Film Theory: An Introduction

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The most complete anthology for scholars interested in psychoanalysis, semiotics, and ideological criticism. Includes accurate translations of several essays originally written in French. DRPS:Course Catalogue: School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures: Common Courses (School of Lit, Lang and Cult) Geraghty, Christine (2008). Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama. Lanham, Maryland : Rowman & Littlefield. 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: Alternative Museum of New York 1989. Prisoners of Image: Ethnic and Gender Stereotypes. New York: The Museum.

Much of the early writing on cinema was produced by literary figures. Here is the Russian novelist Maxim Gorky responding to an 1896 screening of a film: Commissioned essays on topics in cinema study with special attention to theory. Many of the most important contemporary scholars contributed.Auerbach, Erich 1953. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brazilian cinema, literature, and popular culture form another node in Stam's research. He co-edited Brazilian Cinema (1982) with Randal Johnson. Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture (Duke, 1997) offered the first book-length study in English of racial representation, especially of Afro-Brazilians, during the century of Brazilian Cinema, within a comparative framework in relation to similar issues in American cinema. Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media (Rutgers, 2000), coauthored with Ella Shohat Find sources: "Robert Stam"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( September 2011) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)

Rosen, Philip, ed. Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Foucault, M. (1986 (1969)) ¿What is an Author¿, in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 101-20.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. Aragay, Mireia, (ed.) (2005) Books in Motion: Adaptation, Intertextuality, Authorship. Amsterdam / New York : Rodopi,. Mobilizing Fictions: The Gulf War, the Media and the Recruitment of the Spectator," Public Culture Vol.4, No.2 (Spring 1992). 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: Gledhill, Christine, and Linda Williams, eds. Reinventing Film Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

The concern with issues of colonialism, postcolonialism, race, and cultural difference also found expression in a number of seminal texts co-authored with Ella Shohat. Their 1985 Screen essay “The Cinema After Babel: Language, Difference, Power,” introduced a Bakhtinian “translinguistic” and trans-structuralist turn into the study of language difference, translation, and postsynchronization in the cinema. Their Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Routledge, 1994) formed part of and helped shape the surge of writing about race, colonialism, identity politics, and postcoloniality in the 1990s. Edward Said Unthinking Eurocentrism a “brilliant” and landmark book". The book combines two strands of work – an ambitious study of colonialist discourse and Eurocentrism – and a comprehensive and transnational study of cinematic texts related to those issues. With extraordinary transnational and transdisciplinary range, World Literature, Transnational Cinema, and Global Media comprehensively explores the genealogies, vocabularies, and concepts orienting the fields within literature, cinema, and media studies. 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. This essay explor... more Originally published in New Literary History Volume 40, Number 3, Summer 2009.Constandinides, Costas (2010) From Film Adaptation to Post-Celluloid Adaptation: Rethinking the Transition of Popular Narratives. New York: Continuum. One might even expand the discussion to examine the proto-theoretical implications of the etymologies of the words for pre-cinematic devices: camera obscura (dark room) evokes the processes of photography, Marx’s comparison of ideology to a camera obscura, and the name of a feminist film journal. Magic lantern evokes the perennial theme of movie magic along with Romanticism’s creative lamp and the Enlightenment’s lantern. Phantasmagoria and phasmotrope (spectacle-turn) evoke fantasy and the marvelous, while cosmorama evokes the global world-making ambitions of the cinema. Marey’s fusil cinématographique (cinematic rifle) evokes the shooting process of film while calling attention to the aggressive potential of the camera as a weapon, a metaphor resurrected in the guerrilla cinema of the revolutionary filmmakers of the 1960s. Mutoscope suggests a viewer of change, while phenakistiscope evokes cheating views, a foreshadowing of Baudrillard’s simulacrum. Many of the names for the cinema include some variant on graph (Greek writing or transcription) and thus anticipate later tropes of filmic authorship and écriture. The German lichtspiel (play of light) is one of the few names to reference light. Not surprisingly, given the silent beginnings of the medium, the appelations given the cinema rarely reference sound, although Edison saw the cinema as an extension of the phonograph and gave his pre-cinematic devices such names as optical phonograph and kinetophonograph (the writing of movement and sound). The initial attempts to synchronize sound and image generated such coinages as cameraphone and cinephone. In Arabic the cinema was called sum mutaharika (moving image or form), while in Hebrew the word for cinema evolved from reinoa (watching movement) to kolnoa (sound movement). Otherwise, the names themselves imply that film is essentially visual, a view often buttressed by the historical argument that cinema existed first as image and then as sound; in fact, of course, cinema was usually accompanied both by language (intertitles, visible mouthings of speech) and by music (pianos, orchestras). 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.