"Cinema and Cultural Modernity carves a path through the complex histories and issues of film and cinema studies and vividly explores these in their social and political contexts. It focuses on selected topics such as Hollywood's histories and how authorship, stardom and globalized blockbuster cinema, its pleasures and disappointments, might be thought out. Gill Branston outlines the need for cinema study that is both sensitive to the formal 'textiness' of films, but also less anxious about arguing for its position within broad agendas of representation. She shows how such debates and histories might connect both the very real pleasures of 'consuming' cinema with the need for a critical politics to address the persistent social and cultural inequalities of modernity.". "This is a text for undergraduate courses and an essential source of reference for researchers."--BOOK JACKET.