Reference Books

Essays here explore the relationship between politics and explicitly political feature films from the beginning of the movie industry to World War I, and for each decade through to the 1980's. The included filmography is particularly useful. Originally...

This book argues that serious misreadings of Freud and Lacan on sexual difference have characterized prevailing models of psychoanalytic film criticism. In critiquing theories of identification and female spectatorship, the author maintains that early...

Best known for his documentaries such as Drifters, North Sea, and Housing Problems, John Grierson was the most important figure in the British documentary film movement and one of the most influential of British film theorists.This major assessment of...

This charming classic of film literature was originally published in 1914 and hence represents an early attempt to catalogue the allure of cinema and how the motion picture industry began. This tale of life in the early days of cinema will be of interest...

India is the largest film producing country in the world and its output has a global reach. After years of marginalization by academics in the Western world, Indian cinemas have moved from the periphery to the center of the world cinema in a...

Given Herzog's own pronouncement that 'film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates,' it is not surprising that his work has aroused ambivalent and contradictory responses. Visually and philosophically ambitious and at the same time provocatively...

Originally published in 1964, this book tells the history of the British cinematograph industry for the first time. It describes moments of splendid triumph and others of shattering failure. The mood switches from reckless optimism to demoralising...

This is a study of nine key film-makers who came into prominence in the early '70s: Claude Chabrol, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lindsay Anderson, Stanley Kubrick, Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey, Satyajit Ray, Miklos Jancso, and Dusan Makavejev - representing...

Semiotics offers a systematic approach to analysing the stylistic structure of film. When this study was originally published in 1983 this was a recent addition to the methods of film study and it presents an explanation of film semiotics with direct...

Written specifically with the student in mind and focusing on a number of well-known texts, including Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Nicholas Nickleby, Nice Work and The Color Purple, the contributions in this book demonstrate how we can look critically at...

This collection of papers examines the evolving relationship between the motion picture industry and television from the 1940s onwards. The institutional and technological histories of the film and TV industries are looked at, concluding that Hollywood...

Between 1952 and 1962, when this book was originally published, the number of people visiting British cinemas had fallen by nearly two thirds and was little more than half the pre-war total. Nearly 1500 of the 4500 cinemas functioning in 1955 had closed...

The secrecy in which the British Board of Film Censors enveloped itself until 1948 resulted in a glaring vacuum in British cinematic history. Originally published in 1985, this book filled this important gap, drawing on the detailed registers of films...

Since the cinema first began to be taken seriously as an art form, there has been a constant debate on the question: who is the real creator of the film, the writer or the director? This study of a group of key film-makers in the sixties suggests that...

This study looks at how the movie industry organisation functioned between the late '40s and 1983 when it was originally published. It describes the changing role of domestic exhibition through this time and analyses the wider film industry to provide a...

A polemical introduction to the avant-garde and experimental in film (including making and viewing), Materialist Film is a highly original, thought-provoking book.Thirty-seven short chapters work through a series of concepts which will enable the reader...

This text outlines what sociologists need to know of the nature of communication and of mass culture, while also looking in some empirical detail at the workings of the Hollywood community and the psychology of the star system. It explores trends such as...

During the interwar period cinema and literature seemed to be at odds with each other, part of the continuing struggle between mass and elite culture which so worried writers such as Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot and the Leavises. And this cultural divide...

This fascinating study of the genre of swashbuckling films received wide critical acclaim when it was first published in 1977. Jeffrey Richards assesses the contributions to the genre of directors, designers and fencing masters, as well as of the stars...

This feminist anthology from Italy offers an enriching perspective on cinema studies. Focusing on women's engagement with political theory and film-making, the book never loses sight of the female experience of cinema. It examines how women have chosen...

This book analyses the teen film as the rare medium able to represent the otherwise chaotic and conflicting experience of youth. The author focuses on six major issues: alienation, deviance and delinquency, sex and gender, the politics of consumption,...

Originally published in 1990, this book brought a new rigor and subtlety to the interpretation of film adaptations of Shakespeare. Drawing on traditional literary analysis, psychoanalysis, and current film theory about gender and subjectivity, the author...

Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Vertov: these Soviet film directors are acknowledged to be among the greatest in the history of cinematography. To Eisenstein we owe such films as Battleship Potemkin and October; to Pudovkin Mother and The End of St...

Originally published in 1994, this important book traces the rise of film propaganda in the 20th Century, discussing specifically how film can be used to manipulate public perception and opinions. Two distinct areas are covered: war propaganda, including...

Bringing together the work of leading film historians, originally published in 1981, this book illustrates the breadth of methodological approaches adopted by the field and the variety of its interests. Dealing with a period from about 1924-1945, it...

This book examines the development of cinematic form and culture in Russia, from its late nineteenth-century beginnings as a fairground attraction to the early post-Revolutionary years.The author traces the changing perceptions of cinema and its social...

This is a comprehensive survey of the relationship between film and literature. It looks at the cinematic adaptations of such literary masters as Shakespeare, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence, and considers the contribution to the cinema made...

In 1989 alone, for example, there were some forty-five major motion pictures which were sequels or part of a series. The film series phenomenon crosses all genres and has been around since the silent film era. This reference guide, in alphabetical order,...

A historian's view of the relationship between American history and the American film industry, this book is a witty and perceptive account of Hollywood and its films in the years from the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe to the end of the war...

Taking the subject chronologically from the 1890s to when the book was initially published in 1989, this book analyses those films specifically concerned with working-class conditions and struggle, and discusses them within the context of the debate on...

Collecting together some of the best thinking about the relationship between movies and politics, this book, originally published in 1993, encourages an awareness of the political dimension of film, both for film scholars and those entering the film...

Of all the pioneers of the cinema, the Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein has exerted the most enduring hold on the popular imagination. This book offers a unique portrait of the director based on the personal recollections of those who knew him...

This study analyses the historical development of South African cinema up to he book's original publication in 1988. It describes the films and comments on their relationship to South African realities, addressing all aspects of the industry, focusing on...

If Greek tragedy is sometimes regarded as a form long dead and buried, both theatre producers and film directors seem slow to accept its interment. Originally published in 1986, this book reflects the renewed interest in questions of staging the Greek...

When this book was originally published in 1987, the American feature film had been colonising the world's imagination for over 75 years and the book studies that experience in Britain, where American films have always dominated cinema screens, both...

As Charlton Heston put it: 'There's a temptingly simple definition of the epic film: it's the easiest kind of picture to make badly.' This book goes beyond that definition to show how the film epic has taken up one of the most ancient art-forms and...

This was the first comprehensive study of film production in Ireland from the silent period to the present day, and of representations of Ireland and 'Irishness' in native, British, and American films. It remains an authority on the topic. The book...

Millions of Americans have been thrilled, scared, titillated, and shocked by exploitation movies, low budget films with many scenes of sex, violence, and other potentially lurid elements. The term derives from the fact that promoters of such films...

The flashback is a crucial moment in a film narrative, one that captures the cinematic expression of memory, and history. This author's wide-ranging account of this single device reveals it to be an important way of creating cinematic meaning.Taking as...

This study explores the model derived from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, via Marxism and semiotics, of looking at film. It retraces the steps of film theory from ideological criticism of the late '60s to spectator studies in 1988 when the book...