Law on the Screen (The Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804751625 ISBN 13: 9780804751629

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2005

Synopsis

The proliferation of images of law, legal processes, and officials on television and in film is a phenomenon of enormous significance. Mass-mediated images are as powerful, pervasive, and important as are other early twenty-first-century social forces―e.g. globalization, neo-colonialism, and human rights―in shaping and transforming legal life. Yet scholars have only recently begun to examine how law works in this new arena and to explore the consequences of the representation of law in the moving image. Law on the Screen advances our understanding of the connection between law and film by analyzing them as narrative forms, examining film for its jurisprudential content―that is, its ways of critiquing the present legal world and imagining an alternative one―and expanding studies of the representation of law in film to include questions of reception.

About this title

About the Author

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. Lawrence Douglas is Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, Amherst College. Martha Merrill Umphrey is Associate Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, Amherst College.

From the Back Cover

"The great strength of Law on the Screen lies in its insightful jurisprudential readings of films previously unconsidered by law and film scholars, as well as its innovative focus on reception. This collection offers a sophisticated and challenging analysis of filmic representations of law, making it a very welcome contribution to the emerging field of law and film studies. These essays represent a real coming of age of law and film scholarship."--Professor Leslie J. Moran, School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London
"This collection will serve as a highly relevant and timely introduction to the kinds of nuanced and thoughtful analyses that can be generated in the study of the relationship between law and film. For those more familiar with cultural studies and analyses of law and film, the volume presents essays that approach the area in stimulatingly diverse ways, raising new questions about law, the legal institution, and cultural representations of law and justice."--Alison Young, University of Melbourne

From the Inside Flap

The proliferation of images of law, legal processes, and officials on television and in film is a phenomenon of enormous significance. Mass-mediated images are as powerful, pervasive, and important as are other early twenty-first-century social forces--e.g. globalization, neo-colonialism, and human rights--in shaping and transforming legal life. Yet scholars have only recently begun to examine how law works in this new arena and to explore the consequences of the representation of law in the moving image. Law on the Screen advances our understanding of the connection between law and film by analyzing them as narrative forms, examining film for its jurisprudential content--that is, its ways of critiquing the present legal world and imagining an alternative one--and expanding studies of the representation of law in film to include questions of reception.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Law on the Screen

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2005 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5162-9

Contents

CONTRIBUTORS...........................................................................................................................................................................xiOn Film and Law: Broadening the Focus AUSTIN SARAT, LAWRENCE DOUGLAS, AND MARTHA MERRILL UMPHREY......................................................................................1Part I. Studies of RepresentationCinematic Judgment and Jurisprudence: A Woman's Memory, Recovery, and Justice in a Post-Traumatic Society (A Study of Polanski's Death and the Maiden) ORIT KAMIR.....................27The Racial-Spatial Order and the Law: Devil in a Blue Dress MICHAEL J. SHAPIRO........................................................................................................82Anti-Oedipus, Lynch: Initiatory Rites and the Ordeal of Justice RICHARD K. SHERWIN....................................................................................................106Part II. Studies of ReceptionReproducing a Trial: Evidence and Its Assessment in Paradise Lost JENNIFER L. MNOOKIN.................................................................................................153A Case for Corrective Criticism: A Civil Action DIANE WALDMAN.........................................................................................................................201"Everyone Went Wild over It": Film Audiences, Political Cinema, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington ERIC SMOODIN.........................................................................231INDEX..................................................................................................................................................................................255

Chapter One

Cinematic Judgment and Jurisprudence: A Woman's Memory, Recovery, and Justice in a Post-Traumatic Society (A Study of Polanski's Death and the Maiden)

ORIT KAMIR

... how much to acknowledge, whether to punish and how to recover -Martha Minow

Introduction

Law and Film

This chapter's reading of a feature film demonstrates one type of work facilitated by the developing new field of "law and film," which this edited collection purports to introduce. "Law and film," an interdisciplinary, culturally oriented field in the making, can be viewed as a recent offshoot of the more established and familiar disciplines "law and society" and "law and literature." Law and film scholarship cannot yet be defined "scientifically" or characterized by a distinct methodology or worldview. It does, however, reflect shared fundamental assumptions concerning the central role of law and film in society. The links, analogies, and similarities between the discourses of law and film-and their sociocultural functions-invite some of the unique insights that can be gained from integrated analysis of these two spheres. As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, writers exploring this new field emphasize different aspects and interpretations of this common ground.

