Welcome to the website for Introduction to Film by Nick Lacey
We envisage this site to be used in tandem with the textbook to create and deliver a complete teaching package for yourselves and your students.
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Preface
Introduction to Film is intended to appeal to both the film buff and the academic enthusiast. The book 'covers the ground' by offering the reader a summary of approaches to the subject. However there is always a tension between the use of categories, essential for summary as they enable groups of similar films to be put together, and the differences between the films that the categories ignore. For example, many summative approaches to European cinema focus on art films and so reduce:
a vast and diverse European production to what is . only one section of the market [and it] reinforce[s] American-centrism: if a variety of diverse practices . are reduced to an 'alternative', then Hollywood is reinforced as for ever 'the norm'.
(Vincendeau, 1998: 441a)
