Study Guide for Midterm

FILM 2400: Film Theory
Midterm Study Guide

The midterm exam (November 6) will be 75 minutes long. It will consist of 10 short answer questions. You do not have to write in complete sentences: your answers should be as exhaustive and thorough as possible, rather than well written. Although these are not essay questions, the short answer questions have been formulated in a way that presupposes that you have read all articles very carefully and synthesized the main line of argument in each article. The 10 questions will be selected from the following list.

1. Identify and briefly explain at least two of the ways in which the notion of ‘theory’ in the humanities (e.g. film theory) differs from the notion of ‘theory’ in the hard sciences.
2. What does it mean to “deprovincialize” film theory in terms of time and space?
3. Identify and briefly explain at least two of the antecedents of film theory.
4. Identify and briefly explain two major differences between formalist and realist theories of film.
5. How is the principle of montage exemplified by Japanese representational culture? Give at least three examples.
6. Identify and briefly explain at least three examples of ‘conflict within the shot’ in Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin.
7. Identify and briefly explain at least three types of montage that Eisenstein discusses in his essays.
8. Identify and briefly explain at least three ways in which film is not merely a mechanical reproduction of reality, according to Arnheim.
9. Identify and briefly explain at least two ways in which the perfection of “the complete film” threatens the development of cinema as an art, according to Arnheim.
10. Identify and briefly explain at least three ways in which the photoplay differs from the stage play, according to Münsterberg.
11. According to Bazin, how does identification in cinema function differently from identification in theatre?
12. According to Bazin, what is the relative significance of actors, decor, and speech in film versus theatre?
13. Why does Bazin argue that the cinema of Flaherty and Orson Wells is superior to German Expressionism (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) and to montage cinema (Eisenstein)?
14. What does Bazin mean when he says that “film has freed Western painting, once and for all, from its obsession with realism and allowed it to recover its aesthetic autonomy” (170)?
15. What does Panofsky mean by “the dynamization of space”?
16. What does Panofsky mean by “the principle of coexpressibility”?
17. What does Panofsky mean when he writes that “the screenplay, in contrast to the theatre play, has no aesthetic existence independent of its performance, and...its characters have no aesthetic existence outside the actors” (299)?
18. Identify at least one way in which Panofsky’s discussion of the development of film style fails to exemplify his claim that the film medium owes its existence to technical experimentation.
19. Identify and briefly explain the four ‘cinematic subjects’ Kracauer discusses under the title “recording functions.”
20. Identify and briefly explain at least four of the ‘cinematic subjects’ Kracauer discusses under the title “revealing functions.”
21. Identify and briefly explain at least one way in which Antonioni’s film Red Desert exemplifies an aspect of formalist film theory and one way in which it exemplifies an aspect of realist film theory.
22. Identify and briefly explain at least two ways in which Bergman’s film Persona purposefully deviates from realism.
23. Identify and briefly explain at least three ways in which literature differs from cinema, according to Chatman.
24. Identify and briefly explain the three premises of the auteur theory, according to Andrew Sarris.
25. What is the difference between an ‘auteur’ and a ‘metteur en scène’?
26. What makes Hawks an auteur, according to Peter Wollen?
27. What does Peter Wollen mean when he says that Fuller, Hawks and Hitchcock, the directors, are quite separate from “Fuller,” “Hawks” and “Hitchcock”, the structures named after them?
28. What does Roland Barthes mean when he says that “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin” or that “it is language which speaks, not the author”?
29. What does Barthes mean when he writes that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”?
30. What makes David Lynch an auteur, given Peter Wollen’s criteria for ‘auteurship’?
31. How does the ritual theory of genre differ from the ideological theory of genre?
32. How does the semantic theory of genre differ from the syntactic theory of genre?
33. According to Altman, what are the two fundamental ways in which a new genre develops?
34. How does Altman determine the exact border between the semantic and the syntactic?
35. Identify and briefly explain at least three of the problems with identifying the genre of ‘film noir’ that Frank Krutnik discusses in his article.


Good luck!
Temenuga