Preface
This book has been designed with a particular course in mind: World Cinema and Visual Culture, an introductory film course at the University of Waterloo.
When I took over this course from the previous instructor in 2022, I looked at the many very fine textbooks, both commercial and open access, that exist in film studies. Most of the commercial texts now come with a variety of online materials that lighten the instructor’s load, for example film clips and exercises and test banks. The open textbooks – often referred to as open educational resources, or OERs – tend to have fewer clips (and those are dependent on their owners keeping them current on YouTube or Vimeo), and they usually don’t provide the assessment materials that instructors find so convenient.
So of course I took the path less travelled and chose to create an open textbook. Two key reasons informed this decision:
- open textbooks have a major advantage over commercial textbooks: you can adapt, modify, delete, and add material at will, and you can share those modifications for others to use. This way I can tailor the textbook to the particular needs of the course I’m teaching. Almost all of the textbooks I looked at didn’t investigate world cinema, and those that did, did so in a manner that wouldn’t meet my goals for the course (using from a variety of national cinemas to teach students how stories get told on film and video, and to have students consider the cultural and social influences on the stories those filmmakers were telling).
- open textbooks are free, and they’re available from day one of the course. I have nothing against removing obstacles to student learning.
So this text that you’re reading – Contemporary World Cinema – is based largely on Russell Sharman’s open textbook Moving Pictures; the section An Introduction to Cinema has been imported from his book and left largely intact. I have made some minor changes (e.g. replacing American spelling with Canadian spelling, repairing or removing broken links, occasionally adding some commentary), and to the end of each chapter in that section I’ve added a film analysis question guide drawn from Anton Kaes and Eric Rentschler’s “How to Read a Film Sequence.” When I’ve felt some additional information was in order in this section, I’ve often drawn it from Yelizaveta Moss and Candice Wilson’s open textbook Film Appreciation. I’m grateful to all of these authors for making their work open and accessible.
Let me also point out that the first edition of this text will be a work in progress during the fall of 2022. I’m teaching the world cinema course in the fall term, and I’ll be modifying the text during the term, in particular the chapters on the films I’ll be teaching, in order to incorporate ideas and questions generated by the students. So if you’re making use of this text during 2022, you’ll only have access to a web version. Print and PDF versions will be forthcoming in 2023.
If you’re an instructor, the fact that this textbook is geared to the course I’m teaching may not suit your needs. But if you find anything in it that’s useful, by all means take it and make use of it. All I ask is that you respect the Creative Commons license that governs the use of the materials you’ll find here, and to contact me if you have questions or suggestions or just want to let me know how you’re using the book: skidmore@uwaterloo.ca.
