By Richard Rushton, Gary Bettinson
"... authoritative, constantly engaged, and level-headed within the distinctive examine of good selected motion pictures. this can be an incredibly worthy advent, and sturdy to read."
Professor James Donald, The collage of latest South Wales, Australia
This attractive and available ebook explores significant debates in modern movie idea, delivering an in depth advent to the vital arguments complicated by way of movie theorists because the 1960s.
What is movie Theory? outlines the discipline's key theoretical options, views, and traditions, and seriously examines the assertions posited by means of exemplary movie theorists and philosophers of movie. A step by step method of those concerns courses the reader in the course of the imperative themes of movie theory.
starting with a dialogue of structuralism and semiotics, and relocating via debates on psychoanalysis, feminism, display thought, and cultural reviews, the authors then learn the views of 'post-theory', cognitivism, and historic poetics, in addition to contemporary advancements reminiscent of viewers learn and the 'cinema of attractions'.
research of the key theories is supported with precise and wide-ranging case experiences of specific movies, together with Singin' within the Rain, The Searchers, Tout va bien, Jaws, Do definitely the right factor, Brokeback Mountain, and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet highway. those case reports are observed via a sequence of illustrative movie and creation stills.
What is movie Theory? is necessary studying for all scholars of movie and Media experiences, in addition to for normal readers drawn to the debates that have outlined movie theory.
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Extra info for What is Film Theory?
Sample text
The meaning effect produced', argues Baudry, 'does not depend only on the content of the images but also on the material procedures by which an illusion of continuity, dependent on persistence of vision, is restored from the discontinuous elements' (1985: 536). Once again, therefore, the cinema is based on giving rise to an imaginary relation to reality: the 'real conditions of existence' are covered over by the processes of a transformation of reality which occurs by way of the cinematographic apparatus (camera -f editing + projector).
In other words, for Althusser, theory does not follow upon the heels of practical politics, but practical politics can only be effective if guided by theory in the first place. Film theorists also took up this challenge: a theory of film was not merely one that commented on films and film-making after the fact but was instead geared towards guiding and informing new forms of cinema and new approaches to film-making. If many film theorists agreed about the nature of the struggle to be achieved - that is, the struggle to define a political cinema - then they vehemently disagreed about the precise nature of what a political cinema should entail.
Four important points can be taken from Althusser's theses on ideology, points that are not merely essential to understanding Baudry's approach to the cinematographic apparatus, but central to defining much of film theory's enthrallment with Althusser during the 1970s. The points are: 1. Ideological State apparatuses differ from repressive State apparatuses. Repressive State apparatuses are the kinds of easily identifiable governmental institutions and practices which enforce law and order and which ensure the smooth and civil running of public services - for example, the police, legal institutions, prisons, governments themselves (national and local).