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Formalist Film Theory
Formalist film theory is an approach to film theory that is focused on the formal or technical elements of a film: i.e., the lighting, scoring, sound and set design, use of color, shot composition, and editing. This approach was proposed by Hugo Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Sergei Eisenstein, and Béla Balázs. Today, formalist film theory is a recognized approach in film studies. Formalism in ideological approaches Classical Hollywood cinema Classical Hollywood cinema uses a style referred to as the institutional mode of representation: continuity editing, massive coverage, three-point lighting, "mood" music, and dissolves. The socio-economic ideological explanation for this is style involves Hollywood's desire to monetarily profit and appeal to ticket-buyers. Film noir Film noir is marked by lower production values, darker images, under lighting, location shooting, and general nihilism. This is largely due to the pessimistic outlook filmmakers and filmgoers expressed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Film Theory
Film theory is a set of scholarly approaches within the academic discipline of film or cinema studies that began in the 1920s by questioning the formal essential attributes of motion pictures; and that now provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large. Film theory is not to be confused with general film criticism, or film history, though these three disciplines interrelate. Although some branches of film theory are derived from linguistics and literary theory, it also originated and overlaps with the philosophy of film. History Early theory, before 1945 French philosopher Henri Bergson's '' Matter and Memory'' (1896) anticipated the development of film theory during the birth of cinema in the early twentieth century. Bergson commented on the need for new ways of thinking about movement, and coined the terms "the movement-image" and "the time-image". However, in his 1906 essay ''L'i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Film Noir
Film noir (; ) is a style of Cinema of the United States, Hollywood Crime film, crime dramas that emphasizes cynicism (contemporary), cynical attitudes and motivations. The 1940s and 1950s are generally regarded as the "classic period" of American film noir. Film noir of this era is associated with a low-key lighting, low-key, black-and-white visual style that has roots in German expressionist cinematography. Many of the prototypical stories and attitudes expressed in classic noir derive from the hardboiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Great Depression, known as noir fiction. The term ''film noir'', French for "black film" (literal) or "dark film" (closer meaning), was first applied to Hollywood films by French critic Nino Frank in 1946, but was unrecognized by most American film industry professionals of that era. Frank is believed to have been inspired by the French literary publishing imprint Série noire, founded in 1945. Cinema hist ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Bordwell
David Jay Bordwell (; July 23, 1947 – February 29, 2024) was an American film theorist and film historian. After receiving his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1973, he wrote more than fifteen volumes on the subject of cinema including ''Narration in the Fiction Film'' (1985), ''Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema'' (1988), ''Making Meaning'' (1989), and ''On the History of Film Style'' (1997). With his wife Kristin Thompson, Bordwell wrote the textbooks ''Film Art'' (1979) and ''Film History'' (1994). ''Film Art'', in its 12th edition as of 2019, is still used as a text in introductory film courses. With aesthetics philosopher Noël Carroll, Bordwell edited the anthology ''Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies'' (1996), a polemic on the state of contemporary film theory. His largest work was ''The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960'' (1985), written in collaboration with Thompson and Janet Staiger. Several of his more influential articles on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Structuralist Film Theory
Structuralist film theory is a branch of film theory that is rooted in structuralism, itself based on structural linguistics. Overview Structuralist film theory emphasizes how films convey meaning through the use of codes and conventions not dissimilar to the way languages are used to construct meaning in communication. However, structuralist film theory differs from linguistic theory in that its codifications include a more apparent temporal aspect. In other words, the site of the study (the film) is moving in time and must be analyzed in a framework which can consider its temporality. To that end, structuralist film theory is dependent on a new kind of sign, first proposed by the Prague linguistic circle, dubbed the ostensive sign. Theoreticians Film theorists associated with structuralism include Peter Wollen, Sol Worth, Calvin Pryluck, Christian Metz. and Will Wright. See also * Semiotic literary criticism * Structural film Structural film was an avant-garde exper ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Russian Formalism
Russian formalism was a school of literary theory in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars, such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eikhenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky, and Grigory Gukovsky, who revolutionised literary criticism between 1914 and the 1930s by establishing the specificity and autonomy of poetic language and literature. Russian formalism exerted a major influence on thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin and Juri Lotman as well as on structuralism as a whole. The movement's members had a large impact on modern literary criticism as it developed in the structuralist and post-structuralist periods. Under Stalin it became a pejorative term for elitist art. Russian formalism was a diverse movement, producing no unified doctrine, and no consensus amongst its proponents on a central aim to their endeavours. In fact, "Russian Formalism" describes two distinct movements: ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Neoformalism (film Theory)
David Jay Bordwell (; July 23, 1947 – February 29, 2024) was an American film theorist and film historian. After receiving his PhD from the University of Iowa in 1973, he wrote more than fifteen volumes on the subject of cinema including ''Narration in the Fiction Film'' (1985), ''Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema'' (1988), ''Making Meaning'' (1989), and ''On the History of Film Style'' (1997). With his wife Kristin Thompson, Bordwell wrote the textbooks ''Film Art'' (1979) and ''Film History'' (1994). ''Film Art'', in its 12th edition as of 2019, is still used as a text in introductory film courses. With aesthetics philosopher Noël Carroll, Bordwell edited the anthology ''Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies'' (1996), a polemic on the state of contemporary film theory. His largest work was ''The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960'' (1985), written in collaboration with Thompson and Janet Staiger. Several of his more influential article ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Medium Specificity
Medium specificity is a consideration in aesthetics and art criticism. It is most closely associated with modernism Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ..., but it predates it. Overview According to Clement Greenberg, who helped popularize the term, medium specificity holds that "the unique and proper area of competence" for a form of art corresponds with the ability of an artist to manipulate those features that are "unique to the nature" of a particular medium. For example, in painting, literal flatness and abstraction are emphasised rather than illusionism and figuration. Medium specific can be seen to mean that ''"the artwork is constituted by the characteristic qualities of the raw material."'' This would probably include the techniques used to manipulate the m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Formalism (art)
In art history, formalism is the study of art by analyzing and comparing form and style. Its discussion also includes the way objects are made and their purely visual or material aspects. In painting, formalism emphasizes compositional elements such as color, line, shape, texture, and other perceptual aspects rather than content, meaning, or the historical and social context. At its extreme, formalism in art history posits that everything necessary to comprehending a work of art is contained within the work of art. The context of the work, including the reason for its creation, the historical background, and the life of the artist, that is, its conceptual aspect is considered to be external to the artistic medium itself, and therefore of secondary importance. History The historical origin of the modern form of the question of aesthetic formalism is usually dated to Immanuel Kant and the writing of his third Critique where Kant states: "Every form of the objects of sense is either ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Clive Bell
Arthur Clive Heward Bell (16 September 1881 – 17 September 1964) was an English art critic, associated with formalism and the Bloomsbury Group. He developed the art theory known as significant form. Biography Early life and education Bell was born in East Shefford, Berkshire, in 1881, the third of four children of William Heward Bell (1849–1927) and Hannah Taylor Cory (1850–1942). He had an elder brother ( Cory), an elder sister (Lorna, Mrs Acton), and a younger sister (Dorothy, Mrs Hony). His father was a civil engineer who built his fortune in the family coal mines at Merthyr Tydfil in Wales – "a family which drew its wealth from Welsh mines and expended it on the destruction of wild animals." They lived at Cleeve House, Seend, near Devizes, Wiltshire, where Squire Bell's many hunting trophies were displayed. Bell was educated at Marlborough College and at Trinity College, Cambridge, studying history. In 1902 he gained an Earl of Derby scholarship to study in Par ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg () (January 16, 1909 – May 7, 1994), occasionally writing under the pseudonym K. Hardesh, was an American essayist known mainly as an art critic closely associated with American modern art of the mid-20th century and a formalist aesthetician. He is best remembered for his association with the art movement abstract expressionism and the painter Jackson Pollock. Early life Clement Greenberg was born in the Bronx, New York City, in 1909. His parents were middle-class Jewish immigrants, and he was the eldest of their three sons. Since childhood, Greenberg sketched compulsively, until becoming a young adult, when he began to focus on literature. He attended Erasmus Hall High School, the Marquand School for Boys, and Syracuse University, graduating with an A.B. in 1930, cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. After college, already fluent in Yiddish and English since childhood, Greenberg taught himself Italian and German in addition to French and Latin. Over the next few year ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
German Expressionist Cinema
German expressionist cinema () was a part of several related creative movements in Germany in the early 20th century that reached a peak in Berlin during the 1920s. These developments were part of a larger Expressionist movement in Northwestern European culture in fields such as architecture, dance, painting, sculpture and cinema. Characteristics German Expressionism was an artistic movement in the early 20th century that emphasized the artist's inner emotions rather than attempting to replicate reality. German Expressionist films rejected cinematic realism and used visual distortions and hyper-expressive performances to reflect inner conflicts. History The German Expressionist movement was initially confined to Germany due to the country's isolation during World War I. In 1916, the government banned foreign films, creating a sharp increase in the demand for domestic film production, from 24 films in 1914 to 130 films in 1918. With inflation also on the rise, Germans ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nihilism
Nihilism () encompasses various views that reject certain aspects of existence. There have been different nihilist positions, including the views that Existential nihilism, life is meaningless, that Moral nihilism, moral values are baseless, and that Philosophical skepticism, knowledge is impossible. These views span various branches of philosophy, including ethics, value theory, epistemology, and metaphysics. Nihilism is often characterized as a broad cultural phenomenon or historical movement that pervades modernity in the Western world. Existential nihilism asserts that life is inherently meaningless and lacks a higher purpose. By suggesting that all individual and societal achievements are ultimately pointless, it can lead to Apathy, indifference, Motivation#Amotivation and akrasia, lack of motivation, and existential crises. In response, some philosophers propose detachment from worldly concerns while others seek to discover or create values. Moral nihilism, a related view, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
