Making Meaning : : Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema / / David Bordwell.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter HUP eBook Package Archive 1893-1999
• VerfasserIn: Bordwell, David,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2022]; ©1989
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Harvard Film Studies
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (352 p.)

David Bordwell's new book is at once a history of film criticism, an analysis of how critics interpret film, and a proposal for an alternative program for film studies. It is an anatomy of film criticism meant to reset the agenda for film scholarship. As such Making Meaning should be a landmark book, a focus for debate from which future film study will evolve. Bordwell systematically maps different strategies for interpreting films and making meaning, illustrating his points with a vast array of examples from Western film criticism. Following an introductory chapter that sets out the terms and scope of the argument, Bordwell goes on to show how critical institutions constrain and contain the very practices they promote, and how the interpretation of texts has become a central preoccupation of the humanities. He gives lucid accounts of the development of film criticism in France, Britain, and the United States since World War II; analyzes this development through two important types of criticism, thematic-explicatory and symptomatic; and shows that both types, usually seen as antithetical, in fact have much in common. These diverse and even warring schools of criticism share conventional, rhetorical, and problem-solving techniques-a point that has broad-ranging implications for the way critics practice their art. The book concludes with a survey of the alternatives to criticism based on interpretation and, finally, with the proposal that a historical poetics of cinema offers the most fruitful framework for film analysis.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- 1. Making Films Mean -- Interpretation as Construction -- Meaning Made -- Interpretive Doctrines -- 2. Routines and Practices -- Introduction -- Interpretation Inc. -- The Logic of Discovery or Problem-Solving -- The Logic of Justification or Rhetoric -- An Anatomy of Interpretation -- 3. Interpretation as Explication -- The French Connection -- Explication Academicized -- Picture Planes -- Meaning and Unity -- 4. Symptomatic Interpretation -- Introduction -- Culture Dream and Lauren Bacall -- Myth as Antinomy -- Systeme a la Mode -- The Contradictory Text -- Symptoms and Explications -- 5. Semantic Fields -- Introduction -- Meanings in Structures -- Structures of Meaning -- The Role of Semantic Fields -- 6. Schemata and Heuristics -- Mapping as Making -- Knowledge Structures and Routines -- Mapping as Modeling -- 7. Two Basic Schemata -- Is There a Class for This Text? -- Making Films Personal -- 8. Text Schemata -- Introduction -- A Bull's-Eye Schema -- Meaning Inside Out and Outside In -- Textual Trajectories -- Doctrines into Diachronies -- 9. Interpretation as Rhetoric -- Introduction -- Sample Strategies -- Theory Talk -- 10. Rhetoric in Action: Seven Models of Psycho -- Jean Douchet, "Hitch and His Public" (1960) -- Robin Wood, "Psycho," Hitchcock's Films (1965) -- Raymond Durgnat, "Inside Norman Bates," Films and Feelings (1967) -- V. F. Perkins, "The World and Its Image," Film as Film (1972) -- Raymond Bellour, "Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion" (1979) -- Barbara Klinger, "Psycho: The Institutionalization of Female Sexuality" (1982) -- Leland Poague, "Links in a Chain: Psycho and Film Classicism" (1986) -- 11. Why Not to Read a Film -- The Ends of Interpretation -- The End of Interpretation? -- Prospects for a Poetics -- Notes -- Index