Cinema Studies

This is the essential guide for anyone interested in film. Now in its second edition, the text has been completely revised and expanded to meet the needs of today's students and film enthusiasts. Some 150 key genres, movements, theories and production terms are explained and analyzed with depth and clarity. Entries include:* auteur theory* Blaxploitation* British New Wave* feminist film theory* intertextuality* method acting* pornography* Third World Cinema* Vampire movies.

Film Studies: The Basics is a compelling guide to the study of cinema in all its forms. This second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to take account of recent scholarship, the latest developments in the industry and the explosive impact of new technologies. Core topics covered include: The history, technology and art of cinema Theories of stardom, genre and film-making The movie industry from Hollywood to Bollywood Who does what on a film set Complete with film stills, end-of-chapter summaries and a substantial glossary, Film Studies: The Basics is the ideal introduction to those new to the study of cinema.

In what ways do films influence and interact with society? What social forces determine the kinds of movies that get made? How do movies reinforce—and sometimes overturn—social norms? As societies evolve, do the films that were once considered ‘great’ slip into obscurity? Which ones? Why? These questions, and many others like them, represent the mainstream of scholarly film studies today. In Engaging Cinema, Bill Nichols offers the first book for introductory film students that tackles these topics head-on. Published in a handy 'trade paperback' format, Engaging Cinema is inexpensive and utterly unique in the field—a perfect complement to or replacement for standard film texts.

This collection of essays foregrounds the work of filmmakers in theorizing and comparing postcolonial conditions, recasting debates in both cinema and postcolonial studies. Postcolonial cinema is presented, not as a rigid category, but as an optic through which to address questions of postcolonial historiography, geography, subjectivity, and epistemology. Current circumstances of migration and immigration, militarization, economic exploitation, racial and religious conflict, enactments of citizenship, and cultural self-representation have deep roots in colonial/postcolonial/neocolonial histories. Contributors deeply engage the tense asymmetries bequeathed to the contemporary world by the multiple,diverse, and overlapping histories of European, Soviet, U.S., and multi-national imperial ventures. With interdisciplinary expertise, they discover and explore the conceptual temporalities and spatialities of postcoloniality, with an emphasis on the politics of form, the ‘postcolonial aesthetics’ through which filmmakers challenge themselves and their viewers to move beyond national and imperial imaginaries. Contributors include: Jude G. Akudinobi, Kanika Batra, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Shohini Chaudhuri, Julie F. Codell, Sabine Doran, Hamish Ford, Claudia Hoffmann, Anikó Imre, Priya Jaikumar, Mariam B. Lam, Paulo de Medeiros, Sandra Ponzanesi, Richard Rice, Mireille Rosello and Marguerite Waller.

Inventing Film Studies offers original and provocative insights into the institutional and intellectual foundations of cinema studies. Many scholars have linked the origins of the discipline to late-1960s developments in the academy such as structuralist theory and student protest. Yet this collection reveals the broader material and institutional forces—both inside and outside of the university—that have long shaped the field. Beginning with the first investigations of cinema in the early twentieth century, this volume provides detailed examinations of the varied social, political, and intellectual milieus in which knowledge of cinema has been generated. The contributors explain how multiple instantiations of film study have had a tremendous influence on the methodologies, curricula, modes of publication, and professional organizations that now constitute the university-based discipline. Extending the historical insights into the present, contributors also consider the directions film study might take in changing technological and cultural environments. Inventing Film Studies shows how the study of cinema has developed in relation to a constellation of institutions, technologies, practices, individuals, films, books, government agencies, pedagogies, and theories. Contributors illuminate the connections between early cinema and the social sciences, between film programs and nation-building efforts, and between universities and U.S. avant-garde filmmakers. They analyze the evolution of film studies in relation to the Museum of Modern Art, the American Film Council movement of the 1940s and 1950s, the British Film Institute, influential journals, cinephilia, and technological innovations past and present. Taken together, the essays in this collection reveal the rich history and contemporary vitality of film studies. Contributors: Charles R. Acland, Mark Lynn Anderson, Mark Betz, Zoë Druick, Lee Grieveson, Stephen Groening, Haden Guest, Amelie Hastie, Lynne Joyrich, Laura Mulvey, Dana Polan, D. N. Rodowick, Philip Rosen, Alison Trope, Haidee Wasson, Patricia White, Sharon Willis, Peter Wollen, Michael Zryd

An introduction to feminist film theory as a discourse from the early seventies to the present. McCabe traces the broad ranging theories produced by feminist film scholarship, from formalist readings and psychoanalytical approaches to debates initiated by cultural studies, race and queer theory.

This work will become not only the newly definitive study of Kurosawa, but will redefine the field of Japanese cinema studies, particularly as the field exists in the west.

Now in its sixth edition, this essential guide for students provides accessible definitions of a comprehensive range of genres, movements, world cinemas, theories and production terms. This fully revised and updated book includes new topical entries that explore areas such as film and the environmental crisis; streaming and new audience consumption; diversity and intersectionality; questions related to race and representation; the Black Lives Matter movement; and New Wave Cinemas of Eastern European countries. Further new entries include accented/exilic cinema, border-cinema, the oppositional gaze, sonic sound and Black westerns. Existing entries have been updated, including discussion of #MeToo, and more contemporary film examples have been added throughout. This is a must-have guide for any student starting out on this fascinating area of study and arguably the greatest art form of modern times.

Feminist Film Studies is a readable, yet comprehensive textbook for introductory classes in feminist film theory and criticism. Karen Hollinger provides an accessible overview of women’s representation and involvement in film, complemented by analyses of key texts that illustrate major topics in the field. Key areas include: a brief history of the development of feminist film theory the theorization of the male gaze and the female spectator women in genre films and literary adaptations the female biopic feminism and avant-garde and documentary film women as auteurs lesbian representation women in Third Cinema. Each chapter includes a "Films in Focus" section, which analyzes key texts related to the chapter’s major topic, including examples from classical Hollywood, world cinema, and the contemporary period. This book provides students in both film and gender/women’s studies with a clear introduction to the field of feminist film theory and criticism.

"Ladies and gentlemen: THIS IS CINERAMA." With these words, on September 30, 1952, the heavy red curtains in New York's Broadway Theatre opened on a panoramic Technicolor image of the Rockaways Playland Atom-Smasher Roller Coaster--and moviegoers were abruptly plunged into a new and revolutionary experience. The cinematic transformation heralded by this giddy ride was, however, neither as sudden nor as straightforward as it seemed. Widescreen Cinema leads us through the twists and turns and decades it took for film to change its shape and, along the way, shows how this fitful process reflects the vagaries of cultural history. Widescreen and wide-film processes had existed since the 1890s. Why, then, John Belton asks, did 35mm film become a standard? Why did a widescreen revolution fail in the 1920s but succeed in the 1950s? And why did movies shrink again in the 1960s, leaving us with the small screen multiplexes and mall cinemas that we know today? The answers, he discovers, have as much to do with popular notions of leisure time and entertainment as with technology. Beginning with film's progress from peepshow to projection in 1896 and focusing on crucial stages in film history, such as the advent of sound, Belton puts widescreen cinema into its proper cultural context. He shows how Cinerama, CinemaScope, Vista Vision, Todd-AO, and other widescreen processes marked significant changes in the conditions of spectatorship after World War 11 -and how the film industry itself sought to redefine those conditions. The technical, the economic, the social, the aesthetic -every aspect of the changes shaping and reshaping film comes under Belton's scrutiny as he reconstructs the complex history of widescreen cinema and relates this history to developments in mass-produced leisure-time entertainment in the twentieth century. Highly readable even at its most technical, this book illuminates a central episode in the evolution of cinema and, in doing so, reveals a great deal about the shifting fit between film and society.