hi folks so this is just a very brief introduction to the basic ideas that are going to inform the course and its goals what is film theory and what's classical versus contemporary film theory those two terms that i use to split the course into two distinct halves so first let's just talk about the idea of what film theory is i think a useful way to talk about what film theory is is to present it as distinct from these two other vocations of film studies one of them being film criticism or analysis the other being film history now immediately i want to say that it's not quite that difficult to distinguish film theory on the one hand from film history on the other one way to distinguish film history from film theory is to say that film history involves the cataloging of events in the past as shaping that thing that we call film it's concerned with how things change over time and those things can be the medium of film say the material substrate that makes up film or it can be things like the historical events that largely shape history in general also will inform film history in particular that's quite a bit different from theory which we'll see in a little bit what's the difference between theory and analysis i think that's a harder thing to say um for those of you who have taken cinema 121 one of the main goals of that class was to do film criticism or analysis often to the exclusion of doing film theory so what is film theory if it's not film analysis uh which is the say criticism or analysis of individual films and it's not film history which is understanding the thing that we call film as being informed or influenced by the changes that happen in the historical world over time well one way we can think about what film theory does or what it involves has to do with this idea of the general or generality i'm taking three quotes from three different film scholars who are trying to tackle this question of what film theory is the first is dudley andrew who says film theorists make and verify propositions about film or some aspect of film the second is david bordwell an author of a very very popular film studies textbook a co-author of a film studies test textbook called film art who writes theories are general hypotheses about how best to explain a definite phenomenon in robert stam wright's film theory refers to any generalized reflection on the patterns and regularities to be found in relation to film as a medium to film language to the cinematic apparatus or to the nature of the cinematic text or to cinematic reception what do these things have in common well in each case they hit on the idea that film theory involves some kind of claims or you might use the philosophical jargony term propositions about this thing that we call film and when you say that you're involving claims or propositions about film what you mean are general claims or generalized reflections about film as a medium notice the consistent use of generality now usually we think of the general or generalizing as something not to do in the humanities but in many ways that thing that we call theory whether it's film theory or gender and sexuality theory or post-colonial theory it does involve some kind of generalizing vocation applied to particular phenomena in the world and this in this case with film theory the phenomenon is a artistic medium that we agreed to call film so if film theory involves general ways of thinking about the medium of film um how why is it that film theory looks so wildly different across the 20th century well one thing i want to say is that there's a canonical and influential way of splitting up film theory into two sometimes three different historical units for this class we're going to break it up into two units the first is classical film theory which is roughly looking at the years 1915 to 1960 that that's always going to be a loose estimation the second is contemporary film theory which generally looks at theory that from the 1960s on now these two terms seem to be defined purely historically but often it is observed that the historical determination of classical versus contemporary film theory is not the only way to distinguish them there are different kinds of concerns that come up with those historical periods so in the early era of film theory the classical film theory era these are the kinds of questions that concern film theorists the first is something like what is cinema and what does it do what makes cinema distinct from the other arts what makes cinema a legitimate art form now you can see those very questions reflected in the books that would come out that were collections of classical film theory the ambition to call simply the book or the essay on the thing the photo play or a big question like what is cinema or rudolph arnheim's film as art you'll notice the ambitious and broad claims to understanding what this medium is and what it does right that is a consistent kind of interest of classical film theory you'll also get questions that seem to make sense with a new medium right what makes cinema distinct from the other heart from the other arts well that's not so much a question that the contemporary film theorists are looking at partly because cinema in the first half of the 20th century is a newer medium right in fact there is an early stage of film in which its very uniqueness as a medium is posed as a question is film a unique medium is it even a medium that has the capacity to create art given that it seems bound to the reality of the world in other words it's easy to make a beautiful image with the photographic and cinematographic arts all you have to do is point it at a beautiful thing and then hit record or push a button so these questions are very much bound up in classical film theory now what about contemporary film theory things get a bit different around 1960. you start to get questions like how does cinema produce meaning and indeed yes that question was hit on by certain classical film theorists but you get a more ambitious more systematic investigation of this question especially as theories of meaning in general are propagating in the world in the 1960s people are turning to linguistics and psychoanalysis as ways to understand meaning in general and they get applied to filmic or cinematic meaning in the 1960s second how does cinema perpetuate the dominant ideology notice how different a question this is from these questions because this has an inherent value judgment based in it right it's observed by often left-wing intellectuals that film as a medium is particularly good at hooking the masses and at perpetuating rather conservative or normative forms of stories right so the question is how is cinema as a medium uniquely suited to perpetuating these kinds of normative stories and perhaps maintaining a kind of social or political status quo that's a huge question and a persistent question of contemporary film theory one that still very much informs how film theory is done today third how does cinema address different kinds of identities this is kind of a political or a social question that stemmed from the question of cinema perpetuating dominant ideology what i mean by identities is largely how we think of identity in the humanities today identities like class race and gender and also sexuality right um how is cinema posed to address particular kinds of normative identities and what happens when we invent new forms of cinematic