Research Catalog

Title

Post-theory : reconstructing film studies / edited by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll.

Publication

Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

• Bordwell, David.
• Carroll, Noël, 1947-

Description

xvii, 564 pages : illustrations; 23 cm.

Summary

• Since the 1970s, the academic study of film has been dominated by Structuralist Marxism, varieties of cultural theory, and the psychoanalytic ideas of Freud and Lacan. With Post-Theory, David Bordwell and Noel Carroll have opened the floor to other voices challenging the prevailing practices of film scholarship. Addressing topics as diverse as film scores, national film industries, and audience response. Post-Theory offers fresh directions for understanding film.
• Bordwell and Carroll pose a simple question. Why not employ many theories tailored to specific goals, rather than searching for a unified theory that will explain all sorts of films, their production, and their reception? The scholars writing here use historical, philosophical, psychological, and feminist methods to tackle such basic issues as: What goes on when viewers perceive a film? How do filmmakers exploit conventions? How do movies create illusions? How does a film arouse emotion?
• Bordwell and Carroll have given space not only to distinguished film scholars but to non-film specialists as well, ensuring a wide variety of opinions and ideas on virtually every topic on the current agenda of film studies. Full of stimulating essays published here for the first time, Post-Theory promises to redefine the study of cinema.

Series Statement

Wisconsin studies in film

Uniform Title

Wisconsin studies in film.

Subject

Motion pictures

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

• 1. Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory / David Bordwell -- 2. Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment / Noel Carroll -- 3. Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Problem of the Missing Spectator / Stephen Prince -- 4. Convention, Construction, and Cinematic Vision / David Bordwell -- 5. Is a Cognitive Approach to the Avant-garde Cinema Perverse? / James Peterson -- 6. The Logic and Legacy of Brechtianism / Murray Smith -- 7. Characterization and Fictional Truth in the Cinema / Paisley Livingston -- 8. Empathy and (Film) Fiction / Alex Neill -- 9. Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films / Cynthia A. Freeland -- 10. Apt Feelings, or Why "Women's Films" Aren't Trivial / Flo Leibowitz -- 11. Unheard Melodies? A Critique of Psychoanalytic Theories of Film Music / Jeff Smith -- 12. Film Music and Narrative Agency / Jerrold Levinson -- 13. Nonfiction Film and Postmodernist Skepticism / Noel Carroll --
• 14. Moving Pictures and the Rhetoric of Nonfiction Film: Two Approaches / Carl Plantinga -- 15. Film, Reality, and Illusion / Gregory Currie -- 16. The Case for an Ecological Metatheory / Joseph Anderson and Barbara Anderson -- 17. Movies in the Mind's Eye / Julian Hochberg and Virginia Brooks -- 18. Notes on Audience Response / Richard J. Gerrig and Deborah A. Prentice -- 19. Toward a New Media Economics / Douglas Gomery -- 20. Columbia Pictures: The Making of a Motion Picture Major, 1930-1943 / Tino Balio -- 21. "A Brief Romantic Interlude": Dick and Jane Go to 3 1/2 Seconds of the Classical Hollywood Cinema / Richard Maltby -- 22. The Jazz Singer's Reception in the Media and at the Box Office / Donald Crafton -- 23. Jameson and "Global Aesthetics" / Michael Walsh -- 24. Reconstructing Japanese Film / Donald Kirihara -- 25. Danish Cinema and the Politics of Recognition / Mette Hjort -- 26. Whose Apparatus? Problems of Film Exhibition and History / Vance Kepley, Jr.

ISBN

• 0299149404 (cloth : alk. paper)
• 0299149447 (pbk. : alk. paper)

LCCN

95037052

OCLC

ocm33008676

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries