Introduction

The study of cinema at the university level has become increasingly central in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australasia, positioned in a number of disciplines such as the history of art, languages and literatures, communications, and emerging work on the histories of mass technologies (film among them). Simultaneously, approaches to film studies which have taken their cue from literary analyses (formalism, semiotics, auteur, and genre theory) have recently seen the challenge of new intellectual work in the form of “cultural studies,” an umbrella term for a host of imbricated critical projects such as feminism, queer theory, race studies, poststructuralisms, and materialist analyses. This encounter, of film studies and cultural studies, is the topic of this collection of essays about cinema, with the questions of cultural studies at the foreground.