The best books on film theory for beginners start with how films are made to work on us (shots, editing, sound, narrative) and only then move to the big arguments about realism, spectatorship and ideology. For most readers that means beginning with David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's Film Art: An Introduction or James Monaco's How to Read a Film, then taking a guided tour of theory through Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener's Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses or Robert Stam's Film Theory: An Introduction. After that, go to the sources themselves: André Bazin, Sergei Eisenstein and Laura Mulvey are short enough to read in an evening and still argued over today.
What film theory actually is
Film theory is easy to confuse with reviewing, but they are different jobs. The Wikipedia overview of film theory describes it as a set of scholarly approaches that began in the 1920s by asking what the essential attributes of moving pictures are, and that now offers frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers and society. It is distinct from film criticism and film history, though the three constantly borrow from one another.
That definition explains why beginners struggle. A reviewer asks whether a film works; a theorist asks what a film is and what it does to the person watching. The questions are abstract, so the best introductory books anchor them in scenes you can replay. A good test when browsing: open any chapter at random and see whether the author points to a specific shot, cut or sound within the first page or two.
Start with film form
Film Art – An Introduction by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
If you buy one book, this is the usual choice. The authors describe it on their own book page as a survey of film as an art form aimed at undergraduates and general readers, covering types of film, narrative and non-narrative form, basic techniques and strategies for writing about films. It first appeared in 1979, published by McGraw-Hill, and has been revised many times; David Bordwell's Wikipedia entry notes it was in its 12th edition by 2019 and is still used in introductory courses. Check the publisher for the current edition before buying, though an older second-hand copy teaches the same core vocabulary.
Two things make it especially useful for self-study. The same page hosts free film analyses dropped from earlier editions, such as a close reading of the sound in Christopher Nolan's The Prestige from the 10th edition (2012), so you can see the method at work without paying. And the authors' long-running blog, Observations on film art, applies the same approach to new releases. Bordwell, who taught for most of his career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, died in February 2024; Thompson co-wrote the book and the blog with him.
The caveat is density. Read one chapter, then watch something and apply it, rather than reading straight through.
How to Read a Film by James Monaco
James Monaco (1942 to 2019) was an American critic, publisher and teacher who also founded Baseline, an early online entertainment database. His How to Read a Film, published by Oxford University Press, first appeared in 1977, and the latest revision listed in his bibliography dates from 2009. Its full title in later editions, How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, and Beyond, signals a wider net than Film Art, which suits readers who want context as well as technique. The breadth is also the drawback: it can feel sprawling if you only want to learn how scenes are built.
Survey textbooks with many voices
Introduction to Film Studies, edited by Jill Nelmes
Some readers prefer a team of specialists to a single author. Routledge's page for the fifth edition (2012, 564 pages) describes a textbook that presents theories and theorists "from Formalism to Feminism, from Eisenstein to Deleuze", with each chapter written by a subject specialist, a foreword by Bill Nichols and 150 colour stills. Chapters run from film form and narrative and spectatorship to documentary, animation, British cinema, Indian cinema and Soviet montage, with case studies including District 9, Grizzly Man and Made in Dagenham. It is more academic in tone than Bordwell and Thompson, and it works best once you have a little practice in looking closely.
Guided tours of theory itself
Film Theory – An Introduction through the Senses by Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener
This is the most original of the beginner surveys. Instead of marching through schools in date order, the authors build the book around the relationship between screen and spectator. According to Routledge's description of the second edition (2015, 246 pages), it uses seven configurations, moving from "exterior" to "interior": cinema as window and frame, door, mirror, eye, skin, ear and brain. Along the way it covers neo-realist, modernist, psychoanalytic, apparatus, phenomenological and cognitivist theories, with a final chapter on digital cinema and examples including Her and Gravity. Elsaesser, a German film historian who taught at the University of Amsterdam, died in 2019.
Film Theory – An Introduction by Robert Stam
Robert Stam, Professor in Cinema Studies at New York University, wrote what remains one of the clearest single-author histories of the field. The Wiley-Blackwell listing gives the paperback as December 1999 and 400 pages, and describes coverage of realism, illusionism, narration, point of view, style, semiotics, psychoanalysis and multiculturalism, plus theorists such as Barthes, Lacan and Bakhtin. It is particularly good for readers coming from literature, because it keeps comparing film and literary criticism. Some of its contemporary examples are now dated; the conceptual map is not.
Classic texts to read next
Introductions are a means to an end. Once a survey has given you the vocabulary, read a few of the arguments it summarises.
- André Bazin, What Is Cinema? Bazin co-founded Cahiers du cinéma in 1951 and argued that realism is cinema's most important function, favouring deep focus and wide shots over montage and leaving interpretation to the spectator. A selection of his essays appeared in English in two volumes in the late 1960s and early 1970s and became a staple of film courses; Timothy Barnard's newer annotated translations followed in 2009, and a fuller collection, André Bazin: Selected Writings 1943–1958, in 2018.
- Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form and The Film Sense. The director of Battleship Potemkin set out his ideas on montage in these books, arguing that the "collision" of shots creates meaning and emotion. The Eisenstein entry on Wikipedia lists his methods of montage: metric, rhythmic, tonal, overtonal and intellectual. Reading him beside Bazin gives you the oldest argument in the field in its sharpest form.
- Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". This 1975 essay introduced the idea of the male gaze to film theory, building on John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972). It was published in Screen, the British journal of film and television studies now based at the University of Glasgow and published by Oxford University Press, which was especially influential in the 1970s.
Each of these is short. Read one, then rewatch a film it discusses and decide where you agree.
How to read theory without getting lost
Theory books reward a slower rhythm than novels. A routine that works for many self-taught readers:
- Read one chapter or essay a week.
- Watch one film that week and pick a single scene.
- Write a half-page response applying one idea, in your own words.
- Note one question the reading did not answer.
Keep a viewing log with the title, the timecode of the scene and the concept you tested. Over a few months it becomes a personal map of which ideas explain which films. Beware the common beginner habit of collecting labels. Calling a film "Bazinian" or "Brechtian" means little unless you can point to the long take or the alienating device that justifies the word. Critics disagree constantly, and that disagreement is usually productive rather than a sign that one side is simply wrong. For examples of film criticism written for general readers, see the work of the film critic and documentary director Maria Bregman, and our own guides at Artculture.uk.
Libraries and other ways in
You do not need to buy everything. In London, the BFI Reuben Library at BFI Southbank is open to everyone free of charge, holding books, journals and digitised material on film and television, with a digital scans service for those who cannot visit. The BFI notes that the library will be closed on Tuesday 3 November 2026 for a venue hire (checked October 2026). University libraries and public library inter-library loans are other good routes to the more expensive textbooks.
Older editions are a sensible economy. Film theory changes slowly at the introductory level, and a used copy of Film Art or How to Read a Film a few editions behind will teach the same basics. Spend the saving on the films.
Photo: Rodhullandemu, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
