Film Theory Lecture 4 PDF

Film Appreciation Prof. Aysha Iqbal Department of Humanities and Social Science Indian Institute of Technology, Madras Lecture - 04...

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.