Originally published: Berkley, CA: University of California Press, �1976.

The first volume traces the evolution of film theory and criticism into a new discipline, incorporating various sociological, psychological, and philosophical methodologies. Authors represented include Susan Sontag, Andrew Sarris, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Francois Truffaut and Sergei Eisenstein. The second volume indicates how feminist, structuralist, and psychoanalytic approaches to film have achieved valuable insights. Nichols shows how shared methods and approaches stimulate writing about film, point to common problems critics and theorists have tried to resolve, and describe the internal contradictions that have restricted the usefulness of post-structuralism. The concluding part conveys the diversity of film writing from statistical style analysis to phenomenology and from gay criticism to neoformalism. The writings collected here exhibit a persistent awareness of the social importance of the cinema in American culture.