Film theory

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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; [1] and that now provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large. [2] Film theory is not to be confused with general film criticism, or film history, though these three disciplines interrelate.

Contents

Although some branches of film theory are derived from linguistics and literary theory, [3] it also originated and overlaps with the philosophy of film. [4]

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. [5] According to him, the action film was sculpture-in-motion, while the intimate film was painting-in-motion, and splendour film architecture-in-motion. [5] 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. [6] He also described cinema as hieroglyphic in the sense of containing symbols in its images. [6] He believed this visuality gave film the potential for universal accessibility. [7] Münsterberg in turn noted the analogies between cinematic techniques and certain mental processes. [8] For example, he compared the close-up to the mind paying attention. [8] The flashback, in turn, was similar to remembering. [9] This was later followed by the formalism of Rudolf Arnheim, who studied how techniques influenced film as art. [10]

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. [11] Surrealism also had an influence on early French film culture. [12] 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. [13] 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'". [13] This was similar to defamiliarization used by avant-garde artists to recreate the world. [13] He saw the close-up as the essence of photogénie. [14] Béla Balázs also praised the close-up for similar reasons. [14] Arnheim also believed defamiliarization to be a critical element of film. [15]

After the Russian Revolution, a chaotic situation in the country also created a sense of excitement at new possibilities. [16] This gave rise to montage theory in the work of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein. [16] 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". [17] This produced findings on the Kuleshov effect. [17] Editing was also associated with the foundational Marxist concept of dialectical materialism. [17] To this end, Eisenstein claimed that "montage is conflict". [18] 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. [19] Multiple scenes could work to produce themes (tonal montage), while multiple themes could create even higher levels of meaning (intellectual montage). [19] 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. [20] [21]

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. [22] This had followed the rise of poetic realism in French cinema in the 1930's. [23] He believed that the purpose of art is to preserve reality, even famously claiming that "The photographic image is the object itself". [24] 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. [25] This was soon followed by the rise of Italian neorealism. [25] Siegfried Kracauer was also notable for arguing that realism is the most important function of cinema. [26]

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. [27] 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). [28] His approach was brought to American criticism by Andrew Sarris in 1962. [29] 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. [30] Georges Sadoul deemed a film's putative "author" potentially even an actor, but a film indeed collaborative. [31] [ page needed ] Aljean Harmetz cited major control even by film executives. [32] 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 linguistics —as advanced by scholars such as Christian Metz. [33] 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. [34] 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. [35] 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. [36] From the 1990s onward the Matrixial theory of artist and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger [37] revolutionized feminist film theory. [38] [39] Her concept The Matrixial Gaze, [40] 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 [41] [42] by female authors, like Chantal Akerman, [43] as well as by male authors, like Pedro Almodovar. [44] 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. [45] 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. [46]

Specific theories of film

See also

Related Research Articles

<i>Cahiers du Cinéma</i> French film journal

Cahiers du Cinéma is a French film magazine co-founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma involving members of two Paris film clubs—Objectif 49 and Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dziga Vertov</span> Soviet film director (d. 1954)

Dziga Vertov was a Soviet pioneer documentary film and newsreel director, as well as a cinema theorist. His filming practices and theories influenced the cinéma vérité style of documentary movie-making and the Dziga Vertov Group, a radical film-making cooperative which was active from 1968 to 1972. He was a member of the Kinoks collective, with Elizaveta Svilova and Mikhail Kaufman.

Feminist film theory is a theoretical film criticism derived from feminist politics and feminist theory influenced by second-wave feminism and brought about around the 1970s in the United States. With the advancements in film throughout the years feminist film theory has developed and changed to analyse the current ways of film and also go back to analyse films past. Feminists have many approaches to cinema analysis, regarding the film elements analyzed and their theoretical underpinnings.

Gender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing gender identity and gendered representation. Gender studies originated in the field of women's studies, concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics. The field now overlaps with queer studies and men's studies. Its rise to prominence, especially in Western universities after 1990, coincided with the rise of deconstruction.

Psychoanalytic film theory is a school of academic thought that evokes the concepts of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. The theory is closely tied to Critical theory, Marxist film theory, and Apparatus theory. The theory is separated into two waves. The first wave occurred in the 1960s and 70s. The second wave became popular in the 1980s and 90s.

<i>Man with a Movie Camera</i> 1929 Soviet silent documentary film

Man with a Movie Camera is an experimental 1929 Soviet silent documentary film, directed by Dziga Vertov, filmed by his brother Mikhail Kaufman, and edited by Vertov's wife Yelizaveta Svilova. Kaufman also appears as the eponymous Man of the film.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">André Bazin</span> French film critic (1918–1958)

André Bazin was a renowned and influential French film critic and film theorist. He started to write about film in 1943 and was a co-founder of the renowned film magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 1951, with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca.

Écriture féminine, or "women's writing", is a term coined by French feminist and literary theorist Hélène Cixous in her 1975 essay "The Laugh of the Medusa". Cixous aimed to establish a genre of literary writing that deviates from traditional masculine styles of writing, one which examines the relationship between the cultural and psychological inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text. This strand of feminist literary theory originated in France in the early 1970s through the works of Cixous and other theorists including Luce Irigaray, Chantal Chawaf, Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva, and has subsequently been expanded upon by writers such as psychoanalytic theorist Bracha Ettinger. who emerged in this field in the early 1990s,

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Soviet montage theory</span> A theory of film that developed in Soviet Russia

Soviet montage theory is an approach to understanding and creating cinema that relies heavily upon editing. It is the principal contribution of Soviet film theorists to global cinema, and brought formalism to bear on filmmaking.

French impressionist cinema refers to a group of French films and filmmakers of the 1920s.

<i>Cinema 1: The Movement Image</i> 1983 book by Gilles Deleuze

Cinema 1: The Movement Image (1983) is the first of two books on cinema by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the second being Cinema 2: The Time Image (1985). Together Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 have become known as the Cinema books, the two volumes both complementary and interdependent. In these books the author combines philosophy and cinema, explaining in the preface to the French edition of Cinema 1 that "[t]his study is not a history of cinema. It is a taxonomy, an attempt at the classifications of images and signs"; and that the "first volume has to content itself with […] only one part of the classification". To make this division between the movement-image and the time-image Deleuze draws upon the work of the French philosopher Henri Bergson's theory of matter (movement) and mind (time).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bracha L. Ettinger</span> Israeli artist, painter, philosopher, theorist and psychoanalyst

Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger is an Israeli-British artist, writer, psychoanalyst and philosopher, born in Mandatory Palestine and living and working in Paris. She is a feminist theorist and artist in contemporary New European Painting who invented the concept of the Matrixial Gaze and related concepts around trauma, aesthetics and ethics. Ettinger is a professor at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and at GCAS, Dublin. In 2023, she was part of the Finding Committee for the Artistic Director of Documenta's 2027 edition. She resigned from that role with a public letter intended to open a radical discussion in the artworld, following the administration's rejection of her request for a pause due to the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip.

An auteur is an artist with a distinctive approach, usually a film director whose filmmaking control is so unbounded and personal that the director is likened to the "author" of the film, thus manifesting the director's unique style or thematic focus. As an unnamed value, auteurism originated in French film criticism of the late 1940s, and derives from the critical approach of André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc, whereas American critic Andrew Sarris in 1962 called it auteur theory. Yet the concept first appeared in French in 1955 when director François Truffaut termed it policy of the authors, and interpreted the films of some directors, like Alfred Hitchcock, as a body revealing recurring themes and preoccupations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gaze</span> Awareness and perception of others

In critical theory, philosophy, sociology, and psychoanalysis, the gaze, in the figurative sense, is an individual's awareness and perception of other individuals, other groups, or oneself. The concept and the social applications of the gaze have been defined and explained by existentialist and phenomenologist philosophers. Jean-Paul Sartre described the gaze in Being and Nothingness (1943). Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), developed the concept of the gaze to illustrate the dynamics of socio-political power relations and the social dynamics of society's mechanisms of discipline. Jacques Derrida, in The Animal That Therefore I Am (1997), elaborated upon the inter-species relations that exist among human beings and other animals, which are established by way of the gaze.

