1

MA / BA Bibliography (Revised Sept. 2002; 2010, exam sample revised 2014)

NYU DEPARTMENT OF CINEMA STUDIES

This bibliography is divided into three main areas that focus on the four core courses for the MA degree.
Note that Area One combines the bibliography for the film theory class and the film form/film sense class. In
some cases anthologies have been placed on the bibliography. Students are not expected to read every
article in them but they are expected to be informed about their contents.

1. Film Theory and Film Form

Altman, Rick. “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.” in Eds. Braudy and Cohen. Film Theory and
Criticism. 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 630-41.

Arnheim, Rudolf. Film as Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.

Bakhtin, M.M. “Discourse in the Novel.” Ed.: Michael Holquist. The Dialogical Imagination. Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1981.

Balazs, Bela. “The Close Up” and “The Face of Man.” from Theory of Film. in Eds.: Braudy and Cohen. Film
Theory and Criticism, pp. 304-311.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Ed.: Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974; pp. 16-33.

Baudry, Jean Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographie Apparatus.” in Eds.: Braudy and Cohen.
Film Theory and Criticism, pp. 345-355.

Bazin, Andre. “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema.” in Eds.: Braudy and Cohen. Film Theory and Criticism,
43-56.

Bazin, Andre. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” Eds.: Braudy and Cohen. Film Theory and Criticism, pp.
195-198.

Bazin, Andre. “The Myth of Total Cinema.” Eds.: Braudy and Cohen. Film Theory and Criticism, pp. 199-203.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Eds.: Braudy and Cohen. Film
Theory and Criticism, pp. 731-751.

Bordwell, David, Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 6th ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2001.

Bordwell, David. On the History of Film Style. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

Caughie, John. Theories of Authorship: A Reader. London: Routledge, 1981.

Chion, Michel. “Projections of Sound on Image.” Eds.: Toby Miller and Robert Stam. Film Theory: An Anthology.
Malden: Blackwell, 2000; pp. 111-24.

Currie, Gregory. “Visual Fictions.” The Philosophical Quarterly. 41: 163. 1991; pp. 129-43.

Carroll, Noel. “The Specificity Thesis.” Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory. Eds.: Braudy and Cohen.
Film Theory and Criticism, pp. 322-28.
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Carroll, Noel. “Jean-Louis Baudry and ‘The Apparatus.’” Mystifying Movies, Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary
Film Theory. Eds.: Braudy and Cohen. Film Theory and Criticism, pp. 778-99.

Comolli, Jean Luc, Jean Narboni. “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism.” Eds.: Braudy and Cohen. Film Theory and
Criticism, pp. 752-59.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

_________ . Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Diawara, Manthia. “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance.” Eds.: Braudy and Cohen. Film
Theory and Criticism, pp. 845-53.

Doane, Mary Ann. “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.” Eds.: Stam and Miller. Film and
Theory, pp. 495-509.

Eisenstein, Sergei. “Beyond the Shot.” Eds: Braudy and Cohen. Film Theory and Criticism, pp. 15-24.

Eisenstein, Sergei. “The Fourth Dimension in Cinema.” Ed.: Richard Taylor. Selected Writings. Vol. 1.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998; pp. 181-94.

Eisenstein, Sergei, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov. “Statement on Sound.” Eds.: Braudy and Cohen.
Film Theory and Criticism, pp. 360-62.

Genette, Gerard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.

Gunning, Tom. “Narrative Discourse and the Narrator System.” Eds.: Braudy and Cohen. Film Theory and
Criticism, pp. 461-72.

Hart, Lynda. “Why the Woman Did It: Basic Instincts and its Vicissitudes.” Fatal Woman. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994.

Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1960; pp. 1-74.

Metz, Christian. “Some Points in the Semiotics of the Cinema.” Eds.: Braudy and Cohen. Film Theory and
Criticism, 68-75.

Metz, Christian. “Problems of Denotation: The Fiction Film.” Eds.: Braudy and Cohen. Film Theory and Criticism,
pp. 75-89.

Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier. Eds.: Braudy and Cohen. Film Theory and Criticism, 800-817.

Miller, D.A. “Anal Rope.” Representations. Fall 1990; pp. 114-33.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Eds.: Braudy and Cohen. Film Theory and Criticism, pp.
833-4f4.

Munsterberg, Hugo. The Film: A Psychological Study. D. Appleton & Co., 1916.

Naremore, Jim. “Authorship.” Eds.:Stam and Miller. A Companion to Film Theory. Malden: Blackwell, 2000.

Smith, Murray. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995; chap. 3.
  3

Williams, Linda. “Melodrama Revised.” Ed.: Nick Browne. Refiguring American Film Genres. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1998; pp. 42-62.

Wollen, Peter. “Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d’Est.” Eds.: Baudry and Cohen. Film Theory and Criticism, pp.
499-508.

Zizek, Slavoj. “Looking Awry.” Eds.: Stam and Miller. Film Theory, pp. 524-38.

2. Film History and Historiography

Abel, Richard, ed. Silent Film. Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

Allen, Robert and Douglas Gomery. Film History: Theory and Practice. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985.

Belton, John. “Writing History Backward.” Widescreen Cinema. Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1992; pp. 1-11.

Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Style and Mode of
Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Bowser, Eileen. “The Feature Film.” The Transformation of Cinema: 1907-1915. New York: Charles Scribners’s
Sons, 1990; pp. 191-215.

