After over a century of existence, the cinema still has its mysteries. Why, for example, is the job we call movie stardom unlike any other in the world? How do films provide so much unconcealed information that we fail to notice? What makes it hard to define what counts as ¿acting¿? How do movies like Casablanca and Breathless store the film and world histories of their generations? How can we reconcile auteurism¿s celebration of the movie director¿s authority with the cameräs automatism? Why have the last four decades of film criticism so often neglected such questions? After beginning with an overview of film studies, this book