Film as Art [Paperback]

In the fall of 1957 the University of California Press expanded Arnheims 1933 bookFilmby four essays and brought that landmark work back into print asFilm as Art.Now nearly fifty years after that re-edition, the book continues to occupy an important place in the literature of film. Arnheims method, provocative in this age of technological wizardry, was to focus on the way art in film was derived from that mediums early limitations: no sound, no color, no three-dimensional depth.

Rudolf Arnheimis Professor Emeritus of the Psychology of Art at Harvard University. His books includeVisual Thinking(UC Press, 1969, 2004) andArt and Visual Perception(UC Press, 1954, 1974, 2004).

More than half a century since its initial publication, this deceptively compact book remains among the most incisive analyses of the formal and perceptual dynamics of cinema. No one who cares about film can afford to remain ignorant of its insights and wisdom. As digital technology fundamentally alters motion pictures, the lessons of Film as Art commend themselves as excellent insurance against reinventing the wheel in the new media landscape and hailing it as progress.Edward Dimendberg author ofFilm Noir and the Spaces of Modernity

After more than eight decades, Rudolph Arnheim's small book of film theory remains one of the essential works in defining film art, understanding film less as reproducing the world than as opening up new possibilities for formal play and unexpected imagery. Anyone serious about film, whether scholar, filmmaker or simply a lover of cinema, must take Arnheim seriously.Tom Gunning, author ofThe Films of Fritz LangandD.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film

An aesthetic theory based on the formal limitations of the medium, ArnheimsFilm as Artalways provokes students in an age of few limits and less formality, and they argue and engage tlSÍ