- Born in Flames
- 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
- Cities of Words
- 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
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
- 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
- Ministry of Illusion
- 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
- On the History of Film Style
- 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
- 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
- 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
- The Secret Life of Puppets
- 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
- 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 the New Hollywood
- 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
- 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
- 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