Film is an art form with a language and an aesthetic all its own. Since 1979, David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and now, Co-Author, Jeff Smith's Film Art has been the best-selling and most widely respected introduction to the analysis of cinema. Taking a skills-centered approach supported by examples from many periods and countries, the authors help students develop a core set of analytical skills that will enrich their understanding of any film, in any genre. In-depth examples deepen students' appreciation for how creative choices by filmmakers affect what viewers experience and how they respond. Film Art is generously illustrated with more than 1,000 frame enlargements taken directly from completed films, providing concrete illustrations of key concepts. Along with updated examples and expanded coverage of digital filmmaking, the twelfth edition of Film Art delivers SmartBook, first and only adaptive reading experience currently available, designed to help students stay focused, maximize study time and retain basic concepts.

This new edition of Film History has been revised to include recent films, new examples, and updated comprehensive overviews of the rise of streaming services as purveyors of cinematic content as well as the massive disruptions of film production, distribution, and exhibition caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a comprehensive global survey of film and its many genres - from drama and comedy to documentary and experimental - written by three of the discipline's leading scholars. Concepts and events are illustrated with frame enlargements taken from the original sources, giving students more realistic and relevant points of reference than publicity stills. There are 100 new film clips with commentary in McGraw Hill Connect (R) - the web-based assignment and assessment platform that helps you connect your students to their coursework. Film History is a text that any serious film scholar - professor, undergraduate, or graduate student - will want to read and keep.

Narrative innovation is typically seen as the domain of the avant-garde. However, techniques such as nonlinear timelines, multiple points of view, and unreliable narration have long been part of American popular culture. How did forms and styles once regarded as "difficult" become familiar to audiences? In Perplexing Plots, David Bordwell reveals how crime fiction, plays, and films made unconventional narrative mainstream. He shows that since the nineteenth century, detective stories and suspense thrillers have allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. Tales of crime and mystery became a training ground where audiences learned to appreciate artifice. These genres demand a sophisticated awareness of storytelling conventions: they play games with narrative form and toy with audience expectations. Bordwell examines how writers and directors have pushed, pulled, and collaborated with their audiences to change popular storytelling. He explores the plot engineering of figures such as Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Dorothy Sayers, and Quentin Tarantino, and traces how mainstream storytellers and modernist experimenters influenced one another's work. A sweeping, kaleidoscopic account written in a lively, conversational style, Perplexing Plots offers an ambitious new understanding of how movies, literature, theater, and popular culture have evolved over the past century.

The Cinema of Eisenstein is David Bordwell's comprehensive analysis of the films of Sergei Eisenstein, arguably the key figure in the entire history of film. The director of such classics as Potemkin, Ivan the Terrible, October, Strike, and Alexander Nevsky, Eisenstein theorized montage, presented Soviet realism to the world, and mastered the concept of film epic. Comprehensive, authoritative, and illustrated throughout, this classic work deserves to be on the shelf of every serious student of cinema.

'A dense, challenging and important book.' Philip French Observer 'At the very least, this blockbuster is probably the best single volume history of Hollywood we're likely to get for a very long time.' Paul Kerr City Limits 'Persuasively argued, the book is also packed with facts, figures and photographs.' Nigel Andrews Financial Times Acclaimed for their breakthrough approach, Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson analyze the basic conditions of American film-making as a historical institution and consider to what extent Hollywood film production constitutes a systematic enterprise, in both its style and its business operations. Despite differences of director, genre or studio, most Hollywood films operate within a set of shared assumptions about how a film should look and sound. Such assumptions are neither natural nor inevitable; but because classical-style films have been the type most widely seen, they have come to be accepted as the 'norm' of film-making and viewing. The authors show how these classical conventions were formulated and standardized, and how they responded to the arrival of sound, colour, widescreen ratios and stereophonic sound. They argue that each new technological development has served a function within an existing narrational system. The authors also examine how the Hollywood cinema standardized the film-making process itself. They describe how, over the course of its history, Hollywood developed distinct modes of production in a constant search for maximum efficiency, predictability and novelty. Set apart by its combination of theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, this book is the standard work on the classical Hollywood cinema style of film-making from the silent era to the 1960s. Now available in paperback, it is a 'must' for film students, lecturers and all those seriously interested in the development of the film industry.

