Product Description

Richard Gilman referred to How to Read a Film as simply "the best single work of its kind." Janet Maslin of The New York Times Book Review marveled at James Monaco's ability to collect "an enormous amount of useful information and assemble it in an exhilaratingly simple and systematic way." And Richard Roud, Director of the New York Film Festival stated, "Anyone who writes about film, who is interested in film seriously, just has to have it." Clearly, few books on film have met with such critical acclaim as How to Read a Film. Since its original publication in 1977, this hugely popular book has become the definitive source on film and media. Now, James Monaco offers a completely revised and rewritten third edition that brings every major aspect of this dynamic medium right up to the present day. Looking at film from many vantage points, Monaco discusses the elements necessary to understand how a film conveys its meaning, and, more importantly, how the audience can best discern all that a film is attempting to communicate. He begins by setting movies in the context of the more traditional arts such as the novel, painting, photography, theater--even music--demonstrating that film as a narrative technique is directly comparable to these older mediums. He points out that much of what we see and experience in film can be traced directly back to other art forms. Accordingly, as film is a technology as well as an art, he examines the intriguing science of cinema and follows the development of the electronic media and its parallel growth with film during this century. A new chapter on multimedia brings media criticism into the late 1990s with a thorough discussion of such topics as virtual reality and cyberspace and their relationship to film. Monaco goes on to show how film operates as a language, describing the various techniques and concepts responsible for the often visceral reactions that only film can elicit.

Lavishly illustrated with over 350 halftones and seventy-four original diagrams, as well as discussions on the development of the art of movies and the major theoretical developments of the last seventy-five years, How to Read a Film is an exciting and definitive behind the scenes look at the complex world of film.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #491236 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 672 pages

Review

*Praise for previous editions:
"This book is a compliment to the reader....Monaco's spirit is gracious; he has a gift for making accumulations of detail relevant and uncluttered. His manner is modest and undidactic, and he is painstakingly scrupulous."--Samson Raphaelson, Film Comment
"An astute and thoroughgoing analysis....Monaco is cuts above the popular 'criticism' of Reed, Kael, et al. He is lucid and sophisticated."--Publishers Weekly

About the Author

James Monaco is a writer, publisher, and producer. His books include American Film Now, The New Wave, The Encyclopedia of Film, and The Connoisseur's Guide to the Movies.

Customer Reviews

How to Read a Film from Mise En Scene to Montage
"How to Read a Film" is one of those books that tell you something you already know. I remember how incredibly quiet it was in the packed theater watching "The Blair Witch Project" and realizing that the film was being "read" in such a way that everyone was on the edge of their seat because something was about to happen and because nothing really did happen in that movie the suspense was killing everyone. If you are raised watching films then you learn how to "read" them. What James Monaco does in his book is provide the conceptual vocabulary that is used in the fields of movie making and academic criticism to describe the process.

"How to Read a Film" has six parts. (I) "Film As An Art" establishes where film stands in relationship to other types of performance, representational and recording arts. (II) "Technology: Image and Sound" deals with the hardware of making movies from lens and camera to film stock and projection. (III) "The Language of Film: Signs and Syntax" is the key chapter where Monaco works out the codes of mise en scene and montage. (IV) "The Shape of Film History" makes a useful distinction between the economics of "movies," the politics of "film" and the esthetics of "the cinema." (V) "Film: Theory: Form and Function" looks at theorists on film, which includes not only critics like Bazin but directors like Eisenstein and Godard. (VI) "Media" briefly extends some of the book's ideas to non-film media including television, radio and video. There are also three appendixes: a first class glossary of terms, a bibliography of film/media works and a chronology of film and media.

Even when I have not used this as a textbook in a film class, I have always relied on Monaco's work. His strength is in not only defining concepts but in contextualizing them so that you understand the relationship between various categories of terms. As a result, once students have digested the wealth of information contained within, they could look at a scene from a film lasting less than a minute and write a 50-page essay detailing how the film demands to be read by its audience. As I said in the beginning, we already know how to read a film. What this book does is give us the vocabulary for talking about it once we leave the theater (or rewind the video tape).

Misleading title
While not as concentrated, pragmatic, or reader-friendly as the title might suggest, Monaco's book is still the best comprehensive one-volume introduction to the aesthetics, politics, economics, theory, phenomenology, and industry of film. It's best seen as complementary to more basic introductory texts and detailed histories. Readers with a theoretical bent are most likely to appreciate its unique strengths.

Or, how to ethically use a film in this Information Age
James Monaco states early on if that poetry is something one can't translate, and if art is something one can't define, then film is something that can't be explained. He tries to in this book. Film is shaped by politics, philosophy, economics and the technology of a society, with that last being more a key factor with the digital revolution. How To Read A Film-Movies, Media, Multimedia is more than just a book on film technique, history, and theory. It's that last word in the title that is given emphasis on in the last section, including the emphasis that the book is also about How To USE a Film.

Techniques are covered include lighting, aspect ratio, tracks, film grade, and codes. And yes, there is the requisite film history, which is heavily condensed and goes through individual directors, countries, and certain genres in film. As only one chapter's devoted to it, but it's a quick cram-course in who's who, who-directed-what?, who-starred-in-what?, and what was going on in such-and-such a country.

Another interesting concept is the terms film, cinema, and movies. The terms are defined in the way we look at the medium. Film is what it's called in relationship to the world, i.e. politics. Cinema refers to a more aesthetic and intellectual stance. And movie is a named when defined as a consumer-oriented, economic commodity. The terminology is interesting when one defines a performance as the sum of the actor's persona in conflict with the role he plays.

Monaco then spends some time discussing the two schools, expressionism/formalism versus neorealism/functionalism. Expressionism, derived in Germany from such masters as Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, focuses on the inner aspect of humanity, using symbols, stereotypes, stylization, which eventually influenced directors such as Hitchcock and Welles. Formalism, more from the Soviet masters like Sergei Eisenstein, is more analytic and scientific, concerned with technique. There are discussions of montage (series of shots that advance the action) vs. mis-en-scene (deep focus photography that allows more audience participation in the film experience) and the schools of thought that argued in favour of one over the other. There's an interesting observation by Andre Bazin, who saw film as the asymptote to reality, the imaginary line that nears but never touches reality, which if put into conjunction into the earlier definition of film being something that can't be explained.

All this leds to multimedia and virtual reality. Most of the latter deals with the information age, detailing the history of computers and Internet, which led to the control and access to information. This ties in with the ethics regarding copyright in the merging of texts, images and sound, and downloading MP3's in this postmodernist, recontextualization of art, where film sits squarely. Doesn't this surely affect burning DVD's from the Net, which serves to accelerate already shrinking box office takings? Monaco quotes Lenin on how ethics is the esthetics of the future, sums this dilemma up pretty well.

Monaco uses the example of David Bowman, the astronaut in 2001, and the virtual cage he's in at the end of the movie, to describe how our closed personalized environments, created to block out the noisy outside world, may give us security, i.e. Discmans, cellphones, VCR viewings as opposed to theatrical outings, but at the cost of losing touch visually and morally from our surroundings. Invaluable due to its being not only about the past of film, but its future as well.