murray smith on carroll

140 • Film Studies • Issue 8 • Summer 2006

• Murray Smith

Picking up a theme from his earlier writings, butturning up the volume, Noël Carroll exhorts us to‘Forget the Medium!’ in the opening essay ofEngaging the Moving Image.1 Carroll thusgestures towards a radical doctrine that wemight call medium eliminativism. Beginning withPhilosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory,2

the theme of ‘medium specificity’ has been amajor preoccupation in Carroll’s writings. Thecentral arguments that Carroll has advanced inrespect of this theme, as they are summarizedand elaborated in this essay, are as follows: a)that film was said by many classical theorists offilm to have established a new artform, and thatthis new artform was distinct from all existingartforms in virtue of the unique properties of themedium of film; b) that this uniqueness wastaken to imply ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ aesthetic‘laws’ of the medium, or ‘categorical stylisticimperative[s]’,3 constraining how film style couldbe successfully deployed;4 c) that the proponentsof medium specificity equivocate betweenempirical and analytic arguments in support oftheir case, and in general beg the question bycovertly assuming what is to count as theessence of cinema and then purportedlydiscovering it through empirical research; d) thatartforms generally involve multiple media ratherthan a single medium, unique and distinctive tothe artform; e) consequently, many media areutilized in various artforms; f) that media areroutinely modified and re-invented; media andartforms are historical phenomena, ‘notanalogous’ to natural kinds; and finally g) on thebasis of all the foregoing, we would do better toreconceptualize the field in terms of the artformof the moving image (rather than the medium offilm). In pursuing these arguments in such detail

and with such tenacity, Carroll has performed agreat service, liberating the field from the manyblind alleys into which medium specificity has ledus; just as in other writings Carroll has freed usfrom the tyranny of Grand Theory.

I have to thank Professor Carroll in evenstronger and more personal terms, since hisremarks about medium specificity release mefrom the grip of a troubling memory. In one ofmy very first graduate film courses, the subject ofLouis Malle’s My Dinner with André (1981)somehow came up. This film had been releasedaround the time when I was first gettingseriously interested in film, and I had assimilated,more or less uncritically, the prevailing wisdom atthe time of the film’s release, viz., that it was aMasterpiece. My two teachers, however,dismissed the film briskly, sweeping aside sometentative resistance on my part with the assertionthat the film was ‘theatrical’ and ‘did not exploitthe possibilities of the medium’ – or words tothis effect. This, I think, is a paradigm case of thesort of flawed logic that Carroll identifies – that afilm’s value can be directly, logically derived byassessing the extent to which it realizes or takesadvantage of one or more techniques that aretaken to be essential to the medium.

Cut ahead twenty years and here I am,worrying about this paper, and thinking, ‘MaybeI’ll take a look at My Dinner with André again.’ Imention to my wife that I’m going to watch thefilm. ‘Shall we watch it on the big TV (in theroom with the uncomfortable sofa) or the smallTV (with the comfortable sofa)?’ I enquire. ‘Well,it’s not very cinematic, so let’s watch it on thesmall TV’ she replies. A couple of night’s later,Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour (2003) is on the menu.‘I’m not sure that I can face three hours of SpikeLee melodrama tonight’ I aver. ‘Oh, but his filmsare always so cinematic,’ my wife (re-)assures me.

My Dinner with Noël; or, Can WeForget the Medium?

chap 13 25/5/06 4:23 pm 40

Author Meets Critics: Noël Carroll’s Engaging the Moving Image •

Film Studies • Issue 8 • Summer 2006 • 141

Now my wife’s use of the adjective ‘cinematic’is clearly in important ways akin to the hostileremarks in the film class, but it’s important tostress that her remark about My Dinner wasn’tstraightforwardly damning. She’d seen the filmbefore, liked it, and wanted to see it again. Butit’s not being ‘cinematic’ was a salient feature ofthe film in her mind, certainly descriptively, andperhaps bearing in some way on the quality ofthe film (as a work of art). More on this later.

