Chapter 11: Models of Film Theory

1. Chapter 11: Models of Film Theory

2. Basic Models of Film Theory • Realist • Auteurist • Psychoanalytic • Ideological • Feminist • Cognitive

3. Realist Theory • Looks for correspondences between film images and the realities before the camera • Restrictions on stylistic manipulation • Andre Bazin • Ethical formulation • Deep-focus cinematography • The long take • Jean Renoir, Orson Welles

4. Bazin’s approach • Strength • Stress on ethical contract between filmmaker and viewer • Weakness • Typifies few films • Deep focus, long takes, and montage may co-exist in a given film

5. Other Realist Models • Documentary Realism • Italian neo-realism • Perceptual realism • Basis for realism at perceptual level • Three-dimensional visual/acoustic information • Cinema conveys same information as found in everyday life • Constrained by cinema’s transformative elements

6. Auteurist Theory • The film director as author and artist • A recognizable stylistic signature • Consistencies of theme and visual design • Alfred Hitchcock • Strength: • Helps legitimize the medium as an art • Weakness: • Attributional errors • Filmmaking is collaborative

7. Psychoanalytic Models • Derived from the writings of Freud and Jacques Lacan • Cinema activates unconscious, non-rational pleasures and anxieties • Voyeurism • Fetish and taboo imagery

8. Strength • Emphasis on the emotional power of cinema • Emphasis on its ability to arouse desire and pleasure • Weakness • Based on ambiguous clinical data • Tendency to over-extend its claims

9. Ideological Models • Ideology – set of beliefs about society and the world • Emphasizes how film portrays society and expresses ideologies • Levels of ideological expression • First order • Rambo: First Blood Part II • Second order • Back to the Future

10. Ideological point of view: • Support for established social values • Critique of established values • Conglomeration • Mixed set of appeals and outlooks • Enhances marketing to large, heterogeneous audiences

11. Strength • Emphasizes relationship of film and society • Exposes distorted portraits of social issues • Weakness • Tends to over-extend its claims • Reduces films to ideological symptoms

12. Feminist Models • Depiction of gender in film • Connects this to social ideologies and practices • Images of women (and men) in films made by men • Alternative forms of feminist filmmaking • May blend psychoanalytic and ideological elements

13. Strength • Emphasis on the ways gender influences the production of images • Weakness • Gender is one of many filters on human experience

14. Cognitive Models • Viewer perception of visual and auditory information • Perceptual processing • How viewers organize these perceptions and derive meaning from them • Interpretive processing • Schemas (frameworks of interpretation) • Bases for a viewer’s understanding of cinema • Perceptual correspondences • Social correspondences

15. Strengths • The theory is research-based, supported by empirical data • By accounting for the intelligibility of cinema, the theory also accounts, in part, for the medium’s popularity • Weakness • Relative lack of attention to emotion • Lack of attention to cinema’s transformative functions