The exposure of Anglophone film culture to “Technique and Ideology” was almost instantaneous: in the Spring 1972 issue of Screen (before the series had even con-cluded), Paul Willemen noted that“Jean-Louis Comolli’s account of the moving pic-ture in Cahiers du cinéma is extremely relevant,”71while Christopher Williams unmis-takably channeled Comolli in his claim that an article by Patrick Ogle omitted“two major terms [...] from his considerations on deep focus cinematography. These two terms are Ideology and Economy.”72Having undertaken its own editorial shift toward Marxist theory, Screen had by this time already embarked on a large-scale, BFI-funded project to translate texts from the French journals seen as theoretical role models for its own work, which led to the publication of translations of“Cinema/
Ideology/Criticism” (in three parts, from Spring 1971 to Spring 1972), Gérard Leblanc’s
“Direction” and Jean-Paul Fargier’s “Parenthesis or Indirect Route” in Summer 1971, Pleynet’s “The ‘Left’ Front of Art” in Spring 1972 and Cahiers’ “John Ford’s Young Mr.
Lincoln” in Autumn 1972. Strangely, while “Technique and Ideology” was translated by Diana Matias as part of this project,73it was never published in Screen itself, nor in the 1977 collection of texts (including the aforementioned translated works) Screen Reader 1.74After a period of informal circulation, Matias’ translation was eventually published in the short-lived periodical Film Reader in 197775– but here only the first installment of the series was printed. Later anthologies would include some of the
70. Cf. infra, p. 197. The direct target of this proclamation is the“scholastic” division between aesthetics and film history in Mitry’s work.
71. Paul Willemen,“On Realisms in the Cinema,” Screen, vol. 13 no. 1 (1972), p. 38.
72. Christopher Williams,“The Deep Focus Question: Some Comments on Patrick Ogle’s Article,”
Screen, vol. 13 no. 1 (1972), p. 73.
73. Matias acted as editorial assistant for Screen between August 1970 and the Spring of 1972. A note thanking her for her work was printed in the Spring 1972 editorial. Cf.“Editorial,” Screen, vol. 13 no. 1 (1972), p. 4.
74. Cf. Screen Reader 1, ed. Sam Rohdie (London: BFI, 1977).
75. “Technique and Ideology [part I],” Film Reader, no. 2 (1977), pp. 128-140. An annual journal affiliated to the Film Division of Northwestern University, Film Reader devoted its second number to the“study of narrative structures” and the “issue of industry/technology/ideology.”
other parts of the text, but none would resolve the fragmentary state of its availability in English.76
This did not prevent Comolli’s text, and Cahiers’ writings more generally, from having a seminal influence on Screen, as well as politically radical journals such as Afterimage in the UK, Ciné-Tracts in Canada, and Jump Cut in the US. The work of Stephen Heath, Peter Wollen, Ben Brewster and Colin MacCabe was decisive in the importation and adaptation of the theoretical paradigm associated with Cahiers and Cinéthique, while figures such as Laura Mulvey and Kaja Silverman used the psycho-analytic approaches of Oudart and Baudry to develop feminist theories of the cine-ma. But the crossing of the linguistic barrier also entailed a certain reductionist ef-fect: the convulsions of Cahiers’ writings were smoothed out to a more easily digestible “line,” which has since gone by the various names of “apparatus theory,”
“1970s theory,” “Screen theory” or (pejoratively) “Grand Theory,” and which in some instances tended to exhibit a more Manichaean outlook toward film practice,77 as well as a certain Calvinist attitude toward concepts such as “visual pleasure” and spectatorial“work.”78
Moreover, whereas Cahiers was avidly read in the period between 1970 and 1972, there was little awareness outre-Manche of the subsequent political peripeteia of the journal (culminating in its“return to the mainstream” under Daney and Toubiana).
