Film and Television Research Guide
Resources for Studies of Film and Television
Finding Physical Books
As media scholarship largely grew out of Literature programs, the bulk of our physical books on film and television will be found with call numbers in the P range (between PN 1990 and PN 1997), all of which are shelved in the basement. Some material, however, will be shelved elsewhere; for example, Dr. Groskopf's book on consumer goods advertising in silent film theaters, listed below, was filed with advertising and is thus shelved upstairs in the H range.
Click any of links below to be taken to the page for some of the more recent volumes from the physical collection. Otherwise, feel free to use the search engine on the Library home page to find books on your subject (click here for a pre-loaded search), or simply walk downstairs and browse the PNs!
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Making Believe: Screen Performance and Special Effects in Popular Cinema
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Incorporating film reviews, interviews, trade and fan magazine commentary, training manuals, and publicity materials, Bode discusses the shifts in screen acting practice and philosophy within the context of visual and special effects cinema and technological change (makeup, doubles, green-screen, motion capture, etc). Along the way she considers how performers and visual and special effects crew work together, and struggle with the industry, critics, and each other to define the aesthetic value of their work, in an industrial system of technological reproduction. -
Native Apparitions: Critical Perspectives on Hollywood's Indians
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Native Apparitions offers a critical intervention and response to Hollywood's representations of Native peoples in film, from historical works by director John Ford to more contemporary works, such as Apocalypto and Avatar. Using an American Indian studies framework, Native Apparitions deftly illustrates the connection between Hollywood's representations of Native peoples and broader sociopolitical and historical contexts connected to colonialism, racism, and the Western worldview. -
Profit Margins: The American Silent Cinema and the Marginalization of Advertising
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Between the advent of print advertising and the dawn of radio came cinema ads. In Profit Margins, Jeremy Groskopf examines how the ad industry fought with exhibitors for direct advertisement space in American motion pictures. Looking back at these debates in four case studies, Groskopf reveals that advertising became a marker of class distinctions in the cinema experience as the film industry pushed out advertisers in order to create a space free of ads. By restricting advertising, especially during the rise of high-class, palatial theaters, the film industry continued its ongoing effort to ascend the cultural hierarchy of the arts. -
Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films
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"Everything about me is in my films," Steven Spielberg has said. Taking this as a key to understanding the hugely successful moviemaker, Molly Haskell explores the full range of Spielberg's works for the light they shine upon the man himself. Organizing chapters around specific films, Haskell discusses how Spielberg's childhood in non-Jewish suburbs, his parents' traumatic divorce, his return to Judaism upon his son's birth, and other events echo in his work. -
Working in Hollywood: How the Studio System Turned Creativity Into Labor
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Regev argues that the Hollywood studio system institutionalized creative labor by systemizing and standardizing the work of creative personnel, meshing artistic sensibilities with the efficiency-minded rationale of industrial capitalism. Through extensive use of oral histories, personal correspondence, studio archives, and the papers of leading Hollywood luminaries as well as their less-known contemporaries, Regev demonstrates that, as part of their contribution to popular culture, Hollywood studios such as Paramount, Warner Bros., and MGM cultivated a new form of labor, one that made work seem like fantasy.
Finding Digital eBooks
Finding useful eBooks is little different from finding specific physical books or journal articles: drop your search terms into the search engine on the Library's home page and let the system do the work for you! For those who are just browsing, a few recent examples are linked below. If you would like a painstaking deep dive into the catalog, you may simply click here for a preloaded search listing nearly 7,000 eBooks in our catalog that have to do with film and/or television.
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Israeli Bourekas Films: Their Origins and Legacy
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A genre of comic melodramas produced in the 1960s and '70s, Bourekas films are among the most popular films ever made in Israel. In Israeli Bourekas Films, author and filmmaker Rami Kimchi sets out a history of Bourekas films and discusses their origin. Kimchi considers the representation of Sephardi or Mizrahi Jews in the films, noting that the material culture reflected in the the films presented a culture that was closer to the European Yiddish culture than to the Middle Eastern world of the Mizrahim. -
Crooked but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges
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In Crooked, but Never Common, longtime film critic for The Nation, Stuart Klawans examines what made Sturges's film so distinctive, fun, and incisive in their critique of the hypocrisies of American society. The book ties the films into the director's own life and his struggles navigating the Hollywood studio system, and presents Sturges as a filmmaker whose work balanced slapstick and critique, American and European traditions, and a cynicism and affection for his characters. -
Finnish Film Studios
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This study approaches Finnish studio cinema as both typical and particular: it is a typical European small nation cinema with its industrial structures, reliance on hierarchical organisation of labour and love-hate relationship with Hollywood; yet, it is particular, not only in its genres, cycles and hugely popular domestic stars, but also because films were made in the constant presence of geopolitical realities, at times under the influence of Germany and the Soviet Union. -
Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World
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Melancholy Acts offers a theory of cultural production that arises out of the disjunction between political impoverishment and cultural resistance to colonial oppression. Such a theory allows the author to trace the melancholy disposition of Arabic literary and filmic productions and to discern the precarious rhetorical modes of their critical intervention in a culture that is continually strained. Across six chapters, Melancholy Acts reads contentious topics of Arab contemporaneity such as secular modernity and manhood, Arab nationalism and leftism, literary and artistic iltizām, or commitment, Islamism, and martyrdom. -
Entertaining German Culture: German Cultural History and Contemporary Transnational Television and Film
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Audiences for contemporary German media are becoming increasingly transnational, and depictions of German cultural history are moving beyond a focus on Germany's problematic past. The book builds on recent research into transnational culture to argue that a new process of internal and external cultural reabsorption is taking place through areas such as streaming services, an increasingly international film market, and the import and export of Anglo-American media formats.
