Critical Visions in Film Theory / Edition 1

by Timothy Corrigan, Patricia White, Meta Mazaj

Overview

Embracing groundbreaking approaches without ignoring the history of classical film theory, Critical Visions in Film Theory encompasses the broader, more inclusive perspective of film theory today, focusing on topics such as race, gender and sexuality, and new media.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312446345
Publisher:	Bedford/St. Martin's
Publication date:	12/06/2010
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	1200
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Timothy Corrigan is Professor of Cinema Studies, English, and History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. His work in film studies focuses on modern American and international cinema, as well as on pedagogy and film. He is coauthor, with Patricia White, of The Film Experience: An Introduction (2009). His most recent book is The Essay Film from Montaigne, after Marker. He is an editor of the journal Adaptation and serves on the editorial board of Cinema Journal. He has taught film at the University of Amsterdam, Temple University, University of Iowa, and at campuses in Tokyo, Rome, Paris, and London.
 

Patricia White is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College. She is the author of Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability and is completing a new book on global women's filmmaking in the twenty-first century. With Timothy Corrigan, she is co-author of The Film Experience and co-editor of Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings. A member of the editorial collective Camera Obscura, she also serves on the board of Women Make Movies.
 

Meta Mazaj is a Lecturer in Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published on critical theory, Balkan cinema, new European cinema, film and nationalism. She is author of Nation and Cynicism in the Post 1990s Balkan Cinema (2008), and her current work focuses on East European and transnational cinema.

Table of Contents

Preface

PART 1  Experiencing Film: From Perception to Reception

PLATO From Republic
  The Allegory of the Cave
HUGO MÜNSTERBERG Why We Go to the Movies
CHRISTIAN METZ From The Imaginary Signifier
  Loving the Cinema
  Identifi cation, Mirror
  Disavowal, Fetishism
JEAN-LOUIS BAUDRY Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus
GREGORY CURRIE Film, Reality, and Illusion
VIVIAN SOBCHACK From The Address of the Eye
  Phenomenology and Film Experience
TOM GUNNING The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde
STUART HALL Encoding/Decoding
JUDITH MAYNE Paradoxes of Spectatorship

PART 2  The Sights, Sounds, and Signs of Cinema

JOHN BERGER From Ways of Seeing
BÉLA BALÁZS From Theory of the Film
  The Creative Camera
  The Close-Up 
  The Face of Man
LEV KULESHOV The Principles of Montage
MAYA DEREN Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality
MICHEL CHION From The Voice in Cinema
  The Acousmêtre
CLAUDIA GORBMAN From Unheard Melodies
  Classical Hollywood Practice
GILLES DELEUZE From Cinema II: The Time-Image
  Preface
  Recapitulation of Images and Signs
  Conclusions
JAMES NAREMORE From Acting in the Cinema
  Protocols
PAUL WELLS From Understanding Animation
  Notes Towards a Theory of Animation

PART 3  Modernism and Realism: Debates in Classical

Film Theory
WALTER BENJAMIN The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version)
JEAN EPSTEIN Photogénie and the Imponderable
DZIGA VERTOV Film Directors: A Revolution
SERGEI EISENSTEIN The Dramaturgy of Film Form (The Dialectical Approach to Film Form)
RUDOLF ARNHEIM From Film as Art
  Film and Reality
SIEGFRIED KRACAUER From Theory of Film
  Basic Concepts
  Inherent Affi nities
ANDRÉ BAZIN From What Is Cinema?
  The Ontology of the Photographic Image
  The Evolution of the Language of Cinema
MIRIAM HANSEN The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism

PART 4  Auteurism: Directors, Stars, and Beyond

ROLAND BARTHES The Death of the Author
ALEXANDRE ASTRUC The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo
ANDREW SARRIS The Auteur Theory Revisited
PETER WOLLEN From Signs and Meaning in the Cinema
  The Auteur Theory
TANIA MODLESKI From The Women Who Knew Too Much
  Hitchcock, Feminism, and the Patriarchal Unconscious
JUDITH MAYNE Lesbian Looks: Dorothy Arzner and Female Authorship
RICHARD DYER From Stars
TIMOTHY CORRIGAN From A Cinema without Walls
  The Commerce of Auteurism
JEROME CHRISTENSEN Studio Authorship, Corporate Art

PART 5  Genre: Classifying Stories

ARISTOTLE From Poetics
  The Origins of Tragedy, Comedy and Epic
THOMAS SCHATZ From Hollywood Genres
  Film Genre and the Genre Film
RICHARD DYER Entertainment and Utopia
JEAN-LOUIS COMOLLI and JEAN NARBONI Cinema/Ideology/Criticism
RICK ALTMAN From Film/Genre
  A Semantic/Syntactic/Pragmatic Approach to Genre
THOMAS ELSAESSER Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama
CAROL J. CLOVER From Men, Women, and Chain Saws
  Her Body, Himself

PART 6  Narrative: Telling Stories

TZVETAN TODOROV Structural Analysis of Narrative
ROBERT STAM Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation
DAVID BORDWELL From Poetics of Cinem
  The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice
TERESA DE LAURETIS From Alice Doesn’t
  Desire in Narrative
MANTHIA DIAWARA Black American Cinema: The New Realism
JANE FEUER Narrative Form in American Network Television
HENRY JENKINS From Convergence Culture
  Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling

PART 7  Alternative Modes: Experimental and Documentary Film

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE The Salon of 1859: The Modern Public and Photography
GERMAINE DULAC The Avant-Garde Cinema
JOHN GRIERSON First Principles of Documentary
STAN BRAKHAGE In Consideration of Aesthetics
BILL NICHOLS From Blurred Boundaries 
  Performing Documentary
DOGME 95
  Manifesto
  Vow of Chastity
TRINH T. MINH-HA Documentary Is/Not a Name

PART 8  Sexuality and Gender in Cinema: From Psychoanalysis to Performativity

SIGMUND FREUD On Fetishism
LAURA MULVEY Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
LINDA WILLIAMS “Something Else Besides a Mother”
KOBENA MERCER Dark and Lovely Too: Black Gay Men in Independent Film
YVONNE TASKER Dumb Movies for Dumb People: Masculinity, the Body, and the Voice in Contemporary Action Cinema
B. RUBY RICH New Queer Cinema
LINDA WILLIAMS Porn Studies: Proliferating Pornographies On/Scene

PART 9  Race and Ethnicity in Cinema: From Stereotypes to Self-Representation

FRANTZ FANON From Black Skin, White Masks
  The Fact of Blackness
ELLA SHOHAT and ROBERT STAM From Unthinking Eurocentrism
  Stereotype, Realism, and the Struggle over Representation
RICHARD DYER White
FATIMAH TOBING RONY From The Third Eye
  King Kong and the Monster in Ethnographic Cinema
ANA M. LÓPEZ Are All Latins from Manhattan?
TONI CADE BAMBARA Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye
FAYE GINSBURG Screen Memories and Entangled Technologies

PART 10  National and Transnational Film Histories

BENEDICT ANDERSON From Imagined Communities
CESARE ZAVATTINI Some Ideas on the Cinema
FERNANDO SOLANAS and OCTAVIO GETINO Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World
STEPHEN CROFTS Reconceptualizing National Cinema/s
JYOTIKA VIRDI From The Cinematic ImagiNation
  Nation and Its Discontents
HAMID NAFICY From An Accented Cinema
  Situating Accented Cinema
DUDLEY ANDREW An Atlas of World Cinema

PART 11  Screen Cultures: Current Debates

THEODOR W. ADORNO and MAX HORKHEIMER From The Dialectic of Enlightenment
  The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
FREDRIC JAMESON Postmodernism and Consumer Society
LISA NAKAMURA From Digitizing Race
  The Social Optics of Race and Networked Interfaces in The Matrix Trilogy and Minority Report
LEV MANOVICH From The Language of New Media
  What Is Digital Cinema?
ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAW From Gaming
  Origins of the First-Person Shooter
LAWRENCE LESSIG From Remix
  RW, Revived
LAURIE OUELLETTE “Take Responsibility for Yourself”: Judge Judy and the Neoliberal Citizen
D. N. RODOWICK An Elegy for Theory

  APPENDIX A: Alternative Tables of Contents
  APPENDIX B: Film Pairings for Studying Film Theory
  Acknowledgments
  Index