Reinventing Film Studies
| Author | : Linda Williams |
| Publisher | : Hodder Education |
| Total Pages | : 464 |
| Release | : 2000-01 |
| Genre | : Literary Criticism |
| ISBN | : 9780340677223 |
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This anthology of specially commissioned essays introduces students to some of the central questions and debates which have concerned the development of Film Studies. It differs from other readers in that it does not start with the intellectual history of the evolution of film theory, or the history and criticism of film, but with the problems and questions that confront us now. The contributors begin with questions that are central to the field, asking what we need to know and what theories, concepts, and methods help us to know. These questions that confront the discipline at the beginning of a new century, either reframe or depart from the concerns of the 1970s when film first became an academic subject of study. This second century of moving images, new questions, and a new knowledge animate the field. The aim of this collection is to reinvent film studies in the light of these new questions, rethinking and refiguring what is most useful from the past. There are fourkey issues in this reinvention: that film studies can no longer ignore its interdisciplinary invention next to media studies, cultural studies and visual culture, and that film studies thus needs to confront the 'massness' of its existence as mass media; that film studies has a distinctive and historically changing sensory appeal; that since mass mediated culture is the only terrain on which we have to work, we need to re-confront the aesthetic, generic and modal forms of this mass media; and,finally, that the pressure of postmodernity has compelled a new urgency in the understanding of film history, which is never wholly about then and certainly always about now.
