Since publication of the first edition in 1974, Film Theory and Criticism has been the most widely used and cited anthology of critical writings about film. Extensively revised and updated, this fifth edition is ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in film theory and criticism. Featuring both classic texts and cutting-edge essays from almost a century of thought and writing about the movies, it includes 23 articles new to this edition and new introductions for the individual sections. The sections themselves have also been reformulated to help lead students into a richer understanding of what the movies have and can accomplish both as individual works and as contributions to what has been called the art form of the twentieth century. Building upon the wide range of selections and the extensive historical coverage that marked previous editions, this new compilation stretches from the earliest attempts to define the cinema to the most recent efforts to place film in the context of psychology, sociology, and philosophy, and to explore issues of gender and race. Selections represent four periods in the development of film theory: the "classic formalist" era from film's beginnings roughly to the 1950s; the period of film's societal implications from 1950 to the seventies; the time of emerging theories beginning in the seventies that includes semiotic and structuralist models, approaches from cultural history, Marxist theory, psychoanalytic analysis, and feminist theory; and most recently, the period in which theories are merged into larger perspectives for understanding individual films as well as film in general.