Harry M. Benshoff - Film and Television Analysis: An Introduction to Methods, Theories, and Approaches

This book is designed to introduce basic qualitative approaches to the study of film and television, primarily to undergraduate students. It grew out of a need, in the department of Media Arts at the University of North Texas, for an intermediate level critical-cultural studies class in methodologies, one that could take its place in the curriculum between basic introductory classes (usually offered at the freshman level) and more advanced topics classes, offered at the junior and senior levels. The perceived need for such a class arose from the fact that many of our upper division topics classes regularly assigned books and essays that dealt with concepts that were more theoretically advanced than the materials found in our basic freshman introductory class. Thus RTVF 3610, Film and Television Analysis was created to fill the gap, in order to ease the transition between simpler and more difficult classes. RTVF 3610 was developed by myself and several colleagues over the course of many years, and it has since become a prerequisite for students wanting to enroll in advanced topics classes that may assign (for example) original essays by Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen, D. A. Miller, and/or Linda Williams. All of our critical-cultural faculty agree that the class has been a success: students are much more prepared to engage with writings that incorporate psychoanalytic, feminist, and/or poststructuralist ideas (among others) once they have been introduced to them in a class (or a book) such as this one.

This book also had input from the 2010 Society for Cinema Studies conference, during a workshop I created and chaired entitled Teaching Film and Television Theory to Undergraduate Students. The panelists and the audience had an invigorating discussion on the topic, but what became quickly apparent to me was that very few people in the room even agreed on what the term theory meant, let alone how it might best be incorporated into an undergraduate curriculum. Some people expressed the view that theoryhowever defined was too difficult for undergraduates, while others proudly announced that their students were required to take a year-long sequence of classes wherein they read Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image . I was reminded of a time when I was a teaching assistant for the Introduction to Film class at the University of Southern California, and one of my ambitious colleagues handed out Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema to first-year students. At the time, I wondered what the students would take from the essay, considering it had not been discussed in lecture and that most of them probably had very little exposure to basic psychoanalytic concepts. Surely some sort of primer that introduced and explained the essay's basic theoretical concepts could have helped students in that situationhelped them parse the essay and grasp its meanings. Such a primer is exactly what this book aims to be.

In writing this volume, I have had to confront a fear that it (and I) might be accused of dumbing down and/or misrepresenting the complex and frequently brilliant ideas expressed by previous writers and thinkers on the subjects of film and television analysis. Why not just throw students into the deep end of the theoretical pool (so to speak) and see if they learn to swim? Certainly, there are some universities where highly prepared students can and do encounter Gilles Deleuze or Laura Mulvey in highly productive ways (most likely in smaller seminar settings). However, I also realize there are many other institutions (like mine) where that is not a practical approach to teaching film and television studies. At UNT, we process hundreds of majors a year, and those students are interested in vastly different subject areasfrom fictional filmmaking to TV studio production, and from media management to sports broadcasting. In short, I feel that programs like ours can and do benefit from an approach that is represented by this book, and the class it was derived from, RTVF 3610. Even students who do not go on to take advanced critical-cultural studies classes are exposed to the basic ideas of the discipline, learning to approach film and television from a variety of different critical and analytical perspectives. Those who do pursue further education in critical-cultural studies gain a helpful grounding in the field's central and historically important concepts, a stepping stone that helps them process the more complex concepts and readings explored in later classes.

That said, I think there are many different ways a book like this can and could be useful, based upon varying student abilities and the shape of institutional curricula. At UNT, the class this book is designed upon is taught each long semester to approximately ninety junior-level students. Scantron tests are administered to gauge whether or not the students are learning the concepts at hand, and a number of short writing exercises, designed to allow the students to apply those concepts, are also assigned throughout the semester. (Similarly, questions for discussion are also featured throughout this textbook.) On the other hand, this book might also be ideal in smaller group settings in conjunction with a selection of important primary essays, many of which are increasingly available in excellent anthologies such as Braudy and Cohen's Film Theory and Criticism or Corrigan, White, and Mazaj's Critical Visions in Film Theory . This book is not meant to replace volumes such as those, but rather supplement and introduce some of the ideas they contain, so that when students do encounter the important primary literature of film and television studies, they are prepared to engage with it, and not merely be baffled by it.

The choice of what is included in this volume and how it is presented may seem somewhat idiosyncratic, but this volume is based upon the perceived needs of the students at UNT, as well as my own personal interests and emphases in the area of film and television studies. One of the first things that will become apparent is that I view this as a book of theor ies and method s , not a book about Theoryhowever one might define that. In class I often liken this approach to speed dating: students meet a new method or approach every week. In so doing, they are not required to date or marry any one theory, but they are required to learn the basic concepts and values of any given approach. This book also stresses the historical development of film and television theories, and in so doing further underlines the point that there is not one grand theory for explaining all aspects of film and television, but rather an ever-changing and evolving set of ideas that people have used over the yearsand continue to useto approach and explore the various meanings of film and television texts. I am deeply indebted to two previous textbooks that I feel share these goals (and that I continue to use in my own classes): Robert C. Allen's Channels of Discourse, Reassembled and Joanne Hollows and Mark Jancovich's Approaches to Popular Film . If this volume comes anywhere near the elegance and usefulness of those books, it will be because their clarity and pedagogical brilliance have been my inspiration and my guide.