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40-732: The field of visual culture studies in the United States corresponds or parallels the Bildwissenschaft ("image studies") in Germany. Both fields are not entirely new, as they can be considered reformulations of issues of photography and film theory that had been raised from the 1920s and 1930s by authors like Béla Balázs , László Moholy-Nagy , Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin . Among theorists working within contemporary culture, this field of study often overlaps with film studies , psychoanalytic theory , sex studies , queer theory , and

80-502: A deeper truth than could be seen with the naked eye. In the years after World War II , the French film critic and theorist André Bazin argued that film's essence lay in its ability to mechanically reproduce reality, not in its difference from reality. This had followed the rise of poetic realism in French cinema in the 1930s. He believed that the purpose of art is to preserve reality, even famously claiming that "The photographic image

120-512: A turn from theater studies to performance studies", it is clear that the perspectival shift that both emerging fields embody is comparable. While the image remains a focal point in visual culture studies, it is the relations between images and consumers that are evaluated for their cultural significance, not just the image in and of itself. Martin Jay clarifies, "Although images of all kinds have long served as illustrations of arguments made discursively,

160-408: Is extensively used in analysis of films by female authors, like Chantal Akerman , as well as by male authors, like Pedro Almodovar . The matrixial gaze offers the female the position of a subject, not of an object, of the gaze, while deconstructing the structure of the subject itself, and offers border-time, border-space and a possibility for compassion and witnessing. Ettinger's notions articulate

200-662: Is not the same thing as image studies, and that the study of the visual image is just one component of the larger field." Though the development of Bildwissenschaft ("image-science") in the German-speaking world to an extent paralleled that of the field of visual culture in the United Kingdom and United States, Bildwissenschaft occupies a more central role in the liberal arts and humanities than that afforded to visual culture. Significant differences between Bildwissenschaft and Anglophone cultural and visual studies include

240-464: Is the object itself". Based on this, he advocated for the use of long takes and deep focus , to reveal the structural depth of reality and finding meaning objectively in images. This was soon followed by the rise of Italian neorealism . Siegfried Kracauer was also notable for arguing that realism is the most important function of cinema. The Auteur theory derived from the approach of critic and filmmaker Alexandre Astruc , among others, and

280-455: The Journal of Visual Culture , academic Martin Jay explicates the rise of this tie between the visual and the technological: "Insofar as we live in a culture whose technological advances abet the production and dissemination of such images at a hitherto unimagined level, it is necessary to focus on how they work and what they do, rather than move past them too quickly to the ideas they represent or

320-539: The University of California, Berkeley . He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. Jay received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Union College in 1965. In 1971, he completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree in history at Harvard University under the tutelage of H. Stuart Hughes . His dissertation was later revised into the book The Dialectical Imagination, which covers

360-572: The academic discipline of film or cinema studies that began in the 1920s by questioning the formal essential attributes of motion pictures ; and that now provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film 's relationship to reality , the other arts , individual viewers, and society at large. Film theory is not to be confused with general film criticism , or film history , though these three disciplines interrelate. Although some branches of film theory are derived from linguistics and literary theory , it also originated and overlaps with

400-563: The close-up to the mind paying attention. The flashback , in turn, was similar to remembering . This was later followed by the formalism of Rudolf Arnheim , who studied how techniques influenced film as art. Among early French theorists, Germaine Dulac brought the concept of impressionism to film by describing cinema that explored the malleability of the border between internal experience and external reality, for example through superimposition . Surrealism also had an influence on early French film culture. The term photogénie

440-627: The philosophy of film . French philosopher Henri Bergson 's Matter and Memory (1896) anticipated the development of film theory during the birth of cinema in the early twentieth century. Bergson commented on the need for new ways of thinking about movement, and coined the terms "the movement-image" and "the time-image". However, in his 1906 essay L'illusion cinématographique (in L'évolution créatrice ; English: The cinematic illusion ) he rejects film as an example of what he had in mind. Nonetheless, decades later, in Cinéma I and Cinema II (1983–1985),

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480-582: The study of television ; it can also include video game studies , comics , traditional artistic media , advertising , the Internet , and any other medium that has a crucial visual component. The field's versatility stems from the range of objects contained under the term "visual culture", which aggregates "visual events in which information, meaning or pleasure is sought by the consumer in an interface with visual technology". The term "visual technology" refers any media designed for purposes of perception or with

520-455: The 1960s and 1970s, film theory took up residence in academia importing concepts from established disciplines like psychoanalysis , gender studies , anthropology , literary theory , semiotics and linguistics —as advanced by scholars such as Christian Metz . However, not until the late 1980s or early 1990s did film theory per se achieve much prominence in American universities by displacing

560-489: The 1990s onward the Matrixial theory of artist and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger revolutionized feminist film theory . Her concept The Matrixial Gaze , that has established a feminine gaze and has articulated its differences from the phallic gaze and its relation to feminine as well as maternal specificities and potentialities of "coemergence", offering a critique of Sigmund Freud 's and Jacques Lacan 's psychoanalysis,

600-590: The 1990s the digital revolution in image technologies has influenced film theory in various ways. There has been a refocus onto celluloid film's ability to capture an "indexical" image of a moment in time by theorists like Mary Ann Doane , Philip Rosen and Laura Mulvey who was informed by psychoanalysis. From a psychoanalytical perspective, after the Lacanian notion of "the Real", Slavoj Žižek offered new aspects of "the gaze " extensively used in contemporary film analysis. From

640-469: The French-speaking world, the visual culture and the visual studies have been recently discussed, a.o., by Maxime Boidy , André Gunthert , Gil Bartholeyns . Visual culture studies have been increasingly important in religious studies through the work of David Morgan , Sally Promey, Jeffrey F. Hamburger , and S. Brent Plate. Film theory Film theory is a set of scholarly approaches within

680-467: The ability create meaning transcending the sum of its parts with a thematic effect in a way that ideograms turned graphics into abstract symbols. Multiple scenes could work to produce themes ( tonal montage ), while multiple themes could create even higher levels of meaning ( intellectual montage ). Vertov in turn focused on developing Kino-Pravda , film truth, and the Kino-Eye , which he claimed showed

720-464: The close-up as the essence of photogénie . Béla Balázs also praised the close-up for similar reasons. Arnheim also believed defamiliarization to be a critical element of film. After the Russian Revolution , a chaotic situation in the country also created a sense of excitement at new possibilities. This gave rise to montage theory in the work of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein . After

760-448: The contemporary notion of calling films photoplays and seen as filmed versions of theatre, instead seeing film with camera-born opportunities. He also described cinema as hieroglyphic in the sense of containing symbols in its images. He believed this visuality gave film the potential for universal accessibility. Münsterberg in turn noted the analogies between cinematic techniques and certain mental processes. For example, he compared

800-548: The establishment of the Moscow Film School , Lev Kuleshov set up a workshop to study the formal structure of film, focusing on editing as "the essence of cinematography". This produced findings on the Kuleshov effect . Editing was also associated with the foundational Marxist concept of dialectical materialism . To this end, Eisenstein claimed that "montage is conflict". Eisenstein's theories were focused on montage having

840-640: The former's examination of images dating from the early modern period , and its emphasis on continuities over breaks with the past. Whereas Anglo-American visual studies can be seen as a continuation of critical theory in its attempt to reveal power relations, Bildwissenschaft is not explicitly political. WJT Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm have had a discussion about these potential differences in an exchange of letters Early work on visual culture has been done by John Berger ( Ways of Seeing , 1972) and Laura Mulvey ( Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema , 1975) that follows on from Jacques Lacan 's theorization of

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880-399: The growth of visual culture as a field has allowed them to be examined more in their own terms as complex figural artifacts or the stimulants to visual experiences." Likewise, W. J. T. Mitchell explicitly distinguishes the two fields in his claim that visual culture studies "helps us to see that even something as broad as the image does not exhaust the field of visuality; that visual studies

920-461: The history of the Frankfurt School from 1923 to 1950. While he was conducting research for his dissertation, he established a correspondence and friendship with many Frankfurt School members. Leo Löwenthal provided him access to personal letters and documents for his research. Jay's work since then has explored Marxism , socialism , historiography , cultural criticism , visual culture , and

960-584: The label " the Sixth Art ", later changed to " the Seventh Art ". In 1915, Vachel Lindsay wrote a book on film, followed a year later by Hugo Münsterberg . Lindsay argued that films could be classified into three categories: action films , intimate films , as well as films of splendour . According to him, the action film was sculpture-in-motion , while the intimate film was painting-in-motion , and splendour film architecture-in-motion . He also argued against

1000-477: The links between aesthetics, ethics and trauma. There has also been a historical revisiting of early cinema screenings, practices and spectatorship modes by writers Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen and Yuri Tsivian. In Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice (2011), Clive Meyer suggests that 'cinema is a different experience to watching a film at home or in an art gallery', and argues for film theorists to re-engage

1040-435: The philosopher Gilles Deleuze took Matter and Memory as the basis of his philosophy of film and revisited Bergson's concepts, combining them with the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce . Early film theory arose in the silent era and was mostly concerned with defining the crucial elements of the medium. Ricciotto Canudo was an early Italian film theoretician who saw cinema as " plastic art in motion ", and gave cinema

1080-719: The place of post-structuralism and post-modernism in European intellectual history. His current research is focused on nominalism and photography. He is a recipient of the 2010/2011 Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin . In 2023, he published a sequel to The Dialectical Imagination on the contemporary turns in Critical Theory , entitled Immanent Critiques: The Frankfurt School Under Pressure . He also has

1120-412: The potential to augment our visual capability. Because of the changing technological aspects of visual culture as well as a scientific method-derived desire to create taxonomies or articulate what the "visual" is, many aspects of Visual Culture overlap with the study of science and technology, including hybrid electronic media, cognitive science, neurology, and image and brain theory. In an interview with

1160-584: The prevailing humanistic, auteur theory that had dominated cinema studies and which had been focused on the practical elements of film writing, production, editing and criticism. American scholar David Bordwell has spoken against many prominent developments in film theory since the 1970s. He uses the derogatory term "SLAB theory" to refer to film studies based on the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure , Jacques Lacan , Louis Althusser , and Roland Barthes . Instead, Bordwell promotes what he describes as " neoformalism " (a revival of formalist film theory ). During

1200-405: The reality they purport to depict. In so doing, we necessarily have to ask questions about ... technological mediations and extensions of visual experience." "Visual Culture" goes by a variety of names at different institutions, including Visual and Critical Studies, Visual and Cultural Studies, and Visual Studies. In the development of Visual Studies, WJT Mitchell 's text on the "Pictorial Turn"

1240-614: The specificity of philosophical concepts for cinema as a medium distinct from others. Martin Jay Martin Evan Jay (born May 4, 1944) is an American intellectual historian whose research interests connected history with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School , social theory , cultural criticism , and historiography . He is currently the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History Emeritus at

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1280-496: The two fields. One of the reason for controversy was that the various approaches in art history, like formalism , iconology , social history of art , or New Art History , focused only on artistic images, assuming a distinction with non-artistic ones, while in visual culture studies there is typically no such distinction. Visual culture studies may also overlap with another emerging field, that of performance studies . As "the turn from art history to visual culture studies parallels

1320-519: The unconscious gaze . Twentieth-century pioneers such as György Kepes and William Ivins Jr. as well as iconic phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty also played important roles in creating a foundation for the discipline. For the history of art, Svetlana Alpers published a pioneering study on The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago 1983) in which she took up an earlier impulse of Michael Baxandall to study

1360-652: The visual culture of a whole region of early-modern Europe in all its facets: landscape painting and perception, optics and perspectival studies, geography and topographic measurements, united in a common mapping impulse . Major works on visual culture include those by W. J. T. Mitchell , Griselda Pollock , Giuliana Bruno , Stuart Hall , Roland Barthes , Jean-François Lyotard , Rosalind Krauss , Paul Crowther and Slavoj Žižek . Continuing work has been done by Lisa Cartwright , Marita Sturken , Margaret Dikovitskaya , Nicholas Mirzoeff , Irit Rogoff and Jackie Stacey . The first book titled Visual Culture (Vizuális Kultúra)

1400-432: Was based on films depicting the directors' own worldviews and impressions of the subject matter, by varying lighting, camerawork, staging, editing, and so on. Georges Sadoul deemed a film's putative "author" potentially even an actor, but a film indeed collaborative. Aljean Harmetz cited major control even by film executives. David Kipen 's view of screenwriter as indeed main author is termed Schreiber theory . In

1440-539: Was developed by the German anthropologist Johannes Fabian to criticise the dominating role of vision in scientific discourse, through such terms as observation . He points to an under theorised approach to the use of visual representation which leads to a corpuscular theory of knowledge and information which leads to their atomisation. As visual culture studies, in the United States, have begun to address areas previously studied by art history , there have been disputes between

1480-553: Was highly influential. In analogy to the linguistic turn , Mitchell stated that we were undergoing a major paradigm shift in sciences and society which turned images, rather than verbal language, to the paradigmatic vectors of our relationship to the world. Gottfried Boehm made similar claims in the German-speaking context, when talking about an "iconic turn"., as did Marshall McLuhan when speaking of television in terms of creating an "intensely visual culture" The term "Visualism"

1520-407: Was important to both, having been brought to use by Louis Delluc in 1919 and becoming widespread in its usage to capture the unique power of cinema. Jean Epstein noted how filming gives a "personality" or a "spirit" to objects while also being able to reveal "the untrue, the unreal, the 'surreal'". This was similar to defamiliarization used by avant-garde artists to recreate the world. He saw

1560-451: Was originally developed in articles in Cahiers du Cinéma , a film journal that had been co-founded by Bazin. François Truffaut issued auteurism's manifestos in two Cahiers essays: "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français" (January 1954) and "Ali Baba et la 'Politique des auteurs'" (February 1955). His approach was brought to American criticism by Andrew Sarris in 1962. The auteur theory

1600-406: Was written by Pál Miklós in 1976. For history of science and technology, Klaus Hentschel has published a systematic comparative history in which various patterns of their emergence, stabilization and diffusion are identified. In the German-speaking world, analogous discussions about "Bildwissenschaft" (image studies) are conducted, a.o., by Gottfried Boehm, Hans Belting , and Horst Bredekamp. In

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