Film theorists

Film theorists

Film theorists

Film theorists have sought to develop concepts and to study cinema as an art. Derived from modern technology and being one of the symptoms and causes of this modernity, its principles, such as technique, editing, or shooting, have upset modes of representation in the figurative arts and literature. To form and understand each other as art, the cinema needed theories. In Matter and Memory, in 1896, the French philosopher Henri Bergson anticipated the development of the theory at a time when the cinema had just appeared as a visionary. He also expresses the need to reflect on the idea of ​​movement, and invents the terms "image-movement" and "image-time".

However, in 1907, in his essay L'Illusion cinématographique, taken from L'Évolution créatrice, he rejects cinema as an example of what he has in mind. Nevertheless, much later, in Cinema I and Cinema II, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze takes Matter and Memory as the basis of his own philosophy of cinema and re-examines Bergson's concepts by joining them to the semiotics of Charles Peirce.

It was in 1911 in The Birth of the Sixth Art that Ricciotto Canudo sketched out the first theories that rose up in the era of silence and focused on defining crucial elements. The works and innovations of the directors drained more reflections. Louis Delluc, with the idea of ​​photogeny, Germaine Dulac and Jean Epstein, who see the film as both a way of going beyond and meeting body and mind, are the main actors of a French avant-garde closely followed by German theories which, influenced by expressionism, turn more to the image. At the same time, there is the Gestalt, which was born between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century under the aegis of Ernst Mach.

On the Soviet side, theoreticians and cinematographers hold editing for the essence of cinema. The favorite theme of Sergei Eisenstein will be created in all its aspects, that is all that allows envisaging the creation of a "language" of image-concept and a general theory of the assembly, revealing one and the other identical laws of reality and thought. On his side, Dziga Vertov will be a mouthpiece of novelty and futurism. His theory, corresponding to the assembly of fragments with small units of meaning, wishes the destruction of the whole tradition to replace it by a "factory of the facts", radical conception of the cinema if it is of it. The "honestly narrative" American montage, put in theory by Pudovkin, will, however, prevail in world cinema.

The theory of formal cinema, led by Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs, and Siegfried Kracauer, emphasizes the fact that cinema differs from reality, and that in this it is a real art. Lev Kuleshov and Paul Rotha also highlighted the difference between cinema and reality and support the idea that cinema should be considered as a form of art in its own right. After the Second World War, the French film critic and theorist André Bazin reacts against this approach of the cinema by explaining that the essence of the cinema resides in his ability to reproduce mechanically the reality and not in its difference compared to reality. Bazin turns more towards an ontological approach to cinema and thus shapes a theory of realistic cinema. The cinematographic image would pursue the objectivity of the photographic image whose power is to capture as the essence of a moment. This conception will be repeated several times and in different versions, as in A. Tarkovski's The Sealed Time or in combination with Gadamer's phenomenology in Dubost's The Pornographic Temptation. Against Bazin and his disciples, Jean Mitry develops the first theory of sign and meaning in cinema, without wanting to assimilate, even by analogy, the visual image and film structures with verbal language, as it will be the temptation of semiology. when, in the 1960s and 1970s, cinema theory invaded the academic world, importing concepts from established disciplines such as psychoanalysis, gender studies, anthropology, the theory of literature, semiotics and linguistics. The semiology of cinema will take various forms: psychoanalysis, Russian formalism, deconstructive philosophy, narratology, history, etc. Its importance lies in the "textual analysis", the search in detail of the operating structures of the films.

From the 1960s, there is a cleavage between the theory and practice of cinema. This desired autonomy will remain quite relative: when, with his "great syntagmatic narrative film", Christian Metz proposes, in 1966, to formalize the codes implicit in the functioning of the cinema, Jean-Luc Godard deconstructs such codes within her works. The 1980s will end a fertile era of theories. Then will be born other reflections, in particular, those oriented towards the narratology as well as a certain number of theories aiming at the rediscovery of the cinema of the first times. As such, the works of the Quebec theorist André Gaudreault and the American theoretician Tom Gunning are particularly exemplary.

During the 1990s, the digital revolution in image technologies has had various impacts in cinematographic theory. From a psychoanalytic point of view, after Jacques Lacan's notion of reality, Slavoj Žižek offered new aspects of the view that are extremely used in the analysis of contemporary cinema.

In modern cinema, the body is filmed at length before it is put into action, filmed as a body that resists. In some filmmakers, it is the brain that is staged. Through this movement, called mental cinema, we find extreme violence, always controlled by the brain. For example, the first films of Benoît Jacquot are strongly impregnated by this movement: the characters are folded on themselves, without clarification on their psychology. Jacquot will declare in 1990, about La Désenchantée: "I make films to be close to those who make the films: the actors. Sometimes young directors would like to erect actors as a sign of their world. I do not try to show my own world. I am more interested in working in the film world. It's stupid to say that the actor gets into the skin of his character. These are the characters who have the skin of the actor. Several other filmmakers, such as André Téchiné, Alain Resnais, Nanni Moretti, Takeshi Kitano and Tim Burton were influenced by the mental cinema.