Spectacle and value in classical Hollywood cinema

by Tom Brown

In this essay, in discussing film spectacle, I wish to

bring to the surface the issue of value, an issue that

has only been implicit in my previous writing on the

topic (Brown, 2008). In understanding spectacle as a

facet of film style that, along with elements of mise-en-

scène and editing, can be subjected to close,

interpretative or ‘textual’ analysis,1 my interests are

inherently conflicted. Spectacle intuitively refers

critics and viewers more directly to the commercial

function of cinema, whereas the mise-en-scène of the most

sophisticated films has been seen to transcend the more

crassly commercial aspects of Hollywood and the study of

mise-en-scène in particular has made perhaps the most

compelling case for understanding mainstream cinema as a

commercial art form. I should stress that I support this

position on Hollywood movies, though I am interested

below in addressing gaps in our understanding of

‘classical’ cinema. Given the range of ways in which

1

value can now be talked about in film studies (as this

collection demonstrates), it is necessary to be upfront

about fairly basic beliefs about the cinema as an art

form as these by no means go without saying, at least not

in this context. However, the partiality and some of the

problems of my positions on some of these things will be

acknowledged and explored below.

Value judgments underpin so much of the work we do in

film studies. They represent the major (often

unacknowledged) factor in what films we study and teach

and, significantly, what films we do not. One film

remarkable for its marginal position in a wide range of

accounts of ‘classical’, ‘golden-age’ or ‘studio-era’

Hollywood cinema is Gone with the Wind (Fleming, 1939). Its

neglect is remarkable because, according to a number of

measures of popularity based on attendances (as opposed

to money earned), it is the most successful film of all

time.2 This chapter does not seek to elevate commercial

success as a primary criterion of value; other aspects of

what Gone with the Wind represents interest me here. For

2

academic film studies, Gone with the Wind seems to be a ‘bad’

film, a status in inverse position to the sub-industry of

‘commercially exploitative literature’ that has

capitalised on its popularity (Vertrees, 1997: p. 5).

Particular aspects of its ‘badness’ should be underlined.

The book and film present a vision of American Civil War

history in which the South is presented as the victim of

an aggressive and vindictive North, the moral

unacceptability of slavery being largely sidestepped. The

racism of much 1930s Hollywood cinema is more

historically charged in this context and, though attempts

have been made to rehabilitate the film’s politics along

racial lines (Smyth, 2006: pp. 142-9), its politics

remain beyond the pale for many viewers, even its fans

(see Taylor, 1989). As a ‘woman’s film’, Gone with the Wind

occupies an insecure position within the more established

taste cultures of film studies and, crucially, the film’s

melodrama lacks the critical distance ascribed to Sirk

and Minnelli’s women’s films – Selznick’s production does

not get near anything very ‘Brechtian’ in its

melodramatic mise-en-scène. Moreover, its innovative

3

marketing strategies and enormous commercial success

makes it a prototypical ‘big, dumb, blockbuster’, out of

keeping with the qualities that are more often valued by

classical film scholarship. Indeed, its ‘bigness’ is a

major factor in its ‘badness’:

The most popular and commercially successful film of all

time, embraced by popular historians and journalistic

critics while generally reviled by “serious” scholars and

cinephiles, Gone with the Wind stands as both a monument to

classical Hollywood and a monumental anomaly. It is, for

students and scholars of cinema, our proverbial 800-pound

gorilla – an oversized nuisance that simply won’t go away

and an obvious menace to our carefully constructed

habitat (Schatz in Vertrees, 1997: p. ix).

The film’s bigness is commercial but also quite literal

in terms of its epic running time. Its lack of prominence

in many textbooks on the classical Hollywood cinema is

surely partly down to its size because its running time

makes it difficult to teach (programming a four hour-long

4

film in the curriculum is a problem). However, I have

used Schatz’s comments before (Brown, 2008: p. 167) to

suggest that the ‘carefully constructed habitat’ of

classical film study has difficulty with the film partly,

also, because of its stylistic bigness, that is, more

specifically, its reliance on spectacle. With this in

mind, I am not going to engage so much with the textual

detail of Gone with the Wind here, but situate what I take it

to stand for in relation to much broader meta-critical

problems of value. I will discuss the difficulty of

valuing Gone with the Wind’s spectacle, and spectacle in

general, in the context of ‘classical film study’ (in the

sense, especially, that Noël Carroll [1988] has

categorised V.F. Perkins’ work). I will consider also the

challenge spectacle poses to the very notion of studio-

era Hollywood as ‘classical’ in style (as defined by

Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson [1985] and popularised,

especially, by Bordwell and Thompson [1979 onwards]).

How one evaluates spectacle or, more precisely, how

spectacle affects evaluation depends on how one defines

it – indeed, the more precise qualification is needed

5

because scholars so rarely choose to define it and

therefore to set out terms for its evaluation. There are

two main strands to definitions, one more formal, one

more ideological; the most useful definitions of course

combine both concerns. The more formal definitions

generally privilege the sense of spectacle as moments of

ostentatious display that temporarily arrest the flow of

narrative; on a diagram representing ‘the cinema’,

spectacle represents the vertical line to narrative’s

forward-moving horizontal.3 This can be seen to intersect

with ideological definitions of spectacle in the sense

that the affect of this display is wonder, astonishment,

awe etc. and relies on empty signifiers (to use semiotic

parlance) which render the spectator passive and

uncritical. In Guy Debord’s words, ‘the spectacle is the

sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity’

(no. 13). Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (originally published

in 1967) is the key text in this strand of thinking that

has come increasingly to link spectacle to the alienation

that pervades late-capitalist cultural production:

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The spectacle is ideology par excellence, because it

exposes and manifests in its fullness the essence of all

ideological systems: the impoverishment, servitude and

negation of real life. The spectacle is materially “the

expression of the separation and estrangement between man

and man” (no. 215).

Scholarship on contemporary or ‘post-classical’ cinema

has been the site for most recent discussions of

spectacle,4 the impulse to historicise involving regular

allusions to the pre-1917 ‘cinema of attractions’ (see

Gunning, 1990).5 My interest is to address the significant

gap in the theorisation and historicisation of

spectacle’s textual role in the ‘classical’ cinema; what

has been neglected is spectacle’s place within the

‘vertically-integrated’ system of studio Hollywood (the

‘Fordist’ precursor to the ‘post-Fordist’ contemporary

system Debord’s work seems to speak most directly to).

However, the evaluative problems spectacle represents for

scholarship on classical Hollywood are not easily

divorced from the ideological preoccupations of the work

7

that follows Debord.6 Where Debord noted, ‘the spectacle

is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images’

(no. 34), Richard Maltby writes:

1 I place ‘textual’ in inverted commas because of Jacob

Leigh’s (2006) clear demonstration of the problems of the

film as ‘text’. The practice I refer to is also often

known as ‘close analysis’ (which emphasises methodology)

or, by some, as ‘expressive criticism’. There are

problems with both descriptions. (How ‘close’ is close

enough? A ‘cognitivist’ analysis of the relationship

between individual shots might be very ‘close’ in its

analysis but does not correspond to what I presume ‘close

analysis’ intuitively evokes for most people. As for

‘expressive’, what is being expressed? The meanings of

the films or the eloquence of the reading?) My preference

throughout is for ‘interpretative criticism’ which is, I

feel, more honest about the ends to which its methodology

serves. Understandably, critics are nervous of this term

given the well-trodden debates concerning the status and

legitimacy of interpretation in film studies (see

8

What does most to discredit Hollywood movies as objects

of critical scrutiny… is the fact that they cost money

and are formally organized in the interests of profit.

The very things that most emphatically define Hollywood

cinema’s commercial function as entertainment – musical

especially Bordwell [1989] and Perkins [1990]).

2 The BFI’s ‘Ultimate Film Chart’ (2009) has the film way

out ahead in terms of UK attendances: at 35 million

spectators, it has five million more than the second

place The Sound of Music (Wise, 1965). Similar statistics

show that, after adjustments for inflation, Gone with the

Wind is the most successful film in the US too, grossing

1.45 billion to the 1.28 billion of Star Wars (Lucas,

1977); Titanic (Cameron, 1997; seventh place) earned a mere

922 million (Babic and Majendie, 2009).

3 These formal definitions are discussed at greater length

in Brown (2008).

4 Geoff King has done this at greatest length (2000). See

also Aylish Wood’s work (2002).

5 Bolter and Grusin (1999: p. 157), Andrew Darley (2000:

pp. 31-57) and myself (2007) are all part of a film

studies generation for whom the ‘“cinema of attractions”…

9

routines, car chases, screen kisses, the spectacular, the

star presence – become the greatest obstacles to dealing

critically with the movies themselves (Maltby, 2003: p.

44; emphasis added).

As Maltby suggests, spectacle has about it what one might

call ‘the taint of money’; that is, in signalling

distasteful commercialism, it seems to negate the notions

of individual artistry on which many traditions of film

may be the most quoted watchword’ (Altman, 2004: p. 9).

This suggests spectacle’s central place within

contemporary film debates. However, citations of the

cinema of attractions have arguably taken the place of

more careful historicisation of spectacle throughout film

history.

6 I am aware that this historiography of the spectacle is

not conclusive – one would need to go as far back as, at

the very least, the Frankfurt School in order to trace

the role seen for spectacle within capitalism. However,

in giving specific voice and name to the problems of

‘spectacle’, Debord is the most influential figure.

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criticism rely. Gone with the Wind, on the other hand, both

commercially and formally positively reeks of money.

In fact, Maltby’s book, one of the best general

introductions to Hollywood cinema, is unusual for the

extent to which it considers spectacle and narrative

together in both recent and classical cinema. This is

partly because the book works into its structure a

balance between the textual, formal, aesthetic and the

contextual, cultural and ideological. In this, Maltby

distinguishes his approach from the more rigid formalism

of the most influential conceptualisation of Hollywood’s

classicism, Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson’s The Classical

Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (1985).

David Bordwell (and I quote largely from the

narrative theory sections authored by Bordwell) is clear

to distance himself from superficial emphases on

classical ‘transparency’ or ‘invisible’ narration (in

Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, 1985: p. 25 and Bordwell,

1985: p. 156). However, his account of classical

narration sees ‘visible’ effects and techniques as

entirely marginal. The book is consistent in its use of

11

the term ‘spectacle’, but it is consistent in a way that

causes problems for the kind of evaluative criticism I

want to envisage. Talking about the showy digressions

that may detract from the cause-and-effect narrative

chain that defines ‘classical Hollywood cinema’, David

Bordwell writes:

It is probable that such casual splendors offered by the

Hollywood film owe a great deal to its mixed parentage in

vaudeville, melodrama, and other spectacle-centred

environments. Nevertheless, digressions and flashes of

virtuosity remain for the most part motivated by

narrative causality… or genre (pageantry in the

historical film, costume in the musical). If spectacle is

not so motivated, its function as artistic motivation

will be isolated and intermittent (Bordwell, Staiger and

Thompson, 1985: p. 21).

The historicisation that underpins the narrative theory,

while admitting, as above, the influence of more

‘spectacle-centred’ antecedents, makes all other

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influences greatly subservient to that of the 19th century

‘well-made-play’, an inherently unspectacular form.7 This

history combines with a model of spectatorial activity

centred on audience pleasure in filling in the gaps of

forward moving, goal-oriented narratives (this follows

Meir Sternberg’s narrative theory – Bordwell, Staiger and

Thompson, 1985: p. 8). The coherence of this view of the

primacy of narrative (narrowly defined) has enormous

benefits in helping us understand fundamental elements of

how the vast majority of ‘classical’ Hollywood films

operate for most of the time (defined quantitatively in

terms of running times), and characteristics of narration

we recognise as guiding principles for many modern

movies. However, the importance of spectacle, whose

impact on audiences and in the promotion of films is, by

definition, disproportionate to the screen time it

occupies, finds itself, I would contend, greatly

underestimated in this model. 7 Rick Altman (1989) critiques the historical model

Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson privilege. Christopher

Williams (1994) has also provided a valuable archaeology

of their critical position.

13

To return to the above quotation on ‘the casual

splendors offered by the Hollywood film’, one can see

hints of the lack of integration of spectacle into the

classical model because of that model’s formalist

underpinnings. For example, the mention of ‘artistic

motivation’ refers to a concept derived from Russian

formalism, whereby certain narrational flourishes provide

stylistic embellishments to the story; in the classical

system these are ‘isolated’ and ‘intermittent’. However,

Bordwell, like many film critics, does not interrogate

what spectacle actually is, and it is tacitly associated

merely with ‘digressions’ and ‘flashes of virtuosity’.

For example, in Narration in the Fiction Film, Bordwell seems to

suggest musical numbers are just one amongst many

‘retardation devices’ (1985: p. 164): that is, a device

that momentarily pauses the forward movement of narrative

cause and effect, but in fact strengthens it by

introducing ‘suspense’. In fact, ‘generic motivation’

recurs as a caveat in Bordwell’s analyses of ‘classical

narrative’, a paradigm which of course takes an

overarching look at narration, obviating the specific

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requirements of individual genres. However, in the case

of the musical film, the suggestion that because the

musical numbers occupy less screen time than the

narrative they are subordinate to it seems to me crassly

reductive.

Elsewhere in Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson’s study,

spectacle is cited as a technological flourish whose sole

aim is ‘product differentiation’ (1985: p. 244). For

example, the newly mobile camera of early sound cinema

(p. 307), Technicolor (p. 355) and widescreen (p. 361)

are seen as technological innovations that stressed and

created spectacle but were ultimately absorbed into the

classical system without significantly altering its self-

effacing style. Spectacle, then, emerges as something

that can be counted (in terms of money spent on its

production and promotion and as an un-integrated and

purely commercially-motivated flourish), not something

that, in terms of meaning, can be analysed; the

distinction between counting and thus separating things

and analysing along interpretative lines is something I

shall return to. Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson’s work

15

solidified with such crushing rigour the notion of studio

era cinema as a self-effacing cinema. Their notion of the

kind of spectatorial activity Hollywood movies presuppose

has been countered by ‘interpretative’ or ‘mise-en-scène’

critics who have offered more active or reactive readings

that seek to demonstrate the richness of meanings

available through the tightly controlled style of

Hollywood movies. But, importantly, the mise-en-scène

critics’ areas of interest and the classical paradigm are

not mutually exclusive; it involves an evaluative re-

emphasis, not a fundamental revision of the founding

style.8

The preceding outline of what I propose not to do

requires now a more positive statement of my own critical

agenda. A more precise definition of my focus of analysis

is first needed. I would consider that spectacle becomes 8 I should stress that I do not try to negate The Classical

Hollywood Cinema’s enormous value as a work of film history

by pointing to disagreements with its narrative theory.

Indeed, its rigour as an epoch defining piece of

scholarship merits a much more detailed response than

there is space to offer here.

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available to interpretative analysis only when defined in

relatively specific terms and in relation to particular

kinds of filmmaking practice. This is because the place,

purpose and appearance of spectacle in a musical, say,

are quite different from in a war film. However, it is

useful to begin quite broadly before narrowing one’s

definition down (a more extensive discussion of the

broader ways spectacle can and has been defined appears

in Brown, 2008: pp. 158-163). I would suggest, in broad

terms, one might think of two poles to be ‘human’ and

‘supra-human’ spectacle. This initial distinction crosses

genre boundaries because in forms as distinct as

musicals, kung fu films and other kinds of action cinema,

the skilled and dynamic human performer is him or herself

a source of spectacle. It should be stressed that I do

not consider it helpful to think of actions, events and

people as intrinsically spectacular; particular methods

of cinematic presentation make them so or, rather,

renders these admirable skills as spectacle. The same

goes for ‘supra-human’ spectacle, which relies much more

on scale and the sense of the film as a whole (not some

17

individual appearing within it) performing in a

spectacular way – a mass of bodies organised in a chorus

line and a mass of bodies engaged in a battle scene are

comparable examples. However, as already stressed, what

are needed are ways of talking about spectacle that are

more useful to the specific aims and effects of different

kinds of films. Thus, in writing about spectacle in

historical films (and in Gone with the Wind more specifically

– Brown, 2008), I suggested that one might think of

spectacle in terms of ‘the décor of history’ and the

‘spectacular vista’. This division rhymes with (but is

not the same as) that between human and supra-human kinds

of spectacular display. With the ‘décor of history’,

spectacle emerges as a result of lavish expenditure on

costumes and décor – this emphasises expense slightly

differently from both Debord and Bordwell, Staiger and

Thompson but maintains the connection. These details of

the mise-en-scène become ‘spectacular’ for two reasons:

they are detailed beyond the requirements of

verisimilitude – that is, there are more details than are

needed to establish place and time – and the way the film

18

performs the details makes them spectacular. As Philip

Rosen writes, ‘with respect to the detail, the liberation

[from the requirements of verisimilitude] is so

overwhelming, so playful, so performative as opposed to

referential, that we call it spectacle’ (2001: p. 193;

emphasis added). The scale on which this spectacle is

performed links it more to the human level. Impressive

period interiors frame characters and their manoeuvring

through the social spaces. In, for example, Gone with the

Wind, the costuming of Scarlett O’Hara/Vivien Leigh

accentuates movements carefully coordinated in order to

ensnare her many suitors (Brown, 2008: pp. 169-172). The

‘spectacular vista’, on the other hand, visualises the

diminishment of individual human subjects, stressing

scale and grandeur. In historical films, there is a clear

link between such images (a long shot framing a valley

filled with soldiers, for example) and the film’s themes

(the images present momentous history bigger than any

individual except, perhaps, the great historical leaders

who might look out over these vistas).9 In other genres, a

‘spectacular’ image devoid of human subjects (a massive

19

wave heading towards the camera, say) may derive its

force from the threat it implicitly poses to humans –

this kind of spectacle has evident links to the sublime.

There is an evaluative drive behind the coining of

each of these categories that should be brought forward.

If either category resonates it is because of its

potential for a metaphoric level of meaning. Thus, with

the example given of Scarlett O’Hara, literal movement in

space stands in, figuratively, for personal-political

manoeuvring through the quasi-aristocratic milieu of

antebellum Georgia. To draw on broader examples, one need

only think of the common function of balls and dances in

costume dramas as mise-en-abymes of very similar concerns.

Furthermore, by linking image to theme, the example of a

spectacular vista signifying momentous history again

possesses this kind of metaphoric force. Another example

from Gone with the Wind illustrates how the subsuming of the

individual in the frame underlines the individual’s

dwarfing by events greater than herself. This is seen in

a shot in which Scarlett emerges out into a large space 9 This links to a rhetorical figure I call ‘the historical

gaze’ (Brown, 2008: pp. 163-167).

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filled with injured confederate shoulders, a crane shot

pulling back from framing her tightly to a point from

which it is difficult for the viewer to identify her (see

Brown, 2008: pp. 172-3). I suggest that, in these cases,

spectacle actualises a particular meaning. Stressing affect

(and if spectacle means something, it is clearly a

peculiarly affective means of signification), it can be

said also to vivify these meanings. I should stress that I

am not suggesting that spectacle as I define it always

means something in these terms. However, I want to stress

its potential to do these things, thus negating the

common assumption that spectacle is made up only of empty

signifiers.

This is the central plank of an argument for valuing

spectacle, one that has not been sufficiently put forward

in relation to the ‘classical’ cinema.10 However, in

linking form and content and isolating the metaphoric

meaning of certain stylistic choices, this has a long-10 This kind of work has been done more in relationship to

contemporary cinema. Kristen Whissel (2006), for example,

has examined the metaphoric, symbolic meanings of

contemporary special effects.

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standing provenance in literary analysis and, more

recently, in the interpretative analysis of the cinema.

The famous exchange between Penelope Houston (then editor

of Sight and Sound) and the emerging British mise-en-scène

criticism of the 1950s and 60s comes to mind. John Gibbs

examines the debates centring around comments Houston

made in 1960 in response to the work that was emerging in

Oxford Opinion:

[Houston:] ‘Cinema is about the human situation, not

about “spatial relationships”’. The silliness of this

maxim was noted by [Charles] Barr: ‘The only formulation

that begins to make sense is to say that the “spatial

relationships” in [Nicholas] Ray, [Fritz] Lang,

[Michelangelo] Antonioni, Mizoguchi [Kenji] et al are the

human relationships in metaphor…’ (Gibbs, 1999: p. 82).

The examples of spectacle that I have (admittedly only)

sketched are moments in which the spatial relationships

are something very close to ‘human relationships in

metaphor’.

22

The writing of Charles Barr and other writers who

would form the Movie editorial board marked a radical

break from the previous British film criticism that had

stressed the precedence of the script and the spoken

discourse of characters in the generation of meaning.11

The new emphases of this criticism enabled a more

sophisticated analysis of the work of individual

directors because, even in a system like studio

Hollywood, the organisation of elements that constituted

‘mise-en-scène’ was his/her responsibility. More

profoundly, because form and content were considered in

dynamic relationship to each other, the mise-en-scène

criticism of Movie developed more nuanced ways of talking

about value. There is no manifesto one might point to in

order to sum up this group’s critical position; unlike,

say, ‘1970s Screen Theory’,12 it is difficult to ascribe a

particular ideological agenda to them, except to

underline Movie’s continuation of the work of pre-68

Cahiers du cinéma in arguing for the aesthetic sophistication

of mainstream Hollywood cinema (though, more than is

regularly acknowledged, the writers in Movie were

23

interested in a great number of national cinemas). Though

there is not the space to adequately survey his critical

agenda, I will say something more focused on the work of

one of the key figures in this strand of criticism, V.F.

Perkins, and his influential book, Film as Film: Understanding

and Judging Movies (1993[1972]).

If mise-en-scène criticism represented a break with

the (at least British) movie criticism that had gone

before it, it found itself in line with longer standing

traditions of literary criticism in its emphasis on what

may be called ‘organicism’ or ‘organic unity’ – that is,

in its valuing of an apparently ‘organic’ relationship

between form and content, style and meaning. Perkins’ 11 See Gibbs (1999 and 2002) for a fuller account of these

debates.

12 At the 2009 Screen Studies Conference, which celebrated

the 50th anniversary of the journal’s launch, Annette

Kuhn’s plenary suggested that ‘1970s Screen Theory’

(capital ‘T’ and italicised ‘Screen’ emphasised) was

actually much less pervasive than is generally assumed.

Her recent trawling through the Screen archives had located

the key works in this strand only between 1973 and 1975.

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work is the most influential in articulating this through

terms such as ‘synthesis’ and ‘coherence’. These terms

are cornerstones of Perkins’ evaluative concerns and

emerge in line with the emphasis on organic form but also

as a response to the more specific photographic ontology

of the cinema. Films derive their force, according to

Perkins, both from their ability to disclose the

complexities of the material world (in ethical-evaluative

terms, Perkins’ criticism has much in common with the

‘realist’, humanist criticism of André Bazin, whom he

discusses at some length – 1993: pp. 28-40) and to mould

that world into a meaningful shape: ‘A single image is

made to act both as a recording, to show us what happens,

and as an expressive device to heighten the effect and

significance of what we see’ (ibid. p.78). Perkins

consistently praises films in which that meaning is not

so asserted that it destroys the illusion of disclosure.

For example, he evaluates, negatively, the stone lions

who appear to rise from their slumber in the Odessa steps

sequence of Eisenstein’s 1925 Battleship Potemkin (Perkins,

1993: pp. 103-5). For Perkins, it is not the metaphorical

25

dimension to Eisenstein’s image that is the problem (he

notes the Russian colloquialism ‘“the very stones

roared”: roughly, “all hell broke loose”’ as the image’s

source – ibid. p. 104), rather, it is the fact that the

lions’ function is unmoored in the material construction

of the scene up till that point; there is an imprecision

in the handling of the concrete, material basis for the

metaphor (the space, the sense of place, the statues

themselves) which makes adducing its precise meaning

impossible.13 To return to the example of the ‘spectacular

vista’ from Gone with the Wind, one might compare it

positively with Eisenstein’s lions. The crane shot of 13 It should also be admitted that, despite Perkins’

avowed mistrust of prescriptive film theory (1993, esp.

pp. 26-27), there is an underlying assertion that films

should not sacrifice the material reality of what they

photograph for the sake of dramatic/meaningful shape – in

this, Perkins is bolder (though more rigorous) than Bazin

in asserting formal evaluative criteria. As well as Noël

Carroll’s (1988) detailed critique, I would draw the

reader’s attention to Robin Wood’s discussion of Perkins’

prescriptions (2006: pp. 17-42).

26

Scarlett O’Hara emerging into the sea of wounded soldiers

both discloses the material, quantifiable largeness of

what surrounds her as well as, through its style (the

qualities of the crane shot’s movement), suggesting the

more figurative enormity of what she encounters

(describing it as a ‘sea’ already responds to the image

in this way). The link between what the shot discloses

and what the shot may be said to symbolise is a close

one. To follow a term Vivian Sobchack (1995) has employed

in a related context, this shot as spectacle might be

said to have an ‘onomatopoeic’ (or ‘onomatopoetic’)

relationship to what it signifies – to put it very

crudely, it is a ‘big’ shot that expresses ‘big’

events/history.14 Perkins suggests something similar in

relation to The Cardinal (Preminger, 1963). Describing a

sweeping shot of Fermoyle (Tom Tryon) with his female

companion (Romy Schneider) racing down a hillside on

bicycles that makes use of, what I would call, the

spectacular potentialities of the CinemaScope frame:14 There are clear problems with Sobchack’s choice of

words, however, and the admittedly vaguer ‘actualize’ is

preferable (see Brown, 2008: p. 169).

27

Here Preminger is using for its emotional effect the

transition from an enclosed to an open image and the

physical impact of camera movement projected onto a large

cinema screen. The image conveys a feeling of dramatic

exhilaration and release which we transfer into the

dramatic situation. The director is thus able to make us

aware of Fermoyle’s emotions without filming a dialogue

on the subject… On the other hand, the shot exists in the

context of the story as a simple and uncluttered record

of the way in which the young couple spend their time

together. Its beauty, in film terms, derives from its

concentration: fact and feeling are communicated in one

necessary image (ibid. p. 88).

The terms that Perkins uses to describe the synthesis

between ‘fact and feeling’ resonate with my sense of what

spectacle can achieve. The emphasis on emotional even

physical effects puts one in mind of the spectacular;

indeed, spectacle seems to me to be a particular means of

‘concentration’ in terms of affect and, potentially,

28

dramatic meaning. Importantly, however, to follow

Perkins’ critical line and to make claims for the value

of the spectacle of Gone with the Wind, it would be necessary

to show these moments’ place within the context of the

film as a whole; to suggest its use of spectacle is

coherent. An effect such as Perkins identifies should not

be isolated from its surroundings: ‘In order to comprehend

whole meanings, rather than those parts of the meaning

which are present in verbal synopsis or visual code,

attention must be paid to the whole content of shot,

sequence and film’ (p. 79). Though much more work on the

film would need to be done in order to test claims for

the consistency of its use of spectacle, there is, I

would suggest, an evident schema; if not carried through

to the deeper levels of its style, there is a consistent

use of spectacle as, at the least, dramatic punctuation

(as a first step, I’d draw the reader towards the

function of the recurring long-shots on the hill above

Tara – Brown, 2008: pp. 174-8).

If the above is the beginning of a comparison

between my claims for spectacle in Gone with the Wind and the

29

evaluative methods Perkins outlines, that is perhaps also

the end of it. There are a number of further problems for

its evaluation in these terms; or, seen from another

perspective, other markers of the film’s ‘badness’. One

is the question of its authorship. As already noted,

mise-en-scène criticism initially emerged as a means of

valuing the work of film directors. Indeed, identifying

the director as primary author of film texts was an

essential stage in valuing the medium as an art form –

see also Truffaut (1954) and then Sarris (1968), of

course. The story of Gone with the Wind’s production is

notorious for David O. Selznick’s hiring and firing of a

series of directors (Victor Fleming ending up being the

credited director), circumstances David Thomson sees

borne out in the film being ‘void of creative

personality’ (1995: p. 684). This line of evaluation can

be relatively easily answered by a change of emphasis.

Indeed, Thomson himself then praises the film’s ‘vast

entrepreneurial aplomb’, terms that value its grandeur

(including spectacle) as entertainment product and can be

seen to credit other forces than the director – Thomson’s

30

comments are extracted from his entry on Selznick.

Moreover, were the film’s aesthetic evaluation dependent

on ascribing its formal shape to a particular individual,

rigorous, well-researched work has already stressed the

creative authorship of both Selznick as producer and

William Cameron Menzies as production designer (Vertrees,

1997). But more crucially, the renaissance of mise-en-

scène criticism over recent years (see, for example,

various works authored and edited by John Gibbs and

Douglas Pye) has developed as a means of analysing

closely ‘the objective features of the images on the

screen’ without demanding that these features be ascribed

to the control of the director (Gibbs, 2002: p. 98).

If the authorial problems of Gone with the Wind are

superficial, valuing spectacle proves much more difficult

in other terms. Spectacle remains beyond the pale for the

critical position Perkins represents in part because of

its tone. The mise-en-scène of Renoir and Ophuls, for

example, is valued because of its subtle expressivity.

Where excessive or melodramatic mise-en-scène is

celebrated (Sirk or Minnelli, say), it is often for its

31

ironic commentary – it shows one thing of the characters

and their situation and ‘says’ something else. In these

cases, ‘spatial relations are human relations in

metaphor’ but the metaphors are complex. Also, crucially,

the metaphors seem to emerge as a part of the, what we

might call, broadly ‘realist’ style (complex, expressive

mise-en-scène that nevertheless respects the unity of

time and place) favoured by the most prominent Movie

critics. In Film as Film, Perkins critiques the ‘established

theory’ that valued most highly films that reconstituted

the world and thus distanced film from the automatic

recording function of photography (since 1972 and the

original publication of Film as Film, the ‘established’

status of this theory has shifted): ‘[Its] preferred

movies are most often works of propaganda in which

subtlety or complexity would contradict the raison d’être.

The theory offers no standards by which we could define

the stylistic grossness of such a film as Leni

Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will [1935]’ (Perkins, 1993: p.

26). I think that the examples of spectacle to be found

in Gone with the Wind are more in keeping with Perkins’

32

emphases because they do emerge from the material of the

drama itself (e.g. the time and place of the setting).

However, the metaphor of Scarlett’s diminishment in the

vista remains rather ‘on the nose’. There may be examples

where spectacle is ironic (the ironic ‘vistas’-like

spectacle of the early anti-Western, Cimarron [Ruggles,

1931] would be an example – see Smyth, 2003: p. 11) but

to value spectacle only when it undercuts itself seems to

me reductive. Indeed, if there is any chance of valuing

spectacle on its own terms, its, for want of a better

word, ‘obviousness’ must also be valued.

More profoundly still, spectacle, by its very

nature, must remain at least partially outside ‘organic’

ideals of film form. An organic relationship between form

and content is of course only something that can be

crafted through the deployment of the complex

illusionistic artistry of the cinema apparatus. In this

sense, it is ‘only’ a critical ideal, yet, as an ideal,

it resonates with the work of the best directors of mise-

en-scène. Examples can be found of spectacle’s deployment

within the internal systems of films, systematic uses of

33

spectacle that open up different, more complex levels of

meaning within the film text. However, this drive to

integrate spectacle into interpretation must not negate

spectacle’s tendency to disrupt: what can be called its

‘aggregative’, as opposed to integrative, qualities.15 To

do so would be, at best, disingenuous and, at worst,

undermines through distortion the very thing one wished

to rehabilitate. It is for this reason that, as I

stressed at the beginning, my interest in spectacle is

inherently conflicted. One seeks to marry one critical

agenda with the language or terminology of another.

Indeed, the body of work that provides the most useful

language for talking about spectacle is one that is

regularly seen in opposition to Movie’s critical stance:

that is, the film theory of 1970s Screen.16 Laura Mulvey’s

‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ (1992[1975]) gives

us ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’, a term that expresses the 15 See Martin Rubin’s (1993) brilliant discussion of the

role of musical numbers in the films of Busby Berkeley.

16 See Andrew Britton (1978/79) and Robin Wood (2006: pp.

43-98) for, respectively, a Movie and a related critics’

accounts of this opposition.

34

impact of spectacle more generally; more unfortunately,

it further solidified the equation of spectacle with

passivity (see Brown, 2008: p. 158, pp. 161-2). And Steve

Neale’s essay on Triumph of the Will (Neale, 1979) is one of

the few texts to offer so rigorously defined a discussion

of spectacle. Indeed, whereas the ethical-aesthetic

criticism of Perkins limits itself to noting merely the

stylistic and ideological ‘grossness’ of Riefenstahl’s

film, Neale’s decision to engage directly with that

style’s foundation in spectacle enables ideology and

style to be examined together more directly. More

broadly, 1970s Screen’s interest both in psychoanalysis

(an interest in psychological rupture etc.) and the

methodologies of post-structuralism and semiotics (the

introduction of pseudo-scientific emphases into film

criticism; more ‘counting’ than ‘interpreting’) made it

more attuned to considering spectacle’s important role

within the cinema. Clearly I caricature complex positions

here but meta-criticism must rely on some caricatures

that, hopefully, have the ring of truth. I want to

suggest that the study of spectacle is in fact an ideal

35

site in which to consider and perhaps transcend some of

the territorial disputes that have characterised much

film scholarship.

By way of conclusion, I want again to admit my own

partiality and some more problematic aspects of my

position on Gone with the Wind. At the danger of introducing

a huge and knotty issue in aesthetic evaluation into the

last stages of this discussion, the gendered dimension of

the critical discourses I am working with should be

acknowledged. If, as I suggested at the beginning of this

essay, the ‘bigness’ of the film is part of its

‘badness’, my attempt to evaluate its spectacular bigness

might be perceived by some as a masculinist response to a

film that could, alternatively, be valued for its more

intimate, emotional and melodramatic qualities. Helen

Taylor’s groundbreaking audience analysis of the film

(1989) sought to understand its value for female fans who

engaged with the emotional arcs of the book and film in a

way that many male viewers failed to understand.

Conversely, Taylor noted in an interview around the time

of her book’s release, ‘Men tend to say it’s a well-made

36

film, a spectacular film… They like the special effects

but they never talk about their emotional responses’

(Anon, 1989). After some initial embarrassment at seeing

the partiality of my attempt to re-evaluate the film

exposed (as a man, of course I have latched onto the

spectacle!), it should be said I am arguing for the

emotional, affective force of spectacle. Moreover, the

more radical avenue of what I have been suggesting would

be to further explore what I have defined as film’s human

spectacle and the more intimate level described as ‘the

décor of history’ in Gone with the Wind. In its association

with contemporary action and special-effects driven

cinema, the concept of spectacle frequently carries with

it masculinist overtones. In the latter kinds of films,

the spectacle may be thought of in relation to the

sublime and, as Naomi Schor’s work has shown, moving from

valuing the sublime to the detail can be a radically

feminist enterprise. Schor’s book, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics

and the Feminine (1987) examines the shift that occurred in

nineteenth-century aesthetics from valuing the masculine

sublime to the feminine detail. This evaluative

37

reemphasis anticipated the celebration of the detailed

organisation of mise-en-scène by the Movie critics, which

combined with the re-evaluation of melodrama (and its

relative ‘the woman’s film’) and of directors who were

particularly attuned to female subjectivity (see

especially the journal Movie’s special issue, Max Ophüls and

Melodrama, no. 29/30 [Summer 1982]). However, Schor’s

interests may parallel the Movie writers but her

methodology is radically opposed to it, emerging as it

does from post-structuralism:

One need only recall that a long critical tradition

condemns the superfluous detail as symptomatic of

decadence in order to appreciate the importance of the

question [of the detail] raised by [Roland] Barthes: what

is at stake is nothing less than the legitimacy of the

organic model of literary interpretation, according to

which all details… can, indeed must be integrated into

the whole, since the work of art is organically

constituted (1987: p. 100).

38

As I have shown, organicism is not and cannot be

fundamental to a re-evaluation of spectacle – aside from

other things, it would be inappropriate to think of major

set piece kinds of spectacle emerging ‘organically’ out

of a film’s themes and form. The question of the

‘superfluousness’ or not of spectacle is fraught by

numerous political and aesthetic problems, especially

relating to the commercial function of, especially,

Hollywood cinema. However, I am unwilling to abandon a

search for meaningful synthesis between style (to include

spectacle) and meaning.

39

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