| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, offers an instructive example. Social scientists, and even some scientists, challenged the facts of the movie. Critics, coming more from an artistic point of view, were less concerned about Stone’s liberal use of artistic license, feeling that he had captured the paranoia that still exists about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
The social science approach that I use for film study emphasizes discovering the “truth” of the matter, but always as it stands in relationship to the artistic concerns. The advantage of this approach is that virtually any academic discipline in the university has potential contributions to make to this approach to film study. The disadvantage of this approach is that it does tend to over-emphasize the social science perspectives (without intending to diminish the aesthetic experience of the film itself).
Within this social science approach to film study, I, then, emphasize two themes: reel truth and reel values. The first section of this manuscript emphasizes reel truth. In that section I want to raise the kind of perspectives and issues that social scientists have raised, which I think have excellent payoff in terms of their prospect of lending insight into a variety of films. This section is loosely organized by the traditional disciplines in the social sciences, and emphasizes questions that one could well use in reflecting back on a previously viewed film.
The second section of the book emphasizes reel values. While I agree with Eisner that artists tend to be the ones who emphasize “meaning,” that does not mean that social scientists are unaware of the issue. Less comfortable with artistic considerations like “theme,” there have been social scientists who have developed systematic ways of studying “values.” I do not argue that this consideration of “values” is superior to, or even as good as, an aesthetic consideration of “theme.” But I do think that it is especially important to create discussion about the very real / reel truth that every film has implicit and explicit values. This section presents some of the more classical perspectives on the social science concern for values. It is another way of getting students to focus on the analysis of film content.