Film Aesthetics and New Methods of Film Analysis

Abstract

Almost every piece of scientific or critical work which is concerned with the film expresses at the same time opinions both about the nature of film and about the methods of film analysis, in most cases only implicitly. In contrast to such implicit statements, I will try here to make these theoretical and methodological positions explicit and demonstrate them with examples. First of all, I should like to refresh our memory about the basic theoretical premises of what I call “film aesthetics” (a concept which was presented in 1982 at great length). Then we have to name the rather more practical prerequisites essential to any serious film analysis. Third, we should concentrate on new methods of film analysis paying special attention to quantitative analysis. It would hardly be possible to give a full picture of all the various methods which in the past have been applied to various feature films with various results-many of them are presented and discussed in several introductory books on the analysis of film [1]. The new methods will be described here as suitable for analyzing that part which one could call the narrative structure of a film, i.e., its formal construction and the conceptional ordering of the action (this is more than just story and plot).