What is Film Studies?

When I tell people that I majored in Film Studies at university, an assumption that I am often confronted with is that I studied filmmaking.

This is a common misconception.

Although a few practical modules are available at traditional universities, filmmaking is usually taught in dedicated film schools, such as the National Film & Television School (NFTS) in England. These programs typically teach the practice of making films, with only a few classes allocated to film theory and history. In these schools, the film student mainly learns technical skills––such as editing, camera operation, sound design––with the expectation, or at least intention, that these students will go on to work in the industry in some capacity upon graduation. On the other hand, Film Studies, sometimes referred to as Cinema Studies, is an academic field with a rich, albeit relatively young, history. This article seeks to clarify and introduce what the academic study of film actually entails.

Like most other disciplines available to study at a traditional university, a Film Studies module involves attending lectures, wherein an academic delivers a talk on a different topic each week, and seminars, wherein the students can then discuss as a group the content of the lecture and the set readings that accompany it. Alongside these two components are, of course, one to two film screenings per week. Typically, these films are chosen because they are good illustrations of the topics being discussed that week. For example, Bicycles Thieves/ Ladri di biciclette by Vittorio de Sica (1948) will most likely be selected when studying Italian Neorealism on account of its canonical status, and its ability to demonstrate the central, although tenuous, tenets of neorealism, such as casting non-professional actors, shooting in the street, and depicting stories that revolve around the working class in the post-war period.

But, above all, Film Studies is concerned with critically examining films, and discerning the many implications of cinema, and occasionally other visual media, as mediums that not only mediate reality but ones that, in turn, become part of that reality as a consumed cultural object. Film Studies is interested in understanding how and why films are made the way they are, the context of their production and consumption, and their ideological, philosophical, and technological ramifications. This can be achieved through various approaches, of which the most common include: historical, political, industrial, cultural, and philosophical.

For example, studies that adopt an industrial approach to Richard Linklater’s films often attempt to locate the director within the nexus of regional, independent, and studio-made American filmmaking. As Linklater has wavered between these different categories throughout his career, such a study may seek to uncover the conditions that have allowed Linklater to occupy such a liminal industrial status, and perhaps extract from this examination a broader observation about the operations of the American film industry at a particular moment in time. Whereas, a political approach to these same films might consider how the ‘slacker’ culture, which has become a recurring motif across Linklater’s filmography, contends with the hegemonic structures of late capitalism. Rob Stone (2018: 1), for instance, proposes that the slacker ethos actively refuses ‘to engage with the fast-track consumerism and aggressive foreign policy of former presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr.’

It goes without saying that each approach taken in the study of cinema has its advantages and disadvantages, with each illuminating different facets of films, and the reality they index. But the one similarity that is inherent to all approaches in Film Studies is that they mount an analytical study of cinema to make their case. They do this by dissecting the whole operation of a film or an industry or a period in film history, and explain how the whole of this phenomenon is a sum of its parts. In this regard, writing about film within an academic context differs slightly to other forms of writing about cinema, such as the film review or film journalism broadly conceived. Film theorist and historian, David Bordwell outlines the three main differences of these various ways of writing about film in his essay, ‘Studying Cinema’. They can be summarised thus:

1) Like more colloquial discussions about film, reviews are often concerned with making a value judgment—this film was good, that film was bad. Bordwell identifies that whilst this may occur in an academic context, it is rarely the driving force behind a study of a film.

2) Film reviews and the like are frequently ahistorical, meaning that their evaluations of certain films tend not to take into consideration that they may be partaking in a certain filmmaking tradition and don’t contextualise films within the broader history of cinema. Bordwell notes that when this does occasionally occur in film journalism, it is often in relation to the present, whereby the film is taken to be reflective of contemporary milieu.

3) Extending from the former two points, the third and most important difference that Bordwell identifies is that film reviews are evaluative, whereas academic studies of film are, as mentioned, analytic. Although reviews may broach some of the same topics of an academic study, they do not delve into comprehending films and their histories in a systematic way. And, they don’t deeply consider certain aesthetic strategies their filmmakers may be executing. This is in part due to the restrictions of the form – reviews and articles in magazines or online aren’t very long, whereas an academic essay or book has much more breathing room to excavate these questions.

Bordwell ends his essay with an interesting observation about the parallel between academic studies of films and fan subcultures. He notes that eager fans of films like to analyse them with a similar attention to detail found in academic film studies, dissecting certain scenes and proposing rationales for the methods of the director. We can see this in the video essay community on YouTube, with various channels dedicated to analysing films, discerning their methods of signification, with many proposing a central thesis, or argument, from these observations.

There are many benefits of the video essay form over the written alternative, especially when discussing an audio-visual medium like cinema. It can be difficult to describe sounds and images only using words and, whilst I can’t see video essays replacing the rigour of a written essay any time soon, they can be something the study of film in an academic context can benefit more from.

If you would like to view a video essay version of this article, I've embedded such below. Alternatively, you can head over to the Cinema Scholar YouTube channel to check it out, along with several other videos on similar topics. Coming from a background in film studies, part of my goal in starting the YouTube channel is to explore this new audio-visual way of communicating about film.

References:

• Bordwell, David. (2000). ‘Studying Cinema’, David Bordwell’s website on cinema, viewed 20 November 2020, http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/studying.php
• Stone, Rob. (2018). The Cinema of Richard Linklater: Walk, Don’t Run. Columbia University Press.