Communication between the French journal and its English-speaking exegetes was a decidedly one-way affair: the only evidence in Cahiers of any awareness of its influ-ence abroad was a terse editorial notice in no. 279-280 warning against unauthorized translations of its articles.79A major exception to this state of affairs was a
confer-76. “Technique and Ideology” gained a wider readership in the mid-1980s with the re-printing of the first installment in Movies and Methods and the publication of the third and fourth installments in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. Cf.“Technique and Ideology,” trans. Diana Matias, in Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), vol. 2, pp. 40-57;
“Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field (Parts 3 and 4),” trans. Diana Matias (with revisions by Marcia Butzel and Philip Rosen), in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 421-443. Rosen made emendations and added editorial comments to the segments of the text published in his collection, some of which are cited in the translator’s notes in the present volume. The publication of a mod-ified version of Matias’ translation of parts I and II followed in 1990. Cf. “Technique and Ideology,”
Cahiers du cinéma, 1969-72, op. cit., pp. 213-247.
77. A notable example of this tendency occurs in Dayan’s exposition of Oudart’s notion of suture.
Cf. Daniel Dayan,“The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” Film Quarterly, vol. 28 no. 1 (1974), pp. 22-31.
78. Visual pleasure was rejected outright by many writers at Screen and elsewhere, whereas Cah-iers tended to offer a more nuanced understanding of its function in the cinema. In an interview given to the weekly magazine Politique Hebdo (but which ended up being published in Cahiers), for instance, they discuss Straub/Huillet’s Othon in the following terms: “We feel that Othon is a very beautiful film, also capable of arousing pleasure, but a pleasure which, let us be clear, has nothing to do with the narcissistic identification and hedonism which is almost always the rule in cinematic spectacle.” Cf. “Réponses à ‘Politique Hebdo’,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 229 (1971), p. 62.
79. Cf.“À propos de la traduction plus ou moins pirate des Cahiers,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 279-280 (1977), p. 2. It is probable that the editors have Screen in mind when they write:“Finally, there
ence on“The Cinematic Apparatus” organized by Stephen Heath and Teresa de Laur-etis and held in February 1978 in Milwaukee, at which both Comolli and Christian Metz were present.80 Comolli presented a paper,“Machines of the Visible,” which incorporated a series of fragments from“Technique and Ideology” alongside more recent considerations of issues raised by the articles. Here, however, the French critic did not always see eye to eye with his Anglo-American interlocutors: a screening of his film La Cecilia met with a largely negative response from the audience,81while a discussion of Peter Gidal’s film Condition of Illusion led to Gidal curtly telling Comolli,
“You must be blind,” before comparing his comments to “Radek’s speech against James Joyce.”82
The late-1970s also marked the onset of a backlash against the theoretical para-digm established by Screen. As early as the winter of 1975/76, members of its editorial board issued a statement in protest at the extravagances of the journal’s deployment of psychoanalytic theory, which led to their resignation two issues later.83Rival peri-odical Movie, meanwhile, lambasted Screen for“avant-garde intellectual ‘terrorism’,”84 while even figures associated with the journal began to take their distances from its approach.85Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, many of the former adherents to a Marxist and/or psychoanalytic approach to film theory shifted their concerns to cultural studies, film historiography or Deleuzian/Foucaldian theories of the cinema.
At the same time, in a process beginning with Noël Carroll’s heated polemic with Stephen Heath in October86and culminating with Carroll and Bordwell’s Post-Theory,
are those friends across the world, who participate in or put out journals close to Cahiers, and who, concerned with familiarizing their readers with its work, have adopted the habit of reproducing certain texts in the name of a real support and what they suppose to be a de facto consensus.”
80. The proceedings of this conference were published in book form as The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980).
81. For an account of the film’s US screening, cf. an interview with Jean-Louis Comolli: “On the Practice of Political Film,” Ciné-Tracts, vol. 1 no. 4 (1978), p. 44.
82. The Cinematic Apparatus, op. cit., pp. 170-171. Gidal, of course, represented a markedly differ-ent practico-theoretical tradition to that of Screen, let alone Cahiers.
83. Cf. Edward Buscombe, Christine Gledhill, Alan Lovell and Christopher Williams,“Statement:
Psychoanalysis and Film,” Screen, vol. 16 no. 4 (1975-76), pp. 119-130, and “Why We Have Resigned from the Board of Screen,” Screen, vol. 17 no. 2 (1976), pp. 106-109.
84. Ian Cameron,“Editorial,” Movie, no. 26 (1978-79), p. 1. Cf. also Andrew Britton, “The Ideology of Screen,” Movie, no. 26 (1978/79), pp. 2-28.
