"... offers a range of approaches to cinema's explorations of a hidden or absent God through a group of essays by thirty-five writers who discuss some fifty movies"--p. 11.

This remarkable text, first published in 1964, was a landmark of its era and remains, in the words of Michael Lwy, a work of "remarkable richness." Drawing on Georg Lukcs' History and Class Consciousness, Lucien Goldmann applies the concept of "world visions" to flesh out the similarities between Pascal's Penses and Kant's critical philosophy, contrasting them with the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Hume. For Goldmann, a leading exponent of the most fruitful method of applying Marxist ideas to literary and philosophical problems, the "tragic vision" marked an important phase in the development of European thought, as it moved from rationalism and empiricism to the dialectical philosophy of Hegel, Marx and Lukcs. Here he offers a general approach to the problems of philosophy, of literary criticism, and of the relationship between thought and action in human society.

Literary Nonfiction. Cinema Studies. Revised 3rd Edition. Devotional Cinema offers an exploration into the language of film, reprised from a lecture on religion and cinema delivered at Princeton University. The new edition includes additions and changes related to the author's understanding of Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc as well as other smaller clarifications. Dorsky has been making and exhibiting films within the avant-garde tradition since 1964.

Since the 1950s Eric Rohmer has been one of the major presences in French cinema as critic and director. This book is a sophisticated engagement with his work in which Keith Tester argues that Rohmer is not the naIve realist he is often claimed to be. Instead, his films are revealed as a sustained exercise in Catholic theology.

French novels, plays, poems and short stories, however temporally or culturally distant from us, continue to be incarnated and reincarnated on cinema screens across the world. From the silent films of Georges Méliès to the Hollywood production of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary directed by Sophie Barthes, The History of French Literature on Film explores the key films, directors, and movements that have shaped the adaptation of works by French authors since the end of the 19th century. Across six chapters, Griffiths and Watts examine the factors that have driven this vibrant adaptive industry, as filmmakers have turned to literature in search of commercial profits, cultural legitimacy, and stories rich in dramatic potential. The volume also explains how the work of theorists from a variety of disciplines (literary theory, translation theory, adaptation theory), can help to deepen both our understanding and our appreciation of literary adaptation as a creative practice. Finally, this volume seeks to make clear that adaptation is never a simple transcription of an earlier literary work. It is always simultaneously an adaptation of the society and era for which it is created. Adaptations of French literature are thus not only valuable artistic artefacts in their own right, so too are they important historical documents which testify to the values and tastes of their own time.

At a time when traditional film theory privileged the purely visual, Film Hieroglyphs introduced a new way of watching film—examining the ways in which writing bears on cinema. Author Tom Conley gives special consideration to the points (ruptures) at which story, image, and writing appear to be at odds with one another. Conley hypothesizes that major directors—Renoir, Lang, Walsh, Rossellini—tend unconsciously to meld history and ideology. Graphic elements are seen as simultaneously foreign and integral to the field of the image. From these contradictions hieroglyphs emerge that mark a design attesting to a hidden rhetoric and to configurations of meaning that cinema cannot always control. Tom Conley is Lowell Professor of romance languages and visual and environmental studies at Harvard University. Among his books is The Self-Made Map (1996), as well as translations of The Fold (1992) by Gilles Deleuze and In the Metro (2002) by Marc Augé, all available from the University of Minnesota Press.