Inventing Film Studies - Paperback

by Lee Grieveson (Editor), Haidee Wasson (Editor)

Inventing Film Studies offers original and provocative insights into the institutional and intellectual foundations of cinema studies. Many scholars have linked the origins of the discipline to late-1960s developments in the academy such as structuralist theory and student protest. Yet this collection reveals the broader material and institutional forces-both inside and outside of the university-that have long shaped the field. Beginning with the first investigations of cinema in the early twentieth century, this volume provides detailed examinations of the varied social, political, and intellectual milieus in which knowledge of cinema has been generated. The contributors explain how multiple instantiations of film study have had a tremendous influence on the methodologies, curricula, modes of publication, and professional organizations that now constitute the university-based discipline. Extending the historical insights into the present, contributors also consider the directions film study might take in changing technological and cultural environments.

Inventing Film Studies shows how the study of cinema has developed in relation to a constellation of institutions, technologies, practices, individuals, films, books, government agencies, pedagogies, and theories. Contributors illuminate the connections between early cinema and the social sciences, between film programs and nation-building efforts, and between universities and U.S. avant-garde filmmakers. They analyze the evolution of film studies in relation to the Museum of Modern Art, the American Film Council movement of the 1940s and 1950s, the British Film Institute, influential journals, cinephilia, and technological innovations past and present. Taken together, the essays in this collection reveal the rich history and contemporary vitality of film studies.

Back Jacket

This collection contributes new understandings to the history of film studies, particularly regarding the discipline's development in the humanities and its gradual abandonment of the methodological practices of the social sciences, in which it had its origins. Inventing Film Studies" will be welcomed by academics working in cinema studies, and it will provide new entrants to the field with an important introduction to the history of their study."--Richard Maltby, author of "Hollywood Cinema"

Author Biography

Lee Grieveson is Reader in Film Studies and Director of the Graduate Programme in Film Studies at University College London. He is the author of Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth-Century America and a co-editor of The Silent Cinema Reader.

Haidee Wasson is Associate Professor of Cinema at Concordia University. She is the author of Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema.