Back and Forth : Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde

The subjects covered in this monograph on the history of early film include: structural or structural/materialist film, metahistory and film historicism, narrative and tableau, primitive style, "cine-tapestry," actuality, apparatus theory and multiple causality, techniques of perspective and filmic space, early cinema and avant-garde films, experimental film and Hollywood classical cinema. Testa reviews and repositions key film historians and "conventional" schools of thought and theory on film