The Off-Screen: An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame by Eyal Peretz

Reviewed by: The Off-Screen: An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame by Eyal Peretz Daniel Keyes Peretz, Eyal. The Off-Screen: An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2017. Pp. 272. US$65.00. Drawing on Lacan, Benjamin, Žižek, and Derrida cultivating the field of Western film philosophy, Eyal Peretz considers how off-screen diegetic spaces in narrative cinema generate possibilities that speak to the mimetic limitations of on-screen representations. [End Page 633] Sounds and sights not shown or heard “on” the screen’s diegetic space offer a realm of mystery for cinema audiences, whom the director as auteur forces to imagine what lies outside of the narrative’s enclosed mimetic spaces. For Peretz, cinema as a modern western narrative technology replaces a monotheistic God with a secular off-screen artistic mystery (52). This book’s mediation on this cinematic dynamic expands into a meditation on modernity and western culture by arguing that ancient Greek theatre’s use of off-stage violence, and specific types of Renaissance theatre and painting, anticipate the principle of the off-screen by generating mystery (21). I wish Peretz had grounded his speculation on these diverse mimetic forms in scholarship. For example, rather than a passing mention of off-stage violence in ancient Greek tragedy (20–21), he could have referred to Taplin’s excellent and more specific work on Aeschylus’s stagecraft or Walton. Peretz’s text and endnotes revel in theorizing connections between disparate texts in ways that are both exciting and frustrating for a reader hoping to see these connections more firmly situated. Peretz’s study is divided into three sections: Part I muses on how pre-cinematic Renaissance art anticipates the rise of cinema’s off-screen spaces, while Part II confines itself to a narrow set of films as the origins of narrative film by exploring Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), Lang’s M (1931), Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), and Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) and other earlier significant Chaplin films. Part III discusses film genre in relation to mid-twentieth-century American director Hawk’s films and Tarantino’s revisionist WWII film Inglorious Basterds (2009). Peretz selects feature-length narrative cinema mainly produced by straight white males grounded in the twentieth century situated in Europe and the United States. In terms of gender, the book’s sole exception is German director Leni Riefenstahl; however, in her case, Peretz lessens her contribution to her celebratory Nazi documentary Triumph of the Will by arguing the film is “a joint visual project” with Hitler as the off-screen/on-screen presence who orders the visuals (113). The book never justifies this selection of films in a way that might suggest that the “off-screen” might be limited to a particular type of cinema or events in the twentieth century or that women, queers, and/or people of colour might lever the off-screen in ways that points to the ideological power of off-screen representations. Given the book’s scant attention to women and others, it would have been best if it self-reflexively unpacked its methodology. Dismissive assertions such as “I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about painting from the perspective of art history to say whether Bruegel deserves a place of honour similar to Shakespeare’s” (23) suggest that Peretz is tone-deaf to the ideological process of canonization. More acutely, Peretz ignores significant feminist scholarship on off-screen spaces, such as Silverman’s The Acoustic Mirror, Doane’s “The Voice in Cinema”, and De Lauretis’s Technologies of Gender. These scholars focus on twentieth-century American and European cinema and posit off-screen and voice-off spaces of cinema as sites of resistance to patriarchy and other dominant ideological projects. Peretz skirts the ideological politics of the off-screen in thinking [End Page 634] through a more universalist model of how great complex canonical films manipulates off-screen spaces despite dealing with ideologically thorny films that could be explored via the lenses of class, nation, gender, race, and sexuality. Peretz’s analysis is indebted to a psychoanalytical frame, as evidenced by the first chapter that asserts Shakespeare’s Hamlet and various paintings...

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