85. A shift away from his Screen writings can first be detected in Colin MacCabe’s Godard:
Images, Sounds, Politics (London: BFI, 1980). This standpoint will be repeated in“Class of ’68: Ele-ments of an Intellectual Autobiography 1967-81” (in MacCabe, Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985], pp. 1-32); Godard: Portrait of the Artist at 70 (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003), pp. 196-197; and“Bazin as Modernist” (in Opening Bazin, op. cit.), p. 66.
86. This debate represents one of the most vocal and detailed polemics between these two theo-retical tendencies, but often descends into petty personal attacks. Cf. Noël Carroll,“Address to the Heathen,” October, no. 23 (1982), pp. 89-163; Stephen Heath, “Le Père Noël,” October, no. 26 (1983), pp. 63-115; and Noël Carroll,“A Reply to Heath,” October, no. 27 (1983), pp. 81-102.
cognitivist and empiricist strands of film theory launched a full-frontal assault on what they saw as a hopelessly incoherent and deeply flawed set of ideas. By this point, few could be found to defend Screen’s legacy, with even those sympathetic to its theoretical heritage, such as Rodowick, accepting that“political modernism” had entered a stage of crisis, and seeking to draw out the contradictions and shortcom-ings of the original theories, while hoping to salvage a kernel of theoretical validity from amidst the conceptual wreckage.
Although members of the Anglophone academy were the main target for these strictures, it was inevitable that Cahiers – seen on both sides of the debate as the intellectual birthplace of“1970s theory” – would find itself in their crosshairs. While accepting the value of Comolli’s “emphasis upon the lag between technological possi-bility and extended use” and his “non-teleological model of change,” Bordwell, for instance, would criticize“Technique and Ideology” as “sweepingly reductive,” arguing that it made“the concept of ‘ideology’ do too much work,” and that it assumed “that
‘bourgeois ideology’ rests in place for three centuries, from Caravaggio to Citizen Kane,” before proceeding to reiterate Sartre’s critique of “‘lazy’ Marxists who replace
‘real, perfectly defined groups’ by vague collectivities such as ‘bourgeois ideology.’”87 Richard Allen, meanwhile, would devote a monograph to an attempted logical dis-mantling of many of the precepts operative in Cahiers’ theoretical arsenal.88
One area of film studies, however, in which the reputation of “Technique and Ideology” did not suffer such a decline has been in what has come to be known as the “new film history” movement, pioneered by, among others, Tom Gunning, Charles Musser and André Gaudreault. While the 1978 FIAF congress at Brighton is traditionally seen as the inauguration site of this movement, its project of revisiting and reevaluating the accounts of early cinema provided by the earlier generation of historians (Sadoul, Mitry and Jacobs in particular) can also trace its provenance to Comolli’s work. This, at any rate, is the view taken by Gaudreault, who, in Film and Attraction, unabashedly asserts that“Comolli’s articles were one of the rare studies to give a thrashing to‘official history’ at such an early date and in such a systematic and forceful manner,” and that his “acerbic critique of empirical historians” formed “a user’s manual for the scholars who were soon about to express an interest in the early days of cinema.”89Gaudreault even goes so far as to call the movement
“post-87. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 247, 249-250.
Ironically, this volume commits some of the same“technicist” errors that were critiqued by Comolli.
For instance, the development of film narrative is seen to be determined by the standardization of the 1000-foot film reel. Cf. ibid., pp. 126-127. This tendency will only be exacerbated in Bordwell and Thompson’s later work.
88. Cf. Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). The philosophical apparatus Allen uses to challenge “ap-paratus theory” is generally Wittgensteinian in nature.
89. Gaudreault, op. cit., pp. 11, 16.
Comolli criticism,” avowing that its members “borrowed, consciously or not, from Comolli’s shaking up of official history.”90This esteem for the groundbreaking char-acter of Comolli’s work was no doubt a major motivation for Gaudreault to co-orga-nize the“Impact of Technological Innovations on the Historiography and Theory of Cinema” conference in Montreal in 2011, which notably brought together many of the
“original combatants” of the “technique and ideology” debates to return to the issues raised 40 years earlier.91