Breaking the Glass Armor

Here Kristin Thompson 'defamiliarizes' the reader with eleven different films. Developing the technique formulated in her Eisenstein's 'Ivan the Terrible', she clearly demonstrates the flexibility of the neoformalist approach. She argues that critics often use cut-and -dried methods and choose films that easily fit those methods. Neoformalism, on the other hand, encourages the critic to deal with each film differently and to modify his or her analytical assumptions continually.