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Film theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Film theory
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Film theory, or cinema studies , is an academic discipline that aims to explore 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. Film theory is not to be confused with general film criticism, or film history, though there can be some crossover between the three disciplines.

Contents
1 History 2 Specific theories of film 3 See also 4 References 5 Further reading

History
French philosopher Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory (1896) has been cited as anticipating the development of film theory during the birth of cinema. 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 cinmatographique (in L'volution cratrice), he rejects film as an exemplification of what he had in mind. Nonetheless, decades later, in Cinma I and Cinema II (19831985), 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. It largely evolved from the works of directors like Germaine Dulac, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, and Dziga Vertov and film theorists like Rudolf Arnheim, Bla Balzs and Siegfried Kracauer.[1] 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 Andr 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.[2] 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 linguistics. 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.[3] American scholar David Bordwell has spoken against many prominent developments film theory since the 1970s, i.e., he uses the humorously derogatory term "SLAB theory" to refer to film studies based on the ideas of Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, and/or Barthes. Instead, Bordwell promotes what he describes as "neoformalism."
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Film theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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 iek offered new aspects of "the gaze" extensively used in contemporary film analysis.[4] There has also been a historical revisiting of early cinema screenings, practices and spectatorship modes by writers Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen and Yuri Tsivian.

Specific theories of film

Apparatus theory Auteur theory Feminist film theory Formalist film theory Genre studies Marxist film theory Philosophy of language film analysis Psychoanalytical film theory Screen theory Structuralist film theory

See also
Film Fictional Film Film journals and magazines Film studies Philosophy of Film

References
1. ^ Robert Stam, Film Theory: an introduction", Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. 2. ^ Andr Bazin, What is Cinema? essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. 3. ^ Weddle, David. "Lights, Camera, Action. Marxism, Semiotics, Narratology: Film School Isn't What It Used to Be, One Father Discovers (http://articles.latimes.com/print/2003/jul/13/magazine/tm-filmschool28)." Los Angeles Times, July 13, 2003; URL retrieved 22 Jan 2011. 4. ^ Slavoj iek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, London: Verso, 2000.

Further reading
Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Francesco Casetti, Theories of Cinema, 1945-1990, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (http://books.google.com/books?
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Film theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

id=Ro23ozNGdzQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=stanley+cavell&ei=NsO5SNm_EIbMywSB3aiuAw&sig= ACfU3U2CBJE_tKHfu5Oa5bUbmh93DafQXQ#PPP1,M11) (1971); 2nd enlarged edn. (1979) Bill Nichols, Representing Reality. Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, Oxford University Press, 1998. Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Film_theory&oldid=571302631" Categories: Film theory Postmodernism Critical theory This page was last modified on 2 September 2013 at 23:37. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

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