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FILM THEORY
A mind map about film theory.
Edited at 2020-09-08 01:08:24
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FILM THEORY
- Interaction between learning and development
A mind map book summary for "Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes" of Lev Vigotsky (chapter 6)
- The Maze Runner
The Maze Runner Mind Map The Maze Runner is a 2014 American dystopian science fiction film directed by Wes Ball, in his directorial debut, based on James Dashner's 2009 novel of the same name.
- The Martian Chronicles
The Martian Chronicles Mind Map The Martian Chronicles is a science fiction fix-up novel, published in 1950, by American writer Ray Bradbury that chronicles the settlement of Mars, the home of indigenous Martians, by Americans leaving a troubled Earth that is eventually devastated by nuclear war. The book is a work of science fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, dystopian fiction, and horror that projects American society immediately after World War II into a technologically advanced future where the amplification of humanity's potentials to create and destroy have both miraculous and devastating consequences.
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- Outline
FILM THEORY
WHAT "IS" FILM? WHAT IS THE REALITY OF FILM ITSELF?
FILM AS LANGUAGE
BAZIN
Bazin's account of film-as-language: 1) Language = genres such as American comedy or crime or the western, 2) Language = content - the plot rules that "pleased the masses and the elite," 3) Language = formal aspects of film - photographic styles, editing, the harmonization of image and sound, and treatment of dramatic and moral themes. (Bazin 45-46).
WORKS CITED
Metz, Christian. "Film Language: Some points in the semiotics of cinema." Braudy, Leo. Film & Criticism. 7th. Oxford: Oxford Press, 2009. 65-71.
Metz, Christian. "Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film." Braudy, Leo. Film Theory & Criticism. 6th. Oxford: Oxford Press, 2006. 72-86
Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. New York: Cornell University Press, 1986.
CHRISTIAN METZ (1931-1993)
FILM AS "HIDDEN" IDEOLOGY
MINIMAL AGENCY - Individual writers, creators have a very limited influence on the film "code" (signifier/signified); instead it is an "arbitrary" set of systematic/discursive conditions that determine signs in language.
METZ'S ACCOUNT OF FILM-AS-LANGUAGE
Semiotic approach (Metz) – how is the film text constructed in such a way that we understand it. There must be a syntax, rules that the text must follow (Eisenstein had this idea) – like grammar. You just don’t string things together randomly… So rules for film as well and they must be operative wherever there’s a film text and so if we want to understand how film works then we should know how these work
SYNTAGMATIC SIGN SEQUENCING - Signs, or film shots, once formed, can then be chained together to create scenes or a film sequence adn thus a diegetic narrative based on the contrasting arrangement of shots. Is usually denotative in how it carries meaning (Metz 83)
DENOTIVE SIGN RELATIONSHIP: Although arbitrary, once the signified-signifier relation is fixed or fairly stable, unambiguous, clear, and tight, then for Metz this is the unambiguous link between a given shot-sound-image and the simple diegetic plot-narrative to which the shot refers. ; At this narrative level the meaning is denotive in that the literal unfolding of plot events is directly, literally, inscribed in the film sequence itself.
Metz's approach to studying the denotive structure of film is to do so within the syntagmatic context of the sequential chain of denotive signs that comprise a film and he is especially interested in outlining the logical space of all possible organizing structures at the denotive syntagmatic level and here he creates his flowchart that features eight important syntagmatic denotative categories which he thinks exhaust all possible organizing principles here. (Metz 77-83)
CONNATIVE SIGN RELATIONSHIP: symbolic, expressionist, and ambiguous. Here the conative “extends over the denotative meaning” to yield a value-added meaning that is tied to the syntagmatic sequence but also goes beyond it. (Metz 73)While even here the logical space of interpretations is circumscribed (not just any interpretation is fair game), the range of interpretations is looser and broader than that of the denotive or diegetic level.
METZ'S use of Ferdinand de Saussure: signs are composed of distinct, yet inseparable units which are always in relation - that of the signifier, signified, and sign
SIGN: describes the signified-signifier relationship; serves as a reminder that the signifier-signified relationship is meaning-producing only for those who understand the relation by virtue of their already-understanding of other contrasting signs.
SIGNIFIER: a specific perceptual “sound-image”; in film this would be whatever is seen and heard in a given shot
SIGNIFIED: what the “sound-image” refers or points to; in film this would be the diegetic “concept” - the narrative or plot in the film.
FUNDAMENTAL "SEMIOTIC" UNIT OF FILM-MEANING: is the shot which loosely approximates, not words, but assertive statements in verbal languages. (Metz 75) Whereas a sentence can be "de-sentenced" into component words and grammatical substructures, a film shot cannot be "de-shot" into component sub-shot units. To attempt this would be simply to replace one shot with another shot.
REALITY OF FILM: AN HISTORICAL SIGN ESSENTIALIST? - Christian Metz takes a roughly ahistorical, synchronic, structural systematic approach. In his attempt to explain film's intelligibility, understandability he appeals to a general theory, semiotics, that might explain how meaning happens in any information-meaning system whether it be verbal or filmic languages.
METZ'S METHODOLOGY - Metz is a strategic thinker who explicitly lays out his methodology for the reader - better first to address the feasible stuff (denotation) first before moving on to exponentially more difficult issues (connotation). Better to first lay out the space of logical possibilities for film sequencing (the syntagmatic)
C. Metz
IS OPPOSED TO:
Contrary to de Saussure, Metz thinks that film signs are fixed in a way that linguistic signs are not, due to the filmmaker’s intention, i.e., the filmmaker has consciously chosen to structure a given sign in a particular way, albeit within a codified cultural code; Users of filmic language, the spectators, should be able to objectively read the narrative unambiguously because they too, have been educated, apprenticed, within this code. (Metz 84-85)
OTHER SCHOOLS/TOPICS/AREAS (also referenced in the following areas)
Lacanian mirror theory
Saussurean semiotics
REALITY OF FILM
SERGEI EISENSTEIN (1898-1948)
S. Eisenstein
WORKS CITED
Eisenstein, Sergei. "Beyond the Shot [The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram]." Cohen, Leo Braudy and Marshall. Film Theory & Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 13-24.
FILM-AS-LANGUAGE (MONTAGE THEORY) - Focus is on construction and composition of films, i.e., shot sequences
MONTAGE: a sequence of shots ("cellular film units") which are simultaneously independent of, and yet in dialectical relationship to one another such that their colliding interplay yields a wholly new, “other dimensional” experience. Each shot (he designates these “embryos” or “cells”) is permeable, open, or internally connected to its surrounding shots in an infinite number of possible ways such that the result of this collision of shots with one another yields a wholly new filmic reality, a new meaning… the montage. The timing of these dialectical shot-collisions can vary – shot collisions can double back, can repeat, can collide with neighboring but non-sequential shots. (Eisenstein 19-20)
IS OPPOSED TO:
VERTOV'S "Cinema Verite" or Man with a movie camera in which the camera "reveals reality" as it is
PUDOVKIN'S THEORY OF MONTAGE/SHOTS
Individual shots do not create montage meaning by simply adding together in a linear manner (as thinks Pudovkin, i.e., his "bricks") a series of atomistic, independent montage elements (shots), arranged by some set of external principles
OTHER SCHOOLS/TOPICS/AREAS (also referenced in the following areas)
FILM PURPOSE (TELOS) - Revolutionary
Soviet Cinema/Russian Formalism
MULVEY
Analyzes how subject position, “I”, is produced in the mirror stage and per Lacan's primitive fantasies it gets translated into a symbolic order that is constitutive of patriarchal culture and language and typified by the “law” – law of literally structures that structure human relations; the law of the symbolic, law of father, name of father; so already a patriarchy in that, ie, naming practices (last name is inheritance
FILM TYPOLOGY - TYPES - GENRES
FILM AS NARRATIVE
FICTION FILM
Genres categorized by the emotions they trigger (horror, fantasy, romance, drama...)
NON-FICTION FILM
DOCUMENTARY FORM
FILM AS IDEOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTION
FEMINIST ACCOUNTS/ QUEER
QUEER
Cinema is made of a constructed "dominant (heteronormative) code"
RUBY RICH?
