While teaching a Film Studies course online to a batch from Bangalore—filling in as a replacement but taking the plunge like a full-time cinephile—I turned to Dudley Andrew’s The Major Film Theories. And oh, what a cornerstone it turned out to be. If film history is a cinematic galaxy, this book is the telescope that brings its brightest constellations into focus.
Andrew doesn’t merely list theories—he animates them. From the metaphysical realism of Bazin to the montage dialectics of Eisenstein, from the psychological underpinnings of Münsterberg to the political force of Screen Theory, this book charts a journey across the philosophies that shaped how we watch and think about films. For my students, it was like being handed the decoder ring to cinema’s secret language. For me, it was like catching up with old rebels and visionaries in a smoky Parisian café—some I agreed with, some I argued with, but all deeply necessary.
The beauty of the book lies in its clarity. Andrew writes not to intimidate but to invite. And as a teacher stepping into a role mid-course, I needed exactly that—something rigorous yet accessible, something that would push students’ minds without burying them in jargon.
In the classroom (Zoom-room?), this text became our common ground. It sparked debates, led to rabbit-hole explorations, and helped us triangulate between art, ideology, and audience. Even now, I think of it as a cinematic compass—pointing to where we’ve come from, and hinting at where we could still go.
A textbook? Sure. But also, in its own way, a manifesto