Film history as cinema history

How cinema was viewed and understood is historically embedded and discernible in films. Cinema has repeatedly, irregularly, and very spontaneously provided indications of how it wanted to be seen and how it was to be understood. It deposited hints in its images about a changed reality and the access to reality in general, reflecting its relationship with the audience in its forms. Therefore, the subject of the book is not so much the aesthetic evaluation of films, a poetics, but rather a somewhat different systematics of film history: films as a historical expression of cinema - films by Dario Argento, Kathryn Bigelow, Jan de Bont, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Dennis Hopper, Buster Keaton, Alan J. Pakula, Sam Peckinpah, Max Ophüls, Martin Scorsese, Mack Sennett, Steven Spielberg, Denis Villeneuve, Haskell Wexler, Peter Yates.