Film Theory:

In some respects, French philosopher Henri Bergson's Matire et Mmoire anticipated

the development of film theory at a time (1896) that the cinema was just being born as a
new medium. In 1896 he published his second large work, entitled Matter and Memory.
This rather difficult, but brilliant, work investigates the function of the brain, undertakes
an analysis of perception and memory, leading up to a careful consideration of the
problems of the relation of body and mind. Bergson had spent years of research in
preparation for each of his three large works. This is especially obvious in Matter and
Memory, where he showed a thorough acquaintance with the extensive pathological
investigations which had been carried out during the period.]
He commented on the need for new ways of thinking about movement, and coined the
terms "image-temps" (images-as-time) and "image-mouvement" (images-as-movement).
However, in his 1906 essay L'illusion cinmatographique (in L'volution cratrice), he
rejects film as an exemplification of what he had in mind. Nonetheless, decades later, in
Cinma I & II (1983-1985), the philosopher Gilles Deleuze takes Matire et Mmoire as
the basis of his philosophy of film and revisits Bergson's conceptscombining them with
the semiotics of Charles Peirce
The Italian futurist Ricciotto Canudo is considered to be the first true theorist of the
cinema. He published The Birth of the Seventh Art in 1911 Another early attempt was The
Photoplay (1916) by the psychologist Hugo Mnsterberg
So-called classical film theory (from the 1910s through, approximately, 1970) arose in
the silent era and was mostly concerned with defining the crucial elements of the
medium. It largely evolved from the works of directors like Germaine Dulac, Louis
Delluc, Jean Epstein, Sergei Eisenstein Lev Kuleshov Dziga Vertov Paul Rotha and film
theorists like Rudolf Arnheim, Bla Balzs and Siegfried Kracauer. These individuals
emphasized how film differed from reality, on how it might be considered a valid art
form.
In the years after World War II the French film critic and theorist Andr Bazin reacted
against this approach to the cinemaarguing that film's essence lay in its ability to
mechanically reproduce reality not in its differences from reality. He also co-founded the
highly influential Cahiers du cinma. Cahiers was more concerned with film criticism
than with film theory, but it was the birthplace of the auteur theory
Cahiers' young critics, such as directors-to-be Franois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard,
were some of the first to take popular Hollywood cinema seriously as an art form. Their
fascination with Westerns and gangster films encouraged the development of genre
theory.
In the 1960s and 1970s, film theory took up residence in academe, importing concepts
from established disciplines like psychoanalysis anthropology, literary theory, semiotics

and linguisticsa tendency encouraged by the influential British journal, Screen, among
others.
During the 1990s the digital revolution in image technologies has had an impact on film
theory in various ways. There has been a refocus onto celluloid film's ability to capture an
indexical image of a moment in time by theorists like Mary Ann Doane, Philip Rosen and
Laura Mulvey. There has also been a historical revisiting of early cinema screenings,
practices and spectatorship modes by writers Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen and Yuri
Tsivian.
Structuralist film theory emphasizes how films convey meaning through the use of
codes and conventions not dissimilar to the way languages are used to construct meaning
in communication.
An example of this is understanding how the simple combination of shots can create an
additional idea: the blank expression on a person's face, a piece of an appetising cherrytopped chocolate fudge cake, and then back to the person's face. While nothing in this
sequence literally expresses hungeror desirethe juxtaposition of the images convey
that meaning to the audience.
Unraveling this additional meaning can become quite complex. Lighting, angle, shot
duration, juxtaposition, cultural context, and a wide array of other elements can actively
reinforce or undermine a sequence's meaning.