MRU Library Website: Film Studies: Books

Searching for Books about Film/Cinema

Note: the following linked searches automatically limit to books/ebooks, book chapters, and some reference works. To expand your search for other types of resources you can change the active filters on the search results page.

Here are some popular subject headings for finding materials on film, cinema, and related criticism.

For commentary and criticism on a specific director or actor use the format [lastname, firstname]"

Kurosawa, Akira

For books and similar resources on film genres, try quotation marks for a phrase search"

Ebooks

You can also search for books directly in our ebook platforms. The following services have strong collections on film and media studies.

Ebook Central - ProQuest
A collection of scholarly ebooks offering coverage of key academic subject areas. This is a subscription package with unlimited simultaneous user access.
Humanities E-Book
An online collection of over 5000 scholarly books across many fields in the humanities and social sciences. This is a subscription package with unlimited simultaneous user access.
JSTOR Collection
Digital library of academic journals, ebooks and primary sources. Includes content across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.
Note: Use the JSTOR platform for access to Primary Source collections including 19th Century British Pamphlets, Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa, World Heritage Sites: Africa, and Global Plants and are not available for inclusion in LibrarySearch primary sources search.

Find out more about indexing of these resources: https://support-jstor-org.libproxy.mtroyal.ca/hc/en-us/articles/5322416293399-JSTOR-ProQuest-Ex-Libris-Discovery-Resources

Search for Books in Other Libraries

You can look for books in other libraries.

Google Books
Search the full text of millions of books online.
University of Calgary Library
Search the books at the University of Calgary

WorldCat
Collection of libraries around the world in one place. Includes a wide variety of publication types (books, serials, etc.) and formats (print, electronic, microform, audiovisual).

MRU Borrowing From Other Libraries
Information about borrowing books from other libraries, including how to obtain TAL and COPPUL cards and how to access interlibrary loan services.

Select Books on Film

Film and the Imagined Image by Sarah Cooper
ISBN: 1474452787
Publication Date: 2019-08-16
From documentary to art-house cinema - and from an abundance of onscreen images to their complete absence - films that experiment variously with narration, voice-over and soundscapes do not only engage viewers' thoughts and senses. They also make an appeal to visualise more than is perceptible on screen. This book explores the extraordinary ways in which film can stimulate and direct the image-making capacity of the imagination.
Filmspeak by Edward Tomarken
ISBN: 9780826428936
Publication Date: 2012-09-20
Filmspeak is an accessible, innovative book which uses specific examples to show how once arcane literary and cultural theory has infiltrated popular culture. Theory reaches us in ways we do not even realize. Issues such as the nature of knowledge or truth, the function of personal response in interpretation, the nature of the forces of politics, the female alternative to the male view of the world, are fundamental for all of us. And intelligent analysis of the relationship between literary theory and popular culture can help us to understand our fast-changing world. H
The Tenth Muse by Laura Marcus
ISBN: 1281341606
Publication Date: 2010-01-10
The Tenth Muse explores writings on the cinema in the first decades of the twentieth century. Laura Marcus examines the impact of cinema on early twentieth-century literary and, more broadly, aesthetic and cultural consciousness, by bringing together the study of the terms and strategies of early writings about film with literary engagement with cinema in the same period.
Adaptation Theory and Criticism by Gordon E. Slethaug
ISBN: 9781623560584
Publication Date: 2014-06-19
Traditional critics of film adaptation generally assumed a) that the written text is better than the film adaptation because the plot is more intricate and the language richer when pictorial images do not intrude; b) that films are better when particularly faithful to the original; c) that authors do not make good script writers and should not sully their imagination by writing film scripts; d) and often that American films lack the complexity of authored texts because they are sourced out of Hollywood. The 'faithfulness' view has by and large disappeared, and intertextuality is now a generally received notion, but the field still lacks studies with a postmodern methodology and lens.

Film Studies | Books

Searching for Books about Film/Cinema

Ebooks

Search for Books in Other Libraries

Select Books on Film