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A global collection exploring the vital significance of film’s materiality to the history of cinema

Made from animal bones, plant cellulose, and precious metals, photochemical film defined a century of cinema. Looking past Hollywood and beyond iconic companies like Eastman Kodak, Agfa, and Pathé, Film Stock travels to Argentina, India, Czechoslovakia, and other locales to offer a truly global history of the very material of film.

Engaging with cultural, political, economic, and environmental questions of significant contemporary concern, Film Stock shows the immense consequences of how film was made, handled, processed, destroyed, and archived. Individual essays explore how climate shaped film distribution in early twentieth-century Southeast Asia, unique film formats manufactured in China, early efforts to standardize the size of film stock in Hollywood, and how Eastman Kodak’s tropical research lab in Panama became a tool of cultural empire.

With a deep commitment to archival research and substantive engagement with primary materials, Film Stock is a major work that tells the international story of film’s physical life. Its innovative, groundbreaking essays make a compelling case for why, even in our digital age, motion picture film matters.

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Frederic Jameson and Film Theory is the first collection of its kind, it assesses and critically responds to Fredric Jameson’s remarkable contribution to film theory. The essays assembled explore key Jamesonian concepts—such as totality, national allegory, geopolitics, globalization, representation, and pastiche—and his historical schema of realism, modernism, and postmodernism, considering, in both cases, how these can be applied, revised, expanded and challenged within film studies. Featuring essays by leading and emerging voices in the field, the volume probes the contours and complexities of neoliberal capitalism across the globe and explores world cinema's situation within these forces by deploying and adapting Jamesonian concepts, and placing them in dialogue with other theoretical paradigms. The result is an innovative and rigorously analytical effort that offers a range of Marxist-inspired approaches towards cinemas from Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America in the spirit of Jameson's famous rallying cry: 'always historicize!'.