Film theory
Film theory studies how cinema’s forms produce meaning, how films relate to history and society, and how moving images affect viewers.
Mise-en-scène: The arrangement of performers, settings, lighting, costumes, and objects within a film frame. Film theory examines how staging and composition shape what an image communicates.
Montage: A filmmaking method that creates meaning or effect by arranging and juxtaposing shots. It demonstrates how relations between images can generate ideas beyond individual shots.
Silent cinema: Cinema produced before synchronized recorded dialogue became standard, often accompanied by live music or narration. Its visual storytelling prompted early theories of cinema’s distinctive expressive resources.
Auteur theory: An approach that treats a film director as a major creative author whose recurring choices shape the work. It locates coherence in directorial authorship rather than broader systems or institutions.
Laura Mulvey: A British film theorist and filmmaker known for analyzing gender, visual pleasure, and spectatorship. Her work made the politics of looking a central issue in film analysis.
Film editing: The selection and arrangement of shots into sequences that structure a film’s time, space, and meaning. Editing makes the relation between shots a central source of cinematic meaning.
Continuity editing: An editing system that maintains coherent screen direction, space, and time across cuts. Its apparent transparency makes cinematic construction feel like uninterrupted action.
Vsevolod Pudovkin: A Soviet filmmaker and theorist who wrote influentially about film direction and editing. His account of constructive editing helped define early Soviet film theory.
Genre theory: The study of how film categories form through conventions, repetition, and audience expectations. It explains meaning through shared conventions rather than individual films alone.
Visual culture: The study of images and visual practices across media, institutions, and everyday life. Film theory helped establish approaches that examine cinema within broader image cultures.