Foreword to the Second Edition

Summary

When Beatrice Rehl, my friend and editor at Cambridge University Press, told me that Cambridge considers The “I” of the Camera to be one of its most successful books on film and invited me to prepare a new edition, I leapt at the opportunity. I was delighted that Cambridge – which can boast of more worthwhile film books than perhaps any other publisher – considers The “I” of the Camera to be a milestone in the history of film study and also a work that remains vital and relevant to shaping the future of the field.

This second edition of The “I” of the Camera contains all fifteen of the essays – with newly made and greatly improved frame enlargements – that were included in the volume when it was originally published in 1988. I have also added no fewer than fourteen essays – enough new material to have made a separate volume of its own. All the additional essays were written subsequent to the book's original publication. They range from critical studies of particular films (“The Goddess: Reflections on Melodrama East and West,” “Stagecoach and the Quest for Selfhood,” “Visconti's Death in Venice”), filmmakers (“Nobody's Perfect: Billy Wilder and the Postwar American Cinema”; “The Villain in Hitchcock” and “Thoughts on Hitchcock's Authorship”; “Philosophical Thought in the Films of Eric Rohmer” and the foreword to the American edition of Rohmer's The Taste for Beauty) and movements or genres (“Eternal Vérités: Cinéma-Vérité and Classical Cinema,” “The ‘New Latin American Cinema,’” “Viewing the World in Black and White: Race and the Melodrama of the Unknown Woman”) to more general reflections (“Hollywood and the Rise of Suburbia,” “Violence and Film,” “What Is American about American Film Study?