Film History: An Introduction (4th Edition)

David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson released a new, fourth edition of their landmark publication Film History: An Introduction. Originally published in 1994 and nearly ten years since the previous edition, a lot of the material is new or updated. Film History is an authoritative overview of the history of the medium and used as a course book by students worldwide.

In the field of documentary, they now incorporate discussions of the work of Wang Bing, Rithy Panh, Joshua Oppenheimer and the emergence of the animated documentary. Their survey of experimental cinema widens to include films by Chick Strand or Phil Solomon among others. In considering national cinemas outside Hollywood, they catch up with developments in Europe and Russia and now take account of filmmakers such as Sergei Loznitsa and the directors of the Romanian New Wave. They've found room for updates on Manoel de Oliveira and Alexei German (Hard to Be a God, 2013). “Slow cinema” is treated as a development out of classic art-cinema strategies of prolonged duration and temps mort and counterposed to the nervous “free-camera” style on display in films like Gomorrah (2008) and Toni Erdmann (2016). They widen their treatment of Nollywood and Indian cinema. In the updated chapter on digital technology and its effects on film form and style, one of the ‘Box’ sections now contrasts David Fincher, “whose embrace of digital yielded new possibilities for classical storytelling,” with Jean-Luc Godard, “whose digital work such as Éloge de l’amour (2001) challenges just that tradition.”

You can read a description of what else is new and how to order the book in one of its many available formats on David Bordwell's website Observations on Film Art.