Out of the past: classical film theory JOHANNES VON MOLTKE ‘What’s new in classical film theory?’ The title of this dossier is intended not simply as a (rhetorical) question but also as a critical intervention. In addition to taking stock of significant developments in the field, we seek to highlight the renewal of the classics’ dormant critical energies. For the overall impulse that emerges from the different but overlapping efforts devoted to the classical tradition amounts to nothing less than a concerted rereading – an impulse that promises to uncover new, previously unavailable dimensions of ostensibly ossified texts, whose central contentions on realism, film as art, and the visual language of silent film we may have taught, quoted and heard quoted so often as to render them virtually meaningless. After all, the very label of ‘classical’ can make the theories it subsumes appear quaint and dated, safely contained in an earlier era that so-called ‘contemporary’ film theory of all stripes has helped us to supersede. According to the progressivist assumptions underlying the championing of the ‘contemporary’ over the ‘classical’ and its methodological orthodoxies, titles such as Film as Art, Theory of Film and even What Is Cinema? can now appear to students as laboured contributions to an earlier set of debates at best, and as outdated theoretical aberrations at worst: in our rapidly changing media environments, have the earlier theories not been rendered obsolete along with the contexts from which they emerged and to which they applied? Have they not exhausted the speculative energies they may once have mobilized? All theories consigned to the ‘classical’, in other words, are in danger of acquiring what Max Frisch, speaking of Bertolt Brecht, once called ‘the resounding ineffectiveness of a classic’. 1 This ineffectiveness, of course, has its own effects. For example, in its mission statement, a recently created SCMS Scholarly Interest Group 1 The German phrase is ‘durchschlagende Wirkungslosigkeit eines Klassikers’. Max Frisch, Öffentlichkeit als Partner (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), p. 73. 398 Screen 55:3 Autumn 2014 © The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved doi:10.1093/screen/hju029 dossier by guest on November 19, 2014 http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from