James Agee’s earliest published book, Permit Me Voyage (1934), was a collection of poems, his second a nonfiction account of Alabama sharecroppers during the Great Depression. He and photographer Walker Evans lived with their subjects for eight weeks in 1936… Read More ›
Film Theory
Key Theories of Christian Metz
Born in 1931 in Beziers in the south of France, Christian Metz died tragically at the end of 1993. Metz opened the way in the 1960s to the establishment of film theory as a new intellectual discipline. Indeed, articles (written… Read More ›
Cinema in the Age of New Media
A look at media at the beginning of the twenty-first century makes one thing certain: nothing is certain in terms of media boundaries and specificities. The cinema, for example, is a composite of elaborate sound and visual systems, enhanced by… Read More ›
Third (World) Cinema and Film Theory
Third Cinema, as Stephen Crofts points out, is one of the most “elastic” concepts in the cinematic lexicon (Crofts 31). It is distinct from First Cinema, represented primarily by Hollywood, and Second Cinema, embodied by the European art cinema and… Read More ›
The Sociology and Aesthetics of Film Adaptation
THE SOURCES OF FILMS Frequently the most narrow and provincial area of film theory, discourse about adaptation is potentially as far-reaching as you like. Its distinctive feature, the matching of the cinematic sign system to prior achievement in some other… Read More ›
Modernism, Postmodernism and Film Criticism
Postmodern cinema ironically has a history now. In 1984, Fredric Jameson observed that contemporary culture seemed to be expressing a new form of ‘depthlessness‘ – a concentration on style and ‘surface’. For Jameson these features represented a retreat from the… Read More ›
Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy, Photography and Film
Emmanuel Levinas is among the least obvious of twentieth-century philosophers to feature in a volume devoted to philosophy of film. From a philosophical grounding in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger that remained an important influence throughout his career,… Read More ›