Table Of ContentThe Analysis of Film
Google
Original from
Digitized by
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Publication history and sources of English translations
A Bit of History (originally "D'une histoire"), published in L'analyse du film,
Raymond Bellour (Paris: Editions Albatros, 1979), translated by Mary Quaintance
for Indiana University Press.
The Unattainable Text (originally "Le texte introuvable"), published in L'analyse
du film; originally published in <;a cinema, special Christian Metz issue (no. 7-8
[May 1975]); published in Screen (vol.16, no.3 [Fall 1975]) as "The Unattainable
Text," translated by Ben Brewster. Reprinted by permission.
System of a Fragment (originally "Systeme d'un fragment"), published in L'analyse
du film; originally published in Cahiers du cinema (no. 216 [October 1969]) as
"Les oiseaux: Analyse d'une sequence"; published (in mimeo) by BFI Education
Department, March 1972, and reprinted January 1981 as "The Birds: Analysis of
a Sequence," translated by Ben Brewster. Reprinted by permission.
The Obvious and the Code (originally "L'evidence et le code"), published in
L'analyse du film; originally published in Revue d'esthetique, special issue, Cinema:
Theorie, lectures (1973); published in Screen (vol. 15, no.4 (Winter 1974n5]) as
"The Obvious and the Code," translated by Diana Matias. Reprinted by permis-
.
s1on.
Symbolic Blockage (originally "Le blocage symbolique"), published in L'analyse
du film; originally published in Communications, special issue on Psychanalyse et
cinema (no. 23 (1975]), translated by Mary Quaintance for Indiana University
Press.
To Segment/To Analyze (o riginally "Segmenter/Analyser"), published in L'analyse
du film; originally published in Quarterly Review ofF ilm Studies (vol. 1, no. 3 [Au
gust 1976]) as "To Segment, To Analyze," translated by Maureen Turim; revised
translation by Diana Matias published in Genre: The Musical, ed. Rick Altman
(London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981); chapter 5 of The Analysis
of
Film is based on this latter version.
To Enunciate (originally "Enoncer"), published in L'analyse du film; originally
published in Camera Obscura (vol. 1, no. 2 [Fall 1977]) as "Hitchcock, the Enun
ciator," translated by Bertrand Augst and Hillary Radner (revised by Constance
Penley for this edition). Reprinted by permission.
Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion (originally "Psychose, nevrose, perversion"), pub
lished in L'analyse du film; originally published in <;a cinema (no.17 [ 1979]); pub
lished in Camera Obscura (no. 3-4 [1979]) as "Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion,"
translated by Nancy Huston. Reprinted by permission.
To Alternate/To Narrate (originally "Alterner/Raconter"), published in Le cinema
americain: Analyses de film, ed. Raymond Bellour (Paris: Flammarion, 1980); pub
of
lished by Australian Journal Screen Theory (vol.15/16 [ 1983]), translated by Inge
Pruks (revised by Roxanne Lapidus for this edition). Reprinted by permission.
Google Original from
Digitized by
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
alysis of Film
e
■
Raymond Bellour
~
Edited by Constance Penley
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
Google
Original from
Digitized by
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
9
g \ ;;).__
gC)
d
JI 7 5
~
This book is a publication of
l3rr
Indiana University Press
601 North Morton Street
-t..
Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA
http://www.indiana.edu/~iupress
Telephone orders 800-842-6796
Fax orders 812-855-7931
Orders by e-mail [email protected]
© 2000 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association
of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions consti
tutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum require
ments of American National Standard for Information Sciences
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-
1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bellour, Raymond.
[Analyse du film. English]
The analysis of film/Raymond Bellour; edited by Constance
Penley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-253-33700-3 (alk. paper)-ISBN 0-253-21364-9 (pbk.:
alk. paper)
l. Hitchcock, Alfred, 1899- 2. Motion pictures-Production
and direction. 3. Cinematography. I. Penley, Constance, 1948-
11. Title.
PN1998.3.H58 B4513 2000
791.43'023 3'092- dc2l
99-045486
1 2 3 4 5 05 04 03 02 01 00
Google
Original from
Digitized by
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
To
THIERRY KUNTZEL
CHRISTIAN METZ
Google Original from
Digitized by
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Google
Original from
Digitized by
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
CONTENTS
.
Preface by Constance Penley
IX
A Bit of History I
I .
The Unattainable Text 21
2.
System of a Fragment (on The Birds) 28
3.
The Obvious and the Code (o n The Big Sleep) 69
4.
Symbolic Blockage (o n North by Northwest) 77
5.
To Segment/To Analyze (on Gigi) 193
6.
To Enunciate (o n Mamie) 217
7.
Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion (o n Psycho) 238
8.
