Movies and Methods

by Nichols, Bill

• ISBN13: 9780520054097
• ISBN10: 0520054091
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1985-09-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

The originalMovies and Methodsvolume (1976) captured the dynamic evolution of film theory and criticism into an important new discipline, incorporating methods from structuralism, semiotics, and feminist thought. Now there is again ferment in the field.Movies and Methods, Volume II, captures the developments that have given history and genre studies imaginative new models and indicates how feminist, structuralist, and psychoanalytic approaches to film have achieved fresh, valuable insights. In his thoughtful introduction, Nichols provides a context for the paradoxes that confront film studies today. He shows how shared methods and approaches continue to stimulate much of the best writing about film, points to common problems most critics and theorists have tried to resolve, and describes the internal contraditions that have restricted the usefulness of post-structuralism. Mini-introductions place each essay in a larger context and suggest its linkages with other essays in the volume. A great variety of approaches and methods characterize film writing today, and the final part conveys their diversity--from statistical style analysis to phenomenology and from gay criticisms to neoformalism. This concluding part also shows how the rigorous use of a broad range of approaches has helped remove post-structuralist criticism from its position of dominance through most of the seventies and early eighties. The writings collected in this volume exhibit not only a strong sense of personal engagement but als a persistent awareness of the social importance of the cinema in our culture.Movies and Methods, Volume II, will prove as invaluable to the serious student of cinema as its predecessor; it will be an essential reference work for years to come.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(28)
Bill Nichols
Part 1 HISTORICAL CRITICISM
The Stalin Myth in Soviet Cinema (with an Introduction by Dudley Andrew)	29	(11)
Andre Bazin
Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field	40	(18)
Jean-Louis Comolli
Technological and Aesthetic Influences on the Development of Deep-Focus Cinematography in the United States	58	(25)
Patrick Ogle
Sound and Color	83	(9)
Edward Buscombe
Notes on Columbia Pictures Corporation 1926-1941	92	(17)
Edward Buscombe
Writing the History of the American Film Industry: Warner Brothers and Sound	109	(12)
Douglas Gomery
Color and Cinema: Problems in the Writing of History	121	(23)
Edward Branigan
Mass-Produced Photoplays: Economic and Signifying Practices in the First Years of Hollywood	144	(21)
Janet Staiger
Part 2 GENRE CRITICISM
Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama	165	(25)
Thomas Elsaesser
Minnelli and Melodrama	190	(5)
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
An Introduction to the American Horror Film	195	(25)
Robin Wood
Entertainment and Utopia	220	(13)
Richard Dyer
Beyond Verite: Emile de Antonio and the New Documentary of the Seventies	233	(25)
Thomas Waugh
The Voice of Documentary	258	(16)
Bill Nichols
Beyond Observational Cinema	274	(13)
David Macdougall
The Avant-Garde: History and Theories	287	(16)
Constance Penley
Janet Bergstrom
Part 3 FEMINIST CRITICISM
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema	303	(12)
Laura Mulvey
Towards a Feminist Film Practice: Some Theses	315	(12)
Claire Johnston
Jeanne Dielman: Death in Installments	327	(13)
Jayne Loader
In the Name of Feminist Film Criticism	340	(19)
B. Ruby Rich
The Right of Re-Vision: Michelle Citron's Daughter Rite	359	(10)
Linda William
B. Ruby Rich
Gentlemen Consume Blondes	369	(10)
Maureen Turim
The Place of Woman in the Cinema of Raoul Walsh	379	(12)
Pam Cook
Claire Johnston
Part 4 STRUCTURALIST SEMIOTICS
Signification in the Cinema	391	(16)
Paul Sandro
The Anatomy of a Proletarian Film: Warner's Marked Woman	407	(22)
Charles Eckert
The Searchers: An American Dilemma	429	(21)
Brian Henderson
Mildred Pierce Reconsidered	450	(8)
Joyce Nelson
The Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach	458	(18)
Nick Browne
S/Z and The Rules of the Game	476	(24)
Julia Lesage
Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d' Est	500	(9)
Peter Wollen
Jaws, Ideology, and Film Theory	509	(8)
Stephen Heath
Part 5 PSYCHOANALYTIC SEMIOTICS
Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Discourse	517	(14)
Charles F. Altman
Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus	531	(12)
Jean-Louis Baudry
Story/Discourse: Notes on Two Kinds of Voyeurism	543	(6)
Christian Metz
A Note on Story/Discourse	549	(8)
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
On the Naked Thighs of Miss Dietrich	557	(8)
Peter Baxter
The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space	565	(11)
Mary Ann Doane
The Avant-Garde and Its Imaginary	576	(26)
Constance Penley
Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema	602	(23)
Gaylyn Studlar
Part 6 COUNTERCURRENTS
The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Film Theory	625	(7)
Dudley Andrew
Colonialism, Racism, and Representation: An Introduction	632	(17)
Robert Stam
Louise Spence
Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic	649	(12)
Robin Wood
A Brechtian Cinema? Towards a Politics of Self-Reflexive Film	661	(11)
Dana Polan
The Point-of-View Shot	672	(19)
Edward Branigan
Statistical Style Analysis of Motion Pictures	691	(12)
Barry Salt
The Space between Shots	703	(12)
Dai Vaughn
Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film	715	(20)
Fredric Jameson
Further Readings	735	(10)
Index	745