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Apparatus Theory
Apparatus theory, derived in part from Marxist film theory, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, was a dominant theory within cinema studies during the 1970s, following the 1960s when psychoanalytical theories for film were popular. Overview Apparatus theory maintains that cinema is by nature ideological because its mechanics of representation are ideological, and because the films are created to represent reality. Its mechanics of representation include the camera and editing. The central position of the spectator within the perspective of the composition is also ideological. In the simplest instance the cinematic apparatus purports to set before the eye and ear realistic images and sounds. However, the technology disguises how that reality is put together frame by frame. The meaning of a film, plus the way the viewing subject is constructed and the mechanics of the actual process and production of making the film affect the representation of the subject. Apparatus theory also states ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marxist Film Theory
Marxist film theory is an approach to film theory centered on concepts that make possible a political understanding of the medium.Mike Wayne (ed.), ''Understanding Film: Marxist Perspectives'', Pluto Press, 2005, p. 24. Overview Sergei Eisenstein and many other Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s expressed ideas of Marxism through film. In fact, the Hegelian dialectic was considered best displayed in film editing through the Kuleshov Experiment and the development of montage. While this structuralist approach to Marxism and filmmaking was used, the more vociferous complaint that the Russian filmmakers had was with the narrative structure of the cinema of the United States. Eisenstein's solution was to shun narrative structure by eliminating the individual protagonist and tell stories where the action is moved by the group and the story is told through a clash of one image against the next (whether in composition, motion, or idea) so that the audience is never lulled into belie ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Laura Mulvey
Laura Mulvey (born 15 August 1941) is a British feminist film theorist. She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She previously taught at Bulmershe College, the London College of Printing, the University of East Anglia, and the British Film Institute. During the 2008–09 academic year, Mulvey was the Mary Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College. Mulvey has been awarded three honorary degrees: in 2006 a Doctor of Letters from the University of East Anglia; in 2009 a Doctor of Law from Concordia University; and in 2012 a Bloomsday Doctor of Literature from University College Dublin. Film theory Mulvey is best known for her essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal ''Screen''. It later appeared in a collection of her essays entitled ''Visual and Other Pl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Giorgio Agamben
Giorgio Agamben ( , ; born 22 April 1942) is an Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, form-of-life (borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein) and '' homo sacer''. The concept of biopolitics (carried forth from the work of Michel Foucault) informs many of his writings. Biography Agamben was educated at the University of Rome, where in 1965 he wrote an unpublished laurea thesis on the political thought of Simone Weil. Agamben participated in Martin Heidegger's Le Thor seminars (on Heraclitus and Hegel) in 1966 and 1968. In the 1970s, he worked primarily on linguistics, philology, poetics, and topics in medieval culture. During this period, Agamben began to elaborate his primary concerns, although their political bearings were not yet made explicit. In 1974–1975 he was a fellow at the Warburg Institute, University of London, due to the courtesy of Frances Yates, whom he met through Italo Calvino. During this fellowship, Agam ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christian Metz (critic)
Christian Metz (; December 12, 1931 – September 7, 1993) was a French film theorist, best known for pioneering film semiotics, the application of theories of signification to the cinema. During the 1970s, his work had a major impact on film theory in France, Britain, Latin America, and the United States. As Constance Penley flatly stated in ''Camera Obscura'', "Modern film theory begins with Metz." Biography Metz was born in Béziers. He lectured at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS). In 1964, he published the article ''Cinema, langue or parole?'' ("cinema, language or speech") in the journal ''Communications'', and the following books over the next 25 years: ''Essays on the Signification of Cinema'' (1968 and 1973), ''Language and Cinema'' (1971), ''Semiotic Essays'' (1977), ''The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema'' (1977). In ''Film Language: A Semiotics of Cinema'', Metz focuses on narrative structure — proposing the "Grand Synt ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jean-Louis Comolli
Jean-Louis Comolli (30 July 1941 – 19 May 2022) was a French writer, editor, and film director. Career Comolli was editor in chief of ''Cahiers du cinéma'' from 1966 to 1978, during which period he wrote the influential essays "Machines of the Visible" (1971) and "Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field" (1971–72), both of which have been translated in English anthologies of film and media studies. This work was important in the discussion on apparatus theory, an attempt to rethink cinema as a site for the production and maintenance of Louis Althusser#Ideological state apparatuses, dominant state ideology in the wake of May 1968. After his tenure at ''Cahiers'', Comolli continued his work as a director and has since published numerous works on film theory, documentary, and jazz. He taught film theory at the Universities of Paris VIII, Barcelona, Strasburg and Genève. In the spring of 2008, Comolli was invited to the Visions du réel documentary film f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser (, ; ; 16 October 1918 – 22 October 1990) was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy. Althusser was a long-time member and sometimes a strong critic of the French Communist Party (''Parti communiste français'', PCF). His arguments and theses were set against the threats that he saw attacking the theoretical foundations of Marxism. These included both the influence of empiricism on Marxist theory, and humanist and reformist socialist orientations which manifested as divisions in the European communist parties, as well as the problem of the cult of personality and of ideology. Althusser is commonly referred to as a structural Marxist, although his relationship to other schools of French structuralism is not a simple affiliation and he was critical of many aspects of structuralism. Althusser's life was marked by periods of intense men ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gregory Ulmer
Gregory Leland Ulmer (born December 23, 1944) is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Florida ( Gainesville) and a professor of Electronic Languages and Cybermedia at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Career From 1972 to 1977 Ulmer worked as an assistant professor in the Humanities Department of the University of Florida and became the Acting Chair of the department in 1979. He received tenure in 1977, and he became the co-director of the Institute for European & Comparative Studies (1987–1990), and the director of the film studies program (1986–1989). Many of Ulmer's theories grow out of his home-spun "puncepts" like textshop, choragraphy, applied grammatology, mystory, heuretics, and post(e)-pedagogy. His explorations into what he refers to as an "anticipatory consciousness" designed to utilize the force of intuition as a way to invent emergent forms of knowledge, are methodologically remixed by Ulmerian disciples all over the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jean-Louis Baudry
Jean-Louis Baudry (March 2, 1930 – October 3, 2015) was a French novelist, ''Tel Quel'' literary editor, and psychoanalytic film theorist. He is best known for "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus" (1970) and "The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema" (1975), two essays which pioneered apparatus theory, a combination of Louis Althusser's concept of the Ideological State Apparatus and Jacques Lacan's theory of the mirror stage to analyse the cinema as an institution. His influential ideas were critiqued and developed by film semiotician Christian Metz and feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey Laura Mulvey (born 15 August 1941) is a British feminist film theorist. She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She previously taught at Bulmershe ... in the mid-1970s. References {{DEFAULTSORT:Baudry, Jean-Louis 1930 bir ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Semiotics
Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes ( semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, usually called a meaning, to the sign's interpreter. The meaning can be intentional such as a word uttered with a specific meaning, or unintentional, such as a symptom being a sign of a particular medical condition. Signs can also communicate feelings (which are usually not considered meanings) and may communicate internally (through thought itself) or through any of the senses: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory (taste). Contemporary semiotics is a branch of science that studies meaning-making and various types of knowledge. The semiotic tradition explores the study of signs and symbols as a significant part of communications. Unlike linguistics, semiotics also studies non-linguistic sign systems. Semiotics includes th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Perspective (visual)
Linear or point-projection perspective (from la, perspicere 'to see through') is one of two types of graphical projection perspective in the graphic arts; the other is parallel projection. Linear perspective is an approximate representation, generally on a flat surface, of an image as it is seen by the eye. Perspective drawing is useful for representing a three-dimensional scene in a two-dimensional medium, like paper. The most characteristic features of linear perspective are that objects appear smaller as their distance from the observer increases, and that they are subject to ''foreshortening'', meaning that an object's dimensions along the line of sight appear shorter than its dimensions across the line of sight. All objects will recede to points in the distance, usually along the horizon line, but also above and below the horizon line depending on the view used. Italian Renaissance painters and architects including Masaccio, Paolo Uccello, Piero della Francesca and Luca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Film Editing
Film editing is both a creative and a technical part of the post-production process of filmmaking. The term is derived from the traditional process of working with film stock, film which increasingly involves the use Digital cinema, of digital technology. The film editor works with raw footage, selecting Shot (filming), shots and combining them into Sequence (filmmaking), sequences which create a finished Film, motion picture. Film editing is described as an art or skill, the only art that is unique to cinema, separating filmmaking from other art forms that preceded it, although there are close parallels to the editing process in other art forms such as poetry and novel writing. Film editing is often referred to as the "invisible art" because when it is well-practiced, the viewer can become so engaged that they are not aware of the editor's work. On its most fundamental level, film editing is the art, technique and practice of assembling shots into a coherent sequence. The job ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