Now the question raised by this secondanecdote is the following one: is this sort oflanguage just a historical hangover? Carrollwrites of the ‘days when we still spoke about“the cinematic”’ (p. 2), as if they were long sincepassed; is he right? Or does such language stillperform an important service, pointing to asubstantive matter? Carroll doesn’t think so; infact, he suggests ‘that we might fruitfullydispense with [the concept of ‘the medium’]completely, at least in terms of the ways in whichit is standardly deployed by aestheticians’ (p. 6).Happily for her, my wife is not an aesthetician.But it’s not clear to me that her way of using theconcept of ‘the medium’ is entirely divorced fromthe way we hardened professionals would wieldit. So for now I will proceed on the basis that herutterances are relevant, but in need ofclarification and justification in the light ofCarroll’s case against the concept of mediumspecificity.

So can we forget the medium, as Carroll urgesus to? Before we can answer that question weneed a working definition of a medium.

Following Carroll, I will assume that the term‘medium’ refers to the physical materials fromwhich, and the instruments by which, a work ofart is made (paint, canvas, paintbrush). Incontrast to medium eliminativism, I want toargue for the retention of the concepts ofmedium and medium specificity, albeit incurtailed form. Call this medium deflationism.

The first point to be made is that bothpractitioners and viewers must necessarilyengage with moving image structures as they arerealized in particular media. The medium is,almost literally, the coalface at which both artistand spectator work. Neither artists nor spectatorsencounter the ‘strategies of articulation’ (p. xxi)common to all moving image media (parallelediting, etc.) in the abstract, but rather as theyare embodied in one or more of these media.Allow me to draw on another anecdote toelaborate this point. My five-year old son wasrecently assigned the task of writing a brief storyusing a set of words he’d just learned to spell.‘OK,’ I said, ‘Let’s begin with this: The dog wastired,’ giving him a start to this little story. ‘ButDaddy, Mrs. Parker wants me to write a story, nota sentence,’ he shot back. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘don’tyou need to make your story out of sentences?’Of course, in a different context I would haveallowed that you can make a story out of lots ofother things, including still and moving pictures.But a story has to be made out of something,and the concept of the medium, whatever itsproblems, is the concept which picks out this‘something’. In performing this role, it is, Ibelieve, the only game in town.

Perhaps it will seem that this is too obvious apoint and that Carroll’s argument cannot reallyoverlook it. Speaking of literature as an artform,however, Carroll argues that it ‘does not appearto have a medium at all. This may sound strangeto you. You may be tempted to regard words asthe distinctive medium of literature. And yet, arewords the right sort of thing to constitute amedium? Aren’t media, in the most clear-cutsense, physical, and are words physical in anyaesthetically interesting way?’ (p. 3)5 Now itmight be that Carroll has some particulardefinition of ‘the physical’ which would make

• My Dinner with André (1981).

chap 13 25/5/06 4:23 pm Page 141

this claim plausible, but as it stands, it soundsvery strange indeed. Surely the sound of a wordis a physical feature of the word, and the soundsof words are integral to the aesthetic characterof literary works; indeed sometimes these soundsare the paramount aesthetic features (think ofcertain forms of poetry and densely poeticnovels, such as the works of Joyce).6

Note how far Carroll pushes his argumenthere. It is one thing to argue, as he does withrespect to film, that moving image artworks canbe realized through several different media. It isanother to argue that an artform exists that hasno medium, and thus, does not need to berealized in a medium. This is to eliminate notonly the notion of medium specificity but theconcept of the medium itself – and this is ofcourse just what Carroll contemplates, in the titleof the essay and in the passage on literature thatI’ve quoted. To my mind, Carroll drives his thesishere so far that it comes off the rails of logic.With the possible exception of conceptual art(and if it is an exception, it is a calculated one),artworks are by definition objects which arerealized through some material substance andprocess, that is, some ‘medium’, the work thusbecoming available for perception by anaudience. As Hegel put it, the work of art is the‘the sensuous embodiment of the idea’. Themedium is the material bridgehead between theartist and the appreciator; it is what allows theartwork to be sensed. In the case of literature,the medium is indeed ‘the word’.

