Film theory
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Film theory debates the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large.
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[edit] History
As the new art form of the twentieth century, film immediately and continuously invited theoretical attempts to define its nature and function. Mostly as a result of film's own inferiority complex as the youngest of the arts, the impetus for much of early film theory was to gain a degree of respectability.
In some respects, French philosopher Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory anticipated the development of film theory at a time that the cinema was just being born as a new medium. He 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), he rejects film as an exemplification 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 Peirce.
Early film theory arose in the silent era and was mostly concerned with defining the crucial elements of the medium. It largely evolved from the works of directors like Germaine Dulac, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, Paul Rotha and film theorists like Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs and Siegfried Kracauer. These individuals emphasized how film differed from reality and how it might be considered a valid art form.
In the years after World War II, the French film critic and theorist André Bazin reacted against this approach to the cinema, arguing that film's essence lay in its ability to mechanically reproduce reality not in its difference from reality.
In the 1960s and 1970s, film theory took up residence in academe, importing concepts from established disciplines like psychoanalysis, gender studies, anthropology, literary theory, semiotics and linguistics.
During the 1990s the digital revolution in image technologies has had an impact on 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. There has also been a historical revisiting of early cinema screenings, practices and spectatorship modes by writers Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen and Yuri Tsivian.
[edit] Specific theories of film
- Apparatus theory
- Auteur theory
- Feminist film theory
- Formalist film theory
- Marxist film theory
- Philosophy of language film analysis
- Psychoanalytical film theory
- Screen theory
- Structuralist film theory
[edit] Further reading
- Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
- André Bazin, What is Cinema? essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
- 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 edn. (1979)
- Bill Nichols, Representing Reality. Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
- Robert Stam, Film Theory: an introduction", Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000
- The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, Oxford University Press, 1998.
- Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, London: Verso, 2000.