Works: Reflections on a Queer Screen
MULVEY - Since films are completely embedded in a totalizing patriarchal ideological field, the "structural-reality of films" is composed of "patriarchal-ness", ie, as a FORM - ie, as a "male gaze"
JEAN-LOUIS BAUDRY (present)
IDEOLOGY
Baudry presumes that we live and breathe wtihin a totalized ideological world and that film is both constructed by this ideological regime and in turn reinforces, or constructs that ideological world (see film production for more on Baudry here)
SPECTATOR THEORY
We are reduced to just an all-perceiving subject and positioned a certain way by the structures of the film: montage, narrative, camera apparati; so we have to identify with the camera and with a type of power, a type of seeing; this position is an ideological construct and is complicit with the dominant ideological state in the world and is naturalized or hidden (made to “seem” natural, ie, continuity editing makes us absorbed in the film, drawn into the world of film, classical Hollywood style
TRANSCENDENTAL SUBJECT: The movement of the camera in a shot places the eye, our eye, at the vanishing point in front of the screen such that everything on the screen is intentionally extended outward in order to convene upon the very spot of our seeing, our gazing eyes. This projection outward by the film-screen constitutes us as a universal-seeing-subject even though we are literally, physically, not "in" the film per se.
The faculty of sight or seeing is no longer tied to a particular body - such as my body or your body - there can be just seeing without a body with the result that the eye is now free to be anywhere, to "be" at any time.
WORKS CITED
Baudry, Jean-Louis. "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus." Braudy, Leo. Film Theory & Criticism. 6th. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
JL Baudry
OTHER SCHOOLS/TOPICS/AREAS (also referenced in the following areas)
KNOWLEDGE/REALITY
FILM PRODUCTION/"CAUSES"
MARX: CRITICAL THEORY
WALTER BENJAMIN (1892-1940)
W. Benjamin
Works: Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
CRITICAL THEORY
MARX: SOVIET/RUSSIAN FORMALISTS
Eisenstein, Vertov - see language, purpose, etc
RACE/GLOBALIZATION
METZ
METZ - an ahistorical, synchronic, structural semiotic, systematic approach.
REALISM - ESSENTIALISM
FILM AS GIVEN MATERIAL/TECHNOLOGICAL PROPERTIES
SIEGFRIED KRACAUER (1889-1966)
WORKS CITED
Kracauer, Siegried. From Theory of Film: Basic Concepts in Film Theory & Criticism, 7th ed., edited by Braudy, 2009, p. 147-158
REALITY OF FILM
PHYSICAL EXISTENCE ("Realistic tendency") - camera reality includes transient physical existence in all its aspects but especially "captured movement" and especially everyday, transient, & unplanned life moments (Kracauer 153)
FORMATIVE TENDENCY – film is able, like no other art form, to explore or "penetrate" realms of fantasy, history (Kracauer 154) or “staged illusion” such as Melier's "Trip to the Moon."
S. Kracauer
METHODOLOGY: Kracauer is interested primarily in basic properties: what are the basic elements of the technology, the medium within an historical context that includes development of modes of production.
IS OPPOSED TO:
German expressionist films that lay claim to "art-films" (i.e., Dr. Caligari)
Casually classifying films as "just another art form" - essential to films is their capacity to record reality and if film is to be considered "art" it must incorporate this 'reality-recording" aspect. (Kracauer 157)
OTHER SCHOOLS/TOPICS/AREAS (also referenced in the following areas)
CRITICAL THEORY
FILM KNOWLEDGE/EPISTEMOLOGY
FILM AS ART/AESTHETICS
FILM AS ESSENCE/IDEA/ETERNAL FORM
ANDRE BAZIN (1918-1958)
OTHER SCHOOLS/TOPICS/AREAS (Bazin is also referenced in the following sections)
Film as Language
Film as Knowledge/Epistemology
Auteur theory
Spectator theory
Cahiers du Cinema
Italian neorealism
Film Criticism
A. Bazin
BAZIN'S ESSENTIALIST ACCOUNT
Film as REVEALING OBJECTIVE REALITY
FILM = "TRACE" OF "ORIGINAL" REALITY due to: CO-PRESENCE VIA MACHINE OBJECTIVITY (the reproduction is the thing itself; the image is the exact model b/c it shared time and space with it's original object) + PROFILMIC OBJECT – the object that appears before it gets captured + INDEXICAL QUALITY (the image is pointing back to the workers not to a painting of the workers) (Trumball Lecture, July 10, 2012, UCSC)
"Filmness" or the IDEAL/IDEA of cinema was "discovered" in the 17th century Baroque period: to duplicate or imitate nature so accurately, so realistically that a spectator would be unable to distinguish real nature from its artistic imitation. "a total and complete representation of reality… a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound, color, and relief." (Bazin 165)
Idea of cinema gradually materializes via historical/techno development in the arts (ie, camera) such as deep focus/wide shots/shot in depth
Filmic language is diachronic, connative (concerned with higher order ambiguous themes), and dialectical (film language continually refines itself as it returns to the idea of film as the perfect illusion of nature). (Bazin 41)
1920s - a self-conscious concern with film-as-image and thus expressionist and symbolic. Juxtaposed montage shots in order to evoke meanings that lie "beyond the film" or that add to the reality captured in film (Bazin 44).
