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The multiplicity of perspectives, theories, and approaches to film study is frequently quite confusing to a newcomer to the field. The practical difficulty of comprehending the sophisticated and sometimes obscure terminology, concepts, and ideas can be daunting and is not easily conducive to what Dewey once referred to as "collateral learning"-the learning of how to learn. Neo-Formalism offers an approach that respects the learner's need for cognitive competence and aesthetic development. It recognizes film as being more than a medium for communicating meaning or for purely passive entertainment or contemplation. Rather, film is assumed capable of encouraging active, nonpractical interaction, of renewing perception, of rearticulating feeling, and of rationalizing and evaluating experience. Students' aesthetic understanding can be enhanced through film's privileging structures, materials, cultural articulations, and processes of defamiliarization and through an educative process that is both reflective and reflexive. It should be a truism, though sadly it is not, that learning a subject or a discipline constitutes an inquiry, a moving toward and beyond, a creative enterprise, an overcoming of existing and restrictive thought processes, values, and modes of conduct. The Neo-Formalist approach to film aesthetics offers certain procedural principles from which an inquiry may begin and the nature of the subject created or renewed. Film study often draws upon a variety of disciplines, and its interdisciplinary identity mirrors the somewhat eclectic methodology of Neo-Formalist film analysis, for what it addresses is what P. H. Hirst would call a field rather than a form of knowledge-something distinguished by its subject matter rather than by a logically distinct mode of expression.
Neo-Formalism is an approach that allows the film student/analyst to become affectively and cognitively engaged with form and meaning. It is an approach to the critical analysis of film text that aims not only to ensure the development of new and increasingly sophisticated viewing skills but also, through the process of defamiliarization, to nurture a strategic awareness of form as a modality of expression. The Renaissance concept of imitation may fruitfully be retrieved in this context, for as Gombrich noted "imitation" is at the heart of artistic development and itself offers opportunities for a genealogical exploration of film form and aesthetics. Neo-Formalism allows for this as it does not abstract the aesthetic experience of...