Historical poetics

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In film studies, historical poetics is a scholarly approach to studying film, which David Bordwell outlined in his book Making Meaning (1989). [1] Poetics studies the text itself rather than its production, reception or cultural significance and it can therefore be seen as a logical first step - though expressly not the last step - in terms of understanding how a narrative text (i.e. a television series or a film) works. [2]

Film studies academic discipline that deals with various theoretical, historical, and critical approaches to films

Film studies is an academic discipline that deals with various theoretical, historical, and critical approaches to films. It is sometimes subsumed within media studies and is often compared to television studies. 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. 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. In this sense the film studies discipline exists as one in which the teacher does not always assume the primary educator role; the featured film itself serves that function. Also, in studying film, possible careers include critic or production. Film theory often includes the study of conflicts between the aesthetics of visual Hollywood and the textual analysis of screenplay. 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 International, CineAction, Screen, Cinema Journal, Film Quarterly and Journal of Film and Video.

David Bordwell American film historian

David Jay Bordwell is an American film theorist and film historian. Since receiving his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1974, he has written 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).

Contents

Overview

Bordwell argues that theory-driven, interpretative approaches should be eschewed and argued that historical poetics was a better approach to studying film. [1] Bordwell argues that "[a]ny inquiry into the fundamental principles by which a work in any representational medium is constructed can fall within the domain of poetics." [3] Henry Jenkins makes a distinction between descriptive poetics and prescriptive poetics where the former examine "how artworks have been constructed" and the latter make a case for "how artworks should be constructed." [4] Much of Bordwell's own research falls within the former category while an example of the latter is the Dogme 95 Manifesto by Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg.

Descriptive poetics is an analytic approach within literary studies. While the concept of poetics goes back to Aristotle, the term descriptive poetics refers to an approach which, according to Brian McHale, represents a middle ground between theoretically oriented approaches and analyses of individual works of literature.

Dogme 95 was a filmmaking movement started in 1995 by the Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, who created the "Dogme 95 Manifesto" and the "Vows of Chastity". These were rules to create filmmaking based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, and excluding the use of elaborate special effects or technology. It was an attempt to take back power for the director as artist, as opposed to the studio. They were later joined by fellow Danish directors Kristian Levring and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, forming the Dogme 95 Collective or the Dogme Brethren. Dogme is the Danish word for dogma.

Denmark constitutional monarchy in Europe

Denmark, officially the Kingdom of Denmark, is a Nordic country and the southernmost of the Scandinavian nations. Denmark lies southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and is bordered to the south by Germany. The Kingdom of Denmark also comprises two autonomous constituent countries in the North Atlantic Ocean: the Faroe Islands and Greenland. Denmark proper consists of a peninsula, Jutland, and an archipelago of 443 named islands, with the largest being Zealand, Funen and the North Jutlandic Island. The islands are characterised by flat, arable land and sandy coasts, low elevation and a temperate climate. Denmark has a total area of 42,924 km2 (16,573 sq mi), land area of 42,394 km2 (16,368 sq mi), and the total area including Greenland and the Faroe Islands is 2,210,579 km2 (853,509 sq mi), and a population of 5.8 million.

Bordwell's research into the stylistic changes in Hollywood cinema demonstrates four specific changes: the use of more rapid editing, an increasingly frequent use of very long or very short lenses, a more prevalent use of close shots, and more camera movement. [5] [6]

Historical poetics and neoformalism [7] are part of the "post-theory" trend in film studies. Bordwell has repeatedly argued that some approaches — ones based in "Grand Theories" — do not study films per se but instead use films to confirm predetermined theoretical frameworks. He and Noël Carroll coined the term "S.L.A.B. theory" which refers to theorists Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, and Barthes. [8] Historical poetics is considered to be related to cognitive film theory. [9]

Noël Carroll American philosopher

Noël Carroll is an American philosopher considered to be one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy of art. Although Carroll is best known for his work in the philosophy of film, he has also published journalism, works on philosophy of art generally, theory of media, and also philosophy of history. As of 2012, he is a distinguished professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Ferdinand de Saussure Swiss linguist

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist and semiotician. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiology in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders of semiotics/semiology.

See also

Hermeneutics is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts.

Linguistic film theory is a form of film theory that studies the aesthetics of film by investigating the concepts and practices that comprise the experience and interpretation of movies.

The philosophy of film is a branch of aesthetics within the discipline of philosophy that seeks to understand the most basic questions regarding film. Philosophy of film has significant overlap with film theory, a branch of film studies.

Related Research Articles

Feminist film theory is a theoretical film criticism derived from feminist politics and feminist theory. Feminists have many approaches to cinema analysis, regarding the film elements analyzed and their theoretical underpinnings.

Formalist film theory is a theory of film study that is focused on the formal, or technical, elements of a film: i.e., the lighting, scoring, sound and set design, use of color, shot composition, and editing. This approach was proposed by Hugo Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Sergei Eisenstein, and Béla Balázs. Today, it is a major theory of film study.

Film theory is a set of scholarly approaches within the academic discipline of film or cinema studies that questions the essentialism of 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 these three disciplines interrelate.

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.

A pseudo-documentary is a film or video production that takes the form or style of a documentary film but does not portray real events. Rather, scripted and fictional elements are used to tell the story. The pseudo-documentary, unlike the related mockumentary, is not always intended as satire or humor. It may use documentary camera techniques but with fabricated sets, actors, or situations, and it may use digital effects to alter the filmed scene or even create a wholly synthetic scene.

<i>The Fright of Real Tears</i> book by Slavoj Žižek

The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski Between Theory and Post-Theory is a 2001 book by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek which uses free associative film interpretation to tangentially examine the films of Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski while avoiding the debate between cognitive film theory and psychoanalytic film theory. It was published by the British Film Institute in 2001.

<i>Quarterly Review of Film and Video</i> journal

The Quarterly Review of Film and Video is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering moving image studies, considered to be among the best-known journals in this field. It is published by Routledge. From 1999 to 2014, Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster were the editors-in-chief of the journal; on December 23, 2014 David Sterritt became the new editor of the journal.

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

Jason Mittell is a professor of American studies and film and media culture at Middlebury College whose research interests include the history of television, media, culture, and new media. He is author of three books, Genre and Television (2004), Television and American Culture (2009), and Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, and co-editor of How To Watch Television.

National cinema

National cinema is a term sometimes used in film theory and film criticism to describe the films associated with a specific nation-state. Although there is little relatively written on theories of national cinema it has an irrefutably important role in globalization. Film provides a unique window to other cultures, particularly where the output of a nation or region is high. Countries like South Korea, Russia and Iran have over the years produced a large body of critically acclaimed films. Regardless of the stories or styles of filmmaking the medium inherently contains a dense wealth of information about people and places through which audiences gain knowledge.

Kristin Thompson is an American film theorist and author whose research interests include the close formal analysis of films, the history of film styles, and "quality television," a genre akin to art film. She wrote two scholarly books in the 1980s which used an analytical technique called neoformalism. As well, she has co-authored two widely used film studies textbooks with her husband David Bordwell.

An auteur is an artist, usually a film director, who applies a highly centralized and subjective control to many aspects of a collaborative creative work; in other words, a person equivalent to an author of a novel or a play. The term is commonly referenced to filmmakers or directors with a recognizable style or thematic preoccupation.

In film theory, the institutional mode of representation (IMR) is the dominant mode of film construction, which developed in the years after the turn of the century, becoming the norm by about 1914. Although virtually all films produced today are made within the IMR, it is not the only possible mode of representation. Other possibilities include the primitive mode of representation, which was dominant before being replaced by the IMR; certain avant-garde films that constitute a “deconstructionist” challenge to the IMR; and various non-western modes, notably pre-war Japanese film, that were possible before the IMR became the worldwide norm. Classical Hollywood cinema is the dominant style within the IMR, but other styles such as art house, independent, and most (current) foreign styles fall no less under the IMR.

Riddles of the Sphinx is a 1977 film written and directed by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen and starring Dinah Stabb, Merdelle Jordine and Riannon Tise. It was produced by the British Film Institute. The electronic score is from Mike Ratledge of Soft Machine.

Annette Frieda Kuhn, FBA is a British author, cultural historian, educator, researcher, editor and feminist. She is known for her work in screen studies, visual culture, film history and cultural memory. Since 2006, she is an Emeritus Professor of Film Studies from Queen Mary University of London.

Finlandia is a 1922 Finnish documentary and propaganda film.

References

  1. 1 2 Ira Stig Bhaskar (2004), "Historical Poetics, Narrative, and Interpretation" in A Companion to Film Theory (eds. Toby Miller & Robert Stan). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, p. 387. Bhaskar's article is a critical account of historical poetics.
  2. ↑ Michael Z. Newman (2006) "From Beats to Arcs: Toward a Poetics of Television Narrative." The Velvet Light Trap Number 58, Fall 2006, p. 26.
  3. ↑ David Bordwell (1989), "Historical Poetics of Cinema" in The Cinematic Text (ed. R. Barton Palmer). New York: AMS Press, p. 371
  4. ↑ Henry Jenkins (1989), "Historical Poetics" in Approaches to Popular Film (ed. Joanne Hollows and Mark Jankovich). Manchester: Manchester UP, p. 100
  5. ↑ David Bordwell (2002) “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film” in Film Quarterly 55(3), 16-28.
  6. ↑ David Bordwell (2006) The Way Hollywood Tells It. Story and Style in Modern Movies Berkeley: University of California Press.
  7. ↑ Historical poetics and neoformalism are sometimes used interchangeably, sometimes as related approaches.
  8. ↑ Annette Kuhn and Guy Westwell (2012). "Post-theory" in A Dictionary of Film Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  9. ↑ Annette Kuhn and Guy Westwell (2012). "Neoformalism" in A Dictionary of Film Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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