Critical Visions in Film Theory by Timothy Corrigan; Patricia White; Meta Mazaj - First Edition, 2011 from Macmillan Student Store

Critical Visions in Film Theory

First Edition ©2011 Timothy Corrigan; Patricia White; Meta Mazaj

Critical Visions in Film Theory is a new book for a new generation, embracing groundbreaking approaches in the field without ignoring the history of classical film theory. The study of film theory has changed dramatically over the past 30 years with innovative ways of looking at classic debat...
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Critical Visions in Film Theory by Timothy Corrigan; Patricia White; Meta Mazaj - First Edition, 2011 from Macmillan Student Store

A bold anthology for a new generation of film theory

Critical Visions in Film Theory is a new book for a new generation, embracing groundbreaking approaches in the field without ignoring the history of classical film theory. The study of film theory has changed dramatically over the past 30 years with innovative ways of looking at classic debates in areas like film form, genre, and authorship, as well as exciting new conversations on such topics as race, gender and sexuality, and new media. Until now, no film theory anthology has stepped forward to represent this broader, more inclusive perspective. Critical Visions also provides the best guidance for students, giving them the context and the tools they need to critically engage with theory and apply it to their film experiences.

Features

The most inclusive anthology, with unique coverage of the classical and newer areas in film theory.
  • Incorporating fresh perspectives in areas such as perception and reception, film form, modernism and realism, auteur theory, and genre, Critical Visions provides an updated and contemporary look at classical film theory.
  • The only anthology with sections devoted to discussions of sexuality and gender, race and ethnicity, national and transnational film histories, documentary and experimental film, as well as new media, Critical Visions fully represents the ever-expanding and increasingly interdisciplinary nature of film theory.
The combination of classic thinkers and newer voices showcases the richness and diversity in film theory. With over 80 carefully selected pieces from a cast of theorists ranging from André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Maya Deren to Judith Mayne, Richard Dyer, Manthia Diawara, and Trinh Minh-ha, Critical Visions has the most balanced and complete picture of film theory.

The only anthology to offer students the contextual and interpretive support they need to move past the challenges of studying film theory and become better critical thinkers.
  • Part introductions and author headnotes contextualize each selection within a larger cultural and historical backdrop, as well as explain the relationships between the theorists and selections. 
  • “Reading Cues & Key Concepts” act as a pre-reading guide for students, allowing them to better engage with, and apply, the main ideas of each selection. 
  • Unique “Film Pairings for Studying Film Theory” appendix pairs readings with films to show students how to connect and apply film theory to the movies they watch.
Designed with the flexibility to work with any teaching style, in any classroom. A wide range of alternative tables of contents gives instructors options they can use to tailor and adapt Critical Visions to their needs.

New to This Edition

“Critical Visions updates the film theory anthology to reflect where film studies has gone by incorporating not only newer media but also debates over cultural representation and recent reappraisals of classical film theory.”
-- Chris Cagle, Temple University
 
“A comprehensive anthology on classical, contemporary, and current film theory that is accessible and can be used for a spectrum of levels.”
-- Roy Grundmann, Boston University
 
“Corrigan & White's headnotes are clearly written, concise, and useful; the 'Reading Cues & Key Concepts' are especially valuable for an undergraduate class.”
-- Joanna Rapf, University of Oklahoma
 

Digital Options

Table of Contents

     Preface
PART 1  Experiencing Film: From Perception to Reception
PLATO From Republic
     The Allegory of the Cave
HUGO MÜNSTERBERG Why We Go to the Movies
CHRISTIAN METZ From The Imaginary Signifier
     Loving the Cinema
     Identifi cation, Mirror
     Disavowal, Fetishism
JEAN-LOUIS BAUDRY Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus
GREGORY CURRIE Film, Reality, and Illusion
VIVIAN SOBCHACK From The Address of the Eye
     Phenomenology and Film Experience
TOM GUNNING The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde
STUART HALL Encoding/Decoding
JUDITH MAYNE Paradoxes of Spectatorship

PART 2  The Sights, Sounds, and Signs of Cinema

JOHN BERGER From Ways of Seeing
BÉLA BALÁZS From Theory of the Film
     The Creative Camera
     The Close-Up 
     The Face of Man
LEV KULESHOV The Principles of Montage
MAYA DEREN Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality
MICHEL CHION From The Voice in Cinema
     The Acousmêtre
CLAUDIA GORBMAN From Unheard Melodies
     Classical Hollywood Practice
GILLES DELEUZE From Cinema II: The Time-Image
     Preface
     Recapitulation of Images and Signs
     Conclusions
JAMES NAREMORE From Acting in the Cinema
     Protocols
PAUL WELLS From Understanding Animation
     Notes Towards a Theory of Animation

PART 3  Modernism and Realism: Debates in Classical

Film Theory
WALTER BENJAMIN The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version)
JEAN EPSTEIN Photogénie and the Imponderable
DZIGA VERTOV Film Directors: A Revolution
SERGEI EISENSTEIN The Dramaturgy of Film Form (The Dialectical Approach to Film Form)
RUDOLF ARNHEIM From Film as Art
     Film and Reality
SIEGFRIED KRACAUER From Theory of Film
     Basic Concepts
     Inherent Affi nities
ANDRÉ BAZIN From What Is Cinema?
     The Ontology of the Photographic Image
     The Evolution of the Language of Cinema
MIRIAM HANSEN The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism

PART 4  Auteurism: Directors, Stars, and Beyond

ROLAND BARTHES The Death of the Author
ALEXANDRE ASTRUC The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo
ANDREW SARRIS The Auteur Theory Revisited
PETER WOLLEN From Signs and Meaning in the Cinema
     The Auteur Theory
TANIA MODLESKI From The Women Who Knew Too Much
     Hitchcock, Feminism, and the Patriarchal Unconscious
JUDITH MAYNE Lesbian Looks: Dorothy Arzner and Female Authorship
RICHARD DYER From Stars
TIMOTHY CORRIGAN From A Cinema without Walls
     The Commerce of Auteurism
JEROME CHRISTENSEN Studio Authorship, Corporate Art

PART 5  Genre: Classifying Stories

ARISTOTLE From Poetics
     The Origins of Tragedy, Comedy and Epic
THOMAS SCHATZ From Hollywood Genres
     Film Genre and the Genre Film
RICHARD DYER Entertainment and Utopia
JEAN-LOUIS COMOLLI and JEAN NARBONI Cinema/Ideology/Criticism
RICK ALTMAN From Film/Genre
     A Semantic/Syntactic/Pragmatic Approach to Genre
THOMAS ELSAESSER Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama
CAROL J. CLOVER From Men, Women, and Chain Saws
     Her Body, Himself

PART 6  Narrative: Telling Stories

TZVETAN TODOROV Structural Analysis of Narrative
ROBERT STAM Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation
DAVID BORDWELL From Poetics of Cinem
     The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice
TERESA DE LAURETIS From Alice Doesn’t
     Desire in Narrative
MANTHIA DIAWARA Black American Cinema: The New Realism
JANE FEUER Narrative Form in American Network Television
HENRY JENKINS From Convergence Culture
     Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling

PART 7  Alternative Modes: Experimental and Documentary Film

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE The Salon of 1859: The Modern Public and Photography
GERMAINE DULAC The Avant-Garde Cinema
JOHN GRIERSON First Principles of Documentary
STAN BRAKHAGE In Consideration of Aesthetics
BILL NICHOLS From Blurred Boundaries 
     Performing Documentary
DOGME 95
     Manifesto
     Vow of Chastity
TRINH T. MINH-HA Documentary Is/Not a Name

PART 8  Sexuality and Gender in Cinema: From Psychoanalysis to Performativity

SIGMUND FREUD On Fetishism
LAURA MULVEY Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
LINDA WILLIAMS “Something Else Besides a Mother”
KOBENA MERCER Dark and Lovely Too: Black Gay Men in Independent Film
YVONNE TASKER Dumb Movies for Dumb People: Masculinity, the Body, and the Voice in Contemporary Action Cinema
B. RUBY RICH New Queer Cinema
LINDA WILLIAMS Porn Studies: Proliferating Pornographies On/Scene

PART 9  Race and Ethnicity in Cinema: From Stereotypes to Self-Representation

FRANTZ FANON From Black Skin, White Masks
     The Fact of Blackness
ELLA SHOHAT and ROBERT STAM From Unthinking Eurocentrism
     Stereotype, Realism, and the Struggle over Representation
RICHARD DYER White
FATIMAH TOBING RONY From The Third Eye
     King Kong and the Monster in Ethnographic Cinema
ANA M. LÓPEZ Are All Latins from Manhattan?
TONI CADE BAMBARA Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye
FAYE GINSBURG Screen Memories and Entangled Technologies

PART 10  National and Transnational Film Histories

BENEDICT ANDERSON From Imagined Communities
CESARE ZAVATTINI Some Ideas on the Cinema
FERNANDO SOLANAS and OCTAVIO GETINO Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World
STEPHEN CROFTS Reconceptualizing National Cinema/s
JYOTIKA VIRDI From The Cinematic ImagiNation
     Nation and Its Discontents
HAMID NAFICY From An Accented Cinema
     Situating Accented Cinema
DUDLEY ANDREW An Atlas of World Cinema

PART 11  Screen Cultures: Current Debates

THEODOR W. ADORNO and MAX HORKHEIMER From The Dialectic of Enlightenment
     The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
FREDRIC JAMESON Postmodernism and Consumer Society
LISA NAKAMURA From Digitizing Race
     The Social Optics of Race and Networked Interfaces in The Matrix Trilogy and Minority Report
LEV MANOVICH From The Language of New Media
     What Is Digital Cinema?
ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAW From Gaming
     Origins of the First-Person Shooter
LAWRENCE LESSIG From Remix
    RW, Revived
LAURIE OUELLETTE “Take Responsibility for Yourself”: Judge Judy and the Neoliberal Citizen
D. N. RODOWICK An Elegy for Theory

     APPENDIX A: Alternative Tables of Contents
     APPENDIX B: Film Pairings for Studying Film Theory
     Acknowledgments
     Index

Timothy Corrigan

Timothy Corrigan is a professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His work in Cinema Studies has focused on modern American and contemporary international cinema. He received a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and completed graduate work at the University of Leeds, Emory University, and the University of Paris III. His other books include New German Film: The Displaced Image (Indiana UP); The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History (Routledge); Writing about Film (Longman/Pearson); A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam (Routledge/Rutgers UP); Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader (Routledge); Critical Visions in Film Theory (Bedford/St. Martin’s), also with Patricia White; American Cinema of the 2000s (Rutgers UP), and The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford UP), winner of the 2012 Katherine Singer Kovács Award for the outstanding book in film and media studies. He has published essays in Film Quarterly, Discourse, and Cinema Journal, among other collections, and is also an editor of the journal Adaptation and a former editorial board member of Cinema Journal. In 2014, he received the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Award for Outstanding Pedagogical Achievement.

Patricia White

Patricia White is Eugene Lang Research Professor of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College. She is the author of Women’s Cinema/World Cinema: Projecting 21st Century Feminisms (Duke University Press) and Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Indiana University Press), as well as numerous articles and book chapters on film theory and culture. She is coeditor with Timothy Corrigan and Meta Mazaj of Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Bedford/St. Martin’s). She serves on the editorial collective of the feminist film journal Camera Obscura and the boards of Women Make Movies and Film Quarterly.

Meta Mazaj

Meta Mazaj is a Lecturer in Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on film history, theory, Balkan cinema, and transnational cinema. She has published on critical theory, Balkan cinema, new European cinema, film and nationalism.  She is the author of National and Cynicism in the Post 1990s Balkan Cinema (2008, VDM Verlag), which examines the relationship between film and nationalism in contemporary Balkan cinema. Her current work focuses on East European and transnational cinema.