V.F. Perkins and the redescription of films

Abstract

This article explores the work of the critic V.F. Perkins in the light of the concept of description, and vice versa. It argues that a range of distinct senses of description come together in Perkins’s work, and uses that work to assist in the construction of some proposals about the function and value of description in films and film criticism. Perkins had, it is argued, a particular interest in films that explore what might be referred to as ‘failures of redescription’, including Max Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman and Elia Kazan’s America, America. His writings on these films are explored with a view to demonstrating the ways in which the descriptive practices Perkins used in his writing can bring out rich and fascinating connections between criticism as an ethical practice with affinities to moral philosophy (via a concern with appropriate act descriptions) and the descriptions that are traced by films themselves.