Kirjahaku

Film, in Theory tells the story of Paddy Whannel and Peter Wollen's revolutionary work at the BFI’s Education Department and how this led to the establishment of film studies, theory and education in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s.Colm McAuliffe explores how Whannel and Wollen worked together to re-fashion the BFI as a modern and progressive laboratory of ideas, hosting experimental seminars, revamping BFI Summer Schools, and launching the Cinema One series (co-edited by Whannel and Penelope Houston, editor of Sight & Sound magazine). Through extensive archival research and interviews with key figures, McAuliffe explores how the department became "a crucible for the future of film theory."He recounts how they transformed Screen from a teachers' journal into a theoretical publication, where a form of feminist film critique, led by Claire Johnston and Laura Mulvey, emerged. Johnston, Mulvey, and other feminist theorists were integral to the formation of a women's counter-cinema and, alongside Whannel and Wollen, sparked not just the birth of film studies, but an intellectual revolution. This book traces contemporary critiques of normativity—regarding race, gender, and sexuality—back to the heated debates that marked the opening up of film studies during the intellectually vibrant Sixties.

Film, In Theory offers the first sustained history of the formation of modern film studies in Britain. It balances unpublished archival materials from the BFI archive and interviews with key figures from the era, including Laura Mulvey, Colin MacArthur, Jacqueline Rose, Judith Williamson, and many more, with an approach rooted in cultural and intellectual history to tell the story of the BFI’s fresh and invigorating approach to film studies. The book tells the story of the institute's pioneering education programme, spearheaded by Paddy Whannel. It also details the remarkable work undertaken by Screen journal, including first-hand accounts of the writing and editing of Laura Mulvey's hugely influential essay on visual pleasure and narrative cinema. During this period of cultural and intellectual experimentation, the theoretical borders were open and key figures at the BFI borrowed from a remarkably wide range of sources spanning aesthetics, Marxism, French theory, and the Frankfurt School. Film Studies emerged amidst an artistic and intellectual tide where the films of Jean-Luc Godard, the re-discovery of Hollywood, the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the semiology of Roland Barthes, and the politics of the 'New Left' combined and collided to intoxicating effect.