AFI Film Readers
About the Book Series
AFI Film Readers, published in cooperation with the American Film Institute, focus on important issues and themes in film and media scholarship.
Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice
1st Edition
Edited
By James Leo Cahill, Luca Caminati
August 01, 2022
Drawing together 18 contributions from leading international scholars, this book conceptualizes the history and theory of cinema’s century-long relationship to modes of exploration in its many forms, from colonialist expeditions to decolonial radical cinemas to the perceptual voyage of the ...
The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars
1st Edition
Edited
By Steven Jacobs, Eva Hielscher, Anthony Kinik
March 31, 2021
The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of the city symphony, an experimental film form that presented the city as protagonist instead of mere decor. Combining experimental, documentary, and narrative practices, these films were marked by a high level of abstraction reminiscent of high-modernist ...
Screening Characters: Theories of Character in Film, Television, and Interactive Media
1st Edition
Edited
By Johannes Riis, Aaron Taylor
September 30, 2020
Characters are central to our experiences of screened fictions and invite a host of questions. The contributors to Screening Characters draw on archival material, interviews, philosophical inquiry, and conceptual analysis in order to give new, thought-provoking answers to these queries. Providing ...
Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres
1st Edition
Edited
By Christopher Holliday, Alexander Sergeant
August 14, 2020
This book examines the relationship that exists between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Animation has played a key role in defining our collective expectations and experiences of fantasy cinema, just as fantasy storytelling has often served as inspiration for our most popular animated ...
Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm: Cinema, Television, and the Archive
1st Edition
Edited
By Mark Garrett Cooper, Sara Beth Levavy, Ross Melnick, Mark Williams
August 14, 2020
The twentieth century generated tens of thousands of hours of American newsfilm but not the scholarly apparatus necessary to analyze and contextualize them. Assembling new approaches to the study of U.S. newsfilm in cinema and television, this book makes a long overdue critical intervention in the ...
Teaching Transnational Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy
1st Edition
Edited
By Katarzyna Marciniak, Bruce Bennett
March 15, 2017
This collection of essays offers a pioneering analysis of the political and conceptual complexities of teaching transnational cinema in university classrooms around the world. In their exploration of a wide range of films from different national and regional contexts, contributors reflect on the ...
New Silent Cinema
1st Edition
Edited
By Katherine Groo, Paul Flaig
September 23, 2015
With the success of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) and Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist (2011) nothing seems more contemporary in recent film than the styles, forms, and histories of early and silent cinemas. This collection considers the latest return to silent film alongside the larger historical ...
Endangering Science Fiction Film
1st Edition
Edited
By Sean Redmond, Leon Marvell
July 16, 2015
Endangering Science Fiction Film explores the ways in which science fiction film is a dangerous and endangering genre. The collection argues that science fiction's cinematic power rests in its ability to imagine ‘Other’ worlds that challenge and disturb the lived conditions of the ‘real’ ...
Hollywood Puzzle Films
1st Edition
Edited
By Warren Buckland
May 27, 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 ...
Cognitive Media Theory
1st Edition
Edited
By Ted Nannicelli, Paul Taberham
March 26, 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...
The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture
1st Edition
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 ...
Pervasive Animation
1st Edition
Edited
By Suzanne Buchan
August 16, 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 ...