Film Theory

Does the cinema most resemble the stage, a painting, or a photograph? When is it like poetry? When do we treat it like a novel or short story? What is the relationship between cinema, television, video, digital arts, and other moving images? What sort of machine is it? Is it more like a picture frame, window on the world, mystic writing pad, or a mirror? Does it function like a language, an address, a puzzle, or a provocation? How should we examine it in terms of narrative, apparatus, and ideology? In terms of image and sound, style, genre, the film artist, and audience reception? What is the relationship between the cinema and democracy? These have been the primary questions throughout the history of film theory and will be the key concerns of this module. It seeks to introduce students to the history and debates of film theory from its beginnings to the contemporary period. Students will be exposed to various ways of addressing films and writing about the cinema, including formalist and realist theories, cultural studies approaches to cinema, semiotics, auteur theory, genre and star analysis, ideological critiques, and apparatus theory. Screenings will include examples from early cinema, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Potemkin, Man with a Movie Camera, Bicycle Thieves, Perfumed Nightmare, Battle of Algiers, Citizen Kane, Rear Window, and Weekend.