Film Theory: An Introduction

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With extraordinary transnational and transdisciplinary range, World Literature, Transnational Cinema, and Global Media comprehensively explores the genealogies, vocabularies, and concepts orienting the fields within literature, cinema, and media studies. The first edition of this book, edited by Cohen and the late Gerald Mast, appeared in 1974 and was the first significant survey of the subject. The various editions of the anthology have included work by early commentators such as Erwin Panofsky, Walter Benjamin, and Kenneth Tynan, who anticipated film theory. More recent editions have paired essays both for and against grand theory. Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality. New York: Cambridge University Press. Find sources: "Robert Stam"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( September 2011) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)

Andrew, Dudley (1984) ¿Adaptation¿ In: Film Theory and Criticism, ed. by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press: 2004, 461-469.Cahir, Linda Constanzo. (2006) Literature into Film: Theory and Practical Approaches. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc.. This essay explor... more Originally published in New Literary History Volume 40, Number 3, Summer 2009.

The popular masses, uncouth and infantile, experience while sitting in front of the screen the enchantment of the child to whom the grandmother has recounted a fairy tale; but I fail to understand how, night after night, a group of people who have the obligation of being civilized can idiotize themselves [in movie theaters] with the incessant repetition of scenes in which the abberations, anachronisms, inverisimilitudes, are made ad hoc for a public of the lowest mental level, ignorant of the most elementary educational notions. (Mora, 1988, p. 6) Stam, R. (2000) ¿Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation¿, in J. Naremore (ed.) Film Adaptation. London: Athlone, 54-76.

Robert Stam (born October 29, 1941) is an American film theorist working on film semiotics. He is a professor at New York University, where he teaches about the French New Wave filmmakers. [1] Stam has published widely on French literature, comparative literature, and on film topics such as film history and film theory. Together with Ella Shohat, he co-authored Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. Reflexion on film as a medium began virtually with the medium itself. Indeed, the etymological meanings of the original names given to the cinema already point to diverse ways of envisioning the cinema and even foreshadow later theories. Biograph and animatographe emphasize the recording of life itself (a strong current, later, in the writings of Bazin and Kracauer). Vitascope and Bioscope emphasize the looking at life, and thus shift emphasis from recording life to the spectator and scopophilia (the desire to look), a concern of 1970s psychoanalytic theorists. Chronophotographe stresses the writing of time (and light) and thus anticipates Deleuze’s (Bergsonian) emphasis on the time image, while Kinetoscope, again anticipating Deleuze, stresses the visual observation of movement. Scenarograph emphasizes the recording of stories or scenes, calling attention both to decor and to the stories that take place within that decor, and thus implicitly privileges a narrative cinema. Cinematographe, and later cinema, call attention to the transcription of movement. The most complete anthology for scholars interested in psychoanalysis, semiotics, and ideological criticism. Includes accurate translations of several essays originally written in French. Last night … my friends took me to the Chi Gardens to see a show. After the audience gathered, the lights were put out and the performance began. On the screen before us we saw a picture – two occidental girls dancing, with puffed-up yellow hair, looking rather silly. Then another scene, two occidentals boxing.… The spectators feel as though they are actually present, and this is exhilarating. Suddenly the lights come on again and all the images vanish. It was indeed a miraculous spectacle. (Quoted in Leyda, 1972, p. 2) The Cinema after Babel: Language, Difference and Power," Screen, Vol. XXVI, Nos. 3-4 (May- Aug 1985).

Alternative Museum of New York 1989. Prisoners of Image: Ethnic and Gender Stereotypes. New York: The Museum. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics Bakhtin speaks of the Menippea, a perennial artistic genre linked to a carnivalesque vision of the world and marked by oxymoronic characters, multiple styles, violation of the norms of etiquette, and the comic confrontation of philosophical points of view. Although not originally conceived as an instrument for cinematic analysis, the category of the Menippea has the capacity to deprovincialize film-critical discourse, which is too often tied to nineteenth-century conventions of verisimilitude. Filmmakers like Buñuel, Godard, Ruiz, and Rocha, in this perspective, are not the mere negation of the dominant tradition but rather heirs of this other tradition, renovators of a perennial mode characterized by protean vitality.Welsh, James M., and Peter Lev, eds (2007) The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation. Lanham, Maryland : The Scarecrow Press. Adams, Parveen 1996. The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences. London: Routledge. Here the notion of photogenie, later developed by French filmmaker-theorists like Jean Epstein to advance the specific potentialities of the seventh art, becomes a normative epidermic notion of beauty, associated with youth, luxury, stars, and, at least implicitly, whiteness. Although the passage does not mention race, its call for clean and hygienic as opposed to dirty faces, and its generally servile stance toward the lily-white Hollywood model, suggest a coded reference to the subject. 6 At times, the racial reference becomes more explicit. One editorialist calls for Brazilian cinema to be an act of purification of our reality, emphasizing progress, modern engineering, and our beautiful white people. The same author warns against documentaries as more likely to include undesirable elements: Braudy, Leo, and Marshall Cohen, eds. Film Theory and Criticism. 7th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Cohen, K. (1979) Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Transnationalizing Comparison: The Uses and Abuses of Cross-Cultural Analogy," co-written with Ella Shohat. New Literary History, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Summer 2009) Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media (Rutgers, 2000), coauthored with Ella Shohat Allen, Richard 1989. Representation, Meaning, and Experience in the Cinema: A Critical Study of Contemporary Film Theory. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. Leitch, Thomas (2007) Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ. Baltimore : The Johns Hopkins University Press. think critically about the migration of stories and ideas across different historical, geographical and generic areas.A thorough, well-annotated collection of important essays in both film and media theory. Perhaps the most up-to-date and relevant of the large, inclusive anthologies. Born in Paterson, New Jersey, Stam completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley in 1977, after which he went directly to New York University, where he has been teaching ever since. Stam's graduate work ranged across Anglo-American literature, French and Francophone literature, and Luso-Brazilian literature. His dissertation was published as a book, Reflexivity in Film and Literature (1985). Film theory is what Bakhtin would call a historically situated utterance. And just as one cannot separate the history of film theory from the history of the arts and of artistic discourse, so one cannot separate it from history tout court, defined by Fredric Jameson as that which hurts but also as that which inspires. In the long view, the history of film, and therefore of film theory, must be seen in the light of the growth of nationalism, within which cinema became a strategic instrument for projecting national imaginaries. It must also be seen in relation to colonialism, the process by which the European powers reached positions of economic, military, political, and cultural hegemony in much of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. (While nations had often annexed adjacent territories, what was new in European colonialism was its planetary reach, its attempted submission of the world to a single universal regime of truth and power.) This process reached its apogee at the turn of the twentieth century, when the earth surface controlled by European powers rose from 67 percent (1884) to 84.4 percent (1914), a situation that began to be reversed only with the disintegration of the European colonial empires after World War II. 1 Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (Routledge, 2006) coauthored with Ella Shohat