This book includes many seminal articles by film scholars such as Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, Stephen Heath, Peter Wollen, Laura Mulvey, and Noel Burch. Also included are articles by the era's leading cultural thinkers: Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Jean-Francçois Lyotard, to name a few.

Philip Rosen has carefully organized these essays to open the reader to a number of central issues in film theory including the classical narrative text, oppositional and avant-garde cinema, subject positioning, the cinematic apparatus, and ideology. Rosen's introductions to each section explain the assumptions, ideas, and arguments important to the articles, and help place the essays in the context of the history of film theory, of narrative analysis, and of social and cultural theory.