A Short History of Film
Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster

"A Short History of Film is a comprehensive and detailed overview of the last 100 years of international film history. It will prove to be a useful reference tool for all students of film, both in and out of the classroom."
—Paula J. Massood, Brooklyn College, CUNY

Beginning with precursors of what we call moving pictures, Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster lead a fast-paced tour through the invention of the kinetoscope, the introduction of sound and color between the two world wars, and ultimately the computer generated imagery of the present day. They detail significant periods in world cinema, including the early major industries in Europe, the dominance of the Hollywood studio system in the 1930s and 1940s, and the French New Wave of the 1960s. In addition, the authors have taken great care to incorporate the stories of women and minority filmmakers who have often been overlooked in other texts.

Compact and easily readable, this is the best one-stop source for the history of world film available to students, teachers, and general audiences alike.

• Perfect for a one semester course!

492 pages | Paper | List Price: $24.95 | 24 color and 228 b&w photographs | Discount Price: $19.96 + Free Shipping

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Hollywood on the Hudson
Film and Television in New York from Griffith to Sarnoff
Richard Koszarski

"This is the definitive history of New York filmmaking in the first half of the twentieth century--and this is no small story or accomplishment." —Steven J. Ross, author of Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America

Thomas Edison invented his motion picture system in New Jersey in the 1890s, and within a few years most American filmmakers could be found within a mile or two of the Hudson River. They planted themselves here because they needed the artistic and entrepreneurial energy that D. W. Griffith realized New York had in abundance. But as the going rate for land and labor skyrocketed and their business grew more industrialized, most of them moved out. The way most historians explain it, the role of New York in the development of American film ends here.

In Hollywood on the Hudson, Richard Koszarski rewrites an important part of the history of American cinema. During the 1920s and 1930s, film industry executives had centralized the mass production of feature pictures in a series of gigantic film factories scattered across Southern California, while maintaining New York as the economic and administrative center. But as Koszarski reveals, many writers, producers, and directors also continued to work here, especially if their independent vision was too big for the Hollywood production line.

East Coast filmmakers-Oscar Micheaux, Rudolph Valentino, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, Paul Robeson, Gloria Swanson, Max Fleischer, and others-quietly created a studio system without back-lots, long-term contracts or seasonal production slates. They substituted "newsreel photography" for Hollywood glamour, targeted niche audiences instead of middle-American families, ignored accepted dramatic conventions, and pushed the boundaries of motion picture censorship. Rebellious and unconventional, they saw the New York studios as laboratories, not factories-and used them to pioneer the development of new technologies (from talkies to television), new genres, new talent, and ultimately, an entirely new vision of commercial cinema.


592 pages | Paper | List Price: $39.95
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The Horse Who Drank the Sky
Film Experience Beyond Narrative and Theory
Murray Pomerance

"A testament to the critical force of cinephilia, this book moves effortlessly across a dazzling array of films and ways of reading them. Pomerance counts among the most compelling writers on cinema in the contemporary field."
—Tom Conley, Harvard University

What is most important about cinema is that we are alive with it. For all its dramatic, literary, political, sociological, and philosophical weight, film is ultimately an art that provokes, touches, and riddles the viewer through an image that transcends narrative and theory. In The Horse Who Drank the Sky, Murray Pomerance brings attention to the visceral dimension of movies and presents a new and unanticipated way of thinking about what happens when we watch them.

By looking at point of view, the gaze, the voice from nowhere, diegesis and its discontents, ideology, the system of the apparatus, invisible editing, and the technique of overlapping sound, he argues that it is often the minuscule or transitional moments in motion pictures that penetrate most deeply into viewers' experiences. In films that include Rebel Without a Cause, Dead Man, Chinatown, The Graduate, North by Northwest, Dinner at Eight, Jaws, Stage Fright,Saturday Night Fever, The Band Wagon, The Bourne Identity, and dozens more, Pomerance invokes complexities that many of the best of critics have rarely tackled and opens a revealing view of some of the most astonishing moments in cinema.

278 pages | Paper | List Price: $26.95
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Screening Genders
Edited and with an introduction by Krin Gabbard and William Luhr

Gender roles have been tested, challenged, and redefined everywhere during the past thirty years, but perhaps nowhere more dramatically than in film. Screening Genders is a lively and engaging introduction to the evolving representations of masculinity, femininity, and places once thought to be "in between."

The book begins with a general introduction that traces the movement of gender theory from the margins of film studies to its center. The ten essays that follow address a range of topics, including screen stars; depictions of gay, straight, queer, and transgender subjects; and the relationship between gender and genre. Widely respected scholars, including Robert T. Eberwein, Lucy Fischer, Chris Holmlund, E. Ann Kaplan, Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, David Lugowski, Patricia Mellencamp, Jerry Mosher, Jacqueline Reich, and Chris Straayer, focus on the radical ideological advances of contemporary cinema, as well as on those groundbreaking films that have shaped our ideas about masculinity and femininity, not only in movies but in American culture at large.

The first comprehensive overview of the history of gender theory in film, this book is an ideal text for courses and will serve as a foundation for further discussion among students and scholars alike.

208 pages | Paper | List Price: $23.95
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Depth of Field series

Dying Swans and Madmen
Ballet, the Body, and Narrative Cinema
Adrienne L. McLean

"Aside from cataloguing, describing, and closely reading the plethora of films that comprise the group with which she is concerned, McLean surfaces interesting theoretical issues concerning the genre. This is a unique and original project."—Lucy Fischer, University of Pittsburgh

From mid-twentieth-century films such as Grand Hotel, Waterloo Bridge, and The Red Shoes to recent box-office hits including Billy Elliot, Save the Last Dance, and The Company, ballet has found its way, time and again, onto the silver screen and into the hearts of many otherwise unlikely audiences. In Dying Swans and Madmen, Adrienne L. McLean explores the curious pairing of classical and contemporary, art and entertainment, high culture and popular culture to reveal the ambivalent place that this art form occupies in American life.

Drawing on examples that range from musicals to tragic melodramas, she shows how commercial films have produced an image of ballet and its artists that is associated both with joy, fulfillment, fame, and power and with sexual and mental perversity, melancholy, and death. Although ballet is still received by many with a lack of interest or outright suspicion, McLean argues that these attitudes as well as ballet's popularity and its acceptability as a way of life and a profession have often depended on what audiences first learned about it from the movies.

320 pages | Paper | List Price: $26.95
Discount Price: $21.56 + Free Shipping

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