By Warren Buckland
In Film conception: Rational Reconstructions, Warren Buckland asks a chain of questions about how movie idea will get written within the first place:
- How does it pick out its gadgets of analysis and its equipment of inquiry?
- How does it make discoveries and clarify filmic phenomena? And,
- How does it formulate and remedy theoretical problems?
He asks those questions of movie conception via a rational reconstruction and a classical observation. either frameworks make clear and reformulate imprecise and inexact expressions, redefine vague techniques, and look at the underlying good judgment of movie idea arguments. This not just topics movie thought to rigorous exam; it additionally teaches scholars how you can write thought, via allowing them to question and seriously interrogate the common sense of earlier movie conception arguments.
The ebook contains 9 chapters that heavily study a chain of canonical movie books and essays in nice element, by means of Peter Wollen, Laura Mulvey, Thomas Elsaesser, Stephen Heath, and Slavoj Žižek, between others.
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Additional info for Film Theory: Rational Reconstructions
Sample text
Similarly, in a reverse move, auteur theory downplayed the European work of former American directors (such as Joseph Losey). However, Wollen plays it safe by focusing his chapter on two well-known directors already confirmed as auteurs by the Cahiers critics and by Sarris – Howard Hawks and John Ford. One advantage of using these directors is that they each have a comprehensive corpus the auteur critic can work with. Wollen collects data from the films that constitute the core of Ford’s corpus – his Westerns (My Darling Clementine [1946], The Searchers, Rio Bravo [1959], The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence [1962], Cheyenne Autumn [1964]) – and notes that Hawks worked in almost every genre in Hollywood (81).
Arguing from a traditional auteur position, Robin Wood declared: ‘any sense we may receive of “scientific” objectivity is manifestly illusory; Wollen’s account of Hawks reveals as strong a personal bias as one will find in the most admittedly “subjective” criticism, the more dangerous for being 34 PETER WOLLEN’S ‘THE AUTEUR THEORY’ concealed beneath an appearance of detached analytic method’ (1976, 202). Wood presupposes Wollen’s analysis is complete and definitive, rather than the first stage in a fundamental reorientation of auteur theory.
For Wollen, Earp’s progress ‘is an uncomplicated passage from nature to culture, from the wilderness left in the past to the garden anticipated in the future’ (96). Rational legal authority/charismatic authority. These two types of authority ‘are combined naturally in Wyatt Earp’ (101). According to Wollen, therefore, Earp begins like Edwards and Doniphon by embodying nomad/wilderness/charismatic authority, but transforms into the three opposite terms as the film progresses. Bill Nichols disputes Wollen’s reading of My Darling Clementine, and offers an alternative structural analysis (discussed below).