Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > English
NOTES ON SOME IMPORTANT TERMS FOR FILM STUDIES
Gopa B. Caesar:
According to scholars such as Jean-Louis Comolli and Stephen Heath, films elicit consent for the dominant order by giving the viewing subject the illusion of freedom and agency, naturalizing and legitimizing the existing exploitative class structure. Althusser asserted that, in order to unmask what the dominant ideology obscures, one must perform symptomatic readings that identify a text’s structuring absences and constitutive lacks. The critics at Cahiers du Cinéma famously applied this type of textual analysis to John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939).
Writers at another French journal, Cinéthique, argued for a self-reflexive film aesthetic that would consciously make audiences aware of the devices of its own construction and the illusory nature of the film image. These critics attacked realism as a bourgeois construct that leads audiences to mistake subjective representation for objective reality.
Gopa B. Caesar:
Apparatus theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry claimed that film’s technological characteristics, as well as the conditions of spectatorship (such as the darkness of movie theaters and the silence and motionlessness of theater audiences), have inherent ideological effects.
Gopa B. Caesar:
Feminist film theory: Early feminist film scholars, such as Molly Haskell and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, focused on stereotypes of women in Hollywood and art cinema and drew attention to previously neglected women filmmakers. Later scholars sought to describe the patriarchal dynamics of cinematic spectatorship. Laura Mulvey argued that classical Hollywood films invite a masculinist gaze that aligns itself with active male characters and voyeuristically looks at or fetishizes passive female characters. According to Mary Ann Doane, female spectators have few options: they may either empower themselves (at the expense of their gender) by identifying with the male protagonist or identify (masochistically) with the female victim. Feminist theorists encouraged women filmmakers to create alternative film aesthetics, which Claire Johnston said should channel female desire, Laura Mulvey said should destroy spectatorial (and hence sexist, patriarchal) pleasure, and Luce Irigaray said should be based on the unique properties of the female body and feminine subjectivity.
Gopa B. Caesar:
Cultural studies: Cultural studies scholarship goes beyond apolitical investigations of medium specificity and film language and tries to situate film texts within broader social, cultural, political, and industrial networks of power. Rejecting previous theorists’ high-art elitism and blindness to racial and sexual difference, cultural scholars consider all aspects of popular culture (such as daytime television, punk clothing, and hip-hop music) as valid objects of study. Unlike apparatus theorists, cultural scholars like Stuart Hall argue that spectatorship is an active process of textual decoding. Cultural studies is often concerned with the demographics and sites of cinematic spectatorship, revealing how certain groups in certain reception contexts and historical moments are capable of reading films subversively, against the grain of their dominant ideology. This approach has led to a proliferation of queer, feminist, and racial reinterpretations of classical and contemporary Hollywood films.
Gopa B. Caesar:
Cognitive theory: In contrast to psychoanalysis, cognitive film theory tries to understand how audiences interpret films in terms of rational, conscious processes. Using Russian formalist terminology, David Bordwell divides narrative into the syuzhet (the order in which the narrative events are presented) and the fabula (the actual chronological order of events). According to Bordwell, spectators use the syuzhet to reconstruct the fabula in their minds—an example of how meaning is created through cognitive rather than emotional or unconscious processes. Cognitive theory assumes that perception and cognition are universal human characteristics, so it does not take cultural or historical differences into account. This approach puts weight on intellectual rather than emotional aspects of watching film.
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