The visuality of film as commodified excess: Beyond narrative and text

"The substance of film: What is the being of film? Or to be more precise, what makes a film a film and not something else? This question is often neglected in theoretical discussion and analysis of film. Literary approaches tend to treat film as 'text', as a kind of secondary form to the novel. Psychoanalytical theory has taken film to be equivalent to a psychic structure or dream-state, linked with the libidinal desire of the spectator. And linguists have reduced films to the generative grammar of language structures. None of these approaches asks the basic ontological question, thereby effecting what amounts to a repression of film's specific mode of being."--p. 119.