Various Film
Theories
Psychoanalytic Theory
Psychoanalytic film theory is an approach that focuses on unmasking the ways in which the phenomenon of cinema in general, and the
elements of specific films in particular, are both shaped by the unconscious. Whose unconscious? This is where things get a little
tricky. The unconscious studied by psychoanalytic film theory has been attributed to four different agencies: the filmmaker, the
characters of a film, the film's audience, and the discourse of a given film.
1. The Filmmaker's Unconscious. In its earliest stages, psychoanalytic film theory compared films to such manifestations of the
unconscious as dreams, slips of the tongue, and neurotic symptoms. Just as these are considered to be manifestations of a patient's
unconscious, films were considered to be manifestations of a filmmaker's unconscious. This kind of psychoanalytic film theory is
somewhat out of fashion today.
2. The Character's Unconscious. Another application of psychoanalysis to cinema studies--one still occasionally seen today--focuses
on the characters of a given film and analyzes their behavior and dialogue in an attempt to interpret traces of their unconscious. This
approach, when it first appeared, was immediately attacked by skeptical film critics who pointed out that fictional characters, insofar
as they are not real people, have neither a conscious nor an unconscious mind to speak of. However, the psychoanalysis of film
characters quickly found new credibility with the next stage in the development of psychoanalytic film theory--the analysis of the
audience's unconscious as it is prompted and shaped during a film viewing.
3. The Audience's Unconscious. The audience-focused approach will often focus on the way in which the behavior and dialogue of
certain characters can be interpreted as manifestations of our unconscious, insofar as we come to identify ourselves with them when
we visit the cinema. Thus, as we sit quietly in the dark and forge our psychic bonds with this or that character, we unconsciously
project our own fantasies, phobias, and fixations onto these shimmering alter-egos. Whenever they inevitably say or do something that
even tangentially touches upon one of these fantasies, phobias, or fixations, we derive unconscious satisfaction or dissatisfaction
accordingly.
4. The Unconscious of Cinematic Discourse. Finally, the most recent version of psychoanalytic film theory more or less abandons the
character-centered approach altogether, focusing instead on how the form of films replicates or mimics the formal model of the
conscious/unconscious mind posited by psychoanalysis. Thus, for example, the psychoanalytic film theorist might focus on the way in
which the formal procedure of editing will sometimes function similarly to the mechanism of repression by cutting out a crucial,
emotionally charged moment which, though unseen, will continue to resonate throughout the film (as in the markedly absent moment
of actual cannibalism in Mankiewicz's Suddenly Last Summer). Here the unconscious that is unveiled belongs neither to the
filmmaker, nor to a character, nor to an audience of viewers, but rather to the film's own discourse. The unconscious is thus conceived
as an organization of hints and traces of meaning residing within the audio-visual language of the cinema. (Of course this unconscious
can always become appropriated by the film-viewer--apropos the third form of psychoanalytic film theory--to the extent that he or she
internalizes this language during the film-viewing situation).
--Jeffrey A. Netto, PhD.
Feminist Theory
By way of introducing the topic of feminist film theory, I will draw upon the work of Laura Mulvey, whose seminal essay, "Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," set the highest standards of academic rigor for all subsequent work in this field. In this essay, Mulvey
demonstrates that the visual pleasure (i.e., the joy of watching) that audiences derive from classic Hollywood cinema is simply an
extension of the way our culture has joyfully envisioned the relationship of men to women in general. According to Mulvey, our
current habits of watching and the visual pleasure we derive from them are largely the result of a certain stereotypical view which
assigns to Men the active, voyeuristic role of looking, and to Women the passive, exhibitionistic role of being-looked-at. Thus men are
culturally programmed to find enjoyment in the act of looking at women, and women are likewise programmed to take pleasure in the
act of displaying themselves to men. This is definitely NOT to say that all men are Peeping-Toms and that all women are shameless
vamps. Rather what Mulvey is pointing out here is a dominant tendency in our culture, a tendency that is whole-heartedly embraced
by some, resisted by others, and partially adopted by most of us.
Classic Hollywood cinema, Mulvey effectively demonstrates, forcefully incorporates--and so helps to perpetuate--this tendency. It
does so by way of proffering the image on an eye-catchingly beautiful, female star. The beautiful star has been, and still is, a mainstay
of Hollywood cinema. From Marlene Dietrich to Anne Bancroft to Salma Hayek, her role in Hollywood is ever the same: to provide
an erotic spectacle for the audience to visually caress. And yet, as central as she is, the beautiful star has always posed a certain
problem for the films that showcase her. The problem is that the visual pleasure she affords tends to disrupt the flow of the filmnarrative. Suddenly, in the flash of a thigh, the audience loses its concentration, and perhaps even its interest, in the unfolding
storyline. Here visual pleasure upstages and so disrupts narrative coherence, threatening to reduce the film to an instance of mere softcore pornography, a veritable peep-show. Hollywood was quick to realize this risk and immediately found a workable solution, a
solution that has become as much a mainstay of classic cinema as the beautiful star. The solution involved finding some way to
incorporate the audience's visual pleasure INTO the film-narrative. This incorporation was effectively brought about by way of
portraying a male protagonist gazing pleasurably at the erotic spectacle of the beautiful star. Through a variety of techniques (POV
shots, reaction shots, tracking shots following the movements of the male lead, etc.), Hollywood manipulated audiences into
identifying with the male protagonist. Henceforth, the visual pleasure audiences derived from watching the beautiful star could be
ascribed to the male protagonist, who acted as a sort of narrative surrogate or alibi for the audience. Our visual pleasure becomes his
visual pleasure as we come to stare at the beautiful star through his eyes.
Thus Hollywood effectively married visual pleasure to narrative coherence at the very dawn of classic cinema. But in solving this
formal problem, Hollywood unwittingly created a new, political problem, one which would only be grasped in the second half of the
20th Century with the emergence of feminist film theory and the experimental films this theory helped to shape. Namely, in retaining
the element of visual pleasure centered on the spectacle of the beautiful star, and in folding it neatly into the narrative under the alias
of the male protagonist who watches her for us, classic cinema implicitly endorsed the stereotypes of the active, voyeuristic male and
the passive, exhibitionistic female. As cinema rose to become by far the most popular medium of public entertainment, reaching
audiences in the millions, it became the agency chiefly responsible for perpetuating these stereotypes.
--Jeffrey A. Netto, PhD.
Marxist Theory
This approach to film studies focuses on the ways in which cinema sometimes perpetuates, and sometimes betrays, the ideological
mechanisms that rationalize the bourgeois world-view. These ideological mechanisms include both the social institutions and the
industrial technologies that actively function to produce the bourgeois culture that we consume on a daily basis. Some specific
examples of such social and technological mechanisms are: 1) the division of labor for the production of capital; 2) class-structure; 3)
technological modernization of the means of production; and 4) commodity exchange. Each of these mechanisms has informed the
film industry from its very beginning. In the domain of film, they form the powerful culture-producing piece of social machinery that
Marxist film theorists have come to call "the cinematic apparatus."
The FUNCTIONS that the aforementioned social and political mechanisms perform within the cinematic apparatus:
1) The mechanism of the division of labor for the production of capital. It is very easy to see how the relations between studio
executives, directors, actors, extras, etc. always shaped both the production process of the film industry, and the films that have been
produced. Certain studios will choose to produce certain films, while rejecting others. These studios will contract directors with
certain styles, and fire other directors with different styles. These directors, in turn, will cast certain actors . . . and so on. The
justification for this state of things is, of course, the projected profit margin, or bottom line.
What is perhaps less easy to see is the division of labor that takes place at the site of a given film's reception--namely the local cinema.
We are probably accustomed to thinking about the reception of film in terms of straightforward consumption. Actually, there is a great
deal of (post)production going on here as well. Films wind up enlisting the creative and interpretive labor of their audiences, who are
tasked with the challenge of making sense of what they see. Often times, one may hear cafe patrons discussing a film they have just
seen. One viewer will ask another what she thought of the film. She will respond, "I'm not quite sure yet. I need to think about it more,
to work it out." This little scenario illustrates the division of labor between the makers and the viewers of film. The fact that the
viewer's labor is unpaid goes without say. And that it goes without say is no accident, for this unpaid labor of viewing must remain an
unacknowledged surplus of labor-value (roughly two man-hours worth per viewer) that contributes to the overall profits to be
distributed among the officially recognized "producers" of the film. Of course, audiences are said to be "enriched" by their viewing
experience, and thereby compensated for their interpretive labor. But of what exactly does this enrichment consist? This question leads
us to consider the next mechanism of the cinematic apparatus.
