Film Theory: An Introduction

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Stam has also been an advocate-exegete of semiotics, poststructuralism, and film theory in such books as New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Beyond (Routledge, 1992) and Film Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2000), the first book to recount the history of film theory from its beginnings to the present within a transnational framework that included Latin America, Africa and Asia alongside Europe and North America. Stam on suutnud aga päris hästi luua loogika ja struktuuri autorite ja igasuguste -ismide virvarris, tuues asjakohaseid filminäiteid ja lektüürisoovitusi sügavamks süvenemiseks. With work that has ranged across a number of different fields, Stam has participated in a number of post-structuralist and postcolonial “turns” within film and cultural studies. Unlike some other reviewers, I was glad that Stam offered summaries of the work of many theorists rather than extensive excerpts from a few in this introduction. Transnationalizing Comparison: The Uses and Abuses of Cross-Cultural Analogy," co-written with Ella Shohat.

Stam's later work in literature and film formed part of and helped advance the field of adaptation studies, which has been undergoing a boom since the turn of the 21st century. At times Stam's summaries of other people's critical stances and theories was helpful (especially when so often you have to read confusing translations of the originals) but usually I would have preferred just an anthology of theory and the original articles rather than Stam's interpretations and opinions. Stam has authored, co-authored and edited some seventeen books on film and cultural theory, literature and film, national cinema (French and Brazilian), aesthetic and politics, intellectual history, and comparative race studies and postcolonial studies.Other material covered includes film adaptations of works of literature and analogies between literary and film criticism. Attempting to go beyond the methodological limitations of the then-dominant paradigm of “positive image” and “negative stereotype” analysis, Stam argued for an approach that emphasized not social accuracy or characterological merits but rather issues such as perspective, address, focalization, mediation, and the filmic orchestration of discourses.

Contesting the monolingual and Anglo-Americano-centric approach to these issues, the book elaborates such concepts as “the seismic shift” provoked by the decolonization of culture, the radicalization of the academic disciplines, the philosophical centrality of indigenous thought, the “left/right” convergence on identity politics, and “inter-colonial narcissism. The discussion of Bakhtin was somewhat unfocused, however, and I was never sure exactly how his ideas were being applied.

It is rooted (by its own admission) in the west and isn't always the snappiest read, but it gave me what I was looking for. Robert Stam, renowned for his clarity of writing, will also include studies of cinema specialists providing readers with a depth of reference not generally available outside the field of film studies itself. Francois Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Adaptation (Rutgers, 2006), meanwhile, explored the “transtextual diaspora” generated by a highly literary ménage-a-trois in the 1920s that led to the books and published journals of Henri-Pierre Roche, Franz Hessel and Helen Hessel, as well as three films by Truffaut based on the life and work of Roche ( Jules and Jim, Two Englishwomen, and The Man Who Loved Women). Stam and Shohat continued with an anthology entitled Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media (Rutgers, 2003); followed by a more political polemic which excoriated the militaristic pseudo-patriotism of the George Bush/ Dick Cheney period -- Flagging Patriotism: Crises in Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (Routledge, 2006). The book combines two strands of work – an ambitious study of colonialist discourse and Eurocentrism – and a comprehensive and transnational study of cinematic texts related to those issues.