Film Historiography as Theory of the Film Subject: A Case Study

a discussion about Japanese Studies, Harry Harootunian and Naoki Sakai observe that a theory cannot be the property of a national, ethnic, racial, or civilizational identity.1 Unlike empirical knowledge, a theory does not divide people into those who know and those who do not, for it is a form of sociability that allows those who are willing to ask questions to relate to one another. A theory is always mediated by the time and the place of its formulation and uses, but, as a model of social functioning, it cannot be reduced to those markers. The historical specificity of film historiography would not, in itself, be a problem if those who practice it would always take the place and time from which they "do" history as the point of departure of their inquiry. The problem is that they rarely do, because embedded in the question "Where does film history speak from?" are questions of film theory that are still unresolved. To "do" film history is more than to acquire a sense of where, over a period of five hundred years, the apparatus of cinema came from. The point of retracing how specific cinematic forms developed out of the apparatus's encounter with preexisting cultural practices is, in the end, to understand how, exactly, films function as terrains in which the push and pull of history are played out. This question of how a "text" or film may relate to a historical "context" has been asked most directly in relation to notions of national cinema. Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1957) and El vampiro (Fernando Mendez, 1957), for example, are different because Pyaasa was made in India and El vampiro in Mexico. By far the majority of national cinemas' historiographies, however, tend to relegate the "context" to a separate chapter, evoking, yes, history, but setting it aside as if it pertained to a sphere other than, or "outside," the films examined. A film is always simultaneously a cluster of forms arranged according to cultural categories and a commodity that is produced and circulates within economic circuits. With cinema, these categories and circuits are always national and global at the same time. So, Pyaasa and Mother India (Mehboob