Critical Dictionary of Film and Television Theory

One of the most significant thinkers about cinema is Siegfried Kracauer (1889‐1966), author of From Caligari to Hitler (1947) and Theory of Film (1960). I learned from a brief biographical entry here that Kracauer was a pupil of George Simmel and friend of Walter Benjamin who was fascinated by “the surface forms of capitalist culture”. According to an entry on “spectacle”, he found evidence of “the dehumanizing effects of modernity” in Busby Berkeley’s “panoramas of female legs”.

This dictionary aims to provide students and scholars with “the necessary conceptual framework to understand the language and terminologies of screen studies”, as...