2) The mechanism of the class-system. Film--commercially successful film at any rate--tends implicitly to endorse the most
conservative of bourgeois values. Protagonists are routinely constructed as paragons of Endurance, of Loyalty, of Self-sacrifice, of
Individuality, and so forth. These are the very values that serve to protect the status quo. Endurance speaks to our adherence to the
work-ethic, Loyalty to our attachments within an existing system of roles and relationships, Self-sacrifice to our acceptance of our
fate, Individuality to our acquiescence to a state of alienation from each other. These heroes, these paragons of bourgeois virtue, are
usually rewarded in some way for their efforts on behalf of bourgeois ideology. They regularly win: the "girl," their lives, their
independence, and so forth. Thus bourgeois film-audiences are pleased to see their own values validated upon the big screen, and
working-class audiences are encouraged to continue towing the line by films which serve as seductive advertisements for the
bourgeois lifestyle. In this way, audiences of both classes are enriched by commercial film. At the cinema, both classes come together
under the banners of bourgeois value, forgetting the fact that the bourgeoisie only exists by way of extracting labor-value from the toil
of the working-class (to which many in the film audience must return the next morning).
3) The mechanism of technological modernization. As Marx pointed out (Capital, I.15), the driving force behind the development of
industrial technologies has always been the desire to standardize labor practices and relegate laborers to increasingly specialized roles
within the overall labor process. Thus, with the technological revolution (which is merely one aspect of the industrial revolution), the
artists and craftsmen who once labored to produce finished goods soon found themselves reduced to the role of anonymous
"workmen" who labored in teams to produce parts of products. Work became standardized, and the workman easily replaceable by
another workman who could be quickly trained to assume any vacant station on the production-line. So too with the film productionline--each worker is trained to perform a specific task (acting, directing, camera operation, set designing, costuming, etc.). Every new
technological development introduced to the film industry (from the boom-mike, to the sewing-machine, to CGI hard and software)
has functioned according to this impulse towards increasing standardization and specialization within the production process. The
individual worker in the film industry has thus come to assume the role of an expendable (easily replaceable) cog in the cinematic
apparatus.
4) The mechanism of commodity exchange. Under the capitalist system, manufactured goods take the form of commodities. By
definition, a commodity is a product of labor whose value is no longer calculated on the basis of its intrinsic qualities (i.e., the caliber
of workmanship or materials, usefulness, durability, etc.). Rather the value of a commodity-product is solely determined by the
exchange market. Thus the imposition of a market economy arbitrarily determines the relative value of commodity A (a particular
brand of sofa) to commodity B (another brand of sofa). The history of the product's production (the degree of skill put into its
manufacture, the quality of materials used) is generally disregarded in the calculation of a commodity's value (all advertising claims to
the contrary notwithstanding). Thus we say that the form of a commodity alienates (divorces) the product of labor from the particulars
of the production process. (No one knows, or really wants to know about working conditions in the third-world where our micro-chips
are manufactured. The commodity-form of these chips helps shield us from the darker side of capitalism).
In the cinematic apparatus, the mechanism of commodity exchange similarly alienates the film-product from the intrinsic properties
(artistic merits) of any particular film, and from the details of any particular film's production. We might begin to get a sense of this
when we find that the cost of the latest Spielberg-produced dinosaur video is arbitrarily set so much higher than a video copy of our
film by Chris Marker (which I recently picked up off a bargain table at my local video store). Both Spielberg and Marker (as actual
people) are alienated from their finished products, which assume their relative roles and values within the market of commodity
exchange. Marker no doubt feels the effects of this alienation much more keenly than Spielberg does.
--Jeffrey A. Netto, PhD.
Structuralist and
semiotic theory
These theories began in linguistics (with Ferdinand de Saussure) and in anthropology (with Claude Levi-Strauss) - their basic aim was
to locate and analyse the ways in which meanings were produced, and to identify structures of meaning underlying language and
kinship relations, respectively. It was quickly recognized that these ideas could be used to analyse almost any kind of meaning system
- Roland Barthes' book, Mythologies has analyses of advertising images, art exhibitions, wrestling, war photos, cooking, and so on.
Applied to film, semiotic and structuralist theories tried to analyse film as a language - Christian Metz (1974) produced an incredibly
detailed analysis of the way film works in terms of its units of meaning and the ways they were strung together. This kind of analysis
is a bit technical and dull, and doesn't produce especially useful results on its own. Still, these approaches are vital because they form
the basis of pretty much every film theory approach to come later.
--Ms. Deborah Jenkin
Post-Colonialist Theory
and Race Studies
Postcolonialist theory came into its own in the 1970s, after the European empires set up in the 18th and 19th centuries had been more
or less dismantled. This body of theory deals with the effects of colonial activity on colonized peoples, and with the possibilities
which exist for them to express themselves, attain cultural independence, and assert their identities and cultural histories.
Studies of film from a postcolonial perspective tend to take one of two approaches (though Shohat & Stam, 1994, deal with both):
(i) Analysing the relationships between film industries around the world, ususally in terms of the dominant position of the
Hollywood industry, and its effects on other industries. This approach concerns itself with the possibilities for national (and subnational) cinemas to develop and survive - the debates about the Australian fim industry often fall into this category. The idea of neocolonialism comes into play in this context - ie. colonisation not in physical terms, but in cultural and economic terms.
(ii) Analysing representations of colonised "Others" and marginalized racial groups, and discussing possibilities for them to produce
images of themselves. We saw this kind of idea in relation to multicultural and Aboriginal identities in Australian films. See also
Guerrero (1993) for an analysis of representations of African-Americans in US films.
--Ms. Deborah Jenkin
Postmodernist Theory
There's no real way of making this idea coherent or straightforward – the term refers to so many ideas and phenomena that any
account is going to be selective. But, to make it possible to deal with now, I'll talk about postmodernism in terms of three issues:
(i) A description of contemporary society, economics and politics. From being a world economy and society based on
industrialisation and manufacture, we've moved to one of information exchange, backed by advances in communication technology.
The new world order is characterized by globalization (dealt with in International Comm), transnational corporations, breakdown of
national boundaries, fragmentation of identity.
(ii) A description of artistic practice and cultural production - postmodernist texts have characteristics such as fragmentation of
narrative structure, pastiche ("borrowing" from other texts, genres), parody (sending up other texts/genres), a breakdown of
distinctions between "high" and "low" culture.
(3) A set of theoretical propositions and approaches which can be used to analyze anything. The main approach is a deconstructive
one - ie. one which looks into texts (or whatever is being analysed) to locate their contradictions, fragmentations, etc.
--Ms. Deborah Jenkin
Historicist Theory
New Historicism began to coalesce in the 1980s as another critical return to focusing on the importance of historical context to
understand literature. The New Historicist understands literature to be rooted in its cultural and authorial connections. In fact, the
study of literary text is only one element of the New Historicist's exploration of the poetics of culture. This exploration draws upon
the insights of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist theory. Some of the assumptions of the New Historicist also are reminiscent of
the Marxist view of the dynamics of culture.
Like the Marxist critic, the New Historicist explores the place of literature in an on-going contest for power within society but does
not define this contest narrowly in terms of an economic class struggle. Rather, within a culture a chorus of disparate voices vie for
attention and influence. Literature provides one venue in which this web of conflicting discourses -- of diverse interests, impulses,
values, and attitudes -- can be heard. While the traditional socio-historical critic seeks to articulate a single determinate social
meaning in the text, the New Historicist seeks to acknowledge the "episteme" of culture -- the multiplicity of perspectives that define
the historical reality reflected in the text. This episteme of culture embodies cultural codes used in the crucial social process of
exchange. In the social exchange of goods, ideas, attitudes and even people, the cultural imperatives of constraint and mobility find
expression. Through its forces of constraint, a society seeks to preserve itself, but through its forces of mobility a society moves to
modify itself. Out of the conflicting discourses and countervailing forces of exchange within a culture, its direction and destiny
emerges. (For more on these concepts see Stephen Greenblatt's discussion in "Culture.")
This New Historicist definition of the historical reality in which literature is embedded has led to some striking new strategies of
critical interpretation. The New Historicist can have a refocused interest in the textual structures so vital to the Formalist because
these reflect cultural forces of constraint and mobility. (See, for instance, Catherine Belsey's discussion of narrative structure in
"History, Literature, and Politics.") But the New Historicist understanding of culture also deprives literature of its special artistic
status accorded it by formalism. Literature is not autonomous but only one of a number of cultural "texts." In order to understand the
meaning of literature in the context of the poetics of culture, the New Historicist must attend to extra-literary materials. The
significance of the literary text resides in its intertextual relations with letters, diaries, advertising, films, paintings, comic books,
fashions in clothing, medical treatises, developments in technology, etc.
This exploration of literature is challenging enough, but New Historicists often acknowledge one additional component to the poetics
of culture comprising literary meaning: their own participation in the cultural discourse of the text. Borrowing from the insights of
Reader-Response theory, the New Historicist recognizes that the predispositions and biases the reader brings to the text influence and
contribute to the episteme of its meaning.
The lists below summarize the main assumptions and common strategies of New Historicism.
Critical Assumptions
All history is subjective. In interpreting historical facts or identifying historical contexts, the commentator actually expresses his
or her own beliefs, habits of thought, or biases.
The attempt of traditional historical criticism to identify a unified worldview of a society or period is a reductive illusion. Culture
is a web of conflicting discourses that cannot be simplified into a single point-of-view or linear set of idea(l)s.
Literature is only one of many historical discourses contributing to the definition of a culture. As such it dramatizes "culture in
action." As much as politics or military campaigns, literature dramatizes a battleground of competing ideas and values within a
culture. Directly or indirectly, the literary text contains a variety of voices with which the critical reader and must discourse to find
meaning.
Thus, the historical commentator of literature does not reveal the objective meaning or absolute truth of a text but only participates
in an historical discourse that often reveals as much about the commentator as about the text.
Critical Strategies
In order to assess the significance of a literary text, the critical reader begins by describing the complex web of attitudes, values,
ideals, and points-of-view in the literary text that comprise its expression of the poetics of culture, the episteme of that historical
moment.
In describing this cultural colloquy, the critic must consider how the circumstances of the writer's life may influence the
discourses contained within the text.
The critical reader must highlight the social rules, codes, or mores articulated within the text.
The critical reader must also acknowledge his own predispositions and cultural biases while exploring how the multiple voices
within a text are balanced, reconciled or subverted.
--Thomas Fish, PhD.
Oneiric Theory
The idea of a connection between film and dreams seems to be grounded in Freud's theories. The father of psychoanalysis stated that
dreams dramatise ideas. The so-called dream-work must produce a visual representation of the dream-thoughts -- and dramatisation
for Freud is the transformation of a thought into a visual situation. (12) The relationship with the visual language of film is as present
here as it is vague. After all, Freud never mentioned cinema in his many writings on art, and he refused categorically to take part in the
making of Pabst's Geheimnisse einer Seele (1926), the first film on psychoanalysis. On the other hand, as Baudry has noticed, in Die
Traumdeutung Freud described the psychic apparatus by comparing it to a microscope or a camera, thus indirectly recognising its
analogy with optical devices.(13)
Besides Freud's reference to the dreams' visual language, relevant considerations can be found in the work of other psychoanalysts.
For Jung, dreams develop according to an authentic dramatic structure, formed by a phase of exposition, in which setting and
characters are presented; by a development of the plot; by a culmination or peripeteia, containing the decisive event; and by a lysis or
solution.(14) Interestingly enough, according to Jung the latter can be absent, when the unconscious mind is unable to propose a
solution to the conflict -- almost a postmodern narrative lacking an ending.
Salomon Resnik also has described dreams as dramatic structures, made up of various acts, which are not always clearly linked, and
can even take place simultaneously.(15) Those acts are perhaps identifiable with the series of detached oneiric episodes that Cesare
Musatti has said to be comparable to filmic sequences.(16)
Structured like a drama, thus, the dream stages the oneiric thoughts. Melanie Klein described the unconscious itself as a mental
theatre, a stage on which the characters of our inner world perform. In his Psychoanalytic Studies Of the Personality (1952), Fairbairn
went beyond his mentor and compared the characters of a dream to film actors. The dreamer is at the one time director, spectator and
main character of his or her dream. To be more specific, the dreamer narcissistically plays all the roles, even when he or she has the
sensation of being a simple spectator of the oneiric show. From a Freudian perspective, this is hypocrisy on the part of the dreamer, a
defence used in order to avoid feeling responsible for the dream's contents. The same hypocrisy can be found in the cinematic
spectator, who feels safe and innocent while, at the same time, identifying with the various characters, and therefore fulfilling her or
his unspoken desires. The dreamer who, while asleep, is contemporaneously director, actor, and spectator, when awake -- according to
Resnik -- becomes an editor, who reorders and connects the various oneiric sequences according to a narrative structure. (17)
A further important reference to the relationship between dreams and film can be found in the psychoanalytical literature. In 1944
Ernst Aeppli noticed that the oneiric events take place in a luminous field, framed by a large dark space. (18) The evident analogy with
the cinema auditorium found confirmation in Bertam D. Lewin's research. According to the American analyst, dreams are projected
onto a white screen, the 'dream screen', representing the idea of sleep itself, or better the desire of sleeping and, contemporaneously,
the maternal breast, as the infant saw it when falling asleep, once sated. In two communications dated respectively 1946 and 1948,
Lewin defined the dream screen as 'a special structure ... distinguished from the rest of the dream and defined as the blank background
upon which the dream picture appears to be projected'. (19)
Whereas some psychoanalysts suggested that a dream is like a film (and seemingly their patients often say 'dream' when talking about
a film and vice-versa, with a revelatory Freudian slip), many film theorists proclaimed, inverting the terms, that a film is like a dream.
--Ms. Laura Rascaroli