Film theory
Film theory debates the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for analyzing, among other things, the film image, narrative structure, the function of film artists, the relationship of film to reality, and the film spectator's position in the cinematic experience.
Film theory is generally distinguished from film criticism by its emphasis on meaning and interpretation over evaluation and judgment. Although there are exceptions, film critics tend to review movies (good? bad? how many stars?) while film theorists tend to analyze the medium's fundamental structure.
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History
In some respects, French philosopher Henri Bergson's Matière et Mémoire anticipated the development of film theory at a time (1896) that the cinema was just being born as a new medium.[citation needed] He commented on the need for new ways of thinking about movement, and coined the terms "image-temps" (images-as-time) and "image-mouvement" (images-as-movement). However, in his 1906 essay L'illusion cinématographique (in L'évolution créatrice), he rejects film as an exemplification of what he had in mind.[citation needed] Nonetheless, decades later, in Cinéma I & II (1983-1985), the philosopher Gilles Deleuze takes Matière et Mémoire as the basis of his philosophy of film and revisits Bergson's concepts--combining them with the semiotics of Charles Peirce.[citation needed]
The Italian futurist Ricciotto Canudo is considered to be the first true theorist of the cinema. He published The Birth of the Seventh Art in 1911. Another early attempt was The Photoplay (1916) by the psychologist Hugo Münsterberg.
So-called classical film theory (from the 1910s through, approximately, 1970) 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, on 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 differences from reality. He also co-founded the highly influential Cahiers du cinéma. Cahiers was more concerned with film criticism than with film theory, but it was the birthplace of the auteur theory. This "theory" is not accurately named as it is more a method of film criticism, which evaluates films based on their directors, than it is a "theory".
Cahiers' young critics, such as directors-to-be François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, were some of the first to take popular Hollywood cinema seriously as an art form. Their fascination with Westerns and gangster films encouraged the development of genre theory.
In the 1960s and 1970s, film theory took up residence in academe, importing concepts from established disciplines like psychoanalysis, literary theory and linguistics--a tendency encouraged by the influential British journal, Screen, among others.
During the 1990s the digital revolution in image technologies has impacted 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. 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
- Marxist film theory
- Psychoanalytical film theory
- Socialist realism
- Screen theory
- Structuralist film theory
Further reading
- Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, Oxford, New York: oxford University Press, 1984
- Andre Bazin, What is Cinema? essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1971
- Francesco Casetti, Theories of Cinema, 1945-1990, Paperback Edition, University of Texas Press 1999
- Bill Nichols, Representing Reality. Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1991
- The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, Oxford University Press 1998
- Stanley Kauffmann, Regarding Film: Criticism and Comment, Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001
See also
Categories
Articles with unsourced statements | Film theory