Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (Sixth Edition)

By: Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen

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Synopsis: In the thirty years since the first edition of this collection appeared in 1974-let alone the more than one hundred years since the first films were shown-the academic study of film has changed enormously, and the journalistic and popular criticism of film has been deeply affected as well. Yet many of the same issues that preoccupied and stimulated writers from the very beginning of film theory and criticism are still puzzling later generations: Is the filmed world realistic or artificial? Is film a language? Is its world best expressed in silence? in sound? through stories that may be derived from other arts? through stories that can be told only on film? Many of these questions were first formulated in critical language indebted to the methods and terminology of such humanistic disciplines as literary criticism, art history, and aesthetics. But early on, theorists began to emphasize the obligation to appreciate what was different, even unique, about film in comparison with the other arts: its formal qualities, its common need for enormous capital investment, and its relation to a mass audience.