Cinema Studies

Since the 1970s, cinema studies has been informed by a theoretical framework comprised out of structuralist semiotics, post-structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and aspects of Althusserian Marxism. These critical perspectives were deployed in the service of the many activities arising out of cinema-going: the implications arising from its social and industrial contexts, psychological and language based dimensions, and the interpretation of films as texts. In the 1990s David Bordwell argued cinema studies was divided between two opposing trajectories emanating out of the theoretical contexts he grouped under, ‘subject-positioning theory’ and ‘culturalism’. Each constituted a Grand Theory approach and revealed how film theory had become unnecessarily bifurcated under their competing and totalising agendas. Bordwell called for a program of ‘middle-level research’ as the solution for developing new lines of enquiry in the field. By surveying interdisciplinary approaches in the field of cinema studies this discussion outlines how the critical impasse of the 1990s has enabled understandings of film in the digital era where film has become embedded in new technologies and systems of meaning