Noël Burch

Who is Noël Burch?

Noël Burch is an American film critic, who moved to France at a young age, famous for his contribution of commonly used terms by film scholars and for his theories compiled in books such as Theory of Film Practice or La lucarne de L'Infini.

Burch's major contribution to the history of film criticism isn't his definition of classical Hollywood film tropes, which had already been done, but rather his focus on early cinema. There, he identified a set of film styles that he would identify as the "Primitive Mode of Representation." In doing so, he found what he thought was a "purer" cinema, one untainted by what he considered bourgeois ideology.

Whether his ideology informed his understanding of film style, or vice versa, his Theory Of Film Practice is one of the key works in the canon of Western film criticism.

In the foreword to the 1980 edition of Theory Of Film Practice, Burch repudiated some of his earlier theories, expanding on his younger self's limited conception of formalism as applied to the film arts. But, Burch insists the reader "sift out the nuggets that may still lie among the dross".

His book To The Distant Observer, while often criticized as a self-serving and selective idealization of Japanese aesthetics in the service of Burch's own anti-structuralist, Marxist ideology, remains the most robust history of Japanese cinema written by a Westerner.