What Is Film Theory? 8 Film Theories Explained With Movies

What is film theory? It is the set of big ideas people use to explain how movies work and what they do to us. Why does a cut make you feel something? Who is the real author of a film? Why does the camera so often look at women the way it does? Film theory is where those questions get argued out.

This guide explains film theory in plain English. It covers how theory differs from analysis and criticism, the oldest argument in the field, and 8 film theories, each paired with one movie to watch. They are ranked by how much each theory changes the way a filmmaker shoots and cuts. When you want to put a theory to work on a single movie, our guide to film analysis and its free worksheet take over.

Film Theory vs Film Analysis vs Film Criticism

They sound alike, but they ask different questions.

	The question it asks	Example
Film theory	How does cinema work in general?	Does editing create meaning, or just record it?
Film analysis	How does this one film work?	How does the cutting in this scene build fear?
Film criticism	Is this film good, and is it worth your time?	A review of a new release

Theory gives you the questions. Analysis applies them to one movie. Criticism adds a verdict, which is the job our guide to writing a movie review covers.

Formalism vs Realism: The Oldest Argument in Film Theory

Almost every film theory sits somewhere between two camps.

• Formalists say cinema is art because it reshapes reality. The frame, the cut and the angle make the meaning. Sergei Eisenstein and Rudolf Arnheim, author of Film as Art (1932), led this side.
• Realists say cinema matters because it records reality. The camera should show the world and let us look. André Bazin, in What Is Cinema?, and Siegfried Kracauer, in Theory of Film (1960), led this side.

You will see both camps in the list below. Montage is pure formalism. Neorealism is pure realism. Most films, and most filmmakers, borrow from both.

8 Film Theories Explained, Each With One Movie to Watch

These 8 film theories count down to the one every editor uses, whether they know its name or not. Each is ranked by how much it changes the way you shoot and cut. Watch the film with the question in each fact box and the theory will click.

8) Marxist Film Theory: Snowpiercer (2013)

Marxist film theory asks who has power and money in a story, and what the film says about that.

The last survivors of a frozen Earth live on one train. The poor are packed in the tail, the rich ride up front, and the story is a fight from back to front. “The whole story is about going through the train to the front,” Bong told Film Comment.

That makes Snowpiercer the easiest film on this list to read through a Marxist lens, because the set is the argument. Bong said the ideas “are about capitalism, which is relatable to people from many countries”. Once you see class in the layout of a train, you start to see it in houses, offices and staircases in other films too.

7) Apparatus Theory: Peeping Tom (1960)

Apparatus theory says the act of watching a film, in the dark with the camera’s eye as your own, shapes what the film does to you.

Baudry compared the moviegoer to a dreamer. Metz argued that film viewing depends on voyeurism, the pleasure of looking. Peeping Tom makes that uncomfortable. Its killer films his victims as they die, and Powell keeps putting us behind his lens.

Critics hated it in 1960. One said the only way to deal with it was to “flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer,” and Powell’s career in Britain never fully recovered. Martin Scorsese championed it from the late 1970s, and it is now seen as a film about what watching films does to us.

6) Psychoanalytic Film Theory: Vertigo (1958)

Psychoanalytic film theory uses Freud and Lacan to read films as dreams: full of desire, fear and things the characters cannot admit.

Scottie falls for a woman he cannot have. When she is gone, he finds another woman and remakes her, forcing her to change her clothes and dye her hair until she matches his memory.

That is obsession put on screen, and theorists have read Vertigo as a study of male desire and control ever since. Critics voted it the greatest film ever made in the 2012 Sight and Sound poll, ahead of Citizen Kane. It is also the film Laura Mulvey used in the essay that leads to the next theory.

5) Feminist Film Theory and the Male Gaze: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

Feminist film theory asks who is looking, who is looked at, and what that does to the women on screen.

Mulvey’s 1975 essay gave film theory one of its best-known terms. She argued that classic Hollywood built its look around a male spectator, with women coded for “to-be-looked-at-ness”. Her examples included Vertigo and Marnie.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire answers her. A painter is hired to paint a woman who refuses to pose, and the two look at each other as equals. Sciamma called it “a manifesto on the gaze”. It won Best Screenplay at Cannes in 2019. If you want to see what the male gaze is, watch Vertigo. If you want to see an alternative, watch this.

4) Classical Hollywood Cinema: Stagecoach (1939)

Classical Hollywood cinema is the “invisible” style: editing and camera work so smooth you forget anyone made choices.

From the 1910s to the 1960s, Hollywood built a shared grammar: establishing shots, shot reverse shot, eyelines that match and the 180 degree rule. The goal was a story you could follow without noticing the filmmaking at all.

Stagecoach is that grammar at its peak. Bazin called it “the ideal example of the maturity of a style brought to classic perfection.” Nine strangers share a coach through Apache country, and Ford makes every cut feel inevitable. Most films you watch today still run on this system.

3) Realism and Italian Neorealism: Bicycle Thieves (1948)

Realist film theory says cinema is at its best when it records the world as it is and lets the audience look.

A poor man in postwar Rome needs his bicycle for work. It is stolen, and he and his son search the city for it. De Sica shot on real streets with untrained actors. His lead, Lamberto Maggiorani, was a factory worker.

Bazin championed films like this as the essence of cinema: the camera as a witness. Bicycle Thieves won an honorary Oscar and topped the first Sight and Sound poll in 1952. Every handheld indie drama shot on real streets owes it something.

2) Auteur Theory: The 400 Blows (1959)

Auteur theory says the director is the true author of a film, with a personal style you can see across their work.

In 1954, a young critic named François Truffaut attacked the polished, script-led French films of the day in Cahiers du Cinéma. He argued for directors who put themselves on screen. American critic Andrew Sarris brought the idea to English in 1962. Pauline Kael pushed back, pointing out that Citizen Kane owes a great deal to its writer and cinematographer.

Five years after his essay, Truffaut made his first feature and proved his own point. The 400 Blows draws on his childhood and ends on a freeze-frame of a boy staring into the camera. It won him Best Director at Cannes. When people call a film “very Wes Anderson” or “very Nolan”, they are using auteur theory.

1) Soviet Montage Theory: October (1928)

Soviet montage theory says meaning is made in the edit: two shots cut together create an idea neither has alone.

The Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s treated the cut as their main tool. Lev Kuleshov showed that audiences read a face differently depending on the shot that follows it, the Kuleshov effect. Eisenstein pushed further with “intellectual montage”, cutting images together to make an argument.

October, made for the tenth anniversary of the revolution, is the textbook case. Eisenstein cuts the politician Kerensky against a preening mechanical peacock, and in another sequence runs from a baroque Christ through Hindu gods and Buddha to crude idols. Nothing is explained, and you still get the point. Every match cut, every montage in a sports movie and every trailer runs on this theory, which is why it sits at number 1.

Other Film Theories Worth Knowing

The 8 above are the big ones, but you will meet these too:

• Semiotics: reads film as a language of signs. Christian Metz led the way.
• Cognitive film theory: studies how audiences actually process films, from attention to emotion. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll are the names to know.
• Queer film theory: reads films for how they show, hide or code queer lives and desire.
• Genre theory: asks how westerns, horror films, musicals and film noir build and break their own rules.

How to Use Film Theory as a Filmmaker

You do not need to write an essay. Use theory the way you use a lens: pick one, look through it, then put it down.

1. Pick a lens before you rewatch. Watch a favorite film once for montage, once for the gaze. You will see two different films.
2. Borrow the question, not the conclusion. Each fact box above ends with a question. Ask it of your own script or cut.
3. Test it on your own work. Show a rough cut, then ask which theory explains the moments that land. Our film analysis worksheet, our guide to mise en scène and the Kuleshov effect make good next steps.

FAQs About Film Theory

The Final Cut on Film Theory

So, what is film theory? It is a set of lenses for understanding how movies work. Montage explains the cut. Auteur theory explains the director’s voice. Realism explains the power of the real. The male gaze explains who the camera serves.

Here is a drill for this week. Pick one scene you love and watch it three times. The first time, watch only the cuts. The second time, watch who is looking at whom. The third time, ask who has the power in the room. You will come away with three films in one.

Then take what you found to our film analysis guide, or see how theory shows up on set in our cinematography guide.