Films have been a central critical issue over the past century. At first, the film didn't have the art title. But critics could not resist the great influence exerted on cinema by society and human thought in a short time. When a film came to be considered an object worthy of serious study, film studies emerged and became firmly established within academic institutions. As soon as moving photographic images were projected onto the screen, critics, writers, philosophers, and even filmmakers began to describe this new medium, as critical issues were driven by the rapid growth and development of the medium . Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayFilm theory provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship with reality, other arts, individual viewers, and society as a whole. Early film theory arose in the silent era and was primarily concerned with defining the crucial elements of the medium. It is largely inspired by the work of directors like Germaine Dulac, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Paul Rotha and film theorists like Rudolf Arnheim, Bela Balazs and Siegfried Kracauer. Discussion of the film has continued in only two directions, the realist and formalist traditions. After World War II, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, film theory became interdisciplinary in nature by importing concepts from established disciplines like Marxism, psychoanalysis, gender studies, anthropology. , literary theory, semiotics and linguistics. During the 1990s, the digital revolution in imaging technologies impacted film theory in a variety of ways. Cinema is meant and expected to entertain, to take the viewer into a world radically different from the real world, a world that allows you to escape the daily grind of life. Cinema is a popular media of mass consumption that plays a key role in forming opinions, constructing images and reinforcing dominant cultural values. Before film studies was established as an academic enterprise, there was already a fair amount of theoretical writing on cinema. Hugo Münsterberg, Béla Balász and Rudolf Arnheim were the most prominent; However, the protagonists of the Soviet montage film, Eisenstein and Kuleshov, also contributed substantially to early theoretical reflections on the nature of cinema and its impact on spectators. André Bazin, perhaps the most notable of this period when early theories of cinema were gradually replaced by modern theories of academia, wrote a number of essays in the 1940s establishing a new angle on cinema, notably through the French film magazine Les Cahiers du cinéma. Characteristic of most early writings is their concern with the meaning of film in relation to other art forms. Can cinema be understood as an extension and transformation of photography, theater, novels or painting, and if so, what is cinema's own contribution? To the extent that cinema was seen as a mechanical recording of reality, it was furthermore not clear that it could at the same time be identified as art. It was considered necessary to define cinema as an art form in itself and in its own right to endow cinema with art. Interested in the essence of the film, the first theories were oftenoriented towards ontological questions about cinema. The 1960s saw a considerable expansion in the humanities. Film programs have been created in Western countries. Many film scholars came from other fields of study, which meant that many new theoretical questions were raised. Even more important was the proliferation of theories and epistemologies, as well as the move toward a new direction in film studies. The question of the essence of cinema still undergirded much writing, but the legitimization of film studies as a scientific enterprise seemed more urgent. The dominance of structuralism, followed by semiotics and psychoanalysis, connected film studies to new areas. Furthermore, the politicization of the human sciences has led to the importation of new theories linked to cultural philosophy and ideology, mainly drawn from different strands of Marxism. The questions throughout this period were therefore scientific and political in nature. Further changes in film theory took place throughout the 1980s, with greater attention to the interaction between film and viewer and a focus on cinema as a cultural issue. These two new focuses meant that film studies was once again linked to new fields as it became part of a huge industry known as cultural studies. New studies linking film to cognitive psychology have further reestablished the connection between film studies and natural sciences, such as neurobiology and other brain sciences. These new fields meant a huge new pile of texts related to film studies. The turn of the 1980s brought to the fore questions about culture and natural sciences. This very brief history of film theory shows how the history of theory creates serious problems for teachers of film studies. The first problem actually concerns teachers' own (in)ability to follow new theoretical paradigms in their entirety. The second problem is related to the actual teaching in the areas of film theory, film history and film analysis. Given the immensity of theories, how is it then possible to present serious and relevant theories for students at different levels? The answer is obvious: by readers of films that encompass the most central texts in the history of film theory. Academic compilations met the challenge posed by the vastness of the theory and gave rise to the "film player industry." However, the film reader always reacts in one way or another to his own historical context with real theoretical agendas and more or less specific requirements. Movie readers are therefore not necessarily the answer to the proliferation of theories but may be part of the problem through a proliferation of books. Rutledge has published a new four-volume film reader Film Theory. Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies edited by Philip Simpson, Andrew Utterson and KJ Shepherdson. One might expect that these four volumes, bringing together 99 articles and book fragments, would target readers without allegiance to any specific agenda and with a high degree of stamina. This expectation, however, is not entirely satisfied. Moreover, the intention was probably not to meet this rather naive expectation of an unbiased presentation when the subtitle of the book (the emphasis on "Cultural Studies") istaken as an indication. Parts of the volumes are strongly influenced by a cultural studies approach. This means that the editors have chosen to include texts that only minimally address issues of cinema, theory and history of cinema, such as for example the text by Jean Baudrillard. The price of this inclusion is, of course, the exclusion of more relevant texts. Film Theory is divided into 12 parts dealing with topics that have dominated film theory in different eras. The first section “Essence and specificity” concerns the first cinematographic theories. It also includes new perspectives on the question of the essence of cinema. This question alone could have filled every volume of the book given that it has been intermittent throughout film theory. The question of essence is linked to the notion of cinema as a specific type of language, addressed in the second part of the first volume. “Language” was, of course, the buzzword or key concept when structuralism was introduced into film studies, or rather academic film studies arose simultaneously with structuralism in the 1960s. In this second section, cinematic language has its origins in Soviet theories of the 1920s, where montage theories treated film exactly as a kind of language. Interestingly, Bazin's influential essay "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema" is also included in this section. This is strange given that Bazin's essay uses language as metaphor rather than understanding the film as language; in fact, his essay addresses the essence of the film. The last section of the first volume deals with “Technologies”. The sections contained in film theory are relevant to most film studies programs and overall the film reader will be an answer to many educational requirements. A very useful chronological table is included, making it easy to get a sense of the historical context of the essays as well as to see what other essays appeared at the same time. The timeline is part of the history of film theory. The table would have benefited from including other significant writings not included in the four volumes and perhaps also some film history. The choices made in each film theory anthology are always contestable based on differing preferences and idiosyncratic judgments of taste. The choices made in Film Theory seem generally balanced despite my reservations. Film Theory is not a superior film reader to other readers, however, and the book's lifespan is not guaranteed by the large number of essays and book fragments included. Once people realized that films could do much more than just provide entertainment, a variety of theories and approaches were developed to help analyze films to understand how they created reactions in viewers and what they could mean. Different approaches look at different aspects of a film for different reasons. A formalist approach focuses on the film itself, its structure and its form. So, while other approaches often use some degree of external evidence to analyze a film, a formalist approach will focus primarily on internal evidence. This approach might analyze how the way the plot presents story material forces the viewer to see things at certain times and have reactions that might be different if presented another way. A narrative analysis will examine how a film uses various formal narrative elements.