A collection of articles that appeared in the journal "film quarterly" that appeared over the last 40 years.

Film Quarterly has published substantial, peer-reviewed writing on cinema and media for nearly sixty years, earning a reputation as the most authoritative academic film journal in the United States, as well as an important English-language voice of cinema studies abroad.

Once derided as senseless entertainment, movies have gradually assumed a place among the arts. Raymond Haberski's provocative and insightful book traces the trajectory of this evolution throughout the twentieth century, from nickelodeon amusements to the age of the financial blockbuster. Haberski begins by looking at the barriers to film's acceptance as an art form, including the Chicago Motion Picture Commission hearings of 1918–1920, one of the most revealing confrontations over the use of censorship in the motion picture industry. He then examines how movies overcame the stigma attached to popular entertainment through such watershed events as the creation of the Museum of Modern Art's Film Library in the 1920s. The arguments between Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris's heralded a golden age of criticism, and Haberski focuses on the roles of Kael, Sarris, James Agee, Roger Ebert, and others, in the creation of "cinephilia." Described by Susan Sontag as "born of the conviction that cinema was an art unlike any other," this love of cinema centered on coffee houses, universities, art theaters, film festivals, and, of course, foreign films. The lively debates over the place of movies in American culture began to wane in the 1970s. Haberski places the blame on the loss of cultural authority and on the increasing irrelevance of the meaning of art. He concludes with a persuasive call for the re-emergence of a middle ground between art and entertainment, "something more complex, ambiguous, and vexing—something worth thought."

The original Movies and Methods volume (1976) captured the dynamic evolution of film theory and criticism into an important new discipline, incorporating methods from structuralism, semiotics, and feminist thought. Now there is again ferment in the field. Movies and Methods, Volume II, captures the developments that have given history and genre studies imaginative new models and indicates how feminist, structuralist, and psychoanalytic approaches to film have achieved fresh, valuable insights. In his thoughtful introduction, Nichols provides a context for the paradoxes that confront film studies today. He shows how shared methods and approaches continue to stimulate much of the best writing about film, points to common problems most critics and theorists have tried to resolve, and describes the internal contraditions that have restricted the usefulness of post-structuralism. Mini-introductions place each essay in a larger context and suggest its linkages with other essays in the volume. A great variety of approaches and methods characterize film writing today, and the final part conveys their diversity—from statistical style analysis to phenomenology and from gay criticisms to neoformalism. This concluding part also shows how the rigorous use of a broad range of approaches has helped remove post-structuralist criticism from its position of dominance through most of the seventies and early eighties. The writings collected in this volume exhibit not only a strong sense of personal engagement but als a persistent awareness of the social importance of the cinema in our culture. Movies and Methods, Volume II, will prove as invaluable to the serious student of cinema as its predecessor; it will be an essential reference work for years to come.

Taiwanese born, Ang Lee (b. 1954) has produced diverse films in his award-winning body of work. Sometimes working in the West, sometimes in the East, he creates films that defy easy categorization and continue to amaze audiences worldwide. Lee has won an Academy Award two times for Best Director--the first Asian to win--for films as different as a small drama about gay cowboys in Brokeback Mountain (2005), and the 3D technical wizardry in Life of Pi (2012). He has garnered numerous accolades and awards worldwide. Lee has made a broad range of movies, including his so-called "Father Knows Best" trilogy made up of his first three films: Pushing Hands (1992), The Wedding Banquet (1993), and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), as well as 1970s period drama The Ice Storm (1997), martial arts film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), superhero blockbuster Hulk (2003), and hippie retro trip Taking Woodstock (2009). Thoughtful and passionate, Ang Lee humbly reveals here a personal journey that brought him from Taiwan to his chosen home in the United States as he struggled and ultimately triumphed in his quest to become a superb filmmaker. Ang Lee: Interviews collects the best interviews of this reticent yet bold figure.

A key collection of essays that looks at the specific issues related to the documentary form. Questions addressed include `What is documentary?' and `How fictional is nonfiction?'

Includes information on author and playwright D.H. Lawrence such as a chronology of his life, a chronology of his writings, a checklist of his reading, calendar and maps of his travel, bibliography, filmography, and discography.

Perkins on Movies gives unimpeded access to one of the most distinctive and distinguished of critical voices and will be widely welcomed by academics, students of film, and informed film enthusiasts.

From What's Up, Tiger Lily? to Match Point, Woody Allen's work has generated substantial interest among scholars and professionals who have written extensively about the director. In The Films of Woody Allen: Critical Essays, Charles L.P. Silet brings together two-dozen scholarly articles that address the core of Allen's work from a variety of cultural and theoretical perspectives. With a special emphasis on his films of the 1980s, this collection includes both general essays that examine various themes and issues encompassed in Allen's repertoire, as well as discussions that focus on one or two specific films. General essays explore Allen's Jewish background as a religious and cultural facet, his apparent love affair with New York City, and his relation to various strains of humor_particularly American film humor, but also Allen's broad use of such traditional comic tropes as irony and parody. The essays on individual films include examinations of some of Allen's most significant work including Love and Death, Annie Hall, Interiors, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hannah and Her Sisters, Manhattan, and Shadows and Fog. A number of the articles collected here were originally published in now hard to locate places, while others were selected from journals not usually associated with film studies. The result is an anthology of essays that presents an overview of the central issues raised by Allen's body of work as well as a close examination of fourteen individual films that convey these larger themes. A wide-ranging exploration of one of America's most innovative and productive modern directors, this book should appeal to both professionals and students of contemporary film comedy.

Bazin's impact on film art, as theorist and critic, is considered to be greater than that of any single director, actor, or producer. He is credited with almost single-handedly establishing the study of film as an accepted intellectual pursuit, as well as with being the spiritual father of the French New Wave. Bazin at Work is the first English collection of disparate Bazin writings since the appearance of the second volume of What Is Cinema? in 1971. It includes work from Cahiers le cinema (which he founded and which is the most influential single critical periodical in the history of the cinema) and Esprit. He addresses filmmakers including Rossellini, Eisenstein, Pagnol, and Capra and well-known films including La Strada, Citizen Kane, Scarface, and The Bridge on the River Kwai.