Take it from a cinema studies grad: Film theory's not for everyone, but there are riches within the jargon

"Two thumbs down!" My friend Alexander Horwath, director of the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, isn't a guy who waves around his thumbs around casually -- much less a man given to quoting Roger Ebert. But Alex was fuming, his double-digit antipathy directed at an article by David Weddle published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine July 13 with the title "Lights, Camera, Action. Marxism, Semiotics, Narratology."

In the article, Weddle's daughter, a film studies major at UC Santa Barbara, tells her dad that she has received a C on one of her finals. Baffled, Weddle worries he's not getting "a fair return on my investment" -- he had, after all, spent "more than $73,000" on her college education. The problem, Weddle soon discovers, is contemporary film studies, a discipline overrun with radicals, who pushed their liberal social agendas via an intellectual smorgasbord of Marx, formalism, semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalysis and narrative study over the apparently discredited auteur theory, which isn't really a theory -- but no matter.

Weddle's daughter wanted a career in film but instead was stuck in a department where, as the UCSB Web site states, the "primary emphasis is on film history, theory and analysis." Film studies majors become "familiar" with what the site calls "the basic tools of filmmaking," and some students can take courses in screenwriting and production, but this isn't the place to go if you're strictly interested in the nuts and bolts of moviemaking.

Expressing concern over his daughter's theory books, with their arcane language that could get her "laughed off" a Hollywood lot, Weddle wondered if there was a "hidden method to these film theorists' apparent madness." Or was Ebert correct when he threw down the gauntlet and declared to Weddle that "film theory has nothing to do with film"?

There are those who will always resent the idea that something as ostensibly frivolous as movies is worthy of intellectual engagement. Readers have always told me to "stick to the film" and leave my opinions and politics out of the mix. They don't want to know that movies are more than actors and camera angles but are also agents of ideology and that movies tell us certain things about ourselves that we can learn nowhere else.

"I just like going to the movies for fun," a friend said when I was in the first flush of my romance with film criticism and theory. "I don't want to think about them." I liked going to the movies for fun too. But I didn't understand why grooving on movies and thinking about them should be mutually exclusive pleasures. I still don't.