Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Harvard Film Studies)

David Bordwell's new book is at once a history of film criticism, an analysis of how critics interpret film, and a proposal for an alternative program for film studies. It is an anatomy of film criticism meant to reset the agenda for film scholarship. As such Making Meaning should be a landmark book, a focus for debate from which future film study will evolve. Bordwell systematically maps different strategies for interpreting films and making meaning, illustrating his points with a vast array of examples from Western film criticism. Following an introductory chapter that sets out the terms and scope of the argument, Bordwell goes on to show how critical institutions constrain and contain the very practices they promote, and how the interpretation of texts has become a central preoccupation of the humanities. He gives lucid accounts of the development of film criticism in France, Britain, and the United States since World War II; analyzes this development through two important types of criticism, thematic-explicatory and symptomatic; and shows that both types, usually seen as antithetical, in fact have much in common. These diverse and even warring schools of criticism share conventional, rhetorical, and problem-solving techniques--a point that has broad-ranging implications for the way critics practice their art. The book concludes with a survey of the alternatives to criticism based on interpretation and, finally, with the proposal that a historical poetics of cinema offers the most fruitful framework for film analysis. Contents......Page 6 Preface......Page 9 Interpretation as Construction......Page 16 Meaning Made......Page 23 Interpretive Doctrines......Page 28 2. Routines and Practices......Page 34 Interpretation, Inc.......Page 36 The Logic of Discovery, or, Problem-Solving......Page 44 The Logic of Justification, or, Rhetoric......Page 49 An Anatomy of Interpretation......Page 55 The French Connection......Page 58 Explication Academicized......Page 63 Picture Planes......Page 68 Meaning and Unity......Page 79 4. Symptomatic Interpretation......Page 86 Culture, Dream, and Lauren Bacall......Page 88 Myth as Antinomy......Page 93 Système à la Mode......Page 98 The Contradictory Text......Page 102 Symptoms and Explications......Page 109 5. Semantic Fields......Page 120 Meanings in Structures......Page 122 Structures of Meaning......Page 130 The Role of Semantic Fields......Page 142 Mapping as Making......Page 144 Knowledge Structures and Routines......Page 150 Mapping as Modeling......Page 157 Is There a Class for This Text?......Page 161 Making Films Personal......Page 166 8. Text Schemata......Page 184 A Butt’s-Eye Schema......Page 185 Meaning, Inside Out and Outside In......Page 196 Textual Trajectories......Page 201 Doctrines into Diachronies......Page 210 9. Interpretation as Rhetoric......Page 220 Sample Strategies......Page 221 Theory Talk......Page 230 Jean Douchet, “Hitch and His Public” (1960)......Page 239 Robin Wood, “Psycho,” Hitchcock’s Films (1965)......Page 241 Raymond Durgnat, “Inside Norman Bates,” Films and Feelings (1967)......Page 245 V. F. Perkins, “The World and Its Image,” Film as Film (1972)......Page 247 Raymond Bellour, “Psychosis, Neurosis,Perversion” (1979)......Page 250 Barbara Klinger, “Psycho: The Institutionalization of Female Sexuality” (1982)......Page 254 Leland Poague, “Links in a Chain: Psycho and Film Classicism” (1986)......Page 256 The Ends of Interpretation......Page 264 The End of Interpretation?......Page 269 Prospects for a Poetics......Page 278 Notes......Page 291 Index......Page 343

David Bordwell's new book is at once a history of film criticism, an analysis of how critics interpret film, and a proposal for an alternative program for film studies. It is an anatomy of film criticism meant to reset the agenda for film scholarship. As such Making Meaning should be a landmark book, a focus for debate from which future film study will evolve.

Bordwell systematically maps different strategies for interpreting films and making meaning, illustrating his points with a vast array of examples from Western film criticism. Following an introductory chapter that sets out the terms and scope of the argument, Bordwell goes on to show how critical institutions constrain and contain the very practices they promote, and how the interpretation of texts has become a central preoccupation of the humanities. He gives lucid accounts of the development of film criticism in France, Britain, and the United States since World War II; analyzes this development through two important types of criticism, thematic-explicatory and symptomatic; and shows that both types, usually seen as antithetical, in fact have much in common. These diverse and even warring schools of criticism share conventional, rhetorical, and problem-solving techniques—a point that has broad-ranging implications for the way critics practice their art. The book concludes with a survey of the alternatives to criticism based on interpretation and, finally, with the proposal that a historical poetics of cinema offers the most fruitful framework for film analysis.

Thomas Doherty - Boston Phoenix Literary Supplement

An A-list historian and theorist himself, Bordwell is the unchallenged capo di tutti capi of academic film studies...His industrial-strength overview is a streamlined and steady Eurail pass through the Continental modes of thought that have dominated the American university since the late 60s.

With this book, the author provides a history of film criticism and an analysis of how critics interpret film as well as a proposal for an alternative programme of film studies Surveys the history of film criticism, examines how critics interpret film, and suggests an alternative program for film studies