Studying Contemporary American Film: A Guide to Movie Analysis
by Thomas Elsaesser, Warren Buckland
Category: Performing Arts

This text presents the most appropriate theories and methods for analyzing contemporary America cinema. Using an innovative approach to writing about individual movies, each of the main chapters examines the assumptions behind one traditional theory of film (e.g. auteurism, narratology, psychoanalysis), distills a method of analysis from it, and then analyzes a contemporary American movie. The text then goes beyond traditional theory by analyzing the same movie using a more current theory and method (e.g. new media theory, deconstruction, cognitivism).