On this page, find recommended print books, ebooks, and websites. Also find suggested questions you to consider when using a given theory or lens to analyze and understand a film.
Here you will find resources to help as you explore film theories. These books, ebooks, websites, etc. discuss literary theories, literary criticism, and film criticism. You will find overviews, general discussions, and information pertaining to specific theories.
Additionally check the following pages for resources specific to each theory/lens: Feminist and Gender Lenses, Psychological Lens, Marxist Lens, Queer Theory, Postcolonial and Transnational Lens, Race and Ethnicity Lens, New Historicism and Cultural Lens, Auteur Lens.
This is a sampling of print titles you may find in the WCC Drimmer Library collection. Please hover over each title to read a brief description.
To search the library catalog, use the search engine (on this page) or visit the library homepage: https://library.sunywcc.edu/homepage
Regarding Film by 
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory by 
Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies by 
Film Theory Reader: Debates and Arguments by 
A Companion to Film Theory by 
Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies by 
Gilles Deleuze by To search the library catalog, use this search engine or visit the library homepage: https://library.sunywcc.edu/homepage
The following is a sampling of many potentially relevant titles of ebooks available to you. Please hover over each title to view a description of the contents.
To search further, access our ebook collections.
Post-Theory by
With Post-Theory, David Bordwell and Noël Carroll challenge the prevailing practices of film scholarship. Since the 1970s, film scholars have been searching for a unified theory that will explain all sorts of films, their production, and their reception; the field has been dominated by structuralist Marxism, varieties of cultural theory, and the psychoanalytic ideas of Freud and Lacan. Bordwell and Carroll ask, why not employ many theories tailored to specific goals, rather than searching for a unified theory? Post-Theory offers fresh directions for understanding film, presenting new essays by twenty-seven scholars on topics as diverse as film scores, audience response, and the national film industries of Russia, Scandinavia, the U.S., and Japan. They use historical, philosophical, psychological, and feminist methods to tackle such basic issues as: What goes on when viewers perceive a film? How do filmmakers exploit conventions? How do movies create illusions? How does a film arouse emotion? Bordwell and Carroll have given space not only to distinguished film scholars but to non-film specialists as well, ensuring a wide variety of opinions and ideas on virtually every topic on the current agenda of film studies. Full of stimulating essays published here for the first time, Post-Theory promises to redefine the study of cinema.
