Summary—“Theories”

· The body of work we know as "film· theory" emerged from the interaction of three intellectual traditions - structuralism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis - in France in the 1960s. The development of film theory was instrumental in legitimating the academic study of cinema through its insistence on the intellectual complexity of its own activity.

· Semiology promised a structuralist methodology potentially able to take account of cinema's complex orchestration of verbal and non-verbal signals. Cine-semiology failed to deliver on its most grandiose promises because its fundamental proposition, that cinema is constituted like a language, proved unusable. Nevertheless, the proposition that a movie should be understood as a "textual system," a matrix of codes and conventional structures, substantially influenced the subsequent direction of the critical study of cinema.

· After the events of 1968, there was a call for politically oriented criticism, seeking evidence of a text's ideological underpinnings. Ideological analysis encouraged viewers and critics to read "obliquely" or symptomatically. Such ideological analysis provided the motivating force behind the development of psychoanalytic and feminist film theory of the 1970s.

· Psychoanalytic theory was applied to cinema as a development from the idea that viewing could be considered analogous to dreaming. This led to the proposition that analysis could reveal a movie's unconscious by uncovering the repressed material that surfaced in the details of its narrative, form, or style.

· From psychoanalysis arose a theory of film spectatorship, in which the experience of each spectator could be considered to be essentially identical, since the subject position that is "the spectator" was constructed by the cinematic apparatus.

· Feminist criticism suggested that within mainstream cinema the gaze of the camera, and the position of the spectator, were inherently masculine. By orchestrating the "three looks" of spectator, camera, and character, the cinematic apparatus adopted a masculine gaze in the service of patriarchal ideology, leaving the female spectator without a gaze of her own. Subsequent feminist theorists have suggested that women's discourses are expressed in fragmented or "subtextual" ways.

· "Reading against the grain" of a Classical Hollywood movie became a widely adopted and productive strategy for textual analysis. Movies could be examined for their gaps and ellisions, in which the workings of ideology were exposed. This approach gave theoretical support to the practice of interpreting films subversively or ironically.

· Neoformalism is an aesthetic theory informed by branches of psychology concerned with perception and cognition, rather than with the unconscious. It regards itself as a "modest approach," seeking only to explain the realm of the aesthetic and its relation to the world.

· Historical reception studies have attempted to understand movies as events, rather than trying to uncover their meanings as objects. This approach examines the relationships between a movie and the contexts of its reception: publicity, censorship, exhibition practice, and reviews.

· The desire to account for the experience of actual movie audiences has increasingly drawn movie analysis away from totalizing "Grand Theory" toward a plurality of methods with less grandiose ambitions.

· The principal aim of this book has been to argue that Hollywood cinema must be understood through the specific historical conditions of its circulation as a commercial commodity. Above all, movies are products for consumption, and it is through a thoroughgoing acknowledgement of their commercial existence, not a denial of it, that their complexity can be most fully examined.