Noël Burch (born 1932) is an American

film theorist Film theory is a set of scholarly approaches within the academic discipline of film or cinema studies that began in the 1920s by questioning the formal essential attributes of motion pictures; and that now provides conceptual frameworks for unde ...

and movie maker who moved to

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...

at a young age. Burch is known for his contribution to terms commonly used by film scholars (such as institutional mode of representation (IMR)) and for his theories compiled in books such as ''Theory of Film Practice'' or ''La lucarne de L'Infini''.

Work

Burch's major contribution to the history of film theory is not his definition of classical Hollywood film tropes, which had already been done, but rather his focus on early cinema. There, he identified a set of film styles that he would identify as the primitive mode of representation (PMR). In doing so, he found what he thought was a "purer" cinema, one untainted by what he considered bourgeois ideology. Whether his ideology informed his understanding of film style, or vice versa, his ''Theory of Film Practice'' is one of the key works in the canon of Western film theory. In the foreword to the 1980 edition of ''Theory Of Film Practice'', Burch repudiated some of his earlier theories, expanding on his younger self's limited conception of formalism as applied to the film arts. But, Burch insists the reader "sift out the nuggets that may still lie among the dross". His book ''To The Distant Observer'', while often criticized as a self-serving and selective idealization of Japanese aesthetics in the service of Burch's own anti-structuralist,

Marxist Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...

ideology, was one of the first attempts by a Western film theorist to situate Japanese cinema within the context of traditional Japanese aesthetics. His first movie, ''Noviciat'', is an experimental short from 1960 in black and white. In 2010, Burch received Venice Horizons Award on Venice Film Festival for documentary movi
''The Forgotten Space''
In January 2013, Burch launched fundraising campaign on Kickstarter.com to make the narrative movi
''The Gentle Art Of Tutelage''

Filmography

*
Noviciat
' (Dir: Noël Burch/FR/15min/1960) *''Correction, Please or How we got into pictures'' (Dir: Noël Burch/UK/57min/1979) *''The Year of the Bodyguard'' (Dir: Noël Burch/UK/57min/1981) *''Red Hollywood'' (Dir: Noël Burch and Thom Andersen/USA/120min/1990) *''Sentimental Journey'' (Dir: Noël Burch/Germany/France/70min/1994) *''Cuba: Entre Chien et Louve'' (Dir: Noël Burch and Michèle Larue/France/57min/1997) *''La Fiancée du danger'' (Dir: Noël Burch and Michèle Larue/France/57min/2005) *''The Forgotten Space'' (Dir: Noël Burch and Allan Sekula/Netherlands/Austria/57min/2011)

Sources

* *Burch, Noel ''Theory of Film Practice'' *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Burch, Noel 1932 births Living people Film theorists French film critics French male writers American emigrants to France