Film theory
Film theory seeks to develop concise, systematic concepts that apply to the study of
cinema as
art. Classical film theory provides a structural framework to address classical issues of techniques,
narrativity,
diegesis, cinematic codes, "the image",
genre, subjectivity, and
authorship. More recent analysis has given rise to
psychoanalytical film theory,
structuralist film theory,
feminist film theory, and theories of documentary, new media,
third cinema, and
new queer cinema, to name just a few. See also
film criticism.
The Italian
futurist Ricciotto Canudo (1879-1923) is considered to be the very first theoretician of cinema. He published his manifesto
The Birth of the Seventh Art in
1911. Another early attempt was
The Photoplay (1916) by the psychologist
Hugo Münsterberg.
It must be noted however, that the French philosopher
Henri Bergson with
Matière et Mémoire (1896) made comments on the need for new ways of thinking on movement, and coined the terms "image-temps" and "image-mouvement". Criticising the concept of
time as analogous to space, in his 1906 essay
l'illusion cinématographique (in:
L'évolution créatrice) he rejects film as an exemplification of what he had in mind when he wrote on images-as-movement and images-as-time.
In
Cinéma I & II (1983-1985), the philosopher
Gilles Deleuze, taking
Matière et Mémoire as the basis of his philosophy of film, revisits Bergson's concepts and combines it with
peircian semiotics.
Classical film theory took shape during the era of silent film. It emerged from the works of directors like
Germaine Dulac,
Louis Delluc,
Jean Epstein,
Sergei Eisenstein,
Lev Kuleshov,
Dziga Vertov,
Paul Rotha and film critics like
Rudolf Arnheim,
Béla Balázs and
Siegfried Kracauer. It was not an academic discipline.
In the early 1950s the French film critic
André Bazin helped to found the highly influential
Cahiers du cinéma. Many of its young writers such as
François Truffaut and
Jean-Luc Godard would go on to direct the films of the
French New Wave. These writers were some of the first to take popular Hollywood cinema seriously as an artform. Their fascination with
Westerns and
gangster films effectively spawned
genre theory.
In the 1960s film theory took up residence in academe, importing concepts from established disciplines like
psychoanalysis,
literary theory and
linguistics.
In the seventies the British journal
Screen was very influential.
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.
*
Apparatus theory*
Art film*
Auteur theory*
Feminist film theory*
Formalist film theory*
Cyberpunk*
Film noir*
German Expressionism*
Horror film*
Italian neorealism*
Marxist film theory*
New Wave*
No Wave Cinema*
Psychoanalytical film theory*
Remodernist Film*
Romanticism*
Socialist realism*
Screen theory*
Structuralist film theory*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
*
Fictional film*
Film journals and magazines*
List of motion picture-related topics
