Reinventing Film Studies offers a comprehensive introduction to film studies in a changing environment. Written by a team of noted film scholars, it surveys the key issues for students today, assessing the impact on the discipline of recent technological, cultural and social developments, challenging received thinking, and reinventing film studies for the post-film era.
Part 1: Really useful theory; from aesthetics to semiotics and half-way back again; why theory?; film theory and the revolt against master narratives; case study - "Singin' in the Rain" - a study of interpretation; who (and what) is it for? Part 2: Film as mass culture; dream factory; the publicness of cinema; case study - the political culture of address in a "Transitional Cinema" - Indian popular cinema; reception theory and audience research - the mystery of the vampire's kiss; re-examining stardom - questions of texts, bodies, and performances. Part 3: questions of aesthetics; after the classic, the classical and ideology - the difference of realism; rethinking genre; case study - judging audiences, the case of the trial movie; introducing film evaluation; "Style" posture and idiom - Tarantino's figures of masculinity. Part 4: The return to history; what is film history?; "Animated Pictures" - tales of cinema's forgotten future, after one hundred years of film; the mass production of the senses - classical cinema as cenacular modernism; case study - discipline and fun - psycho and postmodern cinema. Part 5: Cinema in the age of global multi-media; film theory and spectatorship in the age of the "posts"; case study - digging an old well - the labour of social fantasy in a contemporary Chinese film; facing up to Hollywood; the end of cinema - multi-media and technological change.
