Includes bibliographical references and index.

Themes -- The National / Paul Willemen -- The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage / George E. Marcus -- Experience, Re-presentation, and Film / Leslie Devereaux -- Case Studies: Photography -- Photography and Film: Figures in/of History / Anne-Marie Willis -- Modernism and the Photographic Representation of War and Destruction / Bernd Huppauf -- Case Studies: Film -- Horror and the Carnivalesque: The Body-monstrous / Barbara Creed -- Barrymore, the Body, and Bliss: Issues of Male Representation and Female Spectatorship in the 1920s / Gaylyn Studlar -- Narrative, Sound, and Film: Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun / Roger Hillman -- Novel into Film: The Name of the Rose / Gino Moliterno -- The Subject(ive) Voice -- The Subjective Voice in Ethnographic Film / David MacDougall -- Mediating Culture: Indigenous Media, Ethnographic Film, and the Production of Identity / Faye Ginsburg -- The Pressure of the Unconscious upon the Image: The Subjective Voice in Documentary / Susan Dermody -- Robert Gardner's Rivers of Sand: Toward a Reappraisal / Peter Loizos -- Cultures, Disciplines, Cinemas / Leslie Devereaux.

Filmed images dominate our time, from the movies and TV that entertain us to the news and documentaries that inform us and shape our cultural vocabulary. Cutting across disciplinary boundaries, Fields of Vision is a path-breaking collection of essays that inquire into the power (and limits) of film and photography to make sense of ourselves and others. As critics, social scientists, filmmakers, and literary scholars, the contributors converge on the issues of representation and the construction of visual meaning across cultures.

From the dismembered bodies of horror film to the exotic bodies of ethnographic film and the gorgeous bodies of romantic cinema, Fields of Vision moves across eras, genres, and societies. Always asking how images work to produce meaning, the essays address the way the "real" on film creates fantasy and news as well as "science," and they consider this problematic process as cultural boundaries are crossed. One essay discusses the effects of Hollywood's high-capital, worldwide commercial hegemony over local and non-Western cinemas, while another explores the response of indigenous people in central Australia to the forces of mass media and video. Other essays uncover the work of the unconscious in cinema, the shaping of "female spectatorship" by the "women's film" genre of the 1920s, and the effects of the personal and subjective in documentary films and the photographs of war reportage.

In illuminating dark, elided, or willfully neglected areas of representation, the contributions in this volume help to uncover new fields of vision.