Contemporary Film Theory

During the twentieth century, the medium of film has developed as a means of understanding the complexity of modern life. Since 1968, film theory has concentrated not so much on theme or content but on the deeper question of how the medium works on its viewer. Film theory has been profoundly influenced by the writings of such modern thinkers as Saussure, Freud, Lacan, Anthusser, Derrida and Kristeva. It combines modes of textual analysis relating to linguistics and semiology, a Marxist reading of ideology, and theories of subjectivity, the spectator and gender redefined by psychoanalysis. This judicious selection from key work by Stephen Heath, Fredric Jameson, Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doanne and others, represents some of the most important contemporary writing about film. It provides a consistent and developing analysis that will be of interest to students concerned with film and film studies, as well as students of cultural, media and communication studies.

Reality has become an increasingly prominent topic in contemporary philosophy. The book’s contributors are responding to the challenge to use the philosophically underexplored potential of film to disclose what the editors propose to call “the real of reality.”

During the twentieth century, the medium of film has developed as a means of understanding the complexity of modern life. Since 1968, film theory has concentrated not so much on theme or content but on the deeper question of how the medium works on its viewer. Film theory has been profoundly influenced by the writings of such modern thinkers as Saussure, Freud, Lacan, Anthusser, Derrida and Kristeva. It combines modes of textual analysis relating to linguistics and semiology, a Marxist reading of ideology, and theories of subjectivity, the spectator and gender redefined by psychoanalysis. This judicious selection from key work by Stephen Heath, Fredric Jameson, Laura Mulvey, Mary Ann Doanne and others, represents some of the most important contemporary writing about film. It provides a consistent and developing analysis that will be of interest to students concerned with film and film studies, as well as students of cultural, media and communication studies.

'What is Film Theory? is an introduction to the key elements of film theory. So, what is film theory as a subject? Film studies is divided in to key subjects and themes: there's film art which looks at the aesthetics of film; cinema studies which looks at institutions, films themeselves and the industry; film theory which looks at the concepts, philosophies and disciplines which underline film studies. As such, the book will look at subjects including semiotics and strucutalism, psychoanalysis, formalist film theory, cognitive approaches and neoformalism. In the light of the readers' reports it will also address more 'cultural' issues such as queer theory, ethnicity, postcolonialism and world cinema..

This unique volume collects a series of essays that link new developments in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and recent trends in contemporary cinema. Though Lacanian theory has long had a privileged place in the analysis of film, film theory has tended to ignore some of Lacan's most important ideas. As a result, Lacanian film theory has never properly integrated the disruptive and troubling aspects of the filmic experience that result from the encounter with the Real that this experience makes possible. Many contemporary theorists emphasize the importance of the encounter with the Real in Lacan's thought, but rarely in discussions of film. By bringing the encounter with the Real into the dialogue of film theory, the contributors to this volume present a new version of Lacan to the world of film studies. These essays bring this rediscovered Lacan to bear on contemporary cinema through analysis of a wide variety of films, including Memento, Eyes Wide Shut, Breaking the Waves, and Fight Club. The films discussed here demand a turn to Lacanian theory because they emphasize the disruptive role of the Real and of jouissance in the experience of the human subject. There is a growing number of films in contemporary cinema that speak to film's power to challenge and disturb the complacency of spectators, and the essays in Lacan and Contemporary Film analyze some of these films and bring their power to light. Because of its dual focus on developments in Lacanian theory and in contemporary film, this collection serves as both an accessible introduction to current Lacanian film theory and an introduction to the study of contemporary cinema. Each essay provides an accessible, jargon-free analysis of one or more important films, and at the same time, each explains and utilizes key concepts of Lacanian theory. The collection stages an encounter between Lacanian theory and contemporary cinema, and the result is the enrichment of both.

Film Theory Goes to the Movies fills the gap in film theory literature which has failed to analyze high-grossing blockbusters. The contributors in this volume, however, discuss such popular films as The Silence of the Lambs, Dances With Wolves, Terminator II, Pretty Woman, Truth or Dare, Mystery Train, and Jungle Fever. They employ a variety of critical approaches, from industry analysis to reception study, to close readings informed by feminist, deconstructive and postmodernist theory, as well as recent developments in African American and gay and lesbian criticism. An important introduction to contemporary Hollywood, this anthology will be of interest to those involved in the fields of film theory, literary theory, popular culture, and women's studies.

As the cinematic experience becomes subsumed into ubiquitous technologies of seeing, contemporary artworks lift the cinematic from the immateriality of the film screen, separating it into its physical components within the gallery space. How do film theorists read these reformulations of the cinematic medium and their critique of what it is and has been? Theorizing Cinema through Contemporary Art: Expanding Cinema considers artworks that incorporate, restage, and re-present cinema's configurations of space, experience, presence/absence, production and consumption, technology, myth, perception, event, and temporality, thereby addressing the creation, appraisal, and evolution of film theory as channeled through contemporary art. Taking film theory as a blueprint for the moving image, and juxtaposing it with artworks that render cinema as a material object, this book unfolds a complex relationship between a theory and a practice that have often been seen as virtually incompatible, heightening our understanding of each and, more pertinently, their interactions.