What is Cinema? Critical Approaches Revision and Exam Preparation

early cinema and theory (up to 1950s roughly) classical film theory (1960s to early 1980s) postclassical film theory (1980s and 1990s) theories of postcinema (21st century)

Exam rubric Answer TWO questions. All questions are equally weighted. Please avoid duplication between exam answers and between exam answers and assessed coursework. NB: since last year, candidates have no longer been required to discuss two critical approaches in each answer, though you may wish to do so.

Writing exercise Rephrase one of the following questions in your own words: How effectively have theorists argued that cinema is a distinct art form? Has film theory been more effective at critiquing under- and misrepresentations in cinema, or at proposing counter-cinematic strategies to challenge them?

How effectively have theorists argued that cinema is a distinct art form? Balázs: cinema has a distinctive capacity to vary our perspective (in terms of distance and angle) on people and objects. ‘The whole of mankind is now busy relearning the long-forgotten language of gestures and facial expressions’ (The Visible Man).

Eisenstein: ‘Béla Forgets the Scissors’ Eisenstein: ‘Béla Forgets the Scissors’. ‘Cinema is, first and foremost, montage’ (‘Beyond the Shot’).

Metz and Wollen: used semiotics to explore cinema as a distinct artistic language.

Manovich: digital cinema becomes a ‘subgenre of painting’ or animation (The Language of New Media). Mulvey (2006): ‘the specificity of cinema … dissolves while other relations, intertextual and cross-media, begin to emerge’ (‘Passing Time’).

How effectively have theorists argued that cinema is a distinct art form?

Assess the ways in which cinema’s relationship to reality has been theorised. Bazin: cinema should be judged ‘not according to what it adds to reality but to what it reveals of it’ (‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema’; my emphases).

Kracauer: ‘Films come into their own when they record and reveal physical reality’ (Theory of Film).

Metz and Wollen: cinema does not record or reveal reality but constructs it. Tobing Rony: cinema is industrially and aesthetically entangled with problematic Western ethnographic constructions of reality. Manovich and Mulvey (2006): digital technology means cinema’s specificity can no longer be grounded in indexicality.

Consider theories of spectatorship, in relation to the viewer’s politics, mind, unconscious and/or body. Screen as frame, window or mirror? Baudry and Mulvey (1975): use the tools of psychoanalysis to explore how cinema dramatises psychic processes, including the ‘mirror stage’ described by Lacan.

Mulvey (1975) and Silverman: highlight the gendered dynamics of the gaze and the voice.

Stam and Spence and Tobing Rony: dominant cinema privileges a Western view point (the gaze is raced and implicated in colonial history), which counter-cinemas work to displace.

Butler: identities and identifications are not fixed but fluid and mobile.

Bordwell: cognitivist theorists are concerned with the conventions that explain how viewers routinely, consciously and actively make sense of films by processing audio-visual cues.

Mulvey (2006): digital spectatorship can fragment narrative into tableaux and reveal cinema’s stillness.

Other topics covered in the exam The rationale for applying semiotics to cinema Feminist and postcolonial discussions of the significance of film form Postcolonial and queer approaches to dominant and counter-cinemas Cognitive accounts of cinema The relevance of accounts of postmodernism to cinema The extent to which digital cinema and post-cinema require us to rethink the nature of the medium

Suggestions Remember to contextualise critical approaches: when and where did they emerge? Remember to assess the approaches critically. How did other theorists respond to them? In the exam, remember to link all points explicitly to the question set. After revising, try answering a question from a past paper in 1 hour 30 minutes, without referring to notes.