A Film Theory Cheat Sheet

Film theory is essentially the concept of how we analyze and appraise the art of film, but a lot of the theory is rooted in literary analysis, as well. Each topic covered could easily be its own topic in time, but my goal here is to offer a broad overview, and narrow in on specific concepts in the future.

A lot of the information I'll go over comes pretty predominantly from the works of people like Kenneth Burke and Aristotle. Much of the modern academic discourse surrounding literary theory and analysis is based off of Western schools of thinking. While there is certainly plenty of literary theory and analysis schools of thought from other traditions across the world, my own unfamiliarity with them would be a pretty big disservice, so for the time being we'll be working with more classical academia.

The Basics - Semiotics and Rhetoric

Rhetoric, at least in the academic sense, doesn't exactly mean what we might associate it with (a fancy word for speech and words). Essentially, rhetoric is the use of a shared understanding to create a meaning. Rhetoric could be a convincing speech, a hand gesture, or a movie. Simple acts of rhetoric combine into largear, more meaningful ones, as well. Rhetoric is, therefore, more of a process than a static thing. The process of someone saying something with symbols, then a meaning being derived by it. It might sound complicated, but we do this all the time without even knowing! The process of rhetoric made up of three essential, simple components. They are: human, symbolic, and purposeful.

For example, if I asked my friend for a screwdriver and held out my hand, the human component is my friend and I. The symbolic component is the words I used and the hand gesture. The purposeful component is the meaning. I may have meant for them to hand me a flat-head screwdriver, but instead they gave me a mixed drink with OJ and vodka. Both the intended and derived meaning are important in the study of rhetoric, especially when applied to film and literature! What the author intended to say may not be what you think the work is about, and that doesn't make it any less valid or worthy of debate!

The Three Kinds of Writing For Film

According to Bill Nichols, an academic and film critic, there are three reasons why we write about film and television: for recommendation, for analysis, and for dialogue.

The first, as a recommendation, is the film review as a decision making aid for movie goers and potential viewers. Statements like, "if you enjoy this, you'll love this", or "this is going to be popular, so you should see it" are kind of common in this style of review.

The second, for analysis, is for academic critical essay and discussion, where different theories and lenses are applied to art. The goal of evaluating a work's impact on a critical lens (which we'll get into), how relevant the work is in comparison to others like it, and what it means in the broader spectrum of the literary theory is central to this form of analysis.

The third, being as dialogue among viewers, is kind of tricky to pin down, and can be somewhat viewed as 'everything else'. This tends to be the way most of us talk about film and television, where we are interested in talking about individual components and how they made us feel. It is our personal interaction with media and art, rather than how it applies to a broader academic cannon, or as to whether or not the movie possessed some 'good' or 'bad' qualities for recommendation.

Generally I find this to be a pretty useful breakdown of it. It helps us filter the information we're getting. You may have loved a movie and seek out people who liked it too, whether in person or online, and what you want is a dialogue, to talk about why you liked it or why you thought it was awesome, but if you're met with someone who'd rather discuss its Marxist overtones, you might get bored, no matter how salient or interesting their points are.

What Is Genre?

What a question. So, genre is one of those terms that we're all pretty sure we'll know when we see it. And, the vast majority of academic discourse would agree. Genre, simply put, is the combination of works inside of a category that we as consumers of a work create by agreeing on commonalities. There are, essentially, four elements of genre, which are:

Situations and Conditions - being the things we are trying to prove belong to a category or genre. For example, let's say we're trying to classify the genre of a sitcom. The situations in this case would be things like, Friends, Seinfeld, Scrubs, Cheers, Parks and Recreation, Fraiser, etc.

Substance and Content - being what the commonalities are in terms of what their content is. In our sticom example, this would things like: situations based on humor, relationship drama, exaggerated characters, and self-contained, episodic narratives.

Style and/or Form - refers to what their commanlities are in how they are specifically made and presented. For sitcoms, this would be: television shows with a handful of dedicated sets, often filmed with four cameras, with episodes being written by a handful of directors, often answering to a head writer.

And finally, Organizing Factors/Principle - which is what the overall message and tone amount to. For most sitcoms, there is an emphasis on simplicity, taking difficult situations or questions and bringing them into a funny, easy to tackle way.

Now, of course, there are exceptions to everything, which is where you get conversations like 'what if certain episodes don't conform', or 'what if it's not always funny'? Genre is more of a tool, meant to filter works of media into a category to be quickly and easily referenced, not as gospel for definitively proving whether or not something is or isn't some other thing.

Conclusion

I had intended to dive into literary theories (which are the ways in which we construct meaning from works within a frame of academic reference), but that would have pushed this post way past the length I'd like for the article, and I quickly realized there were a lot of topics that I'd love to cover, like the death of the author, three act structure, intertextuality, and character arcs, to name a few. I think in the future I'll have similar posts that dive into the sort of dry academia, so I can reference it in future discussions, but moving forward, I think I'll analyze a movie a month or every two weeks or something with the express goal of highlighting one of the categories I described earlier.

Thanks for reading and stay media literate!