Film history

Within the academic community over the past 35 years, the study of film has developed across three kinds of enquiry. Douglas Gomery and Robert C. Allen delineated these approaches in their pioneering work, Film History: Theory and Practice (New York, 1985). The first paid attention to the nature of the medium itself and its communicative power, elaborating theories derived from Marxism, feminism, structuralism and poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis. Its essentialist ambitions meant that its purchase upon film culture became increasingly tenuous the more rarefied and internecine its postulations grew.