Kristin Thompson

David Bordwell

Janet Staiger

An overview of American studio filmmaking that examines its distinct mode of film practice, in both production and style, from 1917 through 1960.

Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960

The Classical Hollywood Cinema

Film and television have never been more prevalent or watched than they are now, yet we still have little understanding of how people process and make use of what they see. And though we acknowledge the enormous role the media plays in our culture, we have only a vague sense of how it actually influences our attitudes and desires. In Perverse Spectators, Janet Staiger argues that studying the interpretive methods of spectators within their historical contexts is both possible and necessary to understand the role media plays in culture and in our personal lives. This analytical approach is applied to topics such as depictions of violence, the role of ratings codes, the horror and suspense genre, historical accuracy in film, and sexual identities, and then demonstrated through works like JFK, The Silence of the Lambs, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Psycho, and A Clockwork Orange. Each chapter shows a different approach to reconstructing audience responses to films, consistently and ingeniously finding traces of what would otherwise appear to be unrecoverable information. Using vivid examples, charting key concepts, and offering useful syntheses of long-standing debates, Perverse Spectators constitutes a compelling case for a reconsideration of the assumptions about film reception which underlie contemporary scholarship in media studies. Taking on widely influential theories and scholars, Perverse Spectators is certain to spark controversy and help redefine the study of film as it enters the new millennium.

The Practices of Film Reception

Perverse Spectators

Media Reception Studies broadly surveys the past century of scholarship on the ways in which audiences make meaning out of mass media. It synthesizes in plain language social scientific, linguistic, and cultural studies approaches to film and television as communication media. Janet Staiger traverses a broad terrain, covering the Chicago School, early psychological approaches, Soviet theory, the Frankfurt School, mass communication research and critical theory, linguistics and semiotic theory, social-psychoanalytical research, cognitive psychology, and cultural studies. She offers these theories as a set of tools for understanding the complex relationships between films and their audiences, TV shows and their viewers. She explains such questions as the behavior of fans; the implications of gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity with regard to the media; the effect of violence, horror, and sexually explicit images on viewers; and the place of memory in spectatorship. Providing an organized and lucid introduction to a staggering amount of work, Media Reception Studies is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in understanding the effects of mass media.

Media Reception Studies

David A. Gerstner

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Authorship and Film

"[An] engrossing study, told mainly by the subjects themselves... a valuable addition to POW literature and unique for its positive view of wartime captivity." --Publishers Weekly "Lieblich has skillfully integrated oral histories to produce a compelling story." --Library Journal "The minutes of the meetings recorded hereby are an excerpt of the lives of ten men, who had spent all their days and nights together. Each one observed the other in his grief and joy.Each one, according to his ability and sensitivity, saw it as his duty to contribute to the general welfare, to save our boat from sinking....In fact, we managed to keep afloat most of the time, and if we erred here or there, at least we had the best intentions." --From a secret collective diary kept by ten POWs A national bestseller when it first appeared in Israel, Seasons of Captivity is a story of human survival and hope that documents the experience of ten Israeli prisoners of war who shared a single jail cell in Egypt for more than three years. The engrossing chronicle of the prisoners' ordeal is told in their own words--from their capture in 1969, through six months of interrogation, torture, and isolation, to their movement to a common room. A watershed event, their transfer to shared living quarters enabled them to forge a community and an almost utopian social system. They held weekly meetings, kept a common diary, started study classes, and, among other projects, translated The Hobbit into Hebrew. The narrative goes on to describe the re-entry of the POWs into family and social roles upon their release and return to Israel in 1973. An exploration of the personal impact of the experience on the wives of the married prisoners introduces the women's own stories of separation and reunion. Some of them had suddenly found themselves, in effect, single mothers--yet their husbands were alive. Their husbands found stronger, more independent women in place of the traditional ones they had left behind. One of the women remarks, I thought [my husband] had been angry at me, in part unconsciously, for being so strong and competent in his absence...I had managed, well, almost effortlessly. This dramatic and moving account illustrates the resilience of the human spirit in the face of the most dehumanizing circumstances.

Ann Cvetkovich

Ann Reynolds

Political Emotions explores the contributions that the study of discourses, rhetoric, and framing of emotion make to understanding the public sphere, civil society and the political realm. Tackling critiques on the opposition of the public and private spheres, chapters in this volume examine why some sentiments are valued in public communication while others are judged irrelevant, and consider how sentiments mobilize political trajectories. Emerging from the work of the Public Feelings research group at the University of Texas-Austin, and cohering in a New Agendas in Communication symposium, this volume brings together the work of young scholars from various areas of study, including sociology, gender studies, anthropology, art, and new media. The essays in this collection formulate new ways of thinking about the relations among the emotional, the cultural, and the political. Contributors recraft familiar ways of doing critical work, and bring forward new analyses of emotions in politics. Their work expands understanding of the role of emotion in the political realm, and will be influential in political communication, political science, sociology, and visual and cultural studies.

Political Emotions

The Regulation of Female Sexuality in Early American Cinema

Bad Women

Employing a wide range of examples from Uncle Tom's Cabin and Birth of a Nation to Zelig and Personal Best, Janet Staiger argues that a historical examination of spectators' responses to films can make a valuable contribution to the history, criticism, and philosophy of cultural products. She maintains that as artifacts, films do not contain immanent meanings, that differences among interpretations have historical bases, and that these variations are due to social, political, and economic conditions as well as the viewers' constructed images of themselves. After proposing a theory of reception study, the author demonstrates its application mainly through analyzing the varying responses of audiences to certain films at specific moments in history. Staiger gives special attention to how questions of class, gender, sexual preference, race, and ethnicity enter into film viewers' interpretations. Her analysis reflects recent developments in post-structuralism, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies, and includes a discussion of current reader-response models in literary and film studies as well as an alternative approach for thinking about historical readers and spectators.

Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema

Interpreting Films

'A dense, challenging and important book.' Philip French Observer 'At the very least, this blockbuster is probably the best single volume history of Hollywood we're likely to get for a very long time.' Paul Kerr City Limits 'Persuasively argued, the book is also packed with facts, figures and photographs.' Nigel Andrews Financial Times Acclaimed for their breakthrough approach, Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson analyze the basic conditions of American film-making as a historical institution and consider to what extent Hollywood film production constitutes a systematic enterprise, in both its style and its business operations. Despite differences of director, genre or studio, most Hollywood films operate within a set of shared assumptions about how a film should look and sound. Such assumptions are neither natural nor inevitable; but because classical-style films have been the type most widely seen, they have come to be accepted as the 'norm' of film-making and viewing. The authors show how these classical conventions were formulated and standardized, and how they responded to the arrival of sound, colour, widescreen ratios and stereophonic sound. They argue that each new technological development has served a function within an existing narrational system. The authors also examine how the Hollywood cinema standardized the film-making process itself. They describe how, over the course of its history, Hollywood developed distinct modes of production in a constant search for maximum efficiency, predictability and novelty. Set apart by its combination of theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, this book is the standard work on the classical Hollywood cinema style of film-making from the silent era to the 1960s. Now available in paperback, it is a 'must' for film students, lecturers and all those seriously interested in the development of the film industry.

Janet Staiger

Books

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