Film History

Too often, film and the cinema have been treated primarily as a visual medium, with the consequence that spectatorship has come to be regarded as a matter of the eye alone. In Film History: An Introduction through the Senses, Thomas Elsaesser and Michael Wedel put the other senses at the centre of the cinematic experience, charting the dynamics along which the cinema has configured, positioned, and rearticulated itself over time within the larger cultural force field of media technologies, the body, and the senses. Much like Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses, each chapter in this new book begins by identifying the major terms of a particular period--including early cinema, classical cinema, modern (art) cinema, post-classical cinema, avant-garde cinema, world cinema, and digital cinema--and closely analyzing of one or more of the era's key films. Using major twentieth century media theorists, the authors then examine the way in which media technologies have affected, altered, traversed, or perverted the body and the senses.