A Short History of Film [Hardcover]

Prof. Wheeler Winston Dixon (Author), Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2008

The history of international cinema is now available in a concise, conveniently sized, and affordable volume. Succinct yet comprehensive, A Short History of Film provides an accessible overview of the major movements, directors, studios, and genres from the 1880s to the present. More than 250 rare stills and illustrations accompany the text, bringing readers face to face with many of the key players and films that have marked the industry.

Beginning with precursors of what we call moving pictures, Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster lead a fast-paced tour through the invention of the kinetoscope, the introduction of sound and color between the two world wars, and ultimately the computer generated imagery of the present day. They detail significant periods in world cinema, including the early major industries in Europe, the dominance of the Hollywood studio system in the 1930s and 1940s, and the French New Wave of the 1960s. Special attention is also given to small independent efforts in developing nations and the corresponding more personal independent film movement that briefly flourished in the United States, the significant filmmakers of all nations, censorship and regulation and how they have affected production everywhere, and a wide range of studios and genres. Along the way, the authors take great care to incorporate the stories of women and other minority filmmakers who have often been overlooked in other texts.

Compact and easily readable, this is the best one-stop source for the history of world film available to students, teachers, and general audiences alike.

Editorial Reviews

Review

This is the film history book we''ve been waiting for.

(David Sterritt chairman, National Society of Film Critics )

About the Author

Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including Film Talk: Directors at Work (Rutgers University Press).

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is a professor in the department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. She is the author of Class-Passing: Social Mobility in Film and Popular Culture and the co-editor (with Wheeler Winston Dixon) of Experimental Cinema: The Film Reader.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 492 pages
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press (March 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813542693
• ISBN-13: 978-0813542690
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,476,797 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies, Coordinator of the UNL Film Studies Program, Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Editor-in-Chief of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. His newest books include A History of Horror (Rutgers University Press, 2010); Film Noir and The Cinema of Paranoia (Rutgers University Press and Edinburgh University Press, 2009); A Short History of Film, written with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, (Rutgers University Press and I.B. Tauris, 2008), which has gone through five printings, was issued in a Spanish translation from Ediciones Robinbook in November, 2009 as Breve historia del cine, and is forthcoming as an audio book from University Press Audiobooks in 2010; Film Talk: Directors at Work (Rutgers University Press, 2007); Visions of Paradise: Images of Eden in the Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2006); American Cinema of the 1940s: Themes and Variations (Rutgers University Press, 2006); and Lost in the Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood (Southern Illinois UP, 2005). In 2003, Dixon was honored with a retrospective of his films at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and his films were acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum, in both print and original format.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Probably the best 'short' overview on film, September 11, 2011

By 

Martijn13Maart1970 (Husavik Iceland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Short History of Film (Paperback)

I was wonderfully surprised by A Short History Of Film - it is concise, and yet full of information : probably almost each important fact in the movie timeline is included. The book also not forgets the world outside Hollywood, as it also focuses on worldwide cinema.
As often with broad subjects; the question is which book, or books, to pick. Often reference books can be quite boring to read, since encyclopedic information does not lend itself to be interwoven in a story. This is not the case with A Short History Of Film. Written in sophisticated but clear language, every chapter it is always very interesting to read as a story in itself. The only other book I could compare it with, on a different scale, is the standard university reference Film Theory & Criticism. That book, Film Theory, might claim to go into more detail on diverse film subjects than any other book, but far too many articles (from experts in the history of film) are utterly academic (like Freudian theory that explains movies are mainly meant for male voyeurs etc. - catch my drift?) and far too often simply unreadable - and I am an academic myself! Although still THE reference, Film Theory seems to forget that learning, and acquiring knowledge and information, could, or should, also be just fun! So in my opinion, A Short History Of Film wins.I felt I had learnt a lot more about film in general than any other book I have read yet and I enjoyed it the most of all.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Terrible film history book., November 16, 2011

By 

Amazon Woman (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Short History of Film (Paperback)

This book is used in schools that don't want their students to have to buy the more expensive, but far superior film history book by David A. Cook entitled "A History of Narrative Film."

Having taught a class using this text, I'm intimately aware of its contents. The only redeeming quality about this book is the timeline offered at the front, which chronicles important events in history alongside important milestones in cinema. Otherwise the book is 80%-90% a mere laundry list of directors and film titles. Many paragraphs are just sentences constructed by naming a director and then a list of films that person has directed, requiring students to memorize long lists of films (many of them irrelevant) instead of learning about social context, film analysis and trends.

The book is also terribly politically correct. Elia Kazan (yes, a controversial figure) is barely mentioned, while Leni Riefenstahl gets 3 full pages. Two of the 3 brief references to Kazan are just short mentions of "Pinky". A Streetcar Named Desire and the fact that he broke numerous film stars like Brando, Karl Malden, Marilyn Monroe etc. is/are not mentioned at all. Likewise female filmmakers who are largely forgotten by the public like Ida Lupino and Alice Guy get special treatment but other minority filmmakers do not get equal treatment. It seems the author(s) is trying to re-write film history based on their own agenda. The author also states that "On the Waterfront" is a thinly disguised anti-union film, which every film scholar I know disagrees with.

Also sorely absent is any film analysis. While the fabulous film book by Cook goes into detailed analysis of important films like Psycho and Citizen Kane, "A Short History of Film" can't seem to muster up the same type of inquiry.

Unless you have to buy this book for a class, you're better off buying "A History of Narrative Film" by Cook (the text that's used at USC, UCLA and other prominent schools) or just reading Wikipedia articles.

4 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars New, supplement book, November 2, 2009

By 

Serabily "Serabily" (Saint Albans) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A Short History of Film (Paperback)

I bought this book as a supplement to my Film Appreciation Class in College. I found it informative, especially if you are a movie buff.