Film Theory: An Introduction

Product Information

It is rooted (by its own admission) in the west and isn't always the snappiest read, but it gave me what I was looking for.

Attempting to go beyond the methodological limitations of the then-dominant paradigm of “positive image” and “negative stereotype” analysis, Stam argued for an approach that emphasized not social accuracy or characterological merits but rather issues such as perspective, address, focalization, mediation, and the filmic orchestration of discourses. Representation, Meaning, and Experience in the Cinema: A Critical Study of Contemporary Film Theory. Ou seja, tudo é exposto de modo muito honesto e imparcial (quase sempre, acho ele severo nas críticas ao autorismo) para você tirar suas próprias conclusões. His many books include Film Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell Publishers, 1999), Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture (1997), Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media with Ella Shohat (1994), which won the Katherine Singer Kovocs 'Best Film Book Award'; and Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (1992). Unthinking Eurocentrism addressed such issues as “Eurocentrism versus Polycentrism,” “Formations of Colonialist Discourse,” “The Imperial Imaginary,” “Tropes of Empire,” the “Esthetics of Resistance,” “postcolonial hybridity,” and “indigenous media.In 2006, he co-taught (with Ella Shohat) a seminar on "The Culture Wars in Translation" at Cornell's Society for Criticism and Theory. The discussion of Bakhtin was somewhat unfocused, however, and I was never sure exactly how his ideas were being applied. C. Berkeley in 1977, after which he went directly to New York University, where he has been teaching ever since. Stam has also been an advocate-exegete of semiotics, poststructuralism, and film theory in such books as New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Beyond (Routledge, 1992) and Film Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2000), the first book to recount the history of film theory from its beginnings to the present within a transnational framework that included Latin America, Africa and Asia alongside Europe and North America.

In 2009, he was named a Fellow at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton, where he presented a paper on "The Red Atlantic".Não só pelo escopo geral, uma preocupação de Stam com o terceiro mundo, mas realmente completo e conciso em resumir tudo dos grandes pensadores da teoria cinematográfica até o momento. Anyway, I found myself skimming over the post-silent sections of the book and only reading long passages when Stam hit on an area that I was particularly interested in. In 2002, he was named “University Professor” at New York University, the institutions highest honor. Stam has published widely on French literature, comparative literature, and on film topics such as film history and film theory. At times Stam's summaries of other people's critical stances and theories was helpful (especially when so often you have to read confusing translations of the originals) but usually I would have preferred just an anthology of theory and the original articles rather than Stam's interpretations and opinions.

Other material covered includes film adaptations of works of literature and analogies between literary and film criticism.Their 1985 Screen essay “The Cinema After Babel: Language, Difference, Power,” introduced a Bakhtinian “translinguistic” and trans-structuralist turn into the study of language difference, translation, and postsynchronization in the cinema. Race in Translation: Culture Wars Around the Postcolonial Atlantic (NYU, 2012), finally, dealt with the postwar debates about colonialism, postcoloniality, race, multiculture and Affirmative Action in three cultural zones—the U. The concern with issues of colonialism, postcolonialism, race, and cultural difference also found expression in a number of seminal texts co-authored with Ella Shohat. Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (Blackwell, 2005) offered a historicized account of key trends in the history of the novel – the proto-magic realism of a Cervantes, the colonialist realism of a Defoe (and his critics), the parodic reflexivity of a Henry Fielding or Machado de Assis, or proto-cinematic perspectivalism of a Flaubert, the neurotic narrators of a Dostoyevsky or a Nabokov, the feminist experimentations of Clarice Lispector and Marguerite Duras, and the “marvelous latin-american real” of Mario de Andrade and Alejo Carpentier, all as seen through the many filmic adaptations – both “faithful” and revisionist – of their work. This seemed to happen less frequently as time went on, which I think is probably more due to my lack of interest in certain theories (I have little use for Structuralism or its related theories in literature or film, for instance) than any problems inherent in Stam's work.

The other thing I found appealing about this book was the inclusion of some of the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, my favorite literary critic. For a more comprehensive bibliography, see Toby Miller and Robert Stam (eds), Film and Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999). Stam's Subversive Pleasures; Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film was a Choice "Outstanding Academic Book of the Year" in 1989 and Runner-Up for the Katherine Singer Kovács "Best Film Book" Award in the same year. In 2003, Stam was honored at the Curitiba Film Festival for his "Noteworthy Service to Brazilian Cinema".Unlike some other reviewers, I was glad that Stam offered summaries of the work of many theorists rather than extensive excerpts from a few in this introduction. Stam on suutnud aga päris hästi luua loogika ja struktuuri autorite ja igasuguste -ismide virvarris, tuues asjakohaseid filminäiteid ja lektüürisoovitusi sügavamks süvenemiseks. One feature, which came to characterize all of the Stam-Shohat collaborations was looking at theses issues within a longue timespan by placing the various "1492s" (i.