a preposition proposition

Maybe it shows that I'm drawn to Marxist and psychoanalytic traditions of criticism, as Travis suggested, but I did appreciate the way the Cahiers editors "read" Young Mr. Lincoln. The sequence-by-sequence approach to analysis makes sense, in a sort of "gut" way (and now, I suppose, that's ideology taking its place). Their placing of the film-text in its historico-socio-politico-economic context makes the same sort of sense. That is, these are the elements of an approach that, once fully articulated, allows for a great deal of interpretation. I am willing to grant the writers that interpretive maneuvering on the basis that their method consists in "activating this network [of determinations, ideological/material/etc] in its complexity" (502). The one (mostly rhetorical) technique I want to question in their work is the status of agency -- in other words, their positing of the film as an actor. This seems to happen almost unconsciously (to borrow the psychoanalytic metaphor) in their attempts to mine the "key signification of each scene" (still 502, emphasis theirs). OF each scene, not IN each scene -- and this is my major, if ultimately pedantic, point.

For example, they write: "the film thus effects a naturalisation [sic] of the Lincolnian myth" (503, emphasis theirs). Emphasis most certainly theirs, since I would emphasize the
verb effects. Note that they might just have easily have written, "A naturalisation of the Lincolnian myth is effected in the film". Their choice of wording, however, makes of the film not only the container for the naturalization of the Lincolnian myth, but the very force that puts such a naturalization in motion. This position continues throughout the reading: "the film's ideological purpose" (505); "the film establishes " (507); "the scene presents the relationship" (509, from one of the most insightful and easy-to-follow points in the essay); "the film's supreme guile" (510); "the scene insists" (511); "cf the direction indicated by the film" (512); "the new plot, which this scene develops" (513); "Thus what is happening here is precisely the cinematic questioning of direct vision" (514); "the scene, however, mercilessly destroys this atmosphere" (517); "the film's ideological strategy" (519); "the change in size between the first long shot... and the close up ... compel the viewer to interpret them as..." (521); "a film which at the same time wants to play upon a certain suspense" (525); and so on and so on and so on. My point should be clear - while this sort of anthropomorphism of the film-in-the-process-of-becoming-text is not absolute (there are notable exceptions), it is the dominant mode of the authors' engagement with the film they are reading.

This becomes problematic at the (maybe obvious) level of deviation from that device. When the editors wish to discuss a style, shot or narrative device peculiar to Ford, for example, they tend to change or drop the prepositions of agency in that moment. Sometimes they resort to descriptions of the content alone, foregoing any mention of the apparatus: "But Lincoln's slightly ridiculous solemnity is underlined on the one hand by the other spectators' joyful exuberance, and on the other by a succession of grotesque incidents, coupled with the veterans' shabby appearance, very much in the Fordian tradition." (511) Other times, they take a sort of meta-step back from the film-text, instead engaging more directly with its "complex network", e.g. "an imposition of Ford's writing on Lincoln's character (Lincoln's omnipotence is then controlled and limited by Ford's omnipotence" (522, emphasis theirs). In both cases, they start talking about what is IN or AROUND the film-text rather than what the film-text DOES.