CHAPTER II THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
A. Understanding Film
What do people mean when they talk about the film? The answers to this apparently straightforward question are not simple, not at all based in common sense, and go to the heart of the
complexities of the institutions, the practices, and the viewing of movies. Robert P. Kolker in ‘The film text and film form’ on The Oxford Guide to Film Studies said
that the preference to think of the film as a kind of self-constructed presence, full of story, characters, and emotion, is strong. A film is there, complete, full, and waiting for peoples gaze.
3
Kolker in his writing “The Film Text and Film Form” said further that the Film making is more difficult than it appears because the influence of film on the life of the society is so great,
therefore the film is important to be explained.
4
Understanding film seems to be something easy. Strictly speaking, just by watching the film until the end of the story, people could get what the film is talking about. But actually
understanding film is more than that. It’s all about the aspects that build the film it self as a complex object to be described. Therefore there’s no specific or a ‘real’ semantics meaning describe the film
3 John Hill and Pamela Church, The Oxford Guide to Film Studies New York: Oxford University Press Inc, 1998, p. 11
4 Ibid 7
theory. Related to this statement, Robert Stam in his Film Theory, an Introduction said “Film
theory is rarely “pure”, it is usually laced with admixture of literary criticism, social commentary, and philosophical speculation”.
5
Stam continued that to slightly modify the formulation, film theory is an evolving body of concepts designed to account for the cinema in all its dimension aesthetic, social, psychological
for an interpretative community of scholars, critics, and interested spectators.
6
In the other hand, in responding the movie complexities, the Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, the most popular book in the Faculty of Film Studies in the University of Wisconsin
London that was edited by David Bordwell and Noel Corrol stated: “Since we ask so many different kinds of general questions about film, there is no
common feature that all of our answers should be expected to share. Some theoretical questions about film- for example, about cinematic perception – may
have answers that primarily advert to cinematic forms and structures, whereas other different answers to difficult questions might refers to economic forces. That I,
some theories maybe formal, while others may be social. Our collection of film theories may very well to comprise a mixed bag. There simply is no reason to think
that every film theory will have something to tell us about the same subject – such as the way in which each and every aspect of film figures in the oppression or
emancipation of the film viewer”.
7
From those explanations, it could be perceived that there is no specific theory about the
5 Robert Stam, Film Theory, an Introduction Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 2000, p.5 6 Ibid. p.6
7 David Bordwell and Noel Corroll, Post Theory: Reconstructing Film studies Wisconsin: the University of Wisconsin
8
film, but as the film developed into various genres, the film studies share a great development until now as an art that could be studied specifically and interested to be explained.
Richard Dyer in his essays Introduction to Film studies on The Oxford Guide to Film Studies said that Film-as-art discourses argue, or assume, that film is related to the social –
ideological value therefore it is intrinsically worth studying. If they lean on wider discourses of art, of aesthetics or sometimes erotic, then this is only because film itself is an art and therefore
valuable in the terms of art. There is no appeal to something outside film art. According to him, one kind of Social argument sees film as the exemplary symptomatic art
form of the category modernity. This itself is conceived of as a structure of feeling characterizing an epoch in western and subsequently world society from, say, the late eighteenth century
onwards, based in capitalism, industrialism, urban and large-scale, centralized, mass societies.
8
B. The Description of Crime as the Social Problem
Kategori