Bringing together twenty-five years of work on what he has called the "historical poetics of cinema," David Bordwell presents an extended analysis of a key question for film studies: how are films made, in particular historical contexts, in order to achieve certain effects? For Bordwell, films are made things, existing within historical contexts, and aim to create determinate effects. Beginning with this central thesis, Bordwell works out a full understanding of how films channel and recast cultural influences for their cinematic purposes. With more than five hundred film stills, Poetics of Cinema is a must-have for any student of cinema.

The Cinema of Eisenstein is David Bordwell's comprehensive analysis of the films of Sergei Eisenstein, arguably the key figure in the entire history of film. The director of such classics as Potemkin,Ivan the Terrible, October, Strike, and Alexander Nevsky, Eisenstein theorized montage, presented Soviet realism to the world, and mastered the concept of film epic. Comprehensive, authoritative, and illustrated throughout, this classic work deserves to be on the shelf of every serious student of cinema.

'A dense, challenging and important book.' Philip French Observer 'At the very least, this blockbuster is probably the best single volume history of Hollywood we're likely to get for a very long time.' Paul Kerr City Limits 'Persuasively argued, the book is also packed with facts, figures and photographs.' Nigel Andrews Financial Times Acclaimed for their breakthrough approach, Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson analyze the basic conditions of American film-making as a historical institution and consider to what extent Hollywood film production constitutes a systematic enterprise, in both its style and its business operations. Despite differences of director, genre or studio, most Hollywood films operate within a set of shared assumptions about how a film should look and sound. Such assumptions are neither natural nor inevitable; but because classical-style films have been the type most widely seen, they have come to be accepted as the 'norm' of film-making and viewing. The authors show how these classical conventions were formulated and standardized, and how they responded to the arrival of sound, colour, widescreen ratios and stereophonic sound. They argue that each new technological development has served a function within an existing narrational system. The authors also examine how the Hollywood cinema standardized the film-making process itself. They describe how, over the course of its history, Hollywood developed distinct modes of production in a constant search for maximum efficiency, predictability and novelty. Set apart by its combination of theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, this book is the standard work on the classical Hollywood cinema style of film-making from the silent era to the 1960s. Now available in paperback, it is a 'must' for film students, lecturers and all those seriously interested in the development of the film industry.

First Published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Bringing together twenty-five years of work on what he has called the "historical poetics of cinema," David Bordwell presents an extended analysis of a key question for film studies: how are films made, in particular historical contexts, in order to achieve certain effects? For Bordwell, films are made things, existing within historical contexts, and aim to create determinate effects. Beginning with this central thesis, Bordwell works out a full understanding of how films channel and recast cultural influences for their cinematic purposes. With more than five hundred film stills, Poetics of Cinema is a must-have for any student of cinema.

Narrative innovation is typically seen as the domain of the avant-garde. However, techniques such as nonlinear timelines, multiple points of view, and unreliable narration have long been part of American popular culture. How did forms and styles once regarded as "difficult" become familiar to audiences? In Perplexing Plots, David Bordwell reveals how crime fiction, plays, and films made unconventional narrative mainstream. He shows that since the nineteenth century, detective stories and suspense thrillers have allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. Tales of crime and mystery became a training ground where audiences learned to appreciate artifice. These genres demand a sophisticated awareness of storytelling conventions: they play games with narrative form and toy with audience expectations. Bordwell examines how writers and directors have pushed, pulled, and collaborated with their audiences to change popular storytelling. He explores the plot engineering of figures such as Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Dorothy Sayers, and Quentin Tarantino, and traces how mainstream storytellers and modernist experimenters influenced one another's work. A sweeping, kaleidoscopic account written in a lively, conversational style, Perplexing Plots offers an ambitious new understanding of how movies, literature, theater, and popular culture have evolved over the past century.

