Film studies is an academic discipline that deals with various theoretical, historical, and critical approaches to cinema as an art form and a medium. It is sometimes subsumed within media studies and is often compared to television studies. [1]
Film studies is less concerned with advancing proficiency in film production than it is with exploring the narrative, artistic, cultural, economic, and political implications of the cinema. [1] In searching for these social-ideological values, film studies takes a series of critical approaches for the analysis of production, theoretical framework, context, and creation. [2] Also, in studying film, possible careers include critic or production. Overall the study of film continues to grow, as does the industry on which it focuses.
Academic journals publishing film studies work include Sight & Sound , Film Comment , Film International , CineAction , Screen , Journal of Cinema and Media Studies , Film Quarterly , Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, and Journal of Film and Video .
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Film studies as an academic discipline emerged in the 20th century, decades after the invention of motion pictures. Rather than focusing on the technical aspects of film production, film studies are concentrated on film theory, which approaches film critically as an art, and the writing of film historiography. Because film became an invention and industry only in the late 19th century, a generation of film producers and directors existed significantly before the academic analysis that followed in later generations.
Early film schools focused on the production and subjective critique of film rather than on the critical approaches, history and theory used to study academically. The concept of film studies arose as a means of analyzing the formal aspects of film as the films were created. Established in 1919, the Moscow Film School was the first school in the world to focus on film. In the United States, the USC School of Cinematic Arts, established in 1929, was the first cinematic-based school, which was created in agreement with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was also the first to offer an academic major in film in 1932, but the program lacked many of the distinctions associated with contemporary film study. Universities began to implement cinema-related curricula without separation of the abstract and practical approaches.
The German Deutsche Filmakademie Babelsberg was founded during the era of the Third Reich in 1938. Its lecturers included Willi Forst and Heinrich George. Students were required to create films in order to complete their studies at the academy.
A movement away from Hollywood productions in the 1950s turned cinema into a more artistic independent endeavor. It was the creation of the auteur theory, which examines film as the director's vision and art, that broadened the scope of academic film studies to a worldwide presence in the 1960s. In 1965, film critic Robin Wood, in his writings on Alfred Hitchcock, declared that Hitchcock's films contained the same complexities of Shakespeare's plays. [3] Similarly, French director Jean Luc Godard, a contributor to the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinéma , wrote: "Jerry Lewis [...] is the only one in Hollywood doing something different, the only one who isn't falling in with the established categories, the norms, the principles. [...] Lewis is the only one today who's making courageous films." [4]
A catalyst in the success and stature of academic film studies has been large donations to universities by successful commercial filmmakers. For example, director George Lucas donated $175 million to the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 2006. [5]
Today, film studies are taught worldwide and has grown to encompass numerous methods for teaching history, culture and society. Many liberal arts colleges and universities, as well as American high schools, contain courses specifically focused on the analysis of film. [6] Modern-day film studies increasingly reflect popular culture and art, and a wide variety of curricula have emerged for analysis of critical approaches used in film. [7] Students are typically expected to form the ability to detect conceptual shifts in film, a vocabulary for the analysis of film form and style, a sense of ideological dimensions of film and an awareness of extra textual domains and possible direction of film in the future. [8] Universities often allow students to participate in film research and attend seminars of specialized topics to enhance their critical abilities. [9]
The curriculum of tertiary-level film studies programs often include but are not limited to: [10] [11] [12]
A total of 144 tertiary institutions in the United States offer a major program in film studies. [6] This number continues to grow each year with new interest in film studies. Institutions offering film degrees as part of their arts or communications curricula differ from institutions with dedicated film programs.
The success of the American film industry has contributed to the popularity of academic film studies in the U.S., and film-related degrees often enable graduates to pursue careers in the production of film, especially directing and producing films. [13] Courses often combine alternate media, such as television or new media, in combination with film studies. [14]
Film-studies programs at all levels [15] are offered worldwide, primarily in the countries in the Global North. In many cases, film studies can be found in departments of media studies or communication studies. [16] Film archives and museums such as the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam [17] also conduct scholarly projects alongside educational and outreach programs. South Asian Country Bangladesh's some university have Film graduate programme. Stamford University Bangladesh, Department of Film and Media Studies.https://dafm.stamforduniversity.edu.bd/index.php/dafm/department_program/FLM
In south Asia, the first department for Film studies.
