One of the motivating causes of the structuralist revolution in film studies was the desire to found a politics of cinema. The influence of the Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser, cannot be underestimated in this regard, for his recasting of Marxist debates during the 1960s acted as a template from which theories of cinema expanded, especially in France and the United Kingdom. Althusser gave a particular emphasis to the term theory. In his writings he considers that the proper work of Marxist intellectuals is one in which a theoretical approach to society and politics is a necessary con- stituent of political action. In other words, for Althusser, theory does not follow upon the heels of practical politics, but practical politics can only be effective if guided by theory in the first place. Film theorists also took up this challenge: a theory of film was not merely one that commented on films and film-making after the fact but was instead geared towards guiding and informing new forms of cinema and new approaches to film-making.
If many film theorists agreed about the nature of the struggle to be achieved - that is, the struggle to define a political cinema - then they vehemently disagreed about the precise nature of what a political cin- ema should entail. Fierce debates on the politics of cinema raged in the French journals, Cinethique, Cahiers du cinema and Positif. Perhaps the most famous (or infamous) essay from Cinethique during this period is Jean-Louis Baudry's 'Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Ap-
paratus', published in 1970. What is immediately most notable in that article is its condemnation of the transparent style of Hollywood cinema.
For Baudry, only cinematic forms explicitly opposed to the Hollywood style could bypass bourgeois ideology and bring about social or political change. We discuss Baudry's article in great detail in this chapter, before turning to one of the most influential essays of contemporary film the- ory: Christian Metz's The Imaginary Signified (Metz 1982). Finally, in this chapter we examine a cinematic case study: Singin' in the Rain (Donen and Kelly, 1957). Both Baudry's and Metz's essays are somewhat notorious for avoiding any lengthy discussion of actual films, so the introduction of a case study to this chapter is an attempt to see how their writings might be applied to cinematic examples.
Jean-Louis Baudry, "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus'
(First published in Cinethique, 7-8, 1970; translated in B. Nichols (ed.) Movies and Methods, Volume II [Baudry 1985]. All references are to the latter translation.)
The explicit aim of Baudry's article on the 'basic cinematographic appara- tus' is to mobilize a critique of the accepted Hollywood styles of cinema.
The techniques associated with the Hollywood style, based on continu- ity and transparency, are ones he attributes to a 'basic cinematographic apparatus'. Baudry then refers to the Hollywood style as one that is ideolog- ical. What does he mean by referring to this style as ideological? Baudry's essay was published in the same year as Althusser's very influential essay on Tdeology and Ideological State Apparatuses' (Althusser 1971) and Baudry can be understood to be using the term ideology in the sense intended by Althusser.
Four important points can be taken from Althusser's theses on ideology, points that are not merely essential to understanding Baudry's approach to the cinematographic apparatus, but central to defining much of film theory's enthrallment with Althusser during the 1970s. The points are:
1. Ideological State apparatuses differ from repressive State apparatuses.
Repressive State apparatuses are the kinds of easily identifiable govern- mental institutions and practices which enforce law and order and which ensure the smooth and civil running of public services - for example, the police, legal institutions, prisons, governments themselves (national and local). Ideological State apparatuses differ from repressive ones in the sense that they are not explicitly sanctioned under the banner of ensuring law and order, but are nevertheless institutions which reinforce the function- ing of those laws and that order. Schools are one of Althusser's favoured examples: even though schools are generally considered to be places of learning, enlightenment and free thought, one significant function they perform is to produce 'good citizens', that is, they produce children who know how to behave themselves, and who learn the nature of what is deemed important, and who have inculcated in them the difference be- tween right and wrong. At all times, according to Althusser, those values delivered to school students are the dominant, bourgeois values which ensure the continued empowerment of the dominant class. Thus, central to Baudry's thesis on the 'cinematographic apparatus' is that the cinema itself - at least in its Hollywood form - is an ideological state apparatus, an apparatus that upholds the power and privileges of the ruling, bourgeois classes.
2. Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. This formulation is a complex one, because Al- thusser does not claim that, because of ideology, an individual's real con- ditions of existence become imaginary. Instead, he argues that it is an individual's relation to real conditions that are represented in an imaginary way by ideology. In other words, the real conditions might very well be right there in front of one's eyes, but the way that ideology represents those conditions to individuals is imaginary. We might then see this as a matter of interpretation: ideology interprets reality in such a way that individuals see that reality as if through an imaginary filter.
What, however, does Althusser mean by imaginary? The inspiration for this term comes from the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, es- pecially from his notion of the 'mirror stage', a concept which Baudry also relies on extensively for his essay (see Lacan 2006c). Lacan, in his theory of the mirror stage, argues that human beings between the ages of 6 and 18 months develop a sense of themselves as individuals who are separated from other people and objects in the world. This realiza- tion occurs as a split between the feeling or sense a child has of his/her own body and the way that the child imagines this body looks, for ex- ample, the way that this body is represented to the self as an image in the mirror. This split, therefore, can be understood as one which hap- pens, on the one hand, between the 'real body' inside which the child lives and, on the other, the body which the child imagines it has, the body the child represents to itself. The latter representation is an imagi- nary one which is split, we might say, from that body's 'real conditions of existence'.
