Author Description

The essays that comprise this handbook display the current intellectual and topical diversity of the study of American film history. Contributors focus on technology, reception, exemplary films and filmmakers, celebrity, industry policy, procedure, and regulation. The contributors discuss political economy, textual representation (form, style, diversity), scientific/technological innovation, and the cultural (and subcultural) resonance of movies in their historical time and place. The book is comprised of thirty-two essays from well-known film historians. It begins with pre-cinema experiments and a first wave of films produced before the advent of synchronized sound. It then tracks the history of cinema through the studio or classical era, the post-World War II economic and cinematic transition, the New Hollywood that emerged after the adoption of the film rating system, and ends with speculative accounts of the current convergent mediascape. We may be tempted today to view film history as solely or primarily retrospective. But many or most of us are still avid filmgoers -- even if we don't have to go anywhere to see films, even if films aren't exactly or always produced or exhibited on film anymore. Movies made America, Robert Sklar famously wrote in 1976, because so many Americans wanted it that way, because Hollywood movies were and still are essential to the American experience, and to our experience of America.