This book of twenty-six essays by fifteen authors on movie theory
and criticism is focused around the approach to movies of one person,
William R. Robinson, a member of  what one might call the Discoverer
generation in America of university-based theorists and critics of the movies.
This was the first group of university professors to make a career commitment
to study, teach, and defend movies as art, and therefore worthy of  intellectual
consideration. Through the 1950's and 60's these critics contributed importantly
to, and in return were fed by, the increasing enthusiasm of an expanding American
audience for the new phenomenon of "art movie" theaters offering a mix of
contemporary foreign films (by Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, Bertolucci, Resnais,
Truffaut, Godard, Tony Richardson, Richard Lester just to name directors
Robinson's essays discuss) and new movies by American masters and newcomers
(Ford and Hawks, as well as Kubrick, Altman, Penn, Peckinpah, and others,
again, all discussed in this book). The reviews of Robinson's seminal book Man
and the Movies, published in 1967, reveal that general enthusiasm: "A 21-gun salute
for this editor and his splendid book!...The mood is highly contemporary"
TV-Radio Mirror;  The New York Times: "assertive, knowledgeable, very articulate";
The Los Angeles Times: "One of the best books ever about motion pictures."

            This Discoverer generation of university movie theorists and critics
typically was self-taught, since there wasn't a university film major until 1948
(N.Y.U.). Of course most had Ph.D.'s, generally in a humanities discipline,
but they were the generation that had to discover, invent, and defend an intellectual
approach which matched only their experience of seeing movies, rather than rules
they had been taught by others. They were free to discover movies as a source of
new vision and novel possibilities.

            The passion of the Discoverers for the movies shone through their writings,
as is readily seen in a few of Robinson's essay titles: "The Movies, Too, Will Make
You Free"; "The Movies As a Revolutionary Moral Force, Parts I & II"; "If You
Don't See, You're Dead: The Immediate Encounter With the Image in Hiroshima Mon
Amour and Juliet of the Spirits"; and "The Birth of Imaginative Man in Part III of 2001:
A Space Odyssey." Robinson's background in philosophy has disposed him to approach
movies as moral phenomena that offer us new visions of life as a continually recurring process
of seeing creatively, of seeing in, through, and beyond what the the physical and conventional
eye allows that it sees. This process, he explains, generates new values by which we live our
lives. The first essay title above alludes to the famous dictum to "Know the Truth and the
Truth Shall Make You Free," and it is in the same spirit of moral passion that Robinson
declares the movie maker "a moral educator." Reading through his eleven essays, one
can follow Robinson's intellectual movement towards developinga complete moral view
of the movies, a project on which he continues to work.

            The fifteen essays in the second half of the book are presented by Robinson's
colleagues and former students to honor him both as an intellectual influence and a friend.
All of the authors are university professorst Their biographical profiles, often with photos,
are included in the book. Each addresses in one way or another some aspect of Robinson's intellectual vision, so thattheir essays constitute an elaboration of Robinsonian ideas, as well
as a source of new thinking on their chosen topics. Frank Burke and R.H.W. Dillard write
on a number of Fellini's films, while George Garrett, Armando José Prats, and A.Carl Bredahl, Jr. discuss the Western movie genre (Shane, and the Westerns of John Ford and Sam Peckinpah), and J. P. Telotte analyzes the film noir genre and neo-noir in The Usual Suspects. Vincent B. Leitch surveys theory of the last forty years, and David Lavery recounts his experience as a student with Robinson's theory. Steve Snyder traces the Emersonian vision in Busby Berkeley movies, and Richard P. Sugg calls on Robinson's ideas to analyze elements of Robert Altman's The Player and Short Cuts. Elaine Marshall writes on Robinson's approach to 2001, Walter
C. Foreman Jr. on Meriwether Lewis's vision in his Journals, and Susan Drake and A. Carl Bredahl Jr., assisted by Robinson himself, discuss the evolutionary narrative in Hemingway's
Green Hills of Africa. Annie Dillard opens and closes this second half of the book with two eloquent essays about vision and exploration and the human moral passion to keep seeing
and moving beyond, "Total Eclipse" and "An Expedition to the Pole."

            Near the end of Fellini's movie Roma there is a "Festival of Ourselves." After
the camera has surveyed this ancient city of famous ruins, invoking its gods and heroes and
storied grandeur, we suddenly turn a corner to discover the living inhabitants of the here-and-now city sitting down at tables uniting families and strangers outdoors in the street for a feast to
honor themselves. So let this Preface conclude on a similar note: this book is a cooperative
effort that honors not only Bill Robinson but also all of the contributors, as well as all the
readers who still care enough about movies to believe that they may discover the secret of
life by opening their eyes in the dark.