The Apparatchiks

“Scientific criticism”
Comolli/Narboni set forth a programme: Our film journal has been operating under a rubric of vague assumptions—we here and now performatively enunciate/create those assumptions. That is, while ostensibly seeking to describe a practice, C/N’s essay in fact creates that selfsame method. Follow these rules for looking at film.
“The Film”
Here, then, are the rules. We are looking at the film, not the cinema. Designating their text as “the film,” C/N then go on to talk about “Film” or “Films.” This debate is yet ongoing—Departments do not arbitrarily choose to name themselves Film Studies or Cinema Studies or Screen Cultures or Media Studies. The Institutional name aligns with the Institutional practice. This has become particularly relevant in our digital age, where many film scholars find themselves in limbo—feeling compelled to enunciate what it is that they are looking at. So we have Bordwell/Carroll speaking of “Motion picture studies” and Rodowick speaking of “Film studies,” each framing their argument in relation to both the spectator and the physical material.
“Ideology”
Important to C/N’s critique are their underlying assumptions regarding the term “ideology.” Ideology is one of those words that, for me, acts a sortof barometer, telling me where the critic is coming from—how a thinker uses this ambiguous/powerful word tells me what kind of critic they are. The fact that C/N fail to define this term tells us much both about what kind of thinkers they are and who their audience is. The best they offer is a parenthetical quote from Althusser (If you agree with Althusser, you agree with us), which quote is not a definition but rather a reformulation, a run-around: “’Ideologies are perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects, which work fundamentally on men by a process they do not understand.’” This allows C/N, effectively, to define ideology through particular ideology-instances, through demonstratives, pointing—“This is ideology,” they say, which act of pointing always points away from themselves (You have an ideology, I have a method—I am beyond ideology).
“The Film=Ideology”
C/N categorize films according to their respective ideological contamination levels: a, b, c, d, e, f, g. They finish their cut-and-paste outline (To analyze a film, choose a category and follow the instructions listed therein) with: “It must be a rigidily factual analysis of what governs the production of a film (economic circumstances, ideology, demand, and response) and the meanings and forms appearing in it.”
C/N’s method works great as long as one swallows their assumptions. For this reason, I imagine their practice would be well-liked by those drawn to Marxist or Psychoanalytic criticism, what passed as the dominant mode of Theory through the 70s and 80s and on and on and on.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443272/
Steven Spielberg
Amblin Entertainment (Spielberg)
Screenwriters:
Tony Kushner (famous for Angels in America)
Doris Kearns Goodwin (Presidential historian—most recent book: “Team of Rivals”)