Cinema at the Margins
(0 vote)Average rating:
| 0 | rating |  = We can do without |
| 0 | rating |  = Good book |
| 0 | rating |  = Excellent book |
| 0 | rating |  = Unique / a reference |
Your rating: -
Book Presentation:
More and more, just a few canonical classics, such as Michael Curtiz’s “Casablanca” (1942) or Victor Fleming’s “Gone With The Wind” (1939), are representing the entire output of an era to a new generation that knows little of the past, and is encouraged by popular media to live only in the eternal present. What will happen to the rest of the films that enchanted, informed and transported audiences in the 1930s, 1940s, and even as recently as the 1960s?
For the most part, these films will be forgotten, and their makers with them. Wheeler Winston Dixon argues that even obvious historical markers such as Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960) represent shockingly unknown territory for the majority of today’s younger viewers; and yet once exposed to these films, they are enthralled by them. In the 1980s and 1990s, the more adventurous video stores served a vital function as annals of classic cinema. Today, those stores are gone and the days of this kind of browsing are over.
This collection of essays aims to highlight some of the lesser-known films of the past – the titles that are being pushed aside and forgotten in today’s oversaturation of the present. The work is divided into four sections, rehabilitating the films and filmmakers who have created some of the most memorable phantom visions of the past century, but who, for whatever reason, have not successfully made the jump into the contemporary consciousness.
About the Author:
Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Professor of Film Studies and coordinator of the Film Studies Program at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and editor-in-chief, with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, of the "Quarterly Review of Film and Video."
See the publisher website: Anthem Press
> From the same author:
A Short History of Film (2025)
by Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
Subject: History of Cinema
Death of the Moguls (2012)
The End of Classical Hollywood
21st-Century Hollywood (2011)
Movies in the Era of Transformation
by Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
Subject: Economics
Visions of Paradise (2006)
Images of Eden in the Cinema
Experimental Cinema, The Film Reader (2002)
Dir. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster and Wheeler Winston Dixon
Subject: Genre > Experimental
The Exploding Eye (1997)
A Re-Visionary History of 1960s American Experimental Cinema
Subject: Genre > Experimental
> On a related topic:
Envisioning Freedom (2014)
Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life
by Cara Caddoo
Subject: Sociology
The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History (2020)
Dir. Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby and Philippe Meers
Subject: History of Cinema
The Emergence of Pre-Cinema (2018)
Print Culture and the Optical Toy of the Literary Imagination
Subject: History of Cinema
Egyptomania Goes to the Movies (2017)
From Archaeology to Popular Craze to Hollywood Fantasy
Subject: History of Cinema
Birth of an Industry (2015)
Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation
Subject: History of Cinema
Back
