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  1. Dartmouth Libraries
  2. Research Guides
  3. Dartmouth Libraries Guides
  4. Film Studies
  5. Film theory

Film Studies

This guide is an introduction to the resources for Film Studies at Dartmouth. If you are interested in Television, see the separate research guide for Television.
  • Introduction
  • Basic information on film
  • Finding a specific film title
  • Streaming film services
    • Readings on streaming video
  • National cinemas This link opens in a new window
  • Course guides for Film & Media Studies
  • Starting your research ...
  • Researching early films
  • Film history through the decades
    • 1960's film history
    • 1970's film history
  • Books about film
  • Film reviews
  • Journals & magazines about film
  • Film theory
    • Feminist film theory
    • Auteur theory
  • Film criticism
    • Feminist film criticism
  • Box office information
  • Film audiences
  • Mass media Industry
  • Primary sources for historical film research
    • Cinema Pressbooks from the Original Studio Collections
    • Congressional Hearings & Communism
    • Film Daily
    • Herrick Library Digital Collections
    • Hollywood and the Production Code
    • Media History Digital Library
    • Moving Picture World
  • Themes
  • Acting
  • Racial & ethnic representation on film
    • African American diaspora
    • Asian American diaspora
    • Hispanic American diaspora
    • Native American & Indigenous peoples diasporas
    • Examples on film
  • LGBTQIA+
    • Examples on film
  • Women on/in/creating Film
    • Examples on film
  • Film genres This link opens in a new window
  • Film & society
  • Screenwriting
  • Film adaptations
    • Shakespeare on film
    • Television to Film adaptations
  • Color in film
  • Film music
  • Film festivals
    • A short list of film festivals
  • Film awards
  • Disney
  • Hitchcock
  • Internet resources
  • Future of Media
  • Back to Film & Media
  • Scholarly communication This link opens in a new window
  • Video Help

Subject Librarian

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Lucinda M. Hall
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Subjects: Film and Media Studies, Geography, Polar Studies

A short definition for film theory

A discourse that seeks to establish general principles concerning film as a distinct art form or to set out general concepts underlying all films and cinema: This might include the moving image screen or screens, what is exhibited on these screens, and the nature of the viewer’s encounter with the cinema screen and its contents. Theory provides conceptual and methodological tools for thinking about, understanding, and explaining the objects with which a body of knowledge concerns itself—in the present instance film, films, and cinema—and ideally also takes on board any shifts or changes in disciplinary objects. At its most illuminating, theory measures its generalizations against its objects; and at its most grounded, theory derives its generalizations from its objects. Although the two terms are often used interchangeably and the two practices do overlap, film theory may be held in distinction from film criticism, in that the former is concerned mainly with general ideas relating to films and cinema as opposed to commentary on particular films or filmmakers.

The origins of film theory can be traced to attempts, in the early years of cinema, to identify the unique attributes and aesthetics of this entirely new art form (see medium specificity). Important questions addressed in classical film theory include: What is the distinctive nature of cinema? What is the aesthetic value of cinema? What is the social or educational role of cinema? How might cinema fulfil its potential as a medium? The first major film-theoretical work, published in 1916, was by a psychologist: in The Photoplay: A Psychological Study Hugo Münsterberg observed that films, uniquely, are free of the strictures of time, space, and causality that govern people’s daily lives. Rudolf Arnheim, also a psychologist, wrote a number of books and articles on film, the most influential being Film as Art (published in German in 1932, with an English edition in 1957). Arnheim argued that cinema does not merely imitate reality but manipulates and refashions reality through its own expressive processes: this, suggested Arnheim, is what confers on cinema the status of an art form. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet filmmakers Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein classified and theorized editing and montage and the artistic possibilities opened up by these uniquely cinematic techniques (see Soviet avant garde). The Hungarian-German writer Béla Balázs also published his principal works on film in the 1920s and 1930s (with English translations of some of them appearing in the 1950s): these include pioneering thinking on montage, as well as on the closeup and the shot. In The Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), Siegfried Kracauer struck out in another direction, exploring the relationship between film and the real and the nature of realism in film. Of all the classical film theorists, however, André Bazin has arguably exerted the most profound influence on contemporary film theory. Between 1944 and 1958 Bazin wrote a series of essays on cinema, and in 1951 co-founded the film studies journal Cahiers du cinéma. In the two-volume collection of his writings first published in English under the title What is Cinema? Bazin set out an ontology of cinema, phenomenological rather than realist: he saw cinema’s fundamental nature—indeed its destiny—as resting in its capacity to inscribe the trace of the world and to reveal the world in its full complexity and ambiguity. Film studies has recently seen a renewal of interest in classical film theory; and with the publication of new editions and translations of early writings, film theory has itself become an object of scholarly inquiry.  ...

Kuhn, A., & Westwell, G. (2020). Film theory. In A Dictionary of Film Studies. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 9 Mar. 2023

Searching the online catalog for film theory

  • "film theory"
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  • film theory
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  • motion pictures aesthetics

Introductory reading(s)

  • Cover ArtEric Rohmer's film theory (1948-1953) by Marco Grosoli
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1998.3 .R64 G76 2018
    ISBN: 9789462985803
    In the 1950s, a group of critics writing for Cahiers du Cinéma launched one of the most successful and influential trends in the history of film criticism: auteur theory. Though these days it is frequently usually viewed as limited and a bit old-fashioned, a closer inspection of the hundreds of little-read articles by these critics reveals that the movement rested upon a much more layered and intriguing aesthetics of cinema. This book is a first step toward a serious reassessment of the mostly unspoken theoretical and aesthetic premises underlying auteur theory, built around a reconstruction of Eric Rohmer's early but decisive leadership of the group, whereby he laid down the foundations for the eventual emergence of their full-fledged auteurism.
  • Cover ArtEuropean film theory by Temenuga Trifonova, ed.
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9780415960441
    European Film Theory explores the 'Europeanness' of European film theory, its philosophical origins, the 'culture wars' between 'Continental' and 'Analytical' film theory and philosophy, the major discursive and epistemological shifts in the history of Continental film theory, the relationship between Continental philosophy of art and philosophy of history and European film theory. ...
  • Cover ArtThe Oxford handbook of film theory by Kyle Stevens, ed.
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9780190873929
    Despite changes in the media landscape, film remains a vital force in contemporary culture, as do our ideas of what "a movie" or "the cinematic" are. Indeed, we might say that the category of film now only exists in theory. Whereas film-theoretical discussion at the turn of the 21st century was preoccupied, understandably, by digital technology's permeation of virtually all aspects of the film object, this volume moves the conversation away from a focus on film's materiality towards timely questions concerning the ethics, politics, and even aesthetics of thinking about the medium of cinema. To put it another way, this collection narrows in on the subject of film, not with a nostalgic sensibility, but with the recognition that what constitutes a film is historically contingent, in dialogue with the vicissitudes of entertainment, art, and empire. ...
  • Cover ArtThinking in the dark: cinema, theory, practice by Murray Pomerance; R. Barton Palmer, eds.
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9780813566290
    Today's film scholars draw from a dizzying range of theoretical perspectives--they're just as likely to cite philosopher Gilles Deleuze as they are to quote classic film theorist André Bazin. To students first encountering them, these theoretical lenses for viewing film can seem exhilarating, but also overwhelming. Thinking in the Dark introduces readers to twenty-one key theorists whose work has made a great impact on film scholarship today, including Rudolf Arnheim, Sergei Eisenstein, Michel Foucault, Siegfried Kracauer, and Judith Butler. Rather than just discussing each theorist's ideas in the abstract, the book shows how those concepts might be applied when interpreting specific films by including an analysis of both a classic film and a contemporary one. ...

Selected book title(s)

  • Cover ArtAnimating film theory by Karen Beckman, ed.
    • Open Access Icon
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9780822356400
    Animating Film Theory provides an enriched understanding of the relationship between two of the most unwieldy and unstable organizing concepts in cinema and media studies: animation and film theory. For the most part, animation has been excluded from the purview of film theory. The contributors to this collection consider the reasons for this marginalization while also bringing attention to key historical contributions across a wide range of animation practices, geographic and linguistic terrains, and historical periods. ...
  • Cover ArtConversations with Christian Metz by Warren Buckland; Daniel Fairfax, eds.
    • Open Access Icon
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9789048526734
    From 1968 to 1991 the acclaimed film theorist Christian Metz wrote several remarkable books on film theory: Essais sur la signifi cation au cinéma, tome1 et 2; Langage et cinéma; Le signifiant imaginaire; and L'Enonciation impersonnelle. These books set the agenda of academic film studies during its formative period. Metz's ideas were taken up, digested, refined, reinterpreted, criticized and sometimes dismissed, but rarely ignored. This volume collects and translates into English for the first time a series of interviews with Metz, who offers readable summaries, elaborations, and explanations of his sometimes complex and demanding theories of film. ...
  • Cover ArtFilm worlds: a philosophical aesthetics of cinema by Daniel Yacavone
    • On Campus or VPN
    • E-Book
    Call Number: eBook
    ISBN: 9780231538350
    Crafting a philosophy of cinematic art from the keenest insights of the continental and analytic traditions.
  • Cover artThe terministic screen: rhetorical perspectives on film by David Blakesley, ed.
    • Book
    Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1994 .T47 2003
    ISBN: 9780809324880
    The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film examines the importance of rhetoric in the study of film and film theory. Rhetorical approaches to film studies have been widely practiced, but rarely discussed until now. Taking on such issues as Hollywood blacklisting, fascistic aesthetics, and postmodern dialogics, editor David Blakesley presents fifteen critical essays that examine rhetoric's role in such popular films as The Fifth Element, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Usual Suspects, Deliverance, The English Patient, Pulp Fiction, The Music Man, Copycat, Hoop Dreams and A Time to Kill. ...

Other library resource(s)

  • Resource logoFilm theory before 1945 from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Malcolm Turvey
    • On Campus or VPN
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    ISBN: 9780199791286
    Film theory, defined broadly as any reflection on the nature and functions of cinema, appeared soon after cinema’s emergence in the mid-1890s. Due to the novelty of the moving image and its quick development into a mass entertainment, around 1910, intellectuals and artists began identifying cinema’s particular capacities, articulating their value and highlighting the formal and stylistic techniques best suited to exploiting them. For many, cinema had the capacity to be an art, one that was similar in some respects to the preexisting arts but that differed from and even surpassed those arts in other respects. ...
  • Resource logoPsychoanalytic film theory from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Todd McGowan
    • On Campus or VPN
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    ISBN: 9780199791286
    Psychoanalytic film theory occurred in two distinct waves. The first, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, focused on a formal critique of cinema’s dissemination of ideology, and especially on the role of the cinematic apparatus in this process. The main figures of this first wave were Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, and Laura Mulvey. They took their primary inspiration from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and they most often read Lacan through the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser’s account of subject formation. The second wave of psychoanalytic film theory has also had its basis in Lacan’s thought, though with a significantly different emphasis. ...
  • Resource logoScience fiction film theory and criticism from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Ritch Calvin
    • On Campus or VPN
    Call Number: Electronic resource
    ISBN: 9780199791286
    Defining science fiction is a difficult task. The origins of the term reside in the scientific fantasies of technological developments. However, science fiction can be defined as characteristics of the text (or film), as the speculation on or extrapolation from current events, or as a set of reading (or viewing) protocols. However, in common usage, the term science fiction often encompasses a wide range of concerns, including fantasy and horror.
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  • Last Updated: May 23, 2025 11:30 AM
  • URL: https://researchguides.dartmouth.edu/filmstudies
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Subjects: Film and Media Studies
Tags: Arts, box office, festivals, FILM, film aesthetics, film color, film criticism, film music, film reviews, film studies, future of media, genres, LGBTQIA+, media industry, primary resources, queer cinema, representation in film, screenwriting, streaming film services, themes, women in film

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