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This collection of essays, written between 1970 and 1985, traces the author's thinking from a formalist position to his present preoccupation with the social, ideological and pedagogical dimensions of the film. There are essays on some of the classic auteurs such as Eisenstein, Dreyer, Lang, L'Herbier and Porter, the silent Soviet cinema, the parallels between primitive cinema and the various avant-gardes, and on the functioning of archetypal sub-text as exemplified in Lang's first Mabuse. There are also articles on the issues of language in the political propoganda film, on the auto-reflexive agit-prop strategies of Miss Mend (Barnett and Ozep, 1926), and on the relations between the Japanese cinema and the classical film language of the West.