Film Theory

Vladimir Propp

Fairy tales in the generic form ‘ the folk wonder tale’

He identified:

-8 character roles

-31 functions that move the story along - examples include punishment of the villain

Characters: 

-The hero

-The villain 

-Donor 

-Helper

-Princess

-Princess’s father (Validates the Hero)

-Dispatcher 

-The false hero

Propp’s theory is a form of structuralism, which is a view that all media is inevitably in the form of certain structures:

These structures are often culturally derived and form expectations

e.g.  Fairy Tales always have happy endings or the princess always marries the handsome prince.

Identifying Propp;s 8 spheres in any films we have seen

8 Sphere	Film	Character
Hero	Django	Django (Jamie Foxx)
Villan	Django	Candy ( Leonardo Dicaprio)
Donor	Django	King Schultz (Christoph Waltz)

Todorov

Developed the theory of disrupted equilibrium 

Typical pattern 

• equilibrium - Things are the way they should be.
• disequilibrium - The peace is disrupted 
• equilibrium - is restored at the end of the story by the actions of the hero.

Developed a 5 stage pattern 

1. State of equilibrium
2. A disruption to the equilibrium
3. A recognition that there has been a disruption 
4. An attempt to repair the disruption 
5. A reinstatement of the equilibrium

Barthes 

***************************************************************************************************

Said there were 5 action codes 

• Hermeneutic ( narrative turning points ) 

We know where the story will go next 

• Proairetic ( basic narrative actions )

e.g. detective interviews suspects or femme fatale seduces hero

- Cultural ( prior social knowledge )

e.g. our attitudes to gender or racial stereotypes

• Semic ( medium-related codes )

intertextuality

• Symbolic ( themes )

Iconography or a theme such as ‘ image verses reality ‘ 

Levi-Strauss

Uses the ‘ Western film’ genre to show his idea of every character has an opposite 

These are called binary opposites 

Developed the concept of bricolage

He saw any text as constructed out of socially recognisable ‘debris’ from other texts.

Construction of texts : Addition, Deletion, Substitution, Transposition 

Narrative 

-Diegetic narrative events take place before the audience, within the field of vision

-Non diegetic narrative events take place off-screen before the movie started, between scenes, simultaneously but in another room.

-Diegesis is Greek for the ‘Narrative Word’.

Victor Shklovsky

Shklovsky attempted to distinguish between the plot, which he defined as the events we actually ‘see’ in the narrative; and the story which contains information of events.

Fabula = The story i.e. the whole world of the story before during and after what see or hear

Syuzhet = Only the events that we see or hear within the field of vision

Gill Branston and Roy Stafford

They applied the relevance of Fabula and Syuzhet theory to the crime genre

Josh Fiske

-Develops Barthes Semic code

Gerard Genette

Developed the therm transtextuality and developed 5 sub-groups, but only 4 apply to film 

***************************************************************************************************

• Intertextuality quotation, plagiarism, allusion 

• Architextuality designation of the text as part of a genre by the writer or by the audience

• Metatextuality explicit or implicit critical commentary of one text on another text 

• Hypotextuality the relation between a text and a preceding hypotext - a text or genre on which it is based but which it transforms, modifies, elaborates or extends  

Our movie would be best suited to Propp’s theory on character and Levi Strauss’ binary opposition theory. This is because we have a lot of stereotypical stock characters and closely follows strauss’ theory.

We have:

-A Hero

-A Villain

Feminist Theory

• Cinema is taken by feminist critics to be a cultural practice representing myths about women and femininity. 
• Negative impose on the female viewer.
• Early feminist criticism was directed at stereotypes in Hollywood films.

The look 

• within the film the male characters direct their look towards the female - the spectator is made to identify with the male as the camera films from the optical view of the male.

3 levels of cinematic gaze  

Mulvey also said that physiologically female characters combine seduction with castration.

Monstrous Babies 

Alien; Ripley is female, the alien is female, the iconography is female, the nest and tunnels reminiscent of a womb and fallopian tubes. 

Rosemary’s Baby 

Carrie; carrie begins to suffer hallucinations and terrifying visions when she reaches puberty and starts her period. The iconography of blood is repeated throughout the film.