About film theory

Usually people tend to confuse film theory with film interpretation. They 're making a big mistake!
The use of technical language doesn't transform the interpretation of individual films into theory. "Theory involves evolving categories and hypothesizing the existence of general patterns" (Noell Carroll).
Film theory should be a comprehensive instrument that is able to answer virtually every legitimate question about film. I doubt we have a legitimate instrument to study film. We have had so many different film theories, that we might come to think of film theory as a field of activity where many different projects at different levels of generality and abstraction coexist without being subsumed under a singular general theory.
Theories are framed today in specific historical contexts for the purpose of answering certain questions. In the 1970's we saw the emergence of film-based semiotics, psychoanalisis, textual analysis and feminism; in the 1980's post-structuralism, post-modernism, multiculturalism and the so called "identity politics" (gay/lesbian/queer studies). If we have so many approaches to film studies I would like to know why an inter-theoretical debate is so rare in the history of film theory !
How many film theorists can you name, who are noteworthy for their careful consideration of previous research? I can think only of Christian Metz. I hope you can prove me wrong soon!

How does cinematic fiction render the ordinary world intelligible?

Narrative is one of the fundamental ways in which we organnize the world. In recent years the study of narrative has acquired a new and prominent role in theorizing film theory.
How do you study narratology?

• You should study theories about the nature of those patterns and structures, which are created while consciuonsly reading a text;
• You should look at the concept of causality, space and time and how they have been perceived as data in an imagined story world;
• You should ask yourself how to represent a particular event within a narrative schema;
• You should also expand the concept of the spectator's knowledge beyond immediate seeing to include other influences: cultural expectations, memory of previous scenes and the sound track;
• You should create a hierarchy of roles or levels which describes the typical ways in which a reader participates in a novel.

It isn't a simple task, but Edward Branigan has done it in his Narrative Comprehension and Film. His principal references are Todorov's causal-transformation theory of narrative and Stephen Heath's theory of displacement.
Edward Branigan offers us a great deal of substance and a range of attractive speculative insights. The book explain us how to relate the double argument about narrative in film and human perception as interpretive construals.

Film spectatorship

Yesterday my copy of Projecting Illusion by Richard Allen arrived at my home. The critic disscusses the concept of "illusion" (obviously!) and the aesthetic experience of visual representation. His books touches on fundamental issues in cinema theory, it borrows many concepts from Husserl and Althusser , and invokes Deridda's theory, while the general tendency of film theory seeks instead to exemplify Lacanian theory and embrace Althusser's ideological pparatus theory. The logical incoherencies of contemporary film theorists clearly emerge frome the pages of this book. Allen concurs with Noel Carrol's conclusion that contemporary film theorists's characterization of the impression of reality in cinema is wrong, but while Noel Carroll rejects the applicability of the concept of illusion to the cinema, Allen, on the other hand, gives the concept of illusion renewed significance through a detailed investigation of the ways in which illusion may be experienced and the kinds of beliefs that illusion entails.