Film and Theory : An Anthology

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Film theory is what Bakhtin would call a historically situated utterance. And just as one cannot separate the history of film theory from the history of the arts and of artistic discourse, so one cannot separate it from history tout court, defined by Fredric Jameson as that which hurts but also as that which inspires. In the long view, the history of film, and therefore of film theory, must be seen in the light of the growth of nationalism, within which cinema became a strategic instrument for projecting national imaginaries. It must also be seen in relation to colonialism, the process by which the European powers reached positions of economic, military, political, and cultural hegemony in much of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. (While nations had often annexed adjacent territories, what was new in European colonialism was its planetary reach, its attempted submission of the world to a single universal regime of truth and power.) This process reached its apogee at the turn of the twentieth century, when the earth surface controlled by European powers rose from 67 percent (1884) to 84.4 percent (1914), a situation that began to be reversed only with the disintegration of the European colonial empires after World War II. 1

Robert Stam (born October 29, 1941) is an American film theorist working on film semiotics. He is a professor at New York University, where he teaches about the French New Wave filmmakers. [1] Stam has published widely on French literature, comparative literature, and on film topics such as film history and film theory. Together with Ella Shohat, he co-authored Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. Ray, R. B. (2000) ¿The Field of ¿Literature and Film¿¿, in J. Naremore (ed.) Film Adaptation. London: Athlone, 38-53.Brazilian cinema, literature, and popular culture form another node in Stam's research. He co-edited Brazilian Cinema (1982) with Randal Johnson. Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture (Duke, 1997) offered the first book-length study in English of racial representation, especially of Afro-Brazilians, during the century of Brazilian Cinema, within a comparative framework in relation to similar issues in American cinema. Alternative Museum of New York 1989. Prisoners of Image: Ethnic and Gender Stereotypes. New York: The Museum. Cohen, K. (1979) Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

DRPS:Course Catalogue: School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures: Common Courses (School of Lit, Lang and Cult)The Cinema after Babel: Language, Difference and Power," Screen, Vol. XXVI, Nos. 3-4 (May- Aug 1985).