Define Film Studies

Film studies is an academic discipline that deals with various theoretical, historical, and critical approaches to films. It is sometimes subsumed within media studies and is often compared to television studies. Film studies is less concerned with advancing proficiency in film production than it is with exploring the narrative, artistic, cultural, economic, and political implications of the cinema. In searching for these social-ideological values, film studies takes a series of critical approaches for the analysis of production, theoretical framework, context, and creation.

The critic of film in an academic setting has not existed through the entire history of film. Not to be confused with the technical aspects of film creation, film studies exists only with the creation of film theory—which approaches film critically as an art—and the writing of film historiography. Because the modern film became an invention and industry only in the late nineteenth century, a generation of simply created films by self-investigative producers and directors existed significantly before the academic analysis that followed in later generations.

Early film schools focused on the production and subjective critique of film rather than on the critical approaches, history and theory used to study academically. Since the time film was created, the concept of film studies as a whole grew to analyze the formal aspects of film as they were created. Established in 1919 the Moscow Film School was the first school in the world to focus on film. In the United States the USC School of Cinematic Arts, established in 1929, was the first cinematic based school, which was created in agreement with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. They were also the first to offer a major in film in 1932 but without the distinctions that are assumed in film studies. Universities began to implement different forms of cinema related curriculum without, however, the division between the abstract and practical approaches.

A movement away from Hollywood productions in the 1950s turned cinema into a more artistic independent endeavour. It was the creation of the auteur theory, which asserted film as the director's vision and art that prompted film studies to become truly considered academically worldwide in the 1960s. In 1965, film critic Robin Wood, in his writings on Alfred Hitchcock, declared that Hitchcock's films contained the same complexities of Shakespeare's plays.

Film as an art?

Reference

Dyer, Richard. "Introduction." Film Studies: Critical Approaches. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 1-8. Print.

Sikov, Ed. "Introduction." Introduction pg.1-4. Film Studies: an Introduction. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. Print. Google Books