Bringing together twenty-five years of work on what he has called the "historical poetics of cinema," David Bordwell presents an extended analysis of a key question for film studies: how are films made, in particular historical contexts, in order to achieve certain effects? For Bordwell, films are made things, existing within historical contexts, and aim to create determinate effects. Beginning with this central thesis, Bordwell works out a full understanding of how films channel and recast cultural influences for their cinematic purposes. With more than five hundred film stills, Poetics of Cinema is a must-have for any student of cinema.

Table of Contents

Questions of Theory

1. Poetics of Cinema

2. Convention, Construction, and Cinematic Vision

Studies in Narrative

3. Three Dimensions of Film Narrative

4. Cognition and Comprehension: Viewing and Forgetting in Mildred Pierce

5. The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice

6. Film Futures

7. Mutual Friends and Chronologies of Chance

Studies in Style

8. Cinecerity

9. Taking Things to Extremes: Hallucinations Courtesy of Robert Reinert

10. CinemaScope, The Modern Miracle You See Without Glasses

11. Who Blinked First?

12. Visual Style in Japanese Cinema, 1925-1945

13. A Cinema of Flourishes

14. Aesthetics in Action: Kung Fu, Gunplay, and Cinematic Expression

15. Richness through Imperfection: King Hu and the Glimpse