Critical theory is a school of thought that stresses the examination and the critique of society and culture by applying knowledge from the social sciences and the humanities.
So I love Cinema, critical theory and philosophy. Of course, art and philosophy have a long affair: from before Aristotle’s Poetics to Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory to Zizek’s The Sublime Object of Cinema and beyond.
However, as a former Literature student, I love an essay which analyses a text. My question is therefore, what are some great essays that use critical theory alongside a film? Zizek tends to use cinema to explain philosophy (e.g. the Id, Ego and Superego in Psycho) but I’d love to read more philosophy that helps analyse cinematic texts.
What are your favourite journals or pages to find such essays? Or even better, what are your favourite essays in this vein of writing? (For reference, anything adjacent to CT im I am interested in).
Sorry if this is the wrong sub, but thanks in advance!
Edit: Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club comes to mind!
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Not sure if this is relevant, but there is this collection of essays called „Foucault at the movies“. If I remember correctly, Deleuze has also written about cinema.
Thank you, I know about the rich Lacanian readings of cinema too. Unsure if this is exactly what I was seeking - but a reading recommendation is always appreciated!
Deleuze’s work on film is extremely metaphysical. He’s working with film rather than on film, if that makes sense. It’s all about the metaphysics of time and movement.
In "Combined and uneven apocalypse" Williams analyzes apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic movies through a marxist and psychoanalytic lens. He talks about mad max, night of the living dead, weekend, etc. Not sure if this is what you're looking for.
Precisely what I’m looking for! Thank you
Here are some good very basic ones that you probably have already read - if not all of these are foundational:
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mech.
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema
Sergei Eisenstein, on Montage (A dialectic approach to film)
Dziga Vertov, there is an essay that proposes the camera is the eye that is included in his Kino-Eye book, I think it is called his manifesto? These are all essays & are free online.
I found this resource while I was trying to figure out what Vertov’s writing was called. It looks super helpful and I need to read everything on there!
As for specific films, Sontag reviews a bunch in her Notes and god, like so many people analyze science fiction, specifically Blade Runner. The only analysis of it I have on hand I actually really dislike so I won’t share 😭
I like to read books about film sub topics, like sci-fi or Japanese cinema. That has a lot more visual/formal analysis, which is what you may be looking for?
certainly no essays but Cinema I and II by Deleuze are titans in the philosophy of film and a very stimulating read
I’m not sure that one fits OP’s request because it’s less concerned with textual analysis than it is with metaphysics
maybe but i would argue that the function of a medium is very important to give an account of its sign system and any critical textual analysis needs this.
Think for example of how Barthes elaborates how myth as a secondary linguistic order is derived from the primary sign relation. He arrives at this after looking at the mythologies of the everyday, emerging from TV advertisments and writing and it is very obvious that visual media is not all that comparable to textual matter when one is analysing how social meaning is sustained by naturalized, and furthermore mythologized, culture/ideology
Now since where talking about just film the cinema books are useful for deep analysis of approaches to film. See the excellent book Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories by Elizabeth Freeman for a theoretical media examination that draws upon deleuze at some (tho small) points
I didn’t make any claims about whether it’s important, I just think OP is looking for something else. Deleuze isn’t really doing textual analysis, he’s instead trying to understand how cinema works, using texts to serve his conceptual apparatus rather than having the texts be the primary object of analysis. Something like Deleuze and Horror Film by Anna Powell seems more appropriate for OP (although I’ve only read a few excerpts of the book).
I wouldnt seperate these levels of analysis entirely but OP can do as they like. I will give that book a look, a colleague is writing sociologically about film atm so i am trying to get more into it so thank you kindly.
These really stand out to me, as they're actually about the medium. A weirdly high proportion of film criticism and theory keeps the specificity of the medium at a safe distance.
you mention a long standing trend and this quote on the matter will always be funny to me - there is a letter from Gilles to Felix Guattari where he complains: "I will be giving a course on Cinema and Thought (I've read some of the people on film; it is highly mediocre, we need to get involved)."
Still true today! So much film theory is still huffing about Griffiths' grammar, screenplay formulae and lists of types of shots ... in my opinion the medium is young and there's so much left in it. But a focus on what looking at and listening to an audiovisual work actually involves prior to the reductive schemas is lacking 🙂
absolutely, most interesting stuff ive read recently was still not too innovative and used Barthes work on the grain of the voice and D&Gs tactility, crystal image, etc.
Fredric Jameson has two books on cinema
I want to back that up! I also recommend his essay on the cultural logic of late capitalism.
There is an American scholar, Anna Kornbluh, who picked up his project, she just released a book on immediacy last year.
Those would be my two recommendations. (Just mentioning, but I think you'll know those people for cinema theory: Joan Copjec and Todd McGowan)
Thanks - which one shall I read first? (Limited funds lol)
You can start with Signatures of the Visible, it's a collection of previously published essays on cinema. You should follow the other commentor's suggestion and borrow the books from a library.
If you’re in the US, but not a university student, your local municipal library may still be able to get the book through inter-library loan from a university system.
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey, of course.
It’s on my list to read and I wonder what you think of how Mulvey uses Lacan’s concept of the gaze — I’ve heard from listening to Todd McGowan’s and Ryan Engley’s Why Theory that Mulvey misreads Lacan, and that because of this essay’s popularity her particular misunderstanding of the gaze is prevalent in film theory.
She does misread Lacan but it’s still a great essay. Engels and McGowan always recommend Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire which has a good critique of Mulvey and is a great book in general. Zizek’s Looking Awry is good too if you are into psychoanalysis.
There are a collection of essays about the philosophy of the big Lebowski - I’m forgetting their title but that film in general offers up a lot for this sort of analysis
Not CT specifically, but
Bell hooks reel to real
The devil finds work by James Baldwin
Reel bad Arabs by jack shaheen
There is a book named "Lost in Translation" by Homay King.
Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire is imo truly one of the most important (and criminally under read) books not just in film theory but in theory broadly. A major critique of the gaze as developed in Mulvey, etc., of Foucault, and especially of Butler. Imagine There’s No Woman is also great.
I have it on the bookshelf but think I need to read a little more Lacan first to get the most out of it, an endeavour I’ve pushed back whilst I study Hegel. From what I have read it’s great and I know of it’s famous of importance in film studies. Thanks
The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle by Jonathan Beller.
Wonderful read and intersection between film, and social relationships mediated by commodities, attention economy, and spectacle.
I also particularly like the end of the book's description, "He thus develops an analysis of what amounts to the global industrialization of perception that today informs not only the specific social functions of new media, but also sustains a violent and hierarchical global society."
Siegfried Kracauer
Theory of Film
From Caligari to Hitler
He was a member of the original Frankfurt School, and his theory on film is a classic in the discipline and I am surprised nobody mentioned it given the context..... He is better known for the Mass Ornament, but thats not really on film. There are good youtube videos and essays on the first book, which is a fascinating take on film and reality.....
You’re asking two different things it seems
Do you want textual analyses using critical theory?
Or do you want theory that can be used for the analysis of film?