Filmology

Origin

1949, from French filmologie.

Full definition of filmology

Proper noun

1. (film) A 1950s–60s movement of theoretical study relating to film.
• 1949, Renée Jeanne Fulton, “Theatre, Film, and Radio Notes”, in The French Review, v 22, n 3, American Association of Teachers of French, p 279:title International Bureau of Filmology ¶ When the International Film Congress met in Paris in 1947 a plan was approved for the organization of a “Bureau International de Filmologie.”
• 1949, Renée Jeanne Fulton, “Theatre, Film, and Radio Notes”, in The French Review, v 23, n 2, American Association of Teachers of French, p 144:Pervy's research in filmology may eventually open wider applications of films in modern languages.
• 1950, Adolphe Pervy, “Filmology Applied to the Fields of Vocabulary Growth and Modern Language Methods”, in Modern Language Forum, v 35 (March–June), pp 42–53:title
• 1956, Jean Debrix, “Cinema and Poetry”, in Yale French Studies, n 17, Yale University Press, p 88:So the University of Paris set out to study the science of filmology—after Cohen-Séat's important book had given rise to an institute, a review, and a whole series of investigations.
• 1991, Christian Metz and Michael Taylor, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, University of Chicago Press, p 90:The fourth approach is that of filmology—of the scientific study conducted from outside by psychologists, psychiatrists, aestheticians, sociologists, educators, and biologists. with film criticism, the history of the cinema, and the “theory of cinema”
• 1992, Jacques Aumont et al, Richand Neupert transl., Aesthetics of Film, University of Texas Press:190: According to Marc Soriano, secretary editor of the institute's review, “Before filmology, one was restricted to verifying a basic truth, that the projection of a film affected the audience. As far as how and why, that was another question. It was thus this ‘how and why’ that the nascent filmology tackled.”198: This problem of the film spectator, which we have just begun to address, was already at the center of the filmology movement's debates during the 1950s.
• 1992, John Mowitt, Text, Duke University Press, p 143:In the history of the filmology movement this conjuncture of disciplines underwent a gradual but unrelenting reconfiguration wherein the disciplines of psychology and sociology (at this time overwhelmingly Durkheimian in cast) acquired such prominence that aesthetic or hermeneutic concerns were virtually eliminated.
• 1999, Francesco Casetti, Elizabeth Gard Bartolini-Salimbeni, Theories of Cinema, 1945–1995:9: Filmology once again set an example, by explicitly proposing a new vocabulary (“filmofanic,” “profilmic,” “diegetic,” etc.), just as semiotics and psychoanalysis would become exemplary in the 1960s and 1970s by tending toward private lexemes (“syntagmatic,” “icon,” “suture,” etc.).103: It should be noted that filmology is not the only branch of the ongoing research, however; but we have had strong reasons for privileging it so far. It cannot be said too often that filmology introduced a scientific approach to cinema for the first time and that, during the 1950s and 1960s, it hosted the most important psychological contributions to the topic. But when the references to this experience started disappearing, especially in the second half of the 1970s, other lines of enquiry emerged, close to filmology in spirit.
• 2000, Raymond Bellour and Constance Penley, The Analysis of Film, Indiana University Press, p 6:If filmology, for its part, has not shown much interest in films, it has significantly contributed to the shift in film theory's center of gravity by determining it in relation to certain “scientific” achievements, and, despite the generality of its stakes, has sometimes wound up touching several levels of textual singularity—and above all reviving a concern for method, which will have more or less long term direct effects on the analysis of film, thanks to a progressive displacement at work from filmology toward semiology.