On the Wings of Hypothesis: Collected Writings on Soviet Cinema by Annette Michelson (review)

Abstract

When film studies came into its own as an academic discipline during the 1960s and 1970s, one of its most important scholars and champions was Annette Michelson. She played an integral part in giving cinema critical respectability as an advanced art. Michelson celebrated filmmakers with the same modernist terms that critics used to celebrate painters and sculptors in the pages of respected art magazines like Artforum. She is credited with inventing “philosophical film interpretation” as a model of criticism. Her investigations of film’s impact on the body, at a time when scholarship was largely interested in Marxism and psychoanalysis, presaged the phenomenological turn by decades. With Rosalind Krauss, she co-founded the journal October, the iconic journal of art and politics. She was one of the founding faculty members of New York University’s cinema studies program, and, from there, played a crucial role in shaping the thought of generations of scholars, from Tom Gunning and Noël Carroll to Anne Friedberg and Scott Bukatman. Yet Michelson’s importance as a scholar and critic has been little recognized, especially in comparison to her lifelong colleague Krauss or her contemporaries Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell. She published little. She never completed a monograph; her essays seemed, in comparison to these authors, narrowly conceived. Although her ambitions as a critic were high—she sought to become the American answer to André Bazin, and to an extent she constructed her own methods as rebuttals to his—she never overtly pushed an overarching theoretical agenda. She published on few topics, mostly limiting her writing to studies of the European pre-war and American post-war avant-gardes. Thus, with the exception of her seminal essay on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), she is rarely read outside those fields of specialization, and her style and concerns as a film writer have hardly been studied at all. A synoptic collection of Michelson’s essays, then, is long overdue. On the Wings of Hypothesis, along with its companion, On the Eve of the Future (2017), published shortly before Michelson’s death, goes some length toward