Wednesday 20 September 2017

Film Studies is Essential to Critical Appreciation of Cinema

http://aaft.com/schoolofcinema/Cinemas and society are interlinked and society has always inspired new stories for the filmmakers that are thought-provoking, intricate and meaningful. Cinema studies explore the narrative, artistic, cultural, economic, and political implications of the cinema. Film study is an intellectual discipline that deals with a choice of theoretical, historical, and critical ways to filmmaking. It is concerned with the evolution of the content, the narration, the technology, and the changes in the narrative style with the changing time periods.

The film studies courses in Delhi concentrate more on art factor than focusing on the production knowledge. Many directors have distinct style of their own. They are known as 'auteur'. And the study about those directors, who have given cinema a new dimension, is known as 'auteur theory'. The main thing for students is to learn about the aesthetics of the cinema by analysis of various styles and creative indications used by various world renowned directors from all ages.

Not to be mystified with the technical aspects of film formation, film studies deal only with the creation of film theory—which approaches the film critically as an art. It is appreciating the art in the cinema by studying various film movements which has happened all over the world such as, German expressionism, French new wave, Italian neo-realism, soviet film movement, etc.

Undergraduate degree in filmmaking by top film schools in Delhi cover various areas of screenwriting, direction, cinematography, post-production, sound recording and acting. Often subsumed within media studies and compared to television studies, film studies are a distinct subject. With advances in filmmaking, it is important that the degree courses in cinema must contain film studies among the foundational subjects:

•    Introduction to film studies
•    Modes of film studies
•    Close analysis of films
•    History of film/media
•    Analysis with emphasis
•    Attention to time period
•    Attention to regional creation (Indian cinema, Indian parallel cinema, Indian regional cinemas)
•    Attention to genre
•    Study about creators (auteurs)