Film Studies

The History of Film Studies

While Vachel Lindsay published a book of film criticism in 1915, Hugo Münsterberg is widely regarded the first of the film theorists. Drawing on [Page 567]his expertise as a cognitive psychologist, Münsterberg translated his movie-going experiences into a prescient understanding of the ways film transcends time and space and does not replicate nature but gives us new ways to look at the world. His work provides a foundation for important conversations to come about realism and formalism in cinema. Films have been construed to fit into broad styles of realism (featuring a minimal distortion of reality), formalism or expressionism (featuring an obvious distortion of reality for effect), or the middle way of classicism (featuring cinematic conventions that are not, strictly speaking, realistic but are so broadly accepted that they are taken for granted). These patterns of categorizing films are deeply entrenched despite overlaps among categories (which are reductive by necessity), numerous films that feature competing elements (e.g., a realistic narrative and formalistic editing techniques), and evaluations that have shifted over time (the obviously handheld camera seemed formalistic at one time but became a realistic device after the widespread use of home video cameras). This way of categorizing films dates back to the earliest days of cinema when the Lumière Brothers began projecting their nonfiction shorts in 1895 (realism), Georges Méliès began screening short narratives such as A Trip to the Moon (1902) with illusions and fantastical themes (formalism), and Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 western The Great Train Robbery (1903) included location shooting, crosscutting between two storylines, and special editing effects that were to be taken as realistic (classicism). Film theorists argued the relative merits of one style over another for decades with one motive of their conversation being establishing film as an art form worthy of such consideration.

Director, film teacher, and theorist Sergei Eisenstein was an important part of the Soviet cinema community, and his films and writing, like those of his colleagues, promote editing, which they termed montage, as the foundational element of film art. Eisenstein believed that editing—rendered in dynamic, dialectical ways—could greatly increase the formal power of the art form. Another important voice in promoting formalist films theories was Rudolf Arnheim, a gestalt psychologist who argued that cinema’s formalism—the elements that separate film from reality—is what makes it an art form, and his early works made the case that the technological innovations that made film more “realistic” (such as the advent of synchronous sound) diminished cinema as an art. Important voices advocating for realism in cinema, such as Cesare Zavattini and Siegfried Kracauer, emphasized film’s shared attributes with still photography and celebrated the ways that film can replicate the real world. Zavattini, a screenwriter and Italian neorealist, wrote one of the most important films in the neorealism movement, Ladri di biciclette (released in America originally as The Bicycle Thief, 1948). Stylistically, neorealist films emphasized episodic structures and conversational dialogue, locations rather than studio sets, actors who were nonprofessionals or, at least, not iconic, and a straightforward visual style, a style commonly associated with documentary.

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