A LITERARY SENSIBILITY

Grounded in the French tradition of “explication du texte” as a means of approaching literature, and formed by his initial postgraduate work on French poetry (on Henri Michaux, in particular), Raymond Bellour was among the first film scholars to bring a French literary sensibility to the analysis of classical Hollywood film, which enabled him to recognize the rhetorical refinements of the cinematic medium and its potential for poetic expression. One of his most important contributions to the practice of film analysis, therefore, was his application of the techniques of literary analysis to the “body” of a film, specifically by paying close attention to shots, frame by frame, in order to identify the rhythms and repetitions that structure its presentation, as well as its apprehension by the spectator.

His work in this area was widely circulated in the form of individual articles and book chapters in French and English, and then anthologized in a volume in French in 1979 (reprinted in 1995), with the latter belatedly translated into English as The Analysis of Film (Bloomington: Indiana Press, 2000). The studies included in this English-language book would prove influential because they provided a tool that served to highlight the sophistication of cinema as a visual medium, thereby lending it legitimacy as an art form. Bellour showed that the apparent transparency of film narrative masked the opacity of its mechanisms of expression, which owed their efficacy to a hidden complexity rivaling the hermetic strategies that had become the hallmark of modernism.

The specificity of Bellour's approach was shaped by a set of contradictory intellectual currents arising out of structuralism, on the one hand, especially the work of Christian Metz (a grammarian by training), expressed most obviously in the latter's concept of the grande syntagmatiqueand, on the other, by psychoanalysis (both Freudian and Lacanian), and by the later work of Roland Barthes. The influence of the latter led Bellour to an impasse in which his structuralist tendencies were at odds with his engagement with Barthes. This is expressed most vividly in his 1985 article “L’Analyse flambée,” translated somewhat misleadingly as “Analysis in Flames,” in which he was interpreted by scholars as announcing the death of film analysis – such as by Constance Penley in her preface to the English version of Film Analysis in 2000.