San Antonio College Library

This seven-disc collection contains 155 avant-garde films, revealing hitherto unknown accomplishments of American filmmakers working in the United States and abroad from the invention of cinema until World War II. Offers an innovative and often controversial view of experimental film as a product of avant-garde artists, of professional directors and of amateur moviemakers working collectively and as individuals at all levels of film production.

This vastly readable and richly illustrated volume examines film as art form, technological innovation, big business, and cultural bellwether. It takes in stars from Douglas Fairbanks to Sly Stallone; auteurs from D.W. Griffith to Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee; and genres from the screwball comedy of the 1930s to the "hard body" movies of the 1980s to the independent films of the 1990s. Combining panoramic sweep with detailed commentaries on hundreds...

"This is not an attempt to list the greatest films of the period nor the greatest actors and directors but an attempt to give a representation of the times."--Introduction, p. xii.

In Hollywood's High Noon, Thomas Cripps brings together both the insights of recent scholarship in the field of film studies and the results of his own extensive research to trace the history of Hollywood, from its turn-of-the-century beginnings through the invention and development of the studio system to its heyday in the 1950s, just before television eclipsed the movies as America's dominant entertainment medium. Cripps explores the movie-going...

From Peep Show to Palace recounts the enchanting early years of film, beginning with the primitive motion of the "magic lantern" in the fifteenth century and continuing, most significantly, with the explosion of research from 1893 to 1913, when the modern motion picture was born. Respected film critic David Robinson offers this vivid account of the haphazard process, "like the assembly of the pieces of a puzzle," which was the birth of American film....