Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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book. Bordwell, however, takes issue with this, citing the only three points in Post-
Theory where Lacan is evoked, and at these points, Bordwell argues, Lacan is more
or less peripheral or at least minimal to the overall theses of the papers, or, in one
case, confused with Freud. 1
This is a single example of the claim-response-rebuttal
argument between Bordwell and Žižek. What I find particularly significant is that
Post-Theory is a lengthy tome compiling multiple responses to theoretical
methodologies, and Žižek’s response is included in a shorter work that aims
primarily to focus on the work of Krzysztof Kieślowski. In Bordwell’s rebuttal
essay on davidbordwell.net, he states, in critical form, that:
Most of FRT offers standard film criticism, providing impressionistic
readings of various Kieslowski films in regard to recurring themes, visual
motifs, dramatic structures, borrowed philosophical concepts, and the
like. Žižek also reiterates 1970s argument about how film editing
“sutures” the viewer into the text. I’ll have almost nothing to say about
these stretches of FRT. But Žižek launches the book with an introduction
and two chapters criticizing arguments made in a collection of essays
edited by myself and Noël Carroll, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film
Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). The subtitle of
Žižek’s book indicates the centrality of what he takes to be the
Post-Theory movement, even though he doesn’t pursue arguments about
it through the book. Indeed, the first two chapters seem to me awkwardly
welded onto a fairly conventional book of free-associative film
1 This is a reference to the chapter in Post-Theory written by Stephen Prince “Psychoanalytic Film
Theory and the Problem of the Missing Spectator” (Prince 1996; 71-86), see Žižek 2001; 1, 183