Film and Theory : An Anthology

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Barthes, R. (1988 (1968)) ¿The Death of the Author¿, in D. Lodge (ed.) Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. London and New York: Longman, 167-72. The most complete anthology for scholars interested in psychoanalysis, semiotics, and ideological criticism. Includes accurate translations of several essays originally written in French. The concern with issues of colonialism, postcolonialism, race, and cultural difference also found expression in a number of seminal texts co-authored with Ella Shohat. Their 1985 Screen essay “The Cinema After Babel: Language, Difference, Power,” introduced a Bakhtinian “translinguistic” and trans-structuralist turn into the study of language difference, translation, and postsynchronization in the cinema. Their Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Routledge, 1994) formed part of and helped shape the surge of writing about race, colonialism, identity politics, and postcoloniality in the 1990s. Edward Said Unthinking Eurocentrism a “brilliant” and landmark book". The book combines two strands of work – an ambitious study of colonialist discourse and Eurocentrism – and a comprehensive and transnational study of cinematic texts related to those issues. Born in Paterson, New Jersey, Stam completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley in 1977, after which he went directly to New York University, where he has been teaching ever since. Stam's graduate work ranged across Anglo-American literature, French and Francophone literature, and Luso-Brazilian literature. His dissertation was published as a book, Reflexivity in Film and Literature (1985). In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics Bakhtin speaks of the Menippea, a perennial artistic genre linked to a carnivalesque vision of the world and marked by oxymoronic characters, multiple styles, violation of the norms of etiquette, and the comic confrontation of philosophical points of view. Although not originally conceived as an instrument for cinematic analysis, the category of the Menippea has the capacity to deprovincialize film-critical discourse, which is too often tied to nineteenth-century conventions of verisimilitude. Filmmakers like Buñuel, Godard, Ruiz, and Rocha, in this perspective, are not the mere negation of the dominant tradition but rather heirs of this other tradition, renovators of a perennial mode characterized by protean vitality.

Intended as a complement to Stam and Miller 2000, a variety of commissioned essays interrogate and expand the reach of film and media theory. Would work for an advanced undergraduate class. Geraghty, Christine (2008). Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama. Lanham, Maryland : Rowman & Littlefield.Adorno, T. W. 1978. Minima Moralia: Reflections From a Damaged Life. Trans. E. F. Jeph. London: Verso.

Murray, Simone (2012) The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Contemporary Literary Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Adams, Parveen 1996. The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences. London: Routledge.One might even expand the discussion to examine the proto-theoretical implications of the etymologies of the words for pre-cinematic devices: camera obscura (dark room) evokes the processes of photography, Marx’s comparison of ideology to a camera obscura, and the name of a feminist film journal. Magic lantern evokes the perennial theme of movie magic along with Romanticism’s creative lamp and the Enlightenment’s lantern. Phantasmagoria and phasmotrope (spectacle-turn) evoke fantasy and the marvelous, while cosmorama evokes the global world-making ambitions of the cinema. Marey’s fusil cinématographique (cinematic rifle) evokes the shooting process of film while calling attention to the aggressive potential of the camera as a weapon, a metaphor resurrected in the guerrilla cinema of the revolutionary filmmakers of the 1960s. Mutoscope suggests a viewer of change, while phenakistiscope evokes cheating views, a foreshadowing of Baudrillard’s simulacrum. Many of the names for the cinema include some variant on graph (Greek writing or transcription) and thus anticipate later tropes of filmic authorship and écriture. The German lichtspiel (play of light) is one of the few names to reference light. Not surprisingly, given the silent beginnings of the medium, the appelations given the cinema rarely reference sound, although Edison saw the cinema as an extension of the phonograph and gave his pre-cinematic devices such names as optical phonograph and kinetophonograph (the writing of movement and sound). The initial attempts to synchronize sound and image generated such coinages as cameraphone and cinephone. In Arabic the cinema was called sum mutaharika (moving image or form), while in Hebrew the word for cinema evolved from reinoa (watching movement) to kolnoa (sound movement). Otherwise, the names themselves imply that film is essentially visual, a view often buttressed by the historical argument that cinema existed first as image and then as sound; in fact, of course, cinema was usually accompanied both by language (intertitles, visible mouthings of speech) and by music (pianos, orchestras). The popular masses, uncouth and infantile, experience while sitting in front of the screen the enchantment of the child to whom the grandmother has recounted a fairy tale; but I fail to understand how, night after night, a group of people who have the obligation of being civilized can idiotize themselves [in movie theaters] with the incessant repetition of scenes in which the abberations, anachronisms, inverisimilitudes, are made ad hoc for a public of the lowest mental level, ignorant of the most elementary educational notions. (Mora, 1988, p. 6) Ahmad, Aijaz 1987. “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory,” Social Text 17 (Fall). Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there – the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air – is dipped in monotonous grey.… It is no life but its shadow.… And all this in a strange silence where no rumble of wheels is heard, no sound of footsteps or of speech. Not a single note of the intricate symphony that always accompanies the movements of people. (Quoted in Leyda, 1972, pp. 407–9) A thorough, well-annotated collection of important essays in both film and media theory. Perhaps the most up-to-date and relevant of the large, inclusive anthologies.

Auerbach, Erich 1953. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (co-authored with Ella Shohat) won the Katherine Singer Kovács "Best Film Book" Award in 1994. Stam's Subversive Pleasures; Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film was a Choice "Outstanding Academic Book of the Year" in 1989 and Runner-Up for the Katherine Singer Kovács "Best Film Book" Award in the same year. With extraordinary transnational and transdisciplinary range, World Literature, Transnational Cinema, and Global Media comprehensively explores the genealogies, vocabularies, and concepts orienting the fields within literature, cinema, and media studies.