Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies

by Bordwell, David

• ISBN13: 9780299149444
• ISBN10: 0299149447
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-02-15
• Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Pr

Summary

With Post-Theory, David Bordwell and Noël Carroll challenge the prevailing practices of film scholarship. Since the 1970s, film scholars have been searching for a unified theory that will explain all sorts of films, their production, and their reception; the field has been dominated by structuralist Marxism, varieties of cultural theory, and the psychoanalytic ideas of Freud and Lacan. Bordwell and Carroll ask, why not employ many theories tailored to specific goals, rather than searching for a unified theory? Post-Theoryoffers fresh directions for understanding film, presenting new essays by twenty-seven scholars on topics as diverse as film scores, audience response, and the national film industries of Russia, Scandinavia, the U.S., and Japan. They use historical, philosophical, psychological, and feminist methods to tackle such basic issues as: What goes on when viewers perceive a film? How do filmmakers exploit conventions? How do movies create illusions? How does a film arouse emotion? Bordwell and Carroll have given space not only to distinguished film scholars but to non-film specialists as well, ensuring a wide variety of opinions and ideas on virtually every topic on the current agenda of film studies. Full of stimulating essays published here for the first time, Post-Theorypromises to redefine the study of cinema.

Table of Contents

Contributors
Introduction
Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory	p. 3
Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment	p. 37
Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Problem of the Missing Spectator	p. 71
Convention, Construction, and Cinematic Vision	p. 87
Is a Cognitive Approach to the Avant-garde Cinema Perverse?	p. 108
The Logic and Legacy of Brechtianism	p. 130
Characterization and Fictional Truth in the Cinema	p. 149
Empathy and (Film) Fiction	p. 175
Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films	p. 195
Apt Feelings, or Why "Women's Films" Aren't Trivial	p. 219
Unheard Melodies? A Critique of Psychoanalytic Theories of Film Music	p. 230
Film Music and Narrative Agency	p. 248
Nonfiction Film and Postmodernist Skepticism	p. 283
Moving Pictures and the Rhetoric of Nonfiction Film: Two Approaches	p. 307
Film, Reality, and Illusion	p. 325
The Case for an Ecological Metatheory	p. 347
Movies in the Mind's Eye	p. 368
Notes on Audience Response	p. 388
Toward a New Media Economics	p. 407
Columbia Pictures: The Making of a Motion Picture Major, 1930-1943	p. 419
"A Brief Romantic Interlude": Dick and Jane Go to 3 1/2 Seconds of the Classical Hollywood Cinema	p. 434
The Jazz Singer's Reception in the Media and at the Box Office	p. 460
Jameson and "Global Aesthetics"	p. 481
Reconstructing Japanese Film	p. 501
Danish Cinema and the Politics of Recognition	p. 520
Whose Apparatus? Problems of Film Exhibition and History	p. 533
Selected Bibliography	p. 553
Index	p. 561
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