BFI Film Studies brings together a rich body of titles from BFI Publishing’s pre-eminent and foundational list of books on film history, theory, national cinemas, genres, film-makers, and stars. It includes titles published in the BFI Screen Guides, World Directors, Film Stars, BFI Silver and International Screen Industries series, as well as essential companions to film studies such as Pam Cook’s The Cinema Book.

Explore these handpicked highlights, including authoritative overviews, archivally-based cinema histories, landmark works by filmmakers and critics, analyses of film theory and more:

• The Cinema Book: in this essential companion to cinema history and theory, read Annette Kuhn and Thomas Schatz’s introduction to the Hollywood Studio System of the 1930s and 1940s.
• Signs and Meaning in the Cinema: read Peter Wollen’s discussion of auteur theory in this foundational work, the first to bring ideas from semiotics and post-structuralism to bear on film analysis.
• Preserving and enabling access to British film heritage is a central part of the BFI’s work. Electric Edwardians tells the story of the Blackburn-based filmmakers Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon, early pioneers of British cinema who produced hundreds of short non-fiction films around the turn of the century. Read Vanessa Toulmin’s account of the discovery and importance of this unique archive collection.

• What If I Had Been the Hero?: Investigating Women’s Cinema: Feminist film theorists pioneered our understanding of women on screen as objects of the male gaze. Sue Thornham’s ground-breaking study addresses women behind the camera, exploring how feminist film-makers have created stories of which women are the heroes.
• East Asian Screen Industries: The International Screen Industries series provides overviews of key global media industries, focused by region and medium. In this chapter from their study of the contemporary film industries of China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, Darrell William Davis and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh discuss the global success of two popular East Asian film genres, Japanese horror and Chinese martial arts cinema.
• A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain: The BFI is a champion of artists’ moving image, from avant garde early cinema to underground film, conceptual video and exciting hybrids of personal, political and subversive filmmaking. This chapter from David Curtis’s award-winning study of artists’ film in Britain explores the key figures and institutions that shaped the movement, from the 1920s to the 1990s.

About the British Film Institute

The British Film Institute (BFI) is a cultural charity and the UK’s lead organisation for film, television and the moving image.
Find out more at www.bfi.org.uk

About BFI Publishing

BFI Publishing is the BFI’s publishing imprint. The BFI Publishing list features an unrivalled range of books for film enthusiasts, scholars, students and practitioners, written by leading scholars and critics of cinema history and culture.

Screen Studies offers digitised, searchable access to an acclaimed body of content from the BFI Publishing list, with two dedicated collections available for separate purchase.