Movies and methods

VOLUME 1: Film teachers and students will welcome this new anthology, which makes available in one source a comprehensive selection of recent theoretical work on film, including many articles difficult to locate in the scattered literature. The contents are drawn almost entirely from the publications of the past fifteen years, and include work by the most original film thinkers -- some well known to a wide public, some widely known among readers of film journals. Several important filmmakers are also represented. The materials have been grouped in critical categories reflecting recent approaches to the medium. In place of older questions such as the relation of film to other arts, or film's ability to capture an imprint of reality, the questions emphasized in the anthology concern film's ideological operations, the nature of film genres, the role of the "auteur" in the creative process, the representation of social groups (such as women) in film, the logical of narrative and formal organizations in films, the treatment of films as myths, and new theoretical perspectives. Thus the contents reflect the use of political, structualist, semiological and psychoanalytic methods, as well as those of more traditional criticism. There is virtually no duplication of materials included in the Mast & Cohen anthology "Film Theory and Criticism." -- Publisher description. VOLUME 2: "Movies and Methods," Volume II, captures the developments that have given history and genre studies imaginative new models and indicates how feminist, structuralist, and psychoanalytic approaches to film have achieved fresh, valuable insights. In his thoughtful introduction, Nichols provides a context for the paradoxes that confront film studies today. He shows how shared methods and approaches continue to stimulate much of the best writing about film, points to common problems most critics and theorists have tried to resolve, and describes the internal contraditions that have restricted the usefulness of post-structuralism. Mini-introductions place each essay in a larger context and suggest its linkages with other essays in the volume. A great variety of approaches and methods characterize film writing today, and the final part conveys their diversity--from statistical style analysis to phenomenology and from gay criticisms to neoformalism. This concluding part also shows how the rigorous use of a broad range of approaches has helped remove post-structuralist criticism from its position of dominance through most of the seventies and early eighties. -- Publisher description.