mightily” (p. 51) when it faced “situations, relationships, motives and responses

which could not be expressed in direct, physical action” (p. 51). Filmmakers were forced to

choose in such circumstances between “clarity and economy” (p. 51). Thus the “almost perfect”

film is one that is both clear and economical (by the latter word he does not mean the “cheapest”

in financial terms but rather the most efficient in terms of technical expression). Perkins does

not approve of inter-titles or over-acting or “grandiose symbolism” (p. 51) and sees that

“subtlety and complexity” are the most desired aesthetic elements. For Perkins, the cinema

should be efficiently intelligible, but that “meaning” (if that is the correct term) so well

delivered must retain a subtle complexity (see our previous discussion of “ambiguity”).

Cf. William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity

With the arrival of the “audible picture” (p. 51), Perkins writes that:

Depth and complexity became compatible with economy over an enormously wider

field once the presentation of events ceased to demand elaborate processes of

exposition. (p. 51)

Thus we have two axes: complexity on the one hand and economy (or efficiency) on the other.

We might say that Perkins does not wish the film to tell us what it is doing but rather to show

it. In this sense, we might see Perkins in the tradition of Wittgenstein’s aphorism that the task

of philosophy is to “show” not “tell” (however, I do think that there is a problem here in the

invocation of the apparent – there is no showing without telling, since showing would not make

any sense if there were not a way of understanding what is being shown. We could try and

imagine a narration without narrative – a “way of telling” that has nothing to tell… Perhaps

this might be true of abstract non-narrative films (although I would say that such films are

always narrative in one way or another), but I’m not sure that it is particularly helpful when

thinking about narrative feature films.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1934 / 1956)

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Perkins continues his argument against the “orthodox theorists” who claimed that sound and

colour would ruin the “art” of cinema because these techniques brought realism to the medium

rather than highlighting its difference, that very difference being the definition of cinema’s

“art”. As an example, Perkins discusses the two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much to

show (or prove) that colour improved the second version of the film. Part of my interest here

is that I have always thought that the first film is far superior to the second, and I am surprised

that Perkins thinks otherwise. Perhaps if we explore his analysis here we might come to a

clearer understanding of what my problem might be.

Perkins identifies the central crux of the film as a “conflict between the demands of conscience

(prevention of the murder) and those of instinct (the safe return of the child)” (p. 55). The

mother must choose between preventing an assassination attempt during a public concert and

the threat to her kidnapped daughter/son and, Perkins observes, both versions “employ a device

to represent the woman’s concern”. The silent film is, however, “obvious to the point of

crudity” and the mother “clutches a badge which belonged to her child” (p. 55) [Does she

actually do this? Check the film] and a “close-up of her hand gripping the badge is inserted

to remind us of the price of intervention”. In the second version, according to Perkins,

Hitchcock replaces this crude symbol by using colour which “creates a more subtle effect” (p.

55). Perkins analyses this feature:

Throughout the picture the child is associated with the colour red. Once inside the

auditorium of the Albert Hall, the threat to the child is represented by the bright red

drapes which play an obtrusive, but natural, role in the images. Hitchcock no longer

needs to stress an unlikely symbol when he can show the assassin hiding behind red

curtains in order to take aim. This image is more directly symbolic / of the relationship

between the child and the conspiracy than any in the earlier film; but it is integrated

into the design of the sequence. In the 1934 version the detail has to be interpreted

before it can create its emotional effect. The more subtle procedure made possible by

colour allows Hitchcock to bypass the intellectual response and go straight to the

emotions. The spectator does not have to translate the use of colour, as he must the use

of the badge, in order to be affected by it. (p. 55-56)

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For Perkins Hitchock “integrates” with subtlety in the colour version through the use of the

colour red. Whether or not I agree with this particular interpretation of how the colour red

works in this scene, my sense is that Perkins here succumbs to the same sin of which he finds

other critics culpable: isolating one particular element at the expense of the film as a whole.

There is a charm to the 1934 version – considered as a whole – which the 1956 version

completely lacks. If we were to take this discussion further, I would like to discuss the

extraordinarily poor taste and technical clumsiness of the black-face chase scene in the 1956

version which gives us a very different sense of the way in which colour might work in this

film.

[Comparing the actual scenes in the two films: In The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), in

the equivalent scene, the assassin (played by the rather comically grotesque Reggie Nalder - as

opposed to the fleshy everydayness of Frank Vosper in the 1934 version) walks up to Josephine

McKenna (Doris Day) and says to camera: “You have a very nice little boy, madam. His safety

will depend upon you tonight.” I am sure that we would agree that this is hardly subtle (or

complex). The use of red in this sequence strikes me as extremely heavy-handed and borders

on the a parody of significance.]

Perkins on choice and style:

Devices can be moulded into a style only when they have become inessential and, in

the most favourable sense, gratuitous. In any medium, style is formed by a pattern of

decisions; but decisions can operate only where alternatives exist. […] While an

increase in the area of reality available to the film-maker extends the possibility of

choice, mechanical refinements also extend the opportunities of control, within each

area. (p. 56)

To return to our discussion of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Perkins expounds on the problem

of expected “standards” in filmmaking:

Standards derived primarily from the “demands of the medium” have proved

unsatisfactory partly because the medium has become less and less demanding, but also

because the demands attributed to the medium are necessarily the critic’s

demands in an unhelpful guise. (p. 57)

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Presumably though there are other standards that are satisfactory: the implication is that

“medium-specific” demands are not particularly good standards, but that standards of

economy/complexity and demands of choice/control are in fact suitable standards for both

critics and filmmakers. If I were to sum up Perkins’s standard of taste here, I would say that

Perkins advocates films of subtle complexity. But, again, how do we know whether a film is

subtle and complex? (although I would imagine that some films may be complex without being

subtle and and vice versa – although subtlety without complexity is more difficult to think

through, perhaps Mike Leigh’s Turner might be an example of this?).

Perkins concludes this section:

The search for grace through purity contradicts the cinema’s hybrid character. It

attempts to reduce the movie to one of its functions. In part a recording mechanism but

also an optical illusion, an art based on reality but dependent also on magic, the film is

inherently impure; its facilities are too varied and too much in conflict to be absorbed

within a single technical formula. At the same time, the movie’s mutually exclusive

possibilities are essential to the fact of choice and the concept of style. (p. 58)

Chapter 4: Form and Discipline

“I do not believe that the film (or any other medium) has an essence which we can usefully

invoke to justify our criteria. […] That is why the concept of the cinematic, presented in terms

of demands, has stunted the useful growth of film theory” (p. 59). This, of course, goes against

medium-specific art theory as expounded by Clement Greenberg. For Perkins, “helpful

criteria are more likely to be based on positive statements of value than on prohibitions”

(p. 59). [I think that we have seen in our discussion of The Man Who Knew Too much that even

for Perkins this might be easier said than done]. We should “regard criticism positively, as a

search for the most satisfactory definitions of function and value” and that such criteria should

“relate to claims which the critic can sustain rather than to demands he must make” (p. 59).

Thus the critic should never speak to the filmmaker before the film, but their job is only to

interpret and evaluate that which has already occurred. I would say that Perkins has a romantic

view of the artist film-maker as genius who functions almost entirely without criticism and

whose only criteria should be freedom. This does not in any way guarantee that all film-makers

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with freedom will produce good films, merely that good films cannot be created without such

freedom: “The clarification of standards should help to develop the disciplines of criticism

without seeking to lay obligations on the film-maker” (p. 59). He ends this important first

paragraph:

Criticism and its theory are concerned with the interplay of available resources and

desirable functions. They attempt to establish what the medium is good for. They cannot

determine what is good for the medium, because the question is senseless. The search

for appropriate criteria leads us to observe limitations; it does not allow us to prescribe

them. Anything possible is permissible, but we still have to establish its value. We

cannot assess worth without indicating function. (p. 59)

What does Perkins mean by “function” here? What is the function of art? Is it to deliver subtlety

and complexity? Thus whatever functions to enhance these two elements would seem to be

essential to aesthetic sensibility.

In the following paragraph, Perkins develops an idea that shows his compatibility with Noël

Carroll’s ideas around evaluation and genre. Perkins writes that “we can evolve useful criteria

only for specific types of film, not for the cinema” and that our “standards of judgement will

have to follow from definitions of types in terms of their possibilities and their limitations” (p.

59). We now see Perkins’s second use of the word “magic”:

The movie offers two forms of magic, since its conquest of the visible world extends in

two opposite directions. The first, on which the realist theory concentrates, gives it the

power to “possess” the real world by capturing its appearance. The second, focus of the

traditional aesthetic, permits the presentation of an ideal image, ordered by the film-

maker’s will and imagination. Since the cinema’s mechanism incorporates both these

tendencies, neither of them can be condemned on rational, technical or aesthetic

grounds. A useful film theory must acknowledge the range and diversity of the

film-maker’s achievements. (p. 60)

Perkins then gives examples of the extreme ends of this scale. On the one hand would be the

“most rigorous forms of documentary” while on the other sits the “abstract, cartoon or fantasy

film” (p. 60). This leads to a familiar opposition of the Lumières and Méliès. Perkins continues:

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“The fiction movie exploits the possibilities of synthesis between photographic realism

and dramatic illusion. That synthesis, its value and implications, will be the major subject

of this study” (p. 61).

I hope to present criteria which will aid discussion of various kinds and degrees of

excellence within this form. […] Nonetheless the fiction movie presents the most urgent

claim to attention for two reasons: by almost any reasonable method of calculation, it

must be granted the central role in the cinema’s development; but it is also precisely

the fictional element which existing film theories have most difficulty in

accommodating. (p. 61)

Perkins’s aim: “I hope to present criteria which will aid discussion of various kinds and

degrees of excellence within this form [the cinema of photographic fiction]” (p. 61). Perkins is

one of the few film theoreticians to explicitly address the issue of fiction in film. He says that

fiction film plays a “central role in the cinema’s development” but also that it is “the fictional

element which existing film theories have the most difficulty in accommodating” (p. 61). Of

the role of the critic he says:

The critic cannot require a movie to fit his definitions; it’s his task to find the description

which best fits the movie. (p. 62)

Once again, criticism always comes after the film, never before it and the “central issue” is:

“not what the film-maker may not do, but the value we find in what he has done” (p. 62). Thus

is is the task of the critic to uncover the value of a work. There is a slightly circular logic here

since it is not clear whether our task is to find value in every film, or whether there are only

some films that have value. Without a clearer understanding of what Perkins might mean by

“value”, the value of value, if you will, we might continue in this circle for a while.

A crucial term for Perkins here is “synthesis” and he uses this to explain the particular aptitude

that fiction film has for exploiting “the possibilities of synthesis between photographic realism

and dramatic illusion” (p. 61). Thus the fiction feature synthesises “realism” and “illusion” into

a coherent whole, but a whole of subtle complexity which means that the synthesis should

never be total but that a certain ambiguity should remain at the core of value. What Perkins

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values is the not so much the full synthesis of realism and illusion, but rather the necessary

kernel of ambiguity which escapes synthesis.

The audience has to know what is happening, of course, but it must be convinced by

what it sees. […] The narrative picture, in most of its forms, submits to the twin criteria

of order and credibility. The movie itself creates these criteria whenever it proposes

to be at the same time significant and convincing. (p. 69)

Chapter 5: The World and its Image

One of the markers of achievement in a film is ensure that a symbol does not highlight its

symbolic nature: “The spectator can understand the action of the sequence [in Marnie] without

becoming aware of the device as relevant comment. It does not demand interpretation” (p. 77).

So, for instance, Perkins criticises the use of the colour red in Antonioni’s Red Desert (and

perhaps we could think about this criticism in terms of his discussion of the colour red in The

Man Who Know Too Much) and says:

Intellectually we can identify the effect required. But of the effect itself we feel no

symptom. We are so busy noticing that we respond rather to our awareness of the device

than to the state of mind it sets out to evoke. (p. 85)

This raises an interesting question around the aesthetics of overtly self-reflexive films (such as

Godard, who Perkins mentions towards the very end of the book, and everything from The

Saragossa Manuscript to The French Lieutenant’s Woman to A Cock and Bull Story).

However, that is a discussion for another time.

The distinction between cinema as a recording device and film as illusion, return with Perkins’s

discussion of balance in a specific shot in Marnie:

This balance, the delicate relationship between what is shown and the way of showing,

justifies and exalts the movie’s mongrel confusion of reportage with narrative and

visual art. A single image is made to act both as a recording, to show us what happen,

and as an expressive device to heighten the effect and significance of what we see. (p.

78)

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The skill of a director lies in their ability “to annul the distinction between significant

organization and objective recording” (p. 97).

However, Perkins’s main object in this chapter is to show that isolating a single element, such

as montage, as being the most important element in film aesthetics is a sure way of losing value.

He takes as his negative example, the lion sequence in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin as

imported artificially into the film as a whole and shows that there is more confusion in what

these lions might mean than agreement and he argues that this is because they are brought in

as symbols, but without any coherent framing or contextualising of their significance.

However, he does not damn the film as a whole since the lion sequence is an example of “one

of those bold but fruitless devices which adventurous film-makers are bound to explore” (p.

105) but rather his polemic is against critics who “imply that the moments of greatest

significance in a movie are those when the spectator is most violently alerted to the means by

which significance is sought” (p. 105). Whatever else it might be, the lion sequence is not subtle

and the claims made for its brilliance are exaggerated at best, downright philistine at worst.

It is a little later that Perkins specifically argues that it is the relationships between all the

different elements of the “impure” art of cinema that define its genius. He calls this his

“synthetic approach”:

Basic to the synthetic approach to movies which I believe most productive is the claim

that significance, emotional or intellectual, arises rather from the creation of significant

relationships than from the presentation of things significant in themselves. (p. 107)

He follows this discussion with a long analysis of the shower scene in Psycho to show how

integrated every element of that famous is both in its own sequence, but also within the film as

a whole. He sees a productive tension between the density of the effect and the seeming ease

with which is achieved:

It is a measure of the greatness of Psycho, and of Hitchcock at his finest, that the

achievement of precise and densely interrelated imagery should seem to involve so little

effort. […] It is only by thinking oneself into Hitchcock’s position after the experience

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that one realizes what intensity of artistic effort must have been required. Which is to

say, simply, that the effort of seeming effortless is the most demanding of all. (p. 114)

Thus Perkins’s use of the word “world” in this section is to indicate a unity and integration

which should ideally be self-sufficient: “What matters is not how the image was derived from

reality but how revealingly it relates to the movies world” (p. 115). The materiality of the image

is irrelevant as material, but entirely significant as it becomes the material of the fictional world

of the film.

Chapter 6: “How” is “What”

Here Perkins develops in detail the definitions of the terms he has so far introduced, particularly

balance, coherence, significance and synthesis. Starting with “coherence” he concedes that a

film could have a meaning without establishing a system of internal relationships, without

having an internal coherence (he says “one could ‘film’ an idea by setting it down on paper and

focusing on the printed page” (p. 117)), but that “coherence is the prerequisite of contained

significance. By this I mean significance which we find within, rather than attached to, the

form of the film” (p. 117). This is quite a structuralist claim and one that I would say defines

meaning as an epiphenomenon of the elements of a film (a Humean bundle theory of film

meaning, perhaps) – but this is, again, an argument that I need to develop in more detail. Perkins

puts it clearly:

The specifically filmic qualities derive from the complex, not from any one of its

components. What distinguishes film from other media, and the fiction move from other

forms, is none of the elements but their combination, interaction, fusion. (p. 117)

I think that this also allows us to question those attempts to identify the specifically unique

features of “digital” as opposed to “analogue” film – any such attempt to reduce film is bound

to fail, since “the meanings which are contained most securely within a film are those formed

at the deepest level of interrelation and synthesis” (p. 117).

Perkins then gives a strong discussion of the importance of internal consistency in fictional

worlds and it is this section which most clearly gives us concrete ways in which to judge the

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flaws or otherwise of specific films. Internal incoherence is a sure sign that we are watching a

bad film.

