Product Description: An unpretentious guide for all those who want to learn to analyse, understand and evaluate films.Film Studies: An Introduction provides an overview of the key areas in film studies, including aesthetics, narrative, genre, documentary films and the secrets of film reviewing...read more

Product Description: The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory is an international reference work representing the essential ideas and concepts at the centre of film theory from the beginning of the twentieth century, to the beginning of the twenty-first...read more

Product Description: From Inception to The Lake House, moviegoers are increasingly flocking to narratologically complex puzzle films. These puzzle movies borrow techniques―like fragmented spatio-temporal reality, time loops, unstable characters with split identities or unreliable narrators―more commonly attributed to art cinema and independent films...read more

In Film Theory: Rational Reconstructions, Warren Buckland asks a series of questions about how film theory gets written in the first place: How does it select its objects of study and its methods of inquiry? How does it make discoveries and explain filmic phenomena? And, How does it formulate and solve theoretical problems? He asks these questions of film theory through a rational reconstruction and a classical commentary. Both frameworks clarify and reformulate vague and inexact expressions, redefine obscure concepts, and examine the underlying logic of film theory arguments. This not only subjects film theory to rigorous examination; it also teaches students how to write theory, by enabling them to question and critically interrogate the logic of previous film theory arguments. The book consists of nine chapters that closely examine a series of canonical film books and essays in great detail, by Peter Wollen, Laura Mulvey, Thomas Elsaesser, Stephen Heath, and Slavoj Žižek, among others.

Product Description: An unpretentious guide for all those who want to learn to analyze, understand and evaluate filmsUnderstand Film Studies provides an overview of the key areas in film studies, including aesthetics, narrative, genre, documentary films and the secrets of film reviewing...read more

Product Description: Film theory no longer gets top billing or plays a starring role in film studies today, as critics proclaim that theory is dead and we are living in a post-theory moment. While theory may be out of the limelight, it remains an essential key to understanding the full complexity of cinema, one that should not be so easily discounted or discarded...read more

Drawing upon the expertise of film scholars from around the world, "Puzzle Films" investigates a number of films that sport complex storytelling--from "Memento," "Old Boy," and "Run Lola Run," to the "Infernal Affairs" trilogy and "In the Mood for Love." Unites American 'independent' cinema, the European and International Art film, and certain modes of avant-garde filmmaking on the basis of their shared storytelling complexity Draws upon the expertise of film scholars from North America, Britain, China, Poland, Holland, Italy, Greece, New Zealand, and Australia

Product Description: In The Cognitive Semiotics of Film, Warren Buckland argues that the conflict between cognitive film theory and contemporary film theory is unproductive. He examines and develops the work of "cognitive film semiotics," a neglected branch of film theory that combines the insights of cognitive science with those of linguistics and semiotics...read more

Product Description: Keep up with the Eberts Teach Yourself Film Studies offers an unpretentious method for learning how to analyze, understand, and evaluate films. It discusses the most recent developments in film scholarship, with in-depth discussion of contemporary films.

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Product Description: What are the most appropriate theories and methods for analyzing contemporary America cinema? This book answers this question by taking an innovative approach to writing about individual movies: in each of the main chapters the authors examine the assumptions behind one traditional theory of film (e...read more

Product Description: A reference book for film buffs as well as film studies students. It gives a chronological history of cinema and film with an analysis of the different genres of film, from westerns to sci-fi, Hitchcock to Tarantino. Techniques and effects are discussed and explained. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This is the first collection of essays in English to give prominence to the work of European film scholars whose aim is "to understand how film is understood." The Film Spectator raises fundamental issues that have confronted film theory for the past thirty years, but which have never been adequately answered...read more