Film Theory

An Introduction

Robert Stam

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780631206545, 9780631206538
• eBook ISBN: 9781119491576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

This book is a lively and provoking introduction to film theory. It is suitable for students from any discipline but is particularly aimed at students studying film and literature as it examines issues common to both subjects such as realism, illusionism, narration, point of view, style, semiotics, psychoanalysis and multiculturalism. It also includes coverage of theorists common to both, Barthes, Lacan and Bakhtin among others.

Robert Stam, renowned for his clarity of writing, will also include studies of cinema specialists providing readers with a depth of reference not generally available outside the field of film studies itself. Other material covered includes film adaptations of works of literature and analogies between literary and film criticism.

Select Bibliography

Listed here are works either cited or recommended. For a more comprehensive bibliography, see Toby Miller and Robert Stam (eds), Film and Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999).

1. Abel, Richard 1988. French Film: Theory and Criticism 1907–1939, 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
2. — (ed.) 1996. Silent Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
3. Adams, Parveen 1996. The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences. London: Routledge.
4. Adams, Parveen and Elizabeth Cowie (eds) 1990. The Woman in Question. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
5. Adorno, T. W. 1978. Minima Moralia: Reflections From a Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. Jeph. London: Verso.
6. Adorno, T. W. and Hanns Eisler 1969. Composing for the Films. New York: Oxford University Press.
7. Adorno, T. W. and Max Horkheimer 1997. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cummings. New York: Verso.
8. Affron, Charles 1982. Cinema and Sentiment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
9. Ahmad, Aijaz 1987. “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory,” Social Text 17 (Fall).
10. Alea, Tomás Gutiérrez 1982. Dialectica Del Espectador. Havana: Ediciones Union.
11. Allen, Richard 1989. Representation, Meaning, and Experience in the Cinema: A Critical Study of Contemporary Film Theory. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.
12. — 1993. “Representation, Illusion, and the Cinema,” Cinema Journal No. 32, Vol. 2 (Winter).
13. — 1995. Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality. New York: Cambridge University Press.
14. Allen, Richard and Murray Smith (eds) 1997. Film Theory and Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
15. Allen, Robert C. and Douglas Gomery 1985. Film History: Theory and Practice. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
16. Alternative Museum of New York 1989. Prisoners of Image: Ethnic and Gender Stereotypes. New York: The Museum.
17. Althusser, Louis 1969. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Pantheon Books.
18. Althusser, Louis and Balibar 1979. Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso.
19. Altman, Rick (ed.) 1981. Genre: The Musical. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
20. — 1984, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre,” Cinema Journal. Vol. 23, No. 3.
21. — 1987. The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
22. — (ed.) 1992. Sound Theory, Sound Practice. New York: Routledge.
23. Anderson, Benedict 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflexions on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd edition. London: Verso.
24. Anderson, Perry 1998. The Origins of Postmodernity. New York: Verso.
25. Andrew, Dudley 1976. The Major Film Theories. New York: Oxford University Press.
26. — 1978a. “The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Film,” Wide Angle Vol. 2, No. 2.
27. — 1978b. André Bazin. New York: Oxford University Press.
28. — 1984. Concepts in Film Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.
29. Ang, Ien 1985. Watching “Dallas”: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. Trans. Della Couling. London: Methuen.
30. — 1996. Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World. London: Routledge.
31. Appadurai, Arjun 1990. “Disjunction and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture Vol. 2, No. 2 (Spring).
32. Aristarco, Guido 1951. Storia delle Theoriche del Film. Turin: Eimaudi.
33. Armes, Roy 1974. Film and Reality: An Historical Survey. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
34. — 1987. Third World Filmmaking and the West. Berkeley: University of California Press.
35. Armstrong, Dan 1989. “Wiseman’s Realm of Transgression: Titicut Follies, the Symbolic Father and the Spectacle of Confinement,” Cinema Journal Vol. 29, No. 1 (Fall).
36. Arnheim, Rudolf 1933 [1958]. Film. Reprinted as Film as Art. London: Faber.
37. — 1997. Film Essays and Criticism. Trans. Brenda Benthien. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
38. Astruc, Alexandre 1948. “Naissance d’une novelle avant-garde: la camera-stylo,” Ecran Français, No. 144.
39. Auerbach, Erich 1953. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
40. Aumont, Jacques 1987. Montage Eisenstein. Trans. Lee Hildreth, Constance Penley, and Andrew Ross. Blo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Introduction
• The Antecedents of Film Theory
• Film and Film Theory: The Beginnings
• Early Silent Film Theory
• The Essence of Cinema
• The Soviet Montage-Theorists
• Russian Formalism and the Bakhtin School
• The Historical Avant-Gardes
• The Debate after Sound
• The Frankfurt School
• The Phenomenology of Realism
• The Cult of the Auteur
• The Americanization of Auteur Theory
• Third World Film and Theory
• The Advent of Structuralism
• The Question of Film Language
• Cinematic Specificity Revisited
• Interrogating Authorship and Genre
• 1968 and the Leftist Turn
• The Classic Realist Text
• The Presence of Brecht
• The Politics of Reflexivity
• The Search for Alternative Aesthetics
• From Linguistics to Psychoanalysis
• The Feminist Intervention
• The Poststructuralist Mutation
• Textual Analysis
• Interpretation and its Discontents
• From Text to Intertext
• The Amplification of Sound
• The Rise of Cultural Studies
• The Birth of the Spectator
• Cognitive and Analytic Theory
• Semiotics Revisited
• Just in Time: The Impact of Deleuze
• The Coming Out of Queer Theory
• Multiculturalism, Race, and Representation
• Third Cinema Revisited
• Film and the Postcolonial
• The Poetics and Politics of Postmodernism
• The Social Valence of Mass-Culture
• Post-Cinema: Digital Theory and the New Media
• The Pluralization of Film Theory
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement