cinema essay definition

Essays About Cinema: Top 5 Examples and 10 Prompts

Are you writing an essay on cinema? Check out our round-up of great examples of essays about cinema and creative prompts to stir up your thoughts on this art form.

Cinema is primarily referred to as films. With the power to transport people to different worlds and cultures, cinema can be an evocative medium to tell stories, shape beliefs, and seed new ideas. Cinema can also refer to the production process of films or even film theaters.

If you’re writing an essay about cinema, our inspiring essay examples and prompts below can help you find the best way to express your thoughts on this art form:  

Best 5 Essay Examples

1. french cinema is more than just entertainment by jonathan romney, 2. “nope” is one of the greatest movies about moviemaking by richard brody, 3. the wolf of wall street and the new cinema of excesses by izzy black, 4. how spirited away changed animation forever by kat moon, 5. from script to screen: what role for intellectual property by cathy jewell, 1. the history of cinema, 2. analysis of my favorite movie, 3. the impact of cinema on life, 4. the technological evolution of cinema, 5. cinema and piracy, 6. how to make a short film, 7. movies vs. film vs. cinema, 8. movie theaters during the pandemic, 9. film festivals, 10. the effect of music on mood.

“In France, cinema is taken seriously, traditionally considered an art rather than merely a form of entertainment or an industrial product. In that spirit, and in the name of ‘cultural exception,’ the French state has long supported home-grown cinema as both art and business.”

The culture of creating and consuming cinema is at the heart of French culture. The essay gives an overview of how the French give premium to cinema as a tool for economic and cultural progress, inspiring other countries to learn from the French in maintaining and elevating the global prestige of their film industry.

“‘Nope’ is one of the great movies about moviemaking, about the moral and spiritual implications of cinematic representation itself—especially the representation of people at the center of American society who are treated as its outsiders.”

The essay summarizes “Nope,” a sci-fi horror released in 2022. It closely inspects its action, technology play, and dramatic point-of-view shots while carefully avoiding spoilers. But beyond the cinematic technicalities, the movie also captures Black Americans’ experience of exploitation in the movie’s set period. 

“These films opt to imaginatively present the psychology of ideology rather than funnel in a more deceptive ideology through moralizing. The hope, then, perhaps, that indulging in the sin that we might better come to terms with the animal of capitalism and learn something of value from it. Which is to say, there is a moral end to at all.” 

This essay zooms into various movies of excess in recent times and compares them against those in the ‘60s when the style in the cinema first rose. She finds that current films of excess do not punish their undiscerning heroes in the end. While this has been interpreted as glorifying the excess, Black sees this as our way to learn.

Check out these essays about heroes and essays about college .

“Spirited Away shattered preconceived notions about the art form and also proved that, as a film created in Japanese with elements of Japanese folklore central to its core, it could resonate deeply with audiences around the world.”

Spirited Away is a hand-drawn animation that not only put Japanese cinema on the map but also changed the animation landscape forever. The film bent norms that allowed it to break beyond its target demographics and redefine animation’s aesthetic impact. The Times essay looks back on the film’s historic journey toward sweeping nominations and awards on a global stage long dominated by Western cinema. 

“[IP rights] help producers attract the funds needed to get a film project off the ground; enable directors, screenwriters and actors, as well as the many artists and technicians who work behind the scenes, to earn a living; and spur the technological innovations that push the boundaries of creativity and make the seemingly impossible, possible.”

Protecting intellectual property rights in cinema has a significant but often overlooked role in helping make or break the success of a film. In this essay, the author identifies the film-making stages where contracts on intellectual property terms are created and offers best practices to preserve ownership over creative works throughout the film-making process.

10 Exciting Writing Prompts

See below our writing prompts to encourage great ideas for your essay:

In this essay, you can write about the beginnings of cinema or pick a certain period in the evolution of film. Then, look into the defining styles that made them have an indelible mark in cinema history. But to create more than just an informational essay, try to incorporate your reflections by comparing the experience of watching movies today to your chosen cinema period.

Pick your favorite movie and analyze its theme and main ideas. First, provide a one-paragraph summary. Then, pick out the best scenes and symbolisms that you think poignantly relayed the movie’s theme and message. To inspire your critical thinking and analysis of movies, you may turn to the essays of renowned film critics such as André Bazin and Roger Ebert . 

Talk about the advantages and disadvantages of cinema. You can cite research and real-life events that show the benefits and risks of consuming or producing certain types of films. For example, cinematic works such as documentaries on the environment can inspire action to protect Mother Nature. Meanwhile, film violence can be dangerous, especially when exposed to children without parental guidance.

Walk down memory lane of the 100 years of cinema and reflect on each defining era. Like any field, the transformation of cinema is also inextricably linked to the emergence of groundbreaking innovations, such as the kinetoscope that paved the way for short silent movies and the technicolor process that allowed the transition from black and white to colored films. Finally, you can add the future innovations anticipated to revolutionize cinema. 

Content piracy is the illegal streaming, uploading, and selling of copyrighted content. First, research on what technologies are propelling piracy and what are piracy’s implications to the film industry, the larger creative community, and the economy. Then, cite existing anti-piracy efforts of your government and several film organizations such as the Motion Picture Association . Finally, offer your take on piracy, whether you are for or against it, and explain. 

A short film is a great work and a starting point for budding and aspiring movie directors to venture into cinema. First, plot the critical stages a film director will undertake to produce a short film, such as writing the plot, choosing a cast, marketing the film, and so on. Then, gather essential tips from interviews with directors of award-winning short films, especially on budgeting, given the limited resource of short film projects. 

Beyond their linguistic differences, could the terms movie, film, and cinema have differences as jargon in the film-making world? Elaborate on the differences between these three terms and what movie experts think. For example, Martin Scorsese doesn’t consider the film franchise Avengers as cinema. Explain what such differentiation means. 

Theaters were among the first and worst hit during the outbreak of COVID-19 as they were forced to shut down. In your essay, dig deeper into the challenges that followed their closure, such as movie consumers’ exodus to streaming services that threatened to end cinemas. Then, write about new strategies movie theater operators had to take to survive the pandemic. Finally, write an outlook on the possible fate of movie theaters by using research studies and personally weighing the pros and cons of watching movies at home.

Film Festivals greatly support the film industry, expand national wealth, and strengthen cultural pride. For this prompt, write about how film festivals encouraged the rise of specific genres and enabled the discovery of unique films and a fresh set of filmmakers to usher in a new trend in cinema.

First, elaborate on how music can intensify the mood in movies. Then, use case examples of how music, especially distinct ones, can bring greater value to a film. For example, superhero and fantasy movies’ intro music allows more excellent recall. 

For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers . 

If you’re still stuck, check out our general resource of essay writing topics .

Yna Lim is a communications specialist currently focused on policy advocacy. In her eight years of writing, she has been exposed to a variety of topics, including cryptocurrency, web hosting, agriculture, marketing, intellectual property, data privacy and international trade. A former journalist in one of the top business papers in the Philippines, Yna is currently pursuing her master's degree in economics and business.

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The essay film

In recent years the essay film has attained widespread recognition as a particular category of film practice, with its own history and canonical figures and texts. In tandem with a major season throughout August at London’s BFI Southbank, Sight & Sound explores the characteristics that have come to define this most elastic of forms and looks in detail at a dozen influential milestone essay films.

Andrew Tracy , Katy McGahan , Olaf Möller , Sergio Wolf , Nina Power Updated: 7 May 2019

from our August 2013 issue

Le camera stylo? Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

I recently had a heated argument with a cinephile filmmaking friend about Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1983). Having recently completed her first feature, and with such matters on her mind, my friend contended that the film’s power lay in its combinations of image and sound, irrespective of Marker’s inimitable voiceover narration. “Do you think that people who can’t understand English or French will get nothing out of the film?” she said; to which I – hot under the collar – replied that they might very well get something, but that something would not be the complete work.

The Sight & Sound Deep Focus season Thought in Action: The Art of the Essay Film runs at BFI Southbank 1-28 August 2013, with a keynote lecture by Kodwo Eshun on 1 August, a talk by writer and academic Laura Rascaroli on 27 August and a closing panel debate on 28 August.

To take this film-lovers’ tiff to a more elevated plane, what it suggests is that the essentialist conception of cinema is still present in cinephilic and critical culture, as are the difficulties of containing within it works that disrupt its very fabric. Ever since Vachel Lindsay published The Art of the Moving Picture in 1915 the quest to secure the autonomy of film as both medium and art – that ever-elusive ‘pure cinema’ – has been a preoccupation of film scholars, critics, cinephiles and filmmakers alike. My friend’s implicit derogation of the irreducible literary element of Sans soleil and her neo- Godard ian invocation of ‘image and sound’ touch on that strain of this phenomenon which finds, in the technical-functional combination of those two elements, an alchemical, if not transubstantiational, result.

Mechanically created, cinema defies mechanism: it is poetic, transportive and, if not irrational, then a-rational. This mystically-minded view has a long and illustrious tradition in film history, stretching from the sense-deranging surrealists – who famously found accidental poetry in the juxtapositions created by randomly walking into and out of films; to the surrealist-influenced, scientifically trained and ontologically minded André Bazin , whose realist veneration of the long take centred on the very preternaturalness of nature as revealed by the unblinking gaze of the camera; to the trash-bin idolatry of the American underground, weaving new cinematic mythologies from Hollywood detritus; and to auteurism itself, which (in its more simplistic iterations) sees the essence of the filmmaker inscribed even upon the most compromised of works.

It isn’t going too far to claim that this tradition has constituted the foundation of cinephilic culture and helped to shape the cinematic canon itself. If Marker has now been welcomed into that canon and – thanks to the far greater availability of his work – into the mainstream of (primarily DVD-educated) cinephilia, it is rarely acknowledged how much of that work cheerfully undercuts many of the long-held assumptions and pieties upon which it is built.

In his review of Letter from Siberia (1957), Bazin placed Marker at right angles to cinema proper, describing the film’s “primary material” as intelligence – specifically a “verbal intelligence” – rather than image. He dubbed Marker’s method a “horizontal” montage, “as opposed to traditional montage that plays with the sense of duration through the relationship of shot to shot”.

Here, claimed Bazin, “a given image doesn’t refer to the one that preceded it or the one that will follow, but rather it refers laterally, in some way, to what is said.” Thus the very thing which makes Letter “extraordinary”, in Bazin’s estimation, is also what makes it not-cinema. Looking for a term to describe it, Bazin hit upon a prophetic turn of phrase, writing that Marker’s film is, “to borrow Jean Vigo’s formulation of À propos de Nice (‘a documentary point of view’), an essay documented by film. The important word is ‘essay’, understood in the same sense that it has in literature – an essay at once historical and political, written by a poet as well.”

Marker’s canonisation has proceeded apace with that of the form of which he has become the exemplar. Whether used as critical/curatorial shorthand in reviews and programme notes, employed as a model by filmmakers or examined in theoretical depth in major retrospectives (this summer’s BFI Southbank programme, for instance, follows upon Andréa Picard’s two-part series ‘The Way of the Termite’ at TIFF Cinémathèque in 2009-2010, which drew inspiration from Jean-Pierre Gorin ’s groundbreaking programme of the same title at Vienna Filmmuseum in 2007), the ‘essay film’ has attained in recent years widespread recognition as a particular, if perennially porous, mode of film practice. An appealingly simple formulation, the term has proved both taxonomically useful and remarkably elastic, allowing one to define a field of previously unassimilable objects while ranging far and wide throughout film history to claim other previously identified objects for this invented tradition.

Las Hurdes (1933)

It is crucial to note that the ‘essay film’ is not only a post-facto appellation for a kind of film practice that had not bothered to mark itself with a moniker, but also an invention and an intervention. While it has acquired its own set of canonical ‘texts’ that include the collected works of Marker, much of Godard – from the missive (the 52-minute Letter to Jane , 1972) to the massive ( Histoire(s) de cinéma , 1988-98) – Welles’s F for Fake (1973) and Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), it has also poached on the territory of other, ‘sovereign’ forms, expanding its purview in accordance with the whims of its missionaries.

From documentary especially, Vigo’s aforementioned À propos de Nice, Ivens’s Rain (1929), Buñuel’s sardonic Las Hurdes (1933), Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), Rouch and Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961); from the avant garde, Akerman’s Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974), Straub/Huillet’s Trop tôt, trop tard (1982); from agitprop, Getino and Solanas’s The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), Portabella’s Informe general… (1976); and even from ‘pure’ fiction, for example Gorin’s provocative selection of Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909).

Just as within itself the essay film presents, in the words of Gorin, “the meandering of an intelligence that tries to multiply the entries and the exits into the material it has elected (or by which it has been elected),” so, without, its scope expands exponentially through the industrious activity of its adherents, blithely cutting across definitional borders and – as per the Manny Farber ian concept which gave Gorin’s ‘Termite’ series its name –  creating meaning precisely by eating away at its own boundaries. In the scope of its application and its association more with an (amorphous) sensibility as opposed to fixed rules, the essay film bears similarities to the most famous of all fabricated genres: film noir, which has been located both in its natural habitat of the crime thriller as well as in such disparate climates as melodramas, westerns and science fiction.

The essay film, however, has proved even more peripatetic: where noir was formulated from the films of a determinate historical period (no matter that the temporal goalposts are continually shifted), the essay film is resolutely unfixed in time; it has its choice of forebears. And while noir, despite its occasional shadings over into semi-documentary during the 1940s, remains bound to fictional narratives, the essay film moves blithely between the realms of fiction and non-fiction, complicating the terms of both.

“Here is a form that seems to accommodate the two sides of that divide at the same time, that can navigate from documentary to fiction and back, creating other polarities in the process between which it can operate,” writes Gorin. When Orson Welles , in the closing moments of his masterful meditation on authenticity and illusion F for Fake, chortles, “I did promise that for one hour, I’d tell you only the truth. For the past 17 minutes, I’ve been lying my head off,” he is expressing both the conjuror’s pleasure in a trick well played and the artist’s delight in a self-defined mode that is cheerfully impure in both form and, perhaps, intention.

Nevertheless, as the essay film merrily traipses through celluloid history it intersects with ‘pure cinema’ at many turns and its form as such owes much to one particularly prominent variety thereof.

The montage tradition

If the mystical strain described above represents the Dionysian side of pure cinema, Soviet montage was its Apollonian opposite: randomness, revelation and sensuous response countered by construction, forceful argumentation and didactic instruction.

No less than the mystics, however, the montagists were after essences. Eisenstein , Dziga Vertov and Pudovkin , along with their transnational associates and acolytes, sought to crystallise abstract concepts in the direct and purposeful juxtaposition of forceful, hard-edged images – the general made powerfully, viscerally immediate in the particular. Here, says Eisenstein, in the umbrella-wielding harpies who set upon the revolutionaries in October (1928), is bourgeois Reaction made manifest; here, in the serried ranks of soldiers proceeding as one down the Odessa Steps in Battleship Potemkin (1925), is Oppression undisguised; here, in the condemned Potemkin sailor who wins over his imminent executioners with a cry of “Brothers!” – a moment powerfully invoked by Marker at the beginning of his magnum opus A Grin Without a Cat (1977) – is Solidarity emergent and, from it, the seeds of Revolution.

The relentlessly unidirectional focus of classical Soviet montage puts it methodologically and temperamentally at odds with the ruminative, digressive and playful qualities we associate with the essay film. So, too, the former’s fierce ideological certainty and cadre spirit contrast with that free play of the mind, the Montaigne -inspired meanderings of individual intelligence, that so characterise our image of the latter.

Beyond Marker’s personal interest in and inheritance from the Soviet masters, classical montage laid the foundations of the essay film most pertinently in its foregrounding of the presence, within the fabric of the film, of a directing intelligence. Conducting their experiments in film not through ‘pure’ abstraction but through narrative, the montagists made manifest at least two operative levels within the film: the narrative itself and the arrangement of that narrative by which the deeper structures that move it are made legible. Against the seamless, immersive illusionism of commercial cinema, montage was a key for decrypting those social forces, both overt and hidden, that govern human society.

And as such it was method rather than material that was the pathway to truth. Fidelity to the authentic – whether the accurate representation of historical events or the documentary flavouring of Eisensteinian typage – was important only insomuch as it provided the filmmaker with another tool to reach a considerably higher plane of reality.

Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm (1931)

Midway on their Marxian mission to change the world rather than interpret it, the montagists actively made the world even as they revealed it. In doing so they powerfully expressed the dialectic between control and chaos that would come to be not only one of the chief motors of the essay film but the crux of modernity itself.

Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), now claimed as the most venerable and venerated ancestor of the essay film (and this despite its prototypically purist claim to realise a ‘universal’ cinematic language “based on its complete separation from the language of literature and the theatre”) is the archetypal model of this high-modernist agon. While it is the turning of the movie projector itself and the penetrating gaze of Vertov’s kino-eye that sets the whirling dynamo of the city into motion, the recorder creating that which it records, that motion is also outside its control.

At the dawn of the cinematic century, the American writer Henry Adams saw in the dynamo both the expression of human mastery over nature and a conduit to mysterious, elemental powers beyond our comprehension. So, too, the modernist ambition expressed in literature, painting, architecture and cinema to capture a subject from all angles – to exhaust its wealth of surfaces, meanings, implications, resonances – collides with awe (or fear) before a plenitude that can never be encompassed.

Remove the high-modernist sense of mission and we can see this same dynamic as animating the essay film – recall that last, parenthetical term in Gorin’s formulation of the essay film, “multiply[ing] the entries and the exits into the material it has elected (or by which it has been elected)”. The nimble movements and multi-angled perspectives of the essay film are founded on this negotiation between active choice and passive possession; on the recognition that even the keenest insight pales in the face of an ultimate unknowability.

The other key inheritance the essay film received from the classical montage tradition, perhaps inevitably, was a progressive spirit, however variously defined. While Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938) amply and chillingly demonstrated that montage, like any instrumental apparatus, has no inherent ideological nature, hers were more the exceptions that proved the rule. (Though why, apart from ideological repulsiveness, should Riefenstahl’s plentifully fabricated ‘documentaries’ not be considered as essay films in their own right?)

The overwhelming fact remains that the great majority of those who drew upon the Soviet montagists for explicitly ideological ends (as opposed to Hollywood’s opportunistic swipings) resided on the left of the spectrum – and, in the montagists’ most notable successor in the period immediately following, retained their alignment with and inextricability from the state.

Progressive vs radical

The Grierson ian documentary movement in Britain neutered the political and aesthetic radicalism of its more dynamic model in favour of paternalistic progressivism founded on conformity, class complacency and snobbery towards its own medium. But if it offered a far paler antecedent to the essay film than the Soviet montage tradition, it nevertheless represents an important stage in the evolution of the essay-film form, for reasons not unrelated to some of those rather staid qualities.

The Soviet montagists had created a vision of modernity racing into the future at pace with the social and spiritual liberation of its proletarian pilot-passenger, an aggressively public ideology of group solidarity. The Grierson school, by contrast, offered a domesticated image of an efficient, rational and productive modern industrial society based on interconnected but separate public and private spheres, as per the ideological values of middle-class liberal individualism.

The Soviet montagists had looked to forge a universal, ‘pure’ cinematic language, at least before the oppressive dictates of Stalinist socialist realism shackled them. The Grierson school, evincing a middle-class disdain for the popular and ‘low’ arts, sought instead to purify the sullied medium of cinema by importing extra-cinematic prestige: most notably Night Mail (1936), with its Auden -penned, Britten -scored ode to the magic of the mail, or Humphrey Jennings’s salute to wartime solidarity A Diary for Timothy (1945), with its mildly sententious E.M. Forster narration.

Night Mail (1936)

What this domesticated dynamism and retrograde pursuit of high-cultural bona fides achieved, however, was to mingle a newfound cinematic language (montage) with a traditionally literary one (narration); and, despite the salutes to state-oriented communality, to re-introduce the individual, idiosyncratic voice as the vehicle of meaning – as the mediating intelligence that connects the viewer to the images viewed.

In Night Mail especially there is, in the whimsy of the Auden text and the film’s synchronisation of private time and public history, an intimation of the essay film’s musing, reflective voice as the chugging rhythm of the narration timed to the speeding wheels of the train gives way to a nocturnal vision of solitary dreamers bedevilled by spectral monsters, awakening in expectation of the postman’s knock with a “quickening of the heart/for who can bear to be forgot?”

It’s a curiously disquieting conclusion: this unsettling, anxious vision of disappearance that takes on an even darker shade with the looming spectre of war – one that rhymes, five decades on, with the wistful search of Marker’s narrator in Sans soleil, seeking those fleeting images which “quicken the heart” in a world where wars both past and present have been forgotten, subsumed in a modern society built upon the systematic banishment of memory.

It is, of course, with the seminal post-war collaborations between Marker and Alain Resnais that the essay film proper emerges. In contrast to the striving culture-snobbery of the Griersonian documentary, the Resnais-Marker collaborations (and the Resnais solo documentary shorts that preceded them) inaugurate a blithe, seemingly effortless dialogue between cinema and the other arts in both their subjects (painting, sculpture) and their assorted creative personnel (writers Paul Éluard , Jean Cayrol , Raymond Queneau , composers Darius Milhaud and Hanns Eisler ). This also marks the point where the revolutionary line of the Soviets and the soft, statist liberalism of the British documentarians give way to a more free-floating but staunchly oppositional leftism, one derived as much from a spirit of humanistic inquiry as from ideological affiliation.

Related to this was the form’s problems with official patronage. Originally conceived as commissions by various French government or government-affiliated bodies, the Resnais-Marker films famously ran into trouble from French censors: Les statues meurent aussi (1953) for its condemnation of French colonialism, Night and Fog for its shots of Vichy policemen guarding deportation camps; the former film would have its second half lopped off before being cleared for screening, the latter its offending shots removed.

Night and Fog (1955)

Appropriately, it is at this moment that the emphasis of the essay film begins to shift away from tactile presence – the whirl of the city, the rhythm of the rain, the workings of industry – to felt absence. The montagists had marvelled at the workings of human creations which raced ahead irrespective of human efforts; here, the systems created by humanity to master the world write, in their very functioning, an epitaph for those things extinguished in the act of mastering them. The African masks preserved in the Musée de l’Homme in Les statues meurent aussi speak of a bloody legacy of vanquished and conquered civilisations; the labyrinthine archival complex of the Bibliothèque Nationale in the sardonically titled Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) sparks a disquisition on all that is forgotten in the act of cataloguing knowledge; the miracle of modern plastics saluted in the witty, industrially commissioned Le Chant du styrène (1958) regresses backwards to its homely beginnings; in Night and Fog an unprecedentedly enormous effort of human organisation marshals itself to actively produce a dreadful, previously unimaginable nullity.

To overstate the case, loss is the primary motor of the modern essay film: loss of belief in the image’s ability to faithfully reflect reality; loss of faith in the cinema’s ability to capture life as it is lived; loss of illusions about cinema’s ‘purity’, its autonomy from the other arts or, for that matter, the world.

“You never know what you may be filming,” notes one of Marker’s narrating surrogates in A Grin Without a Cat, as footage of the Chilean equestrian team at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics offers a glimpse of a future member of the Pinochet junta. The image and sound captured at the time of filming offer one facet of reality; it is only with this lateral move outside that reality that the future reality it conceals can speak.

What will distinguish the essay film, as Bazin noted, is not only its ability to make the image but also its ability to interrogate it, to dispel the illusion of its sovereignty and see it as part of a matrix of meaning that extends beyond the screen. No less than were the montagists, the film-essayists seek the motive forces of modern society not by crystallising eternal verities in powerful images but by investigating that ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic relationship between our regime of images and the realities it both reveals and occludes.

— Andrew Tracy

1.   À propos de Nice

Jean Vigo, 1930

Few documentaries have achieved the cult status of the 22-minute A propos de Nice, co-directed by Jean Vigo and cameraman Boris Kaufman at the beginning of their careers. The film retains a spontaneous, apparently haphazard, quality yet its careful montage combines a strong realist drive, lyrical dashes – helped by Marc Perrone’s accordion music – and a clear political agenda.

In today’s era, in which the Côte d’Azur has become a byword for hedonistic consumption, it’s refreshing to see a film that systematically undermines its glossy surface. Using images sometimes ‘stolen’ with hidden cameras, A propos de Nice moves between the city’s main sites of pleasure: the Casino, the Promenade des Anglais, the Hotel Negresco and the carnival. Occasionally the filmmakers remind us of the sea, the birds, the wind in the trees but mostly they contrast people: the rich play tennis, the poor boules; the rich have tea, the poor gamble in the (then) squalid streets of the Old Town.

As often, women bear the brunt of any critique of bourgeois consumption: a rich old woman’s head is compared to an ostrich, others grin as they gaze up at phallic factory chimneys; young women dance frenetically, their crotch to the camera. In the film’s most famous image, an elegant woman is ‘stripped’ by the camera to reveal her naked body – not quite matched by a man’s shoes vanishing to display his naked feet to the shoe-shine.

An essay film avant la lettre , A propos de Nice ends on Soviet-style workers’ faces and burning furnaces. The message is clear, even if it has not been heeded by history.

— Ginette Vincendeau

2. A Diary for Timothy

Humphrey Jennings, 1945

A Diary for Timothy takes the form of a journal addressed to the eponymous Timothy James Jenkins, born on 3 September 1944, exactly five years after Britain’s entry into World War II. The narrator, Michael Redgrave , a benevolent offscreen presence, informs young Timothy about the momentous events since his birth and later advises that, even when the war is over, there will be “everyday danger”.

The subjectivity and speculative approach maintained throughout are more akin to the essay tradition than traditional propaganda in their rejection of mere glib conveyance of information or thunderous hectoring. Instead Jennings invites us quietly to observe the nuances of everyday life as Britain enters the final chapter of the war. Against the momentous political backdrop, otherwise routine, everyday activities are ascribed new profundity as the Welsh miner Geronwy, Alan the farmer, Bill the railway engineer and Peter the convalescent fighter pilot go about their daily business.

Within the confines of the Ministry of Information’s remit – to lift the spirits of a battle-weary nation – and the loose narrative framework of Timothy’s first six months, Jennings finds ample expression for the kind of formal experiment that sets his work apart from that of other contemporary documentarians. He worked across film, painting, photography, theatrical design, journalism and poetry; in Diary his protean spirit finds expression in a manner that transgresses the conventional parameters of wartime propaganda, stretching into film poem, philosophical reflection, social document, surrealistic ethnographic observation and impressionistic symphony. Managing to keep to the right side of sentimentality, it still makes for potent viewing.

— Catherine McGahan

3. Toute la mémoire du monde

Alain Resnais, 1956

In the opening credits of Toute la mémoire du monde, alongside the director’s name and that of producer Pierre Braunberger , one reads the mysterious designation “Groupe des XXX”. This Group of Thirty was an assembly of filmmakers who mobilised in the early 1950s to defend the “style, quality and ambitious subject matter” of short films in post-war France; the signatories of its 1953 ‘Declaration’ included Resnais , Chris Marker and Agnès Varda. The success of the campaign contributed to a golden age of short filmmaking that would last a decade and form the crucible of the French essay film.

A 22-minute poetic documentary about the old French Bibliothèque Nationale, Toute la mémoire du monde is a key work in this strand of filmmaking and one which can also be seen as part of a loose ‘trilogy of memory’ in Resnais’s early documentaries. Les statues meurent aussi (co-directed with Chris Marker) explored cultural memory as embodied in African art and the depredations of colonialism; Night and Fog was a seminal reckoning with the historical memory of the Nazi death camps. While less politically controversial than these earlier works, Toute la mémoire du monde’s depiction of the Bibliothèque Nationale is still oddly suggestive of a prison, with its uniformed guards and endless corridors. In W.G. Sebald ’s 2001 novel Austerlitz, directly after a passage dedicated to Resnais’s film, the protagonist describes his uncertainty over whether, when using the library, he “was on the Islands of the Blest, or, on the contrary, in a penal colony”.

Resnais explores the workings of the library through the effective device of following a book from arrival and cataloguing to its delivery to a reader (the book itself being something of an in-joke: a mocked-up travel guide to Mars in the Petite Planète series Marker was then editing for Editions du Seuil). With Resnais’s probing, mobile camerawork and a commentary by French writer Remo Forlani, Toute la mémoire du monde transforms the library into a mysterious labyrinth, something between an edifice and an organism: part brain and part tomb.

— Chris Darke

4. The House is Black

(Khaneh siah ast) Forough Farrokhzad, 1963

Before the House of Makhmalbaf there was The House is Black. Called “the greatest of all Iranian films” by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who helped translate the subtitles from Farsi into English, this 20-minute black-and-white essay film by feminist poet Farrokhzad was shot in a leper colony near Tabriz in northern Iran and has been heralded as the touchstone of the Iranian New Wave.

The buildings of the Baba Baghi colony are brick and peeling whitewash but a student asked to write a sentence using the word ‘house’ offers Khaneh siah ast : the house is black. His hand, seen in close-up, is one of many in the film; rather than objects of medical curiosity, these hands – some fingerless, many distorted by the disease – are agents, always in movement, doing, making, exercising, praying. In putting white words on the blackboard, the student makes part of the film; in the next shots, the film’s credits appear, similarly handwritten on the same blackboard.

As they negotiate the camera’s gaze and provide the soundtrack by singing, stamping and wheeling a barrow, the lepers are co-authors of the film. Farrokhzad echoes their prayers, heard and seen on screen, with her voiceover, which collages religious texts, beginning with the passage from Psalm 55 famously set to music by Mendelssohn (“O for the wings of a dove”).

In the conjunctions between Farrokhzad’s poetic narration and diegetic sound, including tanbur-playing, an intense assonance arises. Its beat is provided by uniquely lyrical associative editing that would influence Abbas Kiarostami , who quotes Farrokhzad’s poem ‘The Wind Will Carry Us’ in his eponymous film . Repeated shots of familiar bodily movement, made musical, move the film insistently into the viewer’s body: it is infectious. Posing a question of aesthetics, The House Is Black uses the contagious gaze of cinema to dissolve the screen between Us and Them.

— Sophie Mayer

5. Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Still

Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972

With its invocation of Brecht (“Uncle Bertolt”), rejection of visual pleasure (for 52 minutes we’re mostly looking at a single black-and-white still) and discussion of the role of intellectuals in “the revolution”, Letter to Jane is so much of its time as to appear untranslatable to the present except as a curio from a distant era of radical cinema. Between 1969 and 1971, Godard and Gorin made films collectively as part of the Dziga Vertov Group before they returned, in 1972, to the mainstream with Tout va bien , a big-budget film about the aftermath of May 1968 featuring leftist stars Yves Montand and  Jane Fonda . It was to the latter that Godard and Gorin directed their Letter after seeing a news photograph of her on a solidarity visit to North Vietnam in August 1972.

Intended to accompany the US release of Tout va bien, Letter to Jane is ‘a letter’ only in as much as it is fairly conversational in tone, with Godard and Gorin delivering their voiceovers in English. It’s stylistically more akin to the ‘blackboard films’ of the time, with their combination of pedagogical instruction and stern auto-critique.

It’s also an inspired semiological reading of a media image and a reckoning with the contradictions of celebrity activism. Godard and Gorin examine the image’s framing and camera angle and ask why Fonda is the ‘star’ of the photograph while the Vietnamese themselves remain faceless or out of focus? And what of her expression of compassionate concern? This “expression of an expression” they trace back, via an elaboration of the Kuleshov effect , through other famous faces – Henry Fonda , John Wayne , Lillian Gish and Falconetti – concluding that it allows for “no reverse shot” and serves only to bolster Western “good conscience”.

Letter to Jane is ultimately concerned with the same question that troubled philosophers such as Levinas and Derrida : what’s at stake ethically when one claims to speak “in place of the other”? Any contemporary critique of celebrity activism – from Bono and Geldof to Angelina Jolie – should start here, with a pair of gauchiste trolls muttering darkly beneath a press shot of ‘Hanoi Jane’.

6. F for Fake

Orson Welles, 1973

Those who insist it was all downhill for Orson Welles after Citizen Kane would do well to take a close look at this film made more than three decades later, in its own idiosyncratic way a masterpiece just as innovative as his better-known feature debut.

Perhaps the film’s comparative and undeserved critical neglect is due to its predominantly playful tone, or perhaps it’s because it is a low-budget, hard-to-categorise, deeply personal work that mixes original material with plenty of footage filmed by others – most extensively taken from a documentary by François Reichenbach about Clifford Irving and his bogus biography of his friend Elmyr de Hory , an art forger who claimed to have painted pictures attributed to famous names and hung in the world’s most prestigious galleries.

If the film had simply offered an account of the hoaxes perpetrated by that disreputable duo, it would have been entertaining enough but, by means of some extremely inventive, innovative and inspired editing, Welles broadens his study of fakery to take in his own history as a ‘charlatan’ – not merely his lifelong penchant for magician’s tricks but also the 1938 radio broadcast of his news-report adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds – as well as observations on Howard Hughes , Pablo Picasso and the anonymous builders of Chartres cathedral. So it is that Welles contrives to conjure up, behind a colourful cloak of consistently entertaining mischief, a rueful meditation on truth and falsehood, art and authorship – a subject presumably dear to his heart following Pauline Kael ’s then recent attempts to persuade the world that Herman J. Mankiewicz had been the real creative force behind Kane.

As a riposte to that thesis (albeit never framed as such), F for Fake is subtle, robust, supremely erudite and never once bitter; the darkest moment – as Welles contemplates the serene magnificence of Chartres – is at once an uncharacteristic but touchingly heartfelt display of humility and a poignant memento mori. And it is in this delicate balancing of the autobiographical with the universal, as well as in the dazzling deployment of cinematic form to illustrate and mirror content, that the film works its once unique, now highly influential magic.

— Geoff Andrew

7. How to Live in the German Federal Republic

(Leben – BRD) Harun Farocki, 1990

Harun Farocki ’s portrait of West Germany in 32 simulations from training sessions has no commentary, just the actions themselves in all their surreal beauty, one after the other. The Bundesrepublik Deutschland is shown as a nation of people who can deal with everything because they have been prepared – taught how to react properly in every possible situation.

We know how birth works; how to behave in kindergarten; how to chat up girls, boys or whatever we fancy (for we’re liberal-minded, if only in principle); how to look for a job and maybe live without finding one; how to wiggle our arses in the hottest way possible when we pole-dance, or manage a hostage crisis without things getting (too) bloody. Whatever job we do, we know it by heart; we also know how to manage whatever kind of psychological breakdown we experience; and we are also prepared for the end, and even have an idea about how our burial will go. This is the nation: one of fearful people in dire need of control over their one chance of getting it right.

Viewed from the present, How to Live in the German Federal Republic is revealed as the archetype of many a Farocki film in the decades to follow, for example Die Umschulung (1994), Der Auftritt (1996) or Nicht ohne Risiko (2004), all of which document as dispassionately as possible different – not necessarily simulated – scenarios of social interactions related to labour and capital. For all their enlightening beauty, none of these ever came close to How to Live in the German Federal Republic which, depending on one’s mood, can play like an absurd comedy or the most gut-wrenching drama. Yet one disquieting thing is certain: How to Live in the German Federal Republic didn’t age – our lives still look the same.

— Olaf Möller

8. One Man’s War

(La Guerre d’un seul homme) Edgardo Cozarinsky , 1982

One Man’s War proves that an auteur film can be made without writing a line, recording a sound or shooting a single frame. It’s easy to point to the ‘extraordinary’ character of the film, given its combination of materials that were not made to cohabit; there couldn’t be a less plausible dialogue than the one Cozarinsky establishes between the newsreels shot during the Nazi occupation of Paris and the Parisian diaries of novelist and Nazi officer Ernst Jünger . There’s some truth to Pascal Bonitzer’s assertion in Cahiers du cinéma in 1982 that the principle of the documentary was inverted here, since it is the images that provide a commentary for the voice.

But that observation still doesn’t pin down the uniqueness of a work that forces history through a series of registers, styles and dimensions, wiping out the distance between reality and subjectivity, propaganda and literature, cinema and journalism, daily life and dream, and establishing the idea not so much of communicating vessels as of contaminating vessels.

To enquire about the essayistic dimension of One Man’s War is to submit it to a test of purity against which the film itself is rebelling. This is no ars combinatoria but systems of collision and harmony; organic in their temporal development and experimental in their procedural eagerness. It’s like a machine created to die instantly; neither Cozarinsky nor anyone else could repeat the trick, as is the case with all great avant-garde works.

By blurring the genre of his literary essays, his fictional films, his archival documentaries, his literary fictions, Cozarinsky showed he knew how to reinvent the erasure of borders. One Man’s War is not a film about the Occupation but a meditation on the different forms in which that Occupation can be represented.

—Sergio Wolf. Translated by Mar Diestro-Dópido

9. Sans soleil

Chris Marker, 1982

There are many moments to quicken the heart in Sans soleil but one in particular demonstrates the method at work in Marker’s peerless film. An unseen female narrator reads from letters sent to her by a globetrotting cameraman named Sandor Krasna (Marker’s nom de voyage), one of which muses on the 11th-century Japanese writer  Sei Shōnagon .

As we hear of Shōnagon’s “list of elegant things, distressing things, even of things not worth doing”, we watch images of a missile being launched and a hovering bomber. What’s the connection? There is none. Nothing here fixes word and image in illustrative lockstep; it’s in the space between them that Sans soleil makes room for the spectator to drift, dream and think – to inimitable effect.

Sans soleil was Marker’s return to a personal mode of filmmaking after more than a decade in militant cinema. His reprise of the epistolary form looks back to earlier films such as  Letter from Siberia  (1958) but the ‘voice’ here is both intimate and removed. The narrator’s reading of Krasna’s letters flips the first person to the third, using ‘he’ instead of ‘I’. Distance and proximity in the words mirror, multiply and magnify both the distances travelled and the time spanned in the images, especially those of the 1960s and its lost dreams of revolutionary social change.

While it’s handy to define Sans soleil as an ‘essay film’, there’s something about the dry term that doesn’t do justice to the experience of watching it. After Marker’s death last year, when writing programme notes on the film, I came up with a line that captures something of what it’s like to watch Sans soleil: “a mesmerising, lucid and lovely river of film, which, like the river of the ancients, is never the same when one steps into it a second time”.

10. Handsworth Songs

Black Audio Film Collective, 1986

Made at the time of civil unrest in Birmingham, this key example of the essay film at its most complex remains relevant both formally and thematically. Handsworth Songs is no straightforward attempt to provide answers as to why the riots happened; instead, using archive film spliced with made and found footage of the events and the media and popular reaction to them, it creates a poetic sense of context.

The film is an example of counter-media in that it slows down the demand for either immediate explanation or blanket condemnation. Its stillness allows the history of immigration and the subsequent hostility of the media and the police to the black and Asian population to be told in careful detail.

One repeated scene shows a young black man running through a group of white policemen who surround him on all sides. He manages to break free several times before being wrestled to the ground; if only for one brief, utopian moment, an entirely different history of race in the UK is opened up.

The waves of post-war immigration are charted in the stories told both by a dominant (and frequently repressive) televisual narrative and, importantly, by migrants themselves. Interviews mingle with voiceover, music accompanies the machines that the Windrush generation work at. But there are no definitive answers here, only, as the Black Audio Film Collective memorably suggests, “the ghosts of songs”.

— Nina Power

11.   Los Angeles Plays Itself

Thom Andersen, 2003

One of the attractions that drew early film pioneers out west, besides the sunlight and the industrial freedom, was the versatility of the southern Californian landscape: with sea, snowy mountains, desert, fruit groves, Spanish missions, an urban downtown and suburban boulevards all within a 100-mile radius, the Los Angeles basin quickly and famously became a kind of giant open-air film studio, available and pliant.

Of course, some people actually live there too. “Sometimes I think that gives me the right to criticise,” growls native Angeleno Andersen in his forensic three-hour prosecution of moving images of the movie city, whose mounting litany of complaints – couched in Encke King’s gravelly, near-parodically irritated voiceover, and sometimes organised, as Stuart Klawans wrote in The Nation, “in the manner of a saloon orator” – belies a sly humour leavening a radically serious intent.

Inspired in part by Mark Rappaport’s factual essay appropriations of screen fictions (Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, 1993; From the Journals of Jean Seberg , 1995), as well as Godard’s Histoire(s) de cinéma, this “city symphony in reverse” asserts public rights to our screen discourse through its magpie method as well as its argument. (Today you could rebrand it ‘Occupy Hollywood’.) Tinseltown malfeasance is evidenced across some 200 different film clips, from offences against geography and slurs against architecture to the overt historical mythologies of Chinatown (1974), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and L.A. Confidential (1997), in which the city’s class and cultural fault-lines are repainted “in crocodile tears” as doleful tragedies of conspiracy, promoting hopelessness in the face of injustice.

Andersen’s film by contrast spurs us to independent activism, starting with the reclamation of our gaze: “What if we watch with our voluntary attention, instead of letting the movies direct us?” he asks, peering beyond the foregrounding of character and story. And what if more movies were better and more useful, helping us see our world for what it is? Los Angeles Plays Itself grows most moving – and useful – extolling the Los Angeles neorealism Andersen has in mind: stories of “so many men unneeded, unwanted”, as he says over a scene from Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1983), “in a world in which there is so much to be done”.

— Nick Bradshaw

12.   La Morte Rouge

Víctor Erice, 2006

The famously unprolific Spanish director Víctor Erice may remain best known for his full-length fiction feature The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), but his other films are no less rewarding. Having made a brilliant foray into the fertile territory located somewhere between ‘documentary’ and ‘fiction’ with The Quince Tree Sun (1992), in this half-hour film made for the ‘Correspondences’ exhibition exploring resemblances in the oeuvres of Erice and Kiarostami , the relationship between reality and artifice becomes his very subject.

A ‘small’ work, it comprises stills, archive footage, clips from an old Sherlock Holmes movie, a few brief new scenes – mostly without actors – and music by Mompou and (for once, superbly used) Arvo Pärt . If its tone – it’s introduced as a “soliloquy” – and scale are modest, its thematic range and philosophical sophistication are considerable.

The title is the name of the Québécois village that is the setting for The Scarlet Claw (1944), a wartime Holmes mystery starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce which was the first movie Erice ever saw, taken by his sister to the Kursaal cinema in San Sebastian.

For the five-year-old, the experience was a revelation: unable to distinguish the ‘reality’ of the newsreel from that of the nightmare world of Roy William Neill’s film, he not only learned that death and murder existed but noted that the adults in the audience, presumably privy to some secret knowledge denied him, were unaffected by the corpses on screen. Had this something to do with war? Why was La Morte Rouge not on any map? And what did it signify that postman Potts was not, in fact, Potts but the killer – and an actor (whatever that was) to boot?

From such personal reminiscences – evoked with wondrous intimacy in the immaculate Castillian of the writer-director’s own wry narration – Erice fashions a lyrical meditation on themes that have underpinned his work from Beehive to Broken Windows (2012): time and change, memory and identity, innocence and experience, war and death. And because he understands, intellectually and emotionally, that the time-based medium he himself works in can reveal unforgettably vivid realities that belong wholly to the realm of the imaginary, La Morte Rouge is a great film not only about the power of cinema but about life itself.

Sight & Sound: the August 2013 issue

In this issue: Frances Ha’s Greta Gerwig – the most exciting actress in America? Plus Ryan Gosling in Only God Forgives, Wadjda, The Wall,...

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DVDs and Blu Ray

Buy The Complete Humphrey Jennings Collection Volume Three: A Diary for Timothy on DVD and Blu Ray

Humphrey Jennings’s transition from wartime to peacetime filmmaking.

Buy Chronicle of a Summer on DVD and Blu Ray

Jean Rouch’s hugely influential and ground-breaking documentary.

Further reading

Video essay: The essay film – some thoughts of discontent

Kevin B. Lee

The land still lies: Handsworth Songs and the English riots

The world at sea: The Forgotten Space

What I owe to Chris Marker

Patricio Guzmán

His and her ghosts: reworking La Jetée

Melissa Bradshaw

At home (and away) with Agnès Varda

Daniel Trilling

Pere Portabella looks back

John Akomfrah’s Hauntologies

Laura Allsop

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Language of Cinema: Martin Scorsese's Essay Explains the Importance of Visual Literacy

Like I said before, being able to read a film has a range of significance in our world. Scorsese touches on a few areas in his article that explain how film language is important historically, technically, and socially.

Historically

The history of the "language" of cinema started, arguably, with the very first cut. I imagine it being like the first glottal stop or fricative that set apart the constant flow of sound, or in cinema, images, developing a rich and profound language.

Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery  from 1903 is one of the first and most famous examples of cutting. In the first few minutes of the film, there is a shot of the robbers bursting into the train depot office. In the background we can see a train pulling in, and in the next shot, we're outside with the robbers as the train comes to a stop near them. The significance of that is that the audience realized that the train in the first shot was the same one that was in the second, and it all happened in one action (it didn't pull in twice.)

Further along the timeline, filmmakers continued to advance and add to the language of film. D.W. Griffith managed to weave together 4 separate storylines by cross cutting scenes from different times and places in Intolerance . Sergei Eisenstein forwarded the idea of the "montage" most famously in Battleship Potemkin    and his first feature  Strike .  Continuity editing, shot sizes, including the close-up, the use of color, parallel editing, camera movement -- all of these things and more began to speak to audiences and filmmakers in new and exciting ways.

Technically

These techniques began to solidify and become standard. The old way of making a film -- one take or multiple long takes filmed in a wide shot -- began to evolve into much more complex visual narratives. Films could encompass hours, days, years out of a characters story thanks to continuity editing. The shot-reverse-shot editing allowed for the use of close-ups and different camera angles . Certain shot compositions began to speak to audiences in different ways, giving the frame itself a life and language of its own.

Being able to read and speak the language of film as a filmmaker is a skill that must obviously be mastered. Everything on-screen -- the lighting, the shadows, the size of the shot, the angle, the composition, the blocking, the colors, everything -- is a word spoken to your audience.

For example the shot from  Vertigo   that employs the "Vertigo Effect". Second-unit cameraman Irmin Roberts invented this "zoom out and track in" technique, known as the "contra-zoom" or "trombone shot". Roberts, essentially, invented a new word in the language of motion pictures that means "dizziness", "fear", "terrifying realization", etc.

There's a great Proust quote that my visual literacy professor shared with us one day in class, "The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."  Films of the early 1900s were all about  showing  something exciting and different: cats boxing, a woman dancing, a train arriving. But, the filmmakers who developed the visual language of cinema were the ones who began to see things in a new light, and as they screened their films, audiences began to learn the language their films were speaking.

Today, filmmakers and viewers are visually literate, but not many viewers realize it. We, myself included, tend to allow the spectacle to overtake us -- we get wrapped up in the story, the visuals, and the music. We feel sad when we watch an on-screen break up or fight between two people who had been close, but we may fail to realize, or at least consciously identify, that a lot of the drama that leads to that climax was created using visual queues.

Many audiences in the past took for granted this form of communication until the film critics that eventually ushered in the French New Wave, like Truffaut, as well as American critic Andrew Sarris took a closer look at the filmmaking of Alfred Hitchcock.

Scorsese mentions that because Hitchcock's films came out almost like clockwork every year (Scorsese likens this to a sort of franchise,) his film  Vertigo  kind of disappeared into the heap of movies that came out that year. It wasn't a failure by any means, but it wasn't the overwhelming success we today would expect it to have been.

Today, the Master of Suspense is revered as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, but it wasn't until Cahiers du Cinema and   critics like Truffaut and Sarris began studying Hitchcock's work, decoding the film language Hitchcock used, that a more solid understanding of film language started to emerge.

They realized that Hitchcock had his own "dialect", which helped develop the auteur theory. Without visual literacy, there wouldn't be auteurs -- the genius and skill of history's greatest filmmakers could potentially be lost on a an audience that doesn't know how to read  between the lines  of a film.

Understanding the concepts of visual literacy is not only a skill for filmmakers, but all who experience films, because films are such a huge part of our lives. Scorsese says:

Whenever I hear people dismiss movies as “fantasy” and make a hard distinction between film and life, I think to myself that it’s just a way of avoiding the power of cinema. Of course it’s not life—it’s the invocation of life, it’s in an ongoing dialogue with life.

Scorsese laments that today movies are more often judged based on their box office receipts than on the artfulness of their execution.

We can’t afford to let ourselves be guided by contemporary cultural standards -- particularly now. There was a time when the average person wasn’t even aware of box office grosses. But since the 1980s, it’s become a kind of sport -- and really, a form of judgment. It culturally trivializes film. And for young people today, that’s what they know. Who made the most money? Who was the most popular?

I definitely recommend reading Scorsese's full article, which you can find here .

How would Hollywood and independent cinema change if audiences became more aware to what was being communicated to them visually? What is your most favorite cinematic "word?"

Link:  The Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema -- The New York Review of Books

[via Indiewire ]

Netflix's New Engagement Report Reveals Some Surprise Hits

Who's watching what on the streaming giant.

Netflix is the streamer that revolutionized people streaming and watching movies and TV at home, and a few decades later, they have the largest subscriber base with streaming competition and a lot of power within the industry.

Get ready for some more numbers—it's data report day at No Film School.

Their new dominant tactic of wi-fi dependent tyranny is to release six-month engagement reports , where they tell you how many people were watching.

In their latest report they've revealed who's been watching what in the back half of 2023, and the numbers are very interesting.

Firstly, the three most popular titles of all time became Wednesday (98M), Red Notice (62M), and Squid Game (25M)—which were still being watched months and even years after release.

They've posted these numbers for shows that have been around for a while and are still pulling massive numbers over the final six months of 2023.

• The first three parts of Lupin generated nearly 100M views in the second half of 2023, with nearly 200M views across Cocomelon ’s eight seasons.
• The Witcher (76M), Virgin River (69M), The Crown (50M), Sweet Magnolias (35M) , Top Boy (26M), Heartstopper (24M), Sintonia (20M), and Sweet Home (17M) all pulled in huge numbers.
• One Piece (72M)
• Squid Game: The Challenge (33M) increased viewership for Squid Game by 34%

Let me know what you think in the comments.

What Are the Best Mystery Movies of All Time?

The ending of 'challengers' explained, what are the best adventure movies of all time, what are the best crime movies of all time, what are the best fantasy movies of all time, is diversity a risk for streaming viewership absolutely not, says ucla report, minneapolis filmmaker completes first feature film in 17 days, use non-zeiss lenses with zeiss cincraft scenario 2.0, cultivate art in camp with trans slasher 't-blockers', the 'baby reindeer' ending explained.

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Defining the Cinematic Essay: The Essay Film by Elizabeth A. Papazian & Caroline Eades, and Essays on the Essay Film by Nora M. Alter & Timothy Corrigan

When it came time for the students to create their own documentaries, one of my policies was for them to “throw objectivity out the window”. To quote John Grierson, documentaries are the “creative treatment of actuality.” Capturing the truth, whatever it may be, is quite nearly impossible if not utterly futile. Often, filmmakers deliberately manipulate their footage in order to achieve educational, informative and persuasive objectives. To illustrate, I screened Robert Flaherty’s 1922 film Nanook of the North and always marveled at the students’ reactions when, after the screening, I informed them that the film’s depiction of traditional Inuit life was entirely a reenactment. While many students were shocked and disappointed when they learned this, others accepted Flaherty’s defence of the film as true to the spirit, if not the letter, of the Inuit’s vanishing way of life. Another example that I screened was a clip from controversial filmmaker Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002) which demonstrated how Moore shrewdly used editing to villainise then-NRA president Charlton Heston. Though a majority of the class agreed with Moore’s anti-gun violence agenda, many were infuriated about being “lied to” and “misled” by the editing tactics. Naturally these examples also raise questions about the role of ethics in documentary filmmaking, but even films that are not deliberately manipulative are still “the product of individuals, [and] will always display bias and be in some manner didactic.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 193.)

To further my point on the elusive nature of objectivity, I screened Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard ( Night and Fog , 1956), Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) and Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008.) Yet at this point I began to wonder if I was still teaching documentary or if I had ventured into some other territory. I was aware that Koyaanisqatsi had also been classified as an experimental film by notable scholars such as David Bordwell. On the other hand, Nuit et brouillard is labeled a documentary film but poses more questions than answers, since it is “unable to adequately document the reality it seeks.” (Alter/Corrigan p. 210.) Resnais’s short film interweaves black and white archival footage with colour film of Auschwitz and other camps. The colour sequences were shot in 1955, when the camps had already been deserted for ten years.   Nuit et brouillard scrutinises the brutality of the Holocaust while contemplating the social, political and ethical responsibilities of the Nazis. Yet it also questions the more abstract role of knowledge and memory, both individual and communal, within the context of such horrific circumstances. The students did not challenge Night and Fog’s classification as a documentary, but they wondered if Waltz with Bashir and especially Sans Soleil had entirely different objectives since they seemed to do more than present factual information. The students also noted that these films seemed to merge with other genres, and wondered if there was a different classification for them aside from poetic, observational, participatory, et al.  Although it is animated, Waltz with Bashir is classified as a documentary since it is based on Folman’s own experiences during the 1982 Lebanon War. Also, as Roger Ebert notes, animation is “the best way to reconstruct memories, fantasies, hallucinations, possibilities, past and present.” 2 However, it is not solely a document of Folman’s experiences or of the war itself. It is also a subjective meditation on the nature of human perception. As Folman attempts to reconstruct past events through the memories of his fellow soldiers, Waltz with Bashir investigates the very nature of truth itself. These films definitely challenged the idea of documentary as a strict genre, but the students noticed that they each had interesting similarities. Aside from educating, informing and persuading, they also used non-fiction sounds and images to visualise abstract concepts and ideas.

Sans Soleil (Marker, 1983)

Sans Soleil has been described as “a meditation on place […] where spatial availability confuses the sense of time and memory.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 117.) Some of my students felt that Marker’s film, which is composed of images from Japan and elsewhere, was more like a “filmed travelogue”. Others described it as a “film journal” since Marker used images and narration to describe certain experiences, thoughts and memories. Yet my students’ understanding of Sans Soleil was problematised when they discovered that the narration was delivered by “a fictional, nameless woman […] reading aloud from, or else paraphrasing, letters sent to her by a fictional, globe-trotting cameraman.” 3 Upon learning this, several students wondered if Sans Soleil was actually a narrative and not a documentary at all. I briefly explained that, since it was also an attempt to visualise abstract concepts, Sans Soleil was known as an essay film. Yet this only complicated things further!  The students wondered if other films we saw in the class were essayistic as well. Was Koyaanisqatsi an essay on humanity’s impact on the world? Was Jesus Camp (Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, 2006) an essay on the place of religion in society and politics?  Where was the line between documentary and the essay film? Between essay and narrative? Or was the essay just another type of documentary?  Rather than immerse myself in the difficulties of describing the essay film, I quickly changed the topic to the students’ own projects, and encouraged them to shape their documentaries through related processes of investigation and exploration.

If I had been able to read “Essays on the Essay Film” by Nora M. Alter & Timothy Corrigan and “The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia” by Elizabeth A. Papazian & Caroline Eades before teaching this class, I still may not have been able to provide definitive answers to my students’ questions. But this is not to say that either of these books are vague and inconclusive! Each one is an insightful collection of articles that explores the complexities of the essay film. In her essay “The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments” featured in Alter and Corrigan’s “Essays on the Essay Film” Laura Rascaroli wisely notes that “we must resist the temptation to overtheorise the form or, even worse, to crystallise it into a genre…” since the essay film is a “matrix of all generic possibilities.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 190) Fabienne Costa goes so far as saying that “The ‘cinematographic essay’ is neither a category of films nor a genre. It is more a type of image, which achieves essay quality.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 190) It is true that filmmakers, critics, and scholars (myself included) have attempted to understand the essay film better by grouping it with genres that bear many similarities, such as documentary and experimental cinema. Yet despite these similarities, the authors suggest that the essay film needs to be differentiated from both documentary and avant-garde practices of filmmaking. Both “Essays on the Essay Film” and “The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia” illustrate that this mutable form should not be understood as a specific genre, but rather recognised for its profoundly reflective and reflexive capabilities. The essay film can even defy established formulas. As stated by filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin in his essay “Proposal for a Tussle” the essay film “can navigate from documentary to fiction and back, creating other polarities in the process between which it can operate.” (Alter/Corrigan, p. 270.)

Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan’s “Essays on the Essay Film” consists of writings by distinguished scholars such as Andre Bazin, Theodore Adorno, Hans Richter and Laura Mulvey, but also includes more recent work by Thomas Elsaesser, Laura Rascaroli and others. Although each carefully selected text spans different time periods and cultural backgrounds, Alter and Corrigan weave together a comprehensive, yet pliable description of the cinematic essay.

“Essays on the Essay Film” begins by including articles that investigate the form and function of the written essay. This first chapter, appropriately titled “Foundations” provides a solid groundwork for many of the concepts discussed in the following chapters. Although the written essay is obviously different from the work created by filmmakers such as Chris Marker and Trinh T. Minh-ha, Alter and Corrigan note that these texts “have been influential to both critics and practitioners of the contemporary film essay.” (p. 7) The articles in this chapter range from Georg Lukacs’s 1910 “On the Nature and Form of the Essay” to “Preface to the Collected Essays of Aldous Huxley” which was published in 1960. Over a span of fifty years, the authors illustrate how the very concept of the essay was affected by changing practices of art, history, philosophy, culture, economics, politics, as well as through modernist and postmodernist lenses. However, these articles are still surprisingly relevant for contemporary scholars and practitioners. For example, in an excerpt from The Man Without Qualities , Robert Musil writes that, “A man who wants the truth becomes a scholar; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?” (p. 45.) Naturally, this reminded me of my class’s discussion on Sans Soleil and Waltz with Bashir. It concisely encapsulates the difficulties that arise when the essay film crosses boundaries of fiction and non-fiction. However, in his 1948 essay “On the Essay and its Prose”, Max Bense believes that the essay lies within the realm of experimentation, since “there is a strange border area that develops between poetry and prose, between the aesthetic stage of creation and the ethical stage of persuasion.”  (p. 52.)  Bense also notes that the word “essay” itself means “to attempt” or to “experiment” and believes that the essay firmly belongs in the realm of experimental and avant-garde. This is appropriate enough, given that writers, and more recently filmmakers and video artists have pushed the boundaries of their mediums in order to explore their deepest thoughts and emotions.

Alter and Corrigan follow this chapter with “The Essay Film Through History” which details the evolution of the essay film. Writing in 1940, Hans Richter considers the essay film a new type of documentary and praises its abilities to break beyond the purportedly objective goals of documentaries in an attempt to “visualize thoughts on screen.” (p. 91) Eighteen years later, Andre Bazin celebrates Chris Marker’s thought-provoking voice-over narration as well as his method of “not restricting himself to using documentary images filmed on the spot, but [using] any and all filmic material that might help his case.” (p. 104) Bazin even compares Marker’s style to the work of animator Norman McLaren, supporting the idea of the essay film’s use of unfettered creativity. By the time the reader gets to the third chapter, “Contemporary Positions”, he or she is well aware of the capricious and malleable nature of the essay film. As Corrigan remarks:

As it develops in and out of those documentary and avant-garde traditions, the history of the essay film underlines a central critical point: that the essayistic should not necessarily be seen simply as an alternative to either of these practices (or to narrative cinema); rather it rhymes with and retimes them as counterpoints within and to them. Situated between the categories of realism and formal experimentation and geared to the possibilities of “public expression,” the essay film suggests an appropriation of certain avant-garde and documentary practices in a way different from the early historical practices of both, just as it tends to invert and restructure the relations between the essayistic and narrative to subsume narrative within that public expression. The essayistic play between fact and fiction, between the documentary and the experimental, or between non-narrative and narrative becomes a place where the essay film inhabits other forms and practices. (p. 198)

Alter and Corrigan’s volume implies that the essay can inhabit many forms, styles or genres. More importantly is the idea that it should be recognised for its intentions and capabilities. Whatever form it takes, the essay is an attempt to seek, explore, understand, visualise and question, without necessarily providing clearly defined answers. The essay film also places considerable value on the intellect and opinion of the viewer, since it is an invitation to reflect on the thoughts, experiences, emotions and perceptions that are being conveyed. “Essays on the Essay Film” sensibly concludes with the chapter entitled “Filmmakers on the Essayistic”. Notable filmmakers, such as Lynn Sachs and Ross McElwee provide valuable insight into their own practices. The featured filmmakers, documentarians and video artists in this chapter do not focus specifically on what form their work takes, but what they are trying to achieve. For instance, in her article “On Writing the Film Essay,” Lynn Sachs proclaims that “My job is not to educate but rather to spark a curiosity in my viewer that moves from the inside out.” (p. 287.) Admittedly, Sachs’s statement contradicts the idea that documentary films seek to educate, inform and persuade, which I taught in my own classes. Yet Sachs’s insights, as well as those of the many other filmmakers in “Essays on the Essay Film” demonstrate how the camera is as versatile as the pen when communicating thoughts, emotions and ideas.

Tree of Life (Malick, 2011)

Elizabeth A. Papazian and Caroline Eades have also compiled several surprising, challenging and thoroughly captivating articles that exemplify the many forms that the essay film can take. The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia includes articles by several prominent scholars that explore the essay film’s place throughout history as well as within various cultural settings. Like Alter and Corrigan, they also present a convincing argument that the essay film is distinct from both documentary, avant-garde and narrative filmmaking, since it is “characterized by a loose, fragmentary, playful, even ironic approach […] and raises new questions about the construction of the subject, the relationship of the subject to the world and the aesthetic possibilities of cinema.” (Papazian/Eades, p. 1) Papazian and Eades explore how essayistic tendencies can manifest in narrative, documentary, avant-garde, and even video art through careful analyses of specific films and videos. The book opens with Timothy Corrigan’s “Essayism and Contemporary Film Narrative” which explores how the essayistic can inhabit narrative film, specifically through Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross , both released in 2011. Corrigan observes that The Tree of Life “continually seems to resist its own narrative logic” (p. 18) by presenting a highly fragmented and non-linear plot.  Instead of placing it into the hybrid realm of experimental-narrative, however, Corrigan argues that:

Rather than locate a linear connection between past, present and future, the narrative flashbacks in The Tree of Life become a search for genesis – or more accurately many geneses – which might be better described as disruptive recollections that never adequately collect and circulate, as fractured and drifting images and moments producing not evolutionary lines, but the spreading reflective branches of essayism. (p. 19-20.)

The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia continues with essays by other acclaimed, yet indefinable filmmakers such as Jean Luc-Godard and Claire Denis. Essays by Rick Warner and Martine Beugnet explore how these filmmakers defy closure and continuity, even while appearing to work within established forms and genres. Ann Eaken Moss explores the essayistic approach that Chantal Akerman imbues within her experimental “home movies.”   News from Home (1977) is a meditation on Akerman’s own sense of dislocation from her home in Belgium while she adapts to life in New York City. In “Inside/Outside: Nicolasito Guillen Landrian’s Subversive Strategy in Coffea Arabiga” Ernesto Livon-Grosman investigates Landrian’s means of furtively including his own political agenda within a government-sanctioned documentary. What was meant to be a propagandistic documentary about the benefits of Cuban coffee plantations becomes an essayistic critique on the power structure of Fidel Castro’s government. (Livon-Grosman.) Papazian and Eades conclude their volume with an afterward by Laura Rascaroli, affirming that “it is with the potentiality of all essay films to question and challenge their own form”. (p. 300) The essay film may be distinct from narrative, documentary and the avant-garde, but it itself has no discernable style or formula. The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia clearly illustrates how the essay film, although bordering on established genres “must create the conditions of its own form.” (pp. 301-302.) Every filmmaker’s unique thoughts, experiences, meditations, questions and perceptions cannot neatly fit into a strict set of generic guidelines. However, this does not make the essay film more difficult to understand, but further implies that it is a unique practice rather than a specific form.

News from Home (Akerman, 1977)

Even with the insight provided by these two volumes, I do not regret introducing the essay film to my documentary students, despite their questions and confusion. As illustrated throughout Essays on the Essay Film and The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia it has typically been an esoteric and transgressive form, and perhaps including it with better known genres such as documentary and experimental films could be an effective way of introducing it to beginning filmmakers and scholars. Then again, perhaps it should be taught as a form separate from documentary, narrative and the avant-garde. I do wish that I was able to speak more about it at length during that particular instance, since the essay film deserves a considerable amount of thought and attention. Whether or not there is a correct pedagogical approach to teaching the essay film, both of these volumes are tremendously illuminating, but also open the door to further discussion about this compelling form of cinema.

• Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary , 2nd ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010). ↩
• Roger Ebert, “Waltz with Bashir”, rogerebert.com , January 21, 2009, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/waltz-with-bashir-2009 ↩
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Personal Effects: The Guarded Intimacy of Sans Soleil”, The Criterion Collection , June 25, 2017, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/484-personal-effects-the-guarded-intimacy-of-sans-soleil ↩

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The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia

2016, The Essay Film: Dialogue, Politics, Utopia, co-edited by Elizabeth A Papazian and Caroline Eades. London: Wallflower Press, November 2016 (ISBN: 9780231176958 (pbk), 9780231176941 (hbk), 9780231851039 (e-book).

With its increasing presence in a continuously evolving media environment, the essay film as a visual form raises new questions about the construction of the subject, its relationship to the world, and the aesthetic possibilities of cinema. In this volume, authors specializing in various national cinemas (Cuban, French, German, Israeli, Italian, Lebanese, Polish, Russian, American) and critical approaches (historical, aesthetic, postcolonial, feminist, philosophical) explore the essay film and its consequences for the theory of cinema while building on and challenging existing theories. Taking as a guiding principle the essay form's dialogic, fluid nature, the volume examines the potential of the essayistic to question, investigate, and reflect on all forms of cinema—fiction film, popular cinema, and documentary, video installation, and digital essay. Includes contributions by Luka Arsenjuk, Martine Beugnet, Luca Caminati, Timothy Corrigan, Oliver Gaycken, Anne Eakin-Moss, Ernesto Livon-Grosman, Laura U. Marks, Laura Rascaroli, Mauro Resmini, and Eric Zakim.

Related Papers

Jomec Journal

The essay film is one emerging genre in which the sonic elements and the editing characteristics are constructing the basis of its communication structure within and beyond the audiovisual material. This paper will enlighten the unique language and the means of communication of the essay form. In the essay film, the voice functions as a means of expression as opposed to a stack of sounds. With the support of the editing elements, the voice becomes a stylistic reflection towards the world, where the audience perceives the tone of the filmmaker. The voice is also not a rhetoric that oppresses the viewer but functions as a bridge to communicate with, and throughout, the audiovisual material as an artistic act that demands an intellectual response, like an open letter to be finalized in the viewers’ mind. The essay film does not seek to provide answers. Rather, it asks questions to the viewer, directly or indirectly, throughout the dialogue as the core of this filmmaking style. For the filmmaker to communicate with their viewer effectively, they position themselves as part of the audience. The essay film strives to go beyond formal, conceptual, and social constraint. Its structure undermines traditional boundaries, and is both structurally and conceptually transgressive, as well as self-reflective. It also questions the subject positions of the filmmaker and audience as well as the audiovisual medium itself – whether film, video, or digital electronic. This work highlights the dialogical characteristics of the essay film through a selection of essay film works with a focus on the voiceover usage and editing characteristics, to understand how a body of essayistic work addresses the viewer for a dialogical relationship.

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (32) 4, 2012: 637-639

Dagmar Brunow

Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez

The present article aims to show how the consolidation of the cinematic form of the essay film in Jean-Luc Godard’s work is a consequence of the evolution of his experience in the cinéma militant. This militant cinema emerges from the political and social circumstances that caused May 68 and in the case of the filmmaker is materialized through his participation in the Dziga Vertov Group. The defining elements of the group’s filmic experience –the supremacy of montage, the dialectics between images and sounds and the relevance of the spectator as an active part of a dialogical practice– are the same that bring about the essayistic form when the film is enunciated from the author’s subjectivity. With the analysis of Letter to Jane this paper tries to demonstrate how the irruption of subjectivity in the revolutionary cinematic practice allows the appearance of self-reflexivity and the thinking process that define the cinematic essay. RESUMEN El presente artículo pretende mostrar cómo la consolidación de la forma cinematográfica del film-ensayo en la obra de Jean-Luc Godard es consecuencia de la evolución de su experiencia en el cinéma militant. Un cine militante que surge de las circunstancias político-sociales que dieron lugar a mayo del 68 y que en el caso del cineasta se materializa mediante su participación en el Grupo Dziga Vertov. Los elementos definitorios de la experiencia fílmica del grupo –la primacía del montaje, la dialéctica entre imágenes y sonidos y la relevancia del espectador como parte activa de una práctica dialogística– son los mismos que propician la forma ensayística cuando la obra se enuncia desde la subjetividad del autor. Con el análisis de Letter to Jane pretendemos mostrar cómo la irrupción de la subjetividad en la práctica cinematográfica revolucionaria posibilita la aparición de la auto-reflexión y del proceso de pensamiento definitorios del ensayo cinematográfico.

Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media

carolina sourdis

The essayistic device in film often brings together two temporalities of film creation: the present of the filmed image and the present of the editing process. Through the interaction of both moments, provoked by the critical revision of the raw material and its possibilities of montage, the essay film is constructed through the filmmaker’s exploration of the filmic apparatus, thus revealing film forms as a way of producing and disseminating knowledge. The essay film, therefore, subverts a common theoretical practice: thought is no longer assumed as a procedure for unveiling an image, but it is rather produced by film forms. We claim that the essay film, as a research methodology and a theoretical approximation to film informed by practice, must be unfolded through creative gestures, this is to say, images and sounds that present an audiovisual synthesis of the conscious and intuitive work that both precedes and is synchronic to the moments of filming and editing. This article addre...

Teresa Lima

This article intends to identify characteristic traits of the essay film in The Amazed Spectator / O Espectador Espantado (2016), by the Portuguese filmmaker Edgar Pêra. Throughout the analysis, I reflect on how the use of different types of resources-technical (3D), compositional (color and space) and social (the communities involved)-combine to create a sensory object, one which not only aims to question the relationship between the viewers and the films but is also helpful in understanding the director's praxis. More than providing answers, The Amazed Spectator poses questions, prompting a constant dialogue, be it between the film's interviewees, be it among the actors who represent the different kinds of film audiences or the viewers, who watch Pêra's film. Positioning myself as a viewer of the said film, I try to reproduce sensations, add further layers of doubt to the questions posed and erect a new discourse on the The Amazed Spectator. Amongst enigmas and contradictions, one can state that The Amazed Spectator is an essay film about cinema (more specifically about the opposition between window cinema and screen cinema) but might also be about life. That is to say, the way that the viewers-amongst the fear and the awe-go about assuming either a more passive or a more interventional stance towards the world.

Adaptation 6, no. 1 (2013): 1-24.

Rick Warner

Though it stubbornly resists classification, the essay in cinema still tends to be approached as a genre or quasi-genre constituted through recurring structural traits. This article develops an alternative view by stressing the adaptive principles of the form, specifically as they concern citation, self-portraiture, and an implicit running dialogue with a spectator who potentially shares in the intellectual labor of montage. I offer a pointed discussion of the Essais of Montaigne in order to draw attention to the activity of essaying over time, in and across multiple works. Then, while extending this conception to several of the cinema's most prolific essayists, I focus on how Jean-Luc Godard takes up a Montaignian sense of the practice in his late endeavors of self-portrayal, most notably in his film JLG/JLG: Autoportrait in December and in his video series Histoire(s) du cinéma. Ultimately I argue that what distinguishes the most capable essayists working with sounds and images is a " pedagogical " mission to pass on to the spectator not simply ideas and arguments but a particular way of seeing, a means of investigation to be incisively replayed and re-tested.

Comparative Cinema

This article aims to carry out an analysis of the spectatorial position as a thinking space for the contemporary essay film based on the comparative study of two Francophone films: Face aux fantômes (Jean-Louis Comolli and Sylvie Lindeperg, 2009) and Jaurès (Vincent Dieutre, 2012). The dialogism of the essay film, the interpellation to the spectator to produce self-reflection on their position and critical thinking about the images shown, is then generated from the premise of identification. The analysis shows how Face aux fantômes offers an audiovisual thinking process on the mobilization of the gaze of the emancipated spectator theorized by Jacques Rancière, while Jaurès provokes the same reflection from the opposite approach: the fixation of the gaze and the representation of spectatorial passivity. In this way, both films reveal the possibilities of the spectator’s position as an epistemological space for the contemporary essay film.

Studies in European Cinema

Abstract The essay film is defined by its capability to embody an audiovisual thinking process. Chris Marker’s Sans soleil/Sunless (1983) is undoubtedly one of the highest expressions of this filmic form, which reflects on postmodernity through the nature of images. This article aims to analyse the thinking in act of the film, using Jacques Rancière's concept of sentence-image, and applying Gilles Deleuze's theory of the time-image and the crystal-image. The cinematic thinking process thus develops through a succession of sentence-images, which forces the spectator to constantly transform the actual image/virtual image relationship of the film until it reaches a time-image and crystal-image of postmodernity. It is possible thanks to the shifts among the different subjectivities created by Marker and the interstices they generate. This shift also reaches a crystal-image as a materialisation of the postmodern concept of alterity as analysed by Paul Ricœur and Zygmunt Bauman. The reflection is constructed by means of an itinerary through four types of images and their screens –film image, television image, electronic image and video game image– in order to develop the image-memory-history axis and to generate an audiovisual reflection on postmodernity in total consonance with Jean Baudrillard's theory of the image, Marc Augé's of non-places or Fredric Jameson's of the postmodern historicism. Keywords: essay film, cinematic thinking, postmodernity, time-image.

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Film Aesthetics by Matthew Noble-Olson LAST REVIEWED: 28 September 2016 LAST MODIFIED: 28 September 2016 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0212

Any consideration of aesthetics poses difficulties because of the ways the term has been used to designate particular objects, judgments, experiences, and values. This difficulty becomes perhaps especially acute with regard to film, where aesthetics is used both in highly polemical and specific contexts but also as a way to more simply denote something with an artistic element. First, any assessment of film aesthetics must contend with the precarious position of aesthetics itself more broadly. Peter Osborne has argued that contemporary art is distinguished by its anti-aestheticism. From a more reconstructive perspective, Elaine Scarry has called for a reinvestment in the value of aesthetics as an autonomous and self-evident realm of beauty. Second, and considering this contested relation between aesthetics, beauty, and art, the complex and often conflicting relation of film to art must also be noted. Finally, the differentiation of an aesthetic of film from film theory or film philosophy (see Oxford Bibliographies articles Film Theory and Philosophy and Film ) is complicated, overlapping, and often contested. What might be understood as an aesthetic of film extends back almost to the origins of the medium, and much of what we identify as film theory could be understood as having some aesthetic concern, either as a consideration of film as an art or as a part of the realm of the sensible or the beautiful. Riccioto Canudo, Vachel Lindsay, Georg Lukács, and Hugo Münsterberg all produced early aesthetic accounts of the new medium. And if considerations of the aesthetics of film confront the novelty of the medium in its early years, then the recent reemergence of the aesthetic in film studies must be seen as an attempt to confront the seeming obsolescence of the medium. In many ways, the consideration of a film aesthetics demonstrates the fissures within the various critical discourses on film, especially in the present. Divisions appear between those accounts influenced by figures of recent continental philosophy, those associated with what is often called “screen” or “apparatus” theory, and finally those who follow the tradition of analytic philosophy.

There are a number of anthologies that collect significant writings from the history of cinematic study. While none of these are specifically focused on aesthetics, many of them contain central texts that consider the aesthetics of film. Dalle Vacche 2003 collects a series of texts that straddle the border between film theory and art history. Lehman 1997 and Braudy and Cohen 2009 each collect a good selection of texts from the beginning of the study of film, and the latter includes many from its more recent manifestations, with a focus on film theory. Wartenberg and Curran 2005 includes texts from the tradition of film theory and film philosophy, and a range of texts from the history of film. Carroll and Choi 2006 focuses on the analytic tradition. Richardson, et al. 2015 pushes the question of aesthetics into the new forms produced in the emergence of the digital, with important sections on the transformation of cinematic aesthetics. Lehman 1997 includes a selection of canonical essays in film theory that include important contributions to film aesthetics. Livingston and Plantinga 2008 includes a selection of essays by scholars in the field, covering a variety of topics on the philosophical approach to film, including essays on topics such as “Narration” and “Genre,” on important authors in the philosophical approach to film such as Rudolph Arnheim and Stanley Cavell, as well as considerations of individual films.

Braudy, Leo, and Marshall Cohen, eds. Film Theory and Criticism . 7th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

This widely used volume includes a broad selection of both canonical and more recent work covering the history of film studies. It is organized thematically around such topics as “Film Language,” “Film and Reality,” and “Film Narrative and the Other Arts.” It includes many of the authors mentioned elsewhere in this lists and covers many of the essential authors and traditions, from Kracauer and Bazin, to Eisenstein and Arnheim, to Metz and Barthes, as well as more contemporary authors.

Carroll, Noël, and Jinhee Choi, eds. Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology . Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006.

This volume includes a selection of texts covering issues in the philosophy of film from an analytic perspective as signaled by the editors’ contributions as well as texts by more canonical authors such as Cavell and Danto. It includes an initial section with essays on “Film as Art,” with other sections covering “Film and Emotion,” “Film and Ethics,” and “Film and Knowledge.”

Dalle Vacche, Angela, ed. The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003.

This volume collects texts from across the history of film studies that approach the medium through the field of art history and theory. It brings together the fields of art history and film studies and approaches the question of aesthetics as a shared concern of their differing approaches. It is organized so that it pairs texts by more canonical authors such as Benjamin, Bazin, Arnheim, and Panofsky with texts commenting on those texts by more recent scholars such as Richard Allen and Thomas Y. Levin.

Lehman, Peter, ed. Defining Cinema . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Key documents by Eisenstein, Bazin, Kracauer, Metz, and Burch, each matched with extended essays by contemporary commentators. The material tends toward the technical and is probably most useful for advanced students.

Livingston, Paisley, and Carl Plantinga, eds. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film . New York: Routledge, 2008.

This volume includes original essays organized into sections that cover issues and concepts such as “Film as Art” and “Authorship,” authors and trends such as “Gilles Deleuze” and “Psychoanalysis,” genres such as “Horror” and “Avant-Garde Film,” and a final section on film as philosophy, with essays covering such topics as “Ingmar Bergman” and “Film as Philosophy.”

Richardson, John, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis, eds. The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics . New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

This collection includes a number of essays on the issue of aesthetics in an expanded field of audiovisual media such as music videos, installation art, and video games. It considers both these new forms and their impact on old media technologies. It is particularly strong on considerations of the aesthetics of sound and non-Western media texts.

Wartenberg, Thomas E., and Angela Curran, eds. The Philosophy of Film: Introductory Texts and Readings . Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005.

Includes essays and selections from authors across the history of film aesthetics, such as Münsterberg, Bazin, Arnheim, Deleuze, and others. It is organized into seven sections with a number of essays that each respond differently to a question, such as “Do We Need Film Theory?” and “What Can We Learn from Films?”

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The Moviegoer

By David Denby

In late 1995, Susan Sontag, a devoted and often impassioned moviegoer, sorrowfully summed up the state of the art. “A Century of Cinema,” an essay written for the Frankfurter Rundschau , and reprinted (in abridged form) in the Times , was an outraged lamentation for a hundred-year-old art form that was in “ignominious, irreversible decline.” Setting out the reasons for the fall, Sontag mentioned the consumption of TV-size images at home replacing the awed reception of light by “kidnapped” strangers in darkened theatres; the catastrophic rise in movie-production costs in the nineteen-eighties; the tipping of the old balance between art and commerce “decisively in favor of cinema as an industry.” All these forces, she wrote, were producing a “disincarnated, lightweight cinema that doesn’t demand anyone’s full attention.” More than that, moviegoing itself had changed: the blessed state that Sontag called “cinephilia” had faded. Young people no longer arranged their emotional and intellectual lives around an art that was “poetic and mysterious and erotic and moral—all at the same time.” They no longer fed their passions in blissfully uncomfortable revival houses with ill-sprung seats and dank odors.

The 1995 article was Sontag’s last published piece on movies; in retrospect, it was her farewell to film criticism. Renunciation, along with such reverberant partners as epiphany, retraction, and reaffirmation, was one of her familiar dramatic modes. She brought a certain histrionic (i.e., Parisian) quality into American intellectual life—position-taking as existential drama—and, if you regard her seriously, the portentous turning points of her journey have to be endured. What she renounced, of course, was nothing like regular movie criticism. Sontag wrote only a dozen or so articles about film. Yet all of them were substantial, both as intellectual performance and as a challenge to conventional assumptions about movie form and routine reviewing. Available in her essay collections, the pieces remain events today—a limited, idiosyncratic, rather arrogant contribution to the short list of great American film criticism that includes the writing of James Agee, Robert Warshow, Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, and Andrew Sarris.

In Sontag’s case, the movie criticism can be understood only as part of a life-long obsession. In her forty years as a writer, she published fiction and plays; she wrote about literature, theatre, painting, music, and dance; she altered the discourse of illness and debated the aesthetics and morality of photography. She wrote fourteen books in all, and she had, in the last third of her life, an intermittent but much debated public presence as a political moralist and oracle. Yet the preoccupation with movies was there from the beginning, and it went deep. As a young woman, Sontag had done a little acting and worked as a movie extra. When she moved to New York, in 1959, at the age of twenty-six, her apartment was reportedly papered with movie stills. Her essay “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” which brought her amazingly wide notice when it was published, in 1964, in the small-circulation Partisan Review , was filled with references to classic and pop movies as well as to the other arts. Here was an ambitious literary intellectual who was equally at ease with “artists like Pontormo, Rosso, and Caravaggio” and a minor camp favorite like the green-eyed blonde Virginia Mayo. She did a lot of the homework for “Notes on Camp” at Daniel Talbot’s revival house, the New Yorker, at Eighty-eighth Street and Broadway; copies of “Camp” and other Sontag essays were later distributed free at the theatre.

That year, Sontag also sat for one of Andy Warhol’s silent screen tests. Girlishly pretty at the age of thirty-one, she appears rattled by the requirement that she not speak. She’s too self-conscious to engage the movie camera directly (as she engaged the photographer’s lens in the devastating portraits of her that appeared on her book jackets), and she smiles shyly and casts her eyes up and down. It’s an unnerved, coltish encounter. Later, with greater ease, she appeared as the subject of a German documentary, and as an articulate figure in social-issue documentaries (on feminism and on the imprisonment of Cuba’s gay writers and artists). She also turned up, as herself, in Woody Allen’s “Zelig,” commenting in her cathedral tones on Allen’s fictional creation. She worked for film-festival selection committees, and served on festival juries. And, bravely and foolishly, she put her movie love into practice, making four movies of her own. Why did film matter so much to her? What was it that she missed—and so sternly memorialized—in 1995?

In 1948, at the age of fifteen, Sontag, browsing at a newsstand just off Hollywood Boulevard, bought her first copy of Partisan Review . A fatherless, bookish girl, stranded amid the driver’s-ed and typing classes of North Hollywood High, she was happy only in the company of a few like-minded students or at home, listening to music or reading Thomas Mann and German philosophy—“sipping at a hundred straws,” she later wrote. Partisan Review , which was then at its peak, was more or less the house organ for the New York intellectuals, celebrants of high modernism, which, as they understood it, was marked by something unprecedented: an obsession with the physical means of making art (tone rows, dance movement, densely packed clusters of imagery), and by a formalism so radical that it carried art to the border of metaphysics. As a teen-ager, Sontag absorbed the doctrines and the canons. But by the time she came to write for Partisan , in the early sixties, the New York group believed that, with some exceptions—Balanchine’s plotless ballets, the Abstract Expressionist painters—the great, long moment of high modernism was over.

Sontag disagreed. She never mentioned the New York intellectuals (Trilling, Kazin, Rahv, MacDonald, et al.) by name, but her line of attack was clearly directed at them. If they believed that classic modernism was exhausted, they did so, she thought, in a state of ignorance. Most of them, as Gore Vidal pointed out, didn’t read contemporary French novels, and they had turned their backs on Sontag’s beloved Paris. She had spent time there as a graduate student in 1958 and returned again and again—she even lived for a while, in the seventies, in Sartre’s old apartment on the Rue Bonaparte. A beautiful and brainy young American abroad, she was a cross between a Jamesian heroine (“the heiress of all the ages”) and Audrey Hepburn in “Funny Face” (1957). Hepburn’s book-loving American girl goes to the City of Light, is pursued by the bearded, caddish founder of “empathicalism,” and, in the nick of time, gets rescued from the lascivious European embrace by an American photographer (Fred Astaire—a Richard Avedon stand-in), who turns her into a model. Sontag, however, held on to her books; she was saved by Left Bank journals like Les Temps Modernes rather than by Givenchy gowns. She exulted in the intense café life of speculative brilliance and harsh debate, and she brought Paris to bear against the cultural pessimism of the New York group.

First, there were the French Surrealists and the highbrow pornographers and the literary madmen—Jarry, Céline, Genet, Artaud, Bataille, and Michel Leiris, not to mention the then anonymous author of “The Story of O”—all of whom the New York intellectuals had, in her opinion, undervalued. Then there were the theorists and practitioners of “the new novel,” Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet, who had given up on “psychology” and three-dimensional characters moving through sequential stories, and instead floated their characters in a coldly objective world of things. And there was something else that most of the New York intellectuals, in their public funeral for modernism, had ignored: the cinema. Dwight Macdonald did write a film-review column for Esquire from 1960 to 1966, but most of them, if they went at all, sneaked off for a quickie before dinner. Movies weren’t serious.

Sontag spent her life trying to grasp modernity, both as a specific series of developments in the arts and as the quintessence of experience in the violent and demoralizing twentieth century. Film was the new art of the century, and the greatest contemporary directors, going past mere representation and narrative, reformulated its language, expanding consciousness and emotion in the bargain. In 1968, in a long piece on Godard in Partisan Review , Sontag wrote that the director’s “approach to established rules of film technique like the unobtrusive cut, consistency of point of view, and clear story line is comparable to Schoenberg’s repudiation of the tonal language prevailing in music around 1910.” Film, then, was the last great wave of high modernism. Or at least a certain kind of film, in which form became experimental and philosophically resonant: the movies of Resnais but not Buñuel, Bresson but not Dreyer, Godard but not Truffaut, Bergman’s “Persona” but not Bergman’s “Smiles of a Summer Night.” In such works, film amounted to nothing less than the making of new forms and the making of souls.

The period of Sontag’s first essays—the early sixties, before Pop became omnivorous and Vietnam obsessed everybody—was surely the last earnest moment in American culture. Entertainment conglomerates had not yet begun to control mass culture. Irony was a mode of aggression that separated the knowing from the saps, not a weak-backed accommodation to the undermining proliferation of media images and the levelling of cultural values. D. H. Lawrence and Freud were culture heroes, and sex, jubilantly heralded in its liberated form by Norman O. Brown as “polymorphous perversity,” was an energized revolt against the allegedly deadening conditions of modern life. Sontag wrote for a vanguard audience that, a few years later, and considerably enlarged, fell in love with Woody Allen’s culture-quoting farces and satires; part of the charm of her early work lies in its Gitanes-and-espresso period flavor, the exhalations of an unaffiliated intellectual trying to make sense of big issues and problems. It was a time when people did not think it absurd to demand something like redemption from art.

In 1961, Alain Resnais completed the ineffable “Last Year at Marienbad,” in which handsome men and women in dinner clothes stand around in a vast sculpture-strewn hotel, demurely inquiring whether they met the year before. In a 1963 piece on Resnais, Sontag deplored the movie’s sluggishness and the “insufferable incantatory style” of the narration. Yet she also welcomed the film as a startling formal experiment. What “Marienbad” meant—its content, as conventionally understood—was not the issue. “What matters in ‘Marienbad,’ ” she wrote a year later, “is the pure untranslatable sensuous immediacy of some of its images, and its rigorous if narrow solution to certain problems of cinematic form.” Resnais had pulled off a modernist hat trick: the static nature of the movie conveyed his notion of the irrecoverability of memory; the means by which the spectacle existed at all was what the movie was about. The same was true of another Sontag favorite, Antonioni’s 1960 “L’Avventura,” in which a “moral” narrative dissolves into a secondary, “amoral” one, a shift that embodies the dissolution of will suffered by the man and woman at the center of the movie; or, rather, their vanquished wills come to exist on the same plane as the rocks on a barren island and the empty de Chirico cityscapes of Sicily, where the film was shot. “L’Avventura” was a triumphant film equivalent of the “new novel.”

Summoning the disruptive and heroic powers of high modernism, Sontag insisted that formal experimentation could “reorganize the audience’s entire sensibility.” Initially cast adrift by such narratives, we had to re-create ourselves in order to find our way home to meaning, to emotion. At first glance, the films of Robert Bresson, with their austerity and purity—their suppression of ordinary feelings and action—seem remote. The critic’s task, Sontag wrote in a 1964 essay, was to “understand the aesthetics—that is, find the beauty—of such coldness.” And to find the pathos in it, too. In Sontag’s recounting, Bresson’s ascetic Catholicism, by paring away the muck and clutter of conventional expressiveness, reveals the thrilling mystery of God’s work—the extension of grace to a few humble and unwary souls. “The detachment and retarding of the emotions, through the consciousness of form,” she wrote, “makes them far stronger and more intense in the end.”

In these early celebrations of formalism, Sontag ignored the commonplace enticements of storytelling, acting, bodies, faces, movement. And she disdained the regular reviewer’s beaverish practice of sorting good logs from bad, the many varieties of critics’ patter and small talk—the jokes and casual anthropologies of popular taste. She was not in the game for fun. She had, it turned out, little interest in the American cinema, apart from its ability to offer up camp icons like Marlene Dietrich and Mae West, and aesthetically hapless but revealing texts like the bomb-haunted science-fiction films of the nineteen-fifties and sixties. When Godard and the other New Wave directors worked as critics, in their early twenties, they took up the American “auteurs”—Hawks, Ford, Nicholas Ray. But Sontag ignored them. Nor did she have anything to say, in the nineteen-seventies, about Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, and the other young directors of the American Golden Age. The international avant-garde—that’s where the action was, that’s where the nature of the medium itself was at stake. A paradox, then: in the essays collected in “Against Interpretation,” written when she was young, Sontag spoke up for pop, for the Supremes and the Beatles, for outré and disreputable tastes, too, but her film criticism was invariably ambitious and furrow-browed. If a movie or a director’s career was not a major event in the history of art, or at least of cinema, she did not write about it. To her credit, however, she never embraced the delusionary belief that an aesthetic revolution—a new art language—would somehow demystify and dissolve the bourgeois order. The revolution she wanted was personal, internal, singular. “For all my exhortatory tone,” she wrote of the essays in “Against Interpretation,” “I was not trying to lead anyone into the Promised Land except myself.”

In “Against Interpretation,” Sontag praised writers who, like the film critic Manny Farber, “reveal the sensuous surface of art,” but her own practice was to find the skeleton beneath the skin. What were the philosophical implications of a movie’s form? Raptly serious, even solemn, an aphorist without humor, a habitual didact who could wring thunderous meanings from silence, she demanded “the erotics of art” in a metaphor-free prose that was anything but erotic. At times, the moralizing aesthete came close to self-parody: “If we understand morality in the singular, as a generic decision on the part of consciousness, then it appears that our response to art is ‘moral’ insofar as it is, precisely, the enlivening of our sensibility and consciousness,” and so on. Yet she was saved by an uncontrollable element in her temperament—a yearning for emotional experience, even for transcendence. Some of the early manifestos reach for extremes of pleasure or suffering—“excruciation” and “terror” became words of praise. She wanted to be overwhelmed, even humbled. At the movies, she always sat in the third row, right in the center.

As a critic of all the arts, she longed to discover and bring the news; her method was categorization and praise. She was an insistent maker of canons, alternate canons, renegade canons—the specialized tradition of Bosch, Sade, Rimbaud, and Kafka, for example, whose seriousness took the form of “anguish, cruelty, derangement.” She may have rejected cultural levels, but she embraced intellectual hierarchies; she wanted to know who mattered in any given art form and where people ranked. The ardency of her desire for genius was both touching in itself and the secret of her popular appeal as a writer. Sontag’s hunger made one eager to read more of her writing in the same way that Jeanne Moreau’s pouty dissatisfaction made one eager to see what man could possibly please her.

Sontag’s movie essays of the late sixties struck a note of exaltation that hadn’t been heard in American film writing since the naïve rhapsodies of the First World War period, when D. W. Griffith made “The Birth of a Nation” and poets like Vachel Lindsay sang of the movies. Sontag’s writing, however, was anything but naïve. Expounding, qualifying, debating, anticipating objections and retorts, she had become the most methodical of critical revolutionaries. With tempered elation, she laid out a radical program—the destruction of belief in conventional narrative, the devotion of film to selfreflexive “meta-artistic activities.” In the future, she was sure, film would take up with ever greater intensity the modernist task of dramatizing its own expressive means. The twin poles of this activity were “the solemn, exquisitely conscious, self-annihilating structures of Bergman’s great film ‘Persona’ ” (1966) and Godard’s seemingly slapdash methods, which were “much more light-hearted, playful, often witty, sometimes flippant, sometimes just silly.”

In her 1968 piece on Godard, she summed up the director’s early work (through the 1967 “Weekend”) as an unstable compound of fiction, fantasy, lyrical essay, and literary quotation, in which “story” was a relatively trivial and expedient base upon which the most significant activity of the movie could be inscribed as commentary. In Godard’s films, the realistic novel and the missing-fourth-wall theatre had been kicked over at last: realism and “content” had been dissolved into vivacious formal play. And among the elements generated by this breaking of forms were subjects and emotions previously unknown in movies:

If film is, in Godard’s laconic definition, the “analysis” of something “with images and sounds,” there can be no impropriety in making literature a subject for cinematic analysis. Alien to movies as this kind of material may seem, at least in such profusion, Godard would no doubt argue that books and other vehicles of cultural consciousness are part of the world; therefore they belong in films. Indeed, by putting on the same plane the fact that people read and think and go seriously to the movies and the fact that they cry and run and make love, Godard has disclosed a new vein of lyricism and pathos for cinema: in bookishness, in genuine cultural passion, in intellectual callowness, in the misery of someone strangling in his own thoughts.

In order to “read” Godard’s films, the audience needed to participate in disruption and artifice as a daredevil adventure. But Bergman’s breaking of forms in “Persona” was something else—assaultive, alarming, even apocalyptic. The movie is about two women—a mute actress (Liv Ullmann) and a voluble nurse (Bibi Andersson)—who probe each other’s limits while living together on a lonely island. The narrative stalls, and Bergman appears to be not just dramatizing the means of cinema but annulling them. We see a projector turned on at the beginning of the film, and, in the middle, there is a kind of caesura—the image of Andersson’s face “catching” and burning, as if stuck in the projector’s gate. It is a disturbing modernist epiphany. When Bergman returns to the narrative, the consciousness of the Andersson character, as Sontag says, has been drastically altered. So formal exploration stretched to its limits may lead not just to a dramatization of the means of making art but to the dissolution of such means, and the dissolution of consciousness, too. “The deep unflinching knowledge of anything will in the end prove destructive,” Sontag says, summing up Bergman’s idea. Pushing formalism into her favorite early mode—anguish—Sontag had, it turned out, taken film aesthetics as far into modernism as she could.

And then came the descent from inviolate analysis to the humiliating trials of craft. In the wake of Sontag’s enthusiasm for “Persona,” the Swedish film company Sandrews offered her a chance to make movies with Swedish technicians and actors. She quickly took up what she may have interpreted as a dare, but the two features that she made—“Duet for Cannibals” (1969) and “Brother Carl” (1971)—did not turn out well. In fact, they turned out terribly. (They can be seen at the Walter Reade on September 22nd.) In these stifling chamber dramas, small groups of characters prey on each other sexually, moving about like zombies in the dead air of a Stockholm apartment or on a semi-deserted island. Into the portentous void, lines of “sophisticated” dialogue (“I’m much less cruel than I used to be”) awkwardly intrude. The themes are power, domination, the arbitrariness of sexual will; Sontag said that she wanted to create “anxiety,” but, for the viewer, the anxiety is created mainly by her lack of skill. Lars Ekborg, who plays an arrogant revolutionary in “Duet for Cannibals,” comes off as merely snide. Laurent Terzieff, as a dancer who has retreated into silence in “Brother Carl”—renouncing his art like one of the exemplary modernist ascetics (Rimbaud, Artaud) whom Sontag had celebrated in the essay “The Aesthetics of Silence”—has a big, goofy smile and long, floppy limbs. Grinning haplessly as he emerges from the woods, he seems less an artist in voluntary withdrawal than a crazed escapee from a grade-C horror movie. Sontag’s lack of humor had caught up with her. (In “Unguided Tour,” a film she made in 1982, a murmurous narration dawdles over pretty pictures of Venice as her friend the dancer Lucinda Childs, sometimes accompanied by a gentleman, impassively walks around the city.)

Sontag had run afoul of a banal but inescapable problem. A critic-aesthetician may campaign for the dissolution of realism in narrative, but there’s no getting away from the glory and curse of the movies: cinema is a photographic medium in which people appear to be moving through real space in real time. That, of course, is an illusion, but the medium, apart from the genre of poetic experimental films, poses an immediate demand for authoritative representation that no other art is burdened by. The camera remorselessly revealed Sontag’s inadequacy to represent anything at all. Watching “Duet for Cannibals,” with its clumsy sexual fantasias and its possible dream sequences, one understands that to be a good fantasist one first has to be a good realist.

In retrospect, however, Sontag appears to have found a possible cinematic vocation in a film she made between “Brother Carl” and “Unguided Tour.” In October of 1973, at the end of the Yom Kippur War, she led a camera crew to Israel. In the early sections of “Promised Lands,” the documentary that resulted from this adventure, there are some very still shots—of perforated, burned-out tanks in the desert, of blackened, fly-specked corpses and cracked shoes—that attain an authority and a power as art that go way beyond anything else Sontag did in the movies. Given her penchant for moral drama, documenting war and historical catastrophe might have been the right path for her. Years later, in her last book, “Regarding the Pain of Others” (2003), she acknowledged the dangers of voyeurism and moral self-aggrandizement, yet she still affirmed the absolute value of journalists’ and artists’ bearing witness to atrocity. Between 1993 and 1996, she made several trips to the embattled, sniper-ridden city of Sarajevo, and staged a production of Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” there, in the candle-lit Pozoriste Mladih Theatre. Moviegoers may regret that she didn’t make a documentary of the besieged city that she came to love.

Sontag liked to describe herself, paradoxically, as “a besotted aesthete” and an “obsessive moralist,” and if the two selves were constantly at play, and sometimes at war, the moralist, though never quite effacing the aesthete, came to the fore in her later years. In 1965, she had nervously praised Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympiad” as works that “transcend the categories of propaganda or even reportage.” She went on, “We find ourselves—to be sure, rather uncomfortably—seeing ‘Hitler’ and not Hitler, the ‘1936 Olympics’ and not the 1936 Olympics. Through Riefenstahl’s genius as a filmmaker, the ‘content’ has—let us even assume, against her intentions—come to play a purely formal role.” But a decade later, in the startlingly combative essay “Fascinating Fascism,” originally published in The New York Review of Books , Sontag referred to “Triumph” as a film “whose very conception negates the possibility of the filmmaker’s having an aesthetic conception independent of propaganda.” By the time she wrote “Fascinating Fascism” (and the essays included in her 1977 study “On Photography”), the youthful call for an “erotics of art” had been replaced by a demand for an ethics of art.

Sontag’s shift to ethical advocacy produced such controversial public occasions as the 1982 Town Hall speech, in which she said farewell, once and for all, to any further sentimental illusions about Communism in power, even in such Third World countries as Cuba and North Vietnam, which she had earlier praised. She also served as the president of American PEN from 1987 to 1989, and in that role became an early supporter of Salman Rushdie, after the fatwa was issued against him. She did not take well to the intimidation of writers and could be snappish, even haughty, when challenged herself.

This shift in the tonalities of her writing was accompanied by a shift in geographical attention. Roland Barthes, Sontag’s favorite contemporary author, died in 1980, and her role as an importer of literature and ideas from Paris abruptly came to an end. Her ambassadorial activity moved from Paris to Germany and Central Europe, from French brilliance and perversity to Middle-European soulfulness. She wrote essays on the German-language writers Robert Walser, Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti, and W. G. Sebald. She wrote lovingly about the music of Wagner, in a piece that revealed an unsuspected appreciation of lyricism in art, and, in her last three major film articles, she took on Wagnerian works: the Riefenstahl propaganda epics; then, in 1979, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s “Hitler: A Film from Germany,” a seven-hour Surrealist meditation on Hitler’s place in German history and mythology; and, in 1983, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” a fifteen-hour movie made, in hour-long sections, for German television. These two films were summings-up—“posthumous” films, as she called Syberberg’s end-of-culture monstrosity. In that same piece, she quoted Walter Benjamin’s remark that “all great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one.” Godard, Bergman, Syberberg, and Fassbinder, it turned out, had reached a series of stunning dead ends, dissolving not only genres but criticism, too. Sontag had run out of aesthetic revolutions. And the culture that supported revolutionary work had changed.

“Stripped of its heroic stature, of its claims as an adversary sensibility,” she wrote in 1979, “modernism has proved acutely compatible with the ethos of an advanced consumer society.” She was talking, of course, about what soon came to be known as postmodernism. “Art is now the name of a huge variety of satisfactions—of the unlimited proliferation, and devaluation, of satisfaction itself.” Her hopes had fallen victim to the dismaying larger trend in which every radical development in modernism degenerated into routine: by the eighties, avant-garde techniques from the films of the sixties were showing up in commercials and music videos. Art had not only become commodified, as the Marxists like to say; it decorated corporate culture. The breaking of forms had led not to an agonized “reorganization of sensibility” but to an amiable shrugging off of seriousness in art and the levelling of all cultural activity. Like her long-ago mentors among the New York intellectuals, she had come to the end of the redemptive capacities of the avant-garde. When the breaking of forms no longer enlarged the soul, she gave up writing about movies—that was the disappointment behind the 1995 farewell to criticism.

But this chastened “late” mood should not be seen as a defeat. In her fiction, she had abandoned the dry experimentalism of her early works, “The Benefactor” (1963) and “Death Kit” (1967), and had written something much richer, “The Volcano Lover” (1992), a maddeningly attenuated but very juicy meditation on collecting, obsession, manners, violence, and sex. Much has been made of the alleged irony of this clarion avant-gardist shifting to quasi-realistic historical fiction in “Volcano” and in her last novel, “In America” (2000), but perhaps the shift was presaged by the tone of her early essays. In that yearning for transcendence, in the praise of sensuousness (a quality that she achieved at last in “Volcano”), in the desire that formalism offer a heady charge of emotion, an ardent, even deeply romantic temperament can be seen longing for an art that engulfs and devastates. This fiercely proud, even vain, woman was not afraid to acknowledge certain kinds of vulnerability and even error. Some of the early positions needed to be retracted. She hadn’t, as she admitted to Joan Acocella in this magazine in 2000, actually enjoyed the experimental fiction by William Burroughs and Nathalie Sarraute that she had praised thirty years earlier, and “formalism” had very little to do with the things that she did enjoy—say, the dancer Joseph Duell’s putting his hand before his face in Balanchine’s “La Valse” in such a way that it stabbed her “through the heart.”

Sontag’s ambitious work in film criticism holds out heroic, if not always achievable or likable, goals for movies. For regular movie critics, it has served less as a model than as a set of ideas to react against. Yet it takes on difficult art with clarity and rhetorical fervor; it situates film art within all the arts; and it attempts to drive a shaft through American parochialism and self-satisfaction. And Sontag continued to flourish as a movie-lover. Toward the end of her life, what she admired in movies was less a revolution in form than an affecting radical humanism—“inwardness” and “a cinema of personal dilemmas which are never resolved.” After the 1995 piece came out, a few critics complained that she was merely memorializing the passions of her youth and failing to keep up with new developments. But, in talks and in interviews, she praised the humanist Russian director Alexander Sokurov, the Iranian Abbas Kiarostami, and the Taiwanese directors Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang. The hunger was still there, just in altered form. Sontag began her career as an intellectual celebrity by celebrating the mixture of high and low connoisseurship, but she reached the summit of her abilities as a writer with a portrait of an unabashed highbrow, eighteenth-century style, the collector Sir William Hamilton, whose love for antiquities and beautiful things, however precious, class-bound, and self-regarding, is the emotional and intellectual center of “The Volcano Lover.” Connoisseurship of Hamilton’s type is an inherently conservative act, tending toward the reaffirmation of highly defined pleasures. Sontag, it turned out, had a personal canon of about four hundred movies that she visited over and over at revival houses—Renoir’s “Rules of the Game” and Kurosawa’s “High and Low” were particular favorites, and she claimed to have seen Ozu’s heartbreaking “Tokyo Story” thirty times. “There are passions which last forever,” she told an audience of movie-lovers at the Japan Society in 2003. At the end of her life, working hard, and often ill, Susan Sontag went to the movies almost every day of the week. ♦

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World Cinema and the Essay Film

Transnational perspectives on a global practice.

• Brenda Hollweg and Igor Krstić
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• Language: English
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Copyright year: 2019
• Audience: College/higher education;
• Main content: 264
• Other: 40 B/W illustrations
• Keywords: Film, Media & Cultural Studies
• Published: March 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781474429269

609 Cinema Essay Topics & Research Topics about Cinema

Welcome to our list of cinema essay topics! With our unique writing ideas, you are sure to write an excellent film analysis or a study of the movie industry. Besides, we’ve included writing samples you can use for inspiration. Have fun with our film essay topics!

🏆 Best Film Essay Topics

📚 catchy cinema essay topics, 👍 good argumentative essay topics about movies, 🌶️ hot movie essay topics to write about, 🎓 most interesting research topics about cinema, 💡 simple film analysis essay topics, 📌 easy cinema essay topics, ❓ research questions about movies.

• Watching Movies in Cinemas and at Home
• Strengths of the Moview ”Titanic”
• Analysis of Gwen’s Addiction in the Film “28 Days”
• Psychology in The Pursuit of Happyness Film
• Movie Analysis: “Hacksaw Ridge”
• What Does the Red Balloon Symbolize? Movie Analysis
• 10 Things I Hate About You Movie Analysis
• Film “Split” Psychotherapy Analysis The film Split is centered around the main character Kevin, who struggles with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), also known as multiple personality disorder.
• Books vs. Movies: Comparison of Features The main thing in common between books and films is that they convey a story and evoke emotion, a plot can be fiction, fantasy, or a real story from someone’s life.
• Comparing Literature and Film: Rapunzel and Tangled The paper states that Rapunzel is a traditional tale that has been passed through generations. Tangled is the animated movie adaptation.
• Why Movies Are Popular All Over the World Movies provide entertainment as well as knowledge to people. They give people an opportunity to learn about different cultures, religions, and histories.
• Interstellar: An Analysis of the Film This essay analyzes Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar. It is described through the receptive theory of criticism because of the depth of the story.
• Developmental Theories in Docter’s “Up” Movie In the movie “Up” by Pete Docter, two protagonists of different ages are featured, which allows the integration of two developmental theories into the assessment.
• “The Green Mile”: Movie Analysis “The Green Mile” is a mirror of today’s generation where vices surpass the virtues in society. It describes how crimes are left unsolved in the name of capital punishment.
• Raise the Red Lantern: Summary and Analysis Raise the Red Lantern is a beautiful and simple story of a young girl with a number of complex issues represented through effective mise-en-scène and roof-top level shots.
• Film “Sybil” by Joseph Sargent: Plot Summary and Analysis This paper tells about Sybil which highlights the importance of timely professional care in the case of multiple personality disorder, while showing the risks.
• Remember the Titans: Leadership Examples Boone did not want to accept the leadership because of racial prejudices and because he felt like he was doing the same thing that was once done to him.
• Gran Torino Essay – Clint Eastwood’s Film Analysis Gran Torino film, shot by Clint Eastwood, represents the life of Walter Kowalski, a veteran of the Korean War and a true American with his views and moral principles.
• Sociological Concepts in “The Truman Show” Film “The Truman Show” by Peter Weir is a movie that provides viewers with a description of how society can influence individuals and shape their beliefs and actions.
• “My Sister’s Keeper” Ethics Essay The paper outlines the plot and themes of the “My Sister’s Keeper” film and explores the key ethical issue presented in it from the standpoint of 10 different ethical theories.
• Les Intouchables Summary & Analysis “Les Intouchables” explores life in Paris and the clash of the representatives of two different social classes. This is a French film directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano.
• “Good Will Hunting” Movie: Abandonment, Love, and Attachment The movie Good Will Hunting is a prime example of how cinema can provide the audience with a comprehensive narrative of one’s complex psyche and its role.
• “Miss Representation” Documentary Film Analysis The film “Miss Representation” depicts the reality of the disproportionate objectification of women and girls in the contemporary media-constructed culture.
• Going to the Movies Cinemas have giant screens that would not fit into your home and offer quality surround sound which makes watching a movie a truly immersive experience.
• Emotions in the “Up” Movie by Pete Docter The movie “UP” is one of the highly emotional and impactful animated films made by Pixar. The story describes the importance of appreciation, love, and friendship.
• The Effects of Violent Video Games and Movies The paper discusses the effects of violent video games and movies. There is a debate over the relationship between violent video games and movies and aggressive behavior.
• Shakespeare’s Othello Movie Adaptation Overview and Social Relevance William Shakespeare’s “Othello” has been adapted to a variety of media forms, and among the most contemporary versions is Olive Parker’s movie with the same name.
• Movie Reflection – “Contagion” by Steven Soderbergh Towards the end of the film, the spread of the disease is halted after the discovery of a vaccine that can counter its effects. Steven Soderbergh directed the film.
• “Interstellar” Film Under Sociological Analysis Interstellar is a 2014 cinematographic masterpiece by Christopher Nolan that portrays a near-future dystopian society placed on Earth.
• Mi Familia Movie Analysis My Family ? (1995) is an American film by Gregory Nava ?. Learn more about the plot and the characters of Mi Familia from this movie analysis ? essay!
• Video Games Versus Movies The current paper discusses three reasons that make video games a more rewarding and immersive entertainment medium than movies.
• Urbanization and Poverty in “Slumdog Millionaire” Film Boyle’s movie, “Slumdog Millionaire,” is one of many successful attempts to depict the conditions in which people who are below the poverty level live.
• “Django Unchained”: Discussion of Film Techniques This essay discusses in detail the two cinematic techniques — light control and camera angles — that Tarantino used to reinforce the subthemes of the film “Django Unchained.”
• “Whiplash”: The Creation and Key Observations Whiplash, directed by Damien Chazelle in 2014, still conveys a powerful message that is brought to the audience through creative directing.
• “Act Without Words I” by Beckett: Response to the Movie “Act Without Words I” by Samuel Beckett is an example of the Theater of the Absurd, a designation of the particular type of plays written by different playwrights.
• Main Idea and Characters of “Dead Poets Society” Film “Dead Poets Society” is a great representation of building relationships between adolescents of the opposite sex, teachers, and parents, with an emphasis on the topic of suicide.
• Why Are Fantasy Films so Popular? Once people escape into this irrational world of fantasy, they are allowed to wonder and question conventions that have been accepted as truths.
• Character Analysis of the Film “Secret Window” The film “Secret Window” is based on the fictional novel Secret Garden written by Stephen King. This paper tries to analyze the characters of the film.
• Cinematography of “Scarface” Film by Brian De Palma In his film Scarface, the director Brian De Palma is focused on demonstrating Montana’s violent way towards the American dream through cinematography, music, and acting techniques.
• An Analysis of the movie “Crash” by Paul Haggis In the movie “Crash” by Paul Haggis the characters tend to assume certain socioeconomic status and behaviour with certain cultures.
• Films and Their Role in Society Films are part of an industry traditionally devoted to providing “pure entertainment”. However, more recently, there is a focus on the impact of films on society.
• The Film “The Help” from a Sociological Perspective The paper states that due to the change of narrative situations in the film “The Help”, the ideological point of view of the focal characters is manifested.
• Pride and Prejudice (2005): Movie Analysis The character of the move that has been chosen for this analysis of personality is Keira Knightley’s character of Elizabeth Bennet directed by Joe Wright.
• The Film “The Fisher King” by Terry Gilliam: Psychological Analysis The film “The Fisher King” by Terry Gilliam, showcases a possible permutation of symptoms that people suffering from schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder may adopt.
• Business Ethics and Dilemmas in the Film ‘Michael Clayton’ The movie “Michael Clayton” addresses a wide range of ethical issues faced by corporations and advocates. One of the ethical issues addressed entails the impacts of capitalism on morality.
• Environmental Issues in The Lorax Movie The movie The Lorax narrates the story of a walled city that is characterized by an artificial way of life. This essay gives a detailed summary and discussion of the film.
• Organizational Behavior in the “Up in the Air” Film The goal of this paper is to summarize the concepts in Up in the Air and analyze the links between the story told in the movie and well-known theories of organizational behavior.
• Symbolism in Disney’s Movie “Encanto” One of those movies that people will remember ten years from now is Encanto. The movie has flawless execution, and many people may relate to its topic.
• Comedy Movies: Positive Psychological Effects Comedy movies make people feel relaxed, especially after stressful events or when they are extremely exhausted.
• The Analysis of the Film “Dune” Watching the film “Dune” allows us to assert that characteristics such as music, special effects, acting, and an interesting plot influenced the quality of the film.
• Violence in Movies: Adverse Effects on the Adolescents Violence in films and television programs has negatively affected adolescents’ general mental and physical behavior while also desensitizing some in real life.
• Deontology and Ethical Relativism in “The Founder” Film The essay aims to review the movie The Founder, starring Michael Keaton, from the perspective of ethical theories: deontology and ethical relativism.
• The Films “Hachi: A Dog’s Tale” and “Hachiko Monogatari” The film “Hachi: A Dog’s Tale”, is a memorable drama featuring Richard Gere. The movie was remade in 2009 from a Japanese film of 1987 named “Hachiko Monogatari”.
• Viewing Movies: The Problem of Age Restriction Although movies have been known to be a source of negative influence on children, they also have benefits, and the age restriction should be eliminated to allow children to watch.
• The “Hidden Figures” Movie by Ted Melfi The movie “Hidden Figures” by Ted Melfi tells the story of three African-American women who played a significant role in developing the American space program.
• Justice Miscarriage in “The Shawshank Redemption” Film A major theme depicted in “The Shawshank Redemption” film is the inherent failure of the criminal justice system which creates conditions for the miscarriage of justice.
• “A Quiet Place”: Film Analysis The film heavily relies on sound effects and narrative structure to convey its central motif, a dreadful life in which silence is a means of survival.
• Cultural Analysis and Inferences from the Movie 42 The movie 42, which was released in 2013, has been applauded for its relevance. Branch Rickey is a renowned manager of America’s famous Baseball Team-the Brooklyn Dodgers.
• The Documentary Film “The Corporation”: Review It would be interesting to know more examples of how corporations take the responsibilities of the government and what are the costs and benefits of such actions
• “Inception” Directed by Christopher Nolan: Film Analysis This paper analyzes the “Inception” movie, which explores issues such as family dynamics and crime from a psychoanalytic perspective.
• The Relevant Aspects of the Movie “A Beautiful Mind” The purpose of this paper is to discuss the relevant aspects of “A Beautiful Mind”, the topic of mind and motivation, and the lessons learned from this masterpiece of cinema.
• Postmodernism Film: Run Lola Run Analysis The postmodern cinema invites the audience to participate in the dialogue. Run Lola Run, a movie produced by Tom Tykwer, is the specimen of the era that characterizes it quite accurately.
• Gender Stereotypes in “Frozen” Animated Film The shift in gender stereotypes is presented in “Frozen.” The contrast between Elsa and Anna is a conflict between the past stereotypes and emerging perceptions.
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Play and Movie Michael Hoffman’s 1999 movie version of the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream seeks to meet the demands of an audience of the late twentieth century – it has wrestling in the mud.
• The Film Review: “Scarface” DePalma’s Scarface (1983) creates a new gangster genre reorganizes the problems faced by earlier gangster movies and create a larger than life depiction of the issue.
• Documentary Movies Review The paper discusses several films. It includes “The Mask You Live In”, “Women Who Make America”, and “Miss Representation”.
• Theoretical Concepts in “Freedom Writers” Movie The analysis of the movie gives an opportunity to observe the introduction of theoretical sociology and psychology.
• The Aviator’ by Martin Scorsese Film Analysis The Aviator is a biographical film about the life of Howard Hughes. The film concentrates on the Hughes’ life from early adulthood and ends towards the end of his life.
• Analysis of the Movie “Thank You for Smoking”: The Propaganda The movie presents the deceitful nature of Tobacco Academy Studies that use the skills of their lobbyist Nick Naylor to confuse the public that cigarette smoking is good for their.
• Plot and Main Idea of “Back to the Future” Film The “Back to the Future” film’s main idea seems important and modern, as it says that people can influence both their own and others’ future through actions in the present.
• Analysis of “Sleepy Hollow” Film Directed by Tim Burton Tim Burton, the director, employed creativity in developing the story by improving the plot of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and creating a new one with modified characters.
• Sociological Themes in the “Taxi Driver” Film The movie Taxi Driver discusses the sociological themes of deviance and socialization, showing the world through the eyes of a war veteran unable to adjust to a healthy life.
• The “Hero” Film: Shot-by-Shot Analysis The plot of the film “Hero” (2002) by Zhang Yimou unfolds the historical events that took place in the 3rd century B.C..
• “The Crucible” (1996) Film Analysis The Crucible is a film that dramatizes real-life events that took place in Salem where people accused as witches became subjects of mass executions.
• “The Last King of Scotland” Film Analysis If power is the ability to influence the results and behavior of others, then “The Last King of Scotland” helps us understand where despotism and tyranny can lead.
• “Life Is Beautiful” Film by Roberto Benigni The “Life Is Beautiful” film is an illustrative example of a work of art that appeared during the period of the exploration of the Holocaust.
• “Mean Girls” by Mark Walters Movie Analysis Mean girls’ is a teenage movie that bring about, certain aspects of teenage or adolescent issues mostly amongst the female gender.
• Sociological Analysis of One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Film The teaching from the film “One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is that inclusion and consensus methods should be considered while treating patients with mental health issues.
• Leadership in “Erin Brockovich” Film In the “Erin Brockovich” movie, the main protagonist, Erin, is a transformational leader, he shows passion and determination until the desired outcome is achieved.
• “Cast Away” by Robert Zemeckis: Movie Review The movie “Cast Away” focuses on one’s capability to survive and challenges faced in such an environment, where many critical details are considered.
• The Movie “Back to the Future”: The Genre of Science Fiction This work presents the movie “Back to the Future” as a prominent example of the science fiction genre, which contains elements of this classification.
• ”Doctor Strange”: Description and Interpretation The story of the movie is constrained by the need to fit within an established cinematic universe and appeal to the common viewer.
• “Black Panther”: Dealing With Real-Life Social Issues Black Panther is an example of such a movie, which demonstrates how science interacts with literature and society.
• Adolescence: Social Concepts in “Mean Girls” Film The film “Mean Girls” depicts the confrontation of the “new vs. popular students.” The film’s social concepts are presented in a sophisticated and exciting manner.
• Gender Stereotyping in the “Pretty Woman” Movie The movie Pretty Woman, starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, created quite a bit of stirring among the feminist supporters of the country.
• Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in the Fearless Film In the Fearless movie, Max has been suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder that has affected his everyday life, personality, perceptions, and behaviors.
• Aging Theory Analysis in the Film “Up” The film “Up” directed by Docter (2009) shows a storyline about the 78-year-old grouch Carl Fredriksen who believes that life bypasses him.
• Cannibalism and Female Desire in Horror Films The films “Raw”, “Jennifer’s Body”, and “Ginger Snaps”,have cherished the idea of many female protagonists or the main characters being portrayed as cannibals.
• The US Film Industry’s History and Competitiveness This study will evaluate the history of the US film industry, the industry’s competitiveness, and the prospects of inward and outward foreign direct investment.
• The “Juno” Movie Under Communication Analysis The movie “Juno” brings out the challenges, ethical dilemmas, and emotional conflicts that Juno had to go through due to teenage pregnancy.
• Love, Simon’ by Greg Berlanti: Movie Analysis Love, Simon is an excellent example of a movie that expresses the difficulties of people who are afraid to open their sexual orientation to others.
• “West Side Story” and “Romeo and Juliet” Movies Comparative Analysis Even a brief analysis of “West Side Story” and “Romeo + Juliet” leaves no doubt as to the fact that the apparent similarity between two cinematographic pieces is only a skin deep.
• The Movie “Titanic”: A Survey of Semiotics This paper will give a semiotic survey of the film ‘Titanic’ directed by James Cameron. Media Semiotics will be the approach in studying features of communication.
• The Most Beautiful Thing: Short Film Review The short film “The Most Beautiful Thing” brings to life the important themes of love, disability, and communication due to the effective use of film direction.
• Roma by Alfonso Cuarón: A Film Analysis The movie provides a comprehensive image of Mexico in the 1970s. The film highlights the major impact of class, race, and gender on the life of people in Mexican society.
• Gender Representation in Akira Kurosawa’s Films This paper is intended to analyze one of the most controversial topics of Kurosawa’s films, specifically gender representation.
• Rain Man: Movie Characteristic The title of the movie is Rain Man. It was the winner of the 1988 Best Picture Award from the Academy of Motion Picture. There are two major characters.
• “Little Miss Sunshine” Film About Family Issues This essay highlights issues in society and the family through metaphors from Jonathan Dayton’s film Little Miss Sunshine.
• “Don’t Look Up” Movie Directed by Adam McKay The Netflix video ‘Don’t Look Up’, directed by Adam McKay, pays attention to two astronomers who endeavor to alert humans.
• Comparison of the Books and the Movies This essay will aim to contrast both ways of representing the story and learn about the pros and cons of each by comparing their features.
• Rhetorical Analysis of a Film “Us” By pointing out metaphors, symbols, dialogues, and details in various scenes, The Film Theorists make a convincing argument about the film’s “Us” deeper meaning.
• Lessons of “Bon Cop, Bad Cop” for English-Canadian Film “Bon Cop, Bad Cop” points to some social and political messages in the movie’s plot. The film is significant, and its newness for the Canadian filmmaking industry is essential.
• “Twelve Angry Men” Movie Analysis “Twelve Angry Men” is interesting to analyze from the perspective of decision models and the importance of dialogue and potential hidden traps in the decision-making process.
• Race and Culture in The Hate You Give Movie The Hate You Give movie reveals society issues, particularly how society can be cruel even when one wants to amend his/her ways and make right for the errors they did.
• Movie Theatre Business: Porter’s Five Forces Analysis The movie industry should expand the target audience and stop relying on youths whose unpredictable behavior significantly affects the profits generated by companies.
• Caregivers, Teachers, and Children in “Matilda” Film Based on the film “Matilda,” this paper discusses the roles of caregivers, teachers, and children and the interventions parents can use to improve their relationship with children.
• The Shawshank Redemption Movie Review The article provides an overview of The Shawshank Redemption, as well as the reasons why it still invariably resonates with the viewer.
• “Death in Venice”: Mann’s Novel v. Visconti’s Film The purpose of this paper is to discuss the similarities and differences between Thomas Mann’s novel “Death in Venice” and Luchino Visconti’s cinematic adaptation.
• “Get Out” Movie: Genre, Medium, and Pathos The movie Get Out is an exciting illustration of interracial interactions combined with pseudoscientific forces, such as the transfer of consciousness.
• Acculturation and Assimilation in the Mi Familia Movie The movie Mi Familia by Gregory Nava tells the story of a Mexican family, the Sanchez, who immigrated to the United States. The plot revolves around three generations.
• The Devil Wears Prada Film’s Critical Analysis The Devil Wears Prada film tells the story of how the chief can be stubborn, but the courage of potential employees can surprise them.
• Sociology of “Avatar” Movie by James Cameron “Avatar” is a science fiction movie created and produced by James Cameron. The movie follows the colonization of Pandora by the humans whose aim was to exploit the resources.
• “Hotel Rwanda” Directed by Terry George: An Analysis of the Film The British film “Hotel Rwanda” directed by Terry George is one of the most emotional historical dramas of this millennium, which is not a big box office movie.
• “The State of Play: Trophy Kids”: Main Idea and Summary of the Film “The State of Play: Trophy Kids” trails five progenies exercising in a sport on how discipline and parental guidance influence the children psychologically and physically.
• Cinematic Language in A Beautiful Mind Film The movie A Beautiful Mind, directed by Ron Howard, implements a wide range of cinematography techniques to help the audience develop an understanding of powerful ideas.
• Beauty and the Beast’: Movie Review The movie ‘Beauty and the Beast’ seems to be about the power of love. It does not matter how good-looking a person is, but it is important what personality he or she possesses.
• Lighting and Landscapes: The Movie “Call Me by Your Name” Throughout the movie Call Me by Your Name, both lighting and landscapes play a central role in promoting the metaphorical semantics and emotional background.
• “The Patriot”: Historical Film Analysis “The Patriot” is an epic war film which illustrates the relationships of loved ones. The movie is half-way realistic movie and the attempt to address the war-fares.
• “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” Book and the Movie: Similarities and Differences This work describes the similarities and differences between Rebecca Skloot’s “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” and its 2017 film adaptation by George C. Wolfe.
• Deciphering the Meaning of Animals in Films In looking at the use of animals in film, with the possible exception of family type, feel-good animal stories, animals are usually symbolic.
• Indian Culture in the “Pather Panchali” Movie Directed by Satyajit Ray, the movie Pather Panchali became a great event in the cultural life of Western society as it demystified the Indian culture.
• Critical Success Factors: Movie Industry in Hollywood This paper will discuss importance and application of critical success factors in business based on movie industry in Hollywood, which is a home of some of the largest film producers in the world.
• Ideology in “The Matrix” Film “The Matrix” is a film that covers both the mainstream and science fiction film-making cultures. After its premiere, the movie was able to achieve mainstream success even though it was a science fiction film.
• “To Live” Directed by Zhang Yimou: Movie Analysis “To Live” directed by Zhang Yimou tells a story of a Chinese family that has to survive the challenges of living amidst the Cultural revolution.
• Principles of Suspense in the Film “The Fugitive” The film “The Fugitive” is an action thriller film. This essay will focus on the principles of suspense shown in particular scenes of the film and provide a detailed discussion.
• Review of “Frida” Movie From Historical Viewpoint The paper aims to discuss the “Frida” film from the viewpoint of its historical accuracy and entertainment value.
• Representations of Disability, the Example of “Forrest Gump” Film The topic of the present paper is to define the societal roles of handicapped people and to find out how they have been formed due to exclusion and stereotypes of normal people.
• Romantic Comedy in American Film Industry Romantic comedy is a part of the American film industry. A Romantic comedy film basically refers to a movie which is very humorous and it denotes romantic ideals.
• Kantian Moral Philosophy in the Film “Sleepers” by Barry Levinson In the Kantian categorical imperative, an act is termed as good or wrong based on adherence to the moral law. This paper analyses the movie Sleepers using Kant’s moral philosophy.
• The Spirited Away Animated Film The animated film, Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi), by Hayao Miyazaki is of Japanese origin and was released in the year 2001.
• Applying Psychological Principles to Girl Interrupted Film The Girl Interrupted film’s psychodynamic perspective is clearly portrayed through the different characters’ behavior, feelings, and actions.
• Social Inequality in Poems, Songs, and Films Social stratification in the U.S is based on race and ethnicity and is demonstrated in films, poetry, and songs.
• Film Analysis of “Titanic” by James Cameron Its production techniques and the movie’s connection with society will be discussed over the course of this essay as well.
• Ethical, Political and Social Issues in Business in “The Corporation” Movie “The Corporation” is a documentary film released in 2003 that raises the public’s attention to significant problems in the corporate sphere.
• The Symbolism of the Cage in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” Film and Novel The cage symbol has tremendous value for creating Breakfast characters at Tiffany’s feelings; however, the peculiarities of the film and the novel revealed it differently.
• The Language of Dance in the “La La Land” Movie The purpose of this paper is to describe how movement is used to portray the intention and theme of the movie La La Land.
• ”Boy” Directed by Taika Waititi as a Representation of the Local Culture The film “Boy” (2010), directed by Taika Waititi, is a comedy-drama that tells the story of a young Maori boy’s relationship with his father, who returns from prison.
• The Great Debaters – Film Synopsis Produced by Oprah Winfrey The Great Debaters is a 2007 American biopic period film chronicling the success of the 1935 Wiley College Debate Team.
• The “Lions for Lambs” Film Analysis The main theme of Lions for Lambs is that American politicians in America defining the country’s foreign policies refuse to learn the lessons of history.
• Lessons From the Hardball Film Applied to Real Life The Hardball movie details the pitfalls and victories that the team goes through. This is an important lesson that one can apply to one’s life.
• Film Production: Camera, Lighting and Sound It is obvious that filmmaking is impossible without a camera. It is central to the process. Filmmakers sometimes give the camera almost human qualities.
• Stranger Than Fiction: Critical Analysis of Film Stranger Than Fiction entertains, educates, and creates awareness of the virtue of fate and the inevitability of death.
• Leadership Styles in the Forrest Gump Film Forrest managed to inspire Elvis Presley, who imitated Forrest’s dance moves. As such, he received a football scholarship and became a top running back.
• The Main Character’s Traits in the “Precious” Film At the beginning of the film “Precious,” the main character is antisocial and unconfident, but proper education plays a significant role in helping her change.
• Review of “Kung Fu Panda” Movie: Educational Psychology In the movie “Kung Fu Panda”, individual characters use a multimodal learning approach in taking in information.
• Change in the Team in the Moneyball Film From the movie Moneyball, it can be learned that change can be a messy process in an organization, and that change takes time to yield fruits.
• Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls Film Analysis For Colored Girls is a purposeful sharpening to the problem of women’s lack of freedom. For Colored Girls is about gender relationships at its African-American version.
• Negotiation Situation in “The Godfather” Movie The movie “The Godfather” presents an excellent example of a negotiation state involving the Italian family and Corleone family as they discuss a deal about the narcotic business.
• “Harry Potter and Prisoner of Azkaban”: Book and Movie Comparison Both the book “Harry Potter and Prisoner of Azkaban” and its film adaptation share the same character set. The lead character is the hero Harry Potter, a famous wizard.
• Mise-En-Scène in Sofia Coppola’s Films Sofia Coppola is a director known for her feminine movies and signature style. She extensively uses camera movement, composition, color, and lighting to create a striking.
• Predictive Analysis in Business: “Moneyball” Film Predictive analysis is a powerful tool for businesses and individuals; it has started to be used extensively over the past several years.
• “The Kite Runner” Film: History and Cinematography The historical background of the movie The Kite Runner started when the Soviet intelligence had evidence that Amin was attempting intercourse with Pakistan and China.
• “The Neighbor’s Window”: Film Review The characters of the movie “The Neighbor’s Window” Alli and her husband Jacob, watching the life of their neighbors, begin to remember their youth and regret their existing life.
• Review of “Anxiety” Short Film The short film “Anxiety” introduces the viewers to the life of a young and beautiful girl, Madeleine, who is suffering from anxiety.
• “Erin Brockovich” by S. Soderberg: Conflict in a Film Conflict is one of the most common challenges in relationships. The following paper will discuss one interpersonal conflict from a movie and apply conflict resolution strategies to it.
• Amélie Film Directed by J. P. Jeunet Editing plays a critical role in the film Amélie directed by J.P. Jeunet because the producer uses editing techniques to express the personalities.
• Kids Behind Bars: Analysis of Film Kids Behind Bars is a documentary that provides an in-depth insight into the aspirations of former child offenders sentenced to life in prison.
• Cinematography and Visuals in the Tenet Film The purpose of this essay is to discuss the role and effect of the visual aspect in Christopher Nolan’s film Tenet.
• Historical Depiction in the “Helen of Troy” Movie This review is based on the film “Helen of Troy,” which revolves around the Greek mythology of the Trojan War.
• Chapter 5 of Thompson, & Bordwell’s “Film History” In this essay, Chapter 5 of Thompson, & Bordwell’s “Film History” will be summarized in connection with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, an example of German Expressionism.
• Silver Linings Playbook Film Studies The movie ‘The Silver Linings Playbook’ became one of the best of its kind in terms of depicting the issue of mental disorders.
• Real and Escapist Life in the Film “The Slumdog Millionaire” The movie, Slumdog Millionaire attempts to contrast two themes: real-life vs escapist life. The characters are trying to escape from their miserable situations.
• Psychology Behind the Movie “Trading Places” by Landis The psychological trends of society are usually described with the help of various concepts, theories, literary works and movies.
• Stereoscopic Movie Editing: 3D Signal Editing Techniques and Editing Software 3D movie editing is one of the latest tendencies and is one of the most demanding processes of the contemporary movie industry.
• Nash’s Schizophrenia in “A Beautiful Mind” Film This paper discusses John Nash’s paranoid schizophrenia as portrayed in the film “A Beautiful Mind” using different psychological perspectives.
• Schizophrenia in “A Beautiful Mind” Film by Howard Directed by Ron Howard, A Beautiful Mind is a chef-d’oeuvre film centered on the life and mental illness of the renowned mathematician, John Forbes Nash.
• The Functions of Film Music: Essay Example Music plays an important role in films. This paper will discuss how music has been used in the movie Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
• Analysis of a Scene in the Film “Vertigo”
• “Creed” Movie vs. “The Contender” Book by Lipsyte: Similarities and Differences
• Disney Films: Projector of Our Society’s Values
• Movie Narration & Historical Accuracy: Troy
• Analysis of Ben Affleck’s Movie “Gone Baby Gone” From Kant’s Categorical Imperative Perspective
• Lord of the Rings’ and ‘Harry Potter’ Film Analysis
• Mayan Culture in “Apocalypto” Film Discussion
• Plot, Genre and Main Idea of “The Blind Side” Film
• Representation of Race and Intersectionality in Films: “The 13th”
• Theme of Hope in “The Shawshank Redemption” Film
• “Walk. Ride. Rodeo.” Movie Evaluation
• Mise-en-Scene of “Blade Runner” Film by Ridley Scott
• The Phenomenon of PR in Film Industry
• Picnic Scene in “Citizen Kane” Movie by Orson Welles
• Neorealism Elements in “The Color of Paradise” Film
• Stereotypes in “Moonlight” Film by Barry Jenkins
• The Public Enemy and The Godfather Films Analysis
• “Parasite”: Symbols Represented in the Film
• Polanski’s and Kurzel’s Film Adaptations of Macbeth
• Interpersonal Communication in the “One Day” Film
• “Get Out” Movie’s Rhetorical Analysis
• Music in the Movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”
• “The Wizard of Oz”: Movie Analysis
• Film Studies: “I am Sam”
• Gender Roles in the Boys Don’t Cry Movie
• “Psycho” Film by Alfred Hitchcock
• Argento’s Horror Film “Inferno” and Surrealism
• “Farewell”: Interpersonal Communication in the Film
• Disney Movie “Beauty and The Beast”
• Psychotherapy. “A Beautiful Mind” Film by Ron Howard
• Psychology. Memory Disorder in “Fifty First Dates” Film
• Freud’s Ideas in Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” Film
• Colorblind Racism in “The Help” Film
• The Film “Dead Man’s Letters” by Konstantin Lopushansky
• The Morality of the Movie “Gone Baby Gone”
• Watching a Movie at Home and in Theatres
• Quentin Tarantino: Influence on World Cinema
• The Agents of Change Documentary Film Review
• Popular Culture in “Inglourious Basterds” Film
• Surrealism in the Meshes of the Afternoon Film
• Unhappy Marriages in the Movie ”Passing”
• Analysis of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” Film
• Analysis of “The Corporation” Movie
• Copyright Infringement in Music and Film Industry
• “Get Out” Horror Film by Jordan Peele
• Neoliberalism in the Film “Wall Street”
• Science Fiction in Literature and Movies
• Organizational Behavior in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” Movie
• Film Tourism Development and Benefits
• Cinematic Techniques in The Silence of the Lambs Movie
• The Movie “Liar Liar” by Tom Shadyac: Moral Issues Analysis
• The Film “Gran Torino” by Clinton Eastwood
• Movie Review “Angels and Demons”
• Being a Trans Woman in the Call Her Ganda Film
• Romero vs. Voces Innocentes: Films Comparison
• Aspects of the Narrative Construction in “Gladiator” Movie
• The Feminist Ideas in ”A Doll’s House” Movie by Patrick Garland
• The Movie My Family/ Mi Familia: Mise en Scene Analysis
• A Conventional Japanese Family in a Film Tokyo Sonata
• The Movie “The Devil Wears Prada”: Recommendations
• Film Studies: Watching Movies Now and in the Past
• Gender Expectations in the Disney Film “The Little Mermaid”
• Investing in the Film “Escape from Rio Japuni”
• The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring Film Analysis
• “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant” Film Analysis
• The “Hidden Figures” Film Analysis
• Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter” Story and Hitchcock’s Film
• 12 Years a Slave: The Analysis of the Film
• American Society in the 1980s in the Rocky IV Film
• Critique of the Movie “Contagion”
• The Last Night in Soho Film’s Critical Analysis
• Deceiver (1997) Movie Analysis
• True Leadership in the Invictus Film
• Love and Women in Cinderella and Mulan Films
• Interpersonal Relationships and Conflict in “Malcolm & Marie” Film
• Review of “The Patriot” Movie
• Split Personality in the Frankie and Alice Film
• “District 9” Movie Critical Review
• The Importance of Being Earnest: Play Movie (2002)
• Smoking in Movies: Tobacco Industry Tactics
• “The Miracle of Bern” Sports Film
• Kant’s Philosophy in the Movie “Gone Baby Gone” by Ben Affleck
• “The Constant Gardener” a Film by Fernando Meirelles
• 2012′ by Roland Emmerich Film Analysis
• Renton’s Addiction in the “Trainspotting” Movie
• Western Movies and Their Effect on Arab Youth
• The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street – Film Study
• Iranian Revolution and Terrorism: the Rex Cinema Massacre
• Meaning of Symbolism in the Film “Parasite”
• Ethical Analysis of the Awakenings Film
• Conflicts in the Film “A Clockwork Orange”
• Themes in Films by Spike Lee
• Narrative Campaign of “The Hunger Games” Film
• Dunkirk: Analysis of Film by Nolan
• The Movie “Alien” Overview and Analysis
• Analysis of “The Interrupters” Film
• The Whale Rider Film Directed by Niki Caro
• “Rampant: How a City Stopped a Plague” Film Reflection
• Maurice by E.M. Forster Novel and Film Adaptation Comparative Analysis
• Racial Discrimination in the “Selma” Film
• “Sleepers” a Film by Barry Levinson
• “The Corporation”: The Idea of the Movie and Analysis
• Servant Leadership in the Remember the Titans Film
• The Paradise Now Movie Analysis
• Pulp Fiction as Iconic Gangster Cinema
• The Body Film by Brian Evenson
• “The Great Escape” Film from Project Management Perspective
• Data Visualization of Most Profitable Movie Genres
• Defamation in Media Law and Film Industry
• Review of “12 Years a Slave” Movie
• “The Notebook” Film by Nick Cassavetes
• Psychological Struggles of the Main Character from the “Ben X” Film
• “The Break Up” Movie: Family Conflict Theme
• Movie Reflection – “Mi Familia”
• The Films That Used as a Tool to Reimagine Africa and Africans
• Communication in the Movie “Parent Trap”: Communication Disorders
• Cross-Racial Relationships in “The Lunch Date” Movie and Short Stories
• Progress Traps in the “Surviving Progress” Film
• Film Studies. Authorship Theory in Examples
• Feminist Theory Applied to the “Passengers” Film
• Horror Movie Analysis and Its Approaches
• The Book “A History of Narrative Film”
• 3D Animation in “Ice Age: The Meltdown” Film
• Motivation in the “Whiplash” Film by Damien Chazelle
• Moral Behaviours in the Movie “Inside Job”
• Hotel Rwanda Film Review
• History of Film Noir
• Master of Deceit in “Othello”: Iago in the Film Adaptation
• “The Big Short”: Analysis of Adam McKay’s Film
• Comparison of “Metropolis” and “Modern Times” Movies
• “The Matrix” Movie Discussion
• “Doll’s House”: Ibsen’s Play vs. Losey’s Movie
• The “Race, the Power of an Illusion” Film Review
• “Armageddon” Film: American Culture of Patriotism
• The Movie”Smurfs”: The Problem of Gender Roles
• The Movie ”Trainspotting” by Danny Boyle: Presenting Issues and Interventions
• Themes in the Movie “The Physician”
• The Urban Space Depiction in the Cinema
• The Use of Costume as a Style in the Movie ”The Matrix”
• The Butler by Lee Daniels: Movie Review
• Communication Types in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” Film
• “Troy”: Film Analysis From the Point of View of Organizational Behavior
• ”Argo” Directed by Affleck: Summary and Opinion
• Analysing Films “The Great Debaters” and “Crash”
• The “Battle Royale” Film’s Main Ideas
• “Remember the Titans” Movie by B. Yakin
• The Fifth Element: Gender and Sexuality in Cinema
• The Film “Story of a Puppet”
• Masculinity in the Film “Saturday Night Fever”
• The Sundance Film Festival and Its Influence
• “The Shawshank Redemption” Film by Darabont
• Film Studies: “The Sound of Music” by Robert Wise
• “Salt” by Phillip Noyce Film Analysis
• The Movie “The Boy in The Striped Pajamas” by Mark Herman
• The Film “Die Hard’
• Movie “Joy Luck Club” by Wayne Wang
• The Classic Musical Film Grease Analysis
• The Rubber Film by Quentin Dupieux
• The Film “My Sister’s Keeper” by Nick Cassavetes
• Walter Salles’s Film The Motorcycle Diaries Analysis
• Analysis of the Documentary Movie Cowspiracy
• Bulgaria’s Abandoned Children: Analysis of Film by BBC
• “99 Francs” by Jan Kounen as an Immortal Film
• The Iconic Moments in the Film “Gold Rush 1925”
• The Film “Dune” by Denis Villeneuve
• The Movie “Queen and Slim” Analysis
• The Film “Devil’s Playground” by Schepisi
• “District 9” by Neill Blomkamp – Movie Review
• Social Relations and State Control in “Penguin Island” Novel and “Brazil” Film
• Films and Television: Visual Techniques
• Amadeus: Play and Movie Review
• “The Medicated Child”: Film Review
• Short Movie “Darkness/Light/Darkness” by Jan Svankmajer
• Adult – Child Relationships in American Movies
• “The Doctor” the Film by Randa Haines
• The Troy Film Inspired by Homer’s Iliad
• “Goodfellas” Crime Drama Film by Martin Scorsese
• “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” the Film by Joel Coen
• Predicting the Future of Film Narrative
• Gender Display in TV Shows, Movies and News
• “Solitary Nation” – Documentary Film Analysis
• Bill Maher’s Religulous Film Analysis
• The Role of Semiotics in Shaping the Feminist Discourse in Palestinian Cinema
• “It Must Be Heaven” Film Analysis
• Psychoanalytic Criticism of “The Wall” Film by Alan Parker
• Catholic Church and Sexual Abuse in “Doubt” Film
• The Importance of Theological Study of Film
• Japanese Animation: “My Neighbour Totoro” Film
• Aspects of the Film “Fruitvale Station”
• “Watchmen” Film in Relation to the American Dream
• A Beautiful Mind: Analysis of Film
• Review of “Mon Oncle” Movie: A Portrayal of France
• The Movie “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” by Lasse Hallström
• Plot and Characters of the “Brokeback Mountain” Film
• Why the People Crave Horror Movies
• “At Last” Movie Directed by Yiwei Liu
• American Multi-Cinema, Inc. Analysis
• “Rear Window” Movie Analysis
• “The Iron Lady” Movie Review
• Oppression of African Americans in the Selma Film
• “Autism: Insight From Inside” Movie Reflection
• Economic Aspect of The Wall Street Movie
• Pop Culture in Movies: How Far Can It Get?
• Leadership in the Film “Gladiator” by Ridley Scott
• “Blood Diamond” Movie’s Critical Review
• “Maurice” by James Ivory: Film Outline and Symbols
• “Seven Samurai” and “The Magnificent Seven” Movies
• Beowulf: Comparing the Movie and the Book
• “Stephen King On Why We Crave Horror Movies” Analysis
• Women’s Fates in Japanese Films
• “The Crucible” Film and Its Historical Value
• Accidental Horror in Smith’s “The Black Tower” Film
• “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”: Movie of Contrasts
• Films Comparison: “Psycho” by Gus Van Sant and Hitchcock
• Relationships in the “Say Anything” Film by Crowe
• “Out of the Past” Noir Film by Jacques Tourneur
• “Erin Brockovich” a Film by Steven Soderbergh
• Garcia’s Family in the Film “Real Women Have Curves”
• Korean Cinematography and Films Analysis
• Chinese cinema: Two Stage Sisters and Yellow Earth
• The Film “Selma” by Ava DuVernay
• Hidden Figures by Theodore Melfi: Movie Analysis
• The Oedipus Complex in Pasolini’s Movie
• The Film “Do the Right Thing” by Spike Lee
• Character Change in Malcolm X Film by Spike Lee
• The Movie “Gran Torino” by Clint Eastwood
• The Film “Memoirs of a Geisha” by Rob Marshall
• “Metropolis”: Analysis of Issues Raised in the Film
• Substance Abuse Disorder in “The Breaking Bad” Film
• Researching the Concept of the Film Genre
• “The Death of a Salesman” Film by John Malkovich
• “The King’s Speech” Movie and Anxiety Disorder
• Peer Pressure and Decision-Making in “The Breakfast Club” Film
• Capitalism and Class Division in the “Parasite” Film
• Narrative Structure in “Notorious” & “The Place Beyond the Pines” Films
• A Study of Watching Movies as a Way to Practice Language Skills: Proposal
• Film “Ex Machina”: An Artificial Intelligence
• Discussion of Gender and Society Themes in Films
• Movie Review: Miss Evers’ Boys
• The Film Zodiac and Ethical Concerns
• Patrick’s Final Decision in Gone Baby Gone Film
• Benefits and Threats of Digital Cinema: The Matrix World
• The LEGO Movie Promotion Video in Accordance With the AIDA Model
• “Amélie” Film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet Review
• “Freedom Song”: Movie Review
• Meaning of Life in the Sidney Lumet’s Film “Twelve Angry Men”
• Psychological Issues in the “Breaking Away” Movie
• Issues in the Film Industry
• The Lost World Movie Review
• Motion Pictures: “Film/Genre” Book by Rick Altman
• Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Trilogy: The “Blue” Film
• Modern-Day Berlin City in the “Run Lola Run” Film
• Iron Man and The Avengers: Films Comparison
• Racism in the “Devil in a Blue Dress” Film
• Christian Symbolism and Imagery in “The Matrix” Film
• Nazi Propaganda Movies and Their Effects on Viewers
• The Social Worker Role in the Film “Crash”
• China Films’ Influence on Cultural and Creative Industries
• Why the Titanic Film Is Overrated
• Themes and Characters of the “Annie Hall” Movie
• Danny Villeneuve’s “Dune” Film Adaptation
• Family Systems Analysis of “A Family Thing” Movie
• Intriguing Elements of the Michael Clayton Movie
• The Shutter Island Movie by Martin Scorsese
• Hero’s Journey and Archetypes in “Django Unchained” Film
• Mythology in The Hunger Games and Moana Films
• “Kevorkian” Film on Assisted Suicide
• The Movie “Good Will Hunting” by Hans Van Sent
• Themes in The Corporation Documentary Film
• Review of Meaning “Kids in Crisis” Film
• “A Class Divided” Film on Discrimination
• Interpersonal Relationships in the Movie Crash
• “An Introduction to Film Studies” by Jill Nelmes
• The Film “Wall Street” by Oliver Stone
• The Language of the “Citizen Kane” Film
• Internal Racism in the Movie Amreeka
• The Mask You Live In (2015) Movie Review
• “Boyz n the Hood” by Steve Nicolaides: A Movie Review
• The Intersection of Hip-Hop, Sport, and Movies
• Movie Censorship and Ratings in America
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• Federico Fellini Films Analysis
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• “Moby Dick,” a Film Adaptation of the Novel
• God Existence Argument in the “Forrest Gump” Film
• “Training Day” the Film by Fuqua
• “Wetback” a Movie by Arturo Pérez Torres
• Selma: Historical Drama Film by Ava DuVernay
• The Film “We Bought a Zoo” and Single Parenting Issues
• Colors in “The Thief of Bagdad” Movie by A. Korda
• Costume Design in the Soylent Green Film
• Character Development in the Forrest Gump Film
• Tyler Perry’s Contribution to the Growth of the Film Industry in Atlanta
• “A Passage to India” Movie Review
• The Hadza: Last of the First Film by Bill Benenson
• ”Comfort” Movies and Films With Greatest Impact
• The Film “Marry Me” by Kat Coiro: MacBook Placement
• Criteria for Referring a Film to the “Great Works of Cinema”
• Films “172 Hours” and “The Day After Tomorrow”
• The My Sister’s Keeper Film Analysis
• Greek Mythology in the “Inception” Film by Nolan
• Consumer Product-Based Look at Ocean’s 8 Film
• Societal Reflection of the Movie Hustlers
• Silent Films and Foley Artists
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• The Film “Apollo 13” by Ron Howard
• Spanish Cuisine and Its Importance in Spanish Cinema
• Gender Biases in “If These Walls Could Talk 2” Film
• “I, The Worst of All” Film by María Luisa Bemberg
• Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Film
• Batman vs. Joker in “The Dark Knight” Film by Nolan
• “Metropolis” and “Battleship Potemkin”: The Idea of the Film
• Discussion of the Film “The Batman”
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• A Beautiful Mind: A Film About an Outstanding Man
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• Review of ”A Beautiful Mind” Movie
• Animals and Plants in “What Darwin Never Knew” Film
• How Does Composer John Williams Unify His Films Through His Music?
• Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” Book and Movie Comparison
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• Technology Development: Indonesian Film Industry in 2010-2020
• Movie Review: Electromagnetic Spectrum
• Faith and Science: Did Darwin Kill God?
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• African American Males in “Boyz n The Hood” Movie
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• “Taxi to the Darkside” and “No End in Site” Movies
• “Paradise Now” the Film by Abu-Assad
• “American Psycho” Film and Lizardo’s “Fight Club” Article
• “Vagabond” Film Directed by Agnes Varda
• “Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands” Film by Bruno Barreto
• Asian Film Industry Globalization
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Book and Film Compared
• Contemporary History. “Schindler’s List” Film
• Ethnocentrism and Stereotypes in the Movie “Crash”
• American Film Comedy. Slapstick Genre
• Historical Evidence in the Renaissance Italy Film
• A Story of Struggle in “Farewell My Concubine” Film
• Chicanos in “Mi Vida Loca” Film by Allison Anders
• Double Indemnity by Billy Wilder and The Spanish Prisoner by David Mamet: Films Comparison
• Arnheim, Eisenstein, Hitchcock: Film and Reality
• Sexualization of Women in Hollywood Cinema
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• “A Doll’s House” the Movie by Patrick Garland
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• International Relationships and Foreign Policy in American Movies
• Film Industry’s Profitability in 1988-1999
• Horror Films: Articles Analysis and Comparison
• Controversial Final Scene in “Gone Baby Gone” Film
• Alzheimer’s Disease in the “Away From Her” Movie
• Early Feature Films and Ethical Considerations
• Slasher and Gothic Horror Film Sub-Genres
• Youth and Media in “The Merchants of Cool” Movie
• “Scarface” Movie: Genre’s Definition
• Racism and Masculinity in the Film “A Soldier’s Story”
• Hollywood Film Industry’ Success Factors
• Bill Monroe – Father of Bluegrass Music Film Analysis
• Fireproof by Stephen Kendrick – Film Study
• Immanuel Kant’s Morality and the Film “Sleepers”
• Edward Zwick’s “Blood Diamond” Movie Analysis Essay
• The Book and Movie Versions of “The Martian”
• Human Experience in the “Purple Hearts” Film
• The Thesis of The Corporation Film
• Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill Films by Quentin Tarantino
• Film Summary: “The Patriot” Directed by Dean Semler
• The Film “The Blind Side” by John Lee Hancock
• “The Karate Kid” Film by John Avildsen
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• “Fences”: Wilson’s Play and Washington’s Movie
• Substance-Related Disorders in the “New Jack City” Movie
• “Avengers: Endgame” as a “Zeitgeist Film”
• The Film “Concussion” by Peter Landesman
• Classic and Mythical Creatures in Books and Animated Films
• The Film “A Time to Kill” by Joel Schumacher
• Race in “The Long Walk Home” Film
• The Film “Chinatown” by Roman Polansky
• Chinese vs. Taiwanese Film Production
• Politics in “28 Days Later” Film by Danny Boyle
• Visual Effects in “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” Film
• The Photographs “Untitled Film Stills” by Sherman and “Early Colors Interiors” by Simmons
• Value of Film in Explaining History
• Visual Effects in the “1917” Movie
• “Crash”: Movie Significance
• “The Book of Eli” Movie Review
• A Good Scary Movie and Key Requirements
• The Movie “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” by Ang Lee
• “The Physician” Film and Narrative Tradition of “The Epic of Gilgamesh”
• Contemporary Literature: Beowulf, the Movie
• Billy Wilder’s Movies Overview
• The Film “Citizen Kane”: Scenes Analysis
• Poetic Themes in the Selma Film Staring D. Oyelowo
• The Gangs of New York Movie Review
• The Film “The Great Debaters” by Denzel Hayes Washington
• “The Help” Movie: Interaction of Characters
• The Film “Cabaret” by Bob Fosse
• Martha Rogers’s Theory and the Movie “The Sixth Sense” by Shyamalan
• Youth Violence in the Film “The Interrupters”
• Humor at American and British Film Comedy
• Battleship Potemkin Movie Review
• Jose Antonio Vargas’ Film Documented
• Cinematography Techniques in Steven Spielberg’s Films
• “His Girl Friday” Film by Howard Hawks
• Family Relations in “Love Actually” Movie
• Gone With the Wind’: The War and Love in the Movie
• “Erin Brockovich” Film Critique
• Character Analysis in the Mean Girls Movie
• Women as Vigilantes in “Thelma & Louise” Movie
• “Avatar” the Film by J. Cameron
• Does Indian Cinema Educate and Entertain?
• Why Do Many Adults Enjoy Animated Movies?
• Are Disney Movies Suitable for the Adolescent Mind?
• How Has Cinema Matured and Developed Within the Last 10 Years?
• Does the Cinema Reflect or Impose Moral Standards?
• Should Sex and Violence on Television or in the Movies Be Restricted?
• How Have Movies Changed Today’s Society?
• Are Television, Movies, and Music Responsible for Teen Violence?
• How Do Cinema Directors Develop Humanism Theories?
• What Factors Affect Student Cinema Attendance?
• How Did the Cinema Affect the Lives of Women and Children in the 1930s?
• Does Film Technology Impacted Cinema’s Evolution?
• Should Adults Criticize Movies Meant for Children?
• How Has the Experience of Cinema-Going Changed Over the Past Century?
• Do Disney Movies Alter a Child’s Perception?
• Why Was Cinema Going So Popular in the First Half of the Century?
• How Did Indian Cinema Evolve Over the Years?
• What Is the Contribution of Edison and Lumiere to Cinema?
• How Was the Cold War Represented in Cinema?
• Do Walt Disney Movies Negatively Affect Attitudes and Behaviors of the American Child?
• How Is the Heart Rate Affected by Suspenseful Movies?
• What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Horror Movies?
• Should People Who Download Movies and Music Illegally Be Punished?
• Why Are Horror Movies So Appealing to the Human Mind?
• How Were Muslims Influenced by American Movies?

Cite this post

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StudyCorgi. (2021, September 9). 609 Cinema Essay Topics & Research Topics about Cinema. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/cinema-essay-topics/

"609 Cinema Essay Topics & Research Topics about Cinema." StudyCorgi , 9 Sept. 2021, studycorgi.com/ideas/cinema-essay-topics/.

StudyCorgi . (2021) '609 Cinema Essay Topics & Research Topics about Cinema'. 9 September.

1. StudyCorgi . "609 Cinema Essay Topics & Research Topics about Cinema." September 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/cinema-essay-topics/.

Bibliography

StudyCorgi . "609 Cinema Essay Topics & Research Topics about Cinema." September 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/cinema-essay-topics/.

StudyCorgi . 2021. "609 Cinema Essay Topics & Research Topics about Cinema." September 9, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/cinema-essay-topics/.

These essay examples and topics on Cinema were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.

This essay topic collection was updated on January 5, 2024 .

Essay on Impact of Cinema in Life for Students and Children

500 words essay on impact of cinema in life.

Cinema has been a part of the entertainment industry for a long time. It creates a massive impact on people all over the world. In other words, it helps them give a break from monotony. It has evolved greatly in recent years too. Cinema is a great escape from real life.

Furthermore, it helps in rejuvenating the mind of a person. It surely is beneficial in many ways, however, it is also creating a negative impact on people and society. We need to be able to identify the right from wrong and make decisions accordingly.

Advantages of Cinema

Cinema has a lot of advantages if we look at the positive side. It is said to be a reflection of the society only. So, it helps us come face to face with the actuality of what’s happening in our society. It portrays things as they are and helps in opening our eyes to issues we may have well ignored in the past.

Similarly, it helps people socialize better. It connects people and helps break the ice. People often discuss cinema to start a conversation or more. Moreover, it is also very interesting to talk about rather than politics and sports which is often divided.

Above all, it also enhances the imagination powers of people. Cinema is a way of showing the world from the perspective of the director, thus it inspires other people too to broaden their thinking and imagination.

Most importantly, cinema brings to us different cultures of the world. It introduces us to various art forms and helps us in gaining knowledge about how different people lead their lives.

In a way, it brings us closer and makes us more accepting of different art forms and cultures. Cinema also teaches us a thing or two about practical life. Incidents are shown in movies of emergencies like robbery, fire, kidnapping and more help us learn things which we can apply in real life to save ourselves. Thus, it makes us more aware and teaches us to improvise.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Disadvantages of Cinema

While cinema may be beneficial in many ways, it is also very damaging in various areas. Firstly, it stereotypes a lot of things including gender roles, religious practices, communities and more. This creates a false notion and a negative impact against that certain group of people.

People also consider it to be a waste of time and money as most of the movies nowadays are not showing or teaching anything valuable. It is just trash content with objectification and lies. Moreover, it also makes people addicts because you must have seen movie buffs flocking to the theatre every weekend to just watch the latest movie for the sake of it.

Most importantly, cinema shows pretty violent and sexual content. It contributes to the vulgarity and eve-teasing present in our society today. Thus, it harms the young minds of the world very gravely.

Q.1 How does cinema benefit us?

A.1 Cinema has a positive impact on society as it helps us in connecting to people of other cultures. It reflects the issues of society and makes us familiar with them. Moreover, it also makes us more aware and helps to improvise in emergency situations.

Q.2 What are the disadvantages of cinema?

A.2 Often cinema stereotypes various things and creates false notions of people and communities. It is also considered to be a waste of time and money as some movies are pure trash and don’t teach something valuable. Most importantly, it also demonstrates sexual and violent content which has a bad impact on young minds.

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Definition of cinema

• moviemaking
• silver screen

Examples of cinema in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'cinema.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

short for cinematograph

1909, in the meaning defined at sense 1a

Phrases Containing cinema

• cinema verité
• go to the cinema

Articles Related to cinema

100 Years Old: New Words of the 1920s

A collection of words turning 100 this decade

The Illuminating History of 'Gaffer'

Etymologically, it’s a nod to the Corleones

Dictionary Entries Near cinema

cinefluorogram

Cite this Entry

“Cinema.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cinema. Accessed 25 May. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of cinema.

derived from French cinématographe "motion picture," from Greek kinēma "movement" and graphe "picture," from kinein "to move" — related to kinetic

More from Merriam-Webster on cinema

Nglish: Translation of cinema for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of cinema for Arabic Speakers

Britannica.com: Encyclopedia article about cinema

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Introduction

• Published: November 2021
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Queer cinema names at least three things: an emergent visual culture that boldly identifies as queer; a body of narrative, documentary, and experimental work previously collated under the rubric of homosexual or lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) cinema; as well as a means of critically reading and evaluating films and other visual media through the lens of sexuality. By this expansive account, queer cinema encompasses more than a century of filmmaking, film criticism, and film reception. It includes early experiments in same-sex desire and trans-identification, such as the 1914 Vitagraph film A Florida Enchantment (Sidney Drew and Gladys Rankin) and the 1930 transnational experimental film Borderline (Kenneth Macpherson, H.D. and Bryher), classical Hollywood fare such as Queen Christina ( Rouben Mamoulian, 1933 ), and international films such as the 1969 Japanese film Funeral Parade of Roses (Toshio Matsumoto). It references methods of interpretation of mainstream culture, from Vito Russo’s pioneering compendium, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (1981), to Alexander Doty’s witty collection, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (1993), to Patricia White’s study of Hollywood’s hidden lesbians, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (1999), to Leslie Feinberg’s journey through trans history, Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (1996). It also references a cycle of films released in the early 1990s that were dubbed by film critic and scholar B. Ruby Rich, the “new queer cinema.” Critics and scholars attached that label to aesthetically and politically challenging films from North American and the UK, such as Paris is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1991), Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991), Swoon (Tom Kalin, 1992), The Living End (Gregg Araki, 1992) , and Young Soul Rebels (Isaac Julien, 1991). For the past twenty-five years, the idea of “queer cinema” has expanded further as a descriptor for a global arts practice.

This handbook brings these three currents of queer cinema together as art and critical practice, aligning the canon of queer cinema and its critics with a new generation of makers and scholars. Several historical currents have brought queer cinema thus understood to the center of cinema and media studies. The first involves a reevaluation of workings of censorship from scrutinizing governments and film industries from Hollywood to Bollywood to China, largely thanks to the influence of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality . Where scholars previously conceived of the censorship, particularly of sexual desire through a model of prohibition, or the “top-down” exercise of power, a new generation of researchers has turned to the archives of film production to understand the productive and creative effects of prohibition. If, according to production codes or censor boards, a character can’t be gay outright, for example, she can certainly be a comic spinster, signifying as gay to the right eyes and ears through a subversive queer mise-en-scène based upon dress, home décor, taste in art, and other elements; these imaginative solutions have bred a huge body of work to which queer artists and workers have often contributed, offering a rich archive for new scholarship. Scholars and artists also turn to the margins of extant archives, discovering evocative queer possibilities in documents and images, or to speculative fictions, inventing a usable past where none seems to exist. Scholarship on trans images and archives likewise submits stereotypes and banished images to critical scrutiny, rethinking the gender binarism that often sustained LGBTQ analysis.

Second, worldwide political movements have dramatically influenced the production of queer cinema. Weimar Germany offered a brief window for new sexual politics with films such as Different from the Others / Anders als die Andern (Richard Oswald, 1919) and Mädchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan, 1931). Postwar undergrounds and new waves (primarily in North America, the UK, and Europe) found license for experimentation in emerging countercultures, student movements, and movements for sexual liberation: out of these emerged queer auteurs such as Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Barbara Hammer, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ulrike Ottinger, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, to name a few. In the 1970s, queer programmers founded new screening spaces in lesbian feminist separatist communities and on college campuses, along with establishing lesbian and gay festivals in large cities, to show LGBTQ-produced work for eager queer audiences. The AIDS crisis and queer activism spawned the “new queer cinema” as well as gave rise to the efflorescence of the academic field of “queer theory,” a body primarily of literary criticism and philosophy that has subsequently influenced virtually every field in the humanities and soft social sciences. More recently, the policing of the Chinese independent film community has resulted in an unprecedented underground documentary and narrative fiction film movement in Beijing and other Chinese cities, such as the work of writer, director, and activist Cui Zi’en, who was also the cofounder of the Beijing Queer Film Festival. Other film festivals have nurtured Chinese queer film work including the Hong Kong Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the Shanghai Queer Film Festival, and the Taiwan International Queer Film Festival. Moreover, the 2014 military coup in Thailand has allowed global queer superstars like Apitchatpong Weerasethakul to make lyrical and significant films outside of the industrial mainstream. Along with these movements and auteurs in East and Southeast Asia, queer filmmakers and collectives are producing groundbreaking work in India, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Africa.

Third, “queer” has marked a turn away from the identity-based acronyms of L, G, B, and T to an embrace of a more fluid, multiple, and inchoate forms of gender expression, gender variance, embodied difference, and sexuality. Embracing a once-pejorative slur, queer artists and scholars now use the term retrospectively to cover a capacious history of art and politics and to anticipate a future that increasingly addresses marginalization and exclusion due to race and ability. This collection also recognizes that “queer” is a term that is fraught politically when applied to non-Western national and diasporic cinemas, where too often queer is read from a Western understanding of gender and sexuality, erasing other terminology and ways of organizing and understanding non-normative gender and sexual behaviors and life worlds. Queer, in other words, carries its own force and horizon that situate this volume at the cutting edge of both cinema/media and sexuality studies.

We commissioned essays that study queer cinema from these capacious perspectives. Importantly, queer cinema takes many forms across time, so that we address narrative, experimental, documentary, and genre filmmaking (including pornography). Likewise, although the study of cinema and media is not restricted to a single method, we showcase the unique combination of textual analysis, cinema/media theory, industrial and production history, interpretation, ethnography, and archival research that our field enables. Queer cinema both is and is not self-evidently an object “out there” for study: some films reinforce negative understandings of queerness while others liberate the subject; some are newly queered, while many queerly-made texts await discovery. Finally, queer cinema is not an Anglophone phenomenon, nor is it, of course, restricted to the medium of film. Our contributors are therefore distributed among scholars who research the worldwide canon of queer cinema, those who are uniquely positioned to address three decades of its particular importance (the 1970s through the 1990s), and those best positioned to ponder the forms it is taking or may take in our new century, namely digital media that moves in new circuits.

Any collection this large is beholden first and foremost to its contributors, who gave their time to composing original essays specifically for this volume. Of course, we could not include every scholar of queer cinema, but we sought to include the most prominent scholars in the field alongside emerging voices. As a result, this is a compendium that does, in its modest way, speak to the state of the field as a teaching resource in the broadest sense for students, instructors, and cinephiles. We do not mean for instructors to teach the book cover to cover (although it splits nicely into three essays per week on the quarter system or two per week on the semester calendar!). Instead, we hope that teachers and students alike will use the book as a classroom and scholarly resource that speaks to queer cinema as it is seen today by its most astute critics and scholars. Any one part of the book – on film history or on feminist production cultures – might yield productively to another one, since all of the essays reflect on this prismatic object, queer cinema.

We did not ask authors to address topics that we generated for them, and we did not guide them toward a particular keyword or focus. Instead, we simply asked them to give us their best: their most recent thinking, their reflections on past films and publications, their methodological insights, and so on. As a result, the essays are eclectic and brilliant, wide-ranging in their objects and insight, and unique to this collection. We thank our contributors for their patience, fierce thinking, and generosity.

A note on style, first with regard to race and ethnicity: our editorial team suggested to each contributor that “White” be capitalized when referring to race/ethnicity, just as Black and Asian and Latinx signal categorical belonging. Many contributors agreed to conform to the suggestion that is now routinized in the Chicago Manual of Style, and some, for reasons we understand, pushed back. “White” acts like a privilege and not a name, they said, and it reproduces settler-colonial domination, as opposed to flagging a more quotidian belonging outside of hierarchy. Because we think a number of positions on capitalization are tenable and politically important, we have not enforced the stylistic change and want to mark this as one among several points of stress in making lots of chapters conform to a formal rule, one that is not understood by the production team as ideological as it in fact is. Similarly, many essays refer to previous historical periods and names for LGBTQ+ worlds and lives, some of which may feel out of touch with current modes of designating who we are and how we wish to be addressed. We stand behind our contributors, who try to make sense of the historicity of naming, in ways that we hope expands the very ground on which we make lives liveable. We underscore that there is a great deal at stake in our language, and we have tried to make room for each contributor to make those stakes palpable and plausible. Ultimately though, as editors, we stand accountable for our language.

Each section of the book is organized to raise questions that cut across the object as a whole, so that really any essay might be productively repositioned in order to generate conversation across different aspects of the field. The first section aspires to define queer cinema, but each essay positions the object differently by virtue of theoretical orientation, pedagogical interests, politico-methodological commitments, and transnational frame. Likewise, the following sections on silent cinema (itself a misnomer), classical Hollywood and European art cinema showcases fresh findings from the archives alongside canonical films that become transformed through new paradigms, such as a focus on laughter, diva fandom, the gendering of voice, reclaimed queer auteurs, and marginality. Revisiting classical Hollywood demonstrates how even the most cherished assumptions about popular narratives (the idea, say, that the Hollywood musical is about normative heterosexual pairings) can be upended through careful study and “queer” readings. If we believe that experimental films conversely wore their queerness on their proverbial sleeves, many of the essays traverse a range of alternative, pre and post-Stonewall, and festival spaces to watch how the interpretation and uses of films shifted as they circulated. When the “new queer cinema” emerged in the early 1990s, it was not a monolith but a varied set of practices about which we are still learning from reflections such as those offered in this section. The final sections move us resolutely into the (evolving) present, thinking about digital platforms and changing politics, global queer culture and persistent national formations, and the kinds of experimentation in galleries, museums, and online spaces fostered by digital queer image-makers. Comprehensive? No. Fantastically interesting? We hope so.

The editors acknowledge and are grateful for the support of their home institutions. At Cornell, this includes the Department of Performing and Media Arts and two of its chairs, Nick Salvato and Sabine Haenni, as well as the many undergraduate and graduate students who nurtured queer media culture in Ithaca. At UCLA, new colleagues including Phyllis Nagy, Liza Johnson, and Kathleen McHugh provided a capacious welcome during the pandemic transition. At Yale, this includes faculty and students in Film and Media Studies, LGBT Studies, and American Studies, who participated in conversations across courses, conferences, and special screenings. Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center, the FLAGS fund in LGBT Studies, and the Film Study Center supported these many screenings and visits by queer filmmakers and scholars. At Columbia, faculty and students in Film and Media Studies have added to this nurturing conversation. Particular thanks to Sonia Brand-Fisher, who helped in the final stages of editing. And at Oxford University Press, we thank Lauralee Yeary, Karthiga Ramu, and Suma George for steering a big manuscript through the publication process with grace and patience. Special thanks to the incredibly supportive Norm Hirshy at Oxford, who invited us to edit this handbook and whose help at every stage has made the book possible. Finally, we owe thanks to our respective partners, George Chauncey and Andrea Hammer, who patiently supported and encouraged us through the process and for many decades of queer viewing, companionship, and love.

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Essay on Cinema

Cinema is a major source of recreation in most countries of the world especially in India where the majority of people live below the poverty line. It provides us with entertainment and sometimes educates us too. Depending on the quality of films produced by the directors, one could label cinema as a curse or a boon.

Bombay is the main centre of film city. Films are mainly produced in Mumbai. There are hundreds of them produced every year. India is known to be the highest producer of movies in the world. Indian cinema provides us with a good view of the glamour and glitter of the affluent Indian society and also the poverty and misery in the slums of this country.

Hence it, more or less, with a few exceptions, presents a fairly authentic picture of the lives of Indians. It educates the public with the help of stories that depict conflicts between the good and the evil in our society.

There is some sort of a moral lesson behind these stories and the society is often greatly influenced by these values. Some of the stars acting in films become role models for the youth who are usually quite impressionable at their age. Hence a great responsibility lies with the makers of cinema.

They have to form their ideas after careful research and thinking and the public too has to be able to sift out the best from the film, if at all they want to be influenced. But the cinema can become a curse when the movies are full of mindless sex and violence. This could colour the mind of the young boys and girls who watch these movies with great interest.

Cinema can become an addiction and these films could sometimes distract the youth so much that they might lose interest in their studies and other work that requires serious concentration.

Cinema has such an attraction that one often finds young boys and girls getting so attracted to it that they begin to harbour a craze about joining the film industry themselves.

Very few talented people make a name for themselves in the tinsel world and quite a few unfortunate ones waste many a precious year trying to make it big in that world of money and glamour.

The cinema can remain a boon for us as long as those who view it keep a balance between what they believe in and what the cinema may be thrusting down their throats. Cinema should be enjoyed and used as a means of pure entertainment and education.

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