Cinema & Media Studies
How a legendary woman from classical antiquity has come to embody the threat of transcendent beauty in movies and TV
How cable television upended American political life in the pursuit of profits and influence
A historical and theoretical investigation of the unexpected ways screen-based media protect and excite viewers’ fears and anxieties of the world
Essays on media systems and contemporary art by a leading theorist of modern visual culture
How a modern radio works, told through mathematics, history, and selected puzzles
An arresting illustrated history of twins in mythology, science, and visual culture
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, chosen by Tom Stoppard
"A revelation."—Marc Weingarten, Washington Post
How the urban spectator became the archetypal modern viewer and a central subject in late nineteenth-century French art
A groundbreaking examination of the “double” in modern and contemporary art
A richly illustrated history of the Gothic across a wide range of media, including architecture, literature, and film
A rich history of underwater filmmaking and how it has profoundly influenced the aesthetics of movies and public perception of the oceans
A powerful portrait of the greatest humanitarian emergency of our time, from the director of Human Flow
A bold new account of how celebrity works
How creative freedom, race, class, and gender shaped the rebellion of two visionary artists
A leading trans scholar and activist explores cultural representations of gender transition in the modern period
How New York’s Lower East Side inspired new ways of seeing America
An essential work of the cinematic history of the Weimar Republic by a leading figure of film criticism
From its first publication in 1992, Men, Women, and Chain Saws has offered a groundbreaking perspective on the creativity and influence of horror cinema since the mid-1970s. Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition...
The History of Italian Cinema is the most comprehensive guide to Italian film ever published. Written by the foremost scholar of Italian cinema and presented here for the first time in English, this landmark book traces the complete...
How war trauma haunted the films of Weimar Germany
Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation analyzes white fantasies of interracial desire in the history of popular American film. From the first interracial screen kiss of 1903, through the Production Code's nearly thirty-year ban on...
In An Accented Cinema, Hamid Naficy offers an engaging overview of an important trend--the filmmaking of postcolonial, Third World, and other displaced individuals living in the West. How their personal experiences of exile or diaspora...
This book examines the representation of blackness on television at the height of the southern civil rights movement and again in the aftermath of the Reagan-Bush years. In the process, it looks carefully at how television's ideological...
Gone with the Wind an inspiration for the American avant-garde? Mickey Mouse a crucial source for the development of cutting-edge intellectual and aesthetic ideas? As Greg Taylor shows in this witty and provocative book, the idea is not...
In this, the first comprehensive book on Liliana Cavani, Gaetana Marrone redraws the map of postwar Italian cinema to make room for this extraordinary filmmaker, whose representations of transgressive eroticism, spiritual questing, and...
Greek film director Theo Angelopoulos is one of the most influential and widely respected filmmakers in the world today, yet his films are still largely unknown to the American public. In the first book in English to focus on...
The Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa, who died at the age of 88, has been internationally acclaimed as a giant of world cinema. Rashomon, which won both the Venice Film Festival's grand prize and an Academy Award for best...
Famous for their stunts, gags, and images, Buster Keaton's silent films have enticed everyone from Hollywood movie fans to the surrealists, such as Dalí and Buñuel. Here Robert Knopf offers an unprecedented look at the wide-ranging...
From 1989 to 1991, Barry Dornfeld had an unusual double role on the crew of the major PBS documentary series Childhood. As a researcher for the series, he investigated the relationship between children and media. As an anthropologist...
David MacDougall is a pivotal figure in the development of ethnographic cinema and visual anthropology. As a filmmaker, he has directed in Africa, Australia, India, and Europe. His prize-winning films (many made jointly with his wife...
Just before World War II, French cinema reached a high point that has been dubbed the style of "poetic realism." Working with unforgettable actors like Jean Gabin and Arletty, directors such as Renoir, Carné, Gremillon, Duvivier, and...
The black man suffering at the hands of whites, the white woman sexually threatened by the black man. Both images have long been burned into the American conscience through popular entertainment, and today they exert a powerful and...
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
The official book behind the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley
Why is the U.S. motion picture industry concentrated in Hollywood and why does it remain there in the age of globalization? Allen Scott uses the tools of economic geography to explore these questions and to provide a number of highly...
The American musical has long provided an important vehicle through which writers, performers, and audiences reimagine who they are and how they might best interact with the world around them. Musicals are especially good at this...
