This book is about theories. It offers a survey of the different ways in which films have been conceived, defined, studied, and observed from the mid-1940s to the beginning of the 1990s.1 It is meant as an addition to the existing studies, but with specific characteristics of its own. It examines the last fifty years of research, from 1945 to the present. The period of classic theories, to which Canudo, Epstein, Eisenstein, Balàsz, and Arnheim contributed, is already behind us. The postwar age hails new perspectives and styles, which make this era as interesting as the previous one, and even more complex, while the debates that originate in it are better articulated.
This book also focuses on broad trends more than on isolated contributions. It is true that every theorist's ideas deserve attention, but they need to be placed in the broader context of contemporary, more or less widespread statements, attitudes, and interests. Consequently, the following pages will approach the contributions of each scholar as representative of a specific trend or school of thought.
Another peculiarity of this book is that it develops an idea of film theory that is far from both the abstractions of those who would like to make it what it never was and the complacency of those who find traces of it in any intelligent discourse. Contemporary epistemology, in its effort to redefine the notion of "scientific theory," helps us to avoid this double danger. "Theory" is no longer seen only as a formal device, based on a restricted number of postulates, a well-defined conceptual framework, and rigid modalities for the employment of empirical concepts (Nagel); rather, it is thought of as a conjecture that allows us to try to grasp the meaning or the function of certain phenomena (Popper) or--better yet--as a point of view shared by a scientific community and considered effective (Kuhn). Therefore, a theory need not be an axiomatic construction, but it must at least be shared knowledge with which one tries to explain the world.2 According to this logic we will characterize film theory as a set of assumptions, more or less organized, explicit, and binding, which serves as a reference for scholars so that they can understand and explain the nature of the phenomenon under investigation.
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The definition of theory that we have advanced also allows us to clarify the slant of this work. On the one hand, we will devote a great deal of attention to the content of the various studies. We will see what notion of cinema they express, which aspects and problems they underscore. On the other hand, we will devote even more attention to the ways in which all research is realized. We will study the motivations behind it, the instruments it relies on, the strategies with which it proceeds, the traditions from which it emerges. Thus, on the one hand, "what is said" about film; on the other hand, how that content is expressed. Better still, we will examine the image of cinema proposed by a group of scholars and the styles of reflection adopted by them. In the last analysis it is often the latter that really differentiate one approach from another.
