________________________________________ ________________________________________ Concepts for Reading a Film • Try applying the following concepts to the film. Answer and consider the questions in each section and apply those ideas to the particular film you are studying. 1. The Concept of Absence. Cinema is about illusion and therefore what is missing from the screen is ‘present’ in some ways in the viewer’s mind.
It means that camera is pen and the director is the author of the film. Film itself is an expression. Film is not just entertainments; it is the thoughts of director, although it is abstract. The films are unique and there are significant and character in the films. Moreover, Francois Truffaut emphasized on mise-en-scene of a film.
Film Theory debates the essence of cinematic value and provides conceptual frameworks for understanding a film’s relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large. In order to successfully approach film criticism it is important to examine several theories. It is important to keep in mind that, “no critical approach can tell us everything about a film but, rather, different approaches can teach us different things about a film” (Luhr, Lehman 80). First and foremost, films are perceived in terms of their narrative structure. When discussing a film, audiences will recall its story line or characters to exemplify what the film was about.
This article seeks to specifically investigate the influence of Lacanian psychoanalysis on film theory. Its development will be traced in two articles through classic film theory, the role of Karl Marx and Louis Althusser, the contributions of semiotics, the debates surrounding apparatus theory and the gaze, and finally the input of feminism. While this type of broad overview has been attempted in many general introductions to film theory, it is hoped here to provide a rough sketch of its formative stages of development, while filling in the detail on a number of significant issues that highlight Lacan’s influence. Classic Film Theory It was not until after the First World War that it became possible to identify two particular groups within film criticism. Spearheading the first of these groups was the figure of Sergei Eisenstein, whose film-making and theoretical essays in the 1920’s established a conception of the role of the cinema as a primarily aesthetic one.
Defining Your Terms Clearly, What Element of Brecht’s Theories Can Be Traced in Films that are said to be ‘Alternative Cinema’? The term alternative cinema has certain connotations. To many, it is not alternative, instead it is the way cinema was meant to be viewed, in that the viewer should be able to define the film in their own personal terms. In the following essay, I will firstly examine what the term alternative cinema means, and secondly how Brecht’s theories are evident in many elements of the films that have been pigeon-holed as alternative cinema. The word alternative is described in Collins English Dictionary as: “Denoting a lifestyle, culture, art form, etc., regarded by its adherents as preferable to that of contemporary society because it is less conventional, materialistic, or institutionalised, and, often, more in harmony with nature.”(Makin, 1992) This is an extremely useful definition, as the word ‘alternative’ has been used to describe a form of medicine or therapy, and even forms of energy.
It is from this vantage point that one needs to assess all characteristics of film, including the development of sound. Accordingly, the central query for such an appraisal must be how does this particular property (sound) contribute or detract from the medium’s intended effect? Münsterberg’s early death notwithstanding, one can hypothesize from chapter nine of his work The Photoplay: A Psychological Study as to his probable judgment concerning sound in cinema. The Means of the Photoplay, as Münsterberg coined this portion of his study, refers directly to the modes of perception that give film its unique elegance as an art: the aesthetic and psychological. From these two analyses, Münsterberg declares a formative principle: We recognized there that the photoplay, incomparable in this respect with the drama, gave us a view of dramatic events which was completely shaped by the inner movements of the mind…
Aesthetic, social and technological. From this we shall derive a conclusion as to its relevant interests to the film historian. When we refer to aesthetic film history, we are considering films as an art form. The immediate problem with film history as a study of art is that what constitutes art is subjective in itself. It is very easy to dismiss Titanic as being a ‘formulaic’ Hollywood blockbuster made with the sole intent of making capital, a special effects laden epic combined with a love story.
Recognition describes the spectator’s construction of character, the perception of a set of textual elements, in film typically cohering around the image of a body, as an individuated and continuous human agent. This just is how it sounds. It is the recognition of characters in a film and how they play the part with the textual evidence. Recognition receives little attention when regarding to the levels of engagement because it is rather obvious and almost automatic when watching a film. Second Smith describes alignment.
As Patricia Pisters (2003) asserts in her study of Deleuze and film theory The Matrix of Visual Culture, the Wachowski brothers’ film can be read from number of different theoretical perspectives. It invites readings via Lacanian psychoanalysis, Platonic notions of the cave and the disparity between the two strata of perception and also as a “New Age” (Pisters, 2003: 11) quasi-religious evocation of the second coming. However, here I would like to place the film’s visual sense and diegesis into a context of postmodern philosophy; drawing inferences and theoretical connections between the film and the work of Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin and the neo-Marxists of the Frankfurt School, most notably Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1979). The importance of postmodern philosophy and cyber culture to the visual sense of The Matrix is declared from its very opening titles. Random strings of green neon data are scrolled against a black background imbuing the viewer with a sense of the virtual and the cybernetic and this is concretised and given definite focus later on as Neo (Keanu Reeves) hides the two thousand dollars given to him by Anthony in a copy of Simulacra and Simulation by Baudrillard.
Observational documentaries are what Erik Barnouw calls “direct cinema”. This specific mode emphasis the non-intervention of filmmakers, highlighting the lack of control the filmmakers have over events and people participating in various scenes. According to Nichols, the observational mode is in its purest form, with “voice over commentary, music, intertitles, re-enactments and interviews are completely eschewed”. This paper will question Nichol’s and various other scholar’s works, in order to highlight the contradictory notions