Film theory : an introduction / Robert Stam.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The antecedents of film theory -- Film and film theory : the beginnings -- Early silent film theory -- The essence of cinema -- The Soviet montage-theorists -- Russian formalism and the Bakhtin School -- The historical avant-gardes -- The debate after sound -- The Frankfurt School -- The phenomenology of realism -- The cult of the auteur -- The Americanization of auteur theory -- Third world film and theory -- The advent of structuralism -- The question of film language -- Cinematic specificity revisited -- Interrogating authorship and genre -- 1968 and the leftist turn -- The classic realist text -- The presence of Brecht -- The politics of reflexitivity -- The search for alternative aesthetics -- From linguistics to psychoanalysis -- From feminist intervention -- The postsructuralist mutation -- Textual analysis -- Interpretation and its discontents -- From text to intertext -- The amplification of sound -- The rise of cultural studies -- The birth of the spectator -- Cognitive and analytic theory -- Semiotics revisited -- Just in time : the impact of Deleuze -- The coming out of queer theory -- Multiculturalism, race, and representation -- Third cinema revisited -- Film and the postcolonial -- The poetics and politics of postmodernism -- The social valence of mass-culture -- Post-cinema : digital theory and the new media -- The pluralization of film theory.