Book cover of How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, and Beyond

Book description

Richard Gilman referred to How to Read a Film as simply "the best single work of its kind." And Janet Maslin in 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…


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Why read it?

1 author picked How to Read