Research in Progress
March 16, 2024
Film Theory: General Notes
Not every movie has to matter, or can matter
Most people go to the movies to be relaxed, refreshed, entertained.
What’s vital to the enjoyment of movies is a sense of playfulness.
Light, even shallow movies (and pop culture) can keep the viewers sane.
Movies have extraordinary power, unmatched by any other medium or art, to convey what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s good and what’s evil, even though the critical details presented may be false or slanted.
Art (film) opens our experience and arranges our ways of perceiving experience, and changes the spaces within which experience may be represented and perceived.
Art (and film) is a form of discovery and creator of the conditions of experience.
Art (and film) can become a testing ground, a realm of experiential probing, in which art may receive its informal impulses from sources other than itself.
Art as a way of appraising experience, it’s a kind of praxis (Allan Thiher, 143)
The hit movies make the most noise in our culture.
The hits of the 1980s have often been just TV in a souped-up format
Interest9ng films, regardless of their quality, must touch a social nerve (like crime and musicals in the 1930s).
If they fail to talk to us consciously or subconsciously, they become rigid, formalized works.
The cinema cannot show the truth, or reveal the truth, because the truth is not out there in the real world, waiting to be photographed.
What cinema can do is produce meaning, and meaning can only be plotted in relation to other meanings. (Peter Allen)
Modernist aesthetics aims at forms of revelation.
Surrealist (Cocteau) the goal is the revelation of the merveilleux, devolvement or unveiling.
revealtiond removed from the rational categories of time causality
Joyce search for epiphany
Prust disclosure of privileged moments
Art as a form of ecstatic knowledge
Art (film) goal is to lay bare the repressed
Film Notes (A to Z)
Film: Textbook proposal (chapters)
Film General
Film-Unique
American Film
Hollywood
Film as Industry
Film Concepts:
Age
Black
Character
Classics (Masterpieces)
Camera: Cinematography
Close-Up
Closure
Color
Formalism
Frame
Metaphor (Allegory)
Pace
Take (frame)
Black
Bloom, Harold (to Theory)
Closure
Color
Creativity
Comedy
Critics
Docus
Dog
Drag Film
Eclectic
Education
Effeminacy (to Gay)
Egghead
Elevator
Epic
Erotic
Ethnic Minorities
European Cinema
Exile (Emigres)
Exploitation
Flop
Food
Gender:
Genre:
Comedy
Comedy Biblio
Information
Innovation
Realism
Style
