The 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.

Patricia White is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College. She is the author of Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability and is completing a new book on global women's filmmaking in the twenty-first century. With Timothy Corrigan, she is co-author of The Film Experience and co-editor of Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings. A member of the editorial collective Camera Obscura, she also serves on the board of Women Make Movies.