Current Research in Film: Audiences, Economics and Law

Abstract

Since the late 1970s. Film Studies as a discipline within North America has come to display many of the signs of paradigmatic coherence. Polemics within the field are increasingly rooted in shared sets of terms and premises, and the theoretical developments produced over the last decade in influential journals such as Screen have trickled down to undergraduate text-books, and laterally into such hitherto isolated enterprises as the writing of corporate histories. For a discipline which suffered for decades from an eclecticism and discontinuity with few parallels elsewhere, this new coherence has brought a sense of community to the field, and an elusive academic respectability. At the same time, a heightened awareness of the political stakes within theoretical debates has. meant that a high level of vigilance exists concerning the acceptability of certain concerns and procedures within academic writing on film.