Film Theory: Body, Senses and the Moving Image

I had wondered how it might be possible to address 100 years of film theory in less than ten weeks. It seems to be happening though, and the insight I am gaining in to the breadth of contemporary moving image theory seems to be far outweighing the pedagogical questions I normally have about specific set reading paths and the non-flagging of disciplinary prejudices. As with literary studies, and also from my limited experience of art history, film theory suffers from it’s own histories of ‘influences undermentioned’, and parallels misappropriated/unknown; for example I am still trying to comprehend the discipline’s narrative of Deleuze alone bringing affect theory to film studies, and the rather unmalleable sense of historicity set in place by this for a graduate student. What is working so well with this theory course however is the way in which it links ontological (and epistemological, and aesthetic) similarities in theorists (and practitioner’s) conceptualisations of film materiality, cinematic experience, and the bodily spectator from across the century each and every week. Given the richness of early writings, the post 60s splinterings of theoretical regimes, and more recent ambitious efforts at bridging, this intense, ordered ‘tasting and linking’ structure joined through key historic metaphors of bodies and senses-meeting-film seems sympathetic with the way I might think it. I am going to post on a few of the key essays that will be most relevant to my essay, and leave the rest as markers.

Entrance: Doors and Screens

1. Classic Film Theory:
- Jean Epstein. ‘The Senses’ in Richard Abel (ed.). French Film Theory and Criticism 1907-1939.
-  Béla Balázs. ‘Der Sichtbare Mensch’ in Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art.
- Edgar Morin. From ‘The Soul of the Cinema’ in The Cinema or the Imaginary Man.
2. Modern Film Theory:
- Thomas Elsaesser. ‘Film as System: Close Analysis and Film’s Openings’.
- Dana Polan. ‘Brecht and the Politics of Self-Reflexive Cinema’ . Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media.
- Linda Hutcheon. ‘The Politics of Parody’ in The Politics of Postmodernism.
3. Contemporary Film Theory:
- Gilles Deleuze. ‘Cinema, Body and Brain, Thought’ in Cinema 2: The Time-Image.
- Janet Harbord. ‘Innocent Monsters: Film and Other Media’ in The Evolution of Film: Rethinking Film Studies.

Window and Frame

1. Classic Film Theory:
- André Bazin. ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’ and ‘Painting and Cinema’ in What is Cinema?
- Siegfried Kracauer. From ‘Film in Our Time’ in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality,
- Sergei Eisenstein. From ‘The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram’ and ‘A Dialectic Approach to Film Form’ in Film Form. Essays in Film Theory.
2. Modern FilmTheory:
- Mary Ann Doane. From ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator’ in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis.
3. Contemporary Film Theory:
- Elena del Rio. ‘Choreographies of Affect’ in Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection.

Mirror and Face

1. Classic Film Theory:
- Jean Epstein. ‘Magnification’ in Richard Abel (ed.). French Film Theory and Criticism 1907-1939.
- Béla Balázs. ‘The Face of Man’ in Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art.
- Lev Kuleshov, ‘Montage as the Foundation of Cinematography’ in Ronald Levaco (ed.), Kuleshov on Film: Writings of Lev Kuleshov.
2. Modern Film Theory:
Christian Metz. ‘Identification, Mirror and the Passion of Perceiving’ in Peter Lehman (red.) Defining Cinema.
3. Contemporary Film Theory:
Amy Herzog. ‘Suspended Gestures: Performance, Affect, and the Face in Cinema’ in Ian Buchanan and Patricia MacCormack (eds.), Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema.

Eye and Gaze

Reading:
1. Classic Film Theory:
Germaine Dulac. ‘The Essence of the Cinema: The Visual Idea’ in P. Adams Sitney (ed.).
2. Modern Film Theory:
- Laura Mulvey. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in Philip Rosen (ed.) Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology.
- Linda Williams. ‘Prehistory: The Frenzy of the Visible’ in Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible’.
3. Contemporary Film Theory:
- Slavoj Zizek. ‘A Triumph of the Gaze over the Eye’ in Slavoj Zizek (ed.). Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan, but Where Afraid to Ask Hitchcock.
- Richard Allen, ‘Looking at Motion Pictures’ in Richard Allen and Murray Smith (eds.). Film Theory and Philosophy

Skin and Touch

1. Classic Film Theory:
Sergei Eisenstein. ‘The Filmic Fourth Dimension’ in Film Form. Essays in Film Theory.
2. Modern Film Theory:
Barbara Creed. ‘Kristeva, Femininity, Abjection’ and ‘Horror and the Archaic Mother: Alien’ in The Monstrous Female: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge, 1993, pp. 8-30.
3. Contemporary Film Theory:
- Vivian Sobchack. ‘Beating the Meat/Surviving the Text, or How to Get Out of the Century Alive’ in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture.
- Laura Marks, ‘Haptic Visuality’ in The Skin of Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses.

Body and Ear

1. Classic Film Theory:
Béla Balázs. From ‘Sound’ in Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art.
2. Modern Film Theory:
Kaja Silverman, ‘Body Talk’ in The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema.
3. Contemporary Film Theory:
- Rick Altman, ‘ Cinema as Event’ and ‘The Matrial Heterogeneity of Recorded Sound’ in Sound Theory Sound Practice.
- Steven Connor, ‘Sounding Our Film’
- Tarja Laine. ‘Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Affective Images in THE HOUSE’. Mediascape, Spring 2006.

Brain, Mind, Soul

1. Classic Film Theory:
Hugo Munsterberg. ‘Why we Go to the Movies?’ in Allan Langdale (ed.) The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings.
2. Modern Film Theory:
- Jean-Louis Baudry. ‘The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema’ in Phillip Rosen (ed.) Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader.
3. Contemporary Film Theory:
- Gilles Deleuze. ‘The Brain is the Screen’ in Gregory Flaxman (ed.) The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema.
- Joseph Anderson. ‘Diegesis’ in The Reality of Illusion. An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory.
- Robert Pepperel. ‘Where’s the Screen? The Paradoxical Relationship between Mind and World’ in Robert Pepperel and Michael Punt (eds.). Screen Consciousness. Cinema, Mind and World.
- Patricia Pisters. ‘Mathematics, Madness and Metaphysics: Two Poles of the Neuro-Image in Pi and The Fountain’ in Peter Gaffney (ed.), Deleuze and the Forces of the Virtual. University of Minnesota Press, 2008 (forthcoming).