Foreword: Through Carroll's Looking Glass of Criticism

Summary

“I meant by ‘impenetrability’ that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life.”

“That's a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone.

“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.”

– Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

In a critique of the film theory of André Bazin that is both penetrating in its logic and devastating to Bazin's theoretical argument and yet seems somehow nearly irrelevant to what most of us would agree is the importance of Bazin to film studies, Noël Carroll proposes a distinction between film theory and film criticism. Redefining Bazin's theory of cinematic realism, Carroll claims it is best approached as an argument in favor of a particular film style rather than definition of the essence of cinema. Instead of a coherent argument about the nature of the film image, Bazin offers, as Carroll puts it, “an astute appreciation of an important stylistic shift.” Acknowledging that the weakness of Bazin's theoretical metalogic does not gainsay his deep insight into a stylistic change in film history, Carroll admits, with the sort of disarming candor that so often strikes one in his work, “What fails as theory may excel as criticism.”