Althusser takes Lacan's theory of the mirror stage and weaves ideology into it: ideology sets in place an imaginary relation to the real conditions of existence. Baudry then takes this notion a step further by applying it to the cinema. The cinematographic apparatus - the camera, projector and screen - are the methods by which the real conditions of existence are represented in the cinema. Therefore, according to Baudry's argument, the cinematographic apparatus sets in place an imaginary relation to the real conditions of existence. On this count, the cinematographic apparatus is fundamentally ideological.
3. Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects. Intuitively, Althusser's as- sertion here is even more difficult to grasp. If individuals are not subjects, then what are they? And what does ideology have to do with making indi- viduals into subjects, for can't we all be considered subjects anyway, with or without ideology? The seemingly obvious answers to these questions form part of Althusser's point: it seems entirely natural for us to conceive of ourselves as subjects because that is the reigning ideology of our day.
For human beings to conceive of themselves as subjects is a happening
of fairly recent origin (say, of the past two or three hundred years), and Althusser contends that for humans to understand themselves as subjects is something possible only under the conditions of bourgeois, capitalist ideology. The category of the subject is one that upholds the beliefs and interests of the bourgeois classes, for it is a particular way of conceiving of what human beings are: free, isolated individuals who are solely re- sponsible and answerable for the outcomes of their actions, rather than individuals who are determined by larger social forces.
What does Althusser mean by declaring that ideology interpellates indi- viduals as subjects? Interpellation, for Althusser, is a form of recognition, so that, in ideology, individuals may be said to recognize themselves as subjects. Again, Althusser's reasoning may seem odd, for surely only if individuals are already subjects will they necessarily recognize themselves as subjects. Not so, however, according to Althusser. Rather, it is the very process of being recognized by ideology that makes individuals into sub- jects. In other words, individuals only recognize themselves as subjects if the ideology at first recognizes them as subjects.
Althusser's overarching point is therefore that individuals are not sub- jects automatically but are only made so by ideology. We shall see that this category of the subject - which both Baudry and Metz refer to as a 'transcendental subject' - has been very important for conceptualizing the positions of spectators of the cinema.
4. Ideology can be countered by science. If ideology is conceived by Althusser as an imaginary relation to real conditions, is there a way of breaking down this imaginary relation so that the real conditions of ex- istence can manifest themselves? In simple terms, if ideology emanates from those elements of society which uphold the power of the bourgeois classes, then to break with ideology is to break this power. To expose the 'real conditions of existence', therefore, is to reveal the manner in which the working classes are exploited by the bourgeoisie. Althusser refers to the manner of this exploitation as the 'real relations of production'. The task of ideology, on the other hand, is to cover up the real relations of production.
Althusser refers to the domain which can expose ideology- the domain which is 'outside' ideology - as science. By calling it science, he does not necessarily mean the disciplines of biology, chemistry, physics, and so on, for he means those human sciences such as Marxism, psychoanalysis and philosophy - and structuralism, especially - whose very task is, according to Althusser, to theorize the real relations of production. Once again the role of theory is paramount here, for it is by way of the theoretical analysis of society and its structures that 'scientific knowledge' of the real relations of production can be surmised. Again, we shall see that Baudry utilizes the distinction between ideology and science in his essay.
As was noted above, Baudry conceives of Hollywood cinema as reso- lutely ideological. This means that, to follow in Althusser's footsteps, the Hollywood cinema must represent the real conditions of existence in an imaginary way and, in doing so, interpellate individuals as subjects.
For Baudry, therefore, how does Hollywood and its cinematographic ap- paratus manage to do this? Baudry argues that there is one overriding reason to conceive of the cinematographic apparatus as ideological and that is that the cinematographic apparatus is geared towards denying dif- ference in favour of unity. The apparatus achieves this unity in three ways:
1. The 'screen-mirror'. Just as the mirror unifies the fragmentary body of the child according to Lacan's theory of the mirror stage, so too does the cinema screen offer the spectator who gazes upon it a unity which is not typically found in reality. The cinema screen, for Baudry (and indeed also for Metz, as we shall see) thus functions in a way that is similar to the mirror of the mirror stage. Baudry notes some similarities between the way in which spectators are situated in front of a cinema screen and the way the child is positioned in front of the mirror during the mirror stage. First of all, the spectator, like the child, is immobile - the mirror stage typically takes hold before a child can crawl or walk, while cinema spectators are likewise immobilized in their seats. Second, the spectator's relation to the screen is primarily visual in much the same way as the child gets its bearings as a self from its visual capacities: the child's production of an imaginary relation to the self is established visually, by way of its reflection in the mirror. Key to understanding Baudry's point is that the cinema screen provides spectators with images instead of reality and therefore it offers representations of reality rather than reality itself. By doing this, the cinema represents the real conditions of existence in an imaginary way - a precise, Althusserian definition of ideology.
2. Movement, continuity and unity. Baudry argues that the cinema offers a transformation of 'objective reality'. The camera records photographic images of 'objective reality', then these images are edited and projected in a cinema theatre. At each stage of this process, a transformation occurs.
The camera is a site of inscription, while the end result is a projection, with the result, Baudry claims, that
between the inscription and projection are situated certain oper- ations, a work which has as its result a finished product. To the extent that it is cut off from the raw material ('objective reality') this product does not allow us to see the transformation which has taken place.
(1985: 533)
The cinematographic apparatus is an apparatus of transformation, but the processes of this transformation are typically hidden: the end product (the projection of a film) is irrevocably severed from the real process of its production; that is, the end product we see in Hollywood films offers an
out and out denial of the work involved in producing that end.
This denial of the transformational processes of cinema is the case be- cause the traditional patterns of Hollywood cinema have provided that outcome. Even if the many frames, shots and scenes that make up a film are captured at different places and times, the traditions of Hollywood cin- ema have always aimed to maintain the unity of the filmic fabric, to form its disparate images and scenarios into an organic unity. Baudry attributes this organic unity to Hollywood's insistence on restoring continuity to discontinuous elements - what is known as continuity editing - but also to the persistence of vision which restores the illusion of movement to the separate, individual frames of a film. The meaning effect produced', argues Baudry, 'does not depend only on the content of the images but also on the material procedures by which an illusion of continuity, dependent on persistence of vision, is restored from the discontinuous el- ements' (1985: 536). Once again, therefore, the cinema is based on giving rise to an imaginary relation to reality: the 'real conditions of existence' are covered over by the processes of a transformation of reality which occurs by way of the cinematographic apparatus (camera -f editing + pro- jector). The cinematographic apparatus is, on the basis of Baudry's points here, inherently ideological.
3. Perspective and monocular vision: The typical way that a cinema camera - or photographic camera - captures images of reality is in ac- cordance with the theory of linear perspective, or perspetiva artificialis, which was mathematically formulated during the fifteenth century. The system of perspective has been used widely by artists and architects ever since as a way of representing three dimensions on a two-dimensional plane. Indeed, most computer graphics which attempt to describe three- dimensional spaces also rely on linear perspective. The system of perspec- tive is based on the notion that three dimensions can be represented on a two-dimensional plane if that representation is made to cohere with a sin- gle point. This single point is both the Vanishing point' of the image and the ideal position of the spectator's eye (see Edgerton 1975; White 1972). Perspective is therefore a system in which a spectator is reduced to a single point. With the system of perspective, the viewing subject is fixed in reference to a specific position: the vanishing point. The viewing subject is thus monocular, reduced to the vantage point of a single eye.
In this way the system of perspective, and the optical instruments which conform to this system, not the least of which is the cinematographic
camera, generate a vision intended for the point of view of an isolated, idealized subject. As Baudry argues, 'It lays out the space of an ideal vi- sion and in this way', he adds, 'asserts the necessity of a transcendence' (1985: 534).
The transcendence inherent in the idealized vision of the cinemato- graphic apparatus is attributable to none other than what Baudry calls a transcendental subject. This transcendental subject exists beyond experi- ence and without a body, and is, above all, an idealized subject who is the centre of a world of vision. In short, the cinema, as provided by continu- ity editing and the system of perspective and the idealistically transparent 'mirror-screen', gives rise to an idealized view of the world. For Baudry, this idealization of what the viewer sees is inherently ideological. In short, what Baudry means to imply is that all otherness, difference and multi- plicity are reduced and denied at the cinema. Rather, what is presented there is a world which is centred and unified on me and for me. Again, Baudry's argument is one in which the cinema apparatus is produced by denying difference in favour of unity.
And if the eye is no longer fettered by a body, by the laws of matter and time, if there are no longer any assignable limits to its displacement - conditions fulfilled by the possibilities of shooting and of film - the world will not only be constituted by this eye but for it.
(1985: 537) The cinematographic apparatus interpellates individuals as transcenden- tal subjects: the cinema makes individuals into self-centred, self-seeking, self-affirming identities who feel as though they are the centre of the world.
Baudry does, however, consider that there might be ways of counter- ing what he sees as being the extremely negative cinematic apparatus produced by Hollywood films. Films which expose the ideological func- tioning of the cinema apparatus - films which explicitly display the work involved in the transformation from 'objective reality' to screen - will be able to counteract the ideology of the dominant, Hollywood cinema apparatus. Baudry poses the question thusly: 'The question becomes: is the work made evident, does consumption of the product bring about a
"knowledge effect", or is the work concealed? If the latter, consumption of the product will obviously be accompanied by ideological surplus value' (1985: 533). For him, if films are effective in displaying the work of the apparatus, then they will be able to produce a 'knowledge effect': they will be science rather than ideology. We shall pose this question to Singin' in the Rain at the end of this chapter.