Reference - Find these books in the Reference Section on the main floor.
American Film Institute Catalog Motion- Feature Films, 1941-1950 by
The American Film Institute Catalog has won great praise for its comprehensiveness, reliability, and utility. These volumes are an essential purchase for every library, and individual researchers will also find them indispensable. This newest AFI volume contains over 4,300 entries for feature-length films produced in the United States in the 1940s. The decade was an important and transitional one for filmmakers. Societal changes from the war years were reflected in films, and in the late 1940s the rise of television, the Hollywood blacklist, and the breakup of studio-owned theater chains greatly affected the number and types of films produced. Among films newly viewed for the book are such well-known classics as Citizen Kane, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Casablanca, along with less heralded films such as Fighting Men of the Plains and The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler. Entries include complete cast and crew credits, extensive plot summaries, and notes and sources for further study. A large accompanying volume provides access to the films through nine separate indexes, including personal and corporate names, subjects, and genres.
Nonfiction - Find these books in the Upper Level (2nd floor) collection.
Seeing Fictions in Film by
In works of literary fiction, it is a part of the fiction that the words of the text are being recounted by some work-internal "voice": the literary narrator. One can ask similarly whether the story in movies is told in sights and sounds by a work-internal subjectivity that orchestrates them:a cinematic narrator. George M. Wilson argues that movies do involve a fictional recounting (an audio-visual narration) in terms of the movie's sound and image track. Viewers are usually prompted to imagine seeing the items and events in the movie's fictional world and to imagine hearing theassociated fictional sounds. However, it is much less clear that the cinematic narration must be imagined as the product of some kind of "narrator" - of a work-internal agent of the narration. Wilson goes on to examine the further question whether viewers imagine seeing the fictional world face-to-face or whether they imagine seeing it through some kind of work-internal mediation. It is a key contention of this book that only the second of these alternatives allows one to give a coherentaccount of what we do and do not imagine about what we are seeing on the screen. Having provided a partial account of the foundations of film narration, the final chapters explore the ways in which certain complex strategies of cinematic narration are executed in three exemplary films: DavidFincher's Fight Club, von Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress, and the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There.
