Film theorist

Dziga (Dzyga) Vertov (, ) January 2, 1896–February 12, 1954) was a Russia pioneer documentary film and newsreel director. His brothers Boris Kaufman and Mikhail Kaufman were also notable filmmakers. Born Denis Abelevich Kaufman into a family of Jew intellectuals in Białystok, Congress Poland, then a part of the Russian Empire, he Russified his Jewish patronymic to Arkadievich in his youth. Kaufman studied music at Białystok Conservatory until his family fled from the invading German army to...

Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (; January 23, 1898 – February 11, 1948) was a revolutionary Soviet Russian film director and film theorist noted in particular for his silent film Strike, Battleship Potemkin and October, as well as historical epics Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. His work vastly influenced early film makers owing to his innovative use of and writings about montage. Eisenstein's father, Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein, was an assimilated Jew, who worked as a civil engineer...

Andrew Sarris, born on October 31, 1928 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, is a U.S. film critic and a leading proponent of the auteur theory of criticism. He is generally credited with popularising this theory in the Americas and coining the half-English, half-French term, "auteur theory," in his essay, "Notes on the Auteur Theory," which was inspired by critics writing in Cahiers du Cinéma. He wrote the highly influential book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968,...

Kaja Silverman is an American film theorist and art historian. She received a Ph.D. in English from Brown University. She taught at Yale University, Trinity College, Simon Fraser University, Brown University, and the University of Rochester before joining the Rhetoric Department and the Film Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley in 1991. Her writing and teaching are concentrated at the moment primarily on phenomenology, psychoanalysis, photography, and time-based visual art...

Slavoj Žižek (born 21 March 1949) is a Slovene sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic. He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution, abolished in...

Stan Brakhage (January 14, 1933 – March 9, 2003) was an American non-narrative filmmaker. He is regarded as one of the most important experimental film of the 20th century. He worked with various kinds of celluloid: 16mm, 8mm, 35mm, and IMAX, and was a practitioner of what he referred to as "pure cinema". Brakhage was born as Robert Sanders in an orphanage in Kansas City, Missouri. Three weeks after his birth, he was adopted by Ludwig and Clara Brakhage and given the name James Stanley...

Teresa de Lauretis is an Italian-born author and Professor of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her doctorate in Modern Languages and Literatures from Bocconi University in Milan before coming to the United States. Prior to joining the faculty at UCSC, she taught in Colorado (University of Colorado) and Wisconsin (University of Wisconsin). She currently teaches, researches and advises graduate students. She has held Visiting Professorships at...

Christian Metz (1931-1993) was a French film theorist, best known for pioneering the application of Ferdinand de Saussure's theories of semiotics to film. During the 1970s, his work had a major impact on film theory in France, Britain and the United States. In Film Language: A Semiotics of Cinema, Metz focuses on narrative structure — proposing the "Grand Syntagmatique", a system for categorizing scenes (known as "syntagm") in films. Metz applied both Sigmund Freud's psychology and Jacques...

Jacques Rivette (born March 1, 1928) is a French film director. With Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette is considered to be the most experimental of the French New Wave directors. Like Godard, he had a background in film criticism, but he also loved popular American cinema, especially genre directors such as Robert Aldrich and Frank Tashlin. Rivette's stories progress in unconventional ways - often following multiple plot lines that can be romantic, mysterious, and comic all at once and...

Laura Mulvey (born August 15, 1941) was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She worked at the British Film Institute for many years before taking up her current position. Mulvey is best known for her essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen. It later appeared in a collection of her essays entitled Visual...

Claire Johnston (1940-1987) was a feminist film theoretician. She wrote seminal essays on the construction of ideology in mainstream cinema (Hollywood and European auteur cinema).

Robert McKee is a creative writing instructor who is widely known for his popular "Story Seminar", which he developed when he was a professor at the University of Southern California. McKee is the author of a "screenwriters' bible" called Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. Many of Hollywood's active screenwriters claim him as an inspiration. Rather than simply handling "mechanical" aspects of fiction technique such as plot or dialogue taken individually,...

William Moritz (May 6, 1941-March 12, 2004), film historian, specialized in visual music and experimental animation. His principle published works concerned abstract filmmaker and painter Oskar Fischinger. He also wrote extensively on other visual music artists who worked with motion pictures, including James and John Whitney and Jordan Belson; Moritz also published on German cinema, Visual Music, color organs, experimental animation, avant-garde film and the California School of Color Music. ...

Michael Betancourt (b. 1971, New Jersey) is a critical theorist, art and film historian, and animator. His principle published works focus on the technologies of visual music, new media art and theory, and formalist study of motion pictures. He is the curator at the Sioux City Art Center. Betancourt's father is archaeologist Philip P. Betancourt, and his brother is author John Gregory Betancourt. He spent his summers in Crete, Greece, working as a photographer on his father's on the excavation...