1930s - a classical (Hollywood) view of film language as focused on structures of unity and harmony, increasing realism, and the resolution of any possible ambiguity. (Bazin 45-46)
1940s - a synthesis of 1930s concern for harmony and unity and increased realism along with a return to 1920s emphasis on creating suggestive, ambiguous meanings. Both ambiguity and realism are heightened (Welles, Renoir) by exploiting techniques such as the depth of field shot ("…the sequence of shots "in depth"… does not exclude the use of montage… he makes it an integral part of his "plastic." … depth of field is not just a stock in trade of the cameraman… it is a capital gain in the field of direction - a dialectical step forward in the history of film language.." (Bazin 49-50)). Depth of field invited the spectator to more actively engage in the film, to experience ambiguities within each shot or scene since there are now literally more layers of reality encountered, layers (foreground, background, etc) that are simultaneously spatially present within each shot - more reality is literally "packed in" to each shot. (Bazin 50)
BAZIN IS OPPOSED TO:
Soviet Cinema/Russian Formalism/Eisenstein's montage theory
Bazin of Renoir: "He… uncovered the secrets of a film form that would permit everything to be said without chopping the world up into little fragments [montage], that would reveal the hidden meanings in people and things without disturbing the unity natural to them." (Bazin 52)
because... it aims to communicate a preconceived idea of an idea in eisenstein’s head… and the film tells you what to think VS. this other way, depth of field in which spectator is more active… and thus unintended meanings might emerge…
shot in depth… it’s an inherent good; shot in depth introduces a certain degree of ambiguity that you have to pick up on and deal with (vs. Soviet cut and dry, no ambiguity…)
WORKS CITED
Bazin, Andre. "What is cinema? The ontology of the photographic image." Criticism, Film Theory &. Leo Braudy. 7th. Oxford: Oxford Press, 2009. 159-163
Bazin, Andre. "What is cinema? The evolution of the language of cinema." Braudy, Leo. Film Theory & Criticism. 7th. Oxford: Oxford Press, 2009. 41-53
Bazin, Andre. "What is cinema? The myth of total cinema." Braudy, Leo. Film & Criticism. 7th. Oxford: Oxford Press, 2009. 163-166
JEAN EPSTEIN (1897-1953)
OTHER SCHOOLS/TOPICS/AREAS (Epstein is also referenced in the following sections)
KNOWLEDGE/EPISTEMOLOGY
HUMAN NATURE/PSYCHOLOGY/EMOTIONS
French Impressionist Cinema
German Expressionism
EPSTEIN IS OPPOSED TO:
The notion that film is primarily a storytelling (narrative) device
EPSTEIN'S ESSENTIALIST ACCOUNT - that "filmness" ("photogenie") is something that is eternal, unchanging & objectively independent of any subject-position (Epstein 236)
Photogenie manifests in magnified close-ups in motion and in brief temporal durations, usually preceding resolution in a given scene (Epstein 236)
Photogenie somehow reveals the form of the beautiful itself, a form that lies beyond language and beyond material substrates, (Epstein 243) and in particular is what he terms the “moral character” of a thing, it’s unique personality perhaps that is brought to life, animistically, by the close-up. (Epstein 316)
J. Epstein
WORKS CITED
Epstein, Jean. "Magnification." Abel, Richard. French Film Theory and Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1921. 235-241.
Epstein, Jean. "On Certain Characteristics of Photogenie." Abel, Richard. French Film Theory and Criticism: A Historical Anthology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1924. 314-318.
Epstein, Jean. "The Senses I (b)." Abel, Richard. French Film Theory and Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1921. 241-246.
FILM PRODUCTION AS CONSTITUTIVE OF FILM
KEY FILM TECHNIQUES
Kino-eye/Cinema Verite (Vertov)
EXPERIMENT APPROACH: experiments with every possible technique – double images, slow motion…
Close-up (Epstein)
Montage (Eisenstein)
Deep focus (Bazin, Welles)
Mise en Cine
mise en cine – everything in front of the camera: composition, sets, props, actors, costumes, and lighting, positioning and movement of actors on the set (blocking) as overseen by the director (the "placer on scene."). Often this is how the director is said to impose meaning on the scene; usually a SINGLE SHOT with a moving camera within shot; Example:, “dr. caligari” – the stage/set is composed like paintings that themselves express a feelling/etc and the actors walks in front of that…
FILM ARTIST/AUTEUR
PETER WOLLEN (1938-present)
P. Wollen
Husband of Laura Mulvey
AUTEUR THEORY
Purpose of auteur theory is to make possible different judgments between films… there’s a consistent signature… a criterion of judgment… is this the work of an auteur or not? Who is an auteur and hasn’t yet been recognized as such…
Film Author (Auteur/”author” theory) approach – synonymous with Cahiers du Cinema – the game is to discover and ID the unique fingerprint that exists across all the films… and this notion is behind the film texts… Emphasis on providing a criteria, yardstick for a kind of evaluation, for what is a good or bad film… leads to distinction between film criticism and film theory (so this director-focus allows for more film criticism…). Auteur is the director-ness – the essence of the director that is found throughout all their works – they are “always telling the same story”
Works: The Auteur Theory
OTHER SCHOOLS/TOPICS/AREAS (also referenced in the following areas)
STRUCTURALISM
SEMIOTICS
BAZIN
Bazin: films should represent personal "spiritual" vision of director
DIGITALIZATION
FILM MEDIUM - IMAGES, SOUND
BAUDRY
BAUDRY: Film is both constitutive of, and constituted by, "ideology":
the apparatus hides how it works; it specifies a spot (the "vanishing point") in which you must occupy but hides this process.
the construction of the transcendental subject as something that is inescapably ideological and concealment as a necessary ideological effect within film.
To this end he emphasizes the material processes by which cinema is recorded, projected, and consumed as well as film's ability to create unified meaning comparable to other meaning-creating, semiotic phenomena such as the unconscious or the practice of writing.
FILM TELOS (PURPOSE)
REVOLUTIONARY
Feminist revolutionary films
MULVEY: Counter-cinema film can serve as a weapon, a “political use of psychoanalysis”, “destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon”
CLAIRE JOHNSTON
WHAT SHOULD A COUNTER-CINEMA DO?
COUNTER-CINEMA (p. 214) – should construct and manufacture new meanings… not enough just to complain about distorted presentation of women or representation; we have to disrupt dominant myths…
Issue isn’t showing how sexist films are but in showing how signs work – must “dismantle the master’s house from within.”
NATURALIZING MYTH: A PROBLEM - Myth transmits and transforms ideology of sexism and renders it invisible and therefore natural” – makes a sexist regime seem like it’s the only way it can be.
Works: Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema
Race theory films
VERTOV
VERTOV: film can help to create the "perfect man" via superior sensory technology of film machinery (superior to the body senses) - Humans can be "evolved" via film "from a bumbling citizen through the poetry of the machine to the perfect electric man.” (Vertov 69)
SOVIET CINEMA
SOVIETY CINEMA (Eisenstein, Pudovkin): Films should be transformative and effect a revolutionary consciousness… not about entertainment but pedagogy for the illiterate masses
CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING WITHIN DEMOCRATIC-LIBERAL SOCIETIES
Feminism-Liberal
QUEER: There are real histories that have been inscribed in certain ways and these should be included in analysis…
FILM & VALUE (AXIOLOGY)
FILM & ETHICS
Do spectators have moral duties or obligations in their film practices?
Do filmmakers have moral duties or obligations in their film practices?
FILM CRITICISM (AESTHETIC EVALUATIONS)
FILM AS ART
ROGER SCRUTON: Film CANNOT POSSIBILY be considered an "art form"
DOMINIC MCIVER LOPES: Film CAN be considered art
In what way can film be considered "art"; what are the necessary and sufficient conditions in order for a given film to count as "art" or even "quality art"?
QUEER
QUEER: What can film theory say about other non straight, non-white subject positions… axes of identity? Isn’t it possible that film theory hasn’t accounted for other types of viewing positions?
BAZIN
Should be limited to "Appreciative Criticism" (Bazin)
MOVIE CRITICS
What distinguishes "good" movie critics from mediocre critics? ie, the Rotten Tomatoes question.
SPECTATORSHIP & HUMAN NATURE
MUNSTERBERG
MUNSTERBERG: – film spectators should feel a harmony with the film by entering with their own impulses "into the will of every element" (every line, color, form, word, tone, note); these elements"carry intentionality…" (Munsterberg 416)
BAZIN
Bazin: Spectator-focused interpretation (spectator should be free to interpret)
BAUDRY
Baudry – we are reduced to just an all-perceiving subject and positioned in a certain way by the structures of the film: montage, narrative, camera apparatus; thus we identify with the camera and with a type of power, a type of seeing; this position is an ideological construct and is complicit with the dominant ideological state in the world and is naturalized or hidden (made to “seem” natural… continuity editing makes us absorbed in the film, drawn into the world of film, classical Hollywood style are designed to do that; more powerful because they don’t see what they are doing to us…)
METZ
METZ – when he talks about identification, mirror stuff – not talking about surveying people (perception studies) but is talking about an unconscious process that is at work in viewing… a position carved out, produced by the text that forces you to occupy… ways
MANTHIA DIAWARA
Works: Black Spectatorship
LAURA MULVEY (1941-present
MULVEY'S THREE QUESTIONS
First, CONTENT: how are women portrayed in films?
Second, building off of metz, baudry, how are we positioned as spectators? What kind of subject position is carved out?
Third, what are the alternative possibilities for film? For producing film, say by feminists?
VOYEURISM & CASTRATION: voyeurism is obviously pleasurable but when the woman appears it’s threatening because the threat of castration anxiety is unconsciously raised… free floating anxiety that gender isn’t as stable as we like to think – this unconscious process is subject to repression (Mulvey identifies a fundamental unconscious identification process that carves out a subjection position of an identification of the camera ).
CASTRATION – per Freud, children learn about sexual difference via presence or lack of a penis and this sets up women as passive bearers of no-penis and men as anxiety-ridden as they inescapably are confronted with the possibility of no-penis.; this results in a psychic effect of... a symbolic patriarchy, women function as a kind of indicator of castration and nothing else
The Look – the look in the cinema, a certain kind of vision; look of the camera and the look of the spectator (similar to Metz’s ID of camera and ID with oneself)
EGO-IDEAL - Relay identification with characters in which we fantasize we are them as ego ideals…
STRATEGY OF COUNTER-CINEMA: Cannot get outside of patriarchy – so we must attack it from within, ie, the pleasurable aspect to film – she thinks makes us complicit and has real effects
Ways of looking are encoded in patriarchy; hierarchical structure will affect content too of films; even in films with strong feminist protagonists as women watchers you are complicit in your own oppression b/c you ENJOY watching it
we primarily identify with the male gaze presupposed by the film system and so any investigation we want to do, say how women are portrayed on screen, is secondary to the first question – the type of looking… all the issues of how women are presented is conditioned by a form of looking inherent in films and we need to look at that first.
Scopophilia (p. 713) – Freudian term in which we instinctually, sexually, enjoy “looking” at the Other; has a narcissistic aspect in which the mirror stage is the exemplary here; identification with the image not with the other person
Narcissism – apart from mundane ways in which screen is like a mirror; pleasurable reinforcing of idealized fantasy is what is going on;
a pleasurable surplus which is relayed into pleasurable identification with some character…; the way that the screen functions as a mirror is an idealized fantasy
Voyeurism – a type of scopophilia in which the object of one’s gaze doesn’t know that one is being enjoyably watched. So with films (Metz too here), the finished product is made “to be watched” and structurally, semiotically, the structure is that the film is “made to be watched and simultaneously act as if it isn’t being watched.”; there’s a psychic distance that is maintained
Women vs. Men in Cinema (p. 715)
PROBLEM – the erotic has potential to be disruptive to narrative (ie, Blonde Venus – gotta control Marlene Dietrich by relaying through cary grant…)
the image of woman is threatening; there’s a couple different strategies (DEFENSE MECHANISMS) Hollywood employs in order to contain threat or to escape:
Sadistic voyeurism – punishment that is enacted in which one takes pleasure in another’s pain; so grace Kelly gets beaten up – not enough that she’s an object of erotic pleasure now we enjoy her getting thrown around (Rear Window) – and Stewart is looking but can’t do anything b/c of his leg injry
Fetishism – Fetishistic Scopophilia – for Freud fetishism something extrananeous gets built up to idealized perfection such that it is substituting for something else that has been repressed in the subconscious. So with women… we don’t have to confront castration aspect of women and instead we fetishize with…
Camera takes the POV of the male/active
WOMEN
WOMEN: Passive as image to be looked at; object for consumption, for display, for male desire
an object with to-be-looked-at-ness with voyeuristic aspect; no agency of her own (so Dietrich has no agency even though she’s being aggressively sexual in that she wants to have sex with every guy – this is a male fantasy).
MEN
MEN: as bearer (actively) of the look; a looker; projects fantasy onto female figure and women are coded/constructed in order “to be looked at” passively.
FILM AS IDEOLOGY
She’s not focused on women in stereotyped roles but how viewing is coded as masculine and is not neutral..
So must be a primary identification with camera, with way of looking and then secondarily things get relayed into characters, etc. but this primary level is already masculine and concealed, coded in such that we don’t think about it;
L. Mulvey
Works: Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema
OTHER SCHOOLS/TOPICS/AREAS (also referenced in the following areas)
KNOWLEDGE/EPISTEMOLOGY
FILM PURPOSE - REVOLUTIONARY
FILM AS LANGUAGE
Psychoanalytic/Lacan
Feminism
REALITY OF FILM
TANIA MODLESKI (present)
T. Modleski
Not quite saying that Mulvey is wrong but maybe it’s not as totalizing as Mulvey thinks (that we have no choice you are positioned in the text)… - maybe when women watch cinema we have more agency than it seems.
HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY/EMOTION
HUGO MUNSTERBERG (1863-1916)
OTHER SCHOOLS/TOPICS/AREAS (also referenced in the following areas)
FILM & KNOWLEDGE
SPECTATOR THEORY
WORKS CITED
Munsterberg, Hugo. From the Film: A Psychological Study: The Means of the Photoplay, in Film Theory and Criticism, 6th ed, Oxford, Oxford Press, 2004.
ONTOLOGY (REALITY) OF SILENT FILM (PHOTOPLAY)
a succession of instantaneous (static) impressions that causes phenomenological experience of continuous movement of events
Film has its own laws and conventions – just different from the rest of the world. And then lets map these laws… ; must be rules/laws so that “we” can discuss, agree on what happened in the film…
MUNSTERBERG - PSYCHOLOGY OF FILM VIEWING: film has the potential to create a full range of emotion quite rapidly; so analogous to MENTAL FACULTIES of attention, imagination, memory; gives one multiple perspectives on an emotion not bound by linear time – so juxtaposition of past and present
ATTENTION – in the outer world we zero in and are selective; in photoplay the closeup enlargens detail to exclusion of all else
MEMORY – breaks into present events by bringing up pictures of the past; photoplay uses frequent cutbacks
EMOTION – we have shades, lots of different emotions: photoplay uses emotions to mold scenes such that these scenes become the embodiment of our feelings themselves…
IMAGINATION – anticipates the future via fancies/dreams; photoplay achieves this “more richly” than imagination could ever do…
IS OPPOSED TO:
The notion that only the theater/drama can have character development and that the silent photoplay can at best just show character "types" (Munsterberg 417)
the notion that cinema fails to offer any new insights about the human mind beyond what prior art-forms showed us
H. Munsterberg
EPSTEIN
Discovery of this previously unknown "photogenie-ness" is transformative for the viewer: the magnification of emotions, the creation of new intoxicating sight-based pleasures, and the introduction of a doubly abstracted "second sight" in which we see on film what the film itself has seen.
BAZIN
It is human nature to have some sort of basic, human psychological desire to freeze and reproduce the world; mummification of time, of being, of persons…
FILM & EMOTION
METHODOLOGY
Linguistics
Semiotics (de Saussure)
Examine how both form and content of films are structured by deep linguistic strucutres common to all (?) societies
Auteur
PHILOSOPHY: Continental
Race
Examine how both form and content of films are structured by dominant racial codes (ie, whiteness)
Critical Theory/Frankfurt
Examine how both form and content of films are structured by our present system of exchange and modes of production: capitalism
Queer
Examine how both form and content of films are structured by dominant sexual codings - ie, heteronormativity
Russian Formalism
Feminist
Examine how both form and content of films are structured by patriarchal ideology
Psychoanalytic/Lacan
Examine how both form and content of films are structured by psychological dynamics originating in childhood and continuing through adult stages
PHILOSOPHY: Analytic
Feminist
Examine how both form and content of films are structured by patriarchal ideology
1. Analysis of concepts, categories, types of reasoning that organize film practices and figuring out how the categories relate to one another
2. Resolution of apparent conceptual paradoxes, tensions, contradictions that occur in film practices
3. Discovery of metaphysical presuppositions & entailments of conceptual frameworks of relevant practices
FILM & KNOWLEDGE
EPSTEIN
EPSTEIN: the close-up shot, reveals some objectively independent reality, "photogenie," located in objects and events prior to their recording by the camera
EPSTEIN: the close-up lens allows us to see not only the irreducible distinctiveness of each object, the personality of each object but that we are thereby thrust, undistractedly into the vision of the film-poet, the director, “personality, the soul, the poetry of certain men invaded the cinema… matter is molded and set into relief by personality.” (Epstein 318)
BAZIN
Bazan (like Kracauer) thinks film gives us access to an unseen world
MUNSTERBERG
MUUNSTERBERG'S MIND ANALOGY THESIS - Film mirrors how the mind works and is closer to the inner workings of mind vs. how world works… “freedom of mind has triumphed over the unalterable law of outer world” (Munsterberg 414)
DZIGA VERTOV (1896-1954)
WORKS CITED
Vertov, Dziga, We: Variant of a Manifesto, 1922
D. Vertov
KNOWLEDGE/EPISTEMOLOGY: "Man with a movie camera” (1929) “pure cinema" reveals things that have been overlooked; specifically the Kino-eye (eye of the camera) is a better eye than the human eye as it can read the thoughts of another
CINEMA VERITE: – kino pravda – “truth cinema”… kino = cinema
IS OPPOSED TO:
Narrative and drama is worthless/bourgeoisie culture, etc.
OTHER SCHOOLS/TOPICS/AREAS (also referenced in the following areas)
FILM GENRE: Documentary
FILM PURPOSE: Revolutionary
FILM TECHNIQUES
KRACAUER
KRACAUER: Film reveals incalculable, fleeting movements such as crowd patterns;
BAUDRY
BAUDRY: The camera reveals, "lays out" and reflects constructed reality (ideology) and perhaps it allows us to more precisely note the effects and nature of ideology, ie., how it constructs the transcendental subject; how it naturalizes the individual thus hiding the effects of ideology
What sort of truths do film practices reveal?
KEY
PINK = Analytic categories (from "Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures" - Blackwell Anthology, 2006)
ORANGE = Continental categories (?) (from Baudry's Film Theory & Criticism, 2009)
GREY: My categories upon reflection on the whole thus far... (Anelli)
GREEN = Theorist covered in Film 120
YELLOW = Specific theoretical school