Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology - by Philip Rosen (Paperback)

About the Book

This book includes many seminal articles by film scholars such as Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, Stephen Heath, Peter Wollen, Laura Mulvey, and Noe]l Burch. Also included are articles by the era's leading cultural thinkers: Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Jean-FrancAois Lyotard, to name a few.

Book Synopsis

Smartly selected and organized, the essays in this anthology introduce several central issues in film theory, namely, the classical narrative text, oppositional and avant-garde cinema, subject positioning, the cinematic apparatus, and ideology. Written by seminal scholars, including Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, Stephen Heath, Peter Wollen, Laura Mulvey, and Noël Burch, as well as such leading thinkers as Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Jean-François Lyotard, these works utilize a number of approaches in their analyses, particularly structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, feminism, neoformalism, Marxism, and semiotics. Divided into sections, the anthology features introductions to each group of essays outlining the major assumptions, ideas, and arguments of the articles and situating them within the history of film theory, narrative analysis, and social and cultural theory.

From the Back Cover

This essential anthology presents the most significant and influential writings on film theory from the last twenty years. The book includes many seminal articles by film scholars such as Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, Stephen Heath, Peter Wollen, Laura Mulvey, and Noel Burch, and by the era's leading cultural thinkers as well: Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, to name a few.

Review Quotes

A much sought-after resource.-- "Choice"

Exceptionally well-crafted... Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology achieves a substantial contextual horizon, through Philip Rosen's impeccable positioning of essays within an intellectual history. In addition to this, his collection successfully strives for representativeness on such a number of significant fronts that it promises to provide a very engrossing forum for the introduction and discussion of contemporary film theory in the classroom.--Barbara Klinger "Journal of Film and Video"

Rosen's collection continues to be a classic and irreplaceable guide to contemporary film theory. This essential anthology includes key texts by Roland Barthes, Raymond Bellour, Christian Metz, David Bordwell, and others, as well as superb contextual essays by Rosen for each section of the book.--David Rodowick "Harvard University"

Intoxicating analyses of films dance alongside the most far-reaching theories of signification and history. Yet through it all Philip Rosen maintains a sober eye, pointing out the backgrounds of these performers and the consequences of their gestures. Under his measured gaze this dizzying flight of ideas takes on a pattern, or rather multiple patterns, that will keep us thinking and talking for a long time to come. Read either for the careful continuity of these introductions or for the dramatic intensity of the individual pieces, the anthology must reward the student, the initiated, and the merely curious.--Dudley Andrew, Yale University, author of What Cinema Is!

About the Author

Philip Rosen is professor of modern culture and media at Brown University and works in the fields of film theory and history, with special attention to the question of culture and ideology and to historiography and temporality in the contexts of national cinemas. He is the author of Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory and coeditor of Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices.