Dear Screen-L:





The University of California Press  is pleased to announce the publication of:



Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film



Dana Polan is Professor of Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the 

Arts, New York University. Among his books are _Jane Campion, Pulp 

Fiction, In a Lonely Place,_ and the forthcoming titles _The 

Sopranos_ and _The French Chef._



http://go.ucpress.edu/Polan



"Polan's book offers the first pedagogical history of the emergence 

of film studies courses within the American university system prior 

to World War II, based on an amazing wealth of little known or even 

unknown material. It also offers an equally valuable intellectual 

history in which early film studies courses clarify the theoretical 

frameworks governing the humanities and social sciences in higher 

education. And the writing is sophisticated yet accessible and 

engaging."-Richard Abel, author of _Americanizing the Movies and 

"Movie-Mad" Audiences, 1910-1914_



This engaging book chronicles the first classes on the art and 

industry of cinema and the colorful pioneers who taught, wrote, and 

advocated on behalf of the new art form. Using extensive archival 

research, Dana Polan looks at, for example, Columbia University's 

early classes on Photoplay Composition; lectures at the New School 

for Social Research by famed movie historian Terry Ramsaye; the film 

industry's sponsorship of a business course on film at Harvard; and 

attempts by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to create 

programs of professionalized education at the University of Southern 

California, Stanford, and elsewhere. Polan examines a wide range of 

thinkers who engaged with the new art of film, from Marxist Harry 

Alan Potamkin to sociologist Frederic Thrasher to Great Books 

advocates Mortimer Adler and Mark Van Doren.



Full information about the book, including the table of contents, is 

available online: http://go.ucpress.edu/Polan





-- 

Lolita Guevarra

Electronic Marketing Coordinator

University of California Press

Tel. 510.643.4738 | Fax 510.643.7127

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Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the

University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu