Conclusion: Method-Free Orientation

Summary

Over the course of the discipline's still relatively short history, film studies has proposed a range of orientational strategies, including attending to: a film's authorship and the intentions behind it (perhaps assisted by information about its production history); patterns of comprehension based in universal or at least quasi-universal features of human cognition; the details of the particular means – often conceptualised as quasi-linguistic – by which films signify or produce meaning; the ways historical conditions find expression in particular films; genres and the webs of shared, public expectations they form, and how these webs shape and guide viewers’ orientational presuppositions; the gender or sexual politics represented in a film, or implied by its means of representation; ideological phenomena, often expressed in unconscious contradictions between material conditions of production and explicitly stated content or intentions; or unconscious processes more generally, whether at work in a film's producers or its spectators. All these methods, and others besides, have made great contributions to our understanding of films. But they all have also, at one time or another, been proposed as secure methods of achieving true understanding of films or, to put it in the language of this book, of reliably keeping disorientation to a minimum.

It is my contention that, with regard to the aesthetic judgement of films – which is by no means detached from questions of authorship, cognition, signification, history, ideology and so forth, but is nevertheless not synonymous with them – the best orientational method is the absence of method. By this I do not mean that aesthetic criticism should not be methodical but that it should aim to avoid general methods, that the critic should be prepared to attend to the individual film and tailor their method to the demands of that film rather than arriving armed with a predetermined way of forcing the film to give up its secrets. The most interesting forms of confusion and disorientation might then be seen not as calling for methodological rectification but as methodological resources in themselves.