Film theory is a set of scholarly approaches
within the academic discipline of cinema studies
that questions the essentialism of cinema
and 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 film theory originated from linguistics
and literary theory, it also overlaps with
the philosophy of film.
== History ==
French philosopher Henri Bergson's Matter
and Memory (1896) has been cited as anticipating
the development of film theory during the
birth of cinema.
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) in Creative, he rejects
film as an exemplification of what he had
in mind.
Nonetheless, decades later, in Cinéma I and
Cinema II (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.
It largely evolved from the works of directors
like Germaine Dulac, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein,
Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, and Dziga
Vertov and film theorists like Rudolf Arnheim,
Béla Balázs and Siegfried Kracauer.
These thinkers emphasized how film differed
from reality and how it might be considered
a valid art form.
In the years after World War II, the French
film critic and theorist André Bazin reacted
against this approach to the cinema, arguing
that film's essence lay in its ability to
mechanically reproduce reality, not in its
difference from reality.In the 1960s and 1970s,
film theory took up residence in academia
importing concepts from established disciplines
like psychoanalysis, gender studies, anthropology,
literary theory, semiotics and linguistics.
However, not until the late 1980s or early
1990s did film theory per se achieve much
prominence in American universities by displacing
the prevailing humanistic, auteur theory that
had dominated cinema studies and which had
been focused on the practical elements of
film writing, production, editing and criticism.
American scholar David Bordwell has spoken
against many prominent developments in film
theory since the 1970s, i.e., he uses the
derogatory term "SLAB theory" to refer to
film studies based on the ideas of Saussure,
Lacan, Althusser, and Barthes.
Instead, Bordwell promotes what he describes
as "neoformalism" (a revival of formalist
film theory).
During the 1990s the digital revolution in
image technologies has influenced film theory
in various ways.
There has been a refocus onto celluloid film's
ability to capture an "indexical" image of
a moment in time by theorists like Mary Ann
Doane, Philip Rosen and Laura Mulvey who was
informed by psychoanalysis.
From a psychoanalytical perspective, after
the Lacanian notion of "the Real", Slavoj
Žižek offered new aspects of "the gaze"
extensively used in contemporary film analysis.
From the 1990 onward the Matrixial theory
of artist and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger
revolutionized feminist film theory.
Her concept The Matrixial Gaze, that has established
a feminine gaze and has articulated its differences
from the phallic gaze and its relation to
feminine as well as maternal specificities
and potentialities of "coemergence", offering
a critique of Sigmund Freud's and Jacques
Lacan's psychoanalysis, is extensively used
in analysis of films by female authors, like
Chantal Akerman, as well as by male authors,
like Pedro Almodovar.
The matrixial gaze offers the female the position
of a subject, not of an object, of the gaze,
while deconstructing the structure of the
subject itself, and offers border-time, border-space
and a possibility for compassion and witnessing.
Ettinger's notions articulate the links between
aesthetics, ethics and trauma.
There has also been a historical revisiting
of early cinema screenings, practices and
spectatorship modes by writers Tom Gunning,
Miriam Hansen and Yuri Tsivian.
In Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice
(2011), Clive Meyer suggests that 'cinema
is a different experience to watching a film
at home or in an art gallery', and argues
for film theorists to re-engage the specificity
of philosophical concepts for cinema as a
medium distinct from others.
== Specific theories of film ==
== 
See also ==
Film
Fictional film
Film journals and magazines
Film studies
Glossary of motion picture terms
Philosophy of film
