Film Theory: An Introduction

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Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there – the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air – is dipped in monotonous grey.… It is no life but its shadow.… And all this in a strange silence where no rumble of wheels is heard, no sound of footsteps or of speech. Not a single note of the intricate symphony that always accompanies the movements of people. (Quoted in Leyda, 1972, pp. 407–9) In the earliest writings on the cinema, theory is often only an implicit embryonic presence. We find in some journalistic critics, for example, a discourse of wonderment, a kind of religious awe at the sheer magic of mimesis, at seeing a convincing simulacral representation of an arriving train or of the wind blowing through the leaves. Responding to an 1896 screening of the Lumière films in Bombay, a Times of India (July 22, 1896) reporter remarked on the life-like manner in which the various views were portrayed on the screen … [with] something like seven or eight hundred photographs being thrown on the screen within the space of a minute. 1 A 1989 article in the Chinese paper Yo-shi-Bao (The Amusement Journal) speaks of one reporter’s initial experience of cinema: Barthes, R. (1988 (1968)) ¿The Death of the Author¿, in D. Lodge (ed.) Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. London and New York: Longman, 167-72. Intended as a complement to Stam and Miller 2000, a variety of commissioned essays interrogate and expand the reach of film and media theory. Would work for an advanced undergraduate class.

Film theory also inherits antecedent questions concerning artistic realism. An uncommonly contested and elastic term, realism comes to film theory heavily laden with millennial encrustations from antecedent debates in philosophy and literature. Classical philosophy distinguished between Platonic realism – the assertion of the absolute and objective existence of universals, i.e. the belief that forms, essences, abstractions such as beauty and truth exist independent of human perception – and Aristotelian realism – the view that universals only exist within objects in the external world (rather than in an extra-material realm of essences). The term realism is confusing because these early philosophical usages often seem diametrically opposed to common-sense realism – the belief in the objective existence of facts and the attempt to see these facts without idealization. The most complete anthology for scholars interested in psychoanalysis, semiotics, and ideological criticism. Includes accurate translations of several essays originally written in French.

Armstrong, Dan 1989. “Wiseman’s Realm of Transgression: Titicut Follies, the Symbolic Father and the Spectacle of Confinement,” Cinema Journal Vol. 29, No. 1 (Fall). Several film and media scholars have published books—some of them hefty—that collect significant writings from the history of cinema study. Stam and Miller 2000 and the several editions of Braudy and Cohen 2009 have found a large audience among students and scholars. Earlier, Nichols 1985 and Rosen 1986 collected crucial texts in the traditions of grand theory. Easthope 1993 has tried to pare down the large bibliography on theory to its essentials, while Gledhill and Williams 2000, Miller and Stam 1999, and Palmer 1989 have commissioned new essays that take a metacritical stance toward the material.

The issue of realism also had to do with intercultural dialogue. In the case of European modernism, as Bakhtin and Medvedev (1985) suggest in The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, non-European cultures became the catalysts for the supercession, within Europe, of a retrograde culture-bound verism. Africa, Asia, and the Americas provided a reservoir of alternative trans-realist forms and attitudes. In film theory, Sergei Eisenstein invoked extra-European traditions (Hindi rasa, Japanese kabuki) as part of his attempt to construct a film aesthetic which went beyond mere mimesis. A realist or, better, illusionist style was revealed by the modernist movement to be just one of many possible strategies, and one marked, furthermore, by a certain provinciality. Vast regions of the world, and long periods of artistic history, had shown little allegiance to or even interest in realism. Kapila Malik Vatsayan speaks of a very different aesthetic that held sway in much of the world: The course takes an expanded approach to the question of adaptation, seeing film as not simply based on literary antecedents but as an art form which draws on other forms of art. It will consider movements across genres - from literary classics to comic books - and across historical periods and geographical spaces.Allen, Robert C. and Douglas Gomery 1985. Film History: Theory and Practice. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

This essay explor... more Originally published in New Literary History Volume 40, Number 3, Summer 2009.Naremore, J. (1990) ¿Authorship and the Cultural Politics of Film Criticism¿, Film Quarterly 44 (1), 14-22. Indigeneity and the Decolonizing Gaze: Transnational Imaginaries, Media Aesthetics, and Social Thought (Bloomsbury, 2023) Adams, Parveen 1996. The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences. London: Routledge. The concept of realism, while ultimately rooted in the classical Greek conception of mimesis (imitation), gained programmatic significance only in the nineteenth century, when it came to denote a movement in the figurative and narrative arts dedicated to the observation and accurate representation of the contemporary world. A neologism coined by French critics, realism was originally linked to an oppositional attitude toward romantic and neo-classical models in fiction and painting. The realist novels of writers like Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, George Eliot, and Eça de Queiròs brought intensely individualized, seriously conceived characters into typical contemporary social situations. Underlying the realist impulse was an implicit teleology of social democratization favoring the artistic emergence of more extensive and socially inferior human groups to the position of subject matter for problematic–existential representation (Auerbach, 1953, p. 491). Literary critics distinguished between this deep, democratizing realism, and a shallow, reductionistic, and obsessively veristic naturalism – realized most famously in the novels of Emile Zola – which modeled its human representations on the biological sciences. The first edition of this book, edited by Cohen and the late Gerald Mast, appeared in 1974 and was the first significant survey of the subject. The various editions of the anthology have included work by early commentators such as Erwin Panofsky, Walter Benjamin, and Kenneth Tynan, who anticipated film theory. More recent editions have paired essays both for and against grand theory.

Rothwell, K. S. (2004 (1999)) A History of Shakespeare on Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Film theory is what Bakhtin would call a historically situated utterance. And just as one cannot separate the history of film theory from the history of the arts and of artistic discourse, so one cannot separate it from history tout court, defined by Fredric Jameson as that which hurts but also as that which inspires. In the long view, the history of film, and therefore of film theory, must be seen in the light of the growth of nationalism, within which cinema became a strategic instrument for projecting national imaginaries. It must also be seen in relation to colonialism, the process by which the European powers reached positions of economic, military, political, and cultural hegemony in much of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. (While nations had often annexed adjacent territories, what was new in European colonialism was its planetary reach, its attempted submission of the world to a single universal regime of truth and power.) This process reached its apogee at the turn of the twentieth century, when the earth surface controlled by European powers rose from 67 percent (1884) to 84.4 percent (1914), a situation that began to be reversed only with the disintegration of the European colonial empires after World War II. 1 Carroll, Rachel, ed. (2009) Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities. London: Continuum. McFarlane, B. (1996) Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon.Corrigan, T. (1999) Film and Literature: An Introduction and a Reader. Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Prentice-Hall