The 4 "P's" of Mise en Scene

Point of View - the perspective that the camera and director give us on a character, location, or object. Two common camera angles are the low angle (tilt-up) and the high angle (tilt down). Neither perspective is neutral nor does the implication of using such a shot help the audience construct meaning.

High angle - implies weakness, vulnerability, loss of power

Low angle - or tilt-up conveys power and authority

Posture - Posture or body language are key clues in reading a character's mood and reaction. Watch closely at the way that the character acts and reacts physically to others or the environment around them. This can give clues to how the character is dealing with inner struggles and may foreshadow upcoming events.

Example: arms and legs crossed suggest a restrained temperament, while arms out and in motion suggests a more impulsive disposition.

Props - When everyday items are shown from a privileged perspective, it serves as a message form the director "This is important; I am telling you something here!" Composing the frame to include props gives special attention to what might be overlooked in a wider context.

Position - Position refers to the placement within the frame in relationship to other elements. Examples…

Above or Below - placement of a character above or below (on a staircase or in a building) another character is a common positioning tool within a scene.

Personal Space - a tight space can make one feel claustrophobic while an open space can make one feel abandoned.

Fantasy theory and the mobile gaze

The concept of a more mobile gaze was explored by Elizabeth Cowie in her article 'Fantasia' (1984), in which she drew on Laplanche and Pontalis's influential essay of 1964, 'Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality'. Laplanche and Pontalis established three original fantasies - original in that each fantasy explains an aspect of the 'origin' of the subject. The 'primal scene pictures the origin of the individual; fantasies of seduction, the origin and upsurge of sexuality; fantasies of castration, the origin of the difference between the sexes' (1964/ 1986:19). These fantasies - entertained by the child - explain or provide answers to three crucial questions: Who am I?' 'Why do I desire?' Why am I different?' The concept of primal fantasies is also much more fluid than the notion of fantasy permitted by apparatus theory, which inevitably and mechanistically returns to the Oedipal fantasy. The primal fantasies run through the individual's waking and sleeping life, through conscious and unconscious desires. Laplanche and Pontalis also argued that fantasy is a staging of desire, a form of mise-en-scène. Further, the position of the subject is not static in that positions of sexual identification are not fixed. The subject engaged in the activity of fantasizing can adopt multiple positions, identifying across gender, time, and space.

Cowie argued that the importance of fantasy as a setting, a scene, is crucial because it enables film to be viewed as fantasy, as representing the mise-en-scene of desire. Similarly, the film spectator is free to assume mobile, shifting modes of identification- as Cowie demonstrated in her analysis of Now Voyager (USA, 1942) and The Reckless Moment (USA, 1949). Fantasy theory has also been used productively in relation to science fiction and horror-genres in which evidence of the fantastic is particularly strong.

Pamela Church Gibson, Oxford University Press, 1998

The Oedipal heroine

Drawing on Freud's theory of the libido and the female Oedipal trajectory, feminists extended Mulvey's application of the theory to argue for a bisexual gaze. Perhaps the spectator did not identify in a monolithic, rigid manner with his or her gender counterpart, but actually alternated between masculine-active and feminine-passive positions, depending on the codes of identification at work in the film text.

In a reading of Hitchcock's Rebecca (USA, 1940), Tania Modleski (1982) argued that when the daughter goes through the Oedipus complex - although she gives up her original desire for her mother, whom she blames for not giving her a penis, and turns to the father as her love object - she never fully relinquishes her first love. Freud also argued that the girl child, unlike the boy, is predisposed towards bisexuality. The girl's love for the mother, although repressed, still exists. In Rebecca the unnamed heroine experiences great difficulty in moulding herself to appeal to the man's desire. When she most imagines she has achieved this aim, the narrative reveals that she is 'still attached to the "mother", still acting out the desire for the mother's approbation' (1982: 38). Recently, the notion of the female Oedipal trajectory has been invoked in a series of articles published in Screen (1995) on Jane Campion's The Piano (New Zealand, 1993), which suggests that these debates are still of great relevance to film theory.

Other work raised related issues. In The Desire to Desire (1987), Mary Ann Doane turned her attention to the 'woman's film' and the issue of female spectatorship. Janet Bergstrom, in 'Enunciation and Sexual Difference' (1979), questioned the premise that the spectator was male, while Annette Kuhn, in The Power of the Image (1985), explored cross-dressing, bisexuality, and the spectator in relation to the film Some Like it Hot (USA, 1959).

Pamela Church Gibson, Oxford University Press, 1998

Developments in psychoanalysis, feminism, and film

Mulvey's use of psychoanalytic theory to examine the way in which the patriarchal unconscious influenced film form led to heated debates and a plethora' of articles from post-structuralist feminists. Theorists such as Joan Copjec (1982), Jacqueline Rose (1980), and Constance Penley (1985) argued that apparatus theory, regardless of whether or not it took questions of gender into account, was part of a long tradition in Western thought whereby masculinity is positioned as the norm, thus denying the possibility of a place for woman. They argued that there was no space for the discussion of female spectatorship in apparatusbased theories of the cinema. Responses to Mulvey's theory of spectatorship followed four main lines: one approach was to examine the female Oedipal trajectory; another approach, known as fantasy theory, drew on Freud's theory of the primal scene to explore the possibility of a fluid, mobile or bisexual gaze; a third concentrated on the representation of masculinity and masochism; and a fourth approach, based on Julia Kristeva's (1986) theory of the 'abject maternal figure' and on Freud's theory of castration, argued that the image of the terrifying, overpowering woman in the horror film and suspense thriller unsettles prior notions of woman as the passive object of a castrating male gaze.

Pamela Church Gibson, Oxford University Press, 1998

Psychoanalysis, feminism, and film: Mulvey

Psychoanalytic film theorists, particularly feminists, were interested in the construction of the viewer in relation to questions of gender and sexual desire. Apparatus theory did not address gender at all. In assuming that the spectator was male, Metz examined desire in the context of the male Oedipal trajectory. In 1975 Laura Mulvey published a daring essay, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', which put female spectatorship on the agenda for all time. As Mulvey later admitted, the essay was deliberately and provocatively polemical. It established the psychoanalytic basis for a feminist theory of spectatorship which is still being debated. What Mulvey did was to redefine, in terms of gender, Metz's account of the cinema as an activity of disavowal and fetishization. Drawing on Freudian theories of scopophilia, castration, and fetishism, and Lacanian theories of the formation of subjectivity, Mulvey introduced gender into apparatus theory.

In her essay, Mulvey argued that in a world ordered by sexual imbalance the role of making things happen usually fell to the male protagonist, while the female star occupied a more passive position, functioning as an erotic object for the desiring look of the male. Woman signified image, a figure to be looked at, while man controlled the look. In other words, cinematic spectatorship is divided along gender lines. The cinema addressed itself to an ideal male spectator, and pleasure in looking was split

in terms of an active male gaze and a passive female image.

               Mulvey argued that in a world ordered by sexual imbalance the role of making

               things happen usually fell to the male protagonist, while the female star occupied

               a more passive position, functioning as an erotic object for the desiring

               look of the male. Woman signified image, a figure to be looked at, while man

               controlled the look.

She argued that, although the form and figure of woman was displayed for the enjoyment of the male protagonist, and, by extension, the male spectator in the cinema, the female form was also threatening because it invoked man's unconscious anxieties about sexual difference and castration. Either the male protagonist could deal with this threat (as in the films of Hitchcock) by subjecting woman to his sadistic gaze and punishing her for being different or he could deny her difference (as in the films of Joseph von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich) and fetishize her body by overvaluing a part of her body such as her legs or breasts. The narrative endings of films, which almost always punished the threatening woman, reinforced Mulvey's argument about the voyeuristic gaze, while the deployment of the close-up shot, which almost always fragmented parts of the female form for erotic contemplation, reinforced Mulvey's argument about the fetishistic look.

Whereas Freudian and Lacanian theory argued that the castration complex was a universal formation that explained the origins and perpetuation of patriarchy, Mulvey demonstrated in specific terms how the unconscious of patriarchal society organized its own signifying practices, such as film, to reinforce myths about women and to offer the male viewer pleasure. Within this system there is no place for woman. Her difference represents - to use what was fast becoming a notorious term - 'lack'. However, Mulvey did not hold up this system as universal and unchangeable. If, in order to represent a new language of desire, the filmmaker found it necessary to destroy pleasure, then this was the price that must be paid.

What of the female spectator? In a second article, 'Afterthoughts on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" Inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946)'(1981), Mulvey took up the issue of the female spectator. Since the classic Hollywood text is so dependent upon the male Oedipal trajectory and male fantasies about woman to generate pleasure, how does the female spectator experience visual pleasure? To answer this question, Mulvey drew on Freud's theory of the libido, in which he asserted that 'there is only one libido, which performs both the masculine and feminine functions' (1981: 13). Thus, when the heroine on the screen is strong, resourceful, and phallic, it is because she has reverted to the pre-Oedipal phase. According to Freud, in the lives of some women, 'there is a repeated alternation between periods in which femininity and masculinity gain the upper hand' (quoted in Mulvey 1971: 15). Mulvey concluded that the female spectator either identifies with woman as object of the narrative and (male) gaze or may adopt a 'masculine' position. But, the female spectator's 'phantasy of masculinisation is always to some extent at cross-purposes with itself, restless in its transvestite clothes' (in Mulvey 1981: 15).

It is this aspect of her work that became most controversial amongst critics, such as D. N. Rodowick (1982), who argued that her approach was too reductive and that her analysis of the female character on the screen and female spectator in the auditorium did not allow for the possibility of female desire outside a phallocentric context. 

Pamela Church Gibson, Oxford University Press, 1998

Apparatus theory: Baudry and Metz

The notion of the cinema as an institution or apparatus is central to 1970s theory. However, it is crucial to understand that Baudry, Metz, and Mulvey did not simply mean that the cinema was like a machine. As Metz explained, 'The cinematic institution is not just the cinema industry... it is also the mental machinery - another industry - which spectators "accustomed to the cinema" have internalized historically and which has adapted them to the consumption of films' (1975/1982: 2). Thus the term 'cinematic apparatus' refers to both an industrial machine as well as a mental or psychic apparatus.

Jean-Louis Baudry was the first to draw on psychoanalytic theory to analyse the cinema as an institution. According to D. N. Rodowick, one 'cannot overestimate the impact of Baudry's work in this period' (1988: 89). Baudry's pioneering ideas were later developed by Metz, who, although critical of aspects of Baudry's theories, was in agreement with his main arguments. Baudry explored his ideas about the cinematic apparatus in two key essays. In the first, 'Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus' (1970), he argued that the cinema is ideological in that it creates an ideal, transcendental viewing subject. By this he meant that the cinema places the spectator, the 'eye-subject' (1986a: 290), at the centre of vision. Identification with the camera-projector, the seamless flow of images, narratives which restore equilibrium-all of these things give the spectator a sense of unity and control. The apparatus ensures 'the setting up of the mirror stage refers to the pre symbolic, the period when the infant is without language.

Nevertheless, Metz advocated the crucial importance of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory for the cinema and stressed the need to theorize the screen-spectator relationship- not just in the context of the Imaginary, but also in relation to the Symbolic. To address this issue, Metz introduced the notion of voyeurism. He argued that the viewing process is voyeuristic in that there is always a distance maintained, in the cinema, between the viewing subject and its object. The cinematic scene cannot return the spectator's gaze. Metz also introduced a further notion which became the subtitle of his book: the imaginary signifier. The cinema, he argued, makes present what is absent. The screen might offer images that suggest completeness, but this is purely imaginary. Because the spectator is aware that the offer of unity is only imaginary, he is forced to deal with a sense of lack that is an inescapable part of the viewing process.

Metz drew an analogy between this process and the experience of the (male) child in the mirror phase. (Metz assumes the spectator is male.) When the boy looks in the mirror and identifies for the first time with himself as a unified being he is also made aware of his difference from the mother. She lacks the penis he once thought she possessed. Entry into the Symbolic also involves repression of desire for the mother and the constitution of the unconscious in response to that repression. (Here, Lacan reworks Freud's theories of the phallus and castration.) Along with repression of desire for the mother comes the birth of desire: for the speaking subject now begins a lifelong search for the lost object - the other, the little 'o' of the Imaginary, the mother he relinquished in order to acquire a social identity.

As the child enters the Symbolic it acquires language. However, it must also succumb to the 'law of the father' (the laws of society) which governs the Symbolic order. Entry into the Symbolic is entry into law, language, and loss - concepts which are inextricably bound together. Thus, entry into the Symbolic entails an awareness of sexual difference and of the 'self' as fragmented. The very concept of 'I' entails lack and loss. 

When the boy mistakenly imagines his mother (sisters, woman) is castrated, his immediate response is to disavow what he has seen; he thinks she has been castrated, but he simultaneously knows that this is not true. Two courses of action are open to the boy. He can accept her difference and repress his desire for unification with the mother on the understanding that one day he will inherit a woman of his own. He can refuse to accept her difference and continue to believe that the mother is phallic. Rather than think of her lack, the fetishist will conjure up a reassuring image of another part of her body such as her breasts or her legs. He will also phallicize her body, imagining it in conjunction with phallic images such as long spiky high heels. Hence, film theorists have drawn on the theory of the phallic woman to explain the femme fatale of film noir (Double Indemnity, USA, 1944; Body Heat, USA, 1981; The Last Seduction, USA, 1994), who is depicted as dangerously phallic. E. Anne Kaplan's edited collection Women in Film Noir (1978) proved extremely influential in this context.

The Oedipal trajectory, Metz argued, is re-enacted in the cinema in relation not only to the Oedipal nature of narrative, but, most importantly, within the spectator screen relationship. Narrative is characteristically Oedipal in that it almost always contains a male protagonist who, after resolving a crisis and overcoming a 'lack', then comes to identify with the law of the father, while successfully containing or controlling the female figure, demystifying her threat, or achieving union with her. The concept of 'lack' is crucial to narrative in another context. According to the Russian Formalist Tzvetan Todorov, the aim of all narratives is to solve a riddle, to find an answer to an enigma, to fill a lack. All stories begin with a situation in which the status quo is upset and the hero or heroine must - in general terms - solve a problem in order for equilibrium to be restored. This approach sees the structures of narrative as being in the service of the subject's desire to overcome lack.

Pamela Church Gibson, Oxford University Press, 1998

1970s psychoanalytic theory and after

One of the major differences between pre- and post-1970s psychoanalytic theory was that the latter saw the cinema as an institution or an apparatus. Whereas early approaches, such as those of Tarratt, concentrated on the film text in relation to its hidden or repressed meanings, 1970s theory, as formulated by Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, and Laura Mulvey, emphasized the crucial importance of the cinema as an apparatus and as a signifying practice of ideology, the viewer-screen relationship, and the way in which the viewer was 'constructed' as transcendental during the spectatorial process.

Psychoanalytic film theory from the 1970s to the 1990s has travelled in at least four different, but related, directions. These should not be seen as linear progressions as they frequently overlap: The first stage was influenced by apparatus theory as proposed by Baudry and Metz. In an attempt to avoid the totalizing imperative of the structuralist approach, they drew on psychoanalysis as a way of widening their theoretical base. The second development was instituted by the feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, who contested aspects of the work of Baudry and Metz by rebutting the naturalization

of the filmic protagonist as an Oedipal hero, and the view of the screen-spectator relationship as a one-way process. The third stage involved a number of feminist responses to Mulvey's work. These did not all follow the same direction. In general, they included critical studies of the female Oedipal trajectory, masculinity and masochism, fantasy theory and spectatorship, and woman as active, sadistic monster. The fourth stage involves theorists who use psychoanalytic theory in conjunction with other critical approaches to the cinema as in post-colonial theory, queer theory, and body theory.

Pamela Church Gibson, Oxford University Press, 1998

Pre-1970s psychoanalytic film theory

One of the first artistic movements to draw on psychoanalysis was the Surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s. In their quest for new modes of experience that transgressed the boundaries between dream and reality, the Surrealists extolled the potential of the cinema. They were deeply influenced by Freud's theory of dreams and his concept of the unconscious. To them, the cinema, with its special techniques such as the dissolve, superimposition, and slow motion, correspond to the nature of dreaming.

André Breton, the founder of the movement, saw cinema as a way of entering the marvellous, that realm of love and liberation. Recent studies by writers such as Hal Foster (1993) argue that Surrealism was also bound up with darker forces - explicated by Freud - such as the death drive, the compulsion to repeat, and the uncanny. Certainly, the films of the greatest exponent of cinematic Surrealism, Luis Buñuel (Un chien andalou, France, 1928; The Exterminating Angel, Mexico, 1962; and That Obscure Object of Desire, France, 1977), explore the unconscious from this perspective. Not all theorists used Freud. Others drew on the ideas of Carl Gustav Jung, and particularly his theory of archetypes, to understand film. The archetype is an idea or image that has been central to human existence and inherited psychically from the species by the individual. Archetypes include: the shadow or the underside of consciousness; the anima, that is the feminine aspect in men; and the animus, orthe masculine aspect in women. But generally, Jungian theory has never been widely applied to the cinema. Apart from Clark Branson's Howard Hawks: A Jungian Study (1987) and

John Izod's The Films of Nicolas Roeg: Myth and Mind (1992), critical works consist mainly of articles, by authors such as Albert Benderson (1979), Royal S. Brown (1980), and Don Fredericksen (1980), which analyse archetypes in the film text. Writers of the 1970s who turned to Freud and Lacan - the two most influential psychoanalysts - were critical, however, of what they perceived to be an underlying essentialism in Jungian theory, that is a tendency to explain subjectivity in unchanging, universal terms.

Many of Freud's theories have been used in film theory: the unconscious; the return of the repressed; Oedipal drama; narcissism; castration; and hysteria. Possibly his most important contributions were his accounts of the unconscious, subjectivity, and sexuality. According to Freud, large parts of human thought remain unconscious; that is, the subject does not know about the content of certain troubling ideas and often much effort is needed to make them conscious. Undesirable thoughts will be repressed or kept from consciousness by the ego under the command of the super-ego, or conscience. In Freud's 4ew, repression is the key to understanding the neuroses. Repressed thoughts can manifest themselves in dreams, nightmares, slips of the tongue, and forms of artistic activity. These ideas have also influenced film study and some psychoanalytic critics explore the 'unconscious' of the film text - referred to as the 'subtext' - analysing it for repressed contents, perverse utterances, and evidence of the workings of desire.

Freud's notion of the formation of subjectivity is more complex. Two concepts are central: division and sexuality. The infantile ego is a divided entity. The ego refers to the child's sense of self; however, because the child, in its narcissistic phase, also takes itself, invests in itself, as the object of its own libidinal drives, the ego is both subject and object. The narcissistic ego is formed in its relationship to others. One of the earliest works influenced by Freud's theory of the double was Otto's Rank's 1925 classic The Double which was directly influenced by a famous movie of the day, The Student of Prague (Germany, 1913). In his later rewriting of Freud, Lacan took Freud's notion of the divided self as the basis of his theory of the formation of subjectivity in the mirror phase (see below), which was to exert a profound influence on film theory in the 1970s.

Sexuality becomes crucial during the child's Oedipus complex. Initially, the child exists in a two-way, or dyadic, relationship with the mother. But eventually, the child must leave the maternal haven and enter the domain of law and language. As a result of the appearance of a third figure - the father - in the child's life, the child gives up its love-desire for the mother. The dyadic relationship becomes triadic. This is the moment of the Oedipal crisis. The boy represses his feelings for the mother because he fears the father will punish him, possibly even castrate him - that is, make him like his

mother, whom he now realizes is not phallic. Prior to this moment the boy imagined the mother was just like himself. On the understanding that one day he will inherit a woman of his own, the boy represses his desire for the mother. This is what Freud describes as the moment of 'primal repression'; it ushers in the formation of the unconscious. The girl gives up her love for the mother, not because she fears castration (she has nothing to lose) but because she blames the mother for not giving her a penis-phallus. She realizes that only those who possess the phallus have power. Henceforth, she transfers her love to her father, and later to the man she will marry. But, as with the boy, her repressed desire can, at any time, surface, bringing with it a problematic relationship with the mother. The individual who is unable to come to terms with his or her proper gender role (activity for boys, passivity for girls) may become an hysteric; that is, repressed desires will manifest themselves as bodily or mental symptoms such as paralysis or amnesia. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (USA, 1960) and Marnie (USA, 1964) present powerful examples of what might happen to the boy and girl respectively if they fail to resolve the Oedipus complex.

Freud's theories were discussed most systematically in relation to the cinema after the post structuralist revolution in theory during the 1970s. In particulars writers applied the Oedipal trajectory to the narrative structures of classical film texts. They pointed to the fact that all narratives appeared to exhibit an Oedipal trajectory; that is, the (male) hero was confronted with a crisis in which he had to assert himself over another man (often a father figure) in order to achieve social recognition and win the woman. In this way, film was seen to represent the workings of patriarchal ideology. In an early two-part article, 'Monsters from the ID' (1970, 1971), which pre-dates the influences of poststructuralist criticism, Margaret Tarratt analysed the science fiction film. She argued that previous writers, apart from French critics, all view science fiction films as 'reflections of society's anxiety about its increasing technological prowess and its responsibility to control the gigantic forces of destruction it possesses' (Tarratt 1970: 38). Her aim was to demonstrate that the genre was 'deeply involved with concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis and seen in many cases to derive their structure from it' (38). In particular, science fiction explores the individual's repressed sexual desires, viewed as incompatible with civilized morality. Utilizing Freud's argument that whatever is repressed will return, Tarratt discusses Oedipal desire, castration anxiety, and violent sadistic male desire.

Source: Pamela Church Gibson, Oxford University Press, 1998

Film and psychoanalysis

Barbara Creed

Psychoanalysis and the cinema were born at the end of the nineteenth century. They share a common historical, social, and cultural background shaped by the forces of modernity. Theorists commonly explore how psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the importance of desire in the life of the individual, has influenced the cinema. But the reverse is also true-the cinema may well have influenced psychoanalysis. Not only did Freud draw on cinematic terms to describe his theories, as in 'screen memories', but a number of his key ideas were developed in visual terms-particularly the theory of castration, which is dependent upon the shock registered by a close-up image of the female genitals. Further, as Freud (who loved Sherlock Holmes) was aware, his case histories unfold very much like popular mystery novels of the kind that were also adopted by the cinema from its inception.

The history of psychoanalytic film criticism is extremely complex-partly because it is long and uneven, partly because the theories are difficult, and partly because the evolution of psychoanalytic film theory after the 1970s cannot be understood without recourse to developments in separate, but related areas, such as Althusser's theory of ideology, semiotics, and feminist film theory. In the 1970s psychoanalysis became the key discipline called upon to explain a series of diverse concepts, from the way the cinema functioned as an apparatus to the nature of the screenspectator relationship.

Despite a critical reaction against psychoanalysis, in some quarters, in the 1980s and 1990s, it exerted such a profound influence that the nature and direction of film theory and criticism has been changed in irrevocable and fundamental ways.

Source: Pamela Church Gibson, Oxford University Press, 1998

The Basics of (Film) Aesthetics

In the mission statement of this blog, I indicated that I would be approaching the field of film criticism from the perspective of a particular school of aesthetics – Romantic Realism. But, in order to establish what is meant by “Romantic Realism”, to explain its principles, and to apply its methods of analysis, there is a little background work that must be done first. There is a hierarchy to the field of philosophy, and we can’t begin discussing Romantic Realism without first discussing aesthetics as a whole, particularly in the context of film. This is the purpose of my first post on aesthetics – to define precisely what is meant by that concept, and to provide a foundation on which we can build more nuanced ideas.

The first question that we will ask is, “what is aesthetics”? Aesthetics is a fancy word for, “The philosophy of art” and seeks to answer the questions pertaining to the definition of art, its role in man’s life, and by what standards works of art can be judged (if any). Different schools of aesthetics have different answers to these questions, and we will not delve into those at this primordial stage of our discussion, except to say that it is important to realize that a certain aesthetic perspective does not arise from a philosophical vacuum, but instead follows from more fundamental philosophical views. Hence, aesthetics is often related and dependent on other important ideas, which leads to these different perspectives on art, itself. These relationships can be very fun to explore, and may be the subject of future aesthetic posts.

While multiple schools of aesthetic thought exist, there are common concepts throughout the field that are fundamental. In all of art, whether a painting, poem, symphony or film, there are two fundamental aspects of a particular work that we can identify: what is shown, and how the artist shows it. The “what” is referred to as the “subject” and the “how” is known as the “style”. The forms on the painting, words of the poem, notes of the symphony, and what appears on screen in a film are the subject, respectively. No matter how definite or abstract, a piece of art must provide us with something to experience at the sensory level, and that which we experience is the subject. Distinct from the subject is the piece’s style, which comprises the many methods used by the artist to show us the subject. Obviously, a piece’s style is largely determined by its medium, and particular forms of art will be associated with particular styles. But, within particular media, there exist myriad stylistic choices which seek to have an effect on the audience and show the subject in a specific way. It is the harmony and interplay between subject and the style which produces the characteristics of a piece of art which generate passionate responses from an audience. The expertise of an artist is to unify a stylistic choice with the subject he wishes to portray and effect a unique message or statement.

Since this is a blog focused on the moving pictures, it is critical to enumerate the specific concepts in film used to generate both subject and style (although not exhaustively, obviously). In film, the subject is created through use of story-telling concepts like plot, characterization, and theme. Plot, as defined by Ayn Rand, is “a purposeful progression of logically connected events leading to the resolution of a climax.” (Basic Principles of Literature, The Romantic Manifesto, p82) Characterization involves the process of creating and displaying characters in the story – introducing us to the people who are important to the story and plot and showing us how they react to the events around them. And, finally, the theme of a work is its overall goal or focus; it deals with not what the film shows or how it shows it, but instead what it means to say – what its purpose is.

The style of a particular film is a little more difficult to sum up in such succinct terms, if only because while the concepts involved in generating a subject are fairly broad and limited, those detailing the style of a film are quite specific and numerous. Elements of a film’s style include, but are not limited to: cinematography (which has many sub-parts such as composition, aspect ratio, camera movement, black and white vs. color, etc), acting choices, direction, use of voice-over, method of story-telling and even the particular choices made in editing the film. Critically, it is the interaction between a film’s subject and style which provides us means for informed analysis.

Superficial analysis of a film often leads much to be desired, and while there is some value and merit to merely providing one’s opinion on the worth of film, a proper understanding of subject and style provides us a more objective approach to analysis. This process entails first identifying the subject of a film, especially its theme, and then analyzing how the particular aspects of style are used to express that subject. As a simple example, we could take Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and his choice to shoot the film in black-and-white instead of color. In terms of the subject of this film, there is clearly much to say, but it will suffice to identify that the plot deals with Nazi concentration camps, many characters in the story are subjugated, and the theme directly pertains to the response of the human spirit in times of great horror and adversity. Given this subject, Spielberg’s decision to show his world in black-and-white has two effects relating to the subject: it creates a bleak, joyless world (the director himself has noted that he sees color as a symbol of happiness), and also establishes a stark contrast between the corrupt and the virtuous characters in the film. Hence, we see that a single stylistic choice portrays aspects of plot, characterization, and theme – and very effectively.

Films that are able to accomplish artistic feats such as these are deserving of our praise and admiration for uniquely utilizing the tools of its medium (style) to tell a compelling, important story (subject). When we analyze a film, it is important for us to look beyond whether or not we enjoyed it, and instead attempt to appreciate its artistic merits, and determine why it elicits that particular response. And, it is absolutely critical to realize that those are two distinct concepts: one may evaluate a film as “great” while simultaneously contending, “I didn’t really like it”. It is the focus of this blog to remark on each idea by providing both well-reasoned arguments and impassioned opinions on films.

Source: wiki, google

Mise-en-scène

The arrangement of everything that appears in the framing – actors, lighting, décor, props, and costume – is called mise-en-scène, a French term that means “placing on stage.” The frame and camerawork are also considered part of the mise-en-scène of a movie. In cinema, placing on the stage really means placing on the screen, and the director is in charge of deciding what goes where, when, and how.David  A. Cook, in his book A History of Narrative Film , points out how a mise-en-scène is formed by all the elements that appear “within the shot itself, as opposed to the effects created by cutting.” In other words, if it’s on the screen and if it’s a physical object recorded by the camera, then it’s part of the mise-en-scène.

From the craftsmen who build bookcases to the cinematographer who chooses where the lights will go, the mise-en-scène is the result of the collaboration of many professionals. Thus in the production environment, the director is more specific with his requests and orders. Is he talking to the prop master, the set designer, the actors, the make-up artists? All of them are part of different departments. But all of them, in the end, have influence in the mise-en-scène.

In the academic realm, the term mise-en-scène is often used when the overall look and feel of a movie is under discussion. Students taking Film Analysis courses should be quite familiar with the term.

Even though many professionals are involved in its creation, the director is the one who oversees the entire mise-en-scène and all of its elements. Not just that, but during the early stages of pre-production, the director or his AD sits down with set designers, prop masters, location managers, costume designers, and scenic artists to determine the look and feel intended.

In some instances, the mise-en- scène is designed to evoke emotions that permeate the whole movie. For example in the German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), distorted shapes and claustrophobic scenery are implemented to disturb the audience and enhance the horror.

Mike Nichols’  The Graduate  (1967) has been praised by its amazing, colorful, and multi-layered visual design. For this reason, the following segments will shed light on many scenes from The Graduate but also from other pictures.

Set Design

The set design refers to the decor of the the set, or how it’s dressed, comprising mainly of the furniture, props, and the set itself. Instead of just placing objects here and there, the director must be savvy to fathom how these elements may bear significance in a deeper level, while also emphasizing themes, creating meanings, and provoking thoughts.

To illustrate: an early scene from The Graduate (1967) opens with a close-up of Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) alone on his bed. Behind him is a fish tank, which symbolically represents Ben’s entrapment in a life that he doesn’t want. Later in the movie, Ben finds himself at the bottom of a swimming pool, thus further elaborating on that concept.

The Production Designer is the professional responsible for building and dressing the set. She works with the Art Director, the Set Designer, and the Prop Master to create and add these physical elements to the filmic space. The Production Designer reports to the Director, and together they conceptualize the look of the film well before cameras start rolling.

In Rear Window  (1954), an enlarged photograph placed in the living room offers exposition on the accident that made L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart) handicap:

Lighting

Unarguably one of the film elements that has the greatest power to evoke emotions, lighting must be manipulated by the director to accommodate his or her desires for the movie. In broad terms, the two types of lighting approaches are: low-key lighting and high-key lighting.

High-key lighting is often seen in romantic comedies and musicals, encompassing an even lighting pattern and avoiding dark areas in the frame. Everything looks bright with little to no shadow at all. High-key lighting has little dramatic effect itself.

Low-key lighting is often seen in horror movies and thrillers, comprising of a lighting pattern that has both bright and dark areas in the frame. The chiaroscuro (Italian: bright-dark) technique, long used by painters, is characterized by strong contrast, often employed to unnerve the audience.

Note that this terminology is counter-intuitive as low-key lighting is high contrast and high-key lighting is low contrast.

Costume

The obvious purpose of costuming is to dress an actor according to his character. Lawyers wear suits, nurses wear scrubs, and a drifter could wear worn out shoes, ragged shirt, and baggy pants.

But, more than that, costuming can also be used to establish someone’s hierarchic level. Regimentals, for instance, bear the status of the person who wears it. And even the color may distinguish an enemy from a friend. In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly  (1966), a comic situation arises when Blondie (Clint Eastwood) heads toward the enemy cavalry that was covered in dust. When the enemy general dusts off his sleeve, his apparently gray uniform turns blue, making it obvious that our beloved protagonist was going into the shark’s mouth.

Costuming may also be used to emphasize a theme. In the first scene at the Taft Hotel in The Graduate, Mrs. Robinson wears a fur coat that makes her look like a predator hunting for her prey. Her coat bears a pattern that resembles the fur of a cheetah. Or could it be a cougar?

Location

In Witness  (1985), on the day after rejecting Rachel’s (Kelly McGillis) seduction, John Book (Harrison Ford) explains to her why nothing could have happened between them the night before. Quite conveniently, the confrontation takes place in a barn, while Rachel is collecting eggs. The location emphasizes Rachel’s responsibilities as a woman. If they had made love and Rachel gotten pregnant, she would have to carry the baby and eventually give birth. Also, during the conversation, John stands outside the barn, thus being physically separated from Rachel by the barn’s door. In this case, the door functions as a metaphor of the social and cultural barriers that keeps them a part.

The final confrontation in The Graduate takes place in a church. Ben tries to prevent Elaine (Katherine Ross) from getting married, but he arrives too late. Nonetheless, when Elaine sees him, she sprints to him, and they run away. When the couple is cornered by infuriated parents and relatives, Ben starts swinging a cross to avoid them. As they exit, Ben uses the cross to hold the church’s doors shut.

The prop (cross) and location (church) offer a comment on religious institutions, perhaps implying that Elaine’s parents are trapped by traditional believes and practices.

For the Future Directors, With Love

As you know, the director on a set has final word on all the creative elements, which means many of your crew members will stop you and ask for approval on this or that: Is the blond wig okay? Can we shoot on top of the building? Can we place the sofa under the window? Where’s is the restroom?

Some of these questions may or may not be the questions you are willing to answer at the time, but remember: everyone is just doing their job. The important thing is to not get overwhelmed and snap at your crew. They are all there for you, working on your film.

If you are on an well-oiled set, your Assistant Director (AD) will be the last barrier before people get to you. He or she will try to answer as many questions for you as they can. And if your AD doesn’t know the answer, at least he or she will be able to prioritize and let you know what needs immediate attention.

Source wiki, google

Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture

By Douglas Kellner

Radio, television, film, and the other products of media culture provide materials out of which we forge our very identities; our sense of selfhood; our notion of what it means to be male or female; our sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of sexuality; and of "us" and "them." Media images help shape our view of the world and our deepest values: what we consider good or bad, positive or negative, moral or evil. Media stories provide the symbols, myths, and resources through which we constitute a common culture and through the appropriation of which we insert ourselves into this culture. Media spectacles demonstrate who has power and who is powerless, who is allowed to exercise force and violence, and who is not. They dramatize and legitimate the power of the forces that be and show the powerless that they must stay in their places or be oppressed.

We are immersed from cradle to grave in a media and consumer society and thus it is important to learn how to understand, interpret, and criticize its meanings and messages. The media are a profound and often misperceived source of cultural pedagogy: They contribute to educating us how to behave and what to think, feel, believe, fear, and desire -- and what not to. The media are forms of pedagogy which teach us how to be men and women. They show us how to dress, look and consume; how to react to members of different social groups; how to be popular and successful and how to avoid failure; and how to conform to the dominant system of norms, values, practices, and institutions. Consequently, the gaining of critical media literacy is an important resource for individuals and citizens in learning how to cope with a seductive cultural environment. Learning how to read, criticize, and resist socio-cultural manipulation can help empower oneself in relation to dominant forms of media and culture. It can enhance individual sovereignty vis-a-vis media culture and give people more power over their cultural environment.

Components of a Critical Cultural Studies

At its strongest, cultural studies contains a three-fold project of analyzing the production and political economy of culture, cultural texts, and the audience reception of those texts and their effects. This comprehensive approach avoids too narrowly focusing on one dimension of the project to the exclusion of others. To avoid such limitations, I would thus propose a multi-perspectival approach that (a) discusses production and political economy, (b) engages in textual analysis, and (c) studies the reception and use of cultural texts. [3]

Production and Political Economy

Because it has been neglected in many modes of recent cultural studies, it is important to stress the importance of analyzing cultural texts within their system of production and distribution, often referred to as the political economy of culture. [4] Inserting texts into the system of culture within which they are produced and distributed can help elucidate features and effects of the texts that textual analysis alone might miss or downplay. Rather than being antithetical approaches to culture, political economy can actually contribute to textual analysis and critique. The system of production often determines what sort of artifacts will be produced, what structural limits there will be as to what can and cannot be said and shown, and what sort of audience effects the text may generate. 

Study of the codes of television, film, or popular music, for instance, is enhanced by studying the formulas and conventions of production. These cultural forms are structured by well-defined rules and conventions, and the study of the production of culture can help elucidate the codes actually in play. Because of the demands of the format of radio or music television, for instance, most popular songs are three to five minutes, fitting into the format of the distribution system. Because of their control by giant corporations oriented primarily toward profit, film and television production in the U.S. is dominated by specific genres such as talk and game shows, soap operas, situation comedies, action/adventure series, reality TV, and so on. This economic factor explains why there are cycles of certain genres and subgenres, sequelmania in the film industry, crossovers of popular films into television series, and a certain homogeneity in products constituted within systems of production marked by rigid generic codes, formulaic conventions, and well-defined ideological boundaries.

For more

https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/SAGEcs.htm

New Formalism or Neo-formalism

New Formalism, or Neo-formalism, was a late-twentieth century development in American poetry that sought to draw fresh attention to traditional forms of verse in terms of meter, rhyme, and stanzaic symmetry. Disheartened both by the overwhelming popularity of free verse during the Cold War and by the notion that metrical patterns were somehow antithetical to organic truth, New Formalist poets and their advocates rallied behind the traditions, aesthetics, and practices they believed had been all but abandoned by many of their contemporaries.

Though poets like Anthony Hecht, Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur, and Mona Van Duyn had continued to explore the possibilities of form during the 1960s and ’70s, they had been schooled by New Critics, including Yvor Winters, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate, who had been outspoken in defense of formalist verse all along. The poets who considered themselves New Formalists in the ’80s and ’90s were drawn to form in response to the free verse standard that was handed to them.

New Formalism’s most noted poets include Charles Martin, Brad Leithauser, Timothy Steele, Molly Peacock, Phillis Levin, Marilyn Hacker, Mark Jarman, and Dana Gioia, among others.

In the preface to the anthology Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism (1996), editors Jarman and David Mason wrote, “It is no surprise that the most significant development in recent American poetry has been a resurgence of meter and rhyme, as well as narrative, among large numbers of young poets, after a period when these essential elements of verse had been suppressed.” Critics of the movement decried neo-formalists for privileging metrical artifice and (sometimes) stylized speech over otherwise more ambitious, visionary, and free forms. Some have gone so far as to call New Formalism patriarchal. Still, others make the case that free verse is no more or less a form than traditional (metrical, rhythmical) verse.

For further reading, consult Gioia’s “Notes on the New Formalism” (Hudson Review, 1987) or his book of essays, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture. Noteworthy criticism of the movement includes Ira Sadoff’s, “Neo-Formalism: A Dangerous Nostalgia," originally published in American Poetry Review in 1990.

Formalist Theory

Very loosely, formalists are those who regard cinema as predominantly a manipulative medium. Out of inchoate reality the filmmaker needs to shape the material into a clearly cinematic form, and it is this shaping that allows film to be an art. Here are a few formalist statements to ground us. Bela Belázs says, for example, in The Theory of the Film, that “in order that out of the empirical fog of reality the truth…may emerge…such a maker must bring into play every means of expression available to the art of the film.” Sergei Eisenstein, meanwhile, believed, in The Film Sense, “that a work of art, understood dynamically, is just this process of arranging images in the feelings and mind of the spectator.” Another formalist critic, Rudolf Arnheim in Film as Art, mentions a scene from The Battleship Potemkin, showing “a stone lion rearing up and roaring. The scene is made from shots of three different statues of lions. First statue – a lion roaring. Second statue – a lion rising. Third statue – a lion standing with his jaws open to roar. The way the stone comes to life by the help of editing is remarkable.”

All emphasise the degree to which a film needs to be made, even though some formalists were more inclined to play down formal self-consciousness for the importance of the story to hand; others play it up. “In a good film every shot must be contributory to the action”, Arnheim believed, and went on to give an example where this wasn’t the case: where a filmmaker switches from two people in conversation taken at head height, before inexplicably switching to an overhead shot of the two characters. Meanwhile, though both V. I. Pudovkin and Eisenstein may have been Russian Formalists they disagreed on certain key points. Where Eisenstein saw cinema as dynamic and believed in Kino Fist – in a collision of images that would revolutionise the spectator; for Pudovkin, in Film Technique and Film Acting, the work of the film director was first and foremost narrative involvement: “the process of analysis, the dissection into elements, forms equally only a point of departure, that has to be followed by the assemblage of the whole from the discovered parts.” This is evident in an early fight scene in Pudovkin’s Mother, where he adds to the tension by utilising numerous close ups not just of faces, but also hands and objects, but very much for the purpose of telling the story dramatically. The degree to which the filmmaker should manipulate reality depends then on the particular theorist, but none of them would have concurred with that most famous exponent of realism, André Bazin, when he said, in an article in What is Cinema? vol II, “There is nothing aesthetically retrogressive about simple cinematographic recording, on the contrary, there is progress in expression, a triumphant evolution of the language of cinema, an extension of its stylistics.”

That said, more recent formalists, like Noel Bürch, Paul Schrader, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, have drawn on Bazin to explain and explore their own interests. Schrader for example in, Transcendental Style in Film, was undeniably sympathetic to Bazin’s theological concerns, while in Figures Traced in Light, Bordwell explores the use of the long take through cinema history, a central tenet of Bazinian realism. This was however for different ends. If Bazin played up the openness of the form; Bordwell believes that “before directors wish to convey ideas or moods, evoke emotions or themes, transmit ideologies or cultural values, they must take care of some mundane business.” This mundane business is, he says in an article called ‘On Staging in Depth’, to “make their images intelligible”; in carefully directing the viewer’s attention.

What we want to look at today is the way formalist ideas can help make sense of the films under discussion, and also show how divergent formalism can be. Hiroshima mon amour was a film that signalled many of the editing innovations of the sixties, an editing schema that wanted to manipulate not on the basis of generating ideological certitude (as Eisenstein and even Pudovkin desired), but a certain perceptual confusion. After Resnais’ film came a series of works using montage in a relatively new way. Certainly there were earlier films interested in editing and subjectivity, from Germaine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet in the twenties, to Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon in the forties, but Resnais deeply problematized subjectivity in films like Last Year at Marienbad, Muriel and Je t’aime, Je t’aime. Then there were numerous filmmakers who were influenced by Resnais’ style – including Joseph (Accident) Losey, John Boorman with Point Blank, and most especially Nic Roeg in Performance, The Man Who Fell to Earth and Bad Timing. This was an editing schema turning inside out the preoccupations of the early montage filmmakers who tended to undermine subjectivity.

For example, what interested Eisenstein were the masses, and he liked nothing better than ‘typage’, as we notice in Strike and The Battleship Potemkin for example. As James Monaco in How to Read a Film makes clear “…actors were to be cast not for their individual qualities but for the “types” they represented” In montage oriented films the opposite is the case, as Hiroshima mon amour, Accident, Bad Timing and even Point Blank are interested in how to capture somebody’s world from an intimate place. We can see this clearly in Hiroshima mon amour, where the flashbacks very much serve the central character’s thoughts and feelings. In one scene she starts to talk about her past to her Japanese lover, and Resnais moves steadily and sensitively into her personal history.

Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Resnais, Roeg etc. were all, if you like, montage formalists, directors who made their work formally innovative first and foremost through editing. But we can also talk of mise-en-scene formalists, directors who work with elaborate long takes, like Miklos Jancso, Theo Angelopoulos and Bela Tarr. In Jancso’s The Round-Up and Red Psalm, in Angeloupolos’ Ulysses’ Gaze, Eternity and a Day and The Weeping Meadow, Bela Tarr’s Damnation, Satantango and Werckmeister Harmonies, the filmmaker manipulates through elaborate blocking, as the camera moves around the cinematic space to create an elaborate weave that mesmerises the viewer. In each instance we feel the weight of the cut. Such an approach gives back to the word cutting its sensuous dimension. This is the long take not necessarily to reveal reality better, as Bazin proposed; more to play up the nature of film form, even to suggest links to painting over reality. This is clearly evident in the scene where the villagers evacuate their flooded houses in Angelopoulos’s The Weeping Meadow, and it is present in the opening scene in Satantango, where a lateral track shows us a farm and animals in such a way that it dissolves as an establishing shot of an actual space, and takes on the features of abstraction as Tarr gives us a strong sense of the texture of the image in relation to what it shows us.  As Bordwell says in Figures Traced in Light: “in Angelopoulos the momentum of storytelling is invariably dissipated by dedramatization…” It is often in this dedramatization that the painterly comes through.

For more

http://tonymckibbin.com/course-notes/formalist-theory

Film Semiotics

Film semiotics is the semiotics of film; the study of signs as they pertain to film on a variety of levels. Semiotic theory focuses on the social and cultural meaning of signs and codes (Scholes, 1982; 1985). Signs consist of an image, a word, an object or even a certain type of practice. The meaning of signs depends on the relationships between the signifier (the image, word, object, or practice), the signified (the implied meaning), and the referent (what the image, word, object, or practice refers to) (Scholes, 1982). A yellow yield sign is a signifier that conveys the meaning — the signified, to yield to other cars. The referent is the actions referred to, in this case, yielding to other cars. People learn that the colors red and green as signifiers have certain signified meanings — stop and go, with the referent being stopping and starting a car on the street based on a set of cultural codes and conventions (Peim, 1993).

Concepts

Denotation and Connotation

Film communicates meaning denotatively and connotatively. What the audience sees and hears is denotative, it is what it is and they don’t have to strive to recognize it. At the same time these sounds and images are connotative and the way the scene is shot is meant to evoke certain feelings from the viewer. Connotation typically involves emotional overtones, objective interpretation, social values, and ideological assumptions. According to Christian Metz, “The study of connotation brings us closer to the notion of the cinema as an art (the “seventh art”).”  Within connotations, paradigmatic connotations exist, which would be a shot that is being compared with its unrealized companions in the paradigm. A low angle shot of a rose conveys a sense that the flower is somehow dominant or overpowering because we unconsciously compare it with an overhead shot of a rose which would diminish its importance. Syntagmatic connotation would not compare the rose shot to other potential shots but compare it with actual shots that precede or follow it. The meaning adheres to it because its compared to other shots we actually see. 

Narrative

Narrative is generally known as having two components; the story presented and the process of telling it, or narration, often referred to as narrative discourse. Film narrative theory seeks to uncover the apparently “motivated” and “natural” relationship between the signifier and the story-world in order to reveal the deeper system of cultural associations and relationships that are expressed through narrative form. As Roland Barthes has said, “narrative may be transmitted through oral or written language; through static or moving images, through gestures and through an organized mixture of all these substances. There is narrative in myth, legend, fables, fairytales, novellas, novels, history, novel, epos, tragedy, drama, comedy, pantomime, pictures, comics, events and conversation. In these unlimited forms, narrative exists at all times, in all corners of the earth, in all societies. Narrative begins with the history of mankind.” Films use a combination of dialog, sounds, visual images, gestures and actions to create the narrative. Narrators, usually in a voice-over format, are very popular in documentary film and greatly assist in telling the story while accompanying powerful shots.

Tropes

Metonymy refers to the ability of a sign to represent something entirely, while literally only being a part of it. An example of this is the Eiffel Tower, which is a metonym for Paris. Film uses metonyms frequently because they rely on the external to reveal the internal. Another powerful semiotic tool for filmmaking is the use of metaphors, which are defined as a comparison between two things that are unrelated but share some common characteristics. In film, a pair of consecutive shots is metaphorical when there is an implied comparison of the two shots. For instance, a shot of an airplane followed by a shot of a bird flying would be metaphorical, implying that the airplane is (or is like) a bird.

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~rbeach/teachingmedia/module4/4.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_semiotics

Semiotic Analysis

The study of these signs, codes and conventions in movies is called semiotics. Semiotic analysis is a way to explain how we make meaning from codes – all meaning is encoded in that which creates the meaning. No object or word goes without a meaning – we cannot read or see something without associating it to a certain idea – the meaning. In our youths, we have all been taught how to decode what we see, read and hear, we have all learned to decode meaning.

However, what we should realize is that the decoded meaning is not our own idea, but somebody else’s. For example. If you read the word “failure”, you decode it by relating it to the value your culture adheres to the concept of failure and its antonym – success. Although it’s not said we cannot create meaning on our own, 99% percent of the time, the meaning comes from some pre-established (cultural) idea. For instance, the colour red simply denotes a colour, but in a certain context it can connote emotion, like anger, or love. These codes are often used in media to reinforce, subtly, the way audiences should think about certain things or how they should behave. These are a culture’s dominant ideologies. For instance, a long-standing cultural ideology is that diamonds (or chocolate) symbolise love and that people should give this to your significant other as proof of their love for the other.

These codes are groups of signs that seem to fit together naturally. Together, they create meaning. To stick to the signs and codes of romance: the sign of a broken heart means lost love, and if you add the broken heart to the signs of two people, the three signs together, the code, anyone will read into it that the couple has broken off their relationship.

Filmic Code

Four types of signs and codes exist in semiotic analysis of film:

Indexical Signs

These are the most basic of signs in film. Indexical signs indirectly point to a certain meaning – they act as cues to existing knowledge. For example, smoke means fire, panting means exercise, a ringing bell means end of class. This type of signs is constantly used in (all types of) media and are very common.

Symbolic Code

Symbolic codes often denote something they have nothing to do with at first glance, but only because the code exists and because we use them society-wide. For instance, the red heart symbolises love, the white dove symbolises peace, the colour green symbolises jealousy.

Iconic Signs and Code

These are the literal signs and codes: a cop means a cop. They are meant to appear like the thing itself. However, they always represent more than just the thing itself. When we see a cop, we also associate this with our cultural ideas of “justice” or “the law”, or even masculinity or toughness. These codes also reinforce the ideas we have about these concepts in our culture, it reinforces the ideological meaning of those concepts.

Enigma Code

This is an important type of code used in film: it creates a question which the film “text” will then go on to answer. This is often used in trailers of movies as well as posters. They make people wonder. For example, “who murdered the protagonist”, or “how will they survive the apocalypse”. They pique curiosity and intrigue the viewers, with the intention of making them go see the movie.

Convention

Convention is another important concept that you’ll see discussed frequently in film analysis. It indicates the “establishment”, the established way of doing something, or understanding something, or presenting something.

They are the generally accepted norms. It’s behaviour and ideas that we see as natural; they’re so deeply embedded in culture that we’re generally not aware of them, and definitely don’t realise what their effect is, or how they affect us. In film, conventions are used to represent certain topics, characters and events, and more. When you start to scrutinise these conventions, you’ll find that, often, they are used to shape how we think about a character or event. When it comes to characters, conventions can easily turn into stereotypes.

You will find that they don’t always represent reality, and can even be harmful to how audiences perceive the world. A common convention, for instance, is how Muslims are always terrorists, and to state the obvious, that’s not the case in reality. Indians don’t always have thick Indian accents, especially when they were born outside of India. Nonetheless, these are stereotypes you will find in film abundantly. Other common conventions can be found in how women are portrayed in film. For instance, in film noir, female leads are either the helpless dame in distress, or the femme fatale – there is rarely an in-between. Nowadays, women are still frequently portrayed as damsels in distress, though while we see more female superheroes, they are generally clad in tight outfits, and their characters are underdeveloped; they are just there to serve the male main character’s plot.

https://www.filminquiry.com/analyse-movies-signs/

Psychoanalytic film theory

Psychoanalytic film theory is a school of academic thought that evokes of the concepts of psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. The theory is closely tied to Critical theory, Marxist film theory, and Apparatus theory. The theory is separated into two waves. The First wave occurred in the 1960s and 70s. The second wave became popular in the 1980s and 90s.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Psychoanalysis was created, Film followed shortly after. André Breton, the founder of the Surrealist movement, saw film as a means of engaging the unconscious. Since films had the ability to tell a story using techniques such as superimposition, and slow motion, the Surrealists saw this as mimicking dreams.

Early applications of psychoanalysis to cinema concentrated on unmasking latent meanings behind screen images, before moving on to a consideration of film as a representation of fantasy. From there, a wider consideration of the subject position of the viewer led to wider engagements with critical theory - to psychoanalytic film theory proper. Freud's concepts of the Oedipus complex, narcissism, castration, the unconscious, the return, and hysteria are all utilized in film theory. The 'unconscious' of a film are examined; this is known as subtext.

Gaze

Gaze means "to look steadily, intently, and with fixed attention.

In the early 1970s, Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey separately explored aspects of the "gaze" in the cinema, Metz stressing the viewer's identification with the camera's vision, - an identification largely "constructed" by the film itself - and Mulvey the fetishistic aspects of (especially) the male viewer's regard for the onscreen female body. The viewing subject may be offered particular identifications (usually with a leading male character) from which to watch. The theory stresses the subject's longing for a completeness which the film may appear to offer through identification with an image, although Lacanian theory also indicates that identification with the image is never anything but an illusion and the subject is always split simply by virtue of coming into existence (aphanisis).

A second wave of psychoanalytic film criticism associated with Jacqueline Rose emphasised the search for the missing object of desire on the part of the spectator: in Elisabeth Cowie's words, "the pleasure of fantasy lies in the setting out, not in the having of the objects". As post-structuralism took an increasingly pragmatic approach to the possibilities Theory offered, so too Joan Copjec criticised early work around the gaze in the light of the work of Michel Foucault. The role of trauma in cinematic representation came more to the fore, and Lacanian analysis was seen to offer fertile ways of speaking of film rather than definitive answers or conclusive self-knowledge.

Reference

Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1994) p. 207-8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoanalytic_film_theory

Marxist film theory

Sergei Eisenstein and many other Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s expressed ideas of Marxism through film. In fact, the Hegelian dialectic was considered best displayed in film editing through the Kuleshov Experiment and the development of montage. While this structuralist approach to Marxism and filmmaking was used, the more vociferous complaint that the Russian filmmakers had was with the narrative structure of the cinema of the United States.

Eisenstein's solution was to shun narrative structure by eliminating the individual protagonist and tell stories where the action is moved by the group and the story is told through a clash of one image against the next (whether in composition, motion, or idea) so that the audience is never lulled into believing that they are watching something that has not been worked over. Eisenstein himself, however, was accused by the Soviet authorities under Joseph Stalin of "formalist error," of highlighting form as a thing of beauty instead of portraying the worker nobly.

French Marxist film makers, such as Jean-Luc Godard, would employ radical editing and choice of subject matter, as well as subversive parody, to heighten class consciousness and promote Marxist ideas. Situationist film maker Guy Debord, author of The Society of the Spectacle, began his film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni [Wandering around in the night we are consumed by fire] with a radical critique of the spectator who goes to the cinema to forget about his dispossessed daily life.

Situationist film makers produced a number of important films, where the only contribution by the situationist film cooperative was the sound-track. In Can dialectics break bricks? (1973) a Chinese Kung Fu film was transformed by redubbing into an epistle on state capitalism and Proletarian revolution. The intellectual technique of using capitalism's own structures against itself is known as détournement.

Marxist film theory has developed from these precise and historical beginnings and is now sometimes viewed in a wider way to refer to any power relationships or structures within a moving image text.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_film_theory

Formalist film theory

Formalist film theory is a theory of film study that is focused on the formal, or technical, elements of a film: i.e., the lighting, scoring, sound and set design, use of color, shot composition, and editing. It is a major theory of film study today. Formalism, at its most general, considers the synthesis (or lack of synthesis) of the multiple elements of film production, and the effects, emotional and intellectual, of that synthesis and of the individual elements. For example, take the single element of editing. A formalist might study how standard Hollywood "continuity editing" creates a more comforting effect and non-continuity or jump cut editing might become more disconcerting or volatile. Or one might consider the synthesis of several elements, such as editing, shot composition, and music. The shoot-out that ends Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western "Dollars" trilogy is a notable example of how these elements work together to produce an effect: The shot selection goes from very wide to very close and tense; the length of shots decreases as the sequence progresses towards its end; the music builds. All of these elements, in combination rather than individually, create tension.

Formalism is unique in that it embraces both ideological and auteurist branches of criticism. In both these cases, the common denominator for Formalist criticism is style. Ideologues focus on how socio-economic pressures create a particular style, and auteurists on how auteurs put their own stamp on the material. Formalism is primarily concerned with style and how it communicates ideas, emotions, and themes (rather than, as critics of formalism point out, concentrating on the themes of a work itself).

Ideological formalism 

The classical Hollywood cinema has a very distinct style, sometimes called the Institutional Mode of Representation: continuity editing, massive coverage, three-point lighting, "mood" music, dissolves, all designed to make the experience as pleasant as possible. The socio-economic ideological explanation for this is, quite crassly, that Hollywood wants to make as much money and appeal to as many ticket-buyers as possible.

Film noir, which was given its name by Nino Frank, is marked by lower production values, darker images, under lighting, location shooting, and general nihilism: this is because, we are told, during the war and post-war years filmmakers (as well as filmgoers) were generally more pessimistic. Also, the German Expressionists (including Fritz Lang, who was not technically an expressionist as popularly believed emigrated to America and brought their stylized lighting effects (and disillusionment due to the war) to American soil.

It can be argued that, by this approach, the style or 'language' of these films is directly affected not by the individuals responsible, but by social, economic, and political pressures, of which the filmmakers themselves may be aware or not. It is this branch of criticism that gives us such categories as the classical Hollywood cinema, the American independent movement, the New American independent movement, the new queer cinema, and the French, German, and Czech new waves.

Formalism in auteur theory

First, it was created to redeem the art of film itself. By arguing that films had auteurs, or authors, Truffaut sought to make films (and their directors) at least as important as the more widely accepted art forms, such as literature, music, and painting. Each of these art forms, and the criticism thereof, is primarily concerned with a sole creative force: the author of a novel (not, for example, his editor or type-setter), the composer of a piece of music (though sometimes the performers are given credence, akin to actors in film today), or the painter of a fresco (not his assistants who mix the colours or often do some of the painting themselves). By elevating the director, and not the screenwriter, to the same importance as novelists, composers, or painters, it sought to free the cinema from its popular conception as a bastard art, somewhere between theater and literature.

Secondly, it sought to redeem many filmmakers who were looked down upon by mainstream film critics. It argued that genre filmmakers and low-budget B-movies were just as important, if not more, than the prestige pictures commonly given more press and legitimacy in France and the United States. According to Truffaut's theory, auteurs took material that was beneath their talents—a thriller, a pulpy action film, a romance—and, through their style, put their own personal stamp on it.

It is this auteur style that concerns formalism.

A perfect example of formalist criticism of auteur style would be the work of Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock primarily made thrillers, which, according to the Cahiers du cinema crowd, were popular with the public but were dismissed by the critics and the award ceremonies, although Hitchcock's Rebecca won the Oscar for Best Picture at the 1940 Academy Awards. Though he never won the Oscar for directing, he was nominated five times in the category. Truffaut and his colleagues argued that Hitchcock had a style as distinct as that of Flaubert or Van Gogh: the virtuoso editing, the lyrical camera movements, the droll humour. He also had "Hitchcockian" themes: the wrong man falsely accused, violence erupting at the times it was least expected, the cool blonde. Now, Hitchcock is more or less universally lauded, his films dissected shot-by-shot, his work celebrated as being that of a master. And the study of this style, his variations, and obsessions all fall quite neatly under the umbrella of formalist film theory.

Reference

Bordwell, David, "Film Art: An Introduction"; McGraw-Hill; 7th edition (June, 2003).

Braudy, Leo, ed., "Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings"; Oxford University Press; 6th edition (March, 2004).

Gianetti, Louis, "Understanding Movies"; Prentice Hall; 10th edition (March, 2004)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formalist_film_theory