Jeff Menne reviews Fredric Jameson and Film Theory

Fredric Jameson and Film Theory: Marxism, Allegory, and Geopolitics in World Cinema. Ed. Keith B. Wagner, Jeremi Szaniawski, and Michael Cramer. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2022. 268 pp.

Review by Jeff Menne

8 August 2024

For his ninetieth birthday Fredric Jameson’s longtime publisher Verso assembled a roster of critics to pay tribute to each of his books—their roster is long on illustrious literary critics but short on scholars properly identified with film studies.[1] The recent essay collection, Fredric Jameson and Film Theory, means to address an unevenness of this kind. Editors Keith B. Wagner, Jeremi Szaniawski, and Michael Cramer suggest that the mark Jameson has left on film studies is scarcely legible—not in the way that the marks of Gilles Deleuze and Slavoj Žižek are—and they attribute this to the scale of historical imagination that Jameson’s methodology entails. “There are very few film scholars,” they say, “who approach film in a broad enough way so as to see its history as inextricable from the development of capitalism itself” (p. 2) Jameson himself remarks in an afterword that the only “method” that personally interests him is “to insert a film (or another kind of work of art) into a historical narrative,” a practice that “will somehow always turn it into something of a transitional object” (p. 252). Transitions don’t always take, of course, but an openness to historical change—a feel for history as process—is for Jameson a primary value for the aesthetic object.

The method that has let Jameson move between aesthetic objects, from literature to film and beyond, is known in one guise as allegory. “Interpretation,” Jameson says in The Political Unconscious, is to be “construed as an essentially allegorical act.”[2] But this is allegory as a device for moving between social levels, and because it decenters the text the critic is less committed to literature or film, as such, than to the method. In the case of film, Wagner, Szaniawski, and Cramer describe it as a method for “mov[ing] beyond the immediate experience of visual pleasure” but—and herein lies the claim the editors make for Jameson’s importance—in a direction quite at odds with the so-called Screen theory predominant in the 1970s, which conceived of criticism as a “purely negative” act: its purpose, the editors say, was to reveal “the falseness of any image or code that claims to give us access to the real” (pp. 12, 8). Because Jameson is largely unconcerned with the falseness of a representation, and is focused instead on its capacity for libidinal investment, he can attend to the sensuous pleasures and formal excitements of film without losing sight of its historical imbrications; his method readily scales between close reading and periodization.

The gambit of this essay collection is that Jameson’s methodology, however marginal in film studies, has had an influence too far-flung to generate a subfield but one that must yet be registered, organized in this very form—an essay collection—if we are to understand the work it has enabled. Here my task is only to call attention to the salutary goal of the editors; its realization in the individual essays should be reckoned with by readers. And its readership ought to overlap with the discipline of film studies, insofar as Jameson’s “simultaneous presence and absence” in the field can show a way out from the stalemate between Screen theory and Post-Theory (which both, to quote the editors, “treat film as a kind of ahistorical machine that works upon a subject conceived of as uniform and outside of any particular historical context”) (pp. 4, 6). Dudley Andrews’s retrospective assessment of Jameson’s essay on Diva, for instance, insists that Diva did in fact mark a “conjuncture,” between French cinema and politics, and Andrew makes his case by deepening both the close reading and historiography that were both “offhand” and pegged to the moment in Jameson’s response to the film (p. 33). Pansy Duncan, in another fine essay, posits that the “undistinguished” medium shot might be the affective unit—“the shot of the ‘encounter,’” as she describes it—in the “cognitive mapping” of multinational capital that 1970s conspiracy films were attempting within their popular idiom (p. 224). I single out these essays only to demonstrate the range of interpretive projects made possible in the Jamesonian mode, the “geopolitical aesthetic,” as it were, entailed in the study of the cultures generated in globalized capitalism.[3] These collected essays bear out the editors’ belief that Jameson’s film theory might be a missing link that authorizes nuanced historiography without divesting the field of its critical powers.

[1] These tributes have been published on Verso’s website blog under the title “Jameson at 90.”

[2] Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981), p. 10.

[3] I use this term in reference to Jameson’s volume on film, see The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington, Ind., 1992).