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.
New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality
1st Edition
Edited
By Anna Everett, John T. Caldwell
February 28, 2003
The mushroom-like growth of new media technologies is radically challenging traditional media outlets. The proliferation of technologies like DVDs, MP3s and the Internet has freed the public from what we used to understand as mass media. In the face of such seismic shifts and ruptures, the ...
Authorship and Film
1st Edition
Edited
By David A. Gerstner, Janet Staiger
November 08, 2002
Authorship in film has been a persistent theme in the field of cinema studies. This volume of new work revitalizes the question of authorship by connecting it to larger issues of identity--in film, in the marketplace, in society, in culture. Essays range from the auteur theory and Casablanca to ...
Westerns: Films through History
1st Edition
Edited
By Janet Walker
October 12, 2001
The cowboys and Indians, sheriffs and outlaws, schoolmarms and barkeeps of Western films have wholly transformed our ideas about the reality of the American frontier. Westerns is the first book to consider seriously the historical meanings and functions of the Western film genre. In Westerns , ...
Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture
1st Edition
Edited
By Peter Lehman
May 02, 2001
Lehman brings together new work on masculinity in film by established film scholars, new academics, performance artists, and cultural critics. The essays analyze trends from the role of gay men in saving heterosexuality to the emergence of new queer cinema....
Violence and American Cinema
1st Edition
Edited
By J. David Slocum
December 05, 2000
American cinema has always been violent, and never more so than now: exploding heads, buses that blow up if they stop, racial attacks, and general mayhem. From slapstick's comic violence to film noir, from silent cinema to Tarantino, violence has been an integral part of America on screen. This new...
Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place
1st Edition
Edited
By Hamid Naficy
December 01, 1998
Global changes in capital, power, technology and the media have caused massive shifts in how we define home and community, leaving redrawn territories and globalized contexts. This interdisciplinary study of the media brings together essays by accomplished critics to discuss the way film, ...
Black Women Film and Video Artists
1st Edition
Edited
By Jacqueline Bobo
April 09, 1998
Black women film and video makers have been producing shorts, documentaries and films since the early part of this century. Unfortunately, not only has their work been overlooked by distributors, but critical reviews have been few and far between. Conceived to redress that omission, Black Women ...
The Revolution Wasn't Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict
1st Edition
Edited
By Lynn Spigel, Michael Curtin
April 04, 1997
Caricatures of sixties television--called a "vast wasteland" by the FCC president in the early sixties--continue to dominate our perceptions of the era and cloud popular understanding of the relationship between pop culture and larger social forces. Opposed to these conceptions, The Revolution ...
The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event
1st Edition
Edited
By Vivian Sobchack
December 27, 1995
The Persistence of History examines how the moving image has completely altered traditional modes of historical thought and representation. Exploring a range of film and video texts, from The Ten Commandments to the Rodney King video, from the projected work of documentarian Errol Morris to Oliver...
Classical Hollywood Comedy
1st Edition
Edited
By Kristine Brunovska Karnick, Henry Jenkins
October 19, 1994
Applies the recent `return to history' in film studies to the genre of classical Hollywood comedy as well as broadening the definition of those works considered central in this field....
Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom
1st Edition
Edited
By Eric Smoodin
March 22, 1994
Hirohito and his Mickey Mouse watch, Goofy and Donald as our "Goodwill Ambassadors:" Disney Discourse is an interdisciplinary examination of the founder and his empire. These essays use an interdisciplinary approach to read through Disney's domestic cultural production "innocent" national icons, as...
Black American Cinema
1st Edition
Edited
By Manthia Diawara
August 18, 1993
This is the first major collection of criticism on Black American cinema. From the pioneering work of Oscar Micheaux and Wallace Thurman to the Hollywood success of Spike Lee, Black American filmmakers have played a remarkable role in the development of the American film, both independent and ...