My own law and film work reflects my understanding of law and film as founded upon three fundamental premises. The first premise is that law and film are two pivotal discourses that both reflect and refract fundamental values, images, notions of identity, lifestyles, and crises of their societies and cultures, and that there is a significant correlation between their parallel functions. Both law and film are dominant participants in the construction of concepts such as subject, community, identity, memory, gender roles, justice, and truth; they offer major sociocultural arenas where collective hopes, dreams, beliefs, anxieties, and frustrations are publicly portrayed, evaluated, and enacted. Law and film often perform these functions in ways that echo and reinforce each other, inviting attentive interdisciplinary examination. Certain underlying structures and modes of operation relevant to such functions are sometimes more explicit and identifiable in one discourse than in the other. The interdisciplinary comparison sheds light on the less obvious, analogous structures and modes of operation underlying the other discourse. Detailed comparison of such parallel structures may expand our understanding of both discourses, as well as the operation of social discourses and institutions at large. Most significant and intriguing of the parallel functions are the many subtle ways each field offers its readers or viewers a seductive invitation to take on a sociocultural persona and become part of an imagined (judging) community, sharing the worldview constituted by the law or the film. Much of my work, therefore, focuses on this.

The second premise is that some films, "law films" in particular, perform large-scale "legal indoctrination," this is, they train audiences in judgment while examining-and often reinforcing-legal norms, logic, and structures. For decades, James Boyd White has been exploring and demonstrating how legal rhetoric constitutes human subjects and communities of readers, endowing them with collective visions, aspirations, and hopes, and supplying them with frameworks, images, and stories to imagine themselves and their world. Judicial decision and other legal texts are inherently imbued with judgment and concerned with justice; their construction of subjects and communities are, therefore, inseparable from judgment and the search for justice. Less evidently-but no less significantly-the same can be said of many films. Films, much like judicial decisions and legislative rhetoric, can-and do-constitute communities (of viewers) that are often engaged in judgment, legal-like reasoning, the pursuit of justice, and self-creation through judgment and justice. Judgment is an activity not merely portrayed but often actively performed by films, together with their (constructed and/or actual) viewers; it is often a function of film's constitution of a community of viewers and cinematic engagement in the social constitution of primary values, institutions, and concepts.

The many and various means of performing such cinematic judgment and engaging viewers in cinematic judging acts can be complex, subtle, and often elusive, and thus uncritically influential on viewers. They frequently involve cinematic choices regarding genre, editing, methods of narration, plots, points of view, rhythm, and casting. Manipulation of viewer identification with on-screen characters and eliciting emotional responses to powerful imagery are particularly frequent strategies. Law films, which offer a direct combination and fictional integration of these two fields, are of particular interest in this context.

Law films, which treat the law as their subject matter, create on-screen fictional legal systems that execute judgment, pursue justice, and construct social subjects and communities both on- and off-screen. At the same time such law films may pass cinematic judgment on these "legally constructed" individuals and communities and on the judgment and justice their fictional legal systems demonstrate and execute. A film can be read as passing such cinematic judgment when, in addition to portraying an on-screen fictional legal system, it offers alternative cinematic constructions of subjects and societies, of justice and judgment. In its cinematic judgment, a law film may echo the worldview encoded in its fictional legal system, allowing legal and cinematic mechanisms to reinforce each other in the creation of community and worldview. Alternatively, a law film may constitute a community and value system that criticizes or undercuts those supported by its fictional legal system. Moreover, as a rich, multilayered text, a law film can perform both these functions concomitantly, through different means and on different levels, evoking complex and even contradictory responses toward social and legal issues presented on screen.