To Alternate/To Narrate (on The Lonedale Operator) 262
~- 2~
Works by Raymond Bellour 295
Index 297
Google
Original from
Digitized by
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Google Original from
Digitized by
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
PREFACE
Constance Penley
Raymond Bellour's approach to scholarship and writing has been astonishingly con
sistent over many years, especially given the broad range of nineteenth- and twenti
eth-century images and texts that he has worked on, including film, photography,
video, novels, interviews, diaries, and critical editions of writers from the Brontes to
Michaux. He typically advances knowledge by following his own fascinations rather
than the protocols of a set research program. He tends not to adopt technical lan
guages wholesale but rather to borrow and recombine terms and concepts for the
needs of the task at hand. He warrants his arguments through art as much as sci
ence. He refuses to claim as definitive even his most exhaustive analyses. He relishes
collaboration, as can be seen in the work he has done over the years with friends and
colleages, most notably Christian Metz, Thierry Kuntzel, and Serge Daney. Al
though never anyone's disciple, he created his own "book of others" (Le livre des
autres) by inerviewing and writing about many of France's most important think
ers, Merleau-Ponty and Blanchot from the fifties; then the "structuralists," Barthes,
Lacan, Levi-Strauss, and Foucault; later and very importantly Deleuze; and always
certain historians, in particular Aries. Finally, he understood the importance of situ
ated knowledge long before it became de rigueur in academic discourse, as can be
seen in the frank acknowledgment of his implication in the Western, male-domi
nated stories and structures his work attempts to analyze.
The Analysis of Film is based largely on L'analyse du film, first published in
1979 and reprinted in 1995. 1 It brings together Bellour's now classical analyses of
classical Hollywood film, in a volume that consists of at least three books. The first
book presents his pioneering methods for the close analysis of film. The second
examines the work of Alfred Hitchcock, one of the greatest formal innovators in the
history of cinema. The third offers original insights that are informed by a lifetime of
research on American cinema.
There is yet a fourth, more virtual, book that appears when reading Bellour's
extensive comments on the role of the woman in Western representation alongside
the lively feminist engagement with his film analyses. Feminist film scholar Judith
Mayne, writing in 1990, claimed that "much feminist work of the last decade or so
has been a response to the assumptions inherent in both [Laura] Mulvey's and
Bellour's work."2 Even feminists who found his conclusions about female subjectiv
ity in Hollywood film to be too pessimistic or totalizing nonetheless believed that
his approach offered a powerful model of how to write about the complexities of
film meaning and narrative, shot by shot, sequence by sequence, while addressing
Google
Original from
Digitized by
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
x I Preface
larger social and psychological issues of subjectivity, desire, and identification in
Western culture. 3
of
A key feature of The Analysis Film is the appearance for the first time in
English of "Symbolic Blockage," Bellour's magisterial, monograph-length study of
North by Northwest, which brilliantly demonstrates the intricate ways in which the
multiple mirroring and interlocking systems of the film- micro- and macro-textual,
hermeneutic, symbolic-resolve themselves in an Oedipally fueled fantasy of na
tion and couple so typical of American cinema. This study complements a new
chapter, "To Alternate/To Narrate" (chapter 8), on D. W. Griffith's The Lonedale
Operator, which was written after the publication of L'analyse du film. This 1980
study is included here because it shows so convincingly that the dynamics of alter
nation and t.he repetition-resolution effect that Bellour discovered to be the heart
beat of Hollywood narrative film were already there in nascent form at the begin
ning of cinema. The stakes of the argument of "To Alternate/To Narrate" can best
be understood by placing the essay in its original context, Bellour's two-volume, still
definitive collection on American cinema, Le cinema americain: Analyses de film
( 1980), which brought together the best of French and Anglo-American analyses
of American films and their history.4 Bellour's contribution to the study of Ameri
can film stretches back to at least 1966, the year in which his edited collection Le
Western appeared. As Janet Bergstrom pointed out in her 1979 interview with him,
while other contributors to that volume chose to write about such elements of the
genre as "Indian attack," "sheriff's office," "fistfight," "gambler," or "ranch," Bellour
chose "woman." Bergstrom also notes that even in this very early study of American
cinema, Bellour closely links "an analysis of the woman's symbolic position as cru
cial in determining the narrative structure, the system of fictional representation
carried over from the nineteenth-century novel, and enunciation as the principe
producteur of the narrative."5
Four short but seminal essays from L'analyse du film are regrettably missing
here for reasons of space. (Bellour's introduction has been modified slightly to re
flect these omissions and the addition of one new essay.) Even though they are from
what the author refers to as his "pre-analytic" period, the degree to which these early
essays prefigure-conceptually and practically-all of his later approaches to ana
lyzing the system of classical Hollywood cinema, and beyond that, other national
cinemas and other media as well, is striking. These four essays also show his early
predilection for the work of directors who "embody the very possibility of cinema"
and who state and restate through their direction-the mise-en-scene-the "pri
macy of vision," as Bellour puts it in "On Fritz Lang," the only one of the essays
published in English.6 In "Le monde et la distance," "Sur Fritz Lang," "Sur l'espace
cinematographique," and "Ce que savait Hitchcock," it is clear that he was already
concerned, from the mid-sixties on, with the necessity of understanding the mini
mal signifying elements of filmic narration ( camera distance, framing, movements
within the frame, etc.), enunciation and the director's role in enunciation, and the
whole range of repetitions, oppositions, and variations between and across levels
that gradually produce the film's volume and meaning.7
It was no simple auteurism that attracted Bellour first to Lang and then
Google Original from
Digitized by
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
-- ·-- ..,.t
