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In a fresh and invigorating look at British cinema that considers film as an art form among other arts, John Orr takes a critical look at the intriguing relationship between romanticism and modernism in British cinema.

This book investigates the sensuous qualities of narration in the feature-length fiction film. Sensuous narration takes place when details of visual (or aural) texture are foregrounded for storytelling purposes. For example, the image becomes 'soft' in order to signal the representation of a character's memory; a 'scratchy' version of a song plays on the soundtrack in order to shape the viewer's understanding of the images it accompanies. In these cases, image and sound are associated with tactile properties (softness and scratchiness).The book provides a comprehensive account of existing work on film narration and offers an overview of the sensuous aspects of cinematic storytelling, as demonstrated through a broad selection of films. The films used as case studies in the book are particularly 'multi-layered', in that they all make extensive use of materials with sensuously contrasting visual and/or aural properties: for example, films whose images are a combination of colour and monochrome (e.g. The Wizard of Oz); whose soundtracks feature multiple voiceover narrators (e.g. All About Eve) or which feature multiple performers portraying the same character (e.g. the Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There).

Through the feature films and documentaries of directors including Emmer, Erice, Godard, Hitchcock, Pasolini, Resnais, Rossellini and Storck, Jacobs examines the way films 'animate' artworks by means of cinematic techniques, such as camera movements and editing, or by integrating them into a narrative. He explores how this 'mobilization' of the artwork is brought into play in art documentaries and artist biopics, as well as in feature films containing key scenes situated in museums. The tension between stasis and movement is also discussed in relation to modernist cinema, which often includes tableaux vivants combining pictorial, sculptural and theatrical elements. This tension also marks the aesthetics of the film still, which have inspired prominent art photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall. Illustrated throughout, Jacobs' study of the presence of art in film, alongside the omnipresence of the filmic image in today's art museums, is an engaging work for students and scholars of film and art alike.

Anna Backman Rogers argues that American independent cinema is a cinema not merely in crisis, but also of crisis. As a cinema which often explores the rite of passage by explicitly drawing on American cinematic heritage, from the teen movie to the western, American independent films deal in images of crisis, transition and metamorphosis, offering a subversive engagement with more traditional modes of representation.aExamining films by Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola to highlight their use of cinematic time as a mode of philosophical thought, this book brings new and exciting perspectives to American independent cinema.