The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History (review)

Students of Film Studies and Art History have long recognized the centrality of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and are accustomed to considering its place in the canon of theoretical writing on the image and on image technologies. Inattentive readers of The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History, would, however, be mistaken in assuming that it is solely canonical impulse that has led Angela Dalle Vacche to open her collection of essays with a discussion of Benjamin’s classic text. Dalle Vacche invokes a portion of this oft-quoted essay in calling attention to Benjamin’s close reading of art historical texts, namely those of Aloïs Riegl —a figure who becomes a “present absence” looming over The Visual Turn and shaping its own dialectical organization.1 Riegl is not the only parental figure hovering over these pages. From Lessing to Wagner to Warburg to Andrew, Dalle Vache introduces discursive strains and disciplinary maps that allow her to pay homage to writers and critics while also expanding her own art historical frame of reference. What emerges is a nuanced view of the art-historical drives of film theory, and a clear understanding that the interdisciplinary study of cinema and painting is actually a “classic” critical paradigm out of which a new interdisciplinary field is swiftly developing. Not only do the contributions to Dalle Vacche’s volume offer ample evidence that “the project of viewing film through the lens of art history has a history of its own” (x), as Donald Crafton remarks in the foreword. They also present a sustained argument concerning the extent to which Film Studies has always used art history unwittingly as a “conceptual tool,” a move that posits canonical film theorists as distanced readers of classic texts in the history and theory of art.