Film Theory and Criticism
Leo Braudy
Language: English
Pages: 928
ISBN: 0195365623
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Since publication of the first edition in 1974, Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen's Film Theory and Criticism has been the most widely used and cited anthology of critical writings about film. Now in its seventh edition, this landmark text continues to offer outstanding coverage of more than a century of thought and writing about the movies. Incorporating classic texts by pioneers in film theory--including Rudolf Arnheim, Siegfried Kracauer, and André Bazin--and cutting-edge essays by such contemporary scholars as David Bordwell, Tania Modleski, Thomas Schatz, and Richard Dyer, the book examines both historical and theoretical viewpoints on the subject.
Building upon the wide range of selections and the extensive historical coverage that marked previous editions, this new compilation stretches from the earliest attempts to define the cinema to the most recent efforts to place film in the contexts of psychology, sociology, and philosophy, and to explore issues of gender and race. Reorganized into eight sections--each comprising the major fields of critical controversy and analysis--this new edition features reformulated introductions and biographical headnotes that contextualize the readings, making the text more accessible than ever to students, film enthusiasts, and general readers alike. The seventh edition also integrates exciting new material on feminist theory, queer cinema, and global cinema, as well as a new section, "Digitization and Globalization," which engages important recent developments in technology and world cinema.
A wide-ranging critical and historical survey, Film Theory and Criticism remains the leading text for undergraduate courses in film theory. It is also ideal for graduate courses in film theory and criticism.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Leo Braudy is University Professor and Bing Professor of English at the University of Southern California. Among other books, he is author of Native Informant: Essays on Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture (OUP, 1991), The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (OUP, 1986), and most recently, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity (2003).
Marshall Cohen is University Professor Emeritus and Dean Emeritus of the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California. He is coeditor, with Roger Copeland, of What Is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism (OUP, 1983) and founding editor of Philosophy and Public Affairs.
Houses of Noir: Dark Visions from Thirteen Film Studios
Trainspotting (BFI Modern Classics)
forms follow theatre and painting rather than the methodology of language, which gives rise, through the combination of concrete descriptions and concrete objects, to quite new concepts and ideas? It is much closer to film than, for instance, painting, where form derives from abstract elements (line, THE DRAMATURGY OF FILM FORM 39 colour). In film, by contrast, it is precisely the material concreteness of the shot as an element that is the most difficult aspect of the process of formation.
secondarily a style of filmmaking? Then as to the style itself, is it not essentially a form of self-effacement before reality? Our intention is certainly not to preach the glory of form over content. Art for art’s sake is just as heretical in cinema as elsewhere, probably more so. On the other hand, a new subject matter demands new form, and as good a way as any towards understanding what a film is trying to say to us is to know how it is saying it. Thus by 1938 or 1939 the talking film,
the illusion of a third dimension. Painting is limited to its two dimensions; cinema is not. Cinema escapes the limits of two dimensions through its own third dimension, time. It does this by varying its range and perspective, by taking different views of its subject (through montage and/or camera movement). Cinema overcomes two-dimensionality through its “walk-around” capability, which is also a prime feature of ordinary human perception. E. H. Gombrich says: “While (one) turns, in other words,
immediate foreground to the group behind her, a group whose responsiveness to events repeats the direction of her own attention, and her relation, spatially, to Dallas and Ringo, who, excluded by the left edge of the frame, are outside. The permanent and underlying fact about the mise-en-scène which justifies the fixity of camera placement is its status as a social drama of alliance and antagonism between two social roles—Lucy, an insider, a married woman and defender of custom; and Dallas,
of the narration. Masking and displacement of narrative authority are thus integral to establishing the sense of the spectator “in” the text, and the prohibition to establishing the film as an independent fiction, different from dream in being the product of another, that can nevertheless be inhabited. Fascination by identification with character is a way the integrity of fictional space is validated, and because the spectator occupies a fictional role, is a way too that the film can efface the
