About the Book
Smartly selected and organized, the essays in this anthology introduce several central issues in film theory, namely, the classical narrative text, oppositional and avant-garde cinema, subject positioning, the cinematic apparatus, and ideology. Written by seminal scholars, including Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, Stephen Heath, Peter Wollen, Laura Mulvey, and Noël Burch, as well as such leading thinkers as Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Jean-François Lyotard, these works utilize a number of approaches in their analyses, particularly structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, neoformalism, Marxism, and semiotics. Divided into sections, the anthology features introductions to each group of essays outlining the major assumptions, ideas, and arguments of the articles and situating them within the history of film theory, narrative analysis, and social and cultural theory.
Table of Contents:
Part 1. Structures of Filmic Narrative Introduction: The Saussurian Impulse and Cinema Semiotics 1. Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures, by David Bordwell 2. Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film, by Christian Metz 3. Segmenting/Analyzing, by Raymond Bellour 4. The Obvious and the Code, by Raymond Bellour 5. The Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach, by Nick Browne 6. Godard and Counter-Cinema: Vent d' Est, by Peter Wollen 7. The Concept of Cinematic Excess, by Kristin Thompson 8. Uncoded Images in the Heterogeneous Text, by Deborah Linderman Part 2: Subject, Narrative, Cinema Introduction: Text and Subject 9. Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein, by Roland Barthes 10. Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure, by Colin MacCabe 11. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, by Laura Mulvey 12. Voyeurism, The Look, and Dwoskin, by Paul Willemen 13. Suture (excerpts), by Kaja Silverman 14. Ellipsis on Dread and the Specular Seduction, by Julia Kristeva 15. The Imaginary Signifier (excerpts), by Christian Metz Part 3: Apparatus Introduction 16. Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus, by Jean-Louis Baudry 17. The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema, by Jean-Louis Baudry 18. The Silences of the Voice, by Pascal Bonitzer 19. The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space, by Mary Ann Doane 20. Acinema, by Jean Francois Lyotard 21. Through the Looking-Glass, by Teresa de Lauretis Part 4: Textuality as Ideology Introduction 22. Narrative Space, by Stephen Heath 23. Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field (Parts 3 and 4), by Jean-Louis Comolli 24. John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln, by Editors of Cahiers du cinema 25. Primitivism and the Avant-Gardes: A Dialectical Approach, by Noel Burch 26. Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions, by Linda Williams 27. Primary Identification and the Historical Subject: Fassbinder and Germany, by Thomas Elsaesser
About the Author :
Philip Rosen is professor of modern culture and media at Brown University and works in the fields of film theory and history, with special attention to the question of culture and ideology and to historiography and temporality in the contexts of national cinemas. He is the author of Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory and coeditor of Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices.
Review :
Intoxicating analyses of films dance alongside the most far-reaching theories of signification and history. Yet through it all Philip Rosen maintains a sober eye, pointing out the backgrounds of these performers and the consequences of their gestures. Under his measured gaze this dizzying flight of ideas takes on a pattern, or rather multiple patterns, that will keep us thinking and talking for a long time to come. Read either for the careful continuity of these introductions or for the dramatic intensity of the individual pieces, the anthology must reward the student, the initiated, and the merely curious. -- Dudley Andrew, Yale University, author of What Cinema Is! Exceptionally well-crafted... Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology achieves a substantial contextual horizon, through Philip Rosen's impeccable positioning of essays within an intellectual history. In addition to this, his collection successfully strives for representativeness on such a number of significant fronts that it promises to provide a very engrossing forum for the introduction and discussion of contemporary film theory in the classroom. -- Barbara Klinger Journal of Film and Video A much sought-after resource. Choice Rosen's collection continues to be a classic and irreplaceable guide to contemporary film theory. This essential anthology includes key texts by Roland Barthes, Raymond Bellour, Christian Metz, David Bordwell, and others, as well as superb contextual essays by Rosen for each section of the book. -- David Rodowick Harvard University
