The Film Studies Dictionary

Abstract

SEMANTIC VAGUENESS has been a typical feature of cinema's professional terminology and taxonomy, a problem which exists both in the academic circles of film studies and among film-makers themselves. Moreover, it is amplified by fashionable but meaningless jargon of some film reviewers and commercial newspeak, the intention of which is often disinformation in the first place. Over the past decades, a few attempts have been made to improve this situation through the publication of film term glossaries and dictionaries, including Geduld-Gottesman's An Illustrated Glossary of Film Terms (1973), S. E. Browne's Film-Video Terms and Concepts (1992) and F. Beaver's Dictionary of Film Terms (1994). A major difficulty facing film dictionary writers has been whether to aim at the practical filmmaker or academic theorist; uniting these two user groups has not always been successful. Another problem plaguing some of these reference publications has been that the entries did not go beyond...