Cinema Then and Now

Conversations with Craig S. Simpson

Part memoir, part critical inquiry, Cinema Then and Now is a wide-ranging conversation with distinguished film scholar and critic James Naremore. In this book-length interview, he reflects on his youth, education, and decades as a writer and teacher, before turning to questions that have shaped his career and continue to animate debates around cinema: the politics of film, the formation of canons, the challenges of adaptation, the evolution of genres, the collaborative nature of filmmaking, and the place of cinema in the age of streaming and digital decay. Occasionally zooming in on specific films — from Psycho to Citizen Kane to Letter from an Unknown Woman — Naremore traces how directors, screenwriters, composers, designers and editors solve problems and create meaning. The result is a thought-provoking, generously illustrated reflection on Hollywood and world cinema of past, present and future, written with the clarity, insight and candor that have made Naremore’s work essential reading for over half a century.

James Naremore, Emeritus Chancellors’ Professor at Indiana University, is the author of several books on film, among them The Magic World of Orson Welles (2015), Acting in the Cinema (1988), More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts (2008), On Kubrick (2023), Charles Burnett: A Cinema of Symbolic Knowledge (2017), and, with Darlene J. Sadlier, The Haunted Cinema of Pedro Costa (2025).

^{Cinema Then and Now (2025)
Paperback ISBN 979-8-89976-001-3 266pp 5×9.2 inches, with b/w images
Hardback ISBN 979-8-89976-002-0 266pp 5×9.2 inches, with b/w images}