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Concept
Film theory
Summary
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.
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'illusion cinématographique (in L'évolution créatrice; English: The cinematic illusion) he rejects film as an example of what he had in mind. Nonetheless, decades later, in Cinéma I and (1983–1985), the philosopher Gilles Deleuze took Matter and Memory as the basis of his philosophy of film and revisited Bergson's concepts, combining them with the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. Early film theory arose in the silent era and was mostly concerned with defining the crucial elements of the medium. Ricciotto Canudo was an early Italian film theoretician who saw cinema as "plastic art in motion", and gave cinema the label "the Sixth Art", later changed to "the Seventh Art".
In 1915, Vachel Lindsay wrote a book on film, followed a year later by Hugo Münsterberg. Lindsay argued that films could be classified into three categories: action films, intimate films, as well as films of splendour. According to him, the action film was sculpture-in-motion, while the intimate film was painting-in-motion, and splendour film architecture-in-motion.
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