New formalism

Neoformalism

Keywords: David Bordwell, Russian Formalists, defamiliarization, story/= form of the story (narration?)

Bordwell has also been associated with a methodological approach known as neoformalism, although this approach has been more extensively written about by Kristin Thompson.^[2] Neoformalism is an approach to film analysis based on an observation first made by the literary theorists known as the Russian Formalists: that there is a distinction between a story and the form that conveys the story. For example, in a detective story, the murder comes at the beginning of the chain of events, but we find out the details about the murder at the end of the film, not the beginning. Much of neoformalism deals with the idea of 'defamiliarization' which is the general neoformalist term for the basic purpose of art in our lives: to show us familiar objects or concepts in a manner that encourages us to look at them in a new way.

Neoformalists reject many assumptions and methodologies made by other schools of film study, particularly hermeneutic (interpretive) approaches, among which he counts Lacanian psychoanalysis and certain variations of post-structuralism. In Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, Bordwell and co-editor Noël Carroll argue against these types of approaches, which they claim act as "Grand Theories" that use films to confirm pre-determined theoretical frameworks, rather than attempting to do middle-level research that can actually illuminate how films work. Bordwell and Carroll coined the term "SLAB theory" to refer to theories that use the ideas of Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, and/or Barthes. Many film scholars have criticized neoformalism, notably Slavoj Žižek, of whom Bordwell has himself been a long-time critic.^[3] Their criticism is generally not based on any internal incosistencies in neoformalism; rather, they argue that neoformalism is an overly limited approach that does not incorporate cultural approaches.