Film History: An Introduction

Kristin Thompson is an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of WisconsinMadison, where she earned her Ph.D. Her books include Eisensteins Ivan the Terrible (1981), Exporting Entertainment: Americas Place in World Film Markets 19011934 (1985), Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (1988), Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (1999), Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood: German and American Film after World War I (2005), and The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood (2007). David Bordwell is Jacques Ledoux Professor Emeritus of Film Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of WisconsinMadison. He also holds a Hilldale Professorship in the Humanities and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Copenhagen. He has also held the Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress. His books include Narration in the Fiction Film (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), On the History of Film Style (Harvard University Press, 1997), Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Harvard University Press, 2000; 2nd ed., Irvington Way Institute Press, 2011), Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic Staging(University of California Press, 2005), The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (University of California Press, 2006), The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2016), and Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling (University of Chicago Press, 2017). He has also written books on Carl Theodor Dreyer, Yasujiro Ozu, Sergei Eisenstein, digital cinema, and Hong Kong film. Jeff Smith is a Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of WisconsinMadison, where he earned his Ph.D. He is the author of two books: The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular FilmMusic (1998) and Film Criticism, the Cold War, and the Blacklist: Reading the Hollywood Reds (2014). He has also published several articles and book chapters on the role of sound and music in American cinema. He is currently at work on a book that traces development of the classical Hollywood film score during the 1930s that examines how studios allocated musical resources to films based on their position within the hierarchy of prestige pictures, programmers, and B films.

Part One: Early Cinema
Chapter 1 – The Invention and Early Years of the Cinema, 1180s -1904
Chapter 2 – The International Expansion of the Cinema, 1905 – 1912
Chapter 3 – National Cinemas, Hollywood Classicism, and World War 1, 1913 – 1919

Part Two: The Late Silent Era, 1919-1929
Chapter 4 – France in the 1920s
Chapter 5 – Germany in the 1920s
Chapter 6 – Soviet Cinema in the 1920s
Chapter 7 – The Late Silent Era in Hollywood, 1920-1928
Chapter 8 – International Trends of the 1920s

Part Three: The Development of Sound Cinema, 1926-1945
Chapter 9 – The Introduction of Sound
Chapter 10 – The Hollywood Studio System, 1930-1945
Chapter 11 – Other Studio Systems
Chapter 12 – Cinema and the State: The USSR, Germany, and Italy, 1930-1945
Chapter 13 – France: Poetic Realism, The Popular Front, and the Occupation, 1930-1945
Chapter 14 – Leftist, Documentary, and Experimental Cinemas, 1930-1945

Part Four: The Postwar Era, 1945-1960s
Chapter 15 – American Cinema in the Postwar Era, 1945-1960
Chapter 16 – Postwar European Cinema: Neorealism and its Context, 1945-1959
Chapter 17 – Postwar European Cinema: France, Scandinavia, and Britain, 1945-1959
Chapter 18 – Postwar Cinema Beyond the West, 1945-1959
Chapter 19 – Art Cinema and the Idea of Authorship
Chapter 20 – New Waves and Young Cinemas, 1958-1967
Chapter 21 – Documentary and Experimental Cinema in the Post War Era, 1945-Mid 1960s

Part 5: The Contemporary Cinema Since the 1960s
Chapter 22 – Hollywood’s Fall and Rise, 1960-1980
Chapter 23 – Politically Critical Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s
Chapter 24 – Documentary and Experimental Cinema Since the Late 1960s
Chapter 25 – New Cinemas and New Developments: Europe and the USSR Since the 1970s
Chapter 26 – A Developing World: Continental and Subcontinental Cinemas Since 1970
Chapter 27 – Cinema Rising: Pacific Asia and Oceania Since 1970

Part 6: Cinema in the Age of New Media
Chapter 28 – American Cinema and the Entertainment Economy, the 1980s and After
Chapter 29 – Toward a Global Film Culture
Chapter 30 – Digital Technology and the Cinema