Elsaesser, Thomas. Weimar Cinema and After: Germay’s Historical Imaginary. London and New York: Routledge,
2000; pp. 18-60.

Diawara, Manthia, ed. Black American Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

Dyer, Richard. Now You See It: Studies in Lesbian and Gay Film. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.

Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African-American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1993.

Gunning, Tom. “Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8.3/4 (1986):
63-70.

Hansen, Miriam. “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Modernist Vernacular,” in Christine
Gledhill and Linda Williams eds., Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2000), pp. 332-350.

Klinger, Barbara. “History Terminable and Interminable: Recovering the Past in Reception Studies.” Screen 38.2
(1997): 107-28.

Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1996.

La Capra, Dominick. “Rhetoric and History,” in History and Criticism. Ithaca and London: Cornell U. Press, 1985.

Musser, Charles. “Toward a History of Screen Practice.” The Emergence of Cinema. New York: Scribner’s 1990,
pp. 15-54.

Naremore, James. More Than Night: Film Noir and its Contexts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Neale, Steve. Genre and Hollywood. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
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Pines, Jim and Paul Willemen. Questions of Third Cinema. London, BFI, 1989.

Rosenstone, Robert. Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to our idea of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001, 101-130.

Singer, Ben. “Making Sense of the Modernity Thesis,” in Melodrama and Modernity (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2001), 101-130

Sorlin, Pierre. The Film and History: Restaging the Past. Totowa N.N.: Barnes and Noble, 1980.

White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University
Press, 1978, chapters 1-4.

Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real. London, BFI, 1995.

Wood, Robin, “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s,” in Hollywood: From Reagan to Vietnam. New York:
Columbia University Press,, 1986, pp. 70-134.

Sklar, Robert. Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies. New York: Random House, 1994.

Wollen, Peter. Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. new and enlarged edition. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1973.

Xavier, Ismail. “Historical Allegory,” in Stam and Miller eds. A Companion to Film Theory Malden, MA: Blackwell,
1999.

Xing, Jun. Asian America Between the Lens. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 1988.

Zhang, Yingjin, ed. Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943. Stanford University Press, 1999.

Zhang, Zhen. “An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: The Actress as Vernacular Embodiment in Early Chinese
Film Culture,” Camera Obscura 48, 16:3 (2001).

3. Television Studies, Media Studies, and Cultural Studies

Allen, Robert C. Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism, edited Robert C.
Allen. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Baker, Houston A. Jr. Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg, eds. Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1993.

Chen, Kuan-Hsing and David Morley, eds. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge,
1996.

Chen, Kuan-Hsing, ed. Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. London: Routledge 1998.

Dyer, Richard. “The Matter of Whiteness,” in White (New York: Routledge, 1997).

Dyer, Richard. “Entertainment and Utopia,” in Only Entertainment (New York: Routledge, 1992).
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Enzenberger, Hans Magnus. “Constituents of a Theory of Media,” in Stam and Miller eds. Film and Theory, 552-
564.

Foucault, Michel. Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Vintage, 1982.

Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” The
Phantom Public Sphere ed. Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Gray, Hermann. Watching Race: Television and the struggle for “Blackness. Minneapolis, U. of Minnesota Press,
1995.

Geraghty, Christine and David Lusted, eds. The Television Studies Book. London: Arnold, 1998.

Hartley, John and Roberta Pearson, eds. American Cultural Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Hoggart. Richard. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and
Entertainments. Harmnondsworth: Penguin, 1957.

Martin Barbero, Jesus. Communications, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations. London: Sage,
1993.

McCarthy, Anna. Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.

Mercer, Kobena and Isaac Julian, “De Margin and De Center” in Houston A., Baker Jr., et al. Black British Cultural
Studies: A Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Miller, Toby, ed. A Companion to Cultural Studies. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

Miller, Toby, ed. Television Studies. London: BFI, 2002.

Morley, David. “Changing Paradigms in Audience Studies,” in Remote Control: Television, Audiences, and Cultural
Power, edited by Ellen Seiter, Hans Borchers, Gabrielle Kreutzner and Eva-Maria Worth. New York: Routledge,
1989.

Morris, Meaghan. “Things To Do With Shopping Centers” in Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

Newcomb, Horace. Television: A Critical View 6th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

O’Regan, Tom. “Mistaking Policy” in John Frow and Meaghan Morris, eds. Australian Cultural Studies: a Reader.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Shiach, Morag, ed. Feminism and Cultural Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992.

Stam, Robert and Ella Shoat. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London and New York:
Routledge, 1994.

Streeter, Thomas. Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1975.

 MA Comprehensive Exam 
Fall 2014 
 
 
 
1. Discuss Eisenstein's theory of intellectual montage using one or more contemporary film or 
media works that exhibit or manifest this theory. 
 
 
 
2. What does "independent" mean in the context of broadcast or cable television production 
and/or reception? Use media theories to define and support or refute the concept of 
independence in television, using public and/or commercial television and examples that speak 
to level of the producer, work, or series. 
 
 
 
3. Discuss the historical transformation of genres in film or television, referring to at least one 
theoretical formulation on the issue and comparing two films or television works in the same 
genre from different periods which exemplify historical genre transformation. 
 
 
 
4. In what ways has the study of “early cinema” (films produced before 1915, say) affected the 
historiography of cinema? 
 
 
 
5. Discuss the relationship between the major Hollywood film studios and television programming 
during the period from 1948 to 1980.