Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (BFI Silver)
Peter Wollen, David Rodowick
The book is divided into three main sections.
The first explores the work of Sergei Eisenstein as film-maker, designer & aesthetician.
The second, which contains a celebrated comparison of the films of John Ford & Howard Hawks, is an exposition & defence of the auteur theory.
The third formulates a semiology of the cinema, invoking cinema as an exemplary test-case for comparative aesthetics & general theories of signification.
Wollen's Conclusionargues for an avant-garde cinema, bringing post-structuralist ideas into his discussion of Godard & other contemporaries.
Published as part of the BFI Silver series, this fifth edition features a new foreword by film theorist David Rodowick & brings together material from the four previous editions, inviting the reader to trace the development of Wollen's thinking, and the unfolding of the discourse of cinema.