The fourth edition of this classic resource is updated to illustrate the most recent approaches in film theory, including semiotic and structuralist imperatives, Marxist historical and Freudian psychoanalytic analysis, and feminist and deconstructionist views, and each section has been revised to show the impact of new thinking on matters such as film language, the film medium, and the film artist. More than half of the contents are new, providing a broad survey of thinking about film over the past eight decades. A comprehensive text for students of film, it is also an invaluable resource for courses in semiotics and modern culture and media.
I. Film Language
VSEVOLOD PUDOVKIN From Film Technique
[On Editing]
SERGEI EISENSTEIN From Film Form
Beyond the Shot [The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram]
The Dramaturgy of Film Form [The Dialectical Approach to Film Form]
ANDRE BAZIN From What Is Cinema?
The Evolution of the Language of Cinema
BRIAN HENDERSON Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style
CHRISTIAN METZ From Film Language
Some Points in the Semiotics of the Cinema
Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film
GILBERT HARMAN Semiotics and the Cinema: Metz and Wollen
STEPHEN PRINCE The Discourse of Pictures: Iconicity and Film Studies
DANIEL DAYAN The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema
WILLIAM ROTHMAN Against "The System of the Suture"
KAJA SILVERMAN From The Subject of Semiotics
[On Suture]
NICK BROWNE The Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach
II. Film and Reality
SIEGFRIED KRACAUER From Theory of Film
Basic Concepts
SIEGFRIED KRACAUER From From Caligari to Hitler
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
ANDRE BAZIN From What is Cinema?
The Ontology of the Photographic Image
The Myth of Total Cinema
De Sica: Metteur-en-scene
RUDOLF ARNHEIM From Film as Art
The Complete Film
MAYA DEREN Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality
STAN BRAKHAGE From Metaphors on Vision
ROBERT STAM AND LOUISE SPENCE Colonialism, Racism, and Representation: An Introduction
CHRISTINE GLEDHILL Recent Developments in Feminist Criticism
III. The Film Medium: Image and Sound
ERWIN PANOFSKY Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures
SIEGFRIED KRACAUER From Theory of Film
The Establishment of Physical Existence
BELA BALASZ From Theory of the Film
The Close-up
The Face of Man
RUDOLF ARNHEIM From Film as Art
Film and Reality
The Making of a Film
NOEL CARROLL From Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory
The Specificity Thesis
GERALD MAST From Film/Cinema/Movie
Projection
STANLEY CAVELL From The World Viewed
Photograph and Screen
Audience, Actor, and Star
Types; Cycles as Genres
Ideas of Origin
JEAN-LOUIS BAUDRY Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus
CHRISTIAN METZ Aural Objects
SERGEI EISENSTEIN, VSEVELOD PUDOVKIN, AND GRIGORI ALEXANDROV Statement on Sound
MARY ANN DOANE The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space
JOHN BELTON Technology and Aesthetics of Film Sound
JOHN ELLIS From Visible Fictions
Broadcast TV as Sound and Image
IV. Film Narrative and Other Arts
HUGO MUNSTERBERG From The Film: A Psychological Study
The Means of the Photoplay
ANDRE BAZIN From What is Cinema?
Theater and Cinema
LEO BRAUDY From The World in a Frame
Acting: Stage vs. Screen
SERGEI EISENSTEIN From Dickens, Griffith and Ourselves [Dickens, Griffith, and Film Today]
SEYMOUR CHATMAN What Novels Can Do That Films Can't (and Vice Versa)
DUDLEY ANDREW From Conceps in Film Theory
Adaptation
TOM GUNNING Narrative Discourse and the Narrator System
SEYMOUR CHATMAN From Coming to Terms
The Cinematic Narrator
KRISTIN THOMPSON The Concept of Cinematic Excess
PETER WOLLEN Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d'Est
V. The Film Artist
ANDREW SARRIS Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962
PETER WOLLEN From Signs and Meaning in the Cinema
The Auteur Theory
ROLAND BARTHES The Face of Garbo
JOHN ELLIS From Visible Fictions
Stars as Cinematic Phenomenon
ROBERT C. ALLEN From Film History: Theory and Practice
The Role of the Star in Film History [Joan Crawford]
MOLLY HASKELL From From Reverence to Rape
Female Stars of the 1940s
From Women and their Sexuality in the New Film
JOAN MELLEN From Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film
The Mae West Nobody Knows
MIRIAM HANSEN Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification
Valentino and Female Spectatorship
THOMAS SCHATZ From The Genius of the System
"The Whole Equation of Pictures"
VI. Film Genres
LEO BRAUDY From The World in a Frame
Genre: The Conventions of Connection
RICK ALTMAN A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre
Film Genre and the Genre Film
ROBERT WARSHOW Movie Chronicle: The Westerner
ROBIN WOOD Ideology, Genre, Auteur
BRUCE KAWIN The Mummy's Pool
TANIA MODLESKI The Terror of Pleasure: The Contemporary Horror Film and Postmodern Theory
LINDA WILLIAMS Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess
DAVID BORDWELL The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice
VII. Film: Psychology, Society, and Ideology
WALTER BENJAMIN The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
JEAN-LUC COMOLLI AND JEAN NARBONI Cinema/Ideology/Criticism
JEAN-LOUIS BAUDRY The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema
NOEL CARROLL From Mystifying Movies
Jean-Louis Baudry and "The Apparatus"
PARKER TYLER From Magic and Myth of the Movies
Preface
CHRISTIAN METZ From The Imaginary Signifier
Identification, Mirror
The Passion for Perceiving
Disavowal, Fetishism
TOM GUNNING An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator
LAURA MULVEY Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
MANTHIA DIAWARA Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance