Nora M. Alter argues that the essay film is a hybrid genre that fuses three major categories of film: feature, art, and documentary. Much like the written essay, its literary predecessor, the essay film draws on a variety of forms and approaches, fundamentally altering the shape of cinema. Alter traces the essay film’s origins to early silent cinema, charting the genre’s evolut...(展开全部)

Nora M. Alter argues that the essay film is a hybrid genre that fuses three major categories of film: feature, art, and documentary. Much like the written essay, its literary predecessor, the essay film draws on a variety of forms and approaches, fundamentally altering the shape of cinema. Alter traces the essay film’s origins to early silent cinema, charting the genre’s evolut...(展开全部)

Communities in Fiction reads six novels or stories (one each by Trollope, Hardy, Conrad, Woolf, Pynchon, and Cervantes) in the light of theories of community worked out (contradictorily) by Raymond Williams, Martin Heidegger, and Jean- Luc Nancy. The book’s topic is the question of how communities or noncommunities are represented in fictional works. Such fictional communities ...(展开全部)

Portraits seem the opposite of fiction, fixed in time and space, not running with the curve of a story or a life. Yet since the birth of the novel, writers have been fascinated by portraits as icons, as motifs, as images of character and evocations of past time. A. S. Byatt delves into the complex relations between portraits and characters, and between portraits and novels as w...(展开全部)

Portraits seem the opposite of fiction, fixed in time and space, not running with the curve of a story or a life. Yet since the birth of the novel, writers have been fascinated by portraits as icons, as motifs, as images of character and evocations of past time. A. S. Byatt delves into the complex relations between portraits and characters, and between portraits and novels as w...(展开全部)

This is the second major revision of a book universally acclaimed as the definitive history of the documentary film. The final section has been completely rewritten and expanded to take into account the major films and trends of the past nine years. Particular attention has been paid to the growth of documentary film-making in the Soviet Union since Glasnost and the correspondi...(展开全部)