Essay 1 Outline Blog Post

Main Argument: While both approaches can and do accurately theorize and criticize film, I believe that the Formalist Approach is the more effective method of STUDYING film. While the ideological approach has importance and sound, it can be used as a general method of studying all arts, while the formalist approach gives light to various aspects of cinema that make film unique, and critique whether those moments were helpful or hurtful to the film.

Claim 1: Formalist theorists and critics take a single aspect of the film (an edit, a camera angle, a lighting choice) and from there make claims about the directors themes and styles and all different analysis. These aspects are usually only unique to film, and therefore so is the formalist approach.

Support for Claim 1: There are no approaches to studying books in which we look at the type of page the publisher decided to print on, or the size of the text, or where he placed the words on the page. Instead, like most art, we use a ideological approach and look at it from a more narrative perspective.

Claim 2: The Ideological Approach loses its validity once a second person places their hand into the project. Whether it be a director taking a script from a screenwriter, or an editor making choices between shots without the director, or the producer limiting what the director is allowed to do. More than more set of minds went into building the project, and while looking at the rooted story (I.E. the original draft of the screenplay) would be very impactful in using ideological approaches, the formalist approach more accurately can show the entirety of the film, and how separate and different choices altered the effect of the film.

Support to Claim 2: "You have to be a great storyteller. And you have  to master the tools that you have to tell the story which are, in order of importance, the script, the actors and then the technical means."

—John Frankenheimer, director

Claim 3: It is easier to decipher what a filmmaker meant by making a film from concrete and proven shots and decisions than it is to assume the director was in a certain mindset or was pushing for a certain motive.

Support for Claim 3: If we were to look at the scene with the knife, and both the ideological writers and formalist writers were attempting to give evidence of their theory that Hitchcock was using the knife as a symbol of many different things, talking about the knife and the scene in an ideological way is going to be much less persuasive than someone with shot for shot proof of why they believe how they do.