Film theory

Template:Short description Template:For Film theory is a set of scholarly approaches within the academic discipline of film or cinema studies that began in the 1920s by questioning the formal essential attributes of motion pictures;<ref>Gledhill, Christine; and Justine Flores, Andrei Bobis, Rovin Macatangay editors. Reinventing Film Studies. Arnold & Oxford University Press, 2000.</ref> and that now provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large.<ref>Mast, Gerald; and Marshall Cohen, editors. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Third Edition.Oxford University Press, 1985.</ref> Film theory is not to be confused with general film criticism, or film history, though these three disciplines interrelate. Although some branches of film theory are derived from linguistics and literary theory,<ref>Pieter Jacobus Fourie (ed.), Media Studies: Content, audiences, and production, Juta, 2001, p. 195.</ref> it also originated and overlaps with the philosophy of film.<ref>"Philosophy of Film" by Thomas Wartenberg – first published 2004; substantive revision m 2008. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.</ref>

History

Early theory, before 1945

French philosopher Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory (1896) anticipated the development of film theory during the birth of cinema in the early twentieth century. Bergson commented on the need for new ways of thinking about movement, and coined the terms "the movement-image" and "the time-image". However, in his 1906 essay L'illusion cinématographique (in L'évolution créatrice; English: The cinematic illusion) he rejects film as an example of what he had in mind. Nonetheless, decades later, in Cinéma I and Cinema II (1983–1985), the philosopher Gilles Deleuze took Matter and Memory as the basis of his philosophy of film and revisited Bergson's concepts, combining them with the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. Early film theory arose in the silent era and was mostly concerned with defining the crucial elements of the medium. Ricciotto Canudo was an early Italian film theoretician who saw cinema as "plastic art in motion", and gave cinema the label "the Sixth Art", later changed to "the Seventh Art".

In 1915, Vachel Lindsay wrote a book on film, followed a year later by Hugo Münsterberg. Lindsay argued that films could be classified into three categories: action films, intimate films, as well as films of splendour.<ref name=":0">Template:Cite book</ref> According to him, the action film was sculpture-in-motion, while the intimate film was painting-in-motion, and splendour film architecture-in-motion.<ref name=":0" /> He also argued against the contemporary notion of calling films photoplays and seen as filmed versions of theatre, instead seeing film with camera-born opportunities.Template:Sfn He also described cinema as hieroglyphic in the sense of containing symbols in its images.Template:Sfn He believed this visuality gave film the potential for universal accessibility.Template:Sfn Münsterberg in turn noted the analogies between cinematic techniques and certain mental processes.Template:Sfn For example, he compared the close-up to the mind paying attention.Template:Sfn The flashback, in turn, was similar to remembering.Template:Sfn This was later followed by the formalism of Rudolf Arnheim, who studied how techniques influenced film as art.Template:Sfn

Among early French theorists, Germaine Dulac brought the concept of impressionism to film by describing cinema that explored the malleability of the border between internal experience and external reality, for example through superimposition.Template:Sfn Surrealism also had an influence on early French film culture.Template:Sfn The term photogénie was important to both, having been brought to use by Louis Delluc in 1919 and becoming widespread in its usage to capture the unique power of cinema.Template:Sfn Jean Epstein noted how filming gives a "personality" or a "spirit" to objects while also being able to reveal "the untrue, the unreal, the 'surreal'".Template:Sfn This was similar to defamiliarization used by avant-garde artists to recreate the world.Template:Sfn He saw the close-up as the essence of photogénie.Template:Sfn Béla Balázs also praised the close-up for similar reasons.Template:Sfn Arnheim also believed defamiliarization to be a critical element of film.Template:Sfn

After the Russian Revolution, a chaotic situation in the country also created a sense of excitement at new possibilities.Template:Sfn This gave rise to montage theory in the work of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein.Template:Sfn After the establishment of the Moscow Film School, Lev Kuleshov set up a workshop to study the formal structure of film, focusing on editing as "the essence of cinematography".Template:Sfn This produced findings on the Kuleshov effect.Template:Sfn Editing was also associated with the foundational Marxist concept of dialectical materialism.Template:Sfn To this end, Eisenstein claimed that "montage is conflict".Template:Sfn Eisenstein's theories were focused on montage having the ability create meaning transcending the sum of its parts with a thematic effect in a way that ideograms turned graphics into abstract symbols.Template:Sfn Multiple scenes could work to produce themes (tonal montage), while multiple themes could create even higher levels of meaning (intellectual montage).Template:Sfn Vertov in turn focused on developing Kino-Pravda, film truth, and the Kino-Eye, which he claimed showed a deeper truth than could be seen with the naked eye.<ref name="leyda">Template:Cite book</ref><ref name=":02">Bulgakowa, Oksana. 2008. "The Ear against the Eye: Vertov's symphony." Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung (2): 142-158. p. 142</ref>

Later theory, after 1945

In the years after World War II, the French film critic and theorist André Bazin argued that film's essence lay in its ability to mechanically reproduce reality, not in its difference from reality.<ref>André Bazin, What is Cinema? essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.</ref> This had followed the rise of poetic realism in French cinema in the 1930s.Template:Sfn He believed that the purpose of art is to preserve reality, even famously claiming that "The photographic image is the object itself".Template:Sfn Based on this, he advocated for the use of long takes and deep focus, to reveal the structural depth of reality and finding meaning objectively in images.Template:Sfn This was soon followed by the rise of Italian neorealism.Template:Sfn Siegfried Kracauer was also notable for arguing that realism is the most important function of cinema.<ref>Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1976, Part II.</ref>

