Graeme Turner - Film as Social Practice

Film as Social Practice (1993) seeks to distance itself from past forms of film study. Turner begins the work by establishing the fact that he is not willing to separate “the film as a piece of art” from its meaning as an instrument of social practice. In addition to the film itself, Turner takes into account the audience, boxoffice, studio, producer, marketing campaign, stars, effects of history (e.g., outbreak of war) and political interference in order to arise with a theory of film as social practice. He argues that there is always a two-way (or more) negotiation between the film and all of these entities and that the film creates these categories as much as they form it.

He begins with an interesting example about the introduction of sound to the film industry and theorizes as to why sound came at that point in time. Optical sound was the crucial component to the rise of the feature film as we know it. Turner argues that it fulfilled a “need” (cultural, aesthetic, political) over and above the economic need that business always demands. He draws this notion from Buscombe who writes that “technological development all comes as a result of some sort of need over and above the economic” (1977) (1993 2^nd ed.).

Talking film, sound, came as a result of the need for realism to which the human subject is in constant pursuit. Turner writes “the camera itself is an apparatus that embodies a theory of reality, ideology, because it sees the world as an object of a single individual’s point of view” (1993 2^nd ed.). Drawing from the Renaissance notion that we are individuals and possess individual views of the world, cinema becomes a vehicle for experiencing and exploring point of view. Turner quotes Neale who writes that “photography constituted an enormous social investment in the centrality of the eye in the category and identity of the individual, in a specific form of visual pleasure, and in an ideology of the visibility of the world” (Steve Neale 1985, 22) (1993 2^nd ed.). Photography is a realistic reproduction of the world offered by the camera embedded in the ideological and aesthetic systems of the 19^th century. Film, with sound, offers a future realistic reproduction of the world. Overall, sound was far more important in terms of impact than was the introduction of colour to the screen.

Turner lists other reasons for the need for sound:

v Narrative structures become more complex

v Dwindling theatre audiences

v Hollywood re-establishes its hegemony over other markets (leads to the studio system)

v Financial backing on Wall Street and movement to other industries in order to acquire sound

A theory of reality is also affected by the introduction colour (1993 2^nd ed. 21-22). Despite the fact colour implies the real world, black and white films generated a new “way of seeing” that was more real than a technicolour world. Much akin to Kress and Van Leeuwen’s notion of modality, Turner explains that colour signified fantasy worlds like the Wizard of Oz or Biblical epics until people became more accustomed to it. The truth-value of colour had not been established.

He analyzes plot structures according to Narrative theories.