Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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opposition to the method, writing, “The effort to set art free from life, to declare it a
craft self-sufficient unto itself, devitalizes and kills art.” (1923; 57) This statement,
however, is complicated by the inclusion of cognitivism into modern formalism.
While these arguments may have been more applicable within Russian formalism,
and many environmental elements are discarded with an aim to objective analysis,
formalists still use their knowledge of the world to understand how a text functions.
In fact, the specific formalist modes of historical poetics and cognitivism require the
understanding of other film texts and neurological response, respectively, to facilitate
their approaches. Formalists, again, reject the idea of approaching a text in order to
reinforce an ideological framework. This is counterproductive and taints something
resembling objective analysis. 5
Returning to questions of value, formalism and theory attribute the worth of a
text using different criteria. Aside from the disparate conclusions I have drawn on
Friday the 13 th and Friday the 13 th Part 2 to those of Robin Wood, you can see
through the following analyses of The French Connection (1971; dir. Friedkin) how
formalist analysis and the application of theory determine value in different ways.
Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner describe the famous car/train chase sequence
culminating in ‘Popeye’ Doyle shooting the unarmed criminal in the back:
The subjective camera lodged in Popeye’s car identifies the audience
with his point of view in a way that works against reflection on the
motivation and consequences of his actions. The audience’s desires are
manipulated into the criminal, no matter what the cost in life or liberty
5 I believe that objectivity is impossible, but formalism aims towards a general understanding and
consensus, whereas theory and interpretation largely aim to provoke discussion, without being able to
create a definitive understanding – interpretation becomes highly individualised.