(Our last entry on film discussed the upcoming anniversary of Moscow’s VGIK film institute, the world’s oldest film school for film production. This entry focuses on the development of film studies, a separate, academic area of research.)

 

On Film Studies

 

Film studies, which includes such topics as film theory, film history, film and society, and film and philosophy, had its start within universities and institutes some time later than schools of production. Of course, film theorists and people interested in the history of film and its relation to society, appeared early on, sometimes as teachers and students within production schools. Others worked in separate academic disciplines. Later, serious studies of film would emerge from independent film criticism. Finally, in the 1960s and 1970s, film studies would emerge as a separate discipline within colleges and universities, most often apart from departments of film and television production.

Today, film studies can trace its origins from among early theorists such as Sergei Eisenstein, Rudolf Arnheim, and Siegfried Kracauer. Eisenstein, of course, is associated with revolutionary aesthetics and political agitation in the Soviet Union.  Arnheim was grounded in experimental psychology and interested in the issue of human physiology forming meaningful patterns of communication through mental perception. Kracauer, in turn, oriented his writings to an understanding of mass psychology and its interplay with historical memory and the fusion of both in representative images in motion pictures that reflect political and social beliefs.

From the beginning, however, film studies has suffered from limitations unknown to other disciplines in the humanities concerned with contemporary arts. There is, most significantly of all, the matter of the movies themselves. They constitute the “texts” around which film studies is organized. Most of these early texts are completely lost. For the Silent Era this is an especially widespread problem. And the origins of the problem are threefold: first, many films were, indeed, simply lost in part or whole through misplacement, neglect, natural disaster (fire), and, even, the habit of some projectionists to edit out their favorite parts of films being exhibited in movie theaters; second, films during the first half of the twentieth century were made on nitrate stock, which is not only combustible but prone to disintegrate into powder; third, the vast majority of films were simply destroyed by the movie studios themselves in order to preserve storage space and save the costs associated with storage. Meanwhile, the shift from nitrate stock to “safety stock” was not entirely effective either. For films made on safety stock, or cellulose acetate plastic, also succumb to deterioration. Referred to as “vinegar syndrome,” because deteriorating film gives off a sharp vinegar-type smell, this type of disintegration occurs when safety stock shrinks and becomes brittle. Warm and humid climates in particular engender vinegar syndrome.

A final further issue has recently made the rediscovery and preservation of old films even more difficult.   A United States law, the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998, extended the length of copyright protection for films. It effectively froze works coming into the public domain until the year 2019. For film preservationists, this meant more often than not that they could not carry out work to save disintegrating films, because copyright owners disallowed it or required rights fees.

In order to engage with these lost films/texts as much as possible, scholars of film studies usually have one of three options. The first comes from the contemporary reviews of the films when they premiered in major cities. Second, there are the memoirs and production notes of the actors and filmmakers who made the films. Third, there are the works of film historians and theorists who at one time had the opportunity to see and review these films.

Siegfried Kracauer is an excellent example of such a figure. A journalist as well as a film theorist and cultural critic, Kracauer produced works that dealt with the impact of modern technologies on the masses and how those masses responded to the displacement of traditional values. Perhaps his most widely known work is From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. It was published after World War II but addressed itself mostly to the study of German films after World War I. Beginning with the landmark German Expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Kracauer determined that there were two themes running through German society. One bent towards a politicized anarchy in the wake the German defeat of 1918. The other tendency was for a restoration of order. In Caligari, the metaphors of the fairground (anarchy) came into conflict with the institutions of authority represented by a bureaucracy manipulated by Dr. Caligary (tyranny). It was Kracauer’s thesis that this conflict eventually resolved itself in actual German society with the ascension of Hitler to power in 1933. In making his case, Kracauer worked with films, some of which were long lost, and others which he could only bring to his memory after viewing them 20 or 30 years earlier. As such, even without full acceptance of his central thesis, From Caligari to Hitler, remains a valuable resource for the description and reception of what is virtually an entire era of filmmaking in Germany.

Subsequent to the formalist emphasis of filmmakers/film theorists such as Sergei Eisenstein and the psycho-historical interpretations in the studies of Arnheim and Kracauer, a move towards film realism took place. This school centered around the writings of André Bazin, a French critic and theorist who in 1951 founded the influential film journal, Cahiers du cinéma.  Bazin believed in the primacy of narrative and that it should promote an objective reality. Accordingly, he advocated that film should eschew the montage inherent in films such as Eisenstein’s and instead use deep focus on long takes and wide shots that emphasized the mise-en-scène (a term itself which might best be described as “the meaningful arrangement of objects within the frame”). A film movement that epitomized Bazinian Realism was Italian Neorealism. And perhaps the individual director that most illustrated Bazin’s theory was Orson Welles in Citizen Kane.

Cahiers du cinéma itself fostered a new generation of film critics soon to become filmmakers in France. The most notable among this group are François Truffaut, Jean Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol.  They pursued an independent style of filmmaking that retained a highly personal style, albeit indebted to Bazinian precepts. As a result, critics associated with Cahiers du cinéma applied the term auteur (author) to such works in an effort to associate filmmaking and filmmakers with the sort of individual authorship given to novelists and poets.

It was the American film critic, Andrew Sarris, who popularized the auteur theory in the United States. He had lived in France during the 1950s and became associated with the Cahiers du cinéma critics and filmmakers. His articles and books on auteurism did more than anything else to pave the way for film studies to be included in the modern day university curriculum. Auteurism gave film an artistic legitimacy that allowed it to be treated on a similar plane with literature, allowing for explication, study of style, authorial intent, and filmic context. Thus it was no coincidence that film studies first began primarily as an offshoot of English and literature departments, although it sometimes made headway into the history departments as well.

Film studies as an individual and separate discipline began to gain ground and proliferate during the 1970s and 1980s. This was the era of Post-Bazinian film theory, in which the introduction of cultural context, anthropology, psychology, and semiotics became more dominant, displacing auteur theory. Often film became an adjunct of those wishing to apply the theories and observations of such psycho-social theorists as Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Christian Metz.

The furtherance of film studies in the 1990s brought yet another emphasis. This one on gender studies and film. Writings that gained prominence included works from Laura Mulvey, which psychoanalyzed “the gaze” in film reception, and Barbara Creed, which borrowed from the essays of Julia Kristeva, while introducing a gender centered study of horror films and their audiences. Also influential was the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who combined a Marxist approach with the psychoanalysis of Lacan.

In effect, film studies has continued to develop as not only the study of an interdisciplinary art form but an interdisciplinary approach itself to understanding filmmaking and filmmakers.