How to Read a Film: The World of Movies, Media, Multimedia: Language, History, Theory

This book is the most lucid textbook on film theory. While there are many other written textbooks on film theory, I have found the few other textbooks that I encountered either full of trivia or too watered down or almost like commentaries rather than text books. This book examines cinema from the technical, evolutionary and cultural perspectives and also gives the most lucid exposition of the work of various film theorists like Metz, Mitry, Eisentein, Kracauer, Wollen and others. Particularly relevant are the explanations of differences between montage and mise en scene approaches, types of montage and grand syntagmas of cinema (cinematic grammars). It also sounds and reads like a deft synthesis of all that can be said about cinema rather than as a loosely strung collection of information that students might seek. It also contains one of the most comprehensive and relevant bibliographies on film theory.

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 Len

Monaco's "How To Read A Film" is an excellent introduction to film theory and it's concepts.While we have all aquired a certain level of "cinematic language" (you can't help it, it's part of watching movies), Monaco provides a Dictonary and Thesaurus for those of us who want a deeper understanding of the film "experience" and the language to descibe it with.Don't be daunted by the above paragraph, either -- Monoco is a good enough writer that it's much easier to read the book than to read *about* the book. Also an excellent companion piece to Cook's "History Of Narrative Film".

"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).

This book from James Monaco is a very good book for beginners in the film buisness and for people who simply want to have an impression what is this moviemaking all about. Monaco does all this in a very easy and understandable way. It is not written for the people from a film class, it is written for normal people with a great interst in the movie world. For this people I think this book is perfect.