Film studies

The Film Studies is an art and cultural studies, which address all aspects of the art of film ( fiction, documentary, experimental film ) is dedicated to cinema and television.

The aim is to gain a better understanding through analysis for the development and design of films. Above all, theoretical and aesthetic structures in film history are examined and interpreted.

History

A scientific examination of the film began in the 1910s by various directions and intentions. In addition to the first papers dealt with the aesthetic characteristics of the film, there were writings, going about the socio-political issues as a threat to the body and especially the spirit of the new medium.

First steps towards the creation of a cinematic term canon on literary terms out and attempt explanations of semantics of the film created filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein in his " montage of attractions ", 1923, Urban Gad ( " films ", 1919) and Vladimir Nilsen ( " The Cinema as Graphic Art ", 1936) as well as film theorist Béla Balázs like ( " The spirit of the film, " 1930). Characterized are many early film theory works through the question of the connection or the classification of the film in the art.

The École de Filmologie the Sorbonne examined in 1948 as an interdisciplinary scientific institution and first movie film theory questions mainly by sociologists and psychologists. Furthermore, a broad study of film developed in France in essays, among others the journal Les Cahiers du cinéma. Genera and film genres were examined, categorized and defined. Particularly artistic aspects of the film were asked in the focus of this study and thus for example, developed the auteur theory. In 1957, with the magazine film critics in Germany a similar medium for film studies work.

In the 1960s three works appeared on film language that had mitbedeutend for the eventual formation of a separate discipline. Umberto Eco examined the setting and their composition as the smallest units of the film language. The structuralist approach Pier Paolo Pasolini saw the use of film as playback means human trafficking. The much acclaimed " semiology of film " by Christian Metz finally saw a film language in the way of Linguistics and sought structural units.

From the mid- 1960s, an analytical examination of films and their aesthetic structures took place in Germany. The various scientific disciplines took a different starting points and issues. Among them, the sociology ( Gerd Albrecht: " The film analysis - aims and methods ", 1964) and in the 1970s the study of literature, theater studies and art history.

The media studies were from the late 1960s, the film studies a private university forum in Germany and moved increasingly, television, and especially the television film in their considerations a. The media studies were the one born of the literature, the other media would accept, and on the other from the newspaper sciences, the later journalism and communication science that has emerged from the social sciences and especially the mass media and the communication of these to the people studied.

In the 1970s, the genre analysis, and has already begun in the 1960s, cultural studies as an interdisciplinary field, was to the study of popular culture at the center. As a scientific approach to the film, the film analysis is discussed. Today's university institutions under the name of film and television studies or media studies are still inconsistent and influenced by different disciplines.

Researcher

German film scholars are, for example: Thomas Elsaesser, Knut Hickethier, Gertrud Koch, Thomas Koebner, Michaela Krützen, Lothar Mikos, Norbert Grob, Marcus Stiglegger, Bernward Wember, Lorenz Engell, Georg Tiefenbach.