Routledge Companion to American Film History
Presenting new and diverse scholarship, this collection brings together original essays that explore American film history from a fresh perspective.
Comprising an introduction and 34 chapters written by leading scholars from around the globe, and edited by Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Paula J. Massood, this collection offers discussions of the American film industry from previously unexplored vantage points. Rather than follow a chronological format, as with most film histories, this Companion offers a multiplicity of approaches to historiography and is arranged according to often underdeveloped or overlooked areas in American film, including topics such as alternate archives, hidden labor, histories of style, racialized technologies, cinema’s material cultures, spectators and fans, transnational film production, intermedial histories, history in and about films, and the historical afterlives of cinema.
An exciting collection for serious film studies students and scholars interested in new perspectives and fresh approaches to thinking about and doing American film history.
Pamela Robertson Wojcik is the Andrew V. Tackes Professor in Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame, USA; a Guggenheim Fellow; and former President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She is the author most recently of Unhomed: Cycles of Mobility and Placelessness in American Cinema (2024).
Paula J. Massood is Professor of Screen Studies at Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College, CUNY, USA. She is the author of Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film (2003) and Making a Promised Land: Harlem in 20th-Century Photography and Film (2013), editor of The Spike Lee Reader (2007), and co-editor of Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures (2021).