Today's moviegoers and critics generally consider some Hollywood products--even some blockbusters--to be legitimate works of art. But during the first half century of motion pictures very few Americans would have thought to call an...
Cinema and opera have become intertwined in a variety of powerful and unusual ways. Vocal Apparitions tells the story of this fascinating intersection, interprets how it occurred, and explores what happens when opera is projected onto...
This path-breaking book reveals how Hollywood became "Hollywood" and what that meant for the politics of America and American film. Working-Class Hollywood tells the story of filmmaking in the first three decades of the twentieth...
Siegfried Kracauer has been misunderstood as a naïve realist, appreciated as an astute critic of early German film, and noticed as the interesting exile who exchanged letters with Erwin Panofsky. But he is most widely thought of as the...
Movie-Struck Girls examines women's films and filmgoing in the 1910s, a period when female patronage was energetically courted by the industry for the first time. By looking closely at how women were invited to participate in movie...
Siegfried Kracauer’s Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time brilliantly reconfigures the biography form into a remarkable work of social and cultural history. In a book that has frequently been compared with Walter Benjamin’s...
Through her study of the narrative themes and strategies of Italian commercial sound films of the fascist era, Marcia Landy shows that cultural life under fascism was not monopolized by official propaganda.
Originally published in 1986.
Noting that motherhood is a common metaphor for film production, Lucy Fischer undertakes the first investigation of how the topic of motherhood presents itself throughout a wide range of film genres. Until now discussions of maternity...
Sergei Eisenstein's greatness lies not only in his films, such as Potemkin or Ivan the Terrible, or his contributions to the technique and art of the cinema but also in his contributions as a theoretician and philosopher of the art....
Do films made by women comprise a "counter-cinema" radically different from the dominant tradition? Feminist film critics contend that women filmmakers do present from a distinctive vision, or "countershot," and Lucy Fischer argues...
The most universal civilian privation in World War II Britain, the blackout possessed many symbolic meanings. Among its complicated implications for filmmakers was a stigmatization of film spectacle--including the display of "Hollywood...
As femme fatale, cabaret siren, and icon of Camp, the Christopher Isherwood character Sally Bowles has become this century's darling of "divine decadence"--a measure of how much we are attracted by the fiction of the "shocking"...
Robert T. Eberwein uses a hypothesis from psychoanalytic theory to explore the frequently noticed similarity between dreaming and watching a film. His comprehensive study of the relationship between films and dreams explains the film...
Film, a latecomer to the realm of artistic media, alludes to, absorbs, and undermines the discourses of the other arts--literature and painting especially--in order to carve out a position for itself among them. Exposing the anxiety in...
The entrepreneur of phonograph concerts and motion-picture programs Lyman H. Howe was the leading traveling exhibitor of his time and the exemplar of an important but until now little examined aspect of American popular culture. This...
The major Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was also a poet, novelist, essayist, and iconoclastic political commentator. Naomi Greene reveals to English-speaking readers the diverse talents that made him one of the most...
The works of Shakespeare and Dante or the figures of George Washington and Moses do not often enter into popular conceptions of the silent cinema, yet, between 1907 and 1910, the Vitagraph Company frequently used such material in...
Peter Brunette and David Wills extend the work of Jacques Derrida into a new realm--with rewarding consequences. Although Derrida has never addressed film theory directly in his writings, Brunette and Wills argue that the ideas he has...
This rich, wide-ranging book explores Italy's national film style by relating it closely to politics and to the historicist thought of Croce, Gentile, and Gramsci. Here is a new kind of film history--a nonlinear, intertextual approach...
This classic in film theory, presents a systematic study of the techniques of the film medium and of their potential uses for creating formal structures in individual films such as Dovzhenko's Earth, Antonioni's La Notte, Bresson's Au...
This is the definitive biography of Emile Cohl (1857-1938), one of the most important pioneers of the art of the animated cartoon and an innovative contributor to popular graphic humor at a critical moment when it changed from...
Reinterpreting twelve of Renoir's best-known works, Professor Faulkner attributes their qualities not to the director's unified sensibility but to varying social and historical circumstances.
Originally published in 1986.
Hadley Cantril's study was launched immediately after the broadcast to give an account of people's reactions and an answer to the question, Why the panic? Originally published by Princeton University Press in 1940, the book explores the...
Siegfried Kracauer's classic study, originally published in 1960, explores the distinctive qualities of the cinematic medium. The book takes its place alongside works in classical film theory by such figures as Béla Balázs, Rudolf...
In Revisioning History thirteen historians from around the world look at the historical film on its own terms, not as it compares to written history but as a unique way of recounting the past. How does film construct a historical world?...
Employing a wide range of examples from Uncle Tom's Cabin and Birth of a Nation to Zelig and Personal Best, Janet Staiger argues that a historical examination of spectators' responses to films can make a valuable contribution to the...
"If it bleeds, it leads." The phrase captures television news directors' famed preference for opening newscasts with the most violent stories they can find. And what is true for news is often true for entertainment programming, where...
Jonas Mekas, one of the driving forces behind New York's alternative film culture from the 1950s through the 1980s, made for an unlikely counterculture hero: a Lithuanian emigr and fervent nationalist from an agrarian family, he had not...
"Classical works have for us become covered with the glassy armor of familiarity," wrote Victor Shklovsky in 1914. Here Kristin Thompson "defamiliarizes" the reader with eleven different films. Developing the technique formulated in her...
Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura, who began his career under the censorship of Franco's regime, has forged an international reputation for his unique cinematic treatment of emotional and spiritual responses to repressive political...
A collaborator with Warner Brothers and Paramount in the early days of sound film, the German film director Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947) is famous for his sense of ironic detachment and for the eroticism he infused into such comedies as...
Was Alfred Hitchcock a cynical trifler with his audience's emotions, as he liked to pretend? Or was he a profoundly humane artist? Most commentators leave Hitchcock's self-assessment unquestioned, but this book shows that his movies...
Emphasizing the importance of cultural theory for film history, Giuliana Bruno enriches our understanding of early Italian film as she guides us on a series of "inferential walks" through Italian culture in the first decades of this...
This major artistic biography of Federico Fellini shows how his exuberant imagination has been shaped by popular culture, literature, and his encounter with the ideas of C. G. Jung, especially Jungian dream interpretation. Covering...
This history of the turbulent destiny of Kino ("film" in Russian) documents the artistic development of the Russian and Soviet cinema and traces its growth from 1896 to the death of Sergei Eisenstein in 1948. The new Postscript surveys...
These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of André Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme...
These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of...
Tracing the development of the Japanese cinema from 1896 (when the first Kinetoscope was imported) through the golden ages of film in Japan up to today, this work reveals the once flourishing film industry and the continuing unique art...
Now faced with the "zero hour" created by a new freedom of expression and the dramatic breakup of the Soviet Union, Soviet cinema has recently become one of the most interesting in the world, aesthetically as well as politically. How...
Patrice Petro challenges the conventional assessment of German film history, which sees classical films as responding solely to male anxieties and fears. Exploring the address made to women in melodramatic films and in popular...
The movement known as neorealism lasted seven years, generated only twenty-one films, failed at the box office, and fell short of its didactic and aesthetic aspirations. Yet it exerted such a profound influence on Italian cinema that...
In Landscapes of Loss, Naomi Greene makes new sense of the rich variety of postwar French films by exploring the obsession with the national past that has characterized French cinema since the late 1960s. Observing that the sense of...
Who decides how, when, and where Americans fall in love and get married? Virginia Wexman's acute observations about movie stars and acting techniques show that Hollywood has often had the most powerful voice in demonstrating socially...
Charles Maland focuses on the cultural sources of the on-and-off, love-hate affair between Chaplin and the American public that was perhaps the stormiest in American stardom.
Here Eduardo Cadava demonstrates that Walter Benjamin articulates his conception of history through the language of photography. Focusing on Benjamin's discussions of the flashes and images of history, he argues that the questions...
Anke Gleber examines one of the most intriguing and characteristic figures of European urban modernity: the observing city stroller, or flaneur. In an age transformed by industrialism, the flaneur drifted through city streets, inspired...
This highly original book draws on narrative and film theory, psychoanalysis, and musicology to explore the relationship between aesthetics and anti-Semitism in two controversial landmarks in German culture. David Levin argues that...
Celebrity personalities, who reign over much of our cultural landscape, owe their fame not to specific deeds but to the ability to project a distinct personal image, to create an icon of the self. Rising Star is a fascinating look at...
Loie Fuller was the most famous American in Europe throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rising from a small-time vaudeville career in the States, she attained international celebrity as a dancer, inventor...
Jonas Mekas, one of the driving forces behind New York's alternative film culture from the 1950s through the 1980s, made for an unlikely counterculture hero: a Lithuanian emigr and fervent nationalist from an agrarian family, he had not...