Film/TV Books Online Movies and Methods, I and II, by Bill Nichols Published by the University of California Press Volume I (1976) Film teachers and students will welcome this anthology, which makes available in one source a comprehensive selection of recent theoretical work on film, including many articles difficult to locate in the scattered literature. The contents . . . include work by the most original film thinkers--some well known to a wide public, some widely knows among readers of film journals. Several important filmmakers are also represented. The materials have been grouped in critical categories reflecting recent approaches to the medium. In place of older questions such as the relation of film to other arts, or film's ability to capture an imprint of reality, the questions emphasized in this anthology concern film's ideological operations, the nature of film genres, the role of the auteur in the creative process, the representation of social groups (such as women) in film, the logic of narrative and formal organization in films, the treatment of films as myths, and new theoretical perspectives. Thus the contents reflect the use of political, structuralist, semiological, and psychoanalytic methods, as well as those of more traditional criticism. The editor provides an overall general introduction, and mini-introductions to each text. A glossary of terms used in structuralist-semiological work is included, and lists of additional reading are provided. Volume II (1985) The original Movies and Methods volume captures the dynamic evolution of film theory and criticism into an important new discipline, incorporating methods from structuralism, semiotics, and feminist thought. Now there is again ferment in the field. Movies and Methods, Volume II, captures the developments that have given history and genre studies imaginative new models and indicates how feminsit, strucuralist, and psychoanalytic approaches to film have achieved fresh, valuable insights. In his thoughtful introduction, Nichols provides a context for the paradoxes that confront film studies today. He shows how shared methods and approaches continue to stimulate much of the best writing about film, points to common problems most critics and theorists have tried to resolve, and desribes the internal contradictions that have restricted the usefulness of post-structuralism. Mini-introductions place each essay in a larger context and suggests its linkages with other essays in the volume. A great variety of approaches and methods characterize film writing today, and the final part conveys their diversity--from statistical style analysis to phenomenology and from gay criticism to neoformalism. This concluding part also shows how the rigorous use of a broad range of approaches has helped remove post-structuralist criticism from its position of dominance through most of the seventies and arly eighties.

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