Film Experience: An Introduction

The Film Experience is a comprehensive introduction to film that treats students as the avid movie fans they are while surpassing all other texts in helping them understand the art form’s full scope, breadth, and depth. Like other introductory texts, it offers strong coverage of film’s formal elements, but goes further by situating this formal knowledge in the larger cultural contexts that inform the ways that we all view film. The authors’ rich narrative integrates the cultural history of film throughout and demonstrates how the elements, practices, economics, and history of the medium contribute to a film’s many possible meanings. The outstanding art program — now in full color — visually reinforces all the key concepts and techniques discussed in the text.

Timothy Corrigan is a Professor of Cinema Studies, English, and History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. His work in film studies has focused on modern American and international cinema, as well as pedagogy and film. Books include New German Film: The Displaced Image, The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, Writing about Film, A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam, Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader, and The Film Experience (co-authored with Patricia White). His current project is a book-length study entitled The Essay Film. He is also one of the three editors of the journal Adaptation: The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies and serves on the editorial board of Cinema Journal. He has taught film at the University of Amsterdam, Temple University, University of Iowa, and at campuses in Tokyo, Rome, Paris, and London.

Patricia White is Associate Professor and Chair of the Program in Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College. She is the author of Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Indiana UP, 1999) and numerous articles and chapters on film theory and culture. She is writing a book on women filmmakers and world cinema. She is a member of the editorial collective of the leading English-language journal of feminism and film, Camera Obscura, and she currently chairs the board of the non-profit feminist media arts organization and independent distributor Women Make Movies. With Timothy Corrigan, co-author of The Film Experience, she is editing an anthology of essays in classical and contemporary film theory.