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This chapter comments on the relative insignificance of whiteness to Hindi film narratives, with white characters turning up, when they do, often as peripheral figures to create the effect of historical accuracy. It argues that in Hindi cinema, whiteness cannot function as it does in the West, where the legacy of imperialism has made it an unmarked category, whose invisibility allows it to function as a norm against which the aberration of racial others may be measured. In Indian films, whiteness is marked; and it is, increasingly, markedly white—to be resisted, or desired, or dismissed.

The Introduction posits the book's guiding question: How did popular songs influence the industrial organization and narrative form of Hollywood cinema during the conversion to sound, from 1927 through 1931? A case is presented for studying the use of songs in non-musical films, a loose category of genre consisting of films that tended to showcase, motivate, and integrate songs in ways that could not always be explained by appealing to the conventions of Broadway musical genres. Over the course of the transition to sound, the status of the popular song performance in non-musical films shifted from modular attraction to integrated narrative device. A study of this shift and its industrial context illuminates a rich period of heterogeneity of film form and style. The Introduction closes with brief summaries of the book's five chapters.

It is difficult or impossible to define what a romantic comedy is because all Hollywood films (except some war films) have romance and all have comedy. While the pervasive presence of romance and comedy is undeniable, there are different levels of representational convention. All Hollywood genres implicitly belong to the broader traditions of American narrative film; romance and comedy are common narrative conventions, hence their ubiquity. This chapter describes the genre, cycle and critical traditions of Hollywood romantic comedies. On the basis of the dominant concept of a film, particular genres can be characterized not only as the only genres in which given elements, devices and features occur, but also as the ones in which they are dominant, in which they play an overall organizing role. Thus, the formation of a couple takes place in many fictional texts as a narrative convention, but it plays the dominant, organizing role in two genres: romance and romantic comedy.

This chapter examines posthumous motion as a staple for the movie death scene. Posthumous motion may be defined as the use of the cutaway to another image—usually one that reframes the body or else infuses part of the environment—to extend the scene after the death moment has apparently occurred, that is, after registration. Whether or not the camera is itself moving, the image is. Seen in various forms throughout American film history, the posthumous shot has become one of the more interpretive shots in genre films, often indicating the solemn passage of time. This chapter discusses the posthumous markings found in the early narrative film and how the techniques of narrative film portend an emergent cinematics around the death shot—or the image of apparent loss of embodied vitality. Focusing on films such as Behind the Scenes, The Mothering Heart, The Birth of a Nation, and The Country Doctor, it discusses the ways that narrative editing “performs on the material of the film the operations that death performs on life”.

This chapter traces the history of how filmmakers, critics, and theorists have conceived the viewer’s psychological activity. Throughout, these conceptions are treated as responses to changing trends in filmmaking across the history of cinema. For most creators, a common-sense or folk psychology has governed their creative decisions, but a few filmmakers developed more explicit appeals to schools of scientific psychology. The chapter considers how psychoanalysis has provided critics and filmmakers both an interpretive tool and a basis for assessing the viewer’s response. In particular, the chapter considers how American critics of the 1940s blended psychoanalysis with social psychology and how French theorists of the 1960s-1980s adapted ideas of Jacques Lacan to explain the role of cinema in reinforcing social constructs of identity. Other schools of scientific or philosophical psychology are considered: Hugo Münsterberg’s neo-Kantian view that cinema manifests essential processes of mind, the influence of Gestalt theory on Rudolf Arnheim, and the materialist reflexology of Eisenstein. The chapter concludes with a survey of the emergence of film theory that draws from the cognitive sciences in an effort to mount naturalistic explanations of film art and viewer response.

Yau Ching's Ho Yuk: Let's Love Hong Kong is the first narrative feature film about Hong Kong lesbians told from a lesbian/feminist perspective. Yau Ching's road to filmmaking shows how Hong Kong's vibrant alternative film and video culture can nurture innovation, strengthen ties to the world filmmaking community, and involve Hong Kong filmmakers in the expansion of the public sphere for the marginalized, maligned, and dispossessed. The story of its production also highlights the connections between Hong Kong independent cinema and international trends in queer counter-cinemas. In this interview, Yau Ching talks about her development as a filmmaker, her inspiration for Ho Yuk, its production, and its impact on local as well global audiences. Yau Ching talks about her experience of making films began long before her film education began.

This chapter examines Clint Eastwood’s 2006 films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima in light of postclassical narration and multi-protagonist plots. Both Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima exhibit several characteristics of the multiple narrative film. Eastwood’s use of multiple narratives in both films is an example of a trend in contemporary cinema and also a continuation of his Mystic River (2003), but at the same time it represents a bold experiment of its own in postmodern war cinema. The essay analyzes the differences in the narrative structures of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima as well as their impact on viewers’ understanding.

Hitchcock and Herrmann had a symbiotic and complementary artistic relationship. However, as this chapter contends, rather than necessarily synergic in their understanding of the unified requirements of drama, sometimes their complementary relationship took on a different character. In Marnie, Herrmann’s music attempted to ameliorate Hitchcock’s dark interests, in an attempt to romanticize Hitchcock’s bleak and grotesque story about a psychologist’s fantasy about possessing a disturbed kleptomaniac killer, which includes a deeply disquieting rape scene. The music moves to make these elements bearable, with a ‘sleight of hand’ that misdirects us from the utter darkness and irredeemable characters and obscene aspects of the film narrative.

This chapter assesses the images that have been used to depict queer Native people in contemporary narrative film. Contemporary narrative film, which offers the most widely viewed representations of queer Native people, often reenacts fragmenting visions of the erotic. Films like Big Eden, Johnny Greyeyes, and The Business of Fancydancing replicate the legacies of settler colonialism in their depictions of Two-Spirit Native people, leaving queer Indigenous people with an untenable choice in which they are “forced to choose.” They must either embrace family and nation in the silence of desire, or embrace sexuality at the expense of tribal and familial alliances.

The introduction outlines Robert Frank’s life and development as a filmmaker and photographer. His works always depicted a narrative in one way or another. He also used striking images and a documentary point of view to capture the way of life for everyday Americans. Kouvaros connects Frank’s film The Americans to contemporary Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Finally, the introduction explains how being a photographer impacted Frank’s filmmaking style and decisions.

This chapter examines Wells's The Invisible Man (IM). It argues that in IM Wells developed something just as aesthetically ahead of its time as any of the optical speculations of his earlier fiction: the generation of a whole fiction from a single trope – metonymy – in a way that created a brilliantly reflexive match between form and theme. IM also brought him closest to the editorial basis of film narrative and, in turn, created one of his most intriguing commentaries on, and opportunities for, cinema itself.