Film Theory: An Introduction

Film theory: an Introduction offers, for the first time, an accessible account of film theory, aimed at the cinema-goer and the student. It ranges from the late 1960s to the present, a period in which a number of conceptual strands – notably politics, semiotics, and psychoanalysis – were woven together in an ambitious synthesis.

Westlake and Lapsley chart the construction of this synthesis and its subsequent fragmentation, and elucidate the various intellectual currents contributing to it. The first part of the book covers the conceptual background of film theory, dealing with historical materialism, semiotics and psychoanalysis, while the second part concentrates on particular topics – authorship, narrative, realism, and the avant-garde and postmodernism.

A major concern of the book is to trace the shift from Althusserian Marxism to Lacanian psychoanalysis as the dominant paradigms for discussing aesthetic questions. As such it has a bearing on the critical debates in other art forms, which have been informed by the pioneering achievements of and problems within film theory.

‘Film needs theory’ said Alan Parker, ‘like it needs a scratch on the negative’. This book shows that statement to be invalid, in a series of chapters simply titled Politics, Semiotics, Psychoanalysis, Authorship, Narrative Realism and The Avant-garde.