For Perkins the coherent film must not only follow its own world rules, whatever they might

be - but they must exist since: “In a fictional world where anything at all can happen, nothing

at all can mean or matter” (p. 121) – but must balance all the various tensions in paly,

particularly the tension between film as recording of the real and film as illusion. I wonder then

whether an argument might be made for a film such as Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (1998) as

the perfect Perkins film since it so carefully balances reality and illusion, stupidity and

brilliance, and much else. I’ll leave that there.

Chapter 7: Participant Observers

Perkins sets out the prejudices against enjoyment of cinema and “the old notion that virtue

consists in hardship, and that what’s pleasant must be regarded with suspicion” (P. 136) – of,

couese, Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) is not to be published for

three more years, but I cannot help but call to mind her dictat: “It is said that analysing pleasure,

or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article” (Screen, p. 8). For Perkins, “the view

which values art as a form of flagellation precludes the acceptance of effortless enjoyment” (p.

136) but that films are not:

Solely, or chiefly, valuable as crossword puzzles in which the clues are difficult enough

to make their solution gratifying, but not so difficult as to frustrate solution altogether.

(p. 137)

Such an attitude sees film “as an alternative, not an addition, to our real lives” (p. 137). Recently

Richard Rushton, among others, has been arguing against exactly this notion (see his Theories

of Filmic Reality (2011)).

Perkins identifies a certain masochism at work here:

There seems to be no difficulty in recognizing that we can profit from experiences,

however second-hand, which are to some extent unpleasant. Pleasure-in-pain seems to

be more readily accepted than pleasure in pleasure. (p. 137)

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The real, that is effective, meaning of a film is contained in the total experience which

it provides, not in its declaration of intent. (p. 149)

Perkins criticises the use of the term “identification” in discussing spectators’ relationships

with characters since such identification is never total. He prefers the term “association” (p.

139) and shows that some directors, like Anthony Mann, asks us to “associate” with one

particular character, while others, like Otto Preminger, depend on “multi-dimensional

involvement whereby we watch and share the experience not simply of one character but also

of relatively minor figures” (p. 151). Neither of this approaches is intrinsically better than the

other. Hitchcock, he argues, presents a more complex example since the “motive behind our

identification, not just the fact of it, is integrated into the structure and meaning of his films”

(p. 151). We see again Perkins predilection for coherence across all levels.

In terms of spectatorship, Perkins insists that approaching a film on its own terms is essential

and that a “position of intellectual detachment may hinder understanding” (p. 156).

Fundamentally, “one cannot analyse, or understand, an experience that one has refused” and

that to “recapture the naïve response of the film-fan is the first step towards intelligent

appreciation of most pictures” (p. 156).1 And Perkins concludes: “One cannot profitably stop

there; but one cannot sensibly begin anywhere else.” (p. 157).

But we cannot all be as lucky as Zizek and have an idiot at hand at every film we see, and I do

not think that Perkins is advocating that we uncritically accept every film we watch, but rather

that we shoud watch films with an eye and an ear out for what Wolgang Iser called the “ideal

reader”. Every film has in its mind its ideal spectator – the one who laughs at the right bits and

cries when the puppy dies – it is this spectator, I think, that Perkins is thinking of here. But

also, Perkins calls to mind the affective spectator of our contemporary turn to phenomenology.

We must be alive to the “thing on the screen” if we are to have any chance of saying anything

interesting about a film (but what is there to say?).

1 This recalls Slavoj Zizek’s description in Enjoy Your Symptom: “When I saw The Matrix at a local theatre in Slovenia, I had the unique opportunity of sitting close to the ideal spectator of the film - namely, to an idiot. A man in the late 20ies at my right was so immersed in the film that he all the time disturbed other spectators with loud exclamations, like ‘My God, wow, so there is no reality!’... I definitely prefer such naive immersion to the pseudo-sophisticated intellectualist readings which project into the film the refined philosophical or psychoanalytic conceptual distinctions.” (http://www.lacan.com/zizek-matrix.htm )

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Chapter 8: Direction and Authorship

The action of a popular movie can be followed and enjoyed without the need for

sophistication of critical discrimination. But a good picture cannot be appreciated in

the same way. (p. 163)

If the relationships established in a film are significant, it makes no difference to the

spectator how they came, or were brought about, or to what extent their significance

was intended. A movie has a meaning for the spectator when he is able to interpret its

pattern of actions and images. Provided that its relationships are coherently shaped, the

film embodies – and can be shown to embody – a consistent meaning which may or

may not have been sought, or sincerely felt, by the director. (p. 173)

The most telling argument for a critical belief n the “director’s cinema” is that it has

provided the richest base for useful analyses of the styles and meanings of particular

films. Yet on theoretical grounds alone, when a movie offers a complex and

meaningful / interrelation of event, image, idea and feeling, it surely makes sense to

think the most likely source a gifted director’s full involvement with his materials. (pp.

185-186)

By seeing the connections between a director’s films we can become more sensitive to

the pattern within each of them. “Director’s cinema” offers us most clues to the

understanding which must precede judgement. (p. 186)

Chapter 9: The Limits of Criticism

Perkins summarise his thinking succinctly at the beginning of his final chapter:

The claims I have advanced for the fiction film depend on our seeing and valuing it as

a synthetic process whose conventions allow the creation of forms in which thought

and feeling are continually related to our common experience of the world. (p. 187)

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He warns that it is each spectator’s private business what pleasure, or otherwise, they find at

the cinema: “What any of us wants from the movies is his personal affair” (p. 187), de gustibus

non est disputandum, one might say. However:

If we are to claim an interest in film as film [and not a “moral propaganda” or as an

“elaborate light show (p. 187)] our judgements must respect the framework within

which judgement can sensibly operate, by presenting criteria which are capable of being

most fully realized by medium and form. (p. 188)

Perkins identifies two types of “meaningful synthesis” which would be appropriate for an

appreciation of the cinema (although they may seem diametrically opposed)::

There are two ways in which the value of this synthesis can be approached: naïvely,

through an unquestioning acceptance of illusion leading to a submersion in the film’s

world which allows its tensions to be intensely felt but imperfectly comprehended;

critically, through a sophisticated awareness of the film-maker’s devices and a

conscious imaginative collaboration in the creation of his world in order to appreciate

its discipline and penetrate the significance of its structure. (p. 188)

Either of these approaches is acceptable but we should avoid the “danger zone of pseudo-

sophistication, where artifice is falsity, and where fiction is despised or patronized for not being

truth” (p. 188). Whatever we do as film critics, or as audiences, we must never condescend to

the film or its experience.

For Perkins, what remains paramount is the language we use to describe films:

[W]e have long needed a language in which to discuss subtlety. I believe a synthetic

theory, a theory of balance, coherence and complexity, does carry su towards this goal.

It cannot do more. Like an artistic discipline a critical theory provides a basis for

excellence and neither a substitute nor a guarantee. (p. 189)

It is interesting here that criticism itself becomes an “artistic discipline” and presumably the

criteria that Perkins has spelled out for film (balance, coherence, complexity) are the same as

those we need to identify good criticism. In the next paragraph, though, Perkins warns that a

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“critical theory […] is by no means the same as, an artistic discipline” (p. 189) and that a

“theory of film is a theory of film criticism and not of film making” (p. 189). The closest

Perkins comes to expressing a firm guide on criteria is that the work must be internally

coherent, that its use of elements must be integral to the film as a whole (this is why he dislikes

the lions in Battleship Potemkin and why, I imagine, Perkins might dislike the inserts of wild

animals hunting at the beginning of Luc Besson’s Lucy (2014) – although I think that film may

actually transcend this particular stupidity). Perkins states it plainly:

We cannot lay down rules for the creators. If we insist on the concept of balance we do

not thereby demand to dictate how or between what elements the balance is to be

achieved. (p. 189)

Perkins does see that some films may not in fact be susceptible to the sort of analysis he has

been proposing in Film as Film. For instance:

The values I have claimed for Rope, say, or for Johnny Guitar, cannot be claimed, in

the terms of this study, for a picture like Godard’s Les Carabiniers, where the fictional

action attempts neither credibility nor the absorption of personal meaning into a

dynamic pattern of action. The degree to which Les Carabiniers is to be valued will

have to be agued in terms other than those proposed here. (p. 190)

Since there are no rules which the critic is entitled to impose on the film-maker, it is

folly to acclaim a movie because it “breaks” them, and all the more important that

criticism present a positive statement of the achievements it claims to have located and

clear definition of the formal discipline which made the achievement possible. (p. 191)

Perkins warns agains the “temptation” to “deny the validity of judgement altogether and to

confine criticism to a descriptive role with no claim to be able to evaluate” (p. 191) but this a

false option, since – as any good phenomenologist knows – “Even description depends upon

forms of evaluation which are no less ‘subjective’ than judgement” (p. 191). Every description

has to “make claims about the distribution of the film’s emphasis; and emphasis is as

subjectively perceived, relies as much on a personal response, as judgement” (p. 191). W

escape this problem by making a “decision”: “that we shall at any one time define the

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perceptible by what we ourselves / actually perceive or what can be demonstrated to us by

others” (pp. 191-192).

One advantage of a criterion based on synthesis is that it allows us to assess a range of

achievements, degrees of productive tension and relationship. (p. 192)

Perkins argues for “positive criteria” that show, “not so much a specific kind of cinematic

‘badness’ as the collapse of the claim for a certain type of excellence” (p. 192). “Badness” is

therefore not so much a quality of the film, as the lack of a convincing positive film analysis

and so it is easier to show that a reading which identifies flaws – as does Perkins’s discussion

of Potemkin – may be mistaken, than it is to contradict a positive, appreciative reading such

as the one he gives of Psycho.

Of necessity, it seems impossible to exhaust the description of a film (since then the description

would be the film, just as the perfect film would be reality) and that:

The richer and more dense the pattern we find, the more conscious we shall be that time

and space allow us to discuss only some representative parts. (p. 193)

Finally, Perkins ends: “a theory of judgement cannot remove the necessity of judgement” and

this perhaps is Perkins as Jacques Derrida, identifying the moment in the argument which

requires the argument itself to resolve the problem. Judgement must be a leap of faith, an event

perhaps, but one that is based on careful consideration of coherence and balance, subtlety and

complexity.

Film as Film-Philosophy

Perhaps the most surprising result of this re-reading of Film as Film has been to discover that

Perkins offers us a defence avant la lettre of what Falzon describes as the “bold thesis” of film-

philosophy (describing Robert Sinnerbrink’s claims in New Philosophies of Film (2011)) that

“films are able to engage in a distinctively cinematic kind of thinking that resists philosophical

translation or paraphrase” (http://www.iep.utm.edu/phi-film/). Perkins says that when film

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does not achieve full “coherence” and density” is becomes merely a “substitute for speech, a

translation of verbal statements” but that it should, or rather can, be “an alternative,

independent mode of communication” (p. 118). Thus film for Perkins, as for Sinnerbrink, offers

us a way of sayings something that could not be said in any other way. I think that this still

somewhat begs the question of what is that can actually be said in this way (and how we would

recognise it) but this is perhaps a discussion that needs fuller investigation than I can offer here.

However, Perkins uses a particularly suggestive image (and I remind you that Film as Film

was written in 1972, long before Deleuze had published his Cinema books). Commenting on

the fully achieved film, he says:

When such unity is achieved, observation, thought and feeling are integrated: film

becomes the projection of a mental universe – a mind recorder. (p. 133)

He continues:

Synthesis here, where there is no distinction between how and what, content and form,

is what interests us if we are interested in film as film. It is that unity to which we

respond when film as fiction makes us sensitive to film as film. (p. 133)

For Perkins, then, the perfect film is a “projection of a mental universe”, film is a “mind

recorder” (and presumably projector). I think therefore it is not too much to claim that not only

should we consider film as film, but – and I think that this is saying the same thing – we should

think of film as film-philosophy. Crucially, however, the implication is that not all film is film-

philosophy and what Perkins offers us is a way of distinguishing those films that we should

consider as film-philosophy and those that we should consider merely as fiction.

Further Thoughts

There may be a way of understanding Perkins through David Hume. Perkins keeps a clear

distinction between is and ought - just because one film is good, this does not mean that any

future films ought to be good in the same sort of way (cf Hume) - however, how do we then

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get to the first "is good" statement? The passions? See also Hume on taste (Hegel on

aestehtics?)