Film Theory: The Basics Questions

Chapter 3

Cinema reinforces the dominant ideology by resembling an art form that has a primarily cookie-cutter system for production. The audience can see that many films are being made by the same people, and especially the same types of people. The stories that are being made, especially in the 70's and 80's that the book focuses on, focus on members of majority groups and appeal to members of majority groups. Using theoretical tools and focusing on specific aspects of the filmmaking process, it can become easy to see who the films are appealing for. If one were to focus on the Male Gaze, they would examine the way that the camera is looking at its female subjects, and analyze the choices that are being made by the director. 

Counter-Cinema is an extremely important concept for the entirety of film, because it represents the struggle for equality within the cinema world. It also creates a rich diversity of not only actors and filmmakers, but the films themselves. Film would simply stagnate and become repetitive if it weren't for counter-cinema challenging the norm. The biggest example of counter cinema, in my opinion, is the Female Gaze, especially because the Male Gaze is such a large part of traditional cinema. Those who make films employing the Female Gaze are doing so in order to change the structure of how we depict empathy in films.

Theorists draw attention to how some specific groups are portrayed in film because there isn't equality in how groups are viewed. The way the camera views certain marginalized groups is done in a way to show them as inferior in many ways. In the case of Feminist Film theory, many theorists look at how the gaze portrays feminine characters in a subordinate way. Audiences can relate to these power struggles, because what is shown on the screen often correlates with how these groups are treated in everyday society. Viewers challenge these images by giving hate to movies that don't have proper representation, and that is part of the reason that counter-cinema can be possible.

Laura Mulvey's essay is an important cornerstone of film theory because it challenged the Male Gaze and the objectification of women on the screen. This birthed the idea for feminist counter-cinema and the Female Gaze can be heavily attributed to her. She started a movement that not many people were willing to recognize, and fought against nearly everyone in the industry to help things change. Her advances were some of the first in creating equality in film in general. 

Audio is often overlooked in film for many reasons, but primarily because the visual part of the medium is what classifies it the most. The writing and audio are important pieces, but they are also not usually the subject of discourse. For the most part, people know what is right and wrong to say, so that isn't as prevalent as a problem in the context of representation and objectification. The visual part of the medium, however, is much more of a subconscious detailed form of portraying someone in a certain light, so it often can slip between the cracks in the editing room. The idea of the Gaze, is that it's the way the filmmaker looks at their subjects and small differences can have a large impact without being noticed. However, once somebody focuses on an idea like the gaze, everything can be clearly understood about the filmmakers thought process.

Chapter 4

Both French Theory and Screen Theory are thought to have to many broad and vague ideas, so they are often looked down upon by other theorists. It was divisive both among theorists in general, and in terms of politics. Many different sides of people hated the theories for different reasons, so there wasn't really any side that was supporting it. Noel Carroll, in particular, found the theories to be quite elitist rather than contributing new ideas. 

It is always important to look into the history of any topic, to figure out how it came to be. To see how many film tropes and structures were introduced, one can go backwards and see it become popularized. IMR and PMR are ideas brought to the table by Noel Burch, Institutional Mode of Representation regarding more of the narrative and Primitive Mode of Representation is more focused on the entertainment aspect of the details of cinema. 

The spectator is known to be an incredibly integral part of the overall film within cinema. Narration alone has the distinct purpose of making the spectator an active role in the narrative of any given film. Everything the filmmaker is doing is for the spectator and knowing the spectator's thought process is important in order to know what things to show and what to hide, knowing the psychology of the spectator is what makes a great director. The spectator is also wanting to go through very different complex emotions while they are watching a film so it is important that they are taken through that ride properly. 

There were many film philosophers that paved the way for new types of movies to be made. Gilles Deleuze popularized the use of psychoanalysis in film studies, and was heavily criticized in his day for doing so. He emphasized that not only the camera mattered in capturing an image, but the techniques that were used to capture the image were equally important. Ludwig Wittgenstein was known for focusing on language, which didn't always align with film theory. However, film being largely a culmination of many art forms made many believe his work to be valuable for film theory. Vivian Sobchack is a philosopher who focused on phenomenology, this being the idea of the spectator having an out of body experience. In this theory there is a connection between the film watcher and the filmmaker even though they might not have much in common. It is a very humanistic way to approach the medium. All of these individual forms of theory deal with a different subject matter in the overall production of a film, but what is important is that they all come from an understanding that film is a lot bigger and more complex than shooting simple moving pictures and there are a lot of subtle decisions to be made in the process.

Film theory definitely has a future because film will continue and evolve whether due to technology, or popular narrative, etc. As these changes are made, audiences and filmmakers alike will respond to them differently to push boundaries. As with all art, everything builds off each other, meaning that the cinema we see today might look nothing like the cinema 50 years from now, however, although it's redefined, it will always be cinema.