Beginning Film Studies: Second Edition (Beginnings)

Beginning film studies offers the ideal introduction for readers keen to enter this vibrant subject. Combining breadth and compactness, exposition and critique, and written accessibly and with verve, it ranges across key topics, theories and approaches in film studies. For this new volume, Andrew Dix has thoroughly updated the first edition, writing fresh case studies, tracking and evaluating recent developments in the study of film, and providing the most up-to-the-minute suggestions of books and websites for further reading.

The book begins with detailed consideration of film's formal features (mise-en-scène, editing and sound) before moving outwards to discuss narrative, genre, authorship, the star, and film's ideological engagement (its staging of class, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity). Later chapters on film industries across the world and on film consumption - where and how we watch movies - reflect and assess the discipline's recent geographical 'turn'.

The book takes a global perspective throughout, illustrating its coverage of the field by reference to film cultures ranging from Hollywood to Bollywood, and from the French 'New Wave' to contemporary Hong Kong. Each chapter concludes with a vivid case study, exploring such topics as mise-en-scène in 12 Years a Slave, sound in The Great Gatsby, narrative in Inception and ideology in Blue is the Warmest Colour. The superhero movie is studied as a genre, and Jennifer Lawrence as a star. Beginning film studies is also fully interactive, with readers enabled in each chapter to reflect upon important questions and to make their own contributions as students of film.