“Movies are entertainment. Movies are documents of their time and place. Movies are artistic forms of self-expression. Movies we see at theatres, on television, or home video are typically narrative films. They tell stories about characters going through experiences. But what are they really about? What is the content of a film?” (Jacobs) These are the essential questions that film theoreticians and historians strive to answer.
Film theory has to do with the analytical study of films that have already been made, or that could be made in the future. As opposed to the technicality of film production, film theory is much more open ended. Film theory can be broken down into two discourse communities: film historians and film critics.
-Film historians, as the name implies, study the history of film and the cinema. There are many different types of film historians, often times, they choose a genre, region, or period of film history to specialize in. These categories can be as broad as the study of an entire era of film, or a director’s entire work, to as narrow to the study of a single scene from a single movie. Those who specialize in film history, often discuss the socio-political context in which the film(s) were made, why they were made, and what their effects were on the audience, and the future of film. Here’s an example article that I had to read for a class last spring, discussing the content and effect of the soviet films of the 1960’s: Thaw
“Like book readers, filmgoers must rely on the accumulated wisdom of film studies—which films have endured and why—a “wisdom” increasingly polluted by populist or academic criteria. What is needed, disingenuously enough, is a film canon.”(Schrader, 2006) In this quote, pulled from an article in “Film Comment”, Paul Schrader explores the idea of a canonical film standard, for film critics, historians, and theoreticians to adhere to, in order to better understand why films are important, in their various contexts.
Discourse in Film Studies 