APPENDIX IGLOSSARY OF KEY TERMS

acousmêtre:

a figure within the story world who is heard but not seen. This position retains a special power within most narratives but can be rendered vulnerable when voice and body are realigned.

Afro-pessimism:

a means of interrogating the ongoing effects of racism and slavery while also foregrounding the violence of anti-blackness; it suggests a system of racial exclusion so severe that existing methods of scholarly inquiry are unable to confront it in a meaningful way.

Anthropocene:

term used to indicate that human activities are affecting the earth on a significant, geological scale; informally, it draws attention to the urgency of current environmental and ecological issues and encourages a new framework for thinking about the relationship between nature and human culture.

anti-humanism:

a position adopted by several post-war French theorists that questions or rejects the assumptions of Western philosophy, especially the sovereignty of the human subject as a rational, self-determining agent.

apparatus theory:

a distinction adopted by critics of cinema’s ideological function; cinema is considered an ideological apparatus based on its methods of representation and the spectatorial position it provides.

attraction:

concept developed by Sergei Eisenstein; derived from popular entertainment (e.g., amusement parks or the circus) and used by Eisenstein to provoke an intense reaction among spectators.

aura:

a distinctive feature found in art and associated with its unique existence in a particular place; ostensibly rendered obsolete following technological advances that allow most forms of culture to reproduced on a mass scale.

authorship:

the general assumption that a film’s creative virtues can be attributed to its director.

avant-garde:

an artistic vanguard or group of innovators explicitly dedicated to challenging social and aesthetic norms.

camp:

a sensibility or style that emphasizes artifice and exaggeration; also, a reading practice whereby queer audiences recognize ostentatious figures or qualities within popular entertainment; a form that simultaneously conveys defiance and affirmation.

carnivalesque:

a cultural practice in which traditional hierarchies are inverted, providing an alternative model of pleasure and subversion; associated with Mikhail Bakhtin.

castration:

psychoanalytic concept associated with the male child’s inability to comprehend anatomical difference; also functions as a paternal threat designed to enforce heteronormative social and sexual relations.

cinema of attractions:

Tom Gunning’s term for a tendency in early cinema to directly address spectators, inciting visual curiosity by foregrounding the novelty of cinematic technologies; the term is drawn from Sergei Eisenstein and has been applied to different genres ranging from experimental cinema to pornography.

cinephilia:

an intense affection or love for the cinema and its effects.

classical Hollywood cinema:

a historical distinction referring to the Hollywood studio system and its methods of production; also, a stylistic distinction referring to narrative conventions that privilege cause-and-effect logic as a way to maintain spatial and temporal continuity.

close analysis:

analysis devoted to explicating a text’s formal elements and their related codes; in the case of film, this involves detailed, shot-by-shot examination of select sequences.

code:

a set of conventions that inform the selection or combination of units within a discursive formation; a code does not have the same regulative force as langue, meaning that it functions in a less restrictive manner; cinema is simultaneously informed by many codes (e.g., narrative codes, stylistic codes, technical codes, gender codes).

cognitivism:

an approach that utilizes different aspects of cognitive science in the analysis and theorization of moving images; emphasizes how spectators understand and respond to specific techniques; borrows certain principles from analytic philosophy in terms of prioritizing clarity of argument and empirical evidence.

commodity fetishism:

the principle developed by Marx that commodities are infused with values or associations that exceed their basic material composition.

condensation:

psychoanalytic term referring to an unconscious process, in dreams for example, whereby certain ideas are fused together.

connotation:

associated meanings attached to or evoked by a sign; often specific to the sign’s social and cultural context.

convergence culture:

a general description of media and society in which older boundaries are dissolving and new relationships are emerging; this is apparent in terms of technology, industrial organization, and transmedia storytelling; but for Henry Jenkins, it is most interesting in relationship to the new forms of audience participation and fandom that have developed.

counter-cinema:

oppositional style of filmmaking that rejects the dominant ideology at the level of both form and content.

Critical Race Theory:

formally, a movement focused on studying the relationship between race, racism, and power according to concepts and methods that are specific to legal studies; informally, it can refer to critical or theoretical engagement with questions about race in a broader sense or according to methods from different theoretical traditions.

cultural studies:

academic field that parallels the emergence of film study in the 1970s; primarily associated with the British scholars at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham.

decoding:

part of any communicative exchange in which an encoded messaged must be decoded by the receiver; in Stuart Hall’s account, decoding can gravitate in different directions – it can adhere to the intended meaning of a message, or it can negotiate or reject that meaning.

defamiliarization:

a practice used to subvert or challenge common conventions by making them appear strange or unfamiliar.

denotation:

literal or obvious meaning of a sign.

dialectical materialism:

a Marxist concept that suggests material economic conditions form the basis of class struggle and the drive to fundamentally transform society; Soviet filmmakers applied to cinema, treating individual shots as film’s material basis and montage as a means of putting them into conflict.

digital humanities:

refers to scholarly activities that merge new digital technologies and access to various computer resources with more traditional disciplines such as the humanities; in principle the idea has generated widespread interest but also some debate regarding its overall implications.

disavow:

a form of denial or a defense mechanism adopted in order to avoid traumatic encounters or other objectionable realities.

displacement:

psychoanalytic term referring to an unconscious process, in dreams for example, whereby certain ideas are rearranged and assigned to different but associated ideas.

écriture:

style of writing developed by a group of intellectuals associated with Tel Quel, one of France’s leading journals of the 1960s and 1970s; this style of writing adopted certain modernist techniques and rejected the imperative that communication need be utilitarian.

fantasy:

an imaginary scenario that accommodates the desire for wish fulfillment; a widely discussed psychoanalytic concept that resonates with cinema’s ability to generate fanciful situations.

fetishism:

psychoanalytic concept that accounts for cases in which an individual maintains two incompatible beliefs at the same time – the primary example of this occurs when a male confronts a female’s lack of a penis; the fetish object stands in for the absent penis allowing the male to disavow both anatomical difference and castration anxiety; for Laura Mulvey, it is part of a containment strategy made necessary by the manner in which female characters evoke castration anxiety; in this case, it involves an extreme aestheticization of the cinematic image to the point that it suspends the threat of castration.

formalism:

a general position that assumes film is primarily defined by its formal practices rather than its photographic realism.

Fourth Cinema:

designates film and media produced by indigenous peoples who are sometimes classified as part of the Fourth World (distinguishing them from the First, Second, and Third Worlds); can be applied to individual productions or institutions ranging from television stations to artist collectives and film festivals that provide support to indigenous filmmakers and media activists.

Frankfurt School:

a designation for German scholars formally or informally associated with the Institute of Social Research; though individual research varied widely, this school represents a general interest in culture, aesthetics, and philosophy.

grande syntagmatique:

a categorization of narrative cinema’s most common autonomous segments or sequential units developed by Christian Metz; the different units are classified according to their ordering logic and function – for example, there is a group that maintains chronological order and a group that doesn’t; nonchronological syntagmas include scenes in which parallel editing links two different events without specifying their temporal relationship.

hegemony:

explains how social control is cultivated through mutual consent rather than direct force; operates in conjunction with common sense whereby the ruling class dictates the ideals that all groups accept as self-evident.

historical poetics:

study of cinema that emphasizes a work’s specific functions, effects, and uses.

identification:

psychological process in which an individual recognizes someone or something as similar to itself; Christian Metz draws a distinction between primary cinematic identification and secondary cinematic identification – in the former, the spectator identifies with the camera and, in the latter, the spectator identifies with characters based on real or perceived similarities.

Ideological State Apparatus (ISA):

term introduced by Louis Althusser to explain why social institutions like family, religion, and the education system are more effective in maintaining the status quo than more repressive means (e.g., military or police forces).

ideology:

the ideas, beliefs, or manner of thinking associated with a particular society or group within a society; in post-war French Theory, more specifically refers to the naturalization of socially and culturally constructed distinctions and how that process supports the ruling class.

indexical:

a type of sign identified by Charles Sanders Peirce and, more specifically, representations that share an existential bond with their referent. This designation had been used to explain the photochemical process that allows images to be recorded.

interpellation:

the process by which individuals are constituted as subjects within a social system; Louis Althusser compares this to the misrecognition that occurs within the mirror stage and uses the example of a police officer “hailing” an innocent bystander.

jouissance:

French term for enjoyment that also evokes a sexual pleasure that exceeds biological necessity; for French feminists, the term is used to indicate a form of female pleasure that exists outside of language or patriarchal repression.

langue:

French term for language and sometimes translated as language-system; refers to the abstract system of rules and conventions that determine parole, or the words that can be spoken by individuals within that system.

male gaze:

the way in which Hollywood cinema aligns the viewer with male protagonists in looking at female characters as a passive or erotic object.

masochism:

behavior in which satisfaction is derived from suffering or humiliation; initially, an overlooked alternative to sadism within feminist film theory.

masquerade:

feminist strategy whereby it is understood that femininity is a culturally constructed façade, but it is also a pretense that can be appropriated as a form of female agency and as a means of resisting patriarchal assumptions about gender.

mass ornament:

Siegfried Kracauer’s term for a 1920s trend in which individuals were assembled into larger patterns as part of a marching band or dance performance; more generally, a figure that illustrates the contradictions within popular culture.

media archaeology:

the archaeological study of new or emerging media; the approach emphasizes the need to counter existing explanations that have become accepted as common sense. In film studies it is closely associated with the study of early cinema, which involved gaining access to archival materials and conducting related forms of historical research. Other variations, however, were influenced by post-structuralism and questioned the authority of historical knowledge.

medium specificity:

the idea that each art form possesses distinct qualities that are unique to its specific material properties and associated techniques.

mirror stage:

psychoanalytic theory introduced by Jacques Lacan to explain human subjectivity; between the age of six and 18 months, a child recognizes itself in the mirror as an independent and unified whole despite still lacking the necessary motor coordination skills necessary to function autonomously.

modernism:

a general art movement that emerged in the early twentieth century and that featured different stylistic techniques designed to deconstruct or problematize conventional aesthetic practices.

montage theory:

the emphasis on editing as the primary means of developing cinema’s aesthetic and political potential; developed by Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s.

narration:

the selection and arrangement of story materials in order to have a specific effect on viewers.

neoformalism:

an approach that emphasizes rigorous formal analysis; inspired in part by Russian Formalists’ approach to literature and closely related to David Bordwell’s notion of historical poetics.

new historicism:

method or approach within literary study that draws attention to contextual factors as a way of analyzing or understanding cultural artifacts; it emerged in the 1980s and gained popularity following the work of Stephen Greenblatt.

new media:

term used to signal the emergence of more recent formats like video games, interactive devices, and Internet-based technologies, as well as multi-media installations and art exhibits; these new formats tend to be positioned in opposition to cinema and television, which are considered older formats.

Oedipal complex:

psychoanalytic theory in which children consider the parent of the same sex to be a rival while also developing a sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex.

optical unconscious:

Walter Benjamin’s term for the way in which photography reveals unseen elements of the visible world; also evokes his ambivalence regarding the status of aura in film and technology’s potential to reverse the negative effects associated with modern industrial society.

Orientalism:

the practice whereby the Orient is constructed to reflect the West’s attitudes and anxieties about the non-West; the Orient is presented as inferior, exotic, and backwards; Edward Said identifies in order to critique.

other:

in Lacanian psychoanalysis the self/other dynamic evokes Hegel’s master/slave dialectic; Lacan later draws a distinction between the little other or objet petite a and the big other or Other – the former suggests the persistence of otherness within the self, the latter is linked to language and the symbolic order; the term more generally refers to individuals or groups that have been socially and culturally marginalized due to racial or ethnic differences.

panopticon:

an architectural design proposed by Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century and discussed by Michel Foucault in his analysis of the prison system and related disciplinary practices. The design allows for prisoners to be observed at any time without their knowing. This leads inmates to internalize a state of perpetual surveillance.

parole:

French term for speech; Saussure uses it to identify the activity of individual speakers within a system of langue.

patriarchy:

a social or cultural system of privilege, whereby the male sex assumes priority over and as the basis for subordinating or oppressing the female sex; feminist film theorists analyze its dis-cursive and structural functions in shaping Hollywood cinema and other forms of popular media.

phallus:

whereas Freud uses phallus and penis somewhat interchangeably, Lacan treats the phallus as a paternal signifier that has only a tenuous relationship to its anatomical reference; the phallus still plays a central role in establishing traditional notions of sexual difference and maintaining a system of patriarchal privilege.

phenomenology:

the study of consciousness as a lived, embodied experience; a distinct area of study within philosophy founded by Edmund Husserl around the start of the twentieth century and continued by Maurice Merleau-Ponty; sometimes extended to include Jean-Paul Sartre or associated with Martin Heidegger.

photogénie:

a reference to something or someone that lends itself to photographic representation; term embraced by French filmmakers and critics in the 1920s to indicate cinema’s unique revelatory powers.

plot:

the arrangement or ordering of events as part of a narrative presentation; this presentation does not necessarily adhere to the chronological succession of events; sometimes used interchangeably with the Russian term, syuzhet.

poetics:

form of literary analysis that examines particular texts as a way to extrapolate their governing formal properties.

political modernism:

term developed by D. N. Rodowick to characterize the approach of many theorists and critics in the 1960s and 1970s; entails a general assumption that theory, politics, and art share an overlapping relationship and that they can be combined in certain ways in order to effect social change or subvert dominant ideologies.

la politique des auteurs:

the concept of authorship as it emerged at Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s; the idea that a film’s director expresses a certain world view through stylistic devices or thematic patterns; a polemical challenge to existing assumptions about Hollywood cinema and critics’ ability to interpret their significance.

postmodern:

a term that refers to both a historical periodization and a stylistic movement – the former signifies a shift following World War II in which earlier cultural and political paradigms begin to lose their efficacy; the latter is typically associated with the proliferation of simulations, pastiche, and blank irony.

poststructuralism:

a movement away from the scientific under-currents of structuralism and the growing interest in the 1960s to deconstruct the idea of fixed or stable structures.

racial capitalism:

the view that race as a system of imposed hierarchy and differentiation precedes the rise of modern capitalism; once established, capitalism purposely utilizes racialized differences as a means of extraction and immiseration; the term shows that economic inequalities are rooted in a system of racialized differences that benefit some and punish others.

realism:

a general position that assumes film is primarily defined by its photographic realism rather than its formal practices.

remediation:

term introduced by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin to indicate the contradictory relationship between old and new media whereby the attempt to replace older formats ends up reaffirming them.

repression:

the effort to confine select thoughts to the unconscious; certain thoughts and ideas are repressed because they are deemed socially unacceptable.

Russian Formalists:

an informal group of intellectuals and scholars interested in the study of language and literature; the group includes figures ranging from Victor Shklovsky and Mikhail Bakhtin to Roman Jakobson.

Quattrocento:

a technique that emerged as part of the Italian Renaissance and that used linear perspective to create the illusion of depth in painting; the cinematic image adheres to this same system in its representational logic.

sadism:

psychoanalytic concept for taking pleasure from the imposition of suffering and humiliation; for Laura Mulvey, part of a containment strategy made necessary by the manner in which female characters evoke castration anxiety.

semiotics

(or semiology): the study of signs or sign systems.

sign:

a unit of meaning that stands in for something else; Saussure equates the sign with an individual word, the smallest unit of meaning within language; signs can also refer to more complex formations like an individual image which may combine multiple signs.

signified:

the mental concept associated with a sign; Saussure divided the sign into two parts – the signified and the signifier – and showed that their relationship is arbitrary.

signifier:

the spoken or written articulation of a sign; Saussure divided the sign into two parts – the signified and the signifier – and showed that their relationship is arbitrary.

story:

the chronological order of events comprised within a narrative; sometimes used interchangeably with the Russian term, fabula.

structuralism:

a broad intellectual movement that took root in post-war France and focused critical attention on the abstract structures and systems of relationships that condition the production of meaning.

surrealism:

an art movement that begins in France in the 1920s and that encourages the blending of dreams and reality.

suture:

term drawn from Lacan’s principle that subjectivity is constituted through discourse and used to explain how spectators are inserted into cinematic discourse in a way that also excludes them; evokes surgical process in which a wound or absence is covered over.

symptomatic:

the appearance of signs that indicate an underlining issue or problem; used in its adjective form to describe the manner in which cultural texts convey meaning.

textual poaching:

a specific tactic associated with the reappraisal of viewers and their ability to be active participants, resisting or subverting film and media’s intended uses.

third cinema:

form of postcolonial counter-cinema conceived in opposition to both dominant commercial cinema and established art cinemas; rejects Eurocentrism and the legacy of imperialism.

to-be-looked-at-ness:

the general tendency for women to function primarily as an erotic spectacle within Hollywood cinema; term introduced by Laura Mulvey as part of her analysis of how patriarchal ideology structure narrative cinema.

trauma:

derived from the Greek term for wound; refers to events or experiences characterized by their intensity and overwhelming nature.

unconscious:

psychoanalytic concept that designates the part of human subjectivity to which forbidden desires and other repressed materials are relegated.

voyeurism:

the pleasure of seeing others or something forbidden while remaining unseen.