Film Theory: An Introduction

Product Information

Unlike some other reviewers, I was glad that Stam offered summaries of the work of many theorists rather than extensive excerpts from a few in this introduction. Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (Blackwell, 2005) offered a historicized account of key trends in the history of the novel – the proto-magic realism of a Cervantes, the colonialist realism of a Defoe (and his critics), the parodic reflexivity of a Henry Fielding or Machado de Assis, or proto-cinematic perspectivalism of a Flaubert, the neurotic narrators of a Dostoyevsky or a Nabokov, the feminist experimentations of Clarice Lispector and Marguerite Duras, and the “marvelous latin-american real” of Mario de Andrade and Alejo Carpentier, all as seen through the many filmic adaptations – both “faithful” and revisionist – of their work. This could surely help someone ease into a less general work on film theory, depending on the interests of the individual.

Two anthologies co-edited with Alessandra Raengo (both published by Blackwell) fleshed out the project: Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Adaptation (Blackwell, 2005), and Companion to Literature and Film (Blackwell, 2004). Francois Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Adaptation (Rutgers, 2006), meanwhile, explored the “transtextual diaspora” generated by a highly literary ménage-a-trois in the 1920s that led to the books and published journals of Henri-Pierre Roche, Franz Hessel and Helen Hessel, as well as three films by Truffaut based on the life and work of Roche ( Jules and Jim, Two Englishwomen, and The Man Who Loved Women).C. Berkeley in 1977, after which he went directly to New York University, where he has been teaching ever since. Anyway, I found myself skimming over the post-silent sections of the book and only reading long passages when Stam hit on an area that I was particularly interested in.

geniş kapsamlı, dönemin felsefi ve politik eğilimleri ile sinema arasındaki bağlara ağırlık veren bir yerden ele alıyor. Stam finnur fyrir þvílíkri þörf til þess að flexa sífellt í átt að lesandanum um hvað hann veit mikið um heimspeki.Chronophotographe" stresses the writing of time (and light) and thus anticipates Deleuze's (Bergsonian) emphasis on the "time image," while "Kinetoscophe," again anticipating Deleuze, stresses the visual observation of movement. Representation, Meaning, and Experience in the Cinema: A Critical Study of Contemporary Film Theory. Unthinking Eurocentrism addressed such issues as “Eurocentrism versus Polycentrism,” “Formations of Colonialist Discourse,” “The Imperial Imaginary,” “Tropes of Empire,” the “Esthetics of Resistance,” “postcolonial hybridity,” and “indigenous media. At times Stam's summaries of other people's critical stances and theories was helpful (especially when so often you have to read confusing translations of the originals) but usually I would have preferred just an anthology of theory and the original articles rather than Stam's interpretations and opinions. Mobilizing Fictions: The Gulf War, the Media and the Recruitment of the Spectator," Public Culture Vol.