Film History Books

New and Published Books

1. Shakespeare on Silent Film

   A Strange Eventful History

   By Robert Hamilton Ball

   Series: Routledge Library Editions: Film and Literature

   In 1899, when film projection was barely three years old, Herbert Beerbohm Tree was filmed as King John. In his highly entertaining history, Robert Hamilton Ball traces in detail the fate of Shakespeare on silent films from Tree’s first effort until the establishment of sound in 1929. The silent...

   Published April 17th 2013 by Routledge
2. Shakespearean Films/Shakespearean Directors

   By Peter S. Donaldson

   Series: Routledge Library Editions: Film and Literature

   Originally published in 1990, this book brought a new rigor and subtlety to the interpretation of film adaptations of Shakespeare. Drawing on traditional literary analysis, psychoanalysis, and current film theory about gender and subjectivity, the author combines close readings of seven films with...

   Published April 17th 2013 by Routledge
3. Cinema as Weather

   Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change

   By Kristi McKim

   Series: Routledge Advances in Film Studies

   How do cinematic portrayals of the weather reflect and affect our experience of the world? While weatherly predictability and surprise can impact our daily experience, the history of cinema attests to the stylistic and narrative significance of snow, rain, wind, sunshine, clouds, and skies. Through...

   Published February 24th 2013 by Routledge
4. Chinese Cinema

   Edited by Chris Berry

   Series: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies

   Chinese cinema is the only non-English language cinema to have a significant global presence. From multiplex blockbusters like Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to festival hits such as Jia Zhangke’s Still Life, Chinese cinema succeeds like no other foreign-language cinema. The...

   Published December 5th 2012 by Routledge
5. A History of Popular Culture

   More of Everything, Faster and Brighter, 2nd Edition

   By Raymond F. Betts, Lyz Bly

   This lively and informative survey provides a thematic global history of popular culture focusing on the period since the end of the Second World War. A History of Popular Culture explores the rapid diffusion and 'hybridization' of popular culture as the result of three conditions of the world...

   Published November 27th 2012 by Routledge
6. The Classical Hollywood Reader

   Edited by Steve Neale

   The Classical Hollywood Reader brings together essential readings to provide a history of Hollywood from the 1910s to the mid 1960s. Following on from a Prologue that discusses the aesthetic characteristics of Classical Hollywood films, Part 1 covers the period between the 1910s and the...

   Published April 23rd 2012 by Routledge
7. Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s

   Blackness and Genre

   By Novotny Lawrence

   Series: Studies in African American History and Culture

   During the early years of the motion picture industry, black performers were often depicted as shuckin’ and jivin’ caricatures. Specifically, black males were portrayed as toms, coons and bucks, while the mammy and tragic mulatto archetypes circumscribed black femininity. This misrepresentation...

   Published April 4th 2012 by Routledge
8. The Cinema and the Origins of Literary Modernism

   By Andrew Shail

   Series: Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

   Modernist writing has always been linked with cinema. The recent renaissance in early British film studies has allowed cinema to emerge as a major historical context for literary practice. Treating cinema as a historical rather than an aesthetic influence, this book analyzes the role of early...

   Published February 26th 2012 by Routledge
9. Film, History and Cultural Citizenship

   Sites of Production

   Edited by Tina Mai Chen, David S. Churchill

   Series: Routledge Studies in Cultural History

   This new book investigates the relationship of film to history, power, memory, and cultural citizenship. The book is concerned with two central issues: firstly, the participation of film and filmmakers in articulating and challenging projects of modernity; and, secondly, the role of film in shaping...

   Published December 8th 2011 by Routledge
10. The Persistence of Hollywood

    By Thomas Elsaesser

    While Hollywood’s success – its persistence – has remained constant for almost one hundred years, the study of its success has undergone significant expansion and transformation. Since the 1960s, Thomas Elsaesser’s research has spearheaded the study of Hollywood, beginning with his...

    Published December 5th 2011 by Routledge