Arts of Impoverishment
Leo Bersani
Ulysse Dutoit
Paperback / Hardcover
Babel and Babylon
Miriam Hansen
Miriam Hansen offers an original perspective on American film by tying the emergence of spectatorship to the historical transformation of the public sphere. Focusing on exemplary moments in the American silent era, she explains how the concept of the spectator evolved as a crucial part of the classical Hollywood paradigm--as one of the new industry's strategies to integrate ethnically, socially, and sexually differentiated audiences in a modern culture of consumption.
Hardcover 1991 / Paperback 1994
Born in Flames
Howard Hampton
Twenty years as an outsider scouring the underbelly of American culture has made Howard Hampton a uniquely hardnosed guide to the heart of pop darkness. Bridging the fatalistic, intensely charged space between Apocalypse Now Redux and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," his writing breaks down barriers of ignorance and arrogance that have segregated art forms from each other and from the world at large. Born in Flames is a headlong plunge into the passions and disruptive power of art.
Hardcover 2007 / Paperback 2008
Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s
Edited by Jim Hillier
Hardcover 1985 / Paperback 1986
Cahiers du Cinéma: 1960-1968
Edited by Jim Hillier
Hardcover 1987 / Paperback 1992
Cahiers du Cinéma: 1969-1972
Edited by Nick Browne
Edited by Jim Hillier
Hardcover 1989
Child of Paradise
Edward Turk
Marcel Carné symbolizes the period, approximately 1930-1945, when French cinema recaptured the creative vitality and prestige it had relinquished almost completely to the American film industry. The first critical biography of this director of classic films, including the epic historical romance Les Enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise), relates the saga of Carné’s meteoric rise in the 1930s and his decline from critical grace after the war.
Paperback / Hardcover
The Cinema of Eisenstein
David Bordwell
Paperback / Hardcover
Cities of Words
Stanley Cavell
This book--which presents a course of lectures Cavell presented several times toward the end of his teaching career at Harvard--links masterpieces of moral philosophy and classic Hollywood comedies to fashion a new way of looking at our lives and learning to live with ourselves.
Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2005
The Emergence of Cinematic Time
Mary Ann Doane

In a work that captures and reconfigures the passing moments of art, history, and philosophy, Mary Ann Doane shows how the cinema, representing the singular instant of chance and ephemerality in the face of the increasing rationalization and standardization of the day, participated in the structuring of time and contingency in capitalist modernity.

Paperback 2002 / Hardcover 2002
Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity
Edward Dimendberg
Exploring classic examples of film noir such as The Asphalt Jungle, Double Indemnity, and The Naked City alongside many lesser-known works, Dimendberg confirms that noir is not simply a reflection of modernity but a virtual continuation of the spaces of the metropolis. He convincingly shows that Hollywood's dark thrillers of the postwar decades were determined by the same forces that shaped the city itself.
Paperback 2004 / Hardcover 2004
From Hitler to Heimat
Anton Kaes
Hardcover 1989 / Hardcover
Hitchcock
William Rothman
Hardcover 1982 / Paperback
Making Meaning
David Bordwell
David Bordwell's new book is at once a history of film criticism, an analysis of how critics interpret film, and a proposal for an alternative program for film studies. It is an anatomy of film criticism meant to reset the agenda for film scholarship.
Hardcover 1989 / Paperback 1991
Ministry of Illusion
Eric Rentschler
Eric Rentschler argues that cinema in the Third Reich emanated from a Ministry of Illusion and not from a Ministry of Fear. His analysis of the sophisticated media culture of this period demonstrates in an unprecedented way the potent and destructive powers of fascination and fantasy.
Paperback 1996 / Hardcover 1996
Moving Pictures
Anne Hollander
Paperback 1991
On the History of Film Style
David Bordwell
David Bordwell shows how film scholars have attempted to explain stylistic continuity and change in film, and in the process celebrates a century of cinema. Examining the contributions of both noted and neglected directors, he considers the earliest filmmaking, the accomplishments of the silent era, the development of Hollywood, and the strides taken by European and Asian cinema in recent years.
Paperback 1998 / Hardcover 1998
Planet Hong Kong
David Bordwell
In Planet Hong Kong David Bordwell trains virtually every critical weapon in the cinema studies arsenal on a film industry that has, ironically, been marginalized by its own popular success. Film scholars will be grateful for its theoretical breadth and acuity; film fans will be happy with the graceful way Bordwell weaves into his chapters an extraordinary amount of telling anecdote; and filmmakers will be thrilled with his wonderfully revealing frame-by-frame analyses of Hong Kong cinema's most exemplary moments.
Paperback 2000 / Hardcover 2000
Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture
Dudley Andrew
Steven Ungar
Andrew and Ungar apply an evocative "poetics of culture" to capture the complex atmospherics of Paris in the 1930s. Rather than a straight story of the Popular Front, they have produced something closer to the format of an illustrated newspaper whose multiple columns represent the breadth of urban life during this critical decade at the end of the Third French Republic.
Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2008
Pursuits of Happiness
Stanley Cavell
During the 30's and 40's, Hollywood produced a genre of madcap comedies that emphasized reuniting the central couple after divorce or separation. And the female protagonists were strong, independent, and sophisticated. Here, Stanley Cavell examines seven of those classic movies for their cinematic techniques, and for such varies themes as feminism, liberty and interdependence. Included are Adam's Rib, Bringing Up Baby, and The Philadelphia Story.
Hardcover 1981 / Paperback 1984
Reel Nature
Gregg Mitman
Like the museum and the zoo, nature films seek to recreate the experience of unspoiled nature while appealing to a popular audience, through a blend of scientific research and commercial promotion, education and entertainment, authenticity and artifice. In the first major analysis of American nature films in the twentieth century, Gregg Mitman shows how our cultural values, scientific needs, and new technologies produced the images that have shaped our contemporary view of wildlife.
Hardcover 1999
Republic of Images
Alan Williams
Republic of Images traces the evolution of French filmmaking from 1895--the year of the debut of the Cinematographe in Paris--to the present day. Williams offers a unique synthesis of history, biography, aesthetics and film theory. He captures the formal and stylistic developments of film in France over nearly one hundred years.
Paperback 1992 / Hardcover 1992
Screening History
Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal intertwines fond recollections of films savored in the movie palaces of his Washington, D.C., boyhood with strands of autobiography and trenchant observations about American politics.
Paperback / Hardcover
The Secret Life of Puppets
Victoria Nelson
Victoria Nelson illuminates the deep but hidden attraction the supernatural still holds for a secular mainstream culture that forced the transcendental underground and firmly displaced wonder and awe with the forces of reason, materialism, and science. In a tour of Western culture that is at once exhilarating and alarming, she shows us the distorted forms in which the spiritual resurfaced in high art but also, strikingly, in the mass culture of puppets, horror-fantasy literature, and cyborgs: from the works of Kleist, Poe, Musil, and Lovecraft to Philip K. Dick and virtual reality simulations.
Hardcover 2002 / Paperback 2003
Slaves on Screen
Natalie Zemon Davis
The written word and what the eye can see are brought together in this fascinating foray into the depiction of resistance to slavery through the modern medium of film. Davis, whose book The Return of Martin Guerre was written while she served as consultant to the French film of the same name, now tackles the large issue of how the moving picture industry has portrayed slaves in five major motion pictures spanning four generations.
Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002
Storytelling in Film and Television
Kristin Thompson
Derided as simple, dismissed as inferior to film, famously characterized as a vast wasteland, television nonetheless exerts an undeniable, apparently inescapable power in our culture. The secret of television's success may well lie in the remarkable narrative complexities underlying its seeming simplicity, complexities Kristin Thompson unmasks in this engaging analysis of the narrative workings of television and film.
Paperback 2003 / Hardcover 2003
Storytelling in the New Hollywood
Kristin Thompson
Drawing on a wide range of films from the 1920s to the 1990s--from Keaton's Our Hospitality to Casablanca to Terminator 2, Kristin Thompson offers the first in-depth analysis of Hollywood's storytelling techniques and how they are used to make complex, easily comprehensible, entertaining films. Thompson then demonstrates in detail how classical narrative techniques work in ten box-office and critical successes made since the New Hollywood began in the 1970s including Tootsie, The Silence of the Lambs, Parenthood, Alien, and Hannah and Her Sisters.
Paperback 1999 / Hardcover 1999
The Virtual Life of Film
D. N. Rodowick
As almost every aspect of making and viewing movies is replaced by digital technologies, even the notion of "watching a film" is fast becoming an anachronism. With the likely disappearance of celluloid film stock as a medium, and the emergence of new media, what will happen to cinema--and to cinema studies? In the first of two books exploring this question, Rodowick considers the fate of film and its role in the aesthetics and culture of the twenty-first century.
Paperback 2007 / Hardcover 2007
Visions of the Past
Robert A. Rosenstone
This essay collection makes a radical venture into the investigation of a new concern: how a visual medium, subject to the conventions of drama and fiction, might be used as a serious vehicle for thinking about our relationship with the past. In essays on specific films, including Reds, JFK, and Sans Soleil, he considers such issues as the relationship between fact and film and the documentary as visionary truth.
Paperback 1998 / Hardcover
Walking with the Wind
Abbas Kiarostami
Translated by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak
Translated by Michael C. Beard
This bilingual edition of verse by the celebrated Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami includes English translations of more than two hundred crystalline, haiku-like poems, together with their Persian originals. The translators contribute an illuminating introduction to Kiarostami's poetic enterprise, examining its relationship to his unique cinematic corpus and to the traditions of classic and contemporary Persian poetry.
Paperback 2002
The World Viewed
Stanley Cavell
Stanley Cavell looks closely at America's most popular art and our perceptions of it. His explorations of Hollywood's stars, directors, and most famous films--as well as his fresh look at Goddard, Bergman, and other great European directors--will be of lasting interest to movie-viewers and intelligent people everywhere.
Paperback 1979 / Hardcover 1980