Movie Lovers Prof.

Aysha Iqbal

The Indian Institute of Technology, Madras has a department of humanities and social
sciences.

Lecture 04: The Theory of Film

(See slide time of 00:18)

Good morning! Today we're going to talk about big trends in film theory. So, since film isn't
as old as some other art forms—Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope and peephole machines didn't
open to the public until 1894 in New York City—we're looking at the start of film theory and
how this new art form called cinema got its start. We also have to talk about Thomas Edison
and his Kinetoscope peephole, which was one of the first ways to watch movies. We're going
to talk about 1894 and how everything starts. In 1895, people paid money to watch movies in
a café in Paris, and that's where the Lumia brothers first showed real-life pictures to paying
customers.

So, film theory and criticism are based on a few main texts, and it's easy to see how they
connect up to the point where the so-called theories of structuralism and post-structuralism
have a big impact on cultural history in general.

After that, film theory and criticism spread very quickly, and film journals became a place
where people could talk about and argue about art and beauty. As magazines were for, say,
your literature of film, it got the attention that was once only given to great works of
literature.

And film journals and film historians played a big part in choosing this state's two films.
There has been a lot of talk about fictional narcotic films from the beginning of this article.
This is because of how popular these kinds of works are compared to documentary films and
more experimental and Avagad films. More than one of the first theories about movies
clearly leaned toward the formalist possibility of movies and certain forms of formality,
especially the montage theory put forward by the great Russian film makers in the 1920s. For
example, Liyo Kuleshov or Lev Kuleshov from Russia started writing essays in 1917 and
many books in the 1920s. In these books, they talk about the methods used by American
filmmakers, especially those like DW Griffiths. Kuleshov learned how to make movies by
watching the best filmmakers of the time.

So, there's a thing called the Kuleshov effect. It has become common in film language to talk
about what Kuleshov saw as the magic of film itself: how meaning and emotional impact are
created by connecting and putting together individual shorts. This is related to montage
theory, which was one of the first attempts to add a more intellectual touch to film studies.
The idea behind it was that scenes are made by connecting and putting together individual
shorts. How meanings are made by putting together different shots, creating a context that
wasn't in any of the individual films and was created by the ending itself. For this reason,
Kuleshov's student would quickly start writing too many scripts, which would then be put
together to make the book film method. This happened while he was working on his movie,
Mother, which was written by magazine workers. So, when the movie was being planned,
people who were interested in film studies would start writing books in the 1920s. So, in this
book, he only talks about his own version of montage, which [FL] Einstein Isis Einstein call
"linkage," in which shots are not optically connected to each other so that they naturally flow
with the storylines of the movies. This is an important addition.

he talks about Kuleshov, but he also goes further with the theory discussion by talking about
how space and time are mixed in films.

Now we're going to talk about the temporal aspects of movies that are unique to Kuleshov.
We'll be talking about dimensions that are made by the editing process and are different from
any place and time we know in real life. That's all Kuleshov had to say about it. In addition to
the idea of linkage editing, Einstein also came up with the collision theory of montage. This
theory says that the way shots are placed dramatically affects how they relate to each other,
making the meaning of the combination clearer to the viewer.

Whereas Kuleshov showed how to put shorts next to each other to create context that wasn't
in the individual images, Einstein went further than his mentor in both his writings and his
films to show that the two images could be synthesized in the minority everywhere to create a
single wholeness and perfection, even to create a level of thought organization beyond the
recitalist images in the know. Moving on to another important theory, Andre Bazin wrote
what is cinema volume one and part volume two in France in the 1940s and 1950s. So, we
have an impressive mix of realism, realist criticism, and the theory of realism. Is his film
actually realistic? That's what the fight is all about.

The work of Kuleshov and Einstein on montage was seen as not suited to the realistic
possibilities of filmmaking. Instead, it created an illusory and false sense of reality that came
from the introduction of short films and not a true reflection of the world, which is filmed on
a photographic base. This made American directors like Orson Welles and William Wells
more aware of the importance of the individual in editing and what each shows about reality
through relationships of images. In this way, there isn't much of a focus in the silent films
made by early Hollywood filmmakers. Now, using deep focus and along take methods based
on the work of Orison Welles and William Wells, we can show that space and time are
continuous and whole, just like they seem to be in the outside world. So, viewers have to get
lost in the pictures and decide for themselves what to see. In the famous scene from Citizen
Kane by Orson Welles, while the mother studies the paperwork for the child's inheritance, the
child is shown happily playing, and we see them playing through the window pane.

They used a method called "deep focus," which makes all the characters very, very clear to
see. And unlike the montage, it's up to the watchers to decide what to see.

So, one of the founders of the French film magazine FL had an impact on the writings of
Godthab, (Refer Time: 10:32) and Yoke Rivet, who later became very important figures in
the French New Way cinema. Bassoon's focus on the individual image and analysis of a
single motion picture within the context of film genre, along with his appreciation of the
personal and unique in the work of each film artist, had an effect on the new ways that these
critics went about directing films. However, it is Bazin's deep understanding of cinema, his
ability to respond to the subtleties of each work, and his very sharp eye for style and form, as
well as his use of detailed techniques as the basis for his ideas, that have served as an
example for writers of film appreciation and film criticism.

(See slide time of 11:48)

I want to draw your attention to a part of What Is Cinema by Andre Bazin. I will read this
quote to you. If the plastic arts were subjected to psychoanalysis, the process of preserving
the dead might be found to be a key part of how they came to be. The process could show
that there is a mummy complex at the start of drawing and sculpture. Egyptian religion was
really against death because people thought that life depended on the body still existing. In
this way, by giving a defense against

The passing of time met a basic need in people, since death is just time coming to an end. It
was natural for him to keep up appearances in the face of the reality of death by preserving
flesh and bone. To preserve his body's appearance artificially is to win the battle of time. To
preserve his body's appearance artificially is to grab it from the flow of time and stow it away
neatly, so to speak. The first Egyptian figure was a mummy that had been tanned and turned
into a person out of sodium. But pyramids and maze-like passageways were not a surefire
way to stop thieves from stealing in the end.
And look at what movies did to this. Along with Bazin's name, Sires Fred Creakier is also an
important one. He is known as one of the measure supporters of real film. He wrote a well-
known academic book in 1960 called Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality.
Furthermore, he believes that the fictional movies that best use the movie medium's potential
are the ones that don't change or take away from the real world too much. These movies can
also help us rethink and see the real world in new ways.

Now let's talk about something called "genre theory and criticism," which got a lot of
attention around the same time and tries to explain why movies are so famous, especially
those made by Hollywood studios. It was thought that all directors were good at what they
did and that they personally influenced certain types of art. This theory and criticism was
based on the relationship between works and their audiences and tried to explain the social
and cultural needs of the viewer. This theory and criticism also tried to figure out where the
most likely or most profitable place was to adopt the new focus on structuralism, which had a
big effect on cultural criticism in the 1960s and 1970s.

So, Hollywood made a lot of movies that were very similar and had well-known features in
each one. This made these movies the natural choice for studying movies and taking a
structuralism approach to movies. And another two-sided opposition and its structure
exploded in these studies. They may seem too surface-level to suggest the deep structure that
anthropologists like Claude Lorius Cross had proposed in his work on primitive culture or the
Oedipus Myth. But then there was a book called Horizon West, written by someone named
Gym Critics in 1969, and he knew that the writer was able to set up a basic structural and
thematic kind of contract in the

westerns in the western genre and also show what each director has brought to the table in
this setting.

Then there is another great theorist, Peter Walloon, who wrote about Hollywood directors
Howard Hawks and Jon Ford in a very inflectional book called Science and Meanings in the
Cinema, which came out in 1969. People who are interested in doing research in film studies
should know about this book. Walloon also used a genre-based approach called atrial
structuralism to find themes and tensions in the films of Howard Hawks and Jon Ford. The
first important work in the field of semiotics was written by Christian Mets and was called
Film Language: A Semiotics of Cinema. It was first released in French.

The main idea behind Mets's theory is that movies show meaning through semiotics codes,
especially codes that are only used in movies, like the way shots can be arranged in a story
order. There's also something called "second semiotics." The idea behind it is to find and then
show the ideological structure and codes of capitalist society that can be seen or even implied
in commercial narrative films. The ideological focus is linked to Zak Lucan's psychoanalytic
theory about the child's early development stages, especially the "merrier" stage, where the
child can regress on some level when looking at images on the screen recreated with in the
imaginary and where a feeling of wordiness and self is first developed when looking at a
reflection in a mirror as a child, but is now developed by film ideology. Using Zak Lucan's
"mirror" theory of stage is like putting stage theory into film.

One more important film theory comes from John Louie Bothered, who wrote about the
effect or ideological effects of the basic film critics. This was the first of several pieces
Christian Mets wrote on the subject that helped him grow as a writer and spread these ideas
in the books he wrote between 1973 and 1975. These essays are now known as the
"imaginary signifier" collection.

Here I am again talking about Zak Lucan's idea of "sucher," which means "to stitch up
something." He gives us this idea, which film writers and film theories have used. So, his
idea of sucher earlier introduce to film theory in ((Refer Time: 19:58)). This idea shows up in
easy Las súber, and it gives

There is a lot of discussion about how to recreate the imaginary, where to put the subject on
the screen, and how to keep the story together with methods like point of view editing. So,
whose point of view should we follow? So, we need to understand these theories about the
mirror stage, point of view match cutting, and eye lining matching. We also need to know
how these methods work and how they might add a subjective element, like the idea of
camera subjectivity. So, how do these things work?

Moving on, let's talk about feminist film theory and criticism, which was and still is a big
trend in how we understand and enjoy movies. So, feminist film theory and criticism has also
been backwards and powerful in schools. It has had a big effect on how film studies are
taught. So, early works in this field take a straightforward critical approach, praising and
analyzing the different types of women in film as products of patriarchal society and culture.
But feminist criticism also incorporates the ideas of Luis Alturas and Zak Lucan, as well as
the semiotics approaches of co-structuralist film theory, in its search for ways to understand
how sections of a film's story and text code are different, as well as how it is watched.

Now, one of the most important writings in this school comes from Laura Mulvey. It's called
"Easy Visual Pleasure Narrative Cinema" and it came out in 1975. It talks about how women
are portrayed in Hollywood movies as the passive objects of active male gays. So ideas like
gay people and women being seen as objects can be traced back to the great feminist writers
of the past. Laura Mulvey is one of the most important theorists in this field. The idea is that
the way women are portrayed as a sign of castration takes away from the pleasure that men
get from them. Mulvey talks about two unconscious ways that men make their fear of
castration worse.

The first is cruel voyeurism, which puts women down, and the second is scopophilia and
fetishizing women, which put too much value on women's looks in response to this focus on
men's pleasure and desire. Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by
Mulvey is based on Kingwida's movie Dual in the Sun. Mulvey wrote this easy on visual
pleasure and narrative cinema based on Kingwida's movie Dual in the Sun. Also, there was a
reviewer named Kaye Silverman who wrote this piece called "Embodying in the Female
Voice," which came out in

1984. Another feminist film critic, a merry in merry and dowel, wrote an essay about film
and the macerated theorizing of the female spectator. All of these theories—Silverman and
Mulvey's, as well as merry and dowel's—looked at the problems and pressures that films
geared toward gay men put on female viewers by making it impossible for them to identify
with the female characters in a positive way. So, one response to the psychoanalytic marks is
that it has had a bigger effect on film form and method. This response is known for using
literary ideas and looking at what happens on the screen in the context of how the viewer
reacts to it.

Now let's talk about a different trend: narratology, which includes viewer response analysis
as an important part of it. Edward Branigan, who is not really a film theorist but a
narratologist, has some important ideas about this movement. He also wrote a book called
Point of View in the Cinema and Theory of Narrative and Subjectivity in Classical Film. In it,
he uses a lot of literary narratology terms to talk about film narrative text and does a pretty in-
depth look at how film techniques create different kinds of subjectivity on the screen and
subjective responses in the viewer. Now, since the 1960s, the ideas and studies of
postmodernism have been studied and the term itself has been defined in a lot of different
ways. But the main things that have stayed the same are the rejection of any complete
theories about life, reality, or art, and the breaking up and lack of unity in both cultural and
personal identities. Again, we have made a subversion of time and history, and media and
technology have taken over the world. This is a reality that we have made up for ourselves as
science majors.

So, the most important things in this discussion have been Guy's (Refer Time: 26:39) work
on the society of this spectacle and John's (Refer Time: 26:45) works, especially Simulations,
which came out in 1983 and is a very important book for people who are interested in film
studies and research. Charles Jameson is a very important author, and his work on
postmodernism or the culture logic of late capitalism is also very important. Since then, the
ideas of postmodernism have been fully utilized in the examination of several movies and in
the comprehension of certain trends in contemporary film. So, we need to understand
Jameson's idea beyond his invitation and collection of filmic codes from the past. This
change was especially helpful, and it was caused by

a short but important article by Alexander that came out in 1939. This book came out in 1968
and was called "The Birth of a New." So, what became known as the Athey theory came to
North America in the 1960s through Andrew Sarris's critical works and his reevaluation of
Hollywood movies, which...

When we talk about post-colonial theories, Frantz Fanon's work, Black Skin White Mask,
which came out in 1952, is a great example of how post-colonial studies and film theory are
connected. In it, Fanon talks about how people watch movies and how race affects those
watching. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media by Ella Shohat and
Robert Stem is another example of this. These authors take a Eurocentric view of the world
and see it from a single dominant point of view.

Again, there is a book called Mystifying Movies that explains the truth and lies in modern
film theory as well as the philosophical issues of classic film theory. The great writer Noel
Carol says that theory is only a coherent and enzymatic set of statements that can both
explain events and make them happen. Carol uses this definition to defend his criticism of
much of the film theory canon, choosing instead to use analytic theory from philosophy as the
basis of his work, which includes theorizing moving images and a philosophy of mass art.
Carlos is part of a large group of film theorists who disagree with the popular "slab theory" in
cinema studies, which is based on the ideas of Sozzceir, Lucan, Althusser, and Bards, which
is where the word "slab" comes from.

So, Carré and David Bordwell co-edited a book called Post Theory Restructuring
Reconstructing Film Studies. In it, different authors criticize the big theories that ruled film
studies in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly those that involved semiotics, cultural studies, and
psychoanalytic studies. Thus, Board Well's book or essay and other modern film studies try
to map out the lack of intellectual grounding and lack of coherence in a lot of recent theory.
Board Well's approach gives us a temporary way to look at how events are presented in a
film, including plot fusion and story, which is also known as fibula. While cognitivism looks
at how movies are shown in people's minds while they watch them.

(See slide time of 31:19)

So, I'd like to draw your attention to a few of these reads. Please look at the list of sources,
the book by Dudley Andrew, and the work of Andre Bazin. If you want to learn more about
film theory and criticism, read Leo Braudy's "The Art of Watching Films." David Cock, A
History of Story-Based Movies. Pam Cock's "The Cinema Book" and Deleuze's "The Cinema
1 and Cinema 2" are also good choices.

Thanks a lot.