Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies

With Post-Theory, David Bordwell and Noel Carroll challenge the prevailing practices of film scholarship. Since the 1970s, film scholars have been searching for a unified theory that will explain all sorts of films, their production, and their reception; the field has been dominated by structuralist Marxism, varieties of cultural theory, and the psychoanalytic ideas of Freud and Lacan. Bordwell and Carroll ask, why not employ many theories tailored to specific goals, rather than searching for a unified theory?
Post-Theory offers fresh directions for understanding film, presenting new essays by twenty-seven scholars on topics as diverse as film scores, audience response, and the national film industries of Russia, Scandinavia, the U.S., and Japan. They use historical, philosophical, psychological, and feminist methods to tackle such basic issues as: What goes on when viewers perceive a film? How do filmmakers exploit conventions? How do movies create illusions? How does a film arouse emotion? Bordwell and Carroll have given space not only to distinguished film scholars but to non-film specialists as well, ensuring a wide variety of opinions and ideas on virtually every topic on the current agenda of film studies. Full of stimulating essays published here for the first time, Post-Theory promises to redefine the study of cinema.

David Bordwell is the Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin--Madison. His books include Narration in the Fiction Film, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press, Making Meaning, The Cinema of Eisenstein, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, and many others. Noel Carroll, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities at Temple University, is the author of Mystifying Movies, The Philosophy of Horror, and Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory. He has written scores of articles and reviews for such publications as The Village Voice, Art Forum, and The Boston Review and has been a documentary screenwriter for WNET-TV in New York.