Chapter 11: Models of Film

Theory
 Basic Models of Film Theory

 Realist
 Auteurist
 Psychoanalytic
 Ideological
 Feminist
 Cognitive
 Realist Theory

 Looks for correspondences between film

images and the realities before the camera
 Restrictions on stylistic manipulation
 Andre Bazin
 Ethical formulation
 Deep-focus cinematography
 The long take
 Jean Renoir, Orson Welles
 Bazin’s approach
 Strength
 Stress on ethical contract between filmmaker and
viewer
 Weakness
 Typifies few films
 Deep focus, long takes, and montage may co-exist
in a given film
 Other Realist Models

 Documentary Realism
 Italian neo-realism
 Perceptual realism
 Basis for realism at perceptual level
 Three-dimensional visual/acoustic information
 Cinema conveys same information as found in
everyday life
 Constrained by cinema’s transformative elements
 Auteurist Theory

 The film director as author and artist

 A recognizable stylistic signature
 Consistencies of theme and visual design
 Alfred Hitchcock
 Strength:
 Helps legitimize the medium as an art
 Weakness:
 Attributional errors
 Filmmaking is collaborative
 Psychoanalytic Models

 Derived from the writings of Freud and

Jacques Lacan
 Cinema activates unconscious, non-rational
pleasures and anxieties
 Voyeurism
 Fetish and taboo imagery
 Strength
 Emphasis on the emotional power of cinema
 Emphasis on its ability to arouse desire and
pleasure
 Weakness
 Based on ambiguous clinical data
 Tendency to over-extend its claims
 Ideological Models

 Ideology – set of beliefs about society and the

world
 Emphasizes how film portrays society and
expresses ideologies
 Levels of ideological expression
 First order
 Rambo: First Blood Part II
 Second order
 Back to the Future
 Ideological point of view:
 Support for established social values
 Critique of established values
 Conglomeration
 Mixed set of appeals and outlooks
 Enhances marketing to large, heterogeneous
audiences
 Strength
 Emphasizes relationship of film and society
 Exposes distorted portraits of social issues
 Weakness
 Tends to over-extend its claims
 Reduces films to ideological symptoms
 Feminist Models

 Depiction of gender in film

 Connects this to social ideologies and practices
 Images of women (and men) in films made by
men
 Alternative forms of feminist filmmaking
 May blend psychoanalytic and ideological
elements
 Strength
 Emphasis on the ways gender influences the
production of images
 Weakness
 Gender is one of many filters on human
experience
 Cognitive Models

 Viewer perception of visual and auditory

information
 Perceptual processing
 How viewers organize these perceptions and
derive meaning from them
 Interpretive processing
 Schemas (frameworks of interpretation)
 Bases for a viewer’s understanding of cinema
 Perceptual correspondences
 Social correspondences
 Strengths
 The theory is research-based, supported by empirical
data
 By accounting for the intelligibility of cinema, the
theory also accounts, in part, for the medium’s
popularity
 Weakness
 Relative lack of attention to emotion
 Lack of attention to cinema’s transformative functions