Book Review: Law’s Moving Image.
| Author | Katherine Biber |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663906069555 |
| Published date | 01 December 2006 |
| Date | 01 December 2006 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
REFERENCE
Nussbaum, M. (2001) The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy
and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
JOSEPH WILLIAM SINGER
Harvard Law School, USA
LESLIE J. MORAN, EMMA SANDON, ELENA LOIZIDOU AND IAN CHRISTIE (EDS), Law’s
Moving Image. London: GlassHouse Press, 2004, 255 pp., £28.00 (pbk).
DOI: 10.1177/0964663906069555
I began to read Law’s Moving Image with one primary question: ‘what do law and
cinema have to say to each other?’ I finished reading it with the same question still
in mind. I like to imagine that, for the editors, this question was posed and reposed,
and that they swung between pleasure and discomfort as they witnessed the simple
conflation of law and film becoming tangled up, and eventually unravelling.
Edited by an interdisciplinary team from Birkbeck College, Law’s Moving Image
has its origins as a conference at Tate Britain, and I would not be the only reviewer
to note the lack of thematic or theoretical cohesion of this volume (Mussawir, 2005;
Panko, 2005). The volume does not make clear the location it seeks in the burgeon-
ing field of literature on law and film, nor does it conclude anything about the viabil-
ity of thinking about law and film together. Divided into three parts, each part filled
with an eclectic sub-collection of essays, it addresses cinema as jurisprudence (viewing
law through film), representation (law in film), and regulation (laws about film).
Certain themes recur (citizenship, aesthetics, markets) but what seemed to me to
be a key question – ‘what is film?’ – was not asked. Film is not an artistic-cultural
practice like any other. It is an extremely expensive, heavily regulated, and highly
collaborative commodity. Film functions as political propaganda, mass education, and
broad-spectrum social distraction. Films are trouble and fun, risky and responsible,
imaginative and banal. The collection of films under discussion here samples certain
components of the medium (documentaries, children’s films, bio-pics, art-house
cinema), but the reader is left wondering if it is possible to even talk about ‘film’ as a
unified subject.
Of course, ‘law’ is itself an intangible term: some chapters take a positivist view of
law, others refer to law as a perspective, a methodology, an ideology, or a cultural text.
More than anything, this volume helps me to conclude that perhaps film and law,
despite their indeterminacy, seek a unified response from their subjects: constantly
asserting themselves as speaking with a single voice, constantly clamouring to be
heard, persistently addressing us as though we were an audience, sitting in the dark,
looking up at them.
The opening chapter, by Ian Christie, points out that the term ‘diegesis’ originally
referred to the recitation of facts in a Greek law court, before he issues a call to discard
legal positivism in favour of ethics, conscience and indeterminacy, looking at several
Second World War films in which characters face various forms of supernatural
judgment. Eugene McNamee’s chapter on Henry Vexplains how the English common
law (and Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s play) trace the journey from
darkness towards light, and how English constitutionalism and Shakespeare both
deploy poetry upon popular consciousness, seeking to achieve consensus about
national identity and sovereignty.
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