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Film theory debates the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large.

Film theory is about the cinema as a medium rather than about individual films, although theorists often use individual films as examples in generating their theories and film theory is frequently applied to discussions of individual films. Film theory is generally distinguished from film criticism, which concentrates on evaluating individual films. Film theory can also be distinguished from film analysis, which aims to describe how specific features of a film relate to each other in the structure of a film (or body of films) as a whole. Thus, a film theory might note that a film is unlike reality in that a viewer cannot control what he or she sees; a film analysis might note that a specific shot restricts the viewer's knowledge of a future plot point; and film criticism might praise the cinematographer's use of framing to increase suspense.

In some respects, French philosopher Henri Bergson's Matière et Mémoire anticipated the development of film theory at a time (1896) that the cinema was just being born as a new medium.^{[citation needed]} He commented on the need for new ways of thinking about movement, and coined the terms "image-temps" (images-as-time) and "image-mouvement" (images-as-movement). However, in his 1906 essay L'illusion cinématographique (in L'évolution créatrice), he rejects film as an exemplification of what he had in mind.^{[citation needed]} Nonetheless, decades later, in Cinéma I & II (1983-1985), the philosopher Gilles Deleuze takes Matière et Mémoire as the basis of his philosophy of film and revisits Bergson's concepts—combining them with the semiotics of Charles Peirce.^{[citation needed]}

The Italian futurist Ricciotto Canudo is considered to be the first true theorist of the cinema. He published The Birth of the Seventh Art in 1911.^{[citation needed]} Another early attempt was The Photoplay (1916) by the psychologist Hugo Münsterberg.^{[citation needed]}

So-called classical film theory (from the 1910s through, approximately, 1970) arose in the silent era and was mostly concerned with defining the crucial elements of the medium. It largely evolved from the works of directors like Germaine Dulac, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, Paul Rotha and film theorists like Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs and Siegfried Kracauer. These individuals emphasized how film differed from reality, on how it might be considered a valid art form.

In the years after World War II, the French film critic and theorist André Bazin reacted against this approach to the cinema—arguing that film's essence lay in its ability to mechanically reproduce reality not in its differences from reality. He also co-founded the highly influential Cahiers du cinéma. Cahiers was more concerned with film criticism than with film theory, but it was the birthplace of the auteur theory.

Cahiers' young critics, such as directors-to-be François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, were some of the first to take popular Hollywood cinema seriously as an art form. Their fascination with Westerns and gangster films encouraged the development of genre theory.

In the 1960s and 1970s, film theory took up residence in academe, importing concepts from established disciplines like psychoanalysis, anthropology, literary theory, semiotics and linguistics—a tendency encouraged by the influential British journal, Screen, among others.

During the 1990s the digital revolution in image technologies has had an impact on film theory in various ways. There has been a refocus onto celluloid film's ability to capture an indexical image of a moment in time by theorists like Mary Ann Doane, Philip Rosen and Laura Mulvey. There has also been a historical revisiting of early cinema screenings, practices and spectatorship modes by writers Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen and Yuri Tsivian.

• Apparatus theory
• Auteur theory
• Feminist film theory
• Formalist film theory
• Marxist film theory
• Psychoanalytical film theory
• Socialist realism
• Screen theory
• Structuralist film theory

• Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
• André Bazin, What is Cinema? essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
• Francesco Casetti, Theories of Cinema, 1945-1990, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999.
• Stanley Kauffmann, Regarding Film: Criticism and Comment, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
• Bill Nichols, Representing Reality. Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
• Robert Stam, Film Theory: an introduction", Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000
• The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, Oxford University Press, 1998.

• Film journals and magazines
• Film
• American Studies in Britain
• Fictional film
• List of motion picture-related topics