Feminist ethics is an approach to ethics that builds on the belief that traditionally ethical theorizing has undervalued and/or underappreciated women's moral experience, which is largely male-dominated, and it therefore chooses to reimagine ethics through a holistic feminist approach to transform it.

The Matrixial Gaze is a 1995 book by artist, psychoanalyst, clinical psychologist, writer and painter Bracha L. Ettinger. It is a work of feminist film theory that examines the gaze as described by Jacques Lacan, criticises it, and offers an original theory concerning feminine and female gaze. Beginning in 1985, Ettinger's artistic practice and her theoretical invention of a matrixial space articulated around her proposal of a feminine-maternal sphere of encounter that begins in the most archaic (pre-maternal-prenatal) humanised encounter-event, led her to publish a long series of academic articles starting 1992, articulating and developing for some decades what she has called the matrixial theory of trans-subjectivity. The matrixial theory formulates Aesthetics and artistic creativity in terms of withnessing, compassion, wondering and 'fascinance', as well as Ethics of witnessing, responsibility, respect, compassion and care, and the passage from co-response-ability to responsibility and from com-passion to compassion. Bracha L. Ettinger invented a field of concepts that have influenced debates in contemporary art, psychoanalysis, women's studies, film studies, feminism, gender studies and cultural studies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Male gaze</span> Concept in feminist theory

In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. In the visual and aesthetic presentations of narrative cinema, the male gaze has three perspectives: that of the man behind the camera, that of the male characters within the film's cinematic representations; and that of the spectator gazing at the image.

Archaic mother is the mother of earliest infancy, whose continuing influence is traced in psychoanalysis, and whose (repressed) presence is considered to underlie the horror film.

The female gaze is a feminist theory term referring to the gaze of the female spectator, character or director of an artistic work, but more than the gender it is an issue of representing women as subjects having agency. As such all genders can create films with a female gaze. It is a response to feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey's term "the male gaze", which represents not only the gaze of a heterosexual male viewer but also the gaze of the male character and the male creator of the film. In that sense it is close, though different, from the Matrixial gaze coined in 1985 by Bracha L. Ettinger. In contemporary usage, the female gaze has been used to refer to the perspective a female filmmaker (screenwriter/director/producer) brings to a film that might be different from a male view of the subject.

Medium essentialism is a philosophical theory stating that each artform has its own distinctive medium, and that the essence of such an artform is dependent on its particular medium. In practice, the theory argues that every artwork should manifest its essential properties, those which no other artform can employ. The theory relies on the presumption that every artform has a unique medium, and is divided into two main interpretations. The ‘limitation’ interpretation of medium essentialism argues that, due to their medium, some artforms should be constrained in their aspirations. The ‘productive’ interpretation reasons that a work's medium determines what content or style will function best, and that practitioners should pursue ventures aligning with the nature of this chosen medium. Clement Greenberg is a prolific medium-essentialist in relation to modernist art, proposing that artists such as Jackson Pollock are successful because they properly exploit elements of their chosen medium, such as a painting's physical flatness. However, medium essentialism was most propagated by film practitioners throughout the twentieth century, as it legitimised cinema as an artform for the first time. Previously, film had been regarded as merely a recorded representation of a written play. It is therefore most discussed today by film theorists, stemming from the work of critics such as André Bazin. Regardless of the interpretation favoured, what constitutes a film's medium, and therefore essential meaning, has been heavily debated, and has prompted the creation of several sub-theories. The theory has been widely discussed among contemporary film theorists and has featured in the Anthology of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures.

