Film studies has largely avoided the biocultural turn that has swept through other areas of the humanities. This resistance may be understood in terms of the field’s recent distaste for grand theory—and in terms of the loose, social-constructionist thinking that is one residue of that distaste. Fortunately, a biocultural approach to cinema can offer film studies a necessary and defensible set of assumptions. It can also offer interpretive tools and potential ways of conceptualizing perennial concerns like (...) authorship and genre. This essay demonstrates the last two points through an evolutionary reading of Howard Hawks’s musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and through proposals for new ways of approaching auteurism and pornography. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40.1 (2006) 104-110 [Access article in PDF] Film Studies, the Moving Image, and Noël Carroll Edward Sankowski Department of Philosophy University of Oklahoma Engaging the Moving Image, by Noël Carroll. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003, 420 pp., $45.00 hardcover. Noël Carroll is the leading writer today about philosophy and film studies among those with an Anglo-American analytic philosophy (...) emphasis. He needs to be read in a larger intellectual context also, as a leading interdisciplinary writer about film. On the positive side, he has expanded the resources of Anglo-American analytic philosophy (and has at the same time contributed work of distinction to scholarship in related areas). He profits from the virtues of analytic philosophy as well as putting to good use his broad acquaintance with other scholarship. He is refreshingly innovative, sometimes operating with valuable results beyond the current conventional borders of the discipline of philosophy in his choice of topics about film (or better, in his view, about the moving image). A collection of his essays written in the second half of the 1990s, Engaging the Moving Image, is thus very welcome. It is fascinating and often persuasive reading.The essays take up a wide range of topics, including (but not limited to) critiques of, and constructive proposals about, film studies. Carroll especially criticizes film studies writing that focuses on "the film medium." "Forget the Medium!" he urges, in the first essay. This is associated for him with attacks on "mediumistic essentialism" (xiii). Indeed, for him the criticism of essentialism is a favorite theme. Many other overlapping topics of great interest are also explored in Carroll's approach. These include the "naturalistic" study of film communication, horror films, film evaluation, the criticism of (Continental) "Big Theory" in film studies, the nature of documentaries, "moving-picture dance," the relationship between TV and film, Siegfried Kracauer on film, Eisenstein on nation building, the political subtext of American Westerns with plots involving Mexican revolutions, and "prospects for film theory," which are discussed in a lengthy concluding piece.While Carroll is characteristically often on the attack, and seems to relish polemics, he is far from predominantly a negative, critical critic. He often formulates fruitful questions for constructive inquiry in a characteristically [End Page 104] clear and reasonable way. He is, however, perhaps not at his strongest in these essays in furthering discussions of what is arguably most moving about "moving images." By this is meant the aesthetic and emotional heights and depths of what films can offer, as art or in other ways. But what he says about movies is sensible, carefully done, and repays repeated study. (One example is Carroll's instructive "cognitively oriented" discussion of emotions in "Film, Emotion, and Genre.")Greatness in film, as in other arts, sometimes makes it more difficult to be reasonable. Carroll's account of evaluation, "Introducing Film Evaluation," notably has a self-avowedly limited scope. That account, as Carroll says, focuses on "evaluating films in terms of whether they are good, bad, better or worse specimens of a kind or category." He writes that "We may also wish to evaluate genres" (162). But beyond genres, the greatness of some films seems well beyond the comparative evaluation of genres. While Carroll writes that his account of evaluation is only introductory and abbreviated, it nonetheless also seems too driven by the desire to emphasize the possibility of agreement about evaluation and to counter radical skeptical worries rather than to understand why evaluation of the very good or great film might matter to us beyond fixing the captured butterfly in its place by assigning a film to a genre.Carroll has seen a lot of movies and read a lot of film theory and other writing about film or the moving image. Some of the theory is awful, in his view, but some of it he considers valuable, and what he claims is plausible on both scores. Carroll thinks and writes incisively about many topics. He is eclectic on principle, but eschews obscurity and pretension. What emerges... (shrink)

_Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies_ Edited by David Bordwell and Noel Carroll Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996 ISBN: 0299149447 564 pp.

_Reinventing Film Studies_ Edited by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams London: Arnold Publishers, 2000 ISBN 0-340-67723-6 464 pp.

The book combines a series of chapters considering a range of responses to the idea of 'de-westernizing' film studies with a series of in-depth interviews with filmmakers, scholars and critics.

Jean Baudrillard _Fatal Strategies_ Translated by Philip Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski Edited by Jim Fleming London: Pluto Press, 1999 ISBN 0-7453-1453-8 191 pp.

Fifteen years after the first translations of Anglo-American feminist film theories, this gender approach is finding it hard to gain acceptance in France. The main reason is the elitist view of cinema d’auteur that is still prevalent in academic circles, where the art is seen as a genius’s creation outside social determinations in general and gender relations in particular. However, under the influence of historians and sociologists, who dominate gender research in France, French work on film privileges a (...) historical and sociocultural approach, whereas American research is dominated by psychoanalytical approaches. French gender analyses privilege the expression of dominant relations but also of contradictions at work in the films, whether popular or by an auteur-e, as well as in the stars’ image or in tv fiction. Finally some research explores the changes brought about by the emergence of female film-makers on the French scene. (shrink)

What is the current state of film studies? How do you enter this field from a media studies background? Is it worthwhile for media scholars to engage in this neighboring field? Can you get a grasp of the key issues, theoretical currents, and analytical approaches consulting a limited number of publications? I will try to answer these questions in an extensive review essay on four fairly recent film studies books. The books approach the field on (...) different levels. Two introductory textbooks supply the basics for beginning students. An anthology of ‘classical’ texts provides an overview of the various theoretical and methodological currents. And a reader with key figures in the field offers state of the art research in search of ‘really useful theory’. This material is of great interest to media studies scholars. As the authors of the books considered here acknowledge, film studies can no longer afford to ignore its interdisciplinary location, intersecting with neighboring disciplines such as media studies and cultural studies, in an engagement with film as popular and mass culture. (shrink)

While every discipline in the humanities worries about its future, film studies is caught in the thrall of a particular anxiety, namely the possibility that it lacks a consistent object and a compelling reason. Behind the question of film studies looms the question of cinema itself, an aging techn? that seems to have hung around in the midst of new(er) media that lay claim to the image as their province. Why cinema? Against so many digital incursions, (...) more traditionally minded critics have defended film on the basis of its indexical powers, but this article envisions an entirely different reason to return to the cinema. Where both the return to the index and the recourse to the digital effect tend to regard the cinema as a matter of visibility, I suggest that we might reclaim our faith in the cinema by virtue of what remains unseen and off-screen. Hence, this essay undertakes a brief history of the out of frame in order to induce a conceptualization of the cinema (pace Deleuze) as the art of the ?Outside.? Turning to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the essay concludes by analyzing how an ostensibly older sense of images nevertheless augurs the critical and philosophical developments with which we can learn to believe in the cinema once more. (shrink)

In this paper, we address the problematic of film narration and its narrator from a re-reading of Émile Benveniste’s theory of enunciation in open discussion with both the theories of film enunciation that have derived from it, and the cognitive theories that, by discarding it, have tried to take its place. This has led us to a differentiation between two dimensions of the problem of enunciation that are usually ignored: that which separates the act of enunciation and the (...) subject who performs it from that of the textual subjects who inscribe that act in the text. An erroneous understanding of the modes of enunciation of story and discourse has derived from their ignorance, which has led to reducing the former to a kind of form that derives from the latter, constituting no more than a form of discourse that would hide its basis. A precise enunciative definition of the lie is derived from their conscience. Certainly, there is always a subject of the act of enunciation whose traces can be recognized in the materiality of the statement. But there is a properly ontological distance that separates them – as material traces – from the enunciator, as a purely formal textual figure that, by being that, may or may not be present in the text. In this way, the Benveniste’s affirmation can be sustained according to which the story, the pure mode of the narrative, so to speak, is characterized by the absence – not the erasure, nor the invisibility – of any enunciator. (shrink)

Jean Baudrillard _Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings on the Modern Object and its Destiny, 1968-1983_ London: Pluto Press, 1999 ISBN: 0-7453-1443-0 198 pp.

이 글은 세계 속 신체-주체와 지각 대상의 접속에 의한 지각 현상의 특성을 밝히고, 이를 바탕으로 영화 속 영화이미지의 현상학적 특성과 현상학적인 존재론적 살로서의 영화 이미지의 특성 및 영화이미지의 존재 의미를 밝히는 것을 목적으로 한다. 이런 밝힘으로 말미암아 현상학적인 존재론적 살로서의 영화이미지의 가치가 드러날 것이다. 현상학적 지각 현상은 차이장 속 차이의 지각 현상이 되고 차이 존재를 토대로 지각 현 상 자체를 나타내는 차이존재론적 지각 현상이 된다. 지각 현상은 운동적인 지각지평-차 이장 속 역동적인 차이들이 시공적으로 생산되고 있는 총체적 시스템의 지각 현상이다. 시간적 (...) 게슈탈트로서의 영화란 단순히 이미지들을 모아놓은 집합이 아니라, 이다. 영화이미지는 가상이면서도 현실이고 현실이면서도 가상이 되고 있으며, 차이장 속 가상과 현실을 맞물리게 하는 맞물림의 시뮬라크르 가 되고 있다. 영화이미지들의 관계적인 접속적 상황에서 영화적 현재는 영화적 과거와 영화적 미래 에 대한 시간적 살을 가진다. 영화이미지들은 서로에 대한 대립과 대립적 살을 가지고, 갈등, 권력, 사랑의 관계적인 영화이미지들은 각각 서로에 대하여 갈등과 갈등적 살, 권력과 권력적 살, 사랑과 사랑의 살을 가진다. 영화이미지들의 교차는 살적인 새로운 생성 의미 와 그 영화이미지들의 존재 의미를 드러내고, 관객은 영화이미지들의 살을 통해서 영화이 미지의 의미와 존재 의미 및 자신의 존재 의미를 느끼고 의식한다. 영화 속 영화이미지들은 항상 컨텍스트-영화이미지들로서 작동한다. (shrink)

In the ancient Greek world, the concept of 'miasma,' which becomes permanent and has the potential to grow over time due to evil acts such as murder committed in the city, is a concept frequently referred to in many classical tragedies. To the extent that miasma has a bad connotation due to its nature and is a situation that occurs due to evil actions, it can be considered together with the philosophical problem of evil. In this study, we aim to (...) examine the concept of miasma by focusing on the characters in La Jauría, one of the most prominent films of recent South American cinema, rather than a purely conceptual analysis of the concept. Filmed in the jungles of Colombia and directed by Colombian director Andrés Ramírez Pulido, the 2022 film La Jauría is a psychological drama that focuses on the lives of young people involved in crime. The tragic story of Eliu, the protagonist of the film, which takes place mainly in a prison specially designed to rehabilitate inmates, seems to us to be a very suitable focal point for examining the concepts of miasma, catharsis, and ecstasy, which are frequently referred to in ancient Greek tragedy. To do so, we will first address the various contexts in which miasma has been used historically, considering the flow of events in the movie La Jauría. Then, we will look at the relationship of the concept of miasma with the problem of evil. Finally, we will discuss the possibilities of the concept of purification, which is seen as a kind of antidote to miasma. (shrink)

Depuis le début des années 2010 fleurissent les publications, les rencontres, les formations qui se placent sous le signe des Film Festival Studies. Depuis longtemps, pourtant, les festivals de films avaient rencontré l’intérêt de chercheurs, issus de diverses disciplines. Une dynamique nouvelle serait-elle donc à l’œuvre depuis la dernière décennie, une volonté explicite de se raccrocher à la perspective très anglo-saxonne des Studies? Ce texte se propose d’ouvrir quelques pistes de réflexion relatives à la spécificité des études (...) portant sur cet objet singulier que constituent les festivals de cinéma et audiovisuel, dans la perspective de poser des jalons propres à l’épistémologie d’un champ de recherche encore à construire. (shrink)

Depuis le début des années 2010 fleurissent les publications, les rencontres, les formations qui se placent sous le signe des Film Festival Studies. Depuis longtemps, pourtant, les festivals de films avaient rencontré l’intérêt de chercheurs, issus de diverses disciplines. Une dynamique nouvelle serait-elle donc à l’œuvre depuis la dernière décennie, une volonté explicite de se raccrocher à la perspective très anglo-saxonne des Studies? Ce texte se propose d’ouvrir quelques pistes de réflexion relatives à la spécificité des études (...) portant sur cet objet singulier que constituent les festivals de cinéma et audiovisuel, dans la perspective de poser des jalons propres à l’épistémologie d’un champ de recherche encore à construire. (shrink)

Thomas Elsaesser and Warren Buckland _Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis_ Arnold: London 2002 ISBN 0 340 76206 3 (PB) x + 309 pp.