Theorizing the Moving Image

This 1996 volume is a selection of essays on film and film theory by a leading critic.

Noel Carroll (Author)

9780521466073, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 31 May 1996

452 pages
25.4 x 17.9 x 2.2 cm, 1.042 kg

"For its breadth of scholarship, its fecundity of ideas, and its rigor in argument, Theorizing the Moving Image deserves a place on the shelves of anyone interested in the study of film." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

A selection of essays written by a leading film critic, this 1996 volume examines theoretical aspects of film and television through penetrating analyses of such genres as soap opera, documentary, comedy, and such topics as 'sight gags', film metaphor, point-of-view editing, and movie music. Throughout, individual films are considered in depth. Carroll's essays, moreover, represent the cognitivist turn in film studies, containing in-depth criticism of existing approaches to film theory.

Part I. Questioning Media: 1. Medium specificity arguments and the self-consciously invented arts
2. The specificity of media in the arts
3. Concerning uniqueness claims for photographic and cinematographic representation
4. Defining the moving image
Part II. Popular Film and TV: 5. The power of movies
6. Toward a theory of film suspense
7. As the dial turns: notes on soap operas
8. Toward a theory of point of view editing
9. Notes on movie music
10. Notes on the sight gag
Part III. Avant-garde and Documentary Film: 11. Avant-garde film and film theory
12. Causation, the amplification of movement and the avant-garde film
13. Language and cinema: preliminary notes for a theory of verbal images
14. A note on film metaphor
15. From real to reel: entangled in non-fiction film
16. Reply to Carol Browson and Jack C. Wolf
Part IV. Ideology: 17. The image of women in film: a defense of a paradigm
18. Film, rhetoric and ideology
Part V. The History of Film Theory: 19. Film/mind analogies: the case of Hugo Munsterberg
20. Hans Richter's Struggle for Film
21. A brief note on Frampton's notion of metahistory
Part VI. Polemical Exchanges: 22. Cognitivism, contemporary film theory and method
23. Cracks in the acoustic mirror
24. A reply to Heath
25. Replies to Jennifer Hammett and Richard Allen
Part VII. False Starts: 26. Film history and film theory
27. Art, film and ideology
28. Toward a theory of film editing.

Subject Areas: Films, cinema [APF]