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Saturday, May 07, 2005  

Spectatorship, Auteur Theory, and Dialectical Montage
Do those terms excite you? Am I weird because when I read about that stuff and I get all warm and fuzzy inside? I have a really skewed perspective of what the average person knows/should-know about film theory. And while my readers are categorically above average, I'm very interested to know what you think about it. Everybody that graduates high-school on a college-preparatory tract has a pretty solid grounding in literary theory and critical thinking, but at least my high-school experience had next to no film theory. And yet I'm willing to wager that 99% of teens spend a lot more resources on cinema than literature. As adults when we are presented with social interaction the first topic of conversation is often movies (or is this just an LA thing?) and yet few people (even in LA) know how to discuss film. Am I in the minority for wanting to have informed conversation about the dominant art-form of our time? God forbid I drop "Mise en scene" in casual conversation and get branded a film geek (or worse yet, film snob.) Do people who spent their college years pursuing a degree in something far more useful that Film Studies understand that term? I really have NO idea, but I think that is is important.

The point of all this is while film PRODUCTION is really the most exciting thing to me, film THEORY comes in as a close second. If it didn't involve 5+ years of crushing poverty, followed by decades of equally crushing debt I would be very happy to return to the scholarly pursuit of film-as-art because I truly believe that more people need a better understanding of film theory. So I'm counting on all of you, dear readers, to quickly stop me if you are disinterested, or feel that you know all that you need to know in this area because I've been working on some ideas and as it stands I'm going to use you as my guinea pigs.

posted by JMV | 5/07/2005 01:33:00 PM
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