HIST 4303: Film and History

Use this link to browse film-related reference materials among EBSCO eBooks,
or use the below search box to add your own terms to that search right from the outset.

Search for film-related reference materials in EBSCO eBooks

Some reference works of particular use might be:

• Historical Dictionary of American Cinema
• The Critical Dictionary of Film and Television Theory
• Closely Watched Films : An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Technique
• Encyclopedia of Film Themes, Settings and Series

Film reviews are often indexed and collected together with other articles (including about such films) from the relevant newspapers, magazines, and academic journals.

Often databases will include a limiter for "reviews" specifically, but sometimes the metadata the limiter depends on isn't present, and it can be more reliable to forgo that limiter and instead use the word "review*" as a search term. (Truncating it with * will allow for "reviewed" also, for instance.)

When looking for articles or reviews of a specific film, it should frequently be effective to include the title (using quotes to keep a phrase together) and the director's last or perhaps full name, along with the word review* as applicable.

For instance,
"Shop on Main Street" Kadar
or
"decision to leave" Park review*

If a given title/director combination brings back many entirely unelated results, it may be worth adding
film* OR movie* OR "motion picture*"

You might find worthwhile the non-catalog search of our main discovery service or any of these databases:

To search for books related to film history, criticism, and production
Use the Advanced Search and include subject terms that either precisely are or are included in
Library of Congress Subject Headings.

There are many very specific LC subject headings relevant for film studies;
to limit to works about film and movies while allowing for multiple genres, specialties, or concepts, you can include these terms that occur within a lot of those subject headings:

Subject contains film* OR "motion picture*"
Subject contains history OR criticism

such as you see in this linked search.

You can then combine that with other terms, whether you search for them in the Subject field or any other field, or you can use any of the subject headings listed on the linked page.

We may have relevant videos, whether of feature films or documentary content, on DVD or in one of a few possible databases.

Relevant databases might include:

Swank and Feature Films for Education each have several movies of interest but are relatively limited in their reach, and many other movies of interest will be missing from them.

To search our catalog and limit results only to videos with a location of Loan Shelves (which currently includes our Audio Visual collection), you may find this search box helpful: