Author Description

"Never before have movies been so readily available to those who wish to watch them. When the first edition of this book was published, students' viewing opportunities were mostly limited to local theaters, classrooms with 16mm projection capabilities, or television. Since then, cable, satellite, VCRs, laserdisc players, and DVRs (beginning with TiVo) have dramatically widened our choice of films to see and ways to see them. DVDs and streaming video via the Internet and Wi-Fi have offered home viewers both improved visual and sound quality, and content extras such as commentaries by directors, actors, writers, editors, cinematographers, and other filmmakers, as well as extended "making of" documentaries. Perhaps most helpfully for the study of film, these technologies allow direct digital entry to individual scenes so that we can now scrutinize a film sequence by sequence, shot by shot, and even frame by frame. What are we to make of this greater access to movies? What purpose does it serve? This textbook is informed by the belief that making films is an art-and that watching films is also an art. Most students come into an introductory film course having watched plenty of movies, but during the semester, they develop ways to engage in the experience on a deeper, more meaningful level"--