The Auteur theory derived from the approach of critic and filmmaker Alexandre Astruc, among others, and was originally developed in articles in Cahiers du Cinéma, a film journal that had been co-founded by Bazin.<ref name="Britannica">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> François Truffaut issued auteurism's manifestos in two Cahiers essays: "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français" (January 1954) and "Ali Baba et la 'Politique des auteurs'" (February 1955).<ref name="auteurism">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> His approach was brought to American criticism by Andrew Sarris in 1962.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> The auteur theory was based on films depicting the directors' own worldviews and impressions of the subject matter, by varying lighting, camerawork, staging, editing, and so on.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Georges Sadoul deemed a film's putative "author" potentially even an actor, but a film indeed collaborative.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>Template:Page needed Aljean Harmetz cited major control even by film executives.<ref name=":3">Aljean Harmetz, Round up the Usual Suspects, p. 29.</ref> David Kipen's view of screenwriter as indeed main author is termed Schreiber theory.

In the 1960s and 1970s, film theory took up residence in academia importing concepts from established disciplines like psychoanalysis, gender studies, anthropology, literary theory, semiotics and linguisticsTemplate:--as advanced by scholars such as Christian Metz.<ref name="Metz">Template:Cite book</ref> However, not until the late 1980s or early 1990s did film theory per se achieve much prominence in American universities by displacing the prevailing humanistic, auteur theory that had dominated cinema studies and which had been focused on the practical elements of film writing, production, editing and criticism.<ref name="Weddle">Weddle, David. "Lights, Camera, Action. Marxism, Semiotics, Narratology: Film School Isn't What It Used to Be, One Father Discovers." Los Angeles Times, July 13, 2003; URL retrieved 22 Jan 2011.</ref> American scholar David Bordwell has spoken against many prominent developments in film theory since the 1970s. He uses the derogatory term "SLAB theory" to refer to film studies based on the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Roland Barthes.<ref name="SLAB">Template:Cite journal</ref> Instead, Bordwell promotes what he describes as "neoformalism" (a revival of formalist film theory).

During the 1990s the digital revolution in image technologies has influenced film theory in various ways. There has been a refocus onto celluloid film's ability to capture an "indexical" image of a moment in time by theorists like Mary Ann Doane, Philip Rosen and Laura Mulvey who was informed by psychoanalysis. From a psychoanalytical perspective, after the Lacanian notion of "the Real", Slavoj Žižek offered new aspects of "the gaze" extensively used in contemporary film analysis.<ref>Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, London: Verso, 2000.</ref> From the 1990s onward the Matrixial theory of artist and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger<ref>Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, University of Minnesota Press, 2006</ref> revolutionized feminist film theory.<ref>Nicholas Chare, Sportswomen in Cinema: Film and the Frailty Myth. Leeds: I.B.Tauris 2015.</ref><ref>James Batcho, Terrence Malick's Unseeing Cinema. Memory, Time and Audibility. Palgrave Macmillan.</ref> Her concept The Matrixial Gaze,<ref>Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Gaze. Published by Leeds University, 1995. Reprinted in: Drawing Papers, nº 24, 2001.</ref> that has established a feminine gaze and has articulated its differences from the phallic gaze and its relation to feminine as well as maternal specificities and potentialities of "coemergence", offering a critique of Sigmund Freud's and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis, is extensively used in analysis of films<ref>Griselda Pollock, After-effects – After-images. Manchester University Press, 2013</ref><ref>Maggie Humm, Feminism and Film. Edinburgh University Press, 1997</ref> by female authors, like Chantal Akerman,<ref>Lucia Nagib and Anne Jerslev (ends.), Impure Cinema. London: I.B.Tauris.</ref> as well as by male authors, like Pedro Almodovar.<ref>Julian Daniel Gutierrez-Arbilla, Aesthetics, Ethics and Trauma in the Cinema of Pedro Almodovar. Edinburgh University Press, 2017</ref> The matrixial gaze offers the female the position of a subject, not of an object, of the gaze, while deconstructing the structure of the subject itself, and offers border-time, border-space and a possibility for compassion and witnessing. Ettinger's notions articulate the links between aesthetics, ethics and trauma.<ref>Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive. Rutledge, 2007.</ref> There has also been a historical revisiting of early cinema screenings, practices and spectatorship modes by writers Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen and Yuri Tsivian.

In Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice (2011), Clive Meyer suggests that 'cinema is a different experience to watching a film at home or in an art gallery', and argues for film theorists to re-engage the specificity of philosophical concepts for cinema as a medium distinct from others.<ref>Template:Citation</ref>

See also

• Cinematography
• Digital cinema
• 3D film
• Film
• Film studies
• Glossary of motion picture terms
• Invisible auditor
• List of film periodicals
• Narrative film
• Philosophy of film
• Psychology of film

Further reading

• Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
• Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
• Francesco Casetti, Theories of Cinema, 1945–1990, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999.
• Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1971); 2nd enlarged ed. (1979)
• Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
• The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, edited by John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, Oxford University Press, 1998.
• The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, edited by Edward Branigan, Warren Buckland, Routledge, 2015.