Film Studies

Music in Cinema

MICHEL CHION

Edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman

Michel Chion is renowned for his explorations of the significance of frequently overlooked elements of cinema, particularly the role of sound. In this inventive and inviting book, Chion considers how cinema has deployed music. He shows how music and film not only complement but also transform each other. Wide-ranging and original, Music in Cinema offers a welcoming overview for students and general readers as well as refreshingly new and valuable perspectives for film scholars.

MICHEL CHION is an independent scholar, composer, filmmaker, and teacher who has written more than thirty books on sound, music, and film. His previous Columbia University Press books include The Voice in Cinema (1999); Film, a Sound Art (2009); Words on Screen (2017); and AudioVision: Sound on Screen (second edition, 2019).

CLAUDIA GORBMAN is professor emerita of film studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma. She has written widely about film sound and music and has translated several books by Michel Chion.

$32.00 / £28.00 paper 978-0-231-19889-9 $130.00 / £108.00 cloth 978-0-231-19888-2 $31.99 / £28.00 e-book 978-0-231-55285-1

SEPTEMBER 408 pages / 6" x 9"

FILM STUDIES

FILM AND CULTURE SERIES

Kill the Documentary

A Letter to Filmmakers, Students, and Scholars

JILL GODMILOW

“This provocative and engaging book by the acclaimed filmmaker Jill Godmilow raises important questions for anyone concerned about the future of political documentary.”

—Deirdre Boyle, author of Ferryman of Memories:

The Films of Rithy Panh

Can the documentary be useful? Can a film change how its viewers think about the world and their potential role in it? The award-winning director Jill Godmilow issues an urgent call for a new kind of nonfiction filmmaking: a “postrealist” cinema. Both manifesto and guidebook, Kill the Documentary proposes provocative new ways of making and watching films.

JILL GODMILOW is professor emerita in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. Her acclaimed films include the Academy Award–nominated Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman (1974); Waiting for the Moon (1987), which won best feature film at the Sundance Film Festival; and What Farocki Taught, which was featured at the 2000 Whitney Biennial.

$30.00 / £25.00 paper 978-0-231-20277-0 $120.00 / £100.00 cloth 978-0-231-20276-3 $29.99 / £25.00 e-book 978-0-231-55470-1

DECEMBER 224 pages / 6.125" x 9.25"

FILM STUDIES

INVESTIGATING VISIBLE EVIDENCE: NEW CHALLENGES FOR

Alluring Monsters

The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization

ROSALIND GALT

“Galt elegantly balances the local and the global, the historical and the theoretical, the industrial and the aesthetic, the cultural and the political, the filmic and the related arts. The result is an important new model for imagining world cinema.”

—Adam Lowenstein, author of Dreaming of Cinema:

Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media

The pontianak, a terrifying female vampire ghost, is a powerful figure in Malay cultures. In animist tradition, she is a woman who has died in childbirth, and her vengeful return upsets gender norms and social hierarchies. Alluring Monsters explores how and why the pontianak found new life in postcolonial Southeast Asian film and society. Rosalind Galt reveals the importance of cinema to histories and theories of decolonization.

ROSALIND GALT is professor of film studies at King’s College London. Her previous Columbia University Press books are The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (2006) and Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (2011).

$35.00 / £30.00 paper 978-0-231-20133-9 $140.00 / £115.00 cloth 978-0-231-20132-2 $34.99 / £30.00 e-book 978-0-231-55404-6

OCTOBER 336 pages / 6.125" x 9.25" / 50 b&w film stills

FILM STUDIES

Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures

Film and History in the Postcolony

ROCHONA MAJUMDAR

“Majumdar gives us a vivid account of India’s art cinema and film societies to take the shifting pulse of a nation in the early decades of its independence. This book changes how we will think about histories of, and histories within, art cinema.”

—Priya Jaikumar, author of Where Histories Reside:

India as Filmed Space

Rochona Majumdar examines key works of Indian art cinema to demonstrate how film emerged as a mode of doing history and that, in so doing, it anticipated some of the most influential insights of postcolonial thought. Analyzing the films of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak as well as a host of film society publications, she offers sweeping new insights into film’s relationship with the postcolonial condition and its role in decolonial imaginations of the future.

ROCHONA MAJUMDAR is an associate professor in the Departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (2009) and Writing Postcolonial History (2010).

$35.00 / £30.00 paper 978-0-231-20105-6 $140.00 / £115.00 cloth 978-0-231-20104-9 $34.99 / £30.00 e-book 978-0-231-55390-2

OCTOBER 304 pages / 6.125" x 9.25" / 35 b&w film stills