Interpretation
as Explication
Interpretation
as Explication
Explicatory criticism involves the interpreter in the principal goal of ascribing implicit meanings to films in a way similar to the son who took the explicit meaning of his father to infer its implicit meaning, "Mow the lawn." Explicatory criticism emerged following World War II, particularly in France, England and the United States where writing appeared that sought to produce genuine interpretations and make them novel and persuasive.
Certain new films that compelled interpretation as well as the growing power of the idea of individual authorship allowed for the development of explicatory criticism. For example, Roberto Rosselini's works, Paisan (1946) and Rome, Open City (1945), from which Italian Neorealism helped get its start, presented ambiguities that invited interpretation. The huge film output from Hollywood during the 1940s, such as the films Guadalcannal Diary (1943) and The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), greatly impacted French criticism such as the following revival of film weeklies. Andre Bazin, who contributed to several of these journals, changed the face of film criticism between 1945 and 1950. He called for a cinema of authorship, concerned himself with the nuances of meaning and attempted to link thematic richness to stylistic complexity. Bazin contributed to the journal, Cahiers du cinema, which, through its promotion of the idea that cinema could sustain writing of intellectual depth as well as its commitment to revealing implicit meanings in films, quickly became the most influential film journal in the world.
Explicatory criticism emerged in the United States during the 1950s with a tremendous contribution from Andrew Sarris. Influenced by Cahiers on a trip to Paris, Sarris embraced the auteur policy and pledged the critic to a director's cinema as well as to explication, the search for "interior meaning." Not until the beginning of the 1960s did the institutional position of England give way to a younger generation of writers who became attracted to the awareness of technique and technical analysis which then took them one step further than those associated with Cahiers. The most influential new publication was Movie which practiced a purely aesthetic, more "American" intrinsic criticism that combined the analysis of technique with the delineation of themes. With the excitement of fresh critical approaches, writers in these countries further generated new magazines, and publishers encouraged auteurist explication, studying individual directors by bringing out their monographs. Cinema also entered universities through the discussions involving art cinema and auteurism by the writers on Cahiers and Movie. Soon film courses shipped into the curriculum and publication patterns changed such that academic periodicals like Cinema Journal focused more intently upon interpretive practice. The whole institutional context of academic film studies resulted from explicatory, chiefly auteur-centered criticism.
This page was last updated June 27, 1999 by Alexia Thomas
