Some Structural Approaches to Cinema: A Survey of Models

Abstract

The theory of an art form usually evolves at some distance from its inception, and this has surely been the case with cinema. As Roland Barthes has recently put it, Born technologically, sometimes even esthetically, the film is yet to be born theoretically.' But today this latter birth is not long in coming. The small arena where the proponents of Eisensteinian montage once did battle with those of Bazinian composition in depth has enlarged within the last decade to include other forces-the vidistic analysis of Sol Worth and Calvin Pryluck in the United States, the auteur-structuralism of Peter Wollen and his colleagues at the British Society for Education in Film and Television, and the cinesemiotics of Christian Metz, Umberto Eco, and Pier Paolo Pasolini on the continent.