The Major Realist Film Theorists

A Critical Anthology

Ian Aitken

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Year: 2016
• Edition: 0
• eBook ISBN:
  9781474402224
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

From the 1910s to the emergence of structuralism and post-structuralism in the 1960s, the writings of John Grierson, Siegfried Kracauer, André Bazin and Georg Lukács dominated realist film theory. In this critical anthology, the first collection to address their work in one volume, a wide range of international scholars explore the interconnections between their ideas and help generate new understandings of this important, if neglected, field. Challenging preconceptions about 'classical' theory and the nature of realist representation, and in the process demonstrating how this body of work can be seen as a cohesive theoretical model, this invaluable collection will help return the realist paradigm of film theory to the forefront of academic enquiry.

Table of contents

• The Major Realist Film Theorists
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Displaced Vision: The Politics of Realism in Kracauer and Kluge
• 2 The Rhetoric of Madness in Realist Film Theory
• 3 Phenomenology, Theology, and ‘Physical Reality’: The Film Theory Realism of Siegfried Kracauer
• 4 ‘Montage, My Fine Care’: Realism, Surrealism and Postmodernism after Bazin
• 5 Multiple Indexicality and Multiple Realism in André Bazin
• 6 André Bazin, or the Ambiguity of Reality
• 7 Realism is to Think Historically: Overlapping Elements in Lukácsian and Brechtian Theories of Realism
• 8 The Moving-image Redemption of Orality and Lukács’s Early Writing on the Cinema
• 9 The ‘Naturalist’ Treatment of Film in The Specificity of the Aesthetic (Georg Lukács, 1963) and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1962; Caspar Wrede, 1970)
• 10 The Documentary Version of Film History
• 11 The Grierson Testament, 1969-71
• 12 John Grierson: From the Poster Movement to the Informational State
• Contributors
• Index