Film Appreciation

Prof. Aysha Iqbal

Department of Humanities and Social Science
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras

Lecture - 04
Film Theory

(Refer Slide Time: 00:18)

Good mornings, so today’s topic is major trends in film theory. So, because of the
relative newness of the film medium as compared with other art forms….remember
Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope a peephole machines were first opened to the public in
New York city only in 1894…. we are looking at the beginnings of film theory, and how
this new medium called cinema started. We also refer to Thomas Edison’s and his
invention Kinetoscope peephole which is one of the earliest modes of the moving
pictures. We are talking about the year 1894, and how it all began. We are also talking
about the Lumia brothers who first projected there shot actualities to paying audience,
audience who paid money to watch films in a café in Paris in 1895.

So, film theory and criticism are dependent on a limited number of major text, and the
lines of their discourse can easily be tries up to the point when the so call theory of
structuralism and post structuralism had their profound effect on cultural history in
general from that point on film theory and criticism proliferated at very rapid rate at a
very rapid speed and film journals, became as much a place for discussion debates
arguments on the issues of art and aesthetics. As journals were for essays on literature of
film, in other words, acquired the status which was earlier accorded only to great works
of literature.

And film journals and film historians played a major role in according this status to films
studies much of discourse on cinema from the start is concerned with fictional narrative
films an emphasize that parallels that the vast popularity of such works compared with a
more limited and specialized appeal of the documentary and more experimental and
avant-garde film. Most of the early theorizations show a clear leaning gravitation toward
the formalist possibility of cinema and certain formalism, and certain aspects of
formalism, definitely the montage theory expounded by the great Russian film makers in
the 1920’s. For example, Lev Kuleshov from Russia, who begins to publish essays in
1917 and many books published in the 1920s they talk about the practices of American
film makers especially film makers such as DW Griffiths and Kuleshov started to
understand the practices of film making by the great film makers of the time.

So, there is term called the Kuleshov effect. It has passed into cinematic language to
describe what for Kuleshov was the inherent magic of the film medium itself that is
which is creation of meanings, significant and emotional impact by relating and
juxtaposing individual shorts, see we are talking about montage theory one of the earliest
efforts to lend a kind of an intellectual touch to film studies the idea was that how scenes
are created by relating and juxtapose individual shorts. How meanings are created by
juxtapose individual shots, a resulting in a context that was not inherent in any of the
single piece of film that was a product of the ending itself. So, Pudovkin begin writing to
books too many scripts that together to become the book film technique when he was
working on his picture, Mother you know mother as authored by Maxim Gorky. So,
when the movie was being picturized when the movie was filmed in 1920’s Pudovkin
started writing to books on films studies. So, in this book he explores his own variation
of montage what Sergei Einstein refers to as linkage in which shots are unobtrusively
linked together so that they continuously and naturally flow along with the films
narrative lines, this is a contribution of Kuleshov, but he also pushes theoretically, this
theoretical discourse further with its discussion of film mix space and time.

Now we are talking about temporal special aspects of cinema and Kuleshov’s discussion
of dimensions created by the editing process itself and distinct from any space and time
known in external reality. So, these are the contribution made by Kuleshov and
Pudovkin. Apart from Pudovkin’s concept of linkage editing there is Eisenstein’s
collision theory of montage in which the dramatic disposition of shots produces kind of
attraction to one and another that make the significant of meaning of the synthesis more
clear to the viewer.

Where is Kuleshov had demonstrated how two juxtaposed shots could create to produce
content not inherent in the individual images Einsestein went beyond his mentor in both
his writings and also in his films to show that the two images could be actually
synthesized in the mind of the viewer to create a single totality and perception even to
create a level of thought beyond the realistic images. Now coming to another key
theories Andre Bazin of in easy of Andre Bazin of return in France in the lay nineteen
forties and fifties the great book is called What is Cinema volume one and volume two.
So, we have an impressive blend of realism and discussion of realist criticism and theory
of realism is cinema actually realistic, can it be realistic? That is the discussion thats the
debate all about.

Bazin found Kuleshovs and Eisenstein’s emphasis on montage antithetical to realistic

possibilities of cinema creating instead and illusory and illusion of reality that is product
of introduction of the shots and not a reflection of the world which is actually filmed or
photographed. Bazin praise the American directors such as Orson Welles and William
Wyler for emphasizing the individual image itself and what each revels of reality not
exactly through relationship of images. So, an emphasis largely absents in cinema since
the silent film of earlier filmmakers earlier Hollywood filmmakers. Now through the
techniques of deep focus and long take according to Bazin Orson Welles and William
Wells presenting space and time as continues and whole as they appear in external
reality. So, that we viewers are force to immerse them self in the images and select for
them self what to see famous scene from Orison Welles, Citizen Kane while the mother
signs the document of the child coming into a inheritance, the child is happily shown
playing away and we watch that the child playing away through the window pane, but
this was called the deep focus technique, where all characters are extremely and very
clearly visible to the viewers. And it depends on the viewers what to select unlike the
montage.
So, one of the founders of the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema Bazin influence
the criticism of people like Godard and Francois Truffaut Chabrol and people like
Jacques Rivette who wrote for the journal and subsequently they also becoming
extremely influential members of the entire French new wave cinema. Bazin’s emphases
on the individual image is analysis of the single motion picture in the context of film
genre and his appreciation of the personal and the unique in the achievement of each film
artist also had an impact on the new wave films these critics were to direct, but it is
basically Bazin’svery insightful appreciation of cinema and his ability to respond to the
nuances of each work and his very discerning eye for a style and form and the use of
details and techniques as the source for his concepts that has survived as a model for
future writers of film appreciation and film criticism. I would like to draw your attention
to passage from Andre Bazin’s What is Cinema, I will read out this quote for you. If the
plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of embalming the dead might
turn out to be a fundamental factor in their creation. The process might reveal that at the
origin of painting and sculpture there lies a mummy complex. The religion of ancient
Egypt aimed against death saw survival as depending on the continued existence of the
corporeal body. Thus, by providing a defense against the passage of time it satisfied a
basic psychological need in man, for death is but the victory of time. To preserve,
artificially his bodily appearance is to victory of time to preserve artificially his bodily
appearance is to snatch it from the flow of time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in
the hold of life it was natural, therefore, to keep up appearances in the face of the reality
of death by preserving flesh and bone. The first Egyptian statue, then, was a mummy,
tanned and petrified in sodium. But pyramids and labyrinthine corridors offered no
certain guarantee against ultimate pillage.
(Refer Slide Time: 11:48)

And look what cinema did to this. So, along with Bazin’s there is another important
name Siegfried Kracauer who is also recognized as one of the major advocates of real
cinema. He wrote a famous theoretical text called theory of film the redemption physical
reality which published in 1960. And the direction he takes that the fictional films that
most full fill the potential of the filmic medium are those that least distort or remove the
audience from the world as we know it those films also have the capacity to make us
rediscover the real world to expand our vision of it.

Now coming to something called genre theory and criticism which made considerable
stride, during the same period of time, and which seeks to recognize the very popular
nature of film especially as a product of the Hollywood studio system. Although
individual directors might be sighted for their ability and certain genres of you know
creating there or inscribing the personally stamp with in the tradition must genres a
theory and criticism was based on the connection between the works and their audiences
and attempted to explain social and cultural needs of the viewer the genre theory and
criticism what itself the most probable or rather probably most profitable location for
adopting the new emphases on structuralism which was having such deep impact on
cultural criticism during the sixties and seventies.

So, Hollywood offered a large number of similar films with very well known elements in
each genre which made these works the inevitable source for a studies in cinema and
structuralism approach to cinema. And now binary opposition and its structure exploded
in these studies and they may seem too superficial to suggest the deep structure that
people like for instance Claude Levi Strauss the great anthropologist had proposed in
myths from primitive culture or in his treatment of Oedipus Myth, but then there is a
work called horizon west written by someone called Jim Kitses in 1969 and he aware the
writer is able to establish a basic structural and thematic kind of construct in the western
in the western genre and also show the individual contributions of a specific directors
with in this context.

Then there is a another great theorist Peter Wollen and his discussions of Hollywood
directors Howard Hawks and Jon Ford in Wollen’s extremely influential book those of
few who are interested in doing some kind of research in film studies should know this
book is called Science and Meanings in the Cinema published in 1969 and Peter Wollen
also uses a genre in auteur structuralism approach to develop thematic structures and
tensions in the films of Jon Ford and Howard Hawks. The most important early work in
context of semiotics was by Christian Metz and his book Film Language: A Semiotics of
Cinema, which was originally published in the French language.

Now Metz’s major theory is to demonstrate the way in which film signify meaning
through semiotics codes especially specialize codes unique to the cinema such as the
arrangement of shots possible in a narrative sequence. There is also something called
second semiotics and where the mean idea of the second semiotics is to identify and then
explore the ideological structure and codes of capitalist society evident or even implied
in commercial narrative cinema and to tie the ideological focus in with Jacques Lacan
psychoanalytic theory about the child’s early developmental stages especially in the
mirror stage to which we regress on some level when viewing the images on the screen
recreated with in a imaginary and where a feeling of oneness and self which is first
developed in as in as when we view are refection in a mirror during our early childhood,
but now is actually developed by a films ideology. So, using Jacques Lacan mirror stage
theory and applying into cinema.

Now there is another important film theorist Jean Louis Baudry who wrote effect or
ideological effects of the basic cinematic apparatus. This was the first of the several
essays on the subject that were to influence Christian Metz to further his further
development and to popularized these ideas in the text that he wrote between nineteen
seventy three and nineteen seventy five collectively they are called imaginary signifier.

Now I coming back to Jacques Lacan his concept of suture you know what is suture to
stitch up something, so he gives us the concept of suture, which filmmakers and film
critics also film theories also applied. So, his concept of suture earlier introduced to film
theory in Oudart’s essay La Suture . Jean Pierre Oudart This concept appears in essay La
suture and it offers much debate on the recreation of the imaginary and how the subject
is position on the screen and how impose on the unity on such techniques of narrative
films as point of view editing’s. So, whose point of view are we supposed to follow. So,
we have to understand these theory of suture of mirror stage and points of view match
cutting and eye line matching and on the way how such techniques impose unity and
perhaps give a subjectivity how you know there is the concept of camera subjectivity,
subjectivism. So, how these things operate.

Now, from here we move on to feminist film theory and criticism, which was also a
major trend, which is still a major trend in understanding appreciating films. So, feminist
film theory and criticism has also been an influential school . it has had great impact on
the teaching of the film studies. So, early text in this area offer a straightforward critical
approach in which the various stereo types of women in film are and analyse them as
products of patriarchal society and culture, but feminist criticism has also becomes very
much involved with the ideas of Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan and semiotics
approaches of co structuralist film theory in his attempt to understand sexual
differentiation within the narrative and text code of the film as well as within the viewing
process itself.

Now one of the major essays of this school comes by Laura Mulvey whose essay Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema published in 1975 describes the images of women in the
Hollywood cinema as the passive object of the active male gays. So, these concepts like
gays and objectification of women, you can trace all these back to the great feminist
writers of this period and Laura Mulvey is one of the most influential theorist of this
trend. So, the idea is that pleasure of the male gaze is threaten by the women’s
representation as a signifier of castration Mulvey describes two unconscious responses of
the male to elevate his fear of castration.
The first of a process of sadistic voyeurism which, denigrates the women and the second
a process of is scopophilia and fetishizing women which over value the women’s
physical appearances in response to this focus on male pleasure and desire. Mulvey
herself in after thoughts on visual pleasure narrative cinema, which is inspired by Duel in
the Sun, it is a movie directed by King Vidor and Mulvey wrote this easy on visual
pleasure and narrative cinema on King Vidors Duel in the Sun. And also there is another
critic called Kaja Silverman who wrote Disembodying in The Female Voice published in
1984. There was another feminist critic film feminist Mary Ann Doane who in her essay
Film and the Masquerade theorizing the female spectator, all these theories Silverman
and Mulvey and Mary Ann Doane the all considered from a psychoanalytic perspective
the pressures and problems brought upon the female viewer by films structured for the
male gays and forbidding any positive identification with the female characters. So, one
response to the psychoanalytic marks its approach has been a greater imposes on film
form and technique and response is noted for its reliance on literary concepts and the
examination of what takes place on the screen in the context of the viewer’s reaction.

So, now let us talk about another trend which is narratalogy that includes an important
dose of viewer response analysis, the important theories of this movement is he is not
exactly a film theorist, but a narratologist Edward Branigan. And he writes in his book
Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film
which often uses the vocabulary on concepts of literary narratology to discuss filmic
narrative text, but does so to achieve a detailed analysis of way film techniques create
various types of subjectivity on this screen and subjective responses in the viewer. Now
since the nineteen sixties have been the concepts and studies of post modernism that term
itself has been definitely or it has been defined quite differently or variably, but
persistent elements are the denial of any meaning full theories concerning life, reality or
art, fragmentation lack of cohesion in both cultural and individual identity, those are the
major features of post modernism. Again the sub version of time and history, and the
domination of the world by media and information technology, which we have created
and where we have created a reality of science major for ourselves.

So, most significant in this discussion has been Guy Debord seminal the Society of the
Spectacle and also the works by Jean Baudrillard especially The Simulations which was
published in 1983 and then again a very seminal text I can emphasize for those who are
interested in research cinema and film studies. This author is very important Frederic
Jameson and his essay Post modernism or the cultural logic of the late capitalism. So, the
concepts of post modernism had been use full so far in the analysis of a number of films
and in understanding certain tendencies in modern cinema. So we have to understand
Jameson concept past his the invitation and accumulation of the filmic codes of the past,
it has been specially useful and this shift was precipitated most notably by a short
influential essay by Alexandre Astruc published in La Camera-Stylo). It was called The
Birth of a New Avant Garde : La Camera-Stylo published in 1968. So, what came be
known as the auteur theory was later imported to North America in 1960s via the critical
writings of Andrew Sarris and his reappraisal of Hollywood cinema. .

Now coming to post-colonial theories, so an important demonstration of the relation

between post-colonial studies and film theory is demonstrated by the works of Frantz
Fanon whose ideas including discussion of films spectatorship and issues of race in his
works called Black Skin White Mask published in 1952. And again we have a works like
in Unthinking Euro Centrism Multi Culturisum and the media by Ella Shohat and Robert
Stem where these are writers argue that euro centrism and visions the worlds from a
single prevails point.

Again there is a book mystifying movies facts and falsies in contemporary film theory
and philosophical problems of classical film theory the great writer Noel Carroll defines
theory strictly as a coherent and enzymatic set of statements that can both explain event
and foresee when Carroll uses the definition to justify the critic of much of the film
theory canon preferring a model, analytic theory from philosophy as the bases of his
work including theorizing the moving images and a philosophy of mass art. Carroll
among significant cluster of film theoretician who are antagonist to the dominance of
what is frequently called slab theory in cinemas studies, which is based on the theories of
Saussure, Lacan, Althusser and Barthes so therefore, we get the term slab.

So, Carroll credited with David Bordwell came up with a co-edited volume called Post
Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies where various authors critic the grand theories that
had come to dominate cinema studies through the nineteen sixties and seventies, most of
which includes cinematic and cultural and psychoanalytic studies. So, Bordwell in his
book or in his essay other contemporary film studies attempts to map out the incoherence
trendiness and general lack of solid intellectual grounding of much recent theory
Bordwell approach provides a template for analyzing the form in which events in a film
are presented including plot fusion and story which is also called fibula, while
cognitivism addresses the cinematic representation in the in the mental activities of the
spectators.

(Refer Slide Time: 31:19)

So, let me draw your attention to some of the selected readings here. Please take a look at
the bibliography, the book by Dudley Andrew, Andre Bazin. The art of watching films
by Joseph Boggs; Leo Braudy Film Theory and Criticism, this is a very important text.
David Cock, A History of Narrative Films. Pam Cock, The Cinema Book and of course
you have Deleuze, the cinema 1 and cinema 2.

Thank you very much.