A law film's cinematic judgment of its on-screen legal system constitutes a "judging act" (or an act of judgment) while also offering jurisprudential commentary. Law films, therefore, often invite analysis as jurisprudential texts. This constitutes the third premise of my law and film theory: (some) films contain popular jurisprudence. Such popular jurisprudence embedded in film may be sophisticated, insightful, and illuminating. Associated with mass consumption and the entertainment industry, it is likely to be overlooked and dismissed, but unrestricted by conventional academic disciplines and categories, it may be fresh, original, innovative, and imaginative, transcending familiar routes and formulas.

The three basic premises are, therefore, that some films' modes of social operation parallel the law's; that some films perform viewer-engaging judgment; and that some films contain popular jurisprudence. The study of films' performance of these functions is a study of law and film. In reference to the three basic premises, law and film studies may sometimes be distinguished on the basis of their primary focus and labeled accordingly as examining "film paralleling law," "film as judgment" and/or "film as jurisprudence." Law films, films that treat legal issues as their subject matter, often operate in two or three of these dimensions, offering a complex and powerful combination of these cinematic-legal functions. Their study may often require an integrated examination of two or three of their cinematic-legal functions.

A law and film study of a film-or a group of films (such as a genre)-may examine its implementation of one or more cinematic-legal functions in search of the film's underlying value system. Such a law and film study may discern that despite the film's proclaimed adherence to liberal values such as equality or dignity, the film's jurisprudence or judging act presumes and promotes conflicting values, such as male honor or gender- or race-based supremacy. Similarly, through the exploration of a film's jurisprudence and/or judging act, such a study may disclose a film's unacknowledged underlying perceptions of gender roles, familial structures, and human relations. It may shed light on the embedded portrayal and treatment of social and normative issues that may otherwise be effectively elusive.

Why should one invest in reading films as popular jurisprudential texts? Why explore the judging acts they perform and analyze the social values they constitute for their viewers? One answer is that films are overwhelmingly influential, playing a key role in the construction of individuals and groups in contemporary societies. They reach enormous audiences and, combining narrative and appealing characters with visual imagery and technological achievements, stir deep emotions and leave deep impressions. Leading viewers through cinematic judgments, constituting notions of justice, equality, honor, and gender, films can be extremely effective in molding public actions and reactions. Touching the viewer's emotions and imagination, a law film may introduce a viewer to jurisprudential issues and value systems while provoking a host of emotive responses and powerful impressions. More people are likely to be influenced by cinematic judging and jurisprudence than by theoretical legal texts or even judicial rhetoric. Additionally, since most viewers treat film as a source of entertainment and not as a jurisprudential challenge to be critically examined, a film's socio-legal influences may remain unnoticed and be embraced uncritically, thereby augmenting film's influence and calling for systematic critical investigation.

Furthermore, the study of cinematic jurisprudence may be valuable for its jurisprudential insight, that is, for purely real-world legal purposes. The study of cinematic judgment acts may help expose structures, techniques, and mechanisms that operate in real-world legal judging yet are more difficult to discern and identify in that realm.

Purely theoretical explication of law and film may seem abstract and baffling, particularly at this early point in the genre's development. A case study of a film is therefore useful to illustrate the arguments presented above and the actual workings of law and film. The film I discuss below, Roman Polanski's 1994 film version of Ariel Dorfman's play Death and the Maiden, is an example of a powerful law film. Investigating law and justice, and explicitly addressing jurisprudential themes, Death and the Maiden portrays an onscreen legal proceeding while conducting its own judging act; it invites its viewer to participate in the cinematic judgment while exploring the film's jurisprudential arguments. The film's specific concern is the role and meaning of law and justice in the context of a society caught in the difficult moment between a traumatic past and an uncertain future.

My reading of it explores the film's jurisprudential insights together with its judging act. Using the law and film terminology I described earlier, the first and third parts of the study offer primarily a "film as jurisprudence" type of reading, whereas the second part focuses on the examination of cinematic technique to facilitate a reading of the "film as judgment" variety. The second part also contains a discussion of the "film parallels law" type, illustrating how the film calls attention to the suspicion and resentment felt by its fictional characters and implied viewer toward the testifying victim who manifests unpleasant post-traumatic symptoms-much like judges, lawyers, and jurors in the real legal system. All three parts jointly explore the film's underlying value system, and in particular its conceptualization of law and justice, dignity, recovery, reconciliation, gender roles, intimacy, and personal relations. The chapter also scrutinizes the film's feminist-including feminist jurisprudential-attitudes and touches on the comparison between the legal process and a truth and reconciliation process.

Ariel Dorfman's powerful play Death and the Maiden is the basis of Roman Polanski's film of the same title. In collaboration with Rafael Yglesias and Polanski himself, Dorfman also authored the film's screenplay, presumably tightening the deep connection between film and play. But in this essay it is the Dorfman-Polanski film that I read, as a film. As George Bluestone stated in his book on the adaptation of novels into films, "the film becomes a different thing in the same sense that a historical painting becomes a different thing from the historical event which it illustrates." The Dorfman-Polanski film is "a different thing" in the same sense that Dorfman's play is different from Franz Schubert's Death and the Maiden, Quartet no. 14 in D Minor, op. posth., which is different in turn from the song (lied) of the same name composed by Schubert seven years later and based on an earlier poem by Mattias Claudius.

This study focuses on the film's unique characteristics. As Bluestone rightly notes, "the spatial liberation of the cinema was its unique achievement. But film editing, combining the integrity of the shot with the visual rhythm of the sequence, gives the director his characteristic signature." It is not merely the story's plotline that I focus on, but the film as such, including specific shots, editing choices, casting choices, acting styles, directing pace, atmosphere, viewer's cognizance of the director's biography and style, and the film's potentially unlimited and universal audience. Some of the significant themes discussed here are clearly relevant to Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden, which, of course, preceded the film. Nevertheless, this reading is exclusively of the cinematic text.

Post-Traumatic Societies

A society faces internal and/or external difficulties, widely experienced as threatening to its identity, safety, fundamental values, and way of life. Anxiety and confusion deteriorate into panic and paralysis; liberal forces dwindle and fall silent as the crisis escalates. A tyrannical nondemocratic force promising personal security, order, and stability emerges and grows into a totalitarian regime. Under the totalitarian regime, radical opposition forces are persecuted and human rights violated. As opposition grows, the authorities resort to torture, kidnappings, and executions, becoming a murderous regime of terror. Freedom fighters and their families experience sacrifice and loss, while the majority procrastinate in silence. Eventually, the public is ready for a change, and after a painful struggle the dictatorship is overthrown. New institutions are established, and the new leadership attempts to unite the country and all its forces, leave the bloody past behind, and enter a new era. The country is weakened by the years of conflict and turmoil, and the new regime is fragile. The old forces are still powerful, the bonds that hold society together are frail, and peace and reconciliation seem vital. Victims of the old regime, their victimizers, and bystanders find themselves forced to cooperate in making a fresh start.

This story is relevant to the history of many societies and states, although the details vary. The totalitarian regime can be a military dictatorship, as in many South American and African countries; an ideological government, as in many Eastern European and East Asian countries; an extreme religious tyranny, as in Iran or Afghanistan; or a colonizing, racist government subjecting a "native" population, as in apartheid South Africa. At other times and in other places the brutal administration may be a powerful branch of an otherwise democratic government, as during the McCarthy era in the United States. Yet the basic plotline is similar, as is the end result: a society torn by internal conflict and brutality struggles to leave the past behind in hopes of a bright future.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Law on the Screen Copyright © 2005 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804751625
• ISBN 13: 9780804751629
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Sarat Austin, Douglas Lawrence, Umphrey Martha Merrill