Smartly selected and organized, the essays in this anthology introduce several central issues in film theory, namely, the classical narrative text, oppositional and avant-garde cinema, subject positioning, the cinematic apparatus, and ideology. Written by seminal scholars, including Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, Stephen Heath, Peter Wollen, Laura Mulvey, and Noel Burch, as well as such leading thinkers as Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, these works utilize a number of approaches in their analyses, particularly structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, neoformalism, Marxism, and semiotics. Divided into sections, the anthology features introductions to each group of essays outlining the major assumptions, ideas, and arguments of the articles and situating them within the history of film theory, narrative analysis, and social and cultural theory.
Part 1. Structures of Filmic Narrative Introduction: The Saussurian Impulse and Cinema Semiotics 1. Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures, by David Bordwell 2. Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film, by Christian Metz 3. Segmenting/Analyzing, by Raymond Bellour 4. The Obvious and the Code, by Raymond Bellour 5. The Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach, by Nick Browne 6. Godard and Counter-Cinema: Vent d' Est, by Peter Wollen 7. The Concept of Cinematic Excess, by Kristin Thompson 8. Uncoded Images in the Heterogeneous Text, by Deborah Linderman Part 2: Subject, Narrative, Cinema Introduction: Text and Subject 9. Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein, by Roland Barthes 10. Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure, by Colin MacCabe 11. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, by Laura Mulvey 12. Voyeurism, The Look, and Dwoskin, by Paul Willemen 13. Suture (excerpts), by Kaja Silverman 14. Ellipsis on Dread and the Specular Seduction, by Julia Kristeva 15. The Imaginary Signifier (excerpts), by Christian Metz Part 3: Apparatus Introduction 16. Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus, by Jean-Louis Baudry 17. The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema, by Jean-Louis Baudry 18. The Silences of the Voice, by Pascal Bonitzer 19. The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space, by Mary Ann Doane 20. Acinema, by Jean Francois Lyotard 21. Through the Looking-Glass, by Teresa de Lauretis Part 4: Textuality as Ideology Introduction 22. Narrative Space, by Stephen Heath 23. Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field (Parts 3 and 4), by Jean-Louis Comolli 24. John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln, by Editors of Cahiers du cinema 25. Primitivism and the Avant-Gardes: A Dialectical Approach, by Noel Burch 26. Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions, by Linda Williams 27. Primary Identification and the Historical Subject: Fassbinder and Germany, by Thomas Elsaesser
