Zürich, Switzerland

Film Studies

Filmwissenschaft

Bachelor's
Language: GermanStudies in German
Subject area: arts
University website: www.uzh.ch
Film
A film, also called a movie, motion picture, theatrical film, or photoplay, is a series of still images that, when shown on a screen, create the illusion of moving images. (See the glossary of motion picture terms.)
Film Studies
Film studies is an academic discipline that deals with various theoretical, historical, and critical approaches to films. It is sometimes subsumed within media studies and is often compared to television studies. Film studies is less concerned with advancing proficiency in film production than it is with exploring the narrative, artistic, cultural, economic, and political implications of the cinema. In searching for these social-ideological values, film studies takes a series of critical approaches for the analysis of production, theoretical framework, context, and creation. In this sense the film studies discipline exists as one in which the teacher does not always assume the primary educator role; the featured film itself serves that function. Also, in studying film, possible careers include critic or production. Film theory often includes the study of conflicts between the aesthetics of visual Hollywood and the textual analysis of screenplay. Overall the study of film continues to grow, as does the industry on which it focuses. Academic journals publishing film studies work include Sight & Sound, Screen, Cinema Journal, Film Quarterly and Journal of Film and Video.
Film
A film is a boat which is always on the point of sinking - it always tends to break up as you go along and drag you under with it.
Francois Truffaut interview in Peter Graham's The New Wave (1968).
Film
The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation.
Walter Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” Illuminations (1968), p. 239.
Film
I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.
Georges Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future (1930), p. 52.
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