About this item
Film is arguably the dominant art form of the twentieth century. In this Very Short Introduction, Michael Wood offers a wealth of insight into the nature of film, considering its role and impact on society as well as its future in the digital age. As Wood notes, film is many things, but it has become above all a means of telling stories through images and sounds. The stories are often quite false, frankly and beautifully fantastic, and they are sometimes insistently said to be true. Indeed, many condemn movies as an instrument of illusion, an emphatic way of seeing what is not there. And others celebrate the reverse: that film brings us closest to the world as it actually is. "Photography is truth," a character says in a film by Jean-Luc Godard.
About the Author
MICHAEL WOOD is one of our most versatile critics, conversant with both modern literature and film. A graduate of Cambridge University, he spent most of his career at Princeton, where he is a professor emeritus of comparative literature. Among his many works are The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction, Children of Science: On Contemporary Fiction, and America in the Movies, a survey of Hollywood films of the 1940s and 1950s.
