Film Theory

This course offers an introduction to the study of film theory – the aesthetic and philosophical discourses that have flourished around the cinematic medium and the moving image.

We explore how writers and filmmakers from different cultures and historical periods have made sense of the changing and complex phenomenon that we call cinema. The course asks students to engage with some of the most significant debates in the history of film theory, as they acquire an increasing familiarity with ideas and concepts through which the moving image and the cinematic medium have been conceived and explained.

Our survey of the field and its central debates are structured around two main questions: 1) what are the potentialities of moving images?; and 2) which is the place of moving image media within societies and cultures at large?

One of the main goals of the course is to reconfigure our understanding of the field of film studies in terms of moving image cultures.

Course topics will include the place of moving images within the visual cultures of modernity, the relation between film theory and film history, debates around medium specificity, the cinematic experience and forms of spectatorship, the transition to digital cinema, the question of cinematic realism, what counts as film theory and what counts as cinema, and the challenges of considering film theory in a global context.