film theory
"My allegiance is not to a literary theory but to the sum total of my liberating literary experiences . . . ."
—Frank Lentricchia, The Edge of Night: A Confession 88 (New York: Random House, 1994)
Film Theory
Film Theory
WikipediaDavid Bordwell: Website on Cinema
David Bordwell is, in my view, the film theorist to read. See generally: David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) and David Bordwell & Noël Carroll, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996)Film Studies
Part of a sprawling site media studies and communications maintained by David Chandler, University of Wales, AberystwythFilm and Television Theory
Thoughtful essays by Ken SanesMountain Dew Web$pace
Film theory with a Marxist focus
Film Theory
Film Criticism after Grand Theories
Is Film Theory Bullshit?Contemporary Film Theory in China
The Ultimate Journey: Remarks on Contemporary Theory
Reflections on Disciplines (including Film Studies) and Their Role in Universities
Film Theory and Theory Critics (Wikipedia)
Rudolph Arheim
André Bazin
Theory: Transplanted Literary Criticism
Politics and Ideology
Hollywood Film and U.S. Society: Some Theoretical Perspectives
The Yellow Menace in American Popular Film: 1991 through 1995
Socialist Realism
Bibliography: Michael Ryan & Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Graeme Turner, Film as Social Practice (London: Routledge, 2nd ed., 1993); Bill Nichols, Ideology and the Image (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981)
Course Syllabi
Links
Bibliography
Paul Willemen, Looks and Frictions (England: British Film Institute, 1993); Anthony Easthope (ed.), Contemporary Film Theory (Longman Higher Education, 1994); Sue Thornham (ed.), Feminist Film Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 1999); Toby Miller & Robert Stams (eds.), Film and Theory (Blackwell Publishers, 1999); Robert Stam, Film Theory (Blackwell Publishers, 1999)
Theoretical Frameworks
Apparatus Theory
Apparatus Theory
Wikipedia
Auteur Theory
Auteur Theory
Wikipedia
Cognitive Theory
Cognitive Film Theory
explained by David BordwellA Case for Cognitivism
article by David Bordwell (1989)
Feminist Theory
Feminist Film Theory
WikipediaFeminist Film Theory
Anneke Smelik
Formalist Film Theory
Formalist Film Theory
Wikipedia
Genre Theory
An Introduction to Genre Theory
Bibliography: Nick Browne (ed.), Refiguring American Film Genres (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
Marxist Theory
Marxist Film Theory
Wikipedia
Phenomenology
Bibliography: Allen Casebier, Film and Phenomenology: Toward a Realist Theory of Cinema (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991)
Postmodernism
Psychoanalytic Theory
Psychoanalytic Film Criticism
WikipediaForum for the Psychoanalytic Study of Film
Psychoanalysis, Film, and Television
The Parted Eye: Spellbound and Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalytic Feminist Approach to Film
Bibliography: Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981)
Rhetoric
The Death And Rebirth Of Rhetoric
Toward a Rhetoric of Film: Identification and the Spectator
Interpretation as Rhetoric [Loaded Words]
Bibliography: John Harrington, Rhetoric of Film (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973)
Schema Theory
Organization of Knowledge: Networks and Schemas
Schemata and Heuristics [Part 2] [Two Basic Schema] [Text Schema] [Text Schema 2]
Semiotics
Are TV and Film Like a Language Which we Read?
The Cognitive Semiotics of Film
Bibliography: Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974)(transl. Michael Taylor); Jean Mitry, Semiotics and the Analysis of Film (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2000)(transl. Christopher King); Warren Buckland, The Cognitive Semiotics of Film (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Structuralist Theory
Structuralist Film Theory
WikipediaThe Theory of Structuralism and Star Trek
Ian Craig
Recommend Reading
Robert C. Allen (ed.), Channels of Discourse: Television and Contemporary Criticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987)
Essays focus on television but draw extensively on film theory. The essays on narrative, genre study, psychoanalysis, feminist criticism, semiotics, and reader-oriented criticism are accessible for novice students; each author presents a helpful survey of bibliographical sources for the theory surveyed.
J. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976)
David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)
Bordwell's book is a bit philosophical for the beginner but presents a brilliant analysis of the way film critics find and create meaning in "reading" film. There are references to hundreds of films, many which the casual film viewer will not have seen.
A review of Making Meaning: Critical Occasions: David Bordwell's Making Meaning and the Institution of Film Criticism
David Bordwell: David Bordwell's website on cinema
Bibliography: Film Theory and Criticism
Rudolph Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969)
André Bazin, What Is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967-71) (Essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray)(2 vols.)
__________, Bazin at Work: Major Essays & Reviews from the Forties & Fifties (New York: Routledge, 1997)(trans. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo, Bert Cardullo ed.)
Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993)
Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981)(trans. Helen R. Lane)
__________, In and Out of Synch: The Awakening of a Cine-dreamer (Brookfield, Vermont: Wildwood House, 1990)
Tim Bywater & Thomas Sobchack, An Introduction to Film Criticism: Major Critical Approaches to Narrative Film (New York: Longman, 1989) (Film criticism from a journalistic, humanist, auteurist, genre, social science, historical, and ideological/theoretical perspectives)
Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (New York: Viking Press, 1971)
Paul Coates, Film at the Intersection of High and Mass Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Jim Collins, Hilary Radner & Ava Preacher Collins (eds.), Film Theory Goes to the Movies (London: Routledge, 1993)
Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form and The Film Sense (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1963)
______________, The Film Sense (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, rev. ed., 1975) (trans. & ed., Jay Leyda)
John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (New York; Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982)
Brian Henderson, A Critique of Film Theory (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1980)
Ian Jarvie, Philosophy of Film: Epistemology, Ontology, Aesthetics (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987) (emphasis on aesthetics and philosophy)
Gerald Mast, Film/Cinema/Movie: A Theory of Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1977)
__________, Howard Hawks, Storyteller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982)
Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen & Leo Braudy (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (New York: Oxford University Press, 4rd ed., 1992)
Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women's Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990)
__________. Cinema and Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 1993) [review]
Marc Crispin Miller (ed.), Seeing Through Movies (New York: Pantheon, 1990) (Essays exploring the cultural context of films and their influence on contemporary life)
James Monaco, How To Read a Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 3rd ed., 1999) [Adobe .pdf files]
Edward Murray, Nine American Film Critics (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975)
Tom O'Brien, The Screening of America: Movies and Values from Rocky to Rain Man (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1990)(ow movies shape contemporary values)
Constance Penley (ed.), Feminism and Film Theory (London: Routledge, 1988)
_____________, The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989)
William H. Philips, Analyzing Films: A Practical Guide (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984)
Stephen Prince, Movies and Meaning: An Introduction to Film (Boston : Allyn and Bacon, 1997)
D. N. Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2nd ed., 1994)
Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986)
Jonathan Ross, The Incredibly Strange Film Book: An Alternative History of Cinema (London: Simon and Schuster Ltd., 1993)
Michael Ryan & Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1988)
Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992)
Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)
Burgoyne Stam & Lewis Flitterman, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics (London: Routledge, 1992)
Ed S. Tan, Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion (Mahwah, New Jersey: 1996)
Gregory Ulmer, Teletheory: Grammatology in The Age of Video (Routledge: New York, 1989)(On the integration of video forms and styles of thought into education).
Linda Williams, Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994)
Trevor Whittock, Metaphor and Film (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
Bibliography: Narrative Theory
David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)
____________, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985)
Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension in Film (London: Routledge, 1992)
Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990)
______________, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978)
John L. Fell, Film and the Narrative Tradition (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974)
Avrom Fleishman, Narrated Films: Storytelling Situations in Cinema History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)
Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)
Nick Lacy, Narrative & Genre: Key Concepts in Media Studies (St. Martin's Press, 2000)