How films are conceived, planned, and produced leaves a mark upon the films, directly and structurally. The relations between film style and mode of production are, according to the authors, reciprocal and mutually influencing. The authors trace such topics as style, economics, and technology over time, demonstrating how significant changes occurrred in Hollywood from the earliest days through the sixties.

Hollywood moviemaking is one of the constants of American life, but how much has it changed since the glory days of the big studios? David Bordwell argues that the principles of visual storytelling created in the studio era are alive and well, even in todayOCOs bloated blockbusters. American filmmakers have created a durable traditionOCoone that we should not be ashamed to call artistic, and one that survives in both mainstream entertainment and niche-marketed indie cinema. Bordwell traces the continuity of this tradition in a wide array of films made since 1960, from romantic comedies like "Jerry Maguire" and "Love Actually "to more imposing efforts like "A Beautiful Mind." He also draws upon testimony from writers, directors, and editors who are acutely conscious of employing proven principles of plot and visual style. Within the limits of the classical approach, innovation can flourish. Bordwell examines how imaginative filmmakers have pushed the premises of the system in films such as "JFK, Memento, " and "Magnolia." He discusses generational, technological, and economic factors leading to stability and change in Hollywood cinema and includes close analyses of selected shots and sequences. As it ranges across four decades, examining classics like "American Graffiti" and "The Godfather" as well as recent success like "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," this book provides a vivid and engaging interpretation of how Hollywood moviemakers have created a vigorous, resourceful tradition of cinematic storytelling that continues to engage audiences around the world."

For nearly half a century, Roger Ebert's wide knowledge, keen judgment, prodigious energy, and sharp sense of humor made him America's most renowned and beloved film critic. From Ebert's Pulitzer Prize to his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, from his astonishing output of daily reviews to his pioneering work on television with Gene Siskel, his was a career in cinema criticism without peer. Arriving fifty years after Ebert published his first film review in 1967, this second edition of Awake in the Dark collects Ebert's essential writings into a single, irresistible volume. Featuring new Top Ten Lists and reviews of the years' finest films through 2012, this edition allows both fans and film buffs to bask in the best of an extraordinary lifetime's work.Including reviews from The Godfather to GoodFellas and interviews with everyone from Martin Scorsese to Meryl Streep, as well as showcasing some of Ebert's most admired essays among them a moving appreciation of John Cassavetes and a loving tribute to the virtues of black-and-white films Ebert's Awake in the Dark is a treasure trove not just for fans of this era-defining critic, but for anyone desiring a compulsively readable chronicle of the silver screen. Stretching from the dramatic rise of rebel Hollywood and the heyday of the auteur to the triumph of blockbuster films such as Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, to the indie revolution that is still with us today, Awake in the Dark reveals a writer whose exceptional intelligence and daily bursts of insight and enthusiasm helped shape the way we think about the movies. But more than this, Awake in the Dark is a celebration of Ebert's inimitable voice a voice still cherished and missed.

Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert were three of America's most revered and widely read film critics, more famous than many of the movies they wrote about. But their remarkable contributions to the burgeoning American film criticism of the 1960s and beyond were deeply influenced by four earlier critics: Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler. Throughout the 1930s and '40s, Ferguson, Agee, Farber, and Tyler scrutinized what was on the screen with an intensity not previously seen in popular reviewing. Although largely ignored by the arts media of the day, they honed the sort of serious discussion of films that would be made popular decades later by Kael, Sarris, Ebert and their contemporaries. With The Rhapsodes, renowned film scholar and critic David Bordwell--an heir to both those legacies--restores to a wider audience the work of Ferguson, Agee, Farber, and Tyler, critics he calls the "Rhapsodes" for the passionate and deliberately offbeat nature of their vernacular prose. Each broke with prevailing currents in criticism in order to find new ways to talk about the popular films that contemporaries often saw at best as trivial, at worst as a betrayal of art. Ferguson saw in Hollywood an engaging, adroit mode of popular storytelling. Agee sought in cinema the lyrical epiphanies found in romantic poetry. Farber, trained as a painter, brought a pictorial intelligence to bear on film. A surrealist, Tyler treated classic Hollywood as a collective hallucination that invited both audience and critic to find moments of subversive pleasure. With his customary clarity and brio, Bordwell takes readers through the relevant cultural and critical landscape and considers the critics' writing styles, their conceptions of films, and their quarrels. He concludes by examining the profound impact of Ferguson, Agee, Farber, and Tyler on later generations of film writers. The Rhapsodes allows readers to rediscover these remarkable critics who broke with convention to capture what they found moving, artful, or disappointing in classic Hollywood cinema and explores their robust--and continuing--influence.

A film tells its story not only through dialogue and actors' performances but also through the director's control of movement and shot design. Figures Traced in Light is a detailed consideration of how cinematic staging carries the story, expresses emotion, and beguiles the audience through pictorial composition. Ranging over the entire history of cinema, David Bordwell focuses on four filmmakers' unique contributions to the technique. In-depth chapters examine Louis Feuillade, master of the 1910s serial; Kenji Mizoguchi, the great Japanese director who worked from the 1920s to the 1950s; Theo Angelopoulos, who began his career as a political modernist in the late 1960s; and Hou Hsiao-hsien, the Taiwanese filmmaker who in the 1980s became the preeminent Asian director. For comparison, Bordwell draws on films by Howard Hawks, Michelangelo Antonioni, Yasujiro Ozu, Takeshi Kitano, and many other directors. Superbly illustrated with more than 500 frame enlargements and 16 color illustrations, Figures Traced in Light situates its close analysis of model sequences in the context of the technological, industrial, and cultural trends that shaped the directors' approaches to staging.

In the 1940s, American movies changed. Flashbacks began to be used in outrageous, unpredictable ways. Soundtracks flaunted voice-over commentary, and characters might pivot from a scene to address the viewer. Incidents were replayed from different characters' viewpoints, and sometimes those versions proved to be false. Films now plunged viewers into characters' memories, dreams, and hallucinations. Some films didn't have protagonists, while others centered on anti-heroes or psychopaths. Women might be on the verge of madness, and neurotic heroes lurched into violent confrontations. Combining many of these ingredients, a new genre emerged--the psychological thriller, populated by women in peril and innocent bystanders targeted for death. If this sounds like today's cinema, that's because it is. In Reinventing Hollywood, David Bordwell examines for the first time the full range and depth of trends that crystallized into traditions. He shows how the Christopher Nolans and Quentin Tarantinos of today owe an immense debt to the dynamic, occasionally delirious narrative experiments of the Forties. With verve and wit, Bordwell examines how a booming movie market during World War II allowed ambitious writers and directors to push narrative boundaries. Although those experiments are usually credited to the influence of Citizen Kane, Bordwell shows that similar impulses had begun in the late 1930s in radio, fiction, and theatre before migrating to film. And despite the postwar recession in the industry, the momentum for innovation continued. Some of the boldest films of the era came in the late forties and early fifties, as filmmakers sought to outdo their peers. Through in-depth analyses of films both famous and virtually unknown, from Our Town and All About Eve to Swell Guy and The Guilt of Janet Ames, Bordwell assesses the era's unique achievements and its legacy for future filmmakers. The result is a groundbreaking study of how Hollywood storytelling became a more complex art. Reinventing Hollywood is essential reading for all lovers of popular cinema.

More than a century after its emergence, classical Hollywood cinema remains popular today with cinephiles and scholars alike. Resetting the Scene: Classical Hollywood Revisited, edited by Philippa Gates and Katherine Spring, showcases cutting-edge work by renowned researchers of Hollywood filmmaking of the studio era and proposes new directions for classical Hollywood studies in the twenty-first century. Resetting the Scene includes twenty-six accessible chapters and an extensive bibliography. In Part 1, Katherine Spring's introduction and David Bordwell's chapter reflect on the newest methods, technological resources, and archival discoveries that have galvanized recent research of studio filmmaking. Part 2 brings together close analyses of film style both visual and sonic with case studies of shot composition, cinematography, and film music. Part 3 offers new approaches to genre, specifically the film musical, the backstudio picture, and the B-film. Part 4 focuses on industry operations, including the origins of Hollywood, cross-promotion, production planning, and talent management. Part 5 offers novel perspectives on the representation of race, in regard to censorship, musicals, film noir, and science fiction. Part 6 illuminates forgotten histories of women's labor in terms of wartime propaganda, below-the-line work, and the evolution of star persona. Part 7 explores the demise of the studio system but also the endurance of classical norms in auteur cinema and screenwriting in the post-classical era. Part 8 highlights new methods for studying Hollywood cinema, including digital resources as tools for writing history and analyzing films, and the intersection of film studies with emergent fields like media industry studies. Intended for scholars and students of Hollywood film history, Resetting the Scene intersects with numerous fields consonant with film studies, including star studies, media industry studies, and critical race theory.

More than a century after its emergence, classical Hollywood cinema remains popular today with cinephiles and scholars alike. Resetting the Scene: Classical Hollywood Revisited, edited by Philippa Gates and Katherine Spring, showcases cutting-edge work by renowned researchers of Hollywood filmmaking of the studio era and proposes new directions for classical Hollywood studies in the twenty-first century. Resetting the Scene includes twenty-six accessible chapters and an extensive bibliography. In Part 1, Katherine Spring's introduction and David Bordwell's chapter reflect on the newest methods, technological resources, and archival discoveries that have galvanized recent research of studio filmmaking. Part 2 brings together close analyses of film style both visual and sonic with case studies of shot composition, cinematography, and film music. Part 3 offers new approaches to genre, specifically the film musical, the backstudio picture, and the B-film. Part 4 focuses on industry operations, including the origins of Hollywood, cross-promotion, production planning, and talent management. Part 5 offers novel perspectives on the representation of race, in regard to censorship, musicals, film noir, and science fiction. Part 6 illuminates forgotten histories of women's labor in terms of wartime propaganda, below-the-line work, and the evolution of star persona. Part 7 explores the demise of the studio system but also the endurance of classical norms in auteur cinema and screenwriting in the post-classical era. Part 8 highlights new methods for studying Hollywood cinema, including digital resources as tools for writing history and analyzing films, and the intersection of film studies with emergent fields like media industry studies. Intended for scholars and students of Hollywood film history, Resetting the Scene intersects with numerous fields consonant with film studies, including star studies, media industry studies, and critical race theory.

Uno de los manuales mas importantes y exitosos de los ultimos tiempos, El arte cinematografico es tambien un esplendido resumen de todo lo que el estudioso y el aficionado deben saber sobre el cine antes de empezar a profundizar de verdad en la materia. Desde una descripcion de los elementos primordiales de la produccion cinematografica hasta una sucinta historia formal del cine, pasando por un vision extremadamente fenomenica del estilo a partir de la puesta en escena, el montaje, la fotografia y el sonido y ejemplos de analisis criticos de filmes, el libro no solo intenta erigirse en un completisimo mosaico sobre todas y cada una de las cuestiones que pueda suscitar el cine entendido como un arte autonomo, sino que ademas lo hace con un objetivo muy claro: como en El significado del filme, La narracion en el cine de ficcion y EL cine clasico de Hollywood, los otros tres textos de Bordwell este ultimo junto con Kristin Thompson y Janet Staiger tambien editados por Paidos, lo que debe importar no es tanto lo que dicen las peliculas como el modo en que lo dicen, o, en otras palabras, lo que Bordwell y Thompson llaman la forma cinematografica, absolutamente distinta de la literaria o de la pictorica. Pues bien: es el dominio de ese alfabeto lo que conseguiran todos aquellos que se adentren en las paginas de esta obra excepcional.

Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert were three of America's most revered and widely read film critics, more famous than many of the movies they wrote about. But their remarkable contributions to the burgeoning American film criticism of the 1960s and beyond were deeply influenced by four earlier critics: Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, and Parker Tyler. Throughout the 1930s and '40s, Ferguson, Agee, Farber, and Tyler scrutinized what was on the screen with an intensity not previously seen in popular reviewing. Although largely ignored by the arts media of the day, they honed the sort of serious discussion of films that would be made popular decades later by Kael, Sarris, Ebert and their contemporaries. With The Rhapsodes, renowned film scholar and critic David Bordwell--an heir to both those legacies--restores to a wider audience the work of Ferguson, Agee, Farber, and Tyler, critics he calls the "Rhapsodes" for the passionate and deliberately offbeat nature of their vernacular prose. Each broke with prevailing currents in criticism in order to find new ways to talk about the popular films that contemporaries often saw at best as trivial, at worst as a betrayal of art. Ferguson saw in Hollywood an engaging, adroit mode of popular storytelling. Agee sought in cinema the lyrical epiphanies found in romantic poetry. Farber, trained as a painter, brought a pictorial intelligence to bear on film. A surrealist, Tyler treated classic Hollywood as a collective hallucination that invited both audience and critic to find moments of subversive pleasure. With his customary clarity and brio, Bordwell takes readers through the relevant cultural and critical landscape and considers the critics' writing styles, their conceptions of films, and their quarrels. He concludes by examining the profound impact of Ferguson, Agee, Farber, and Tyler on later generations of film writers. The Rhapsodes allows readers to rediscover these remarkable critics who broke with convention to capture what they found moving, artful, or disappointing in classic Hollywood cinema and explores their robust--and continuing--influence.

David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson are two of America's preeminent film scholars. You would be hard pressed to find a serious student of the cinema who hasn't spent at least a few hours huddled with their seminal introduction to the field--"Film Art," now in its ninth edition--or a cable television junkie unaware that the Independent Film Channel sagely christened them the "Critics of the Naughts." Since launching their blog "Observations on Film Art "in 2006, the two have added web virtuosos to their growing list of accolades, pitching unconventional long-form pieces engaged with film artistry that have helped to redefine cinematic storytelling for a new age and audience.

"Minding Movies "presents a selection from over three hundred essays on genre movies, art films, animation, and the business of Hollywood that have graced Bordwell and Thompson's blog. Informal pieces, conversational in tone but grounded in three decades of authoritative research, the essays gathered here range from in-depth analyses of individual films such as "Slumdog Millionaire "and "Inglourious Basterds "to adjustments of Hollywood media claims and forays into cinematic humor. For Bordwell and Thompson, the most fruitful place to begin is how movies are made, how they work, and how they work on us. Written for film lovers, these essays--on topics ranging from "Borat "to blockbusters and back again--will delight current fans and gain new enthusiasts.

Serious but not solemn, vibrantly informative without condescension, and above all illuminating reading, "Minding Movies "offers ideas sure to set film lovers thinking--and keep them returning to the silver screen.

David Bordwell's new book is at once a history of film criticism, an analysis of how critics interpret film, and a proposal for an alternative program for film studies. It is an anatomy of film criticism meant to reset the agenda for film scholarship. As such Making Meaning should be a landmark book, a focus for debate from which future film study will evolve. Bordwell systematically maps different strategies for interpreting films and making meaning, illustrating his points with a vast array of examples from Western film criticism. Following an introductory chapter that sets out the terms and scope of the argument, Bordwell goes on to show how critical institutions constrain and contain the very practices they promote, and how the interpretation of texts has become a central preoccupation of the humanities. He gives lucid accounts of the development of film criticism in France, Britain, and the United States since World War II; analyzes this development through two important types of criticism, thematic-explicatory and symptomatic; and shows that both types, usually seen as antithetical, in fact have much in common. These diverse and even warring schools of criticism share conventional, rhetorical, and problem-solving techniques-a point that has broad-ranging implications for the way critics practice their art. The book concludes with a survey of the alternatives to criticism based on interpretation and, finally, with the proposal that a historical poetics of cinema offers the most fruitful framework for film analysis.