The Latest Laocoön: Medium Specificity and the History of Film Theory

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Price
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
History Of

scholarly journals Interstices and impurities in the cinema

2013 ◽  
pp. 6-24
Author(s):  
Angela Dalle Vacche
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
Perpetual Motion ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Aspect

Through a close analysis of Alain Resnais’s Mon Oncle d’Amerique (1980), Angela Dalle Vacche argues that the French filmmaker interrogates the “humanity” of humans through art, science, and religion in the light of Andre Bazin’s film theory. On the scientific side, Resnais’s film clarifies Bazin’s modified Darwinian scheme about the history of the cinema. As far as the religious aspect is concerned, for Bazin and Resnais, the cinema is an illusionistic perpetual motion machine that aligns projection with a pseudo-resurrection of those who were in front of the camera. Finally, in contrast to all the arts and media that precede and follow the cinema, the references to interwoven textiles in Mon Oncle d’Amerique validate Bazin’s claim that cinema is not characterised by medium specificity.

Antarctica and Siegfried Kracauer’s Extraterrestrial Film Theory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Fay
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Human History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Purpose

`Siegfried Kracauer’s film and photographic theory along with cinematic records of early Antarctic exploration explain how this utterly inhospitable continent (Antarctica) and this media theory advance an alternative and denaturalized history of the present. Cinema has the capacity to reveal an earth outside of human feeling and utility without sacrificing the particularity that gets lost in scientific abstraction. And Antarctica, for so long outside of human history altogether, simply numbs feeling and refuses to yield to human purpose. It is also a continent on which celluloid encounters its signifying limits. Kracauer, this chapter argues, helps us to imagine an estranged and selfless relationship to an inhospitable or even posthospitable earth that may not accommodate us.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Jordan Schonig
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Gestalt Psychology ◽  
Film Criticism ◽  
Philosophical Intuition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Generic Structures ◽  
Temporal Flow ◽  
Film Form

The Introduction examines why “movement” is often invoked as a term in film criticism and film theory but is rarely analyzed as an aspect of film form. The reason for this is twofold. First, because film theory has largely examined movement only as a defining property of the cinematic medium, movement is rarely singled out in film criticism. Second, because film theory has inherited the philosophical intuition that form is primarily spatial rather than temporal, formal analysis in film studies tends to break up the temporal flow of film into static units, such as in shot breakdowns and frame analyses. In film studies, then, “form” and “movement” are conceptually incompatible. As a means of thinking motion and form together, the Introduction proposes the concept of “motion forms,” generic structures, patterns, or shapes of motion. The Introduction then explores the philosophical roots of the motion form in phenomenology and Gestalt psychology, and explains how such a way of thinking about cinematic motion differs from other phenomenological approaches in film studies. Finally, the introduction outlines the six chapters of the book, each of which investigates a particular motion form that emerges throughout the history of cinema.

Coda

2020 ◽  
pp. 215-222
Author(s):  
Landon Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
First Century ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Recording Industry ◽  
Unique Form ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Political Expression ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
History Of

This chapter concludes the volume with a concise coda that problematizes the genre and medium specificity of categories such as “rock” and “cinema,” and interrogates their relevance to understanding popular music stardom onscreen in the twenty-first century. By exploring several recent visual albums, this coda demonstrates how the history of rock stardom onscreen paved the way for the unification of the feature film and the music video on display in this unique form. Yet, at the same time, visual albums present musicians with renewed opportunity for overt political expression and aesthetic experimentation not seen since late 1960s rock movies. Visual albums are ultimately the latest intersection between the recording industry and moving image media—an intersection that, as this book demonstrates, has a rich and enduring history.

André Bazin's Film Theory

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Dalle Vacche
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethical Awareness ◽  
Classical Geometry ◽  
Static Object ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Difference

The best way to understand Bazin’s film theory is to pay attention to art, science, and religion, since spectatorship depends on perception, cognition, and hallucination. By arguing that this dissident Catholic’s worldview is anti-anthropocentric, Angela Dalle Vacche concludes that cinema recapitulates the history of evolution and technology inside our consciousness, so that we may better understand how we overlap with, but also differ from, animals, plants, objects, and machines. Whereas in “Art,” the author explains the difference between painting as a static object and the moving image as an event unfolding in time, in “Science,” she discusses Bazin’s dislike of classical geometry and Platonic algebra, his fascination with biology and modern calculus to underline his holistic Darwinism, and his anti-Euclidean mathematics of motion and contingency. Comparable to a religious practice, Bazin’s cinema is the only collective ritual of the twentieth century capable of fostering an emotional community by calling on critical self-interrogation and ethical awareness. Especially keen on Italian neorealism, Bazin argues that this sensibility thrives on beings and things displacing themselves in such a way as to turn the Other into a Neighbor. Bazin’s film theory acknowledges the equalizing impact of the camera lens, which is analogous to, but also different from, the human eye. In the cinema, two different kinds of eyes coexist: one is mechanical and objective, the other is human and subjective. By refusing to reshape the world according to an a priori thesis, Bazin’s idea of an anti-anthropocentric cinema seeks surprise, dialogue, risk, and experiment.

scholarly journals Apes on TV: Medium specificity and considerations of continuity in early transmedia storytelling

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Benson
Keyword(s):  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Television Series ◽  
High Expectations ◽  
Early Attempt ◽  
Broadcast Television ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
Transmedia Storytelling ◽  
History Of ◽  
Film Series ◽  
Tv Show

In 1974, CBS premiered a television series based on the popular Planet of the Apes films. Despite high expectations from the network, the series was a critical and ratings flop and CBS quickly canceled it in the middle of its first season. This article considers the short-lived Planet of the Apes (1974) series as an early attempt at transmedia storytelling and asks what its failure might reveal about certain pre-conglomeration, pre-franchising industrial logics, particularly as they relate to properties that transition from film to television. The Apes television series offers an opportunity to understand certain logics of transmedia textual management before they become entrenched in discourses of media franchising. Through a combination of industrial and textual analysis, I trace the history of the programme and ultimately argue that the industrial considerations (specifically those of network era broadcast television) heavily informed the intertextual relationships between the film series and the TV show.

scholarly journals Theory, Post-theory, Neo-theories: Changes in Discourses, Changes in Objects

2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 33-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Casetti
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Film History ◽  
Social Recognition ◽  
Open Approach ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Cinema Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
Modern Era

Abstract Over the past ten years, film theory has been openly challenged by the tenets of film history, cultural studies, aesthetics and philosophy. The decline of so called “Grand Theory” has made possible the emergence of a new paradigm. This relative eclipsing of film theory is the sign of a three-fold problem within cinema studies. First, film in its new formats and with its new supports is no longer a unique and consistent object which can be subjected to specific forms of research. Film theory’s weakness is thus a sign that “film,” as an object, is now dispersed. Second, cinema has always been at the crossroads of a great number of different fields. Its history is an amalgam of the history of media, the performing arts, visual perception, modern forms of subjectivity, etc. Film theory’s weakness is symptomatic of the urgent need to rethink a history that was never unique or unified. Third, in our post-modern era any recourse to rationality seems to be a trap, the object of study itself being refractory to any kind of schematization. Film theory’s weakness is indicative of the need to maintain an open approach to the subject. Through these three issues, we are witnessing the emergence of a new theory, both informal and dispersed, which is manifested in a variety of discourses that are content to gloss the phenomenon in order better to understand the cinema and facilitate its social recognition.

Queer Timing

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Potter
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Institutional Processes ◽  
Feminist Film Theory ◽  
Lesbian Sexuality ◽  
History Of ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Film Texts

This book is a counter-history of the emergence of lesbian sexuality in early cinema. Drawing on the critical insights of queer theory and the history of sexuality, it challenges approaches to lesbian representation, initially by reframing the emergence of lesbian figures in cinema in the late 1920s and early 1930s as only the most visible and belated signs of an array of strategies of sexuality. The emergence of lesbian representation and spectatorship in early cinema is not a linear progression and consolidation but rather arises across multiple sites in dispersed forms that are modern and backward-looking, recursive and anachronistic. In this tumultuous period, new but not always coherent sexual knowledges and categories emerge, even as older modalities of homoeroticism persist. The book articulates some of the discursive and institutional processes by which women’s same-sex desires and identities have been reorganized as impossible, marginal or—perhaps not so surprisingly—central to new forms of cinematic representation and spectatorship. Complicating the critical consensus of feminist film theory and history, the book foregrounds the centrality of women’s same-sex desire to historically distinct cinematic discourses of both homo- and heterosexuality. It articulates across its chapters the emergence of lesbian sexuality—and that of its intimate “other,” heterosexuality—as the effect of diverse discursive operations of early cinema, considered as a complex assemblage of film texts, exhibition practices, modes of female spectatorship, and reception.

Realism about Film and Realism in Films

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 43-62
Author(s):  
Frank Boardman ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
Ontological Realism ◽  
Art Form ◽  
History Of ◽  
Andre Bazin

Realism has a significant place in the history of film theory. The claim that film is essentially a realistic art form has been employed to justify the art-status of films as well as the distinctness of film as a form. André Bazin and others once used realist ontologies of film to try to establish realist teleologies and universal critical standards. I briefly sketch this history before considering the prospects for various versions of realism: Bazin’s, as well as Kendall Walton’s and Gregory Currie’s less ambitious but more plausible accounts. I argue that these theories, though they are the best cases we have for realism, are not adequate ontologies of film. However, while prior realist philosophers and critics were wrong to think that realism can provide a critical standard for all films, realism is nonetheless a praiseworthy filmic achievement - one that the opponent of ontological realism should not dismiss.

scholarly journals Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Rascaroli
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
Collective Unconscious ◽  
Wizard Of Oz ◽  
Critical History ◽  
History Of

LIKE A DREAM. A CRITICAL HISTORY OF THE ONEIRIC METAPHOR IN FILM THEORY I know it's a cliché to say that films are like dreams -- like a collective unconscious,' Terry began, 'but I was thinking that nobody's ever really followed the idea through. There are different sorts of dreams, aren't there? And so obviously there are horror movies, which are like nightmares, and then there are dirty movies like Deep Throat and Emmanuelle, which are like wet dreams... Then there are remakes, and stories which keep getting told again and again, and those are like recurring dreams. And there are consoling, visionary dreams, like Lost Horizon or The Wizard of Oz. But when a film gets lost, and it's never been shown, and the print goes missing and nobody's ever seen it, that's the most beautiful kind of dream of all. Because that's the kind of dream that...

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