Screening American Film

Bringing together 51 essays, each devoted to a single American film, Screening American Film offers a wide-ranging exploration of the histories, practices, politics, styles, and meanings that have shaped American film since the 1930s. While this volume proceeds decade by decade from the 1930s onward, contributors reach further back and forward to illuminate the breadth and complexity of the American screen.

Complemented by the volumes on Screening American Independent Cinema (2023) and Screening Classical Hollywood Cinema (forthcoming), in these 51 chapters readers will encounter American cinema not as a singular tradition but as a constellation of overlapping and often competing practices, modes, and priorities: classical and post-classical Hollywood, major blockbusters, independent and indie filmmaking, exploitation and arthouse. The essays draw upon a variety of critical frameworks including the industrial, aesthetic, historical, political, and thematic while remaining attentive to key questions of style, genre, authorship, performance, stardom, and context.

The central aim of Screening American Film is to complement the viewing and teaching of American cinema in film and screen studies classrooms, across related disciplines, and to reshape notions of canon. Each essay has been designed to stand on its own while contributing to a larger mosaic of what American film has been, and what it continues to become, from Mae West to Barbie. Written to support film screenings and teaching, every film discussed here is available for viewing, in one format or another, even if it lies outside the conventional structures of platform-era film consumption. Indeed, part of this book’s ambition is to highlight American films whose significance becomes newly visible in the revisitation of established "classics", sitting aside the lesser known, and in some cases, entirely un-mapped cinematic terrain.

The 51 entries introduce students to different approaches within film studies from historical and contextual framing, film analysis, industrial and institutional analysis, politics and ideology, genre and authorship, film theory, representation, exhibition and reception, and technology. Screening American Film is the essential resource for anyone teaching or studying American film.

Nessa Johnston is Lecturer in Screen Studies and Digital Media at the University of Liverpool, author of The Commitments: Youth, Music and Authenticity in 1990s Ireland (Routledge 2022), and co-editor with Jamie Sexton and Elodie Roy of Anonymous Sounds: Library Music and Screen Cultures in the 1960s and 1970s (2025). She has published widely on low-budget filmmaking, American independent cinema, film sound and music, and cult cinema, including in the journals Continuum; Music, Sound and the Moving Image; The Soundtrack; The Velvet Light Trap; and Alphaville.

Gary Needham is Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Liverpool. They are the author or co-editor of several books, including Asian Cinemas (2006), Queer TV (2009), Brokeback Mountain (2010), Warhol in Ten Takes (2013), and United Artists (2020). They are also series editor of both Routledge’s Screening Cinema and, with Yannis Tzioumakis, The Routledge Hollywood Centenary. Their forthcoming books are Sex, Guys, and Videotape: American Independent Cinema and the AIDS Crisis, a co-authored Queer Film Classics on the first AIDS film Buddies, and a co-edited collection on the filmmaker Andrew Haigh.