From its technical and aesthetic inception in the latter half of the nineteenth century, cinema has been preoccupied with its own reasons for being. What is cinema? And what can it do? Is cinema an art of light and shadow? Or is it a technical medium for the exploration of human psychology? And why not both, as well as so much more? These have been pressing—almost to the point of overbearing—questions that govern the scientific and artistic innovations of film. Cinematic thinkers like Henri Bergson, William James, and Hugo Münsterberg pondered them, as did film innovators like Auguste and Louis Lumière and Georges Méliès before them. Cinema is, in this way, an exemplary modernist discipline: fully self-conscious of its own existence and perpetually critical of its limits.

In tandem to the techniques, practices, and forms of critical self-consciousness of cinema, films are also a site of attention for scholars interested in studying the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Such inquiries find indebtedness to the writings of Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukács, Theodore Adorno, and other proponents of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, as well as the Althusserian-inspired apparatus theorists of the 1970s—including Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, and Teresa de Lauretis—and, most recently, those explorations stemming from the theoretical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière. Some recent American political thinkers—notably William E. Connolly, Michael Shapiro, Joshua Foa Dienstag, Elizabeth Anker, Mort Schoolman, Robert Pippin, and Bonnie Honig (to name a few)—are exemplary proponents of the importance of film to political analysis and thinking. All of this to say that there is a rich and well established conceptual and practical research tradition that attends to the politicality of film as a site not only for the transmission of ideas, facts, and norms, but also—and arguably more importantly—as a source for the creation of political ideas and their multivalent perceptibilities.

Professor Roy Germano’s project of analytic filmmaking fits comfortably within cinema’s tradition of self-doubt and self-affirmation, as well as the cinematic tradition of political inquiry sketched out above. In this regard, Germano’s ambitions are exciting, thoughtful, and compelling. Indeed, they are welcome on so many fronts that to argue with them amounts to nitpicking. But nitpick I must.

The concerns I express below are not with the project per se but with some of Germano’s assumptions about what cinema can do; that is, with his media ontology. My sense is that Germano is too enthusiastic about the efficaciousness of causal and direct medial transmission, as if cinema could be as efficacious and static a medium as a blackboard. I intuit in Germano’s project a desire for analytic filmmaking to avoid interpretive ambiguities by making vividly manifest causal processes (pp. 669–670). Film and text, he claims, will produce “a more accurate and complete body of knowledge” (p. 670). Though such a political science cinéma vérité may be an admirable ambition, there are certain features of film capturing, film editing, and film viewing that make that ambition utopic and—from the position of an ontology of cinema—circumspect.

Allow me to explain. I take the “analytics” in analytic film making to register a compression of the space and time between transmission and reception of message such that, as Germano avers, analytic filmmaking can help “develop a more accurate and complete body of scholarly knowledge and offer policy makers and the public a uniquely effective way to glean insights from and engage with scholarly work” (p. 663). I note a contrast in this ambition with the expression of a sensation to which Germano admits while, in the subsequent paragraph of his essay, coming to terms with his novel approach to research creation and projection: “Over time,” Germano affirms, “I refined my filming methods and ultimately shot 32 hours of interview and observational footage. The footage was fascinating and revealed insights that text and survey data could not” (p. 664). What, I wonder, is the relationship between fascination and revelation? More importantly, is what is fascinating and revealing localizable in a manner that it is repeatable? That is, can analytic filmmaking reproduce the same moment of fascination and revelation for any viewer whatsoever and thus generate a sense of conviction in the accuracy, or realism, or credibility of the information projected? If so, is analytic filmmaking transmitting a sensation, or is it communicating knowledge, or both?

I don’t presume to provide Germano with answers to these questions; but these are questions that need to be addressed not just for the research ambitions of analytic filmmaking but also, and especially, for any project that solicits aesthetic experience (i.e., the absorptive fascination that Germano offers his readers as a source of compelling evidence as to why one might turn to film) as a politically and intellectually viable quotient of and for political science research. ^{Footnote 1} That said, I do wish to outline what I take to be some of the stakes of the media ontology that Germano defends.

Most notably there is the matter of editing. Germano places great emphasis—and hope—in the power of editing to produce the kind of capacious accuracy of knowledge he seeks. Indeed, the “theoretical pillars” that Germano outlines are directives for visual editing which, once again, must be oriented towards accurate and credible presentation of information. But editing is a notoriously slippery, elusive, and evasive art and tethering the visual to the textual doesn’t help in firming up accuracy, as any museum curator will no doubt tell you. Editing, to be brief, evinces a blink in time. This is how the pre-eminent Hollywood film editor, Walter Murch, describes part of the editing process in his classic study In the Blink of an Eye: “The truth of the matter is that film is actually being ‘cut’ twenty-four times a second. Each frame is a displacement from the previous one—it is just that in a continuous shot, the space/time displacement from frame to frame is small enough (twenty milliseconds) for the audience to see it as motion within context rather than as twenty-four different contexts. On the other hand, when the visual displacement is great enough (as the moment of the cut), we are forced to re-evaluate the new image as a different context: miraculously, most of the time, we have no problem doing this.” ^{Footnote 2}

Germano’s “fascination” for what he saw is echoed by Murch’s awe for the miraculousness of the viewer’s capacity to process cuts as continuous, even when they never are—something that David Hume had also remarked upon in his A Treatise on Human Nature when he famously affirmed that “The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.” ^{Footnote 3} Hume’s conclusion was a notable one: Experience is mobile, not static. And I might make the same point here, for one of the issues that Germano wishes to (indirectly) insist upon through the elaboration of his theoretical pillars for film editing is the possibility that the making of film produces an accurate depiction of an event such that its accuracy rests on an ontological stasis. Analytic filmmaking, in other words, projects static information and its staticity is what guarantees its accuracy and credibility. This is Germano’s ambition for a political science cinéma vérité, and the medium of film (either celluloid or digital) doesn’t allow for it.

Allow me one last explanation: There is an irresolvable tension between Germano’s research ontology and the ontology of cinema. As many philosophers of film note—André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, Stanley Cavell, and Gilles Deleuze chief amongst them—film involves the assembly of a stochastic series of views. ^{Footnote 4} Such an assembly presupposes the fact of motility—that cinematic images are beholden to frame rate. The question then is not that of accurately representing capacious information but, rather, how to project the event of information as a static and immobile unity when film, by its very nature, is discontinuous movement? To presume a method of filmmaking that would halt the motility of film is counterintuitive at best and ideologically problematic at worst. It is counterintuitive because film projects moving images; it is ideologically problematic because the kind of affective experience of accuracy Germano hopes for requires a form of direct and unambiguous transmission of information, not unlike Moses’ burning bush. By nitpicking in this way, I simply want to raise the question as to what kind of evidentiary support, if any, we can expect from a moving image? As we saw with the Rodney King trial, even raw and unedited film footage was insufficient for prosecution (i.e., did not count as accurate evidentiary support) because the prosecuting attorneys took advantage of the stochastic nature of film to evince doubt as to which moment during the beating—which instant in the series of shots—was the actual moment of excessive violence. ^{Footnote 5} If that raw footage couldn’t stand as accurate information, how can we expect analytic filmmaking to bear such a burden of proof?