Critical Terms Flashcards
allegory
a type of story, film or play in which the objects, characters and plot represent a larger idea than that contained in the narrative itself. An allegory is an extended narrative metaphor achieved by the dual representation of characters, events, or objects; they represent both themselves and abstract ideas that lead to a greater thematic significance. For example, many critics, when interpreting the theme of The Godfather Part II (Francis Coppola, 1974), saw the evolution of Michael (Al Pacino) into a ‘don’ as having allegorical implications for cutthroat business practices in twentieth-century corporate America . At the same time, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) is viewed as a commentary on American capitalism, considering how the mayor of the town seeks to cover-up the presence of something harmful to tourists in order to salvage profits from the holiday season.
auteur
a term that came into use in 1950s French film criticism regarding Hollywood cinema and directorial authorship. Crucial to this definition was the role of the director in staging the mise en scène; and the idea of the director as an independent voice in an otherwise institutionalized mode of film production (i.e., the studio system). In the U.S. , the term ‘auteur’ was adopted by Andrew Sarris who argued for a hierarchy, or ‘Pantheon,’ of great Hollywood authors. In academic critical theory of the 60s and 70s, on the other hand, authorship was challenged by locating the social and cultural influences acting on individual authors, whether in literature or film. Such a position originated out of Structuralism, which sought to outline the auteur’s relationship to linguistic, cultural, and institutional structures.
diagesis/diagetic
the ‘world of the fiction,’ or the world of the fictional film, including both what is shown (visible in the film) and what is not shown or implied as part of the narrative world. A useful critical tool for making distinctions between what may be considered diegetic (belonging to the world of a film) and what may be considered non-diegetic (extraneous to the fictional world of the film) is to think about a film’s music. Music from an identifiable source within the fictional world of the film, from a radio or juke-box for example, is diegetic. Imposed soundtrack music would be non-diegetic.Voice-over is also non-diegetic when it comes from outside of the film’s world.
film noir
so-called by French critics, writing retrospectively on American cinema of the 1940s, this style incorporated low-key lighting, dark themes, labyrinth plots, detective stories, a sexualized atmosphere (often featuring a deceiving ‘spider woman’) and crime. It combined the American realism of the 1920s gangster genre with German Expressionism brought over by émigré directors. As an aesthetic focused on psychological morass, it is often featured in detective or investigative genres where the central character has to discover something revelatory to the plot. Neo-noir, for its part, may combine the noir style with science fiction, or some other genre, as evident in films such as Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), Twelve Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995), and Minority Report (Spielberg, 2001).
genre
a type of film that audiences and filmmakers recognize by familiar narrative, stylistic, and iconographic conventions and characterizations. Genre films were often developed as marketing tools in the studio era. Common genres are the musical, the gangster film, the adventure film, the Western, and the science fiction or fantasy film found in B-movie production.
ideology
mass media have been the study of ideological inquiry since the 1920s and 30s when American sociologists assessed the influence of cinema on the public. However, a continental tradition of ideology studies became prevalent in 1960s film criticism. That tradition originated in the neo-Marxist literature of the Frankfurt School where mass media contribute to a form of ‘false consciousness.’ Later that observation would be rearticulated in the writings of Louis Althusser, who argued that ‘ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.’ Because Hollywood film is constantly involved in concealing its own mode of production (as we saw parodied in Singin’ In The Rain, Stanley Donen, 1952), Althusser’s model of ideology has provided a relevant framework.
intertextuality
the referencing of other films or texts and their associated narrative and aesthetic elements.
plot vs. story
filmic montage often necessitates a distinction between the plot and the story. There is a difference between filmic time and story/event time (except in situations where film time corresponds exactly to story time ‘two hours in the life of’), irrespective of whether we’re dealing with documentary or fiction. The plot, what we experience in the film, refers to an edited representation of an otherwise chronological and complete story that we must reconstruct through the act of imagination.
spectatorship
A term devised by feminist film critics in the 1970s to designate the processes by which the viewer is engaged in acts of looking at the film and how those acts ‘position’ the viewer as a scopic, gazing, or voyeuristic subject.
