film theory

james r. elkins

 

Film Theory

Film Theory
Wikipedia

David Bordwell: Website on Cinema
David Bordwell is one of our more accessible film theorist. See generally: David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) and David Bordwell and 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, Aberystwyth

Film and Television Theory
Thoughtful essays by Ken Sanes

Mountain Dew Web$pace
Film theory with a Marxist focus

Doing Theory

What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh

Film Theory Essays

Film Criticism after Grand Theories

Plato's Theory of Film

The Practice of Filmic Interpretation

The Conversion of a Tragedy by Cocteau into a Cinema Melodrama: A Reading of Il mistero di Oberwald

Postcolonial Film From an Artistic Perspective

Contemporary Film Theory in China

Radicalism in Light

Bakhtin and Film

The Ultimate Journey: Remarks on Contemporary Theory

For Criticism

Two or Three Things I Know About Meaning

Film Theory Critics (Wikipedia)

Rudolph Arheim André Bazin David Bordwell Ray Carney Molly Haskell
James Monaco
Christian Metz Laura Mulvey Hugo Münsterberg Andrew Sarris

Theory: Book Reviews

Cinematic Metaphors

The Implicated Spectator

Theory: Transplanted Literary Criticism

The Limits of Ideological Criticism

Politics and Ideology

Hollywood Film and U.S. Society: Some Theoretical Perspectives

Postcolonial Film

The Yellow Menace in American Popular Film: 1991 through 1995

Socialist Realism
Wikipedia

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

Film Theory and Culture

Film Theory and Criticism

Art and Film Criticism: History, Theory and Practice

Bibliographies

Critical/Theoretical Studies in Film: Bibliography

Links

Cinematic Expression: Links to Film Theory Sites

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 Bordwell

A Case for Cognitivism
article by David Bordwell (1989)

Cognitive Science and Film Theory

Cognitive Film Theory: Bibliography

Feminist Theory

Feminist Film Theory
Wikipedia

Feminist Film Theory
Anneke Smelik

Feminist Film Theory and Female Spectatorship

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

Forcing Phenomenology into Film Theory

Bibliography: Allen Casebier, Film and Phenomenology: Toward a Realist Theory of Cinema (New York; Cambridge University Press, 1991)

Psychoanalytic Theory

Psychoanalytic Film Criticism
Wikipedia

Forum 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?

Semoitics
Wikipedia

Bibliography: Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974 (trans. Michael Taylor)

Structuralist Theory

Structuralist Film Theory
Wikipedia

 

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.

Reviews: Critical Occasions: David Bordwell's Making Meaning and the Institution of Film Criticism

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) (Designed to aid students in viewing, describing, and analyzing films)

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)