The 'I' of the Camera
Essays in Film Criticism, History, and Aesthetics

This second edition of William Rothman's classic includes fourteen new essays and a new foreword.

William Rothman (Author)

9780521820226, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 November 2003

424 pages, 373 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.7 cm, 0.79 kg

The 'I' of the Camera has become a classic in the literature of film. Offering alternatives to the viewing and criticism of film, William Rothman challenges readers to think about film in adventurous ways that are more open to movies and our experience of them. In a series of eloquent essays examining particular films, filmmakers, genres and movements, and the 'Americanness' of American film, Rothman argues compellingly that movies have inherited the philosophical perspective of American transcendentalism. This second edition contains all of the essays that made the book a benchmark of film criticism. It also includes fourteen essays, written subsequent to the book's original publication, as well as a new foreword. The new chapters further broaden the scope of the volume, fleshing out its vision of film history and illuminating the author's critical method and the philosophical perspective that informs it.

1. Hollywood reconsidered: reflections on the classical American cinema
2. D. W. Griffith and the birth of the movies
3. Judith of Bethulia
4. True heart Griffith
5. The ending of City Lights
6. The Goddess: reflections on melodrama east and west
7. Red Dust: the erotic screen image
8. Virtue and villainy in the face of the camera
9. Pathos and transfiguration in the face of the camera: a reading of Stella Dallas
10. Viewing the world in black and white: race and the melodrama of the unknown woman
11. Howard Hawks and Bringing Up Baby
12. The filmmaker in the film: Octave and the rules of Renoir's game
13. Stagecoach and the quest for selfhood
14. To have and to have not adapted a film from a novel
15. Hollywood and the rise of suburbia
16. Nobody's perfect: Billy Wilder and the postwar American cinema
17. The River
18. Vertigo: the unknown woman in Hitchcock
19. North by Northwest: Hitchcock's monument to the Hitchcock film
20. The villain in Hitchcock
21. Thoughts on Hitchcock's authorship
22. Eternal vérités: cinema-vérité and classical cinema
23. Visconti's Death in Venice
24. Alfred Guzzetti's Family Portrait Sittings
25. The taste for beauty
26. A Tale of Winter: philosophical thought in the films of Eric Rohmer
27. The 'New Latin American Cinema'
28. What is American about American film study.

Subject Areas: Film theory & criticism [APFA]