AFI Film Readers, published in cooperation with the American Film Institute, focus on important issues and themes in film and media scholarship.
Edited
By Warren Buckland
June 02, 2014
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 ...
Edited
By Ted Nannicelli, Paul Taberham
March 18, 2014
Across the academy, scholars are debating the question of what bearing scientific inquiry has upon the humanities. The latest addition to the AFI Film Readers series, Cognitive Media Theory takes up this question in the context of film and media studies. This collection of essays by internationally...
Edited
By Vivian Sobchack
December 27, 1995
The Persistence of History examines how the moving image has completely altered traditional modes of historical thought and representation. Exploring a range of film and video texts, from The Ten Commandments to the Rodney King video, from the projected work of documentarian Errol Morris to Oliver...
Edited
By Tom Brown, Belén Vidal
December 07, 2013
The biographical film or biopic is a staple of film production in all major film industries and yet, within film studies, its generic, aesthetic, and cultural significance has remained underexplored. The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture fills this gap, conceptualizing the biopic with a ...
Edited
By Janet Walker
October 12, 2001
The cowboys and Indians, sheriffs and outlaws, schoolmarms and barkeeps of Western films have wholly transformed our ideas about the reality of the American frontier. Westerns is the first book to consider seriously the historical meanings and functions of the Western film genre. In Westerns , ...
Edited
By Simon Brown, Sarah Street, Liz Watkins
November 19, 2012
This new AFI Film Reader is the first comprehensive collection of original essays on the use of color in film. Contributors from diverse film studies backgrounds consider the importance of color throughout the history of the medium, assessing not only the theoretical implications of color on the ...
Edited
By Lynn Spigel, Michael Curtin
April 04, 1997
Caricatures of sixties television--called a "vast wasteland" by the FCC president in the early sixties--continue to dominate our perceptions of the era and cloud popular understanding of the relationship between pop culture and larger social forces. Opposed to these conceptions, The Revolution ...
Edited
By David A. Gerstner, Janet Staiger
November 08, 2002
Authorship in film has been a persistent theme in the field of cinema studies. This volume of new work revitalizes the question of authorship by connecting it to larger issues of identity--in film, in the marketplace, in society, in culture. Essays range from the auteur theory and Casablanca to ...
Edited
By Jacqueline Bobo
April 09, 1998
Black women film and video makers have been producing shorts, documentaries and films since the early part of this century. Unfortunately, not only has their work been overlooked by distributors, but critical reviews have been few and far between. Conceived to redress that omission, Black Women ...
Edited
By J. David Slocum
December 05, 2000
American cinema has always been violent, and never more so than now: exploding heads, buses that blow up if they stop, racial attacks, and general mayhem. From slapstick's comic violence to film noir, from silent cinema to Tarantino, violence has been an integral part of America on screen. This new...
Edited
By Suzanne Buchan
July 15, 2013
This new addition to the AFI Film Readers series brings together original scholarship on animation in contemporary moving image culture, from classic experimental and independent shorts to digital animation and installation. The collection - that is also a philosophy of animation - foregrounds new ...
Edited
By Hamid Naficy
December 01, 1998
Global changes in capital, power, technology and the media have caused massive shifts in how we define home and community, leaving redrawn territories and globalized contexts. This interdisciplinary study of the media brings together essays by accomplished critics to discuss the way film, ...