Reference Sources for Film History and Theory
Critical Dictionary of Film and Television Theory by ISBN: 9780203992005Publication Date: 2005-12-08
Selected Online Resources for Film History and Theory
- Reverse ShotReverse Shot is a publication of Museum of the Moving Image. The magazine was first formed in 2003 and was run independently by editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert until September 2014, when they partnered with the Museum. From "About." Retrieved 17 Fen. 2022
- Senses of CinemaEstablished in Melbourne (Australia) in 1999, Senses of Cinema is one of the first online film journals of its kind and has set the standard for professional, high quality film-related content on the Internet. From the home page. Retrieved 17 Feb. 2022
Books on Film Theory
Film Theory: an introduction by
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.
ISBN: 9781119491576Publication Date: 2017-11-20
Critical Visions in Film Theory by
Embracing groundbreaking approaches without ignoring the history of classical film theory, Critical Visions in Film Theory encompasses the broader, more inclusive perspective of film theory today, focusing on topics such as race, gender and sexuality, and new media.
ISBN: 9780312446345Publication Date: 2010-12-06
Film and Theory: an anthology by
Providing a collection of some of the most provocative and influential writings of film theory in the past thirty years, this anthology aims to provide a polylogue among theorists, deprovincializing the subject. Film Theory multiplies the perspectives and positions, the situations and locations, from which film theory is spoken.
ISBN: 0631206256Publication Date: 2000-04-17
Channels of Discourse, Reassembled by
Since its original publication in 1987, Channels of Discourse has provided the most comprehensive consideration of commercial television, drawing on insights provided by the major strands of contemporary criticism: semiotics, narrative theory, reception theory, genre theory, ideological analysis, psychoanalysis, feminist criticism, and British cultural studies. The second edition features a new introduction by Robert Allen that includes a discussion of the political economy of commercial television. Two new essays have been added--one an assessment of postmodernism and television, the other an analysis of convergence and divergence among the essays--and the original essays have been substantially revised and updated with an international audience in mind. Sixty-one new television stills illustrate the text. Each essay lays out the general tenets of its particular approach, discusses television as an object of analysis within that critical framework, and provides extended examples of the types of analysis produced by that critical approach. Case studies range from Rescue 911 and Twin Peaks to soap operas, music videos, game shows, talk shows, and commericals. Channels of Discourse, Reassembled suggests new ways of understanding relationships among television programs, between viewing pleasure and narrative structure, and between the world in front of the television set and that represented on the screen. The collection also addresses the qualities of popular television that traditional aesthetics and quantitative media research have failed to treat satisfactorily, including its seriality, mass production, and extraordinary popularity. The contributors are Robert C. Allen, Jim Collins, Jane Feuer, John Fiske, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, James Hay, E. Ann Kaplan, Sarah Kozloff, Ellen Seiter, and Mimi White.
ISBN: 9780807898871Publication Date: 2010-01-27
Film Theory: an introduction through the senses by
What is the relationship between cinema and spectator? This is the key question for film theory, and one that Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener put at the center of their insightful and engaging book, now revised from its popular first edition. Every kind of cinema (and every film theory) first imagines an ideal spectator, and then maps certain dynamic interactions between the screen and the spectator's mind, body and senses. Using seven distinctive configurations of spectator and screen that move progressively from 'exterior' to 'interior' relationships, the authors retrace the most important stages of film theory from its beginnings to the present--from neo-realist and modernist theories to psychoanalytic, 'apparatus,' phenomenological and cognitivist theories, and including recent cross-overs with philosophy and neurology. This new and updated edition of Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses has been extensively revised and rewritten throughout, incorporating discussion of contemporary films like Her and Gravity, and including a greatly expanded final chapter, which brings film theory fully into the digital age.
ISBN: 9781138824294Publication Date: 2015-03-27
The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema by
Since the publications of his first essays in the early 1960s Christian Metz has produced a body of work that has established him as the most influential contemporary theorist of cinema and as a leading contributor to the development of semiotics generally. Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier is in many ways a culmination of this work. In the first half of the book Metz explores a number of aspects of the psychological anchoring of cinema as a social institution, using Freudian psychoanalysis to examine the nature of cinematic spectatorship, the relations of cinema and voyeurism, fetishism and so on. In the second half, he shifts his approach a little to look at the operations of meaning in the film text, at the figures of image and sound concatenation. Thus he is led to consideration of metaphor and metonymy in film, this involving a detailed account of these two figures as they appear in psychoanalysis and linguistics - an account which brilliantly disentangles the various analogies that have been proposed between metaphor and metonymy, condensation and displacement, paradigm and syntagm, and makes an important contribution to our general understanding of these issues as well as to our particular understanding of cinema. Throughout, the book is an argument with and recasting of initial semiotic thinking dependent on reference to fixed linguistics models; it offers something of a 'second semiotics', concerned now with the institution of modes of subjectivity, cinema as imaginary signifier, and with the movement and effects of meaning, film as text.
ISBN: 0333278054Publication Date: 1982-02-24
Finding books and other materials
UT Libraries One Search
To find books on a particular topic in One Search, try using words from the following subject headings. Once you're in a catalog record, you can click on other relevant subject heading links to display other items in that category
- Motion pictures
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- Oxford BibliographiesThese annotated bibliographies can guide you to scholarly books on your topic. Explore Film Theory
Finding Articles
Databases for finding scholarly articles on the broader topic of cinema studies are listed on the Cinema Studies Research Guide.
- FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals DatabaseResources for film history, theory, and criticism from The International Federation of Film Archives. Citations and select full-text of academic and popular film journals as well as holdings information of silent-era film archives.
Finding Streaming Media and DVDs
See the Cinema Studies Research Guide homepage for information on how to find streaming video or DVDs in UT Libraries' collection.
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