ABSTRACT
Since the 1970s, cinema studies has been informed by a theoretical framework encompassing structuralist semiotics, post-structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis and aspects of Althusserian Marxism. These critical perspectives were deployed in the service of the many activities arising from cinema-going such as the implications of its social and industrial contexts and the psychological and language-based dimensions from approaching films as communication texts. In the 1990s, renowned film scholar David Bordwell argued cinema studies was at an impasse. Divided between two opposing trajectories emanating from theoretical contexts he grouped under ‘subject-positioning theory’ and ‘culturalism’, each pole constituted a ‘Grand Theory’ approach revealing how film theory had become unnecessarily bifurcated under their competing agendas. By surveying historical approaches in film theory this discussion outlines how the critical impasse led to a reinvigoration of cinema studies, generating new understandings in the digital era.
