Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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3 – The Friday the 13 th series demonstrates a significant case study for understanding
contemporary slasher films, because it either reflects popular aesthetic trends or
stands as exemplary texts to which its contemporaries respond, and has implications
for our understanding of film texts outside of the genre as well.
To develop this formalist framework I begin with David Bordwell and
Kristin Thompson’s seminal textbook Film Art: An Introduction, which thoroughly
outlines a direct approach to film analysis and criticism, arguing that films can be
analysed in terms of form to understand how they create a response like those
created by recognized art forms (i.e.- painting, sculpture, music, etc.). In defining
their foundational attitude toward aesthetic analysis, Bordwell and Thompson state
that “(t)he entire study of the nature of artistic form is the province of the
aesthetician,” (2004; 48) [parentheses mine], and further assert that the aesthetic
elements of a film’s structural form create narrative meaning and emotional effect,
and are of central importance within film analysis. Using this idea, Bordwell and
Thompson make a statement foundational to my methodological approach for
analysis: “Artistic form is best thought of in relation to a perceiver, the human being
who watches the play, reads the novel, listens to the piece of music, or views the
film.” (48) I have adopted this statement within my analytical approach, and this
relative perceiver I will refer to throughout as the “viewer” or “spectator”.
Formalism, as I call it, bears little distinction from the term commonly used,
“neoformalism”. Berliner describes neoformalism as “Adapted to film analysis from
the works of Russian formalist literary theorists”. (2010; 18) In explaining the work
of early Russian formalists, Robert Stam writes, “The early Formalists were, as their
name implies, rigorously aestheticist; for them, aesthetic perception was autotelic, an
end in itself.” (2000; 49) A key Russian formalist critic/theorist, Viktor Shklovsky,