A polemical introduction to the avant-garde and experimental in film (including making and viewing), Materialist Film is a highly original, thought-provoking book.

Thirty-seven short chapters work through a series of concepts which will enable the reader to deal imaginatively with the contradictory issues produced by experimental film. Each concept is explored in conjunction with specific films by Andy Warhol, Malcolm LeGrice, Lis Rhodes, Jean-Luc Goddard, Rose Lowder, Kurt Kren, and others.

Peter Gidal draws on important politico-aesthetic writings, and uses some of...

The flashback is a crucial moment in a film narrative, one that captures the cinematic expression of memory, and history. This author's wide-ranging account of this single device reveals it to be an important way of creating cinematic meaning.

Taking as her subject all of film history, the author traces out the history of the flashback, illuminating that history through structuralist narrative theory, psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity, and theories of ideology.

From the American silent film era and the European and Japanese avant-garde of the twenties, from film noir...

This is a study of nine key film-makers who came into prominence in the early '70s: Claude Chabrol, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lindsay Anderson, Stanley Kubrick, Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey, Satyajit Ray, Miklos Jancso, and Dusan Makavejev - representing seven film-producing countries. In this book John Russell Taylor does for the 1970s what his earlier book Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear did for the 1960s: he disentangles some of the major talents from the minor, and subjects them to close critical scrutiny, documenting their careers, detailing their development as individual creators, and...

This text outlines what sociologists need to know of the nature of communication and of mass culture, while also looking in some empirical detail at the workings of the Hollywood community and the psychology of the star system. It explores trends such as attempts to adapt semiology and psycholinguistics to our understanding of film 'language', using them to develop a paradigm for film analysis. The book goes on to offer a guide to comprehension of the relation between cinema and society through detailed analysis of the relation between the German silent cinema and its social context and...

This book examines the development of cinematic form and culture in Russia, from its late nineteenth-century beginnings as a fairground attraction to the early post-Revolutionary years.

The author traces the changing perceptions of cinema and its social transition from a modernist invention to a national art form. He explores reactions to the earliest films from actors, novelists, poets, writers and journalists. His richly detailed study of the physical elements of cinematic performance includes the architecture and illumination of the cinema foyer, the speed of projection and film...

Since the cinema first began to be taken seriously as an art form, there has been a constant debate on the question: who is the real creator of the film, the writer or the director? This study of a group of key film-makers in the sixties suggests that during this decade there was an emergence of a generation of film-makers who conceived a whole film in their minds just as an architect conceives a whole cathedral or a composer a whole symphony.

The book presents detailed critical studies of the work of six commanding figures in the international cinema: four who have made their major...

Taking the subject chronologically from the 1890s to when the book was initially published in 1989, this book analyses those films specifically concerned with working-class conditions and struggle, and discusses them within the context of the debate on the social significance of the feature film. It concentrates on films which depict labour organizations and political activists, as well as life in working-class communities and actors with working-class identities such as James Cagney.

Reviews of the original edition:

'...fills a gap in film studies...the study of...

A historian's view of the relationship between American history and the American film industry, this book is a witty and perceptive account of Hollywood and its films in the years from the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe to the end of the war in Korea, It describes how film makers and their industry were shaped by and responded to the strong political and social stimuli of wartime America.

The author examines the recurring question of whether the movies were a reflection of the society in which they were produced, or whether by virtue of their undeniable propaganda power...

Semiotics offers a systematic approach to analysing the stylistic structure of film. When this study was originally published in 1983 this was a recent addition to the methods of film study and it presents an explanation of film semiotics with direct application to comparative film research. It takes as its representative subject one trilogy of films and applies semiology, with careful textual analysis. The book begins with a basic introduction to semiotics and the ideas of Christian Metz on cinesemiotics. It then presents a syntagmatic analysis of each of the three Dollars films, with an...