Film Studies

Tuesday night’s Big Ideas event brought new faces but the same potent mix of lively conversation and alcohol. Danny Birchall outlined for us what Film Studies is by first of all telling what it isn’t: it isn’t Media Studies, with its broader scope; or Film Theory, an area loaded with concerns coming out of 1968 like Lacan, poststructuralism and semiotics. No, valid those these areas of study are, he defined Film Studies as the study of film as a distinct artform.

Danny went on to outline three ways in which Film Studies tells us stuff about film.

  • It can help us understand the language of film. This language isn’t ‘natural’ as such, and can be learnt. Continuity editing and reverse angles are techniques that were developed in the first twenty years of film-making, and continue to be fundamental to how most films are made today. Understanding the grammar of film helps us understand what a film is saying. Increasingly it is a language that we all have access to and use when we produce our own video and put it on YouTube.
  • It can help us understand the history of film. It gives us a historical framework within which to understand film. Danny also went on to outline the importance of film archiving to help maintain fragile film history, specifically the work of the BFI National Archive.
  • It can help us understand how films’ meanings exist in more than the stories they tell. Danny outlined three key Film Studies concepts that help understand how a film is put together: mise en scene, the shot and editing.

After Danny had given us the background, the discussion had three themes: the appropriateness of a theoretical framework in understanding art in general; the idea that film isn’t a meaty enough subject to be worthy of serious study (unlike, for example, English lit, which requires more effort to assimulate); and, how the academy permits a subject area to become a discipline.

If you went away last evening feeling you had more to say, why not add something here and now…

Danny recommended some further reading, by the way:

The Cinema Book, by Pam Cook

Film Art: An Introduction, by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson