Long before the 2013 NSA scandal about electronic surveillance, narrative cinema had become a weathervane of social phobias in regard to national security, drawing on a long history of surveillance both as theme and as audiovisual machination that saw its first heyday with the W…
A critic and historian who has been watching cinema for seventy years and has seen almost nineteen thousand films presents a tour of his favorite movies, highlighting forgotten treasures and explaining what makes a film a hit or a flop.
"The first of its kind, this book traces the evolution of motion picture technology in its entirety. Beginning with Huygens' magic lantern and ending in the current electronic era, it explains cinema's scientific foundations and the development of parallel enabling technologies …
Film, like the printed imagery inaugurated during the Renaissance, spread ideas--not least the idea of the power of visual art--across not only geographical and political divides but also strata of class and gender. Moving Pictures and Renaissance Art History examines the early …
