Film Theory. an Introduction (2000)

Robert Stam. Film Theory. An Introduction. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, 381 pp. $26.95 (paper), $59.95 (cloth). A Return of Pleasure to Film Theory In his new book, Film Theory. An Introduction, Robert Stam offers the most lucid, informed, and comprehensive overview of theory from the birth of cinema to the present that exists in English. Stressing that theory, like aspects of history, develops within broad cultural, social, and political context, Stam eloquently explores connections between and the wider world of thought and action. He shows that such links have been significant not just in the last thirty years--when academic study has developed in tandem with new disciplines such as feminist and postcolonial thought, cultural studies, and cognitive theory--but also earlier. For example, in Stam's account, the concerns of Russian Formalism, the Bakhtin Circle, and Prague Structuralism in the 1920s and '30s form rich backdrop to the films and writings of Eisenstein, Vertov, and Soviet artists. More recently, views identified with either Formalism or Bakhtin have influenced the scholarship of David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Stam himself. While Stam examines links between and the wider world, he also addresses relationships within theory--for example, the way in which Hugo Munsterberg's suggestion in 1916 that the spectator's mind actualizes the film anticipates reception theory of the 1980s. Somewhat as Vachel Lindsay, writing about at the same time as Munsterberg, hailed it as hybrid medium in which various art forms collaborate, Stam theory at its best as dialogue, conflux of perspectives designed to illuminate complex films. In embracing this diversity, Stam remains faithful to Bakhtinian dialogism and heteroglossia, which he has examined in previous writings, particularly in his book Subversive Pleasures. Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (1992). Along with poststructural and postcolonial thought, Bakhtin also influences Stam's impassioned commitment to multiculturalism, described in detail in Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (1994), which Stain wrote with Ella Shohat. In Film Theory. An Introduction, Stam observes that theory for most of its history ignored race, and he insists on the need for polycentric multiculturalism. Such multiculturalism does not merely include other voices within pre-existing mainstream, explains Stam, but is celebratory and so called minoritarian communities as active, generative participants at the very core of shared, conflictual history. Further, it sees identities as multiple, unstable, historically situated, the products of ongoing differentiation and polymorphous identifications. Going beyond narrow definitions of identity politics, it is reciprocal, dialogical; it all acts of verbal or cultural exchange as taking place not between essential, discrete, bounded individuals or cultures but rather between permeable, changing individuals and communities . Stam's informed, exacting attention to multiculturalism and to theories of Third Cinema (minoritarian as well as Third World films) constitutes distinctive strength of his introduction to theory. A further aspect of Stam's outlook that he shares with Bakhtin is regard for pleasure as it is generated in the course of wider, freer human contact and exchange. Exemplifying such liberation is the tradition of the carnivalesque, described by Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World. This counter-- hegemonic tradition, writes Stam, runs from Greek Dionysian festivals and the Roman Saturnalia, through the grotesque realism of the medieval 'carnivalesque,' on through Shakespeare and Cervantes, and finally to Jarry and Surrealism. In this tradition, hierarchical distinctions and barriers to communication are suspended, if just briefly, and a new kind of popular, convulsive, rebellious beauty is born or revealed amid cosmic gaiety and laughter. …