Film History Reading List

The following reading list for the English and Film Studies PhD program is provided by the department and is updated yearly to reflect changes in the discipline.

For more information about reading lists, see the Comprehensive Area Exam page.

I. Reference Texts / General Introductions

(not required but helpful background reading)

Grainge, Paul, et al. Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007.

Hill, John, and Pamela Church-Gibson, eds. The Oxford Guide to Film Studies. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.

Jenkins, Keith. Re-Thinking History. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Sklar, Robert. World History of Film. London: Pearson, 2002.

Thompson, Kirstin, and David Bordwell. Film History: An Introduction, 3rd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009.

II. Historiography and History of Film Studies

Allen, Robert C., and Douglas Gomery. Film History: Theory and Practice. New York: Random House, 1985.

Bordwell, David. On the History of Film Style. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1998.

Carr, E.H. What Is History? New York: Vintage, 1961.

Cartwright, Lisa. "Film and the Digital in Visual Studies: Film Studies in the Era of Convergence." Journal of Visual Culture 1.1 (2002): 7-23.

De Certeau, Michel. The Writing of History. Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia UP,1988.

Grieveson, Lee and Haidee Watson, eds. Inventing Film Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 2008.

Kepley, Vance. "Whose Apparatus: Problems of Film Exhibition and History," in PostTheory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Eds. David Bordwell and Noel Carroll. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1996.

III. Film Histories

Early and Silent Cinemas

Abel, Richard. The Cine Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896-1914. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.

Altman, Rick. Silent Film Sound. New York: Columbia UP, 2006.

Burch, Noël. Life to These Shadows. Trans. and ed. Ben Brewster. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

Gaines, Jane. "The Scar of Shame: Skin Color and Caste in Black Silent Meldorama." Cinema Journal 26.4 (Summer 1987): 3-21.

Grieveson, Lee, and Peter Kramer, eds. The Silent Cinema Reader. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Elsaesser, Thomas, ed. Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. London: BFI, 1990.

Gunning, Tom. D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990.

Keil, Charlie. "From Here to Modernity: Style, Historiography, and Transitional Cinema." In American Cinema's Transitional Era. Eds. Charlie Keil and Shelly Stamp. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. 51-65.

Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia UP, 2001.

Thompson, Kristin. Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907-1934. BFI: London, 1985.

American Cinema

Bordwell, David, et al. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.

Cahiers du Cinéma. "John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln." Trans. Helen Lackner and Diana Matias. Screen 14.3 (Autumn 1973): 5-44.

Cripps, Thomas. Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

Doherty, Thomas. Projections of the War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II. 2nd rev. ed. New York: Columbia UP, 1999.

Gomery, Douglas. Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States. Madison: U Wisconsin P, 1993.

Hall, Sheldon and Steve Neale. Epics, Spectacles and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2010.

Hansen, Miriam. "The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism." In Reinventing Film Studies. Eds. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams. London: Arnold, 2000. 332-350.

King, Geoff, ed. American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Lewis, Jon, ed. The New American Cinema. Durham: Duke UP, 1998.

Maltby, Richard. Hollywood Cinema, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.

Wilinsky, Barbara. Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2001.

Willis, Sharon. High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Films. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.

National and Transnational Cinemas

Andrew, Dudley. "An Atlas of World Cinema." In Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film. Eds. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim. London: Wallflower, 2006. 19-29.

Betz, Mark. Beyond the Subtitle: Remapping European Art Cinema. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009.

Landy, Marcia. Italian Film. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Bordwell, David. "Visual Style in Japanese Cinema, 1925-1945." In Poetics of Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2008. 337-374.

Bordwell, David. “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” In Poetics of Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2008. 151-170.

Burch, Noël. To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979.

Chakravarty, Sumita S. National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947-1987. Austin: U of Texas P, 1993.

Elsaesser, Thomas. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2005.

Fu, Poshek. Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2003

Galt, Rosalind, and Karl Schnoover, eds. Gobal Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010.

Hjort, Mette and Scott MacKenzie, eds. Cinema and Nation. London: Routledge, 2000.

Kovåcs, András Bálint. Screening Modernism: European Art Cinema 1950-1980. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007.

Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1947.

Leyda, Jay. Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, 3rd ed. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983.

Marie, Michel. The French New Wave: An Artistic School. Trans. Richard Neupert. London: Blackwell, 2003.

Melnyk, George. One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema. Toronto: U of T Press, 2004.

Mottahedeh, Negar. Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema. Durham: Duke UP, 2008.

Naficy, Hamid. “Theorizing ‘Third World’ Film Spectatorship: The Case of Iran and Iranian Cinema.” Rethinking Third Cinema. Ed. Anthony R. Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake. New York: Routledge, 2003. 183-201.

Pines, Jim and Paul Willemen, eds. Questions of Third Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1989.

Shaw, Tony, and Denise J. Youngblood. Cinematic Cold War: The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds. U of Kansas P, 2014.

Street, Sarah. British National Cinema. London: Routledge, 1997.

Zhang, Zhen. An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2005.

Modes and Representations

Doty, Alexander. "Whose Text is it Anyway? Queer Cultures, Queer Auteurs, and Queer Authorship." In Queer Cinema: The Film Reader. Eds. Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin. New York: Routledge, 2004. 19-34.

Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2002.

McLane, Betsy A. A New History of Documentary Film, 2nd ed. New York: Continuum, 2012.

Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary, 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010.

Rich, B. Ruby. "New Queer Cinema." In Queer Cinema: The Film Reader. Eds. Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin. New York: Routledge, 2004. 53-60.

IV. FILMS

(each to be viewed twice unless otherwise noted)

• The Movies Begin (DVD box set, Kino Lorber, 500 min.) - one viewing will suffice
• Selections from Biograph Shorts, 1909-1913 (Griffith Masterworks) (Kino Lorber, 77 min.): Those Awful Hats, Corner in Wheat, His Trust, Enoch Arden, The Musketeers of Pig Alley, Death's Marathon
• Fantômas in the Shadow of the Guillotine (Louis Feuillade, 1913, 54 min.)
• The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915, 190 min.)
• Within Our Gates (Oscar Micheaux, 1920, 79 min.)
• Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922, 79 min.)
• Selections from Avant-garde Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s (DVD box set, Kino, 140 min.): La Retour a la raison (Man Ray), Menilmontant (Dmitri Kirsanoff), The Life and Death of 9413, A Hollywood Extra (Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapich), Rhythmus 21 (Hans Richter), Ghosts Before Breakfast (Hans Richter), Anemic Cinema (Marcel Duchamp), Ballet Mecahnique (Fernand Leger), Diagonal Symphony (Viking Eggeling), La Glace a trois faces (Jean Epstein), Manhatta (Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler), La Coquille et le Clergyman (Germaine Dulac), Regen (Joris Ivens).
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Weine, 1920, 70 min.)
• Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925, 82 min.)
• Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927, 95 min.)
• Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928, 82 min. [restored version])
• Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
• The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931, 83 min.)
• Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935, 114 min.)
• Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941, 119 min.)
• Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1944, 14 min.)
• Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948, 93 mins)
• Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954, 112 min.)
• Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950, 88 min.)
• Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953, 136 min.)
• Pather Panchali (Satayajit Ray, 1955, 115 min.)
• Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1960, 90 min.)
• Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960, 87 min.)
• Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966, 120 min.)
• Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966, 85 min.)
• Black Girl (Ousmane Sembene, 1966, 65 min.)
• Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967, 111 min.)
• Goin' Down the Road (Donald Shebib, 1970, 90 min.)
• Mon Oncle Antoine (Claude Jutra, 1971, 104 min.)
• Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder, 1974, 93 min.)
• Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975, 201 min.)
• Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, 1988, 85 min.)
• Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989, 120 min.)
• Simple Men (Hal Hartley, 1992, 105 min.)
• Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994, 103 min.)
• Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra, 1995, 186 min.) - one viewing will suffice
• Festen (Thomas Vinterberg, 1998, 105 min.)
• City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1998, 157 min.)
• Boys Don't Cry (Kimberly Pierce, 1999, 118 min.)
• The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999, 136 min.)
• Atanarjuat (Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, 2001, 172 min.)
• Old Boy (Park Chan-wook, 2003, 120 min.)