"Professor Carroll has, in one densely packed collection of thought-provoking essays, forever changed the past, present and future of film theory. His rationale reintroduces creativity to a genre burdened with well-intentioned, but ultimately binding and counter-productive rules imposed by an emerging pool of critics. Professor Carroll answers his own critics with clarity and objectivity, and gives logical arguments in favor of a new approach. This volume will, no doubt, perplex and provoke students of film theory for years to come." Midwest Book Review

• Part I. Questioning Media: 1. Medium specificity arguments and the self-consciously invented arts; 2. The specificity of media in the arts; 3. Concerning uniqueness claims for photographic and cinematographic representation; 4. Defining the moving image; Part II. Popular Film and TV: 5. The power of movies; 6. Toward a theory of film suspense; 7. As the dial turns: notes on soap operas; 8. Toward a theory of point of view editing; 9. Notes on movie music; 10. Notes on the sight gag; Part III. Avant-garde and Documentary Film: 11. Avant-garde film and film theory; 12. Causation, the amplification of movement and the avant-garde film; 13. Language and cinema: preliminary notes for a theory of verbal images; 14. A note on film metaphor; 15. From real to reel: entangled in non-fiction film; 16. Reply to Carol Browson and Jack C. Wolf; Part IV. Ideology: 17. The image of women in film: a defense of a paradigm; 18. Film, rhetoric and ideology; Part V. The History of Film Theory: 19. Film/mind analogies: the case of Hugo Munsterberg; 20. Hans Richter's Struggle for Film; 21. A brief note on Frampton's notion of metahistory; Part VI. Polemical Exchanges: 22. Cognitivism, contemporary film theory and method; 23. Cracks in the acoustic mirror; 24. A reply to Heath; 25. Replies to Jennifer Hammett and Richard Allen; Part VII. False Starts: 26. Film history and film theory; 27. Art, film and ideology; 28. Toward a theory of film editing.