Film Studies

From its early beginnings in the 1890s (with Lumière and Edison), to the contemporary hypermedia, film has been discussed as an art form, but also as a cultural product, the main foci of analysis being aesthetics, medium specificity, genre, realism, perception, representation, communication and reception.

Film studies have emerged as heavily indebted to literary and cultural studies, aiming at bringing forth the filmic text, its addresser and addressee, within ideology and the broader cultural and historical context. Within film studies, one may distinguish between film theory and film criticism; the former considers the medium (cinema), while the latter evaluates individual, mediated, films. Furthermore, one speaks of film analysis with reference to the inner workings and patternings of texts on the screen rather than contexts outside it.

Interdisciplinary in essence, film theory has appropriated auteur, historicist, phenomenological, formalist, (post)structuralist/deconstructive, cognitive, semiotic, psychoanalytical, feminist, postcolonial and postmodernist models of interpretation, being still on the move and in the making. Its evolution is illustrative of changes in perspective and mentality, of the growing concern with a cultural phenomenon whose impact on the masses worldwide deserves special attention.

Early film theory envisaged the definition of film, generally in relation to other arts: Riccioto Canudo, in his groundbreaking The Birth of a Sixth Art (1911), saw film as a total art form, absorbing spatial and temporal arts (architecture, sculpture and painting on the one hand; poetry, music and dance on the other); Vachel Lindsay, in The Art of the Moving Picture (1915), emphasises filmic language and looks into the characteristics of film in opposition with the other media, bringing popular film to the attention of the elites (as does Gilbert Seldes, some ten years later, in The Seven Lively Arts).