A remarkable continuation of Dudley Andrew's classic, The Major Film Theories, this work focuses on the key concepts in film study: perception, representation, signification, narrative structure, adaptation, evaluation, identification, figuration, and interpretation. Beginning with a lucid introductory chapter on the current state of film theory, Andrew goes on to build an overall view of film, presenting his own ideas on each concept, and giving a sense of the interdependence of these concepts. By providing lively explanations of theories that involve perceptual psychology and structuralism,...

Vera Dika explores the reuse of images, plots and genres of film history from a broad range of critical perspectives. Examining works of art and film that resist the pull of the past, Dika provides an in-depth analysis within a variety of media, including performance, photography, Punk film, and examples from mainstream American and European cinema. Her study analyzes avant-garde art work within the context of contemporary mainstream film practice, as well as in relationship to their historical moment.

Inside Soviet Film Satire: Laughter with a Lash is a lively collection of sixteen original essays by Soviet, American, and Canadian scholars and film commentators. It is the first in-depth examination of an important genre within the Soviet film tradition. From its origins, humor and satire have been closely linked in Soviet cinema. Nowhere in this tradition is there the pure comic genre typified in the West in films by Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton; by contrast, Soviet comedy can best be described as "laughter with a lash." Films made during the early years of the communist regime...

This interdisciplinary study of recurrent themes in German cinema as it has developed since the early twentieth century focuses on pertinent films of the pre- and post-World War II eras. The author explores the nature of expressionism, which is generally agreed to have ended with the advent of sound, and its persistence in the styles of such modern masters of film noir as Orson Welles and Ingmar Bergman. In considering the possibility of homologies between the necessary silence of pre-sound cinema and the widespread modernist aspiration to an aesthetic of silence, Coates relates theories of...

Another Frank Capra offers a new interpretation of the great Hollywood director beyond the patriotic sentimentalist or the cynical opportunist that he has been taken for. Often cast as a cinematic simpleton or primitive, Capra's exploitation of the stylistic and narrative resources of cinema was, in fact, extremely self-conscious and adventurous in ways typical of artistic modernism. His modernism is also evident in his repeated and strong identification with female characters. Informed by recent work in genre theory and feminist psychology, Another Frank Capra shows Capra to be a...

Cinema is a dominant force in the lives of many people living in Asia, a continent that has a number of distinguished national film industries. A concept central to much of Asian film production is melodrama. This path-breaking study examines the importance of melodrama in the film traditions of Japan, India, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Australia. Exploring the various ways that melodrama operates with theoretical sophistication, the various essays contained in this volume shed light on the different traditions of Asian cinema, as well as on the wider cultural discourse in which...

Documentary Film Classics offers close readings on a number of major films, such as Nanook of the North, Land Without Bread, Night and Fog, Chronicle of a Summer and Don't Look Back. Spanning the history of the documentary film tradition, William Rothman analyzes the philosophical and historical issues and themes implicit in these works. Designed to guide film students through the "texts" of a wide range of documentaries, his readings also focus on the achievements of these works as films per se.

Theorizing the Moving Image brings together a selection of essays written by one of the leading critics of film over the past two decades. In this volume, Noel Carroll examines theoretical aspects of film and television through penetrating analyses of such genres as soap opera, documentary, and comedy, and such topics as sight gags, film metaphor, point-of-view editing, and movie music. Throughout, individual films are considered in depth. Carroll's essays, moreover, represent the cognitivist turn in film studies, containing in-depth criticism of existing approaches to film theory, and...

John Huston's Filmmaking offers an analysis of the life and work of one of the greatest American independent filmmakers. Always visually exciting, Huston's films sensitively portray humankind in all its incarnations, chronicling the attempts by protagonists to conceive and articulate their identities. In this study, Lesley Brill shows Huston's films to be far more than formulaic adventures of masculine failure, arguing instead that they demonstrate the close connection among humanity, the natural world, and divinity.

Projecting Illusion offers a systematic analysis of the impression of reality in the cinema and the pleasure it provides the film spectator. Film affords an especially compelling aesthetic experience that can be considered as a form of illusion akin to the experience of daydream and dream. Examining the concept of illusion and its relationship to fantasy in the experience of visual representation, Richard Allen situates his explanation within the context of an analytical criticism of contemporary film theory.