A Short History of the Movies

This volume offers students a panoramic overview of the worldwide development of film, from the first movements captured on celluloid, to the early Mack Sennett and Charlie Chaplin shorts, through the studio heyday of the 1930s and 1940s and the "Hollywood Renaissance" of the 1960s and 1970s, to the pictures and their technology appearing in the multiplexes and living rooms of today. This new edition, which has been revised and rewritten to reflect current scholarship, recent industry developments, and new films and filmmakers, represents an accurate, scrupulous updating of a classic.

About the Author

Bruce F. Kawin

I was born in Los Angeles, California in 1945. I went to Fairfax High School, then Columbia, then Cornell. I have an MFA in Creative Writing and Filmmaking and a PhD in Modern Literature and Film. At Wells College I founded the Film program and directed the Creative Writing program. Later I taught at the American Film Institute. Since 1975 I've been teaching at the University of Colorado at Boulder. My books include 1) Telling It Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film, 2) Faulkner and Film, 3) Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film, 4) To Have and Have Not (the screenplay), 5) The Mind of the Novel: Reflexive Fiction and the Ineffable, 6) Faulkner's MGM Screenplays, 7) How Movies Work, 8) A Short History of the Movies (co-author, the late Gerald Mast), 5th through 11th editions, 9) Horror and the Horror Film, and 10) Love If We Can Stand It. I write poetry, film criticism, film history, and literary criticism. My next book will be 11) Selected Film Essays and Interviews. I live in Boulder, Colorado.

Gerald Mast was an author, film historian, and member of the University of Chicago faculty. He was a contributor to the modern discipline of film studies and film history.