Film festivals play an important role in the study of film and may include discourses on topics such as film style, aesthetics, representation, production, distribution, social impact, history, archival and curation. Major festivals such as the Cannes Film Festival [18] offer extensive programs with talks and panel discussions. They also inform film historiography, [19] most actively through retrospectives and historical sections such as Cannes Classics.
Film festival FESPACO serves as a major hub for discourse on cinema on the African continent. [20]
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; and that now 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 these three disciplines interrelate.
The University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) houses seven academic divisions: Film & Television Production; Cinema & Media Studies; John C. Hench Division of Animation + Digital Arts; John Wells Division of Writing for Screen & Television; Interactive Media & Games; Media Arts + Practice; Peter Stark Producing Program.
Irvin Kershner was an American director for film and television.
Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, particularly early ones, relate to arts in other disciplines: painting, dance, literature and poetry, or arise from research and development of new technical resources.
A film school is an educational institution dedicated to teaching aspects of filmmaking, including such subjects as film production, film theory, digital media production, and screenwriting. Film history courses and hands-on technical training are usually incorporated into most film school curricula. Technical training may include instruction in the use and operation of cameras, lighting equipment, film or video editing equipment and software, and other relevant equipment. Film schools may also include courses and training in such subjects as television production, broadcasting, audio engineering, and animation.
Television studies is an academic discipline that deals with critical approaches to television. Usually, it is distinguished from mass communication research, which tends to approach the topic from a social sciences perspective. Defining the field is problematic; some institutions and syllabuses do not distinguish it from media studies or classify it as a subfield of popular culture studies.
David Jay Bordwell was an American film theorist and film historian. After receiving his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1973, he wrote more than fifteen volumes on the subject of cinema including Narration in the Fiction Film (1985), Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (1988), Making Meaning (1989), and On the History of Film Style (1997).
The USC Center for Visual Anthropology (CVA) is a center located at the University of Southern California. It is dedicated to the field of visual anthropology, incorporating visual modes of expression in the academic discipline of anthropology. It does so in conjunction with faculty in the anthropology department through five types of activities: training, research and analysis of visual culture, production of visual projects, archiving and collecting, and the sponsorship of conferences and film festivals. It offers a B.A. and an MVA in Visual Anthropology.
Technoculture is a neologism that is not in standard dictionaries but that has some popularity in academia, popularized by editors Constance Penley and Andrew Ross in a book of essays bearing that title. It refers to the interactions between, and politics of, technology and culture.
Vivian Carol Sobchack is an American cinema and media theorist and cultural critic.
Anne Friedberg was an American author, historian and theorist of modern media culture, chair of the Critical Studies Division in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California and President-elect of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
Robert Stam is an American film theorist working on film semiotics. He is a professor at New York University, where he teaches about the French New Wave filmmakers. Stam has published widely on French literature, comparative literature, and on film topics such as film history and film theory. Together with Ella Shohat, he co-authored Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media.
The academics of the University of Southern California center on The College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, the Graduate School, and its 17 professional schools.
Created in 2013, Media Arts and Practice (MA+P) is the seventh degree-granting division of the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Richard Barsam, author and film historian, is Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at Hunter College of The City University of New York (CUNY).
Marsha Kinder is an American film scholar and Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California.
Steve F. Anderson is an American academic. He is a professor of digital media at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. He was previously an associate professor in the USC Interactive Media & Games Division.
Dr. hab. Piotr Zawojski is a Polish media expert. He is a tenured professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland.
Manouchka Kelly Labouba, is a Gabonese director, screenwriter, and producer of short films including the critically acclaimed Marty et la tendre dame, Le guichet automatique and Le divorce. With the release of Le divorce in 2008 she became the youngest director in the history Gabon, and the first Gabonese woman to direct a fiction film in the country. She is also an academic, cinematographer, editor and camera operator.
William Rothman is an American film theorist and critic. Since receiving his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1974, he has authored numerous books, including Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (1982), The “I” of the Camera: Essays in Film Criticism, History and Aesthetic (1988), and Tuitions and Intuitions: Essays at the Intersection of Film Criticism and Philosophy (2019). He was "part of a modern wave of thinkers to apply questions of philosophy to the medium of movies" during the 1980s, and his work contributed to the emergence of the sub-discipline that has come to be known as “film-philosophy.” Rothman has also written on aspects of film theory and on the writings of Stanley Cavell, an American philosopher who made film a major focus of his work. He is currently Professor of Cinematic Arts in the School of Communication at the University of Miami.