Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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seventies films respond to the ideologies of the time, but it threatens to foul up
aesthetic analysis.” (17)
While I have, in some cases, bared my views throughout the explication of
this tension between “theory” and formalism, I will here summarise this debate, and
my position within it. Theorists warn against formalism as they disapprove of its
nonadherence to an ideological position, its failure to account for receptive links
outside of immediate aesthetic response – assuming it merely traces pattern and form
and does not engage with the gathering of narrative “meaning” – and its inherent
inability to gauge value. Formalists, in turn, largely attempt to point out the flaws in
the methodological model of theorists, and seem to fail to fully respond to these
accusations. The gap in the argument appears to be that, by virtue of their individual
methodologies, theorists make broad, overarching accusations to come to grips with
the scope of the ideals (or lack thereof) of the formalists, whereas the formalists
dissect the minutiae of the arguments of the theorists. For example, see this claim
made by Ryan and Kellner:
The representational conventions include form as well as subject matter.
The formal conventions – narrative closure, image continuity,
nonreflexive camera, character identification, voyeuristic objectification,
sequential editing, causal logic, dramatic motivation, shot centering,
frame balance, realist intelligibility, etc. – help to instill ideology by
creating an illusion that what happens on the screen is a neutral recording
of objective events, rather than a construct operating from a certain point
of view. (1988; 1)