ABSTRACT
If you’ve picked up this book to learn something about what it means to study film, you already know in large measure what cinema is: you’ve been watching movies since you first toddled out to the family television set, or since you braved your first excursion to a multiplex matinee. If you’re old enough, you may have witnessed formats come and go. Perhaps you thrilled in your first chance to watch a beloved film at home on video, rewinding the tape over and again to watch Gene Kelly singin’ in the rain or Greta Garbo unleashing her famous first spoken line in Anna Christie (Jacques Feyder, 1931): “Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side, and don’t be stingy, baby.” DVDs, now repackaged with all of the “extras” that persuade us to replace those VHS tapes, may soon go the way of CDs, consigned right into the dustbin that receives the detritus of digital culture. Who knows? You may be born into a world in which cinema streams in bits onto our computer screens more than it lights up the screens of our neighborhood theaters.
