In a recent World Picture article entitled “The Obviousness of Cinema,” Rosalind Galt, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex and author of The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (Columbia UP, 2006), takes us on a thoughtful, encyclopedic tour of the concept of the “obvious” and its enduring importance to film studies.
In the introduction, which sets the stage for a sweeping unpacking of the ‘obvious’ across the history of film theory, Galt succinctly describes the so-called transparency of the moving image, its obvious ‘obviousness’, and its apparent lacking of anything hide.
“The iconoclastic suspicion of the image, which has haunted film scholarship as much as it has devalued film as a “serious” medium in the public sphere, derives from the supposed obviousness of the image as much as from its deceptive qualities. The image deals in surfaces: it is superficial and hence lacking conceptual depth, so whatever meanings it does produce are overly simplistic, immediate, and intellectually substandard. In Platonic terms, the image is inadequate to the task of articulating reason, and in the language of film criticism, the film is just not as good as the book. Moreover, since the surface of the image engages ideas of the cosmetic, sparkly, and fake, this obvious meaning runs the risk of not even being true. Appearances can be deceptive, the image conceals an ugly truth, and so on. A contradiction, to be sure (the image is both too direct in its meaning and untrustworthy in its meaning), but one that secures the obviousness of the image in a doubled rhetoric of suspicion. If the image means as it obviously seems to, then that meaning is inadequate. If it doesn’t mean what it obviously seems to, then, even worse, its obviousness is a veil for deception. Cinema inherits this rhetorical structure and philosophical impasse, but it also embarks upon a transvaluation of the obvious.”
As anyone who has spent time in an undergraduate film class can attest, the obvious touches on, or brings together under one roof, the most familiar obstacles to the study of film — the immersive, easy ‘readability’ of films (at least the mainstream ones), their apparent withdrawal from language and convention, the film medium’s alleged low form of expression (which naturally follows), and of course the discipline’s general bastardized status in the academy. So while this concept doesn’t come up nearly enough, at least not directly, its elaboration, as Galt seems to suggest, would serve the field, and its teaching, tremendously.
