Thinking About Movies: Watching, Questioning, Enjoying

Thinking about Movies, third edition, is a comprehensive introduction for students and movie lovers who want to learn how to watch movies critically and analytically. Intended for the beginner, the text offers the crucial building blocks required to understand film as an important narrative and cultural form. Guiding readers through basic film concepts – narrative structure, authorship, genre, actors, and stars – as well as more complex analyses of race, class, gender, film theory, audience, and reception, Thinking about Movies offers an intelligent and lively introduction to the ways in which movies are constructed, achieve their effect, and convey their powerful messages. This third edition has been fully revised and updated to cover new developments in filmmaking, including the powerful impact of globalization, new technology, and the convergence of the powerful entertainment and technology industries. It also discusses recent movie releases including the emerging trend of big–budget fantasy films being produced in New Zealand, like King Kong and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the proliferation of elaborate multi–character narratives, like Crash and Syriana . Including extensive illustrations and discussions of a diverse selection of important films, from Citizen Kane to Sin City , this is the ideal textbook to get students thinking about this important medium. The text is accompanied by a website at www.blackwellpublishing.com/lehman, featuring resources for both academics and students.

Preface. Acknowledgments. 1. Introduction. Fatal Attraction and Scarface. 2. Narrative Structure. Jurassic Park and Rashomon. 3. Formal Analysis. Rules of the Game and The Sixth Sense. 4. Authorship. The Searchers and Jungle Fever. 5. Genres. Sin City and Gunfight at the OK Corral. 6. Series, Sequels, and Remakes. Goldfinger and King Kong 1933 and 2005. 7. Actors and Stars. Morocco and Dirty Harry. 8. Audiences and Reception. A Woman of Paris and The Crying Game. 9. Film and the Other Arts. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Nosferatu. 10. Film and its Relation to Radio and Television. Richard Diamond, Private Detective, Peter Gunn, and Victor/Victoria. 11. Realism and Theories of Film. The Battleship Potemkin and Umberto D. 12. Gender and Sexuality. The Silence of the Lambs and American Gigolo. 13. Race. Out of the Past, LA Confidential, and Boyz N the Hood. 14. Class. Pretty Woman and The People Under the Stairs. 15. Citizen Kane: An Analysis. Citizen Kane. 16. Globalization, Digitalization, Convergence: Current Trends. The Matrix. Glossary. Index

Peter Lehman is Director of the Center for Film, Media and Popular Culture at Arizona State University, Tempe. He is author of Roy Orbison: The Invention of an Alternative Rock Masculinity (2003) and Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body, New Edition (2007), and editor of Pornography: Film and Culture (2006). He is former president of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. William Luhr is Professor of English at Saint Peter’s College. Among other works, he is author of Raymond Chandler and Film (2nd edn., 1991), editor The Maltese Falcon: John Huston, Director (1995), and co–editor of Screening Genders (2008). He is Co–Chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation.

“What is most striking is the structure of the text. [Its] relationship to other media is also a welcome addition to this study. THINKING ABOUT MOVIES is an effective text for an introductory film course at the college level. It offers many good insights, and is filled with interesting essays on a variety of cinematic genres.” ( RogueCinema.com , December 2008)