The Routledge Companion to American Film History

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Edited by Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Paula J. Massood

Type

Studies

Subject

History of Cinema

Keywords

history of cinema, american cinema

Publishing date

2025 (February 11, 2025)

Publisher

Routledge

Collection

Routledge Media and Cultural Studies Companions

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 442 pages
6 ¾ x 9 ¾ inches (17 x 24.5 cm)

ISBN

978-1-032-61028-3

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Book Presentation:
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.

About the authors:
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).

Press Reviews:
"Wow. Two of our finest film scholars, Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Paula J. Massood, have produced a volume that makes us reconsider most of what we thought we knew about American cinema. The introduction alone is worth the price of admission, but the cast of multi-disciplinary historians provides the nuance, depth, and surprise that will keep you coming back for more." - Eric Smoodin, Professor of American Studies, University of California, Davis, USA and co-editor, The American Film History Reader

"Get ready to embark on a historical odyssey where toys, music videos, and campy directors comprise the methods; where color technologies, make-up design, and vocal codes reveal cultural frictions; where new media resurrects the old, bad challenges good, and perspectives attuned to the complexities of brown, Black, indigenous, queer, youthful, and female-identified lives come together in a verifiable page turner. I haven’t been this excited in a very long while!" - Jennifer M. Bean, Editor-in-Chief, Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal

See the publisher website: Routledge