Literary Film
Theory & Theory &
Criticism Criticism
Film Studies
Literary Theory & Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
no literary equivalent Auteurism
Thumbnail: Identification of the
primary signatures (thematic,
stylistic, geographical) of a given
filmmaker, customarily the director
Key Terms: signature | motif |
styleme
Important Figures: François Truffaut,
Andrew Sarris, André Bazin, John
Caughie
More on auteurism
tomorrow night.
Film Studies
Film Theory & Criticism
Literary
Theory &
Criticism
No literary
equivalent
Film Theory & Criticism
Film Studies
Cinematic Apparatus
Film Theory & Criticism
Thumbnail: “[D]erived in part from Marxist film theory, semiotics,
and psychoanalysis, . . . a dominant theory within cinema studies
during the 1970s. It maintains that cinema is by nature ideological
because its mechanics of representation [including] the camera
and editing [are ideological]. The central position of the spectator
within the perspective of the composition is also ideological.
Apparatus theory also argues that cinema maintains the
dominant ideology of the culture within the viewer. Ideology is
not imposed on cinema, but is part of its nature. Apparatus
theory follows an institutional model of spectatorship.” [Adapted
from Wikipedia]
Key Terms: the cinematic apparatus | ideology | the spectator
Important Figures: Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Jean-Louis
Baudry, Jean-Louis Comolli, Christian Metz, Laura Mulvey, Peter
Wollen, Constance Penley
Literary Theory & Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
Cultural Studies
Cultural Studies
Thumbnail: Cultural studies and critical theory combine
Thumbnail: Same as for
literary theory.
sociology, literary theory, film/video studies, and cultural
anthropology to study cultural phenomena in industrial
societies. Cultural studies researchers often concentrate
on how a particular phenomenon relates to matters of
ideology, race, social class, and/or gender. Cultural studies
concerns itself with the meaning and practices of
everyday life. Cultural practices comprise the ways people
do particular things (such as watching television, or eating
out) in a given culture. Particular meanings attach to the
ways people in particular cultures do things.
Key Terms: American studies | critical legal studies |
marxist studies | media studies | popular culture |
postcolonial studies | postmodern studies | queer studies
| race studies | women's studies
Important Figures: Stuart Hall, Richard Hoggart, Raymond
Williams, Tony Bennett, Homi Bhabha, Bell Hooks, Andrew
Ross, Constance Penley, Meaghan Morris
Film Studies
Important Figures: Same as
those on the left.
Film Theory & Criticism
Literary Theory & Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
Dialogism/Bakhtinian Dialogism/Bakhtinian
Thumbnail: Examination of the
rival voices in a narrative.
Thumbnail: Same as on the left
Key Terms: carnival | chronotope
| dialogism | heteroglossia |
polyphonic
Key Terms: Same as on the left
Important Figures: Mikhail
Bakhtin
Important Figures: Robert Stam
Film Studies
Film Theory & Criticism
Literary Theory & Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
Feminist
Feminist
Thumbnail: Careful attention
to/examination of (1) the
representation of women in
literature; (2) women as authors.
Thumbnail: Careful attention
to/examination of (1) the
representation of women in film;
(2) women as filmmakers.
Key Terms: androcentric |
androgyny | cyborg | feminism |
gynocriticism | marginality |
patriarchy | phallocentrism |
sexism | écriture féminine
Key Terms: See terms on the left +
gaze | objectification
Important Figures: Julia Kristeva,
Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Gilbert
and Gubar, Eve Sedgwick, Elaine
Showalter, Judith Butler
Important Figures: Laura Mulvey,
Christine Gledhill, Kaja Silverman,
Tania Modleski, Linda Williams,
Molly Haskell, Joan Mellen, Mary
Ann Doane, Gaylyn Studlar,
Constance Penley
Film Studies
Film Theory & Criticism
Literary Theory & Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
Geneva School
Geneva School
Thumbnail: A-chronological study
of the themes exhibited in the
entire corpus of a writer.
Thumbnail: Does not really exist for
film, though has much in common
with auteurism.
Key Terms: interior distance |
phenomenology of reading |
metamorphosis of a circle |
criticism of consciousness |
deepening | prolonging | point of
departure | unit passages |
intimacy | coincidence
Important Figures: Jean
Starobinski, Georges Poulet (r, on
left ), Jean-Pierre Richard, J. Hillis
Miller (r, on the right), Marcel
Raymond
Film Studies
Key Figures: David Lavery
Film Theory & Criticism
Literary Theory & Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
Influence Theory
Influence Theory
Thumbnail: Tracking of the ways
in which an author misreads (an
act known as misprision) a
patriarchal ancestor in order to
establish a “revisionary space” for
himself/herself in literary history.
Thumbnail: Does not yet exist for film
or television but see below.
Key Terms: ancestor texts |
antithetical | belated | defensively
| ephebe | misprision | the
patriarch | revisionary space |
strong
Important Figures: Harold Bloom
Film Studies
Important Figures: None really, but
see David Lavery, “The Ephebe of
Television.”
Film Theory & Criticism
Literary Theory & Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
Marxist/Ideological
Marxist/Ideological
Thumbnail: Examination of the
economic/power context in which
a work of art comes into the
world.
Thumbnail: See the thumbnail on the
left.
Key Terms: alienation | aura |
base and superstructure | cooptation | dialectic | flaneur |
hegemony | ideology |
interpellation | materialism |
reification | slippage
Important Figures: Karl Marx,
Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci
(r, on left), The Frankfurt School,
Walter Benjamin (right, on right),
Michel Foucault, Herbert Marcuse
Film Studies
Important Figures: Same.
Film Theory & Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
Literary Theory & Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
Narratology
Narratology
Thumbnail: Dissection of the storytelling Thumbnail: Same as the thumbnail on the
process in all its forms as well as
left but applied to film and television
identification of all the possible “moving narratives
parts” that contribute to a narrative and
Dr. Jeff Frame’s Dissertation
its understanding.
Key Terms: act/actor | anachrony | author
Key Terms: Similar to those on left.
function | deferment | postponement |
diegesis | discourse | double focalization |
frame tale | double voiced | enunciation |
intertextuality | intrusive narrator | mise-enabyme | narratee | narration | narrative |
repetition, paradigmatic | syntagmatic |
suspense | suture | self-referentiality |
antagonist ] protagonist
Important Figures: Wolfgang Iser, Hans
Important Figures: Seymour Chatman, David
Robert Gauss, Vladimir Propp, Robert
Bordwell
Film Studies
Scholes, Gerard Genette, Frank Kermode
Literary Theory & Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
New Criticism
New Criticism
Thumbnail: The systematic,
formalistic examination of a work
of literature.
Thumbnail: No real equivalent, but is
comparable to various formalistic
readings of film.
Key Terms: tension | heresy of
paraphrase | intentional fallacy |
ambiguity | irony | paradox |
close reading
Important Figures: Robert Penn
Warren, Cleanth Brooks, John
Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate,
William Empson
Film Studies
Important Figures: W. R. Robinson,
my mentor, who was the student of
John Crowe Ransom.
Film Theory & Criticism
Literary Theory &
Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
New Historicism
New Historicism
Thumbnail: The
understanding, perhaps
closer to anthropology
that traditional history, of
historical texts as the
product of complex,
“treacherous,” difficult to
decipher culture forces
and millieus.
Thumbnail: No real
equivalent, perhaps due to
film’s recentness. But should
there be? How would it differ
from its literary equivalent?
Film Studies
Key Terms: deep context,
thick description
Important Figures:
Stephen Greenblatt
Film Theory & Criticism
Important Figures: Perhaps:
Geoffrey O’Brien, Phantom
Empire: Movies in the Mind
of the 20th Century
Literary Theory & Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
Post-Colonialism
Post-Colonialism
Thumbnail: Reading the
Thumbnail: Viewing cinema
work of “Third World” and
from nations now independent
anglophone authors with an from colonial dominance.
eye (and ear) to the
differences that underpin the
work of once dominated
peoples.
Key Terms: authenticity |
contamination | creolization
| double colonization |
master narrative |
Eurocentric | negritude |
subaltern | transculturation
Key Terms: all those on the left,
plus Fourth Cinema
Important Figures: Homi
Bhabha, Edward Said
Important Figures: TBA
Film Studies
Film Theory & Criticism
Literary Theory & Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
Psychoanalytic
Psychoanalytic
Thumbnail: The implementation of
psychoanalytic theory—from Freud, to
Jung, to Lacan—in order to put either
authors or characters or narratives on
the couch
Thumbnail: The implementation of
psychoanalytic theory—from Freud, to
Jung, to Lacan—in order to put not only
authors, characters, and narratives, but
the spectator, too, on the couch
Key Terms: abject | fetishism | fort/da Key Terms: See terms on left, plus: the
| imaginary/symbolic/real | other |
gaze | mirror stage
phallocentrism | pleasure | repression
| transference | unconscious | id | ego
| superego | archetypal | individuation
| sublimation | collective unconscious
| the hero’s journey
Important Figures: Sigmund Freud,
Karen Horney, Alfred Adler, C. G. Jung,
Joseph Campbell, James Hillman
Film Studies
Important Figures: Hugo Münsterberg,
Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek (above)
Film Theory & Criticism
Literary Theory & Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
Queer Theory
Queer Theory
Thumbnail: “Queer theory is a field of critical theory Thumbnail: Interpretation of filmic texts that seeks
that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of
LGBT studies and feminist studies. It is a kind of
interpretation devoted to queer readings of texts.
Heavily influenced by the work of Michel Foucault,
queer theory builds both upon feminist challenges to
the idea that gender is part of the essential self and
upon gay/lesbian studies' close examination of the
socially constructed nature of sexual acts and identities.
Whereas gay/lesbian studies focused its inquiries into
"natural" and "unnatural" behavior with respect to
homosexual behavior, queer theory expands its focus to
encompass any kind of sexual activity or identity that
falls into normative and deviant categories. Queer
theory is derived largely from post-structuralist theory,
and deconstruction in particular. Starting in the 1970s, a
range of authors brought deconstructionist critical
approaches to bear on issues of sexual identity, and
especially on the construction of a normative "straight"
ideology. Queer theorists challenged the validity and
consistency of heteronormative discourse, and focused
to a large degree on non-heteronormative sexualities
and sexual practices.
to bring homosexual/homoerotic themes into the
light of day and in so doing make manifest the forces
of repression that have kept them closeted.
Film Theory & Criticism
Film Studies
Literary Theory & Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
Queer Theory
Queer Theory
The term "queer theory" was introduced in 1990, with
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Adrienne Rich and
Diana Fuss (all largely following the work of Michel
Foucault) being among its foundational proponents.
"Queer" as used within queer theory is less an identity
than an embodied critique of identity. Major aspects of
this critique include discussion of: the role of
Performativity in creating and maintaining identity; the
basis of sexuality and gender, either as natural,
essential, or socially constructed; the way that these
identities change or resist change; and their power
relations vis-a-vis heteronormativity.
Key Terms: performativity,
heteronormativity, LGBT, straight ideology
Important Figures: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
Judith Butler, Michel Foucault
Film Studies
Important Figures: Richard Dyer, the films of
Michael Rappaport, The Celluloid Closet
Film Theory & Criticism
Literary Theory & Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
Reader-Response
Viewer-Response
Thumbnail: “Reader-response criticism maintains Thumbnail: Extends the basic assumptions of
that the interpretive activities of readers, rather
than the author’s intention or the text’s structure,
explain a text’s significance and aesthetic value.”
(Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Criticism)
reader-response to the situation of a film (or
television) viewer.
Key Terms: jouissance | code | hermeneutics
| interpretive community | open and closed
texts | oppositional reading | reading
position | reception theory | self-consuming
artifact | erotics of reading
Key Terms: Pretty much the same as those
on the left.
Important Figures: Roland Barthes, Stanley
Fish, David Bleich, Norman Holland
Important Figures: None of note, yet.
Film Studies
Film Theory & Criticism
Literary Theory & Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
No literary equivalent
Realism
Thumbnail: Any of a variety of attempts
arguing for the essential realism of the
movies.
Key Terms: myth of total cinema, realism
Important Figures: André Bazin, Siegfried
Kracauer, , Andrei Tarkovsky, Roger Munier
Film Theory & Criticism
Film Studies
Film Studies
John Mckenzie, 1980
Now the film has brought us the silent soliloquy, in
which a face can speak with the subtlest shades of
meaning without appearing unnatural and arousing
the distaste of the spectators. In this silent
monologue, the solitary human soul can find a
tongue more candid and uninhibited that in any
spoken soliloquy, for its speaks instinctively,
subconsciously. The language of the face [its
"physiognomy"] cannot be suppressed or controlled.
--Béla Balázs, Hungarian filmmaker and theorist
Watch on the Film History Blog
Film Theory & Criticism
Literary Theory & Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
No literary equivalent
Reception Theory
Thumbnail: A basically materialist and
historical approach to study the cinema
that focuses on the manner in which
they are experienced.
Key Terms: the cinema of attraction|
cinematic apparatus
Important Figures: Tom Gunning, Kevin
Brownlow
Film Studies
Film Theory & Criticism
Literary Theory & Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
Russian-Formalism
Russian-Formalism
Thumbnail: “Russian formalism was an influential school of literary
Thumbnail: No real cinematic
criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of
a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars . . . who
revolutionized literary criticism . . . by establishing the specificity and
autonomy of poetic language and literature. . . . Russian formalism was
a diverse movement, producing no unified doctrine, and no consensus
amongst its proponents on a central aim to their endeavors. . . .
The term "formalism" was first used by the adversaries of the
movement, and as such it conveys a meaning explicitly rejected by the
Formalists themselves. In the words of one of the foremost Formalists,
Boris Eichenbaum: "It is difficult to recall who coined this name, but it
was not a very felicitous coinage. It might have been convenient as a
simplified battle cry but it fails, as an objective term, to delimit the
activities of the "Society for the Study of Poetic Language."[1]
[Wikipedia]
equivalent
Key Terms: defamiliarization (ostranenie) | deformation | fantastic |
figure and ground | literariness
Important Figures: Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp,
Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Grigory Vinokur, Mikhail Bakhntin
Film Studies
Film Theory & Criticism
Important Figures: An
influence on Sergei
Eisenstein and Rudolf
Arnheim.
Film Theory & Criticism
Literary Theory & Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
Semiotics
Semiotics
Thumbnail: The systematic
interpretation of signs and their
meaning or sign-ificance.
Thumbnail: See the thumbnail for
literary theory & criticism. The signs
of film semiotics are more prolific
and complex and include auditory,
visual, and linguistic signs.
Key Terms: code | denotation |
Key Terms: Similar to those for
connotation | discourse | formula | literary theory and criticism
icon | iconography | index | motif |
intertextuality | mythology |
paradigmatic/syntagmatic | pastiche
| semioclasm | semiosis |
signifier/signified | symbol | text |
semiology/semiotics | signifying
practice | langue | langage
Important Figures: Ferdinand de
Saussure, Charles Sanders Peirce,
Thomas Sebeok, Roland Barthes,
Julia Kristeva.
Important Figures: Peter Wollen,
Christian Metz, Sergei Eisenstein,
Jean Mitry, Pier Paolo Pasolini,
Umberto Eco
Film Studies
Literary Theory & Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
Structuralism/Deconstr Structuralism
uction
/ Deconstruction
Thumbnail: The attempt to reduce
literature (and other forms of
expression) to its (to their) most
basic, usually linguistic, functions
and in so doing demonstrate that
“there is nothing outside the text.”
Thumbnail: The attempt to
understand cinema as a kind of
language or code.
Key Terms: desire | differance |
ecriture | erasure | logocentrism |
presence | site | mise-en-abyme |
practice | langue | langage
Key Terms: Similar to those on left.
Important Figures: Ferdinand de
Saussure, Roland Barthes, Jacques
Derrida, Michel Foucault, Claude
Levi-Strauss, Harold Bloom, J. Hills
Miller, Jonathan Culler
Important Figures: Christian Metz,
Frederic Jamieson, Gilles Deleuze
Film Theory & Criticism
Film Studies
Literary Theory & Criticism
Film Theory & Criticism
Textual Criticism
Thumbnail: The process of
determining, through various
historical and textual means an
author’s valid text .
Is there, in fact, a
cinematic/televisual equivalent?
Key Terms: internal evidence |
external evidence | authorial
intent | versions
Important Figures: No rock stars.
Film Studies
Film Theory & Criticism