storytelling that don't seem posed to those normative kinds of identities and the normative identity in this question would be something like heterosexual straight white male able-bodied spectators right um so richard russian i think does a nice job clarifying the distinction and some of the reasons for the distinction between classical and contemporary film theory he writes the film theory that emerged in the 1960s signaled a transition in the fields projects and concerns no longer was the theorist embarked on a campaign to legitimate the media right the auteur theory had helped lend credibility to the cinema while the medium itself had yielded several accepted masterworks notice what he's saying here right there are so the idea that film was an art was no longer something that people would challenge new forms of questions emerged cinema's acceptance as an art form equal to that of the traditional arts the traditional arts here being literature and painting that kind of thing and music had been more or less consolidated now sarah's shifted their sites to analyzing cinema as a system of social and symbolic meaning what i think is important in this passage are a couple things first once again russian is pointing out the fact that given that cinema had changed throughout the 20th century second by the especially by the second half of the 20th century no longer was it considered a kind of unique and important question to question the legitimacy of the medium and second this idea that we analyze cinema as a system of social and symbolic meaning that idea of system um the adjective systemic um is incredibly important to understanding what contemporary film theory changed to classical film theory and that will become really apparent as we shift to the second half of the course um so we can look at these three questions and notice a kind of pattern among them that classical film theory might be understood as dealing with the what of cinema what kind of thing is it um what is it as distinct from the other things we might oppose it against right the other arts like painting um like literature or like music um what is it that makes cinema legitimate art form um contemporary film theory you might think of as dealing with the how of cinema's influence how is cinema so influential how does it perpetuate the dominant ideology how does it address different kinds of identities how does it work on us how does it produce meaning for us a second kind of distinction that you might draw from classical film theory and contemporary film theory is that classical film theory is very much bound up with a love and enthusiasm for for movies for cinema right what motivates this writing is often an excitement for the medium and its possibilities um and the idea that certain kinds of say gatekeepers of artistic value are saying that cinema is not a valid art form is just fuel for the fire of classical film theorists who are so enthusiastic about this new medium and its capabilities that it spurs them to write pages and pages of theoretical claims about what the uniqueness of this medium is on the other hand right we have contemporary film theory which for the most part is not really motivated by a love of cinema it's motivated by a suspicion of cinema right um so of course i have to kind of qualify that and say there's a suspicion of dominant hollywood cinema and a enthusiasm for the kind of cinema that might be posed against the dominant right so that's incredibly important that cinema starts to get bracketed into different forms okay so i think that is a pretty good distinction or a helpful distinction between the two different sectors of the class classical film theory versus contemporary film theory um but now i want to provide a brief uh kind of introduction to um the film theory that we're gonna be looking at in the first half of the class classical film theory and i want to do that as a way um or one way i want to do that is to think about how classical film theory the idea of theorizing what this new medium is is something that's happening even before the formal texts of uh film theory that we're reading say the munsterburg of uh of week two um or the uh or the arnhem of week four i wanna think that classical film theory happens before uh what we think of as classical film theory what do i mean by that think about the ways in which um at the very beginning of uh this new medium just the very names for the companies or the devices of early cinema reveal an attitude a theoretical attitude about what uh is the uniqueness of that medium right so if one of the vocations of classical film theory is to ask the question what is cinema and what does it do look at the names for say companies vitagraph and biograph biograph of course being dw griffith's film company certain devices thomas edison had the vitascope his first projection device edison's kinetoscope seen here also preceded the vitoscope the term that the lumiere brothers used was the cinematograph which we still have in english today the same word without the e on the end and of course today's term cinema is itself a word that means something according to its etymology so if you look at the etymological uh derivations of these terms they all actually articulate some kind of theoretical proposition about what is unique about the movies so you could in fact kind of do a bit of theory to say what does it mean that we that certain names insist on the importance of writing movement or what does it mean that life is invoked all the time that one takes a little bit more thought to imagine what is it about the moving image that suggests the presence of life all right so we can think of these things as theoretical with respect to the specificity of the medium they're doing classical film theory um just by kind of intuiting useful names for um for this thing another version of kind of uh classical film theory happening um as an encounter with the novelty of the medium of cinema can be found in this little um two-page report maxum gorky's the lumiere cinematograph sometimes called the kingdom of shadows maxim gorky was a russian poet um and he wrote a brief kind of report or a review of the lumiere brothers exhibition of their films in 18 early 1896 of course the year attached to the first projection of the lumiere films as december of 1895 but if you look at the writing the way in which he articulates his encounter is very much articulating a hypothesis to these questions what is cinema what does it do what makes cinema distinct from the other arts so i just wanted to remind us of the kind of uh experience that maxim gorky um in 1896 had uh when he viewed a rival of a train at la ciota so um let's just consider it right that that experience of a of a lumiere short and then look at a paragraph from maxim work as a lumiere cinema cinematograph and imagine what theoretical propositions about the medium is he articulating simply by virtue of his fairly poetic description of the medium he starts by saying last night i was in the kingdom of shadows if you only knew how strange it is to be there it is a world without sound without color everything there the earth the trees the people the water and the air is dipped in monotonous gray gray rays of the sun across the gray sky gray eyes and gray faces and the leaves of the trees are ash and gray it is not life but its shadow it is not in motion but it's soundless spectre now of course what we would call this paragraph is not say formal film theory it is a kind of poetically inflected description of an encounter with the new medium but in its richness of its description it's already articulating theoretical propositions about the medium here's one thing that i think is interesting to note about what he's doing he says it's a world without sound without color everything there is dipped in monotonous gray now what might be interesting about this description well what's fascinating i think about it um is that the grayness or the black and whiteness of the cinematographic image is not itself that new after all gorky was very much familiar with the life-like uh black and white or gray-scale image of photography and yet what strikes gorky about the image is the idea that he's looking at a gray world so what might be say about this so what's interesting is that instead of saying last night i looked at a photograph come to life he doesn't actually think of the moving image as a thing he already knows that is a photograph with an added property of movement or life instead the first thing he says is i saw a world that is something akin to his perception of natural reality in front of him that is without something that is without sound without color so what gorky is kind of articulating is that there's two ways of say understanding or experiencing the novelty of the cinematographic image in one sense you can think of it as an image you already know with something added movement or the lifelike or or realism of the moving image is so powerful that he takes a different route he says it's almost like looking at a world the way i look at the world in front of me with things sapped from it right with no sound without color those two ways of experiencing the novelty of the moving image will tell you something about what it is uniquely as an image the image is so real for gorky that it's closer to a world than it is to a photograph and we can actually look at other aspects of his writing as articulating medium-specific conditions of of cinema right at one point he says all this moves teems with life and upon approaching the edge of the screen vanishes somewhere beyond it so what gorky is actually articulating is there's something so real about the moving image so say perceptually verism varus and millitudinous we might be very precise in our language that he notices it's strange when human figures or maybe vehicles approach the edge of the screen and disappear which is not exactly how we experience moving objects and and uh people reach the edge of our perception there isn't a hard uh kind of linear boundary that distinguishes what we can see from what we can't there's more of a kind of a gradient of clarity right things slowly disappear from our perception as opposed to reaching a hard edge and suddenly disappear right gorky is trying to articulate um what makes the cinematic image almost like a real world in front of him or you can think about the way gorky articulates his experience of the the train film right he says everything vanishes and a train appears on the screen it speeds straight at you watch out it seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit but this too is but a train of shadows now i think this is really important to read in light of the famous myth which is that spectators were so naive about the status of the image as being an image that they mistook the train momentarily for a real train and then they uh say got up and fainted or they ducked or they screamed in horror because the position of the camera was such that it was almost as if it was coming straight at them either that it was going to leap through the screen or that the screen wasn't actually there and was kind of a window into a world in which a dangerous object was about to penetrate their own space of the cafe what's interesting um is that gorky articulates this naive viewer's perspective but he also says something to mitigate that he says it seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit this too is but a train of shadows so what we're getting is not naivete but a desire to articulate a paradox right that uh that the image is both so lifelike that it is as if it is real and yet the knowledge that it is a mere image is always informing the experience of the image some scholars will call this a kind of uncanniness right the idea that i know something is dead and yet it feels alive right that is one way we might articulate the unwitting film theory or classical film theory of maxim gorky um and and one final little bit from corki's uh article is he says when he says i saw lumira cinematograph moving photography the extraordinary impression it creates is so unique and complex that i doubt my ability to describe it with all its nuances here i want to say that gorky is also articulating something uh theoretical or a kind of theoretical proposition about the uniqueness of the image because what if we imagine that we've never seen cinematographic image before if our goal is to describe an image like this one say the baby's breakfast by lumiere the lumiere brothers think about just how much is occurring right how many levels of description there are first if we imagine description as a kind of netflix synopsis we might say this is a fairly simple film of two parents and their baby and they're feeding their baby uh kind of a lunch of a cracker right but then we'll notice that if we want to get more detailed we start to notice all of the objects that are on the table we notice the way in which uh the mother figure reaches for the t we'll notice the way in which the father figure was played by one of the lumiere brothers himself gives the biscuit to the child we might notice striking moments like at this particular moment the baby almost reaches uh out to what might be the camera person gesturing beyond the world of the film and revealing the artifice of its construction this too could be subject to description of the content of the film and famously um there's one kind of final detail that might be subject to description of this film that is historically significant that is spectators were famously fixated not on the little drama that's put right before the camera but they were fixated on what's in the background the movement of the leaves in the trees right the idea being that one aspect of the novelty of the moving image is that it captures things that couldn't possibly be planned by an artistic intention right that no matter how much of a fiction you stage before the camera one unique aspect of a cinematographic image is that you'll always get little contingencies things you don't plan the fact that at every moment the leaves and the trees move in this particular way that too could be subject to a description a nuance that is bound up within this text that we call baby's breakfast a one minute film by the lumia brothers right so um in doing this little exercise i merely want to show you the kinds of claims that can emerge from an encounter with a moving image that we might call it might resonate with the kind of claims that you'll see within the first six and seven weeks of this course right what makes a moving image distinct from the other media um that we compare it with painting or the novel or theater what is the nature of the realism of the cinematographic image these kinds of questions are bound up with the novelty of the moving image in something like maxim gorky's encounter