Search results
Contemporary film theory has been indelibly marked by the political upheaval in France during 1968. Comprising filmmakers, technicians and critics, it provided an institutional platform for the articulation of two questions that would dominate film theory thereafter, and that would call on very considerable conceptual resources for their answers. The absence of anything analogous to interpellation occasioned a divide within post-structuralist film theory. The broad shift of film theory from structuralism to post-structuralism occasioned fewer differences and discontinuities than might be supposed. Despite the shift in conceptual terminology, the emphasis remained theoretical; and despite the eclipse of Marxism and the rise of the new politics, there was a continued commitment to oppositional politics. Nevertheless, by the mid-l 970s, in the light of the film theory developments associated with structuralism, many women felt a growing dissatisfaction with the assumptions on which much of feminist film theory proceeded. The first, structuralist theoretical moment in feminist film criticism has more recently been superseded, as it became apparent that the promise of overarching theory was unfulfillable. The influence of Althusser, in particular, was short-lived. Althusserian theory had never enjoyed the authority in the women's movement that it had elsewhere. Put schematically, gender and class appeared to be two quite different axes of exploitation and oppression, with the former no less important than the latter. It was in fact in rethinking and re-evaluating the concept of difference, specifically sexual difference, that the post-structuralist disposition was most evident.
This book embraces studies of cinematic realism and nineteenth-century tradition; the realist film theories of Lukács, Grierson, Bazin and Kracauer; and the relationship of realist film theory to the general field of film theory and philosophy. It attempts a rigorous and systematic application of realist film theory to the analysis of particular films, suggesting new ways forward for a new series of studies in cinematic realism, and for a new form of film theory based on realism. The book stresses the importance of the question of realism both in film studies and in contemporary life.
This book explores Georg Lukács' writings on film. The Hungarian Marxist critic Georg Lukács is primarily known as a literary theorist, but he also wrote extensively on the cinema. These writings have remained little known in the English-speaking world because the great majority of them have never actually been translated into English until now. This book contains the most important writings and the translations. This book thus makes a decisive contribution to understandings of Lukács within the field of film studies, and, in doing so, also challenges many existing preconceptions concerning his theoretical position. For example, whilst Lukács' literary theory is well known for its repudiation of naturalism, in his writings on film Lukács appears to advance a theory and practice of film that can best be described as naturalist. Lukácsian film theory and cinema is divided into two parts. In part one, Lukács' writings on film are explored, and placed within relevant historical and intellectual contexts, whilst part two consists of the essays themselves.
The bulk of Georg Lukács' major writings over the 1931–63 period were concerned with questions of literary criticism or political philosophy. This chapter focuses on The Specificity of the Aesthetic (1963), which marks the return of Lukáacs to the questions of abstract philosophy and high aesthetic theory, as well as his reengagement with issues relating to film.
Filmmaker Jennifer Lyon Bell (Blue Artichoke Films) has made empathy the centre of her practice as an alternative porn filmmaker. This blend of artist manifesto and academic essay illuminates the three ways in which empathy is a driving force at every level of her artistic efforts. 1) Structure: Using a foundation of cognitive film theory and specifically the work of Murray Smith, she builds empathy into the structure and content of her films themselves. 2) Production: She prioritises empathy in her production process on the set with cast and crew 3) Society: By creating and spreading empathetic pornography, she aims to introduce more empathy into society at large.
make that leap for anyone else, so too the recognition of the Divine Will in the world was a personal matter. Bazin's film aesthetics derived from this belief. His condemnation of montage, with its fragmentation of the world, was on the grounds that any such reconstruction of reality imposes a directorial interpretation on it, thus manipulating the spectator and thereby rendering the presence of God in the world invisible. 160 FILM THEORY: AN INTRODUCTION Conversely, Bazin's advocacy of a form of cinematic realism that effaced itself before reality was on the
experience. While its subjectivist tendency testified 182 FILM THEORY: AN INTRODUCTION to the disintegration of bourgeois society it did nothing to explain it, breeding only fatalism and despair with its vision oflife as 'opaque, fragmentary, chaotic and uncomprehended'. 1 What was needed, said Lukacs, was a new realism that would do for the twentieth-century proletariat what the novels of Balzac and Stendhal had done for the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, namely, promote a knowledge of society and the understanding that it can be changed by purposive action. Luka
prior union with the mother as anterior to lack, a condition where it was everything and lacked nothing. 68 FILM THEORY: AN INTRODUCTION Throughout its life the child will attempt to recapture this imagined entirety in a search for that which will overcome the lack, the missing component Lacan terms l'objet petit a and whose most obvious prototype is the breast. This stands as a representation, no more than that, of what is ultimately unrepresentable, in that the object that could overcome the lack is non-existent. & compensation for the continual failure to re
evoke the pairing of black-and-white film with cave painting, perhaps giving further credence to Breton’s description of the cinema as a place where rituals take place in a profoundly modern setting. Taken together, the contributions to the special surrealist issue of L’Âge du cinéma indicated that for surrealism, film was as ripe as ever with promises of intoxication, enchantment, and strategies for resisting ‘inhumanism’. But where the early surrealist writings on film have secured their place in film history and the history of film theory, the surrealist movement