History and Film in Walley

What most struck me from this week’s readings was Walley’s discussion of film in relation to history, and Frampton’s attempt to rewrite film’s history the way “it should have been.” (At least this is what I understood, I could easily be wrong…). On page 28, Walley explains: “Within Structural film, this shift manifested itself in the conscious effort by several filmmakers to make ‘first films’ or to remake film history systematically, following what David James has called ‘an atomized model of the entire cinematic process…’ According to Carroll, Frampton’s turn toward film history revealed the filmmaker’s anxiety about the possibility of continuing to make films in light of achieving ‘pure film’ or ‘film degree zero’ in the era of Structural film.”

It seems to me that this attempt to rewrite the history of film is solely idealistic, a concept that cannot actually be realized. The history of film, just like the history of the United States or the history of technology, is something that has already occurred, and it is therefore impossible to simply go back and rewrite it simply because one wants to. While I am sympathetic to Frampton’s anxiety about the possibility of making films even after achieving “pure film,” I am not convinced that turning back to film’s history and rewriting that history is the answer. To be completely honest, I am not even sure what Walley means by this – is Frampton’s idea to make films that belong to the past (before the time of Structural film) in order to avoid negating his pure films through newer, perhaps “impure” films?

I am also unsure as to what exactly it is that Frampton is attempting to rewrite. According to Walley, Frampton “called for filmmakers working in the present to return to film’s history and, working by hindsight as it were, rebuild it according to an essentialist model of what film history should have been.” What exactly is it about the medium’s past that Frampton so vehemently disagrees with? And what leads him to believe that, by working from the present into the past, he would be able to fix this? My initial reaction to this idea is that, because the past has already occurred, one can only accept it and learn from it – there is no use in attempting to change it.