Film Theory: An Introduction

“People love Mary Pickford because of a certain aspect of her face in her highest mood” wrote the American poet and critic Vachel Lindsay in The Art of the Moving Picture (1915), perhaps anticipating a well‐known essay Roland Barthes (1973) wrote about Greta Garbo 40 years later. Near the beginning of Film Theory: An Introduction Robert Stam discusses Lindsay’s work as an interesting example of a kind of “ad hoc, unsystematic theorizing” that flourished during the early years of cinema. “Systematic” work seems to have got under way in 1916, with The Photoplay: A Psychological Study by Hugo Munsterberg, a...