FILM STUDIES

The power of movies

Considering the importance of the question of realism through the history of film theories, this paper gives a brief overview of the problem while completely discarding the postulates of realist film theories (including more recent approaches based on psychology) and focusing on the basic questions that theorists have tried to answer via ontological, psychological and other models of realist understanding of film. One of the main questions is:  What makes film so popular, or rather, why do many experience such an intensive reaction to film in comparison to opera or theatre? Carroll explores a specific type or genre – the international Hollywood – but the connotations of this approach based on psychology can be noticed in the key thesis that the power of populist films lies in the fact that they can easily be grasped by mass-movie audiences. This paper holds that this clarity is a result of deployment of pictorial representation, variable framing, erotetic narrative and a specific relatedness of these elements.

Noël Carroll