r/filmtheory

Guys, I cannot stop thinking about The Bride! 🫣

I know a lot of reviews say it’s a mess,too loud, too chaotic, too many ideas. Honestly, watching it felt like listening to “Too Much Labour” for two hours in movie form. It didn’t feel disorganized to me at all. It is like someone finally put the emotional load I carry on screen.

I can usually predict every scene in a movie, but this one kept me on the edge of my seat. It kept swerving, like this is what it feels like when everyone wants something different from your body at the same time. I moved with her through sadness, anger, desire, and joy in a way that felt like a deliberate progression.

The way the film tosses her from one context to another. From domestic, villainous, romantic, mythic without giving her time to stabilize mapped onto how it feels to be constantly redefined by other people’s desires and fears. Also her personality is being assembled on screen out of fragments while everyone else keep insisting she already means something.

To me,the “female rage” in this movie is like every emotion that hasn’t been allowed to be felt fully, finally exploding.

If it didn’t click for you, was it because the narrative threads never resolved into something you recognized as satisfying?

For anyone who did click with it, did you also feel that the supposed “chaos” had some kind of emotional unity, especially around the Bride’s search for a self or am I just projecting my own experiences onto it lol?

Sorry in advance that this will propably be very rambling. I'm already afraid that I will have a hard time articulating myself. As of May I only have my masters thesis and seminar left to earn my MA in film studies. I have loved my studies. I have a very good GPA in my masters compared to the more mediocre one in my bachelor's from dicking around with electives. I feel like I have options after graduating. One path I have been warmly invited to try for is to get a phd in a cultural studies department where the researchers use methods from multiple fields and the expectation is I would even them out with my film studies knowledge.

I am supposed to answer to my professor "at least one research method that is well-suited to your work and explain how that method will help you answer your research question:"

Yet I'm having a trouble and feel like I haven't really learned about different films studies research methods. Not very concretely. I actually feel like I have a much better understanding of the schools of thought and research methods of my electives history, philosophy, political science and economics. I have aced broad and historical film theory courses, but to me they were courses about the contents of different topics or theories. Never courses about applying different topics or theories. Never really showing concrete examples of different research methods. The only film studies research method that I feel I comfortably know how to employ and explain the philosophical worldview of is neoformalist analysis which our bachelor's studies were very much based on. I basically know the freebie one. I can explain marxist, psychoanalytic, semiotic or feminist theory conceptually, but I don't feel like I can create a rigid research method of any of these with an articulated structure that the argmuentation and analysis are then subordinated under to concretely produce new knowledge.

The case study sections of books I have been feverishly going through all seem horribly blurry and vague. They spend a chapter explaining the ideas and concepts of a theory but when they do a case study they don't seem to narrow down a systematic way they are proceeding to apply them. Often points about movies are established just by stating them. In many broader film theory books that are multiple essays on individual topics like "modern serial television" or "science fiction cinema" the writers often don't even articulate the philosophical backgrounds of the ideas they are using or how they can be used. So many chapters of books are: "Here is a concept somebody introduced. Let me think about film or series x relative to it." They don't explain the background of the concept or why it is valid apply. The reason writers don't clearly establish in every article what school of thought or philosophical framework they are writing from, was explained to me during my bachelors thesis as a limitation of journals and compendiums where writers are working under word limits. I expected I would have a better grasp on everything after my masters courses but here I am again.

This is disturbing to me, because I feel like on that basis basically any student from an engineer to psychologist could just take a concept and go and write about film studies, with a very narrow vocabulary gap to cross onto writing on the level of a film studies student. Now on the eve of my masters I once again feel disturbed about this. The examples of thesises from the preceding class of students all seem to just be doing similar application of concepts. The course work I have had has all been very similar. What I would describe as "thinking very hard about concept x" essays where you are given a film to discuss based on an essay or two. I would like my degree to tell I have practise with something more systematic than thinking about things very hard.

Meanwhile in the other fields I've dabbled in, the structures of setting up and answering research questions feel way more rigid and concrete. They seem to have it so easy because they are all trying to describe external reality. In political science you're on very steady ground where certain concepts are very distinctly flagged as positivist or structuralist for example. In economics you have formulas with factors that correspond to very specific things and different formulas have upsides and downsides articulated by applying them. All major philosophers seem to have written a book explaining their metaphysical view of the world that qualify their writings on concrete individual phenomenon like art or politics. Etc. Etc.

I don't know how to wrap up my thoughts. I have been described as very "engineer-brained" about studying if it helps illuminate this. This might prove I have just miraculously faked it until I've hit a wall. This might be a classic grass is green on the other side situation. Maybe political science would have been an equal mess as a major. I'm going to answer the method question above with neoformalist analysis and then have a big talk about all this with my professor.

I am curious how and why this so-called ethical turn in film theory happened in mid-2000s (works of Sarah Cooper, Catherine Wheatley, Jinhee Choi and Mattias Frey, Asbjorn Gronstad, etc) -- and this is an ongoing trend. Generally (not in all), there is this great influence of Emmanuel Levinas and I am trying to understand where does it come from. What I understand from these works is that this turn is somewhat related to the affective turn happening since 1990s (more interest in spectatorship, viewing experience etc) but I cannot quite pinpoint a convincing argument of why 1970s-1980s political/ideological criticism faded away by 1990s and it left the stage for affect and ethics. How and why did Levinasian ethics kind of pop up? What has changed socially, historically in 2000s so that theory turned to ethics?

I appreciate anyone who would like to share their knowledge, insight here with me to brainstorm.