Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

'A dense, challenging and important book.' Philip French Observer

'At the very least, this blockbuster is probably the best single volume history of Hollywood we're likely to get for a very long time.' Paul Kerr City Limits

'Persuasively argued, the book is also packed with facts, figures and photographs.' Nigel Andrews Financial Times

Acclaimed for their breakthrough approach, Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson analyze the basic conditions of American film-making as a historical institution and consider to what extent Hollywood film production constitutes a systematic enterprise, in both its style and its business operations.

Despite differences of director, genre or studio, most Hollywood films operate within a set of shared assumptions about how a film should look and sound. Such assumptions are neither natural nor inevitable; but because classical-style films have been the type most widely seen, they have come to be accepted as the 'norm' of film-making and viewing.

The authors show how these classical conventions were formulated and standardized, and how they responded to the arrival of sound, colour, widescreen ratios and stereophonic sound. They argue that each new technological development has served a function within an existing narrational system.

The authors also examine how the Hollywood cinema standardized the film-making process itself. They describe how, over the course of its history, Hollywood developed distinct modes of production in a constant search for maximum efficiency, predictability and novelty.

Set apart by its combination of theoretical analysis and empirical evidence, this book is the standard work on the classical Hollywood cinema style of film-making from the silent era to the 1960s. Now available in paperback, it is a 'must' for film students, lecturers and all those seriously interested in the development of the film industry.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part One The classical Hollywood style, 1917-60
• 1 An excessively obvious cinema
• 2 Story causality and motivation
• 3 Classical narration
• 4 Time in the classical film
• 5 Space in the classical film
• 6 Shot and scene
• 7 The bounds of difference
• Part Two The Hollywood mode of production to 1930
• 8 The Hollywood mode of production: its conditions of existence
• 9 Standardization and differentiation: the reinforcement and dispersion of Hollywood's practices
• 10 The director system: management in the first years
• 11 The director-unit system: management of multiple-unit companies after 1909
• 12 The central producer system: centralized management after 1914
• 13 The division and order of production: the subdivision of the work from the first years through the 1920s
• Part Three The formulation of the classical style, 1909-2814. From primitive to classical
• 15 The formulation of the classical narrative
• 16 The continuity system
• 17 Classical narrative space and the spectator's attention
• 18 The stability of the classical approach after 1917
• Part Four Film style and technology to 1930
• 19 Technology, style and mode of production
• 20 Initial standardization of the basic tehnology
• 21 Major technological changes of the 1920s
• 22 The Mazda tests of 1928
• 23 The introduction of sound Part Five: The Hollywood mode of production, 1930-6024. The labor-force, financing and the mode of production
• 25 The producer-unit system: management by specialization after 1931
• 26 The package-unit system: unit management after 1955
• Part Six Film style and technology, 1930-6027. Deep-focus cinematography
• 28 Technicolor
• 29 Widescreen processes and stereophonic sound
• Part Seven Historical implications of the classical Hollywood cinema
• 30 Since 1960: the persistence of the mode of film practice
• 31 Alternative modes of film practice Envoi
• Appendix A The unbiased sample
• Appendix B A brief synopsis of the structure of the United States film industry, 1896-1960
• Appendix C Principal Structures of the US film industry, 1894-1930
• Appendix D Lighting plots and descriptions
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Photograph credits
• Index