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Robert Stam (born October 29, 1941) is an American film theorist working on film semiotics. He is a professor at New York University , where he teaches about French New Wave filmmakers. [ 1 ] Stam has published widely on French literature , comparative literature , and on film topics such as film history and film theory .
Film semiotics is the study of sign process , or any form of activity, conduct, or any process that involves signs, including the production of meaning, as these signs pertain to moving pictures. Film semiotics is used for the interpretation of many art forms, often including abstract art .
It was the creation of the auteur theory, which examines film as the director's vision and art, that broadened the scope of academic film studies to a worldwide presence in the 1960s. In 1965, film critic Robin Wood , in his writings on Alfred Hitchcock , declared that Hitchcock's films contained the same complexities of Shakespeare 's plays. [ 3 ]
Film theory seeks to systematize film as a medium. It may use Critical theory , Formalism , Marxism , philosophy of language , or Lacanian psychoanalysis , while film criticism analyzes and examines a specific film (though larger generalizations can still be deduced from criticism).
Film theory is a set of scholarly approaches within the academic discipline of film or cinema studies that began in the 1920s by questioning the formal essential attributes of motion pictures; [1] and that now provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large. [2]
Film theorist Robert Stam challenged whether genres really exist, or whether they are merely made up by critics. Stam has questioned whether "genres [are] really 'out there' in the world or are they really the construction of analysts?". As well, he has asked whether there is a "... finite taxonomy of genres or are they in principle infinite?"
The most familiar type of affective shot is of the face. The close-up. Some films, such as Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) are composed from a series of close-ups, and in this way create an affection-image film. The affection-image film is therefore a film which foregrounds emotions: desires, wants, needs.
The philosophy of film is a branch of aesthetics within the discipline of philosophy that seeks to understand the most basic questions about film. Philosophy of film has significant overlap with film theory , a branch of film studies .