Film, Form, and Culture
	About the Author

About the Author

"Teaching film is about getting control of the image and handing that control over to students." That has been Robert Kolker's goal in teaching and writing about film for the past 30 years. "You can't stop a film when it's on the screen in a movie theater. And even though you might be able to push the pause button on the VCR or DVD, it's still difficult to provide the kind of intimacy with the text that students have when they read literature, for example."

So, combining his love of computers with his love of film, Kolker began experimenting with ways to deliver film in manageable, manipulable ways to an audience who could then watch carefully, see it analyzed, and interact with the moving image in a close and comfortable setting. The result is the CD-ROM and textbook, Film, Form, and Culture. The textbook results from another overriding interest: to present a thorough grounding in film form and theory in a readable setting that emphasizes not only the small formal matters of film structure, but the larger cultural contexts in which film thrives.

Robert Kolker chairs the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also teaches courses in films and the use of computer intervention in analyzing the moving image. He is the author of many books on film. A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman is in its third edition. His book on European film, The Altering Eye, is now on the World Wide Web (http://otal.umd.edu/~rkolker/AlteringEye). His first online work combining film analysis with moving images, "The Moving Image Reclaimed," can be found in Postmodern Culture (Volume 5, Number 1, September 1994, (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/toc/pmcv005.html). He edited the special film issue of that journal, Volume 8, Number 2, January 1998 (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/toc/pmcv008.html#v008.1).

His home page is http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~kolker