Film theory
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Film theory debates the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large.
Film theory is about the cinema as a medium rather than about individual films, although theorists often use individual films as examples in generating their theories and film theory is frequently applied to discussions of individual films. Film theory is generally distinguished from film criticism, which concentrates on evaluating individual films. Film theory can also be distinguished from film analysis, which aims to describe how specific features of a film relate to each other in the structure of a film (or body of films) as a whole. Thus, a film theory might note that a film is unlike reality in that a viewer cannot control what he or she sees; a film analysis might note that a specific shot restricts the viewer's knowledge of a future plot point; and film criticism might praise the cinematographer's use of framing to increase suspense.
See also
- Surrealism and film
- David Bordwell vs Slavoj Žižek
- Oneiric (film theory)
- Feminist film theory
- Psychoanalytical film theory
- Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
