Cinema & Society: A Handbook of Film, History Power

Most of us watch movies as entertainment. Cinema & Society asks what movies actually do - to nations, to audiences, to power itself.Cinema & Society: A Handbook of Film, History & Power (Volume One) traces how film and society have shaped each other, from the first paying crowd in a Paris basement in 1895 to the censors' offices of colonial India and the arguments-through-editing of Soviet montage. Twenty-eight concepts across five parts show how cinema became a national industry, a tool of propaganda, a battleground for censors, a stage for postcolonial identity, and a canvas for radical new styles of storytelling.Inside, you'll find: - How the Lumiere brothers' communal screening - not Edison's private peep-show - built cinema as a mass medium- Why WWI's disruption of French cinema handed Hollywood the twentieth century- How colonial censors policed silent cinema in India, and how touring cinemas pushed back- The rise of India's post-independence auteurs - Bimal Roy, Raj Kapoor, Satyajit Ray, and beyond- How German Expressionism, Soviet montage, Italian Neorealism, and the French New Wave each turned a formal technique into an argument about the worldEach concept pairs a clear historical account with real case studies and primary sources - not a chronological survey, but a toolkit for reading cinema as a social and political force, not just an art form.For readers of Frame Theory: The Filmscholar Handbook, this is the next layer - where film form meets the history and power structures that shaped it.