The Film Experience is a comprehensive introduction to film that treats students as the avid movie fans they are while surpassing all other texts in helping them understand the art form’s full scope, breadth, and depth. Like other introductory texts, it offers strong coverage of film’s formal elements, but goes further by situating this formal knowledge in the larger cultural contexts that inform the ways that we all view film. The authors’ rich narrative integrates the cultural history of film throughout and demonstrates how the elements, practices, economics, and history of the medium contribute to a film’s many possible meanings. The outstanding art program — now in full color — visually reinforces all the key concepts and techniques discussed in the text.

Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience uses the philosophy of Martin Heidegger as a framework for addressing key issues in the philosophy of film. This study grapples with the question of how we can reconcile film as a popular entertainment medium with Heidegger’s own various critiques of popular media and culture throughout his career. Shawn Loht also explores topics such as the ontology of film and moving images; the phenomenological character of the viewer experience; film conceived as an art medium; and the function of films as vehicles for philosophical thought. He further discusses important concepts from Heidegger’s philosophy--Dasein, existentiality, world, art and poetry, and the nature of philosophy. The first four chapters take up these issues from a theoretical perspective. The remaining chapters provide robust application of the theoretical material to the films of three contemporary filmmakers: Terrence Malick, Michael Haneke, and David Gordon Green. As the first single-author monograph that takes up Heidegger’s relevance to film, Phenomenology of Film will be of particular interest to philosophers of film and specialists of film and media studies working in the intersection of phenomenology and film or phenomenological approaches to issues in popular culture.

Cinema is a sensuous object, but in our presence it becomes also a sensing, sensual, sense-making subject. Thus argues Vivian Sobchack as she challenges basic assumptions of current film theory that reduce film to an object of vision and the spectator to a victim of a deterministic cinematic apparatus. Maintaining that these premises ignore the material and cultural-historical situations of both the spectator and the film, the author makes the radical proposal that the cinematic experience depends on two "viewers" viewing: the spectator and the film, each existing as both subject and object of vision. Drawing on existential and semiotic phenomenology, and particularly on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Sobchack shows how the film experience provides empirical insight into the reversible, dialectical, and signifying nature of that embodied vision we each live daily as both "mine" and "another's." In this attempt to account for cinematic intelligibility and signification, the author explores the possibility of human choice and expressive freedom within the bounds of history and culture.

For the first time this volume makes Jean-Pierre Meunier's insightful thoughts on the film experience available for an English-speaking readership. Introduced and commented by specialists in film studies and philosophy, Meunier's intricate phenomenological descriptions of the spectator's engagement with fiction films, documentaries and home movies can reach the wide audience they have deserved ever since their publication in French in 1969.

Everyone knows the thrill of being transported by a film, but what is it that makes movie watching such a compelling emotional experience? In Moving Viewers, Carl Plantinga explores this question and the implications of its answer for aesthetics, the psychology of spectatorship, and the place of movies in culture. Through an in-depth discussion of mainstream Hollywood films, Plantinga investigates what he terms "the paradox of negative emotion" and the function of mainstream narratives as ritualistic fantasies. He describes the sensual nature of the movies and shows how film emotions are often elicited for rhetorical purposes. He uses cognitive science and philosophical aesthetics to demonstrate why cinema may deliver a similar emotional charge for diverse audiences.

This essential book covers the key areas for A Level Film Studies students, building confidence through a careful, step-by-step approach. The first part of the book establishes a basic understanding of the grounding of film analysis in the various elements of film construction, mise en scène, cinematography, editing, sound and performance, developing the knowledge students have of movies whilst challenging them to consider new films and ideas. Key theoretical approaches around narrative, genre, representation, spectatorship and authorship are introduced in Part II, before we consider specific national cinemas from around the world in parts III and IV. In Part V, the book assesses a range of slightly different film experiences, looking at silent cinema, experimental films and documentaries; before, finally, Part VI shifts to evaluating creative approaches to students’ own filmmaking. Specifically designed to be user-friendly, the book has an easy-to-follow design, includes more than 60 colour images and is packed with features such as: case studies on a range of films and filmmakers; activities on such films as Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (Murnau, 1927, USA), Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958, USA), Do the Right Thing (Lee, 1989, USA), We Need to Talk About Kevin (Ramsay, 2011, UK) and Stories We Tell (Polley, 2012, Canada); definitions of key terms; and suggestions for further reading and website resources. Matched to the current exam specification, A Level Film Studies: The Essential Introduction covers everything students need to study as part of the course. The book is supported by a companion website at www.alevelfilmstudies.co.uk, offering further advice and activities.

Is it true that film in the twentieth century experimented with vision more than any other art form? And what visions did it privilege? In this brilliant book, acclaimed film scholar Francesco Casetti situates the cinematic experience within discourses of twentieth-century modernity. He suggests that film defined a unique gaze, not only because it recorded many of the century's most important events, but also because it determined the manner in which they were received. Casetti begins by examining film's nature as a medium in an age obsessed with immediacy, nearness, and accessibility. He considers the myths and rituals cinema constructed on the screen and in the theater and how they provided new images and behaviors that responded to emerging concerns, ideas, and social orders. Film also succeeded in negotiating the different needs of modernity, comparing and uniting conflicting stimuli, providing answers in a world torn apart by conflict, and satisfying a desire for everydayness, as well as lightness, in people's lives. The ability to communicate, the power to inform, and the capacity to negotiate-these are the three factors that defined film's function and outlook and made the medium a relevant and vital art form of its time. So what kind of gaze did film create? Film cultivated a personal gaze, intimately tied to the emergence of point of view, but also able to restore the immediacy of the real; a complex gaze, in which reality and imagination were combined; a piercing gaze, achieved by machine, and yet deeply anthropomorphic; an excited gaze, rich in perceptive stimuli, but also attentive to the spectator's orientation; and an immersive gaze, which gave the impression of being inside the seen world while also maintaining a sense of distance. Each of these gazes combined two different qualities and balanced them. The result was an ever inventive synthesis that strived to bring about true compromises without ever sacrificing the complexity of contradiction. As Casetti demonstrates, film proposed a vision that, in making opposites permeable, modeled itself on an oxymoronic principle. In this sense, film is the key to reading and understanding the modern experience.