Fearsome Acts of Interpretation: Audiovisual Historiography, Film Theory andGangs of New York

This article revisits Jean-Louis Comolli's “Historical Fiction: A Body Too Much” (1978) in the spirit of film-philosophy's various efforts to reassess the field's seminal texts, and it recasts Comolli's attentive analyses of film acting in terms of the original interpretations they produce. In short, I look to “A Body Too Much’ for its subtle disclosure of an underappreciated substratum of hermeneutics in so called “1970s film theory.” Comolli's study of the discord between actor and referent, I argue, is surprisingly consistent with Paul Ricoeur's pioneering contemporaneous work on metaphor and interpretation, and it leads him to understand the meaningful deployment of film actors in very particular ways. I provide an extended analysis of Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York (2002) to further demonstrate how the distinctive utilization of actors constitutes both a redescription of the historical past and a spur to interpretation. When critically apprehended as a solution to the broadly construed problems of creating historical fictions (pragmatic filmmaking problems, but also the significant matter of making meaning), the calculated deployment of film actors can reveal a manner of thinking about the historical past – simply put, it can tell us what a film is thinking and how it regards its historical characters and events. In the final analysis, I claim, our attention to – and critical interpretation of – the embodiment of such filmic thinking permits us to grasp the imaginative form of historical knowledge on view in such films.