Comprising over 90 essays and richly illustrated with over 200 images, the Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film provides a chronological portrait of American film history from its origins to the present day.

Taken as a whole, the essays in this collection represent a comprehensive and nuanced overview of American film history from the intersecting perspectives of industry, audiences, aesthetics, culture, politics, issues, and ideology.

Unabashedly ambitious, deeply historical, and unprecedented in its multi-faceted examination of film history, this collection offers you:

• Over 90 original essays written by an international cast of film scholars  
• Discussions of the industrial and institutional components of film history, including multiple modes of production, distribution, and marketing
• Investigations into the political, social, and economic factors that informed industry change and framed the reception of films
• Engaging close readings and in-depth analysis of canonical and non-canonical films
• Profiles of essential industry figures - major directors, stars, and producers - along with important figures outside the industrial mainstream
• An exploration of the history of film criticism and culture, and central issues in American film historiography
• The most authoritative collection of fresh investigations available in one state-of-the-art resource
• Selected by Choice as a 2013 Outstanding Academic Title

Cynthia Lucia is Associate Professor of English and director of the Film and Media Studies Program at Rider University. She is author of Framing Female Lawyers:  Women on Trial in Film (2005) and writes for the film journal Cineaste, where she has served on the editorial board for more than two decades. Among her recent essays are those appearing in Film and Sexual Politics: A Critical Reader (2006) and Authorship in Film Adaptation (2008).

Roy Grundmann is Associate Professor of Film Studies and director of the Film Studies Program in the Department of Film and Television at Boston University. He is the author of Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (2003) and the editor of A Companion to Michael Haneke (2010). Grundmann’s essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including Continuum, Cinemaya, The Velvet Light Trap, and Cineaste, where he also serves as Contributing Editor. He is the curator of “Michael Haneke: A Cinema of Provocation,” and has further curated retrospectives on Matthias Müller and Andy Warhol.

Art Simon is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the English Department at Montclair State University. He is the author of Dangerous Knowledge: The JFK Assassination in Art and Film (1996). Most recently he contributed to ‘Un-American’ Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era (2007). He has curated two film exhibitions for the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York City.