References

  1. ↑ Gledhill, Christine; and Justine Flores, Andrei Bobis, Rovin Macatangay editors. Reinventing Film Studies. Arnold & Oxford University Press, 2000.
  2. ↑ Mast, Gerald; and Marshall Cohen, editors. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Third Edition.Oxford University Press, 1985.
  3. ↑ Pieter Jacobus Fourie (ed.), Media Studies: Content, audiences, and production, Juta, 2001, p. 195.
  4. ↑ "Philosophy of Film" by Thomas Wartenberg – first published 2004; substantive revision m 2008. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  5. 1 2 McDonald, Kevin (2016). Film Theory: The Basics (Kindle ed.). Routledge. p. 12. ISBN   978-1-315-75719-3.
  6. 1 2 McDonald 2016, p. 13.
  7. ↑ McDonald 2016, p. 14.
  8. 1 2 McDonald 2016, p. 15.
  9. ↑ McDonald 2016, p. 16.
  10. ↑ McDonald 2016, p. 18.
  11. ↑ McDonald 2016, p. 23.
  12. ↑ McDonald 2016, p. 24.
  13. 1 2 3 McDonald 2016, p. 25.
  14. 1 2 McDonald 2016, p. 26.
  15. ↑ McDonald 2016, p. 27.
  16. 1 2 McDonald 2016, p. 28.
  17. 1 2 3 McDonald 2016, p. 29.
  18. ↑ McDonald 2016, p. 30.
  19. 1 2 McDonald 2016, p. 33.
  20. ↑ Jay Leyda (1960). Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. George Allen & Unwin. pp. 161–162.
  21. ↑ Bulgakowa, Oksana. 2008. "The Ear against the Eye: Vertov's symphony." Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung (2): 142-158. p. 142
  22. ↑ André Bazin, What is Cinema? essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
  23. ↑ McDonald 2016, p. 45.
  24. ↑ McDonald 2016, p. 46.
  25. 1 2 McDonald 2016, p. 47.
  26. ↑ Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1976, Part II.
  27. ↑ "Auteur theory". Encyclopædia Britannica . n.d.
  28. ↑ "Evolution of the Auteur Theory". The University of Alabama. 2020-02-11. Retrieved 2022-05-31.
  29. ↑ Sarris, Andrew (Winter 1962–1963). "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962" (PDF). Film Culture. 27: 1–8. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2020-07-26. Retrieved 2022-05-31.
  30. ↑ Thompson, Kristin (2010). Film history : an introduction. David Bordwell (3rd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Higher Education. pp. 381–383. ISBN   978-0-07-338613-3. OCLC   294064466.
  31. ↑ Sadoul, Georges; Morris, Peter (1972). Dictionary of Film Makers. University of California Press. ISBN   978-0-520-02151-8.
  32. ↑ Aljean Harmetz, Round up the Usual Suspects, p. 29.
  33. ↑ Metz, Christian (1974). Language and cinema. The Hague: Mouton. ISBN   978-3-11-081604-4. OCLC   840504588.
  34. ↑ 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.
  35. ↑ Quart, Alissa (2000). "David Bordwell Blows the Whistle on Film Studies" (PDF). Lingua Franca. 10 (2): 35–43.
  36. ↑ Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, London: Verso, 2000.
  37. ↑ Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, University of Minnesota Press, 2006
  38. ↑ Nicholas Chare, Sportswomen in Cinema: Film and the Frailty Myth. Leeds: I.B.Tauris 2015.
  39. ↑ James Batcho, Terrence Malick's Unseeing Cinema. Memory, Time and Audibility. Palgrave Macmillan.
  40. ↑ Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Gaze. Published by Leeds University, 1995. Reprinted in: Drawing Papers, nº 24, 2001.
  41. ↑ Griselda Pollock, After-effects – After-images. Manchester University Press, 2013
  42. ↑ Maggie Humm, Feminism and Film. Edinburgh University Press, 1997
  43. ↑ Lucia Nagib and Anne Jerslev (ends.), Impure Cinema. London: I.B.Tauris.
  44. ↑ Julian Daniel Gutierrez-Arbilla, Aesthetics, Ethics and Trauma in the Cinema of Pedro Almodovar . Edinburgh University Press, 2017
  45. ↑ Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive. Rutledge, 2007.
  46. ↑ Laurie, Timothy (2013), "Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice", Media International Australia, 147: 171, doi:10.1177/1329878X1314700134, S2CID   149797284

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