Engaging the Moving Image

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by Noel Carroll,

Introduction by George Wilson

Yale University Press

Due/Published November 2003, 368 pages, cloth

ISBN 0300091958

Carroll has gathered in this book eighteen of his most recent essays on cinema and television--what Carroll calls "moving images." The essays discuss topics in philosophy, film theory, and film criticism.

Drawing on concepts from cognitive psychology and analytic philosophy, Carroll examines a wide range of fascinating topics. These include film attention, the emotional address of the moving image, film and racism, the nature and epistemology of documentary film, the moral status of television, the concept of film style, the foundations of film evaluation, the film theory of Siegfried Kracauer, the ideology of the professional western, and films by Sergei Eisenstein and Yvonne Rainer. Carroll also assesses the state of contemporary film theory and speculates on its prospects. The book continues many of the themes of Carroll's earlier work, Theorizing the Moving Image, and develops them in new directions. A general introduction by George Wilson situates Carroll's essays in relation to his view of moving-image studies.

Contents

Foreword
Introduction

1. Forget the Medium!
2. Film, Attention, and Communication: A Naturalistic Account
3. Film, Emotion, and Genre
4. Ethnicity, Race, and Monstrosity: The Rhetorics of Horror and Humor
5. Is the Medium a (Moral) Message?
6. Film Form: An Argument for a Functional Theory of Style in the Individual Film
7. Introducing Film Evaluation
8. Nonfiction Film and Postmodernist Skepticism
9. Fiction, Nonfiction, and the Film of Presumptive Assertion: Conceptual Analyses
10. Photographic Traces and Documentary Films: Comments for Gregory Currie
11. Toward a Definition of Moving-Picture Dance
12. The Essence of Cinema?
13. TV and Film: A Philosophical Perspective
14. Kracauer's Theory of Film
15. Cinematic Nation Building: Eisenstein's The Old and the New
16. The Professional Western: South of the Border
17. Moving and Moving: From Minimalism to Lives of Performers
18. Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment

Credits
Index

Review

In this rich and consistently rewarding collection of essays, Carroll demonstrates that you do not need “Big Theory” to examine issues concerning film and the moving image. Carroll adopts a piecemeal approach that asks specific questions about specific aspects of film, television, and video. He argues that it is not necessary to have “an overarching, unified theory of the moving image that answers every question about the moving image by means of a reference to a handful of foundational premises concerning either the essence of the moving image qua medium or its putative basic function.” Thus, in “Forget the Medium!” and other essays, Carroll critiques examples of classical film criticism that focus on the essential properties of film. Other subjects discussed include how film addresses its audience cognitively, perceptually, and emotionally; the processes of film evaluation; the morality of the medium of television (there is no inherent morality to the medium, it depends on its use); the objectivity of documentaries (it’s still possible, despite what postmodernists have to say); and the ways in which “certain forms of emotional address, notably horror and comic amusement, can be mobilized in the service of noxious political purposes.” Carroll’s work, as George Wilson aptly puts it in his Foreword, “widen[s] our conceptual horizons and narrow[s] our analytic focus.” Thus, Carroll also gives us original and engaging discussions of specific films and genres, including Westerns, Eisenstein’s The Old and the New, and the work of Yvonne Rainer’s. Suspicious of the pretensions of classical and postmodernist film theory, Carroll brings a welcome sense of rigor and philosophical and aesthetic depth to his writing, carefully exploring specific issues. Yet, his writing is not burdened by thorny theoretical issues or jargon; instead, he offers provocative and clear ideas that expand our understanding of the moving image.