Wheeler Winston Dixon - A Short History of Film, Third Edition

A SHORT HISTORY OF

FILM

A SHORT HISTORY OF

FILM

THIRD EDITION

WHEELER WINSTON DIXON AND GWENDOLYN AUDREY FOSTER

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, NEWARK, AND CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON

Third Edition

ISBN 978-0-8135-9512-2 (pbk)ISBN 978-0-8135-9513-9 (cloth)ISBN 978-0-8135-9514-6 (e-Pub)ISBN 978-0-8135-9515-3 (e-Pub)ISBN 978-0-8135-9516-0 (Web PDF)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the second edition of A Short History of Film as follows:

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Dixon, Wheeler W., 1950

A short history of film / Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8135-6055-7 9 pbk. : alk. Paper 0-ISBN 978-0-8135-6057-1 (e-book)

1. Motion pictures-History. 2. Motion Picture industry-History.

I. Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. II. Title

PN 1993.5.A1D53 2008

791.437dc22

2007022097

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright 2018 by Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

To the filmmakers,

historians,

and critics

of the twenty-first century

CONTENTS

Our first thanks go to Leslie Mitchner of Rutgers University Press for commissioning this volume and believing in it from the outset. We also give our deepest thanks to Dana Miller for a superb typing job; to Jerry Ohlinger for the many stills that grace this volume; to Michael Andersen for his assistance with the bibliography; to Dennis Coleman for help in research; to Virginia Clark for tirelessly checking facts and copyediting the first draft; to Eric Schramm for an excellent job of copyediting subsequent drafts; and to David Sterritt for a thorough and meticulous reading of the final text. We would also like to salute our many colleagues in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and its chair, Marco Abel, for his continuing support of our work.

For their many invaluable insights, we would like to thank our friends and companions over the years, too numerous to mention here, who first saw these films with us; the discussions we have had with our colleagues in film studies at other universities, as well as with our students, are surely reflected in this text as well. For this third edition of this volume, we also want to thank the many students and outside readers who enthusiastically read and critiqued the first two editions of this work. Finally, we thank the University of Nebraska Research Council for a Maude Hammond Fling Research Fellowship that aided us considerably in the completion of this book.

We wish to note that the material incorporated in this text on Dorothy Arzner, Jean Cocteau, Danile Huillet, Jean Renoir, and Jean-Marie Straub, written by Wheeler Winston Dixon, originally appeared in The Encyclopedia of Film , edited by James Monaco and James Pallot (New York: Perigee/Putnam, 1991), provided by Baseline StudioSystems. The material on Chantal Akerman, Dorothy Arzner, Jacqueline Audry, Joy Batchelor, Kathryn Bigelow, Muriel Box, Vera Chytilov, Julie Dash, and Doris Drrie, written by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, from Women Film Directors: An International Bio-Critical Dictionary , is reproduced with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, Connecticut. This material has been significantly revised for its inclusion here.