The academic discipline of film studies has been heavily influenced by European thought, especially by several currents converging in postwar France, including semiotics, structuralism, and Marxism.

The study of linguistics and language models influenced film theory beginning in the 1970s. Semiotics (also called semiology) is the study of signs, which could include words, pictures, gestures, and a wide range of other systems of communication or perception. A sign is composed of a signifier, the spoken or written word, picture, or gesture, and a signified, the mental concept it evokes.

Narratology, the study of narrative forms, is a branch of structuralism that encompasses stories of all kinds, including films. Structuralist theorists reduce narrative to its most basic form: a beginning situation is disrupted, a hero takes action as a result, and a new equilibrium is reached at the end. Modernism, on the other hand, favors a more fragmented human subjectivity and a more open-ended narrative.

Some critical theories reject narrative based on an argument against the naturalization of conventions. One such ideological critique is Marxism. French Marxist Louis Althusser approaches the question of the nature of ideology—a systematic set of beliefs that is not necessarily conscious—with a new understanding of the structures of representation in order to explain how people come to accept ideas and conditions contrary to their interests.

Poststructuralism questions the rational methodology and fixed definitions that structuralists bring to their various objects of study, the assumption of objectivity, and the structuralist disregard for cultural and historical context.

Louis Althusser’s theoretical writing on how an individual comes to believe in ideology as “imaginary representation” refers to psychoanalysis and in particular to the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s definition of the imaginary. Film theorists likened Lacan’s theory of the illusionary mirror stage to the experience of viewing a film and “believing” in its world, which is also an illusion.

Apparatus theory explores the values built into film technology through the particular context of its historical development.

The study of how subjects interact with films and with the cinematic apparatus is known as the theory of spectatorship. Going to the movies gratifies our voyeurism (looking without being seen ourselves) and plays to our unconscious self-image of potency.

Feminist film theory often explores the representation of women in cinema. The objectification of the female image seems to solicit a possessive male gaze or female identification. British theorist and filmmaker Laura Mulvey’s famous article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” argues that the glamorous and desirable female image in film is also a potentially threatening vision of difference, or otherness, for male viewers.

Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender (LGBT) film theorists explore more fluid ways of understanding identity and posit that the gender of a member of the audience need not correspond with that of the character he or she finds most absorbing or most alluring. Audiences can read “against the grain” of intended or conventional meanings to satisfy their own desires and interests.

Cultural studies scrutinizes aspects of cinema embedded in the everyday lives of individuals or groups at particular historical junctures and in particular social contexts; it does not analyze individual texts or theorize about spectatorship in the abstract.

Reception theory focuses on how a film is received by audiences. An important component of reception is our response to stars, performers who become recognizable through their films or who bring celebrity to their roles. In addition to analyzing how a star’s image is composed from various elements—not only film appearances but also promotion, publicity, and critical commentary—theorists are interested in how audience reception helps define a star’s cultural meaning.

The concept of race intersects with the film experience on many different levels, raising questions about the possibilities for cross-racial identification and other aspects of spectatorship. Cultural studies models are flexible enough to address racial images, such as stereotypes, and their reception by diverse audiences, as well as how discourses of imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism, often related to racial representations, are embedded in film stories, genres, and star images.

Theories derived from philosophy and cognitive science have been used to address certain questions about film perception. Cognitivist film theory understands our response to film in terms of rational evaluation of visual and narrative cues. Based in psychological research, it advocates verifiable scientific approaches to studying film. Phenomenology stresses that any act of perception involves a mutuality of viewer and viewed and, when applied to film theory, places emphasis on the film experience as intersubjective and conscious.

The predominance of visual media is characteristic of the culture of postmodernism. Postmodernism has two primary definitions:

Stylistically, postmodern cinema represents history as nostalgia, as if the past were nothing more than a movie that could be quoted. Postmodernism also recognizes the reality of today’s increasing globalization and the role of new technologies in making the flow of images across the globe even easier.