Whenever the area of our research comes up, and we respond truthfully about what it is we do, we are immediately asked, “But, why pornography?” This question is incredibly hard to answer; in fact, this whole book is simply that,… Read More ›
Film Theory
Sarah Kofman and Film Theory
A LADY VANISHES Towards the end of Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (1994), the terse and elegant autobiographical fiction she wrote just before terminating her life, Sarah Kofman (1934-94) inserts a brief episode relating her admiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady… Read More ›
Post-war Spanish Realist Cinema
Whilst fascist dictatorship in Italy came to an abrupt end near the close of the Second World War, a fascist regime continued to rule in Spain up till the death of General Franco, in 1975. After that, a gradual process… Read More ›
Post-war Italian Realist Cinema
Between 1922 and 1943 Italy was ruled by a fascist dictatorship which used mainstream cinema as a means of disseminating officially sanctioned conceptions of national identity. A national regulatory body, the Direzione Generale della Cinematografica, was established in 1934 in… Read More ›
Slavoj Žižek and Film Theory
We need the excuse of a fiction to stage what we really are. (Slavoj Zizek, in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema [dir. Sophie Fiennes, 2005]) Would you allow this guy to take your daughter to a movie? Of course not…. Read More ›
Fredric Jameson and Film Theory
Fredric Jameson is among the most prominent theorists of postmodernism and one of the foremost Marxist critics of his generation. In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), film occupies a central place in his account of the… Read More ›
Jean Baudrillard and Film Theory
Unlike a number of his contemporaries, Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) does not provide a single, systematic theory of cinema. Instead, his comments are scattered across a range of works, taking the variant forms of brief asides, longer analyses and remarks made… Read More ›
Trinh T. Minh-ha and Film Criticism
Born Vietnam in 1953, Trinh T. Minh-ha came to the United States, studied music and comparative literature at the University of Illinois, and she studied ethnomusicology in France. Her later experience as a researcher in Senegal led directly to her… Read More ›
Literary Criticism of James Agee
James Agee’s earliest published book, Permit Me Voyage (1934), was a collection of poems, his second a nonfiction account of Alabama sharecroppers during the Great Depression. He and photographer Walker Evans lived with their subjects for eight weeks in 1936… Read More ›
Christian Metz and Film Theory
Born in 1931 in Beziers in the south of France, Christian Metz died tragically at the end of 1993. Metz opened the way in the 1960s to the establishment of film theory as a new intellectual discipline. Indeed, articles (written… Read More ›
Cinema in the Age of New Media
A look at media at the beginning of the twenty-first century makes one thing certain: nothing is certain in terms of media boundaries and specificities. The cinema, for example, is a composite of elaborate sound and visual systems, enhanced by… Read More ›
Psychoanalysis and the Cinema
Cinema and psychoanalysis were born around the same time. In 1895 the Grand Café of Paris hosted the first movie event of history, while at the same time Studies in Hysteria by Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud hit the shelves… Read More ›
Third (World) Cinema and Film Theory
Third Cinema, as Stephen Crofts points out, is one of the most “elastic” concepts in the cinematic lexicon (Crofts 31). It is distinct from First Cinema, represented primarily by Hollywood, and Second Cinema, embodied by the European art cinema and… Read More ›
The Sociology and Aesthetics of Film Adaptation
THE SOURCES OF FILMS Frequently the most narrow and provincial area of film theory, discourse about adaptation is potentially as far-reaching as you like. Its distinctive feature, the matching of the cinematic sign system to prior achievement in some other… Read More ›
Modernism, Postmodernism and Film Criticism
Postmodern cinema ironically has a history now. In 1984, Fredric Jameson observed that contemporary culture seemed to be expressing a new form of ‘depthlessness‘ – a concentration on style and ‘surface’. For Jameson these features represented a retreat from the… Read More ›
Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy, Photography and Film
Emmanuel Levinas is among the least obvious of twentieth-century philosophers to feature in a volume devoted to philosophy of film. From a philosophical grounding in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger that remained an important influence throughout his career,… Read More ›
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenological Approach to Films
Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote only one essay on film, yet his phenomenological approach informs problems of perception central to film. Taken up by some theorists as a welcome counterbalance to Marxist and psychoanalytic theories that tend to consider the film as… Read More ›
Homi K Bhabha’s Theoretical Contributions to Film Studies
In his epistemological work on colonial and postcolonial discourse, cultural translation, hybridity and ambiguity, Homi Bhabha gives a central place to culture. Bhabha refers regularly to literature and (albeit to a lesser extent) to cinema. Speaking from a profoundly humanities… Read More ›
Lesbian Film Theory and Criticism
Theoretical approaches to the cinematic representation of lesbianism represent a particularly complex and fruitful area of feminist film study, as well as one filled with substantial debate. Issues arise, for instance, concerning the exact definition of a lesbian film as… Read More ›
Laura Mulvey, Male Gaze and the Feminist Film Theory
Laura Mulvey (b. 1941) is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of Visual and Other Pleasures (1989), Fetishism and Curiosity (1996), Citizen Kane (1992) and Death 24x a Second (2006). She… Read More ›
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