Carroll goes onto argue that, even if we acceptfor the sake of argument that words count asthe medium of literature, they can’t be regardedas the ‘distinctive artistic medium’ (p. 3) ofliterature. Words are not the special and uniquepossession of literature, as a moment’s reflectionon the artforms of theatre, song, opera and filmwill tell us. But here too I see the baby going outwith the bathwater. Can we not say that wordsplay a uniquely central role in the artform ofliterature, a role they do not characteristicallyplay in any other artform?7 After all, some worksof literature make use of pictorial devices – thinkof examples of ‘pattern’ or ‘concrete poetry’ inwhich words are arranged on the page in orderto form striking, sometimes depictive, patterns.George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’ is one suchpoem; Guillaume Apollinaire’s Caligrammes forma collection of them. But we would not betempted to say that Herbert’s work is a paintingrather than a poem, any more than we would betempted to say that Michael Snow’s So Is This(1982), a film comprised entirely of shots ofwords, is a poem rather than a film. If the issueof the medium of a work is as incidental orirrelevant as Carroll contends – if it can beeliminated – what would stop us from thinkingof Herbert’s work as a painting8 and Snow’swork as a poem? Why do we not say thesethings? Because we recognize that the word (inHerbert’s case) and the cinematographic image(in Snow’s case) are somehow foundational tothe enterprise of each, even if they are beingused to unusual ends in both cases (to depict,and to render words and sentences, respectively).9 Much of the force of these works resides in thegestures they make within their given media;considered as a painting ‘Easter Wings’ would berudimentary, while So Is This considered as apoem would be barely coherent, since many ofthe sentences articulated by the film refer to itsstatus as a film. The concept of the medium ofthe work is thus playing an importantbackground role here. (Carroll might say that thebackground role here is being played by artformconcepts rather than media concepts. If this isright, however, it suggests that artforms andmedia cannot always be easily disentangled.)

• Author Meets Critics: Noël Carroll’s Engaging the Moving Image


• George Herbert, ‘Easter Wings’.

chap 13 25/5/06 4:23 pm Page 142



If we turn our attention away fromappreciators and towards the creators of art,similar problems emerge with regard to theeliminativist proposal. The range of mediaavailable to artists at any given historical momentoften provide inspiration, and pose problems andchallenges, to artists. At a minimum, not all

filmmakers work all of the time at the level ofshared ‘moving image’ structures, but many willoften work at a more medium specific level.Consider this in relation to the particular qualitiesof digital cinematography, in contrast to thequalities of photographic film, e.g. in terms ofshot duration. Films as otherwise different asTime Code (Mike Figgis, 2000), Russian Ark(Aleksandr Sokurov, 2002), and Elephant (GusVan Zant, 2003) all evince a fascination withextreme long takes – equivalent to the length ofthe entire film in the first two cases. These shotsare of a duration well in excess of anything thatcan be achieved with a conventional(photographic) film camera.10 Such long takesperform a realist function, in the Bazinian sense,but not just that; there is also a fascination incontemplating the orchestration of camera and

• Caligrammes by Guillaume Apollinaire – ‘Il pleut’, ‘Lacolombe poignardée et le jet d’eau’, and ‘La petit auto’.

chap 13 25/5/06 4:23 pm Page 143

figure movement over such extended periods. Sothere are certainly some features of these films,indeed very salient ones, which arise from anengagement with a particular medium (digitalcinematography) rather than generic features ofthe artform of the moving image.

Similarly, Gummo (Harmony Korine, 1997)intercuts a whole variety of moving image media,ranging from 35mm film stock to low-grade

video, playing the different media and theirassociations off each other, and varying its visualtexture in a ‘painterly’ fashion. And looking‘backwards’ rather than ‘forwards’ in terms ofthe historical succession of media technologies,consider Decasia (Bill Morrison, 2002). This filmforegrounds the qualities peculiar to (certaintypes of) photographic film stock, especiallythose qualities that emerge as the stock ages anddecays. We can’t begin to conceptualize this filmwithout something like a concept of medium.Finally, in this vein, we might think aboutcontemporary plastic artists who make anddescribe their works in terms of ‘mixed media’.Perhaps such work will seem like grist to Carroll’seliminativist mill, in that the artists connectedwith it seem to be saying: ‘Forget the medium,just look at the work. Don’t box me in. I’m anartist, not a housepainter or a stonemason or ablacksmith. I’ll use whatever suits the purpose.’And yet surely the ‘mixed media’ label onlydraws further attention to what is usually salientin these works, namely the importance of thevaried textures and associations brought into thework by the ‘media’ in question, which haveincluded, among other materials, blood, dung,and all manner of textiles, fabrics, and consumerproducts. The point isn’t restricted, though, tosuch all-singing, all-dancing contemporaryartists. ‘Lucien Freud’s world is made of paint,’Robert Hughes has said, and we could say similarthings about the black-and-white, celluloid worldof von Sternberg or the videographic world ofBill Viola.11 In all of these cases, the mediumstrikes us – physically as well as mentally – asvital to the life of the artwork.

Note, though, how the proposal here differsdramatically from the proposal that differentmedia determine, in law-like fashion, theparameters of style. The point here is that manyartists work on and ‘through’ media as sourcesof inspiration, and consumers of these works ofart must attend to the qualities of media in orderto appreciate them. This, of course, takes us backto my original point – that artforms have to berealized and then perceived through particularmedia. To the extent that artforms do not floatfree of media and that, at least in any given



• An extended sequence shot in Elephant (2003)

chap 13 25/5/06 4:23 pm Page 144



historical context, we will relate them to one ormore media – then we cannot entirely forget themedium.

This leads us to recognize the historically-embedded nature of artforms, a feature whichCarroll, here and elsewhere, has emphasized.One aspect of this history is constituted by theway theories of art (in the broadest sense)become part of the ‘filmworld’ and are taken upand explored by practitioners – whether or notthe theory is philosophically defensible orscientifically correct. Consider again My Dinner. Isnot part of the force of this film the way it flies inthe face of received wisdom regarding the‘cinematic’? Two characters meet in a restaurant.They talk, and talk, and talk. Occasionally they

pause, briefly, to eat or drink. Then they talksome more. What’s more, they talk mostly abouttheatre, and the ‘characters’ are dramatizedversions of the people playing them – playwrightWallace Shawn and director André Gregory, bothwell-known figures in the world of theatre. Thefilm is bookended by sequences showing Shawntravelling to the restaurant and then returninghome, but is otherwise resolutely rooted in therestaurant, and for the most part visuallyrestricted to the table at which the twointerlocutors sit. What could be more like‘canned theatre’ and less like ‘pure cinema’ thanthis, and thus more in danger of failingaesthetically?

Now as I’ve implied, the film is widelyregarded as a success. But my point here is notto defend the aesthetic value of the film. Rather Iwant to stress the way in which it appears to bea calculated response (even affront) to the ideathat subject matter of this sort cannot workcinematically, and must be reserved for thetheatre. Even if we think the film an aestheticfailure in this light, in order to properlyunderstand the project of the film we would stillneed to make reference to the theory of mediumspecificity. In order to interpret the film as acritique of the theory of medium specificity, wewill need to refer not only to the film’s medium,but the theory of medium specificity itself.12 Insum, then, even if medium specificity can beeliminated as a first-order concept, it cannot beeliminated as a second-order concept, that is, asa concept that has entered and is now part offilm history.

That history includes not only the history offilmmaking and film theory, but also the historyof both professional film criticism and casualcritical discourse about films – the sort of talkengaged in not only by innocent by-standers likemy wife, but even us professionals, in off-dutymode. I suggested earlier that the casual,everyday use of an adjective like ‘cinematic’ was,at the very least, not unrelated to the use of theterm by aestheticians. What, then, is themeaning of this word, when used in the kind ofstatement made by my wife (‘this film is (not)cinematic’)? The word is both descriptive and

• Varied visual texture in Gummo (1997).

chap 13 25/5/06 4:23 pm Page 145

evaluative. It identifies features in a film which,to the speaker, are in some way characteristic orprototypical of the medium; often, though notnecessarily, this will mean a film ‘doing only whatonly film can do’.13 But note that features takento be characteristic of the medium (or theartform, for that matter) could be judged to becharacteristic simply by virtue of tradition – thatis, as a matter of historically-validated practice;

we’ve seen these features in earlier films, and wehave seen that they have worked well.14 (This ishow speaking of ‘characteristic’ features of themedium differs from speaking of ‘definitive’ or‘essential’ features of the medium.) So the word‘cinematic’ need not imply anything like a ‘law’of the medium being observed, but mightinstead suggest a stylistic practice beingemulated.

A similar point may be made about theevaluative force of the word. ‘Cinematic’ isinvariably a term of praise, but it does notdepend on a concept of the ‘laws of themedium’ to have evaluative force. My wife’sremarks about My Dinner with André are a casein point. For her, the film wasn’t very ‘cinematic’– that’s why watching it on the small TV was OK.But the film had other artistic virtues, inhering (Iguess) in its dialogue and its philosophical playwith ideas, its love of argument, and perhaps itsoverall conception. These are not, in her mind,qualities associated uniquely (nor evenparticularly) with cinema. Still, the film has thesevirtues, so her implied overall judgement is thatthe film is good, if uncinematic, and thus worthviewing. ‘Cinematic’ in this scheme is thus justone of many criteria which might inform anevaluation of a film; and it does not implyanything mechanical or law-like about theprocess of evaluation. So while I maintain that‘cinematic’ in everyday discourse is related to theway the term may be used by aestheticians, it isquite different from the medium-specificist useof the term as analysed by Carroll.

Incidentally, my comments here on theevaluative significance of the word ‘cinematic’are very much in accord with Carroll’s proposalson film evaluation in Engaging the MovingImage, insofar as Carroll is concerned to developa theory of evaluation based on a plurality ofevaluative criteria.15 My arguments here suggesta way in which ‘the cinematic’ might bereconceived and rehabilitated in order to fit intosuch a pluralistic account of film evaluation, incontrast to the ‘unitary’ approach implied bymost classical film theory.

A last thought before I move to myconclusion. The arguments I have offered here in



• Photographic decay in Decasia (2002).

chap 13 25/5/06 4:23 pm Page 146



favour of medium deflationism have beenbroadly epistemic in nature. But Carroll notesthat one of the reasons that the concept of ‘thecinematic’ has stuck around is more pragmaticand political than epistemic, namely, that itfosters an intellectual environment in which awide and deep knowledge of film is regarded asessential to the teaching of film. Is Carrollimplying, in recommending that we set aside themedium and focus instead on questions posed atthe (more abstract) level of artforms, that this isno longer a worry? I for one am not ready toturn over the teaching of film, or the movingimage, to (for example) my colleagues in theEnglish department, even though they are(mostly) smart and well-intentioned people, andthat the knowledge of narrative that they derivefrom their own discipline makes them veryinsightful about the narrative aspects of movingimage artworks. The trouble is that they aretypically, in equal measure, less able to discernthose features of moving image works whicharise from the specific media in which they areembodied.

Perhaps much of what I have said in this papermisses the point, since Carroll has proven mostattentive to matters of medium and style in othercontexts. In that case, this paper can be regardedas an invitation to Carroll to develop more fullyhis speculative aside on the desirability ofeliminating the concept of the medium; to clarifyhow his arguments about ‘forgetting themedium’ mesh with his writings on othersubjects in which features of particular mediaplay an important role; and to say more aboutthe concept of an artform, and the relationshipbetween the concepts of artform and medium. 16

Carroll concludes his essay by elaborating onthe imperative declaration that serves as his title:‘Forget the medium; watch the movement – themovement of history and the movement of theimage.’ (p. 9) The trouble is that in watching themovement of any given image, we will bewatching a work rendered in one or more media,and in surveying the history of the moving imageas an artform, we will to a large degree bewatching the emergence of media throughwhich the artform has been realized, along with

the way artists have exploited new media, and indoing so sometimes redrawn the limits anddefinition of the artform itself. So Carroll iswrong to ask us to forget the medium – but he isabsolutely justified in jolting us out of ourcomplacent, doctrinaire or obsessive focus onfilm as the only medium that matters in theworld of the moving image. Forget the dogma;watch the image as both medium and artform.

Notes

1 Noël Carroll, ‘Forget the Medium!’ Chapter 1 ofEngaging the Moving Image (New Haven, YaleUniversity Press, 2003), pp. 1–9. All subsequentquotations are taken from this edition. Pagenumbers follow quotations in brackets.

2 Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical FilmTheory (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1988).

3 Carroll, ‘Introduction,’ Engaging the Moving Image,p. xxiv.

4 The medium-as-artform being regarded as a (virtual)‘natural kind’ Carroll, ‘Forget the Medium!’, (p. 7).

5 Words as a part of language as a whole strikes meas a more obvious candidate for this role,acknowledging the array of sub- and superordinatelevels of language arrayed around words:phonemes, morphemes, sentences, paragraphs, etc.

6 Presumably Carroll thinks of words (and languagemore generally) as pre-eminently mental (ratherthan physical) entities. The fact that most of thetime literary works are read silently, however, andthe words comprising the poem or novel inquestion are only ‘voiced’ mentally, does not upendthe argument that the physical properties of wordsare central to their aesthetic effects. The mentalvoicing of words depends on our understandingand experience of the literal voicing of words, andthus their physical presence in this sense. When weread ‘I Like Ike’ and voice this in our minds, whatwe ‘hear’ is the repetition of particular sounds –physical events – that we would hear if we utteredthe words out loud.

What non-physical feature of words might Carrollhave in mind as having more obvious aestheticsalience? I guess that he has in mind the meaningor ‘semantics’ of words (and language in general),which are not physical ‘in the most clear-cut sense’.The meanings created by the language of literaryworks are indubitably of the utmost aestheticsignificance, but the physical aspects of words oftenbear on their meanings (think of the new meaningssuggested by rhyming sounds, as in ‘his room was atomb’) or, alternatively, they may have a dialecticalfunction, tugging us away from the meaning and

chap 13 25/5/06 4:23 pm Page 147

creating a more ‘musical’ effect. The only point I amconcerned to insist on here is that the aestheticcharacter of words in literary works cannot bereduced to their meaningfulness, understood interms of non-physical semantic properties.

7 If one thinks of theatre as an artform distinct fromliterature, one might think that the centrality ofwords to theatre would be a problem for my claimhere. In theatre, however, a particular kind oflanguage – speech – is central, and such speech istypically performed live.

8 I use this term in the broad and inclusive sensealluded to by Carroll in his essay on Gregory Currie’sImage and Mind (Cambridge, Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996), where he notes that the word‘painting,’ as it is used to refer to an artform, isreally a stand-in for the idea of ‘marking surfaces,’since art historians routinely encompass greatdiversity in respect of the material of the surface tobe marked, the materials used to mark it, and theinstruments and techniques used in the process ofmarking (‘The Essence of Cinema ?’ Engaging theMoving Image, note 11, p. 264). Herbert’s poemfits comfortably into this definition as a ‘painting’ –a surface marked to depict something or to create avisually arresting design.

9 The case of Snow’s film is similar to the sub-genreof painting and sculpture known as ‘word art,’ inwhich the artwork is dominated by the rendering ofwords. Contemporary exponents of the forminclude Jenny Holzer, Sean Landers, Richard Prince,and Peter Davies; Landers’ Self-Something (1994) isa spectacular example. Again we can ask: why dowe think of these artworks as paintings rather thanpoems or short stories, in spite of their intense focuson language? Are we right to do so?

10 Other than through the kind of ‘cheat’ deployedfamously by Hitchcock in Rope (1948).

11 I derive this observation from J. Hoberman, ‘Veni,vidi, video,’ Vulgar Modernism (Philadelphia, TempleUniversity Press, 1991), p. 41. Hughes’ remark wasmade in The New Shock of the New (BBC, 2004).

12 Carroll himself discusses structural film in this way,in his review of Currie – that is, as a mode offilmmaking engaging directly with questions aboutthe supposed nature and essence of the medium offilm. As in the case of Malle’s film, even wherephilosophically suspect assumptions are made bystructural filmmakers, as viewers and critics we needthese assumptions in order to make sense of thework – that is, we need to recognize them as partof the ‘theoretical’ background of the world; wedon’t need to assume their truth, of course. In thisrespect, beliefs about medium specificity are nodifferent to the other beliefs an artist might hold inmaking a work, e.g. in the existence of God. Wewon’t get far with a film by Bresson if we don’trecognize the spiritual beliefs which informed themaking of the film, but this doesn’t commit us tothe beliefs. And so it is with an artist’s belief inmedium specificity.

13 Bruce Kawin, review of My Dinner with André, FilmQuarterly, 35:2 (1981/2): 63.

14 Nothing on this account blocks recognition ofinnovative artistic strategies. But these would morelikely be identified and praised as ‘novel’ rather than‘cinematic,’ insofar as the latter term refers tovalued traditions of practice. Or one might claimthat a certain film exploited a previously unforeseenpotential of the medium. The key point here is that‘cinematic,’ in this model, has descriptive andevaluative but not prescriptive force.

15 Carroll, ‘Introducing Film Evaluation’, Engaging theMoving Image, pp. 147–64.

16 Some passages from the essay under scrutiny here,and some other essays by Carroll, suggest that hisstance too would be best described as deflationaryrather than eliminativist, in spite of the title of thelead essay in Engaging the Moving Image. So thispaper might also be regarded as an invitation toCarroll to clarify how the theses of elimination anddeflation, significantly different in my view, coherein his work.



chap 13 25/5/06 4:23 pm Page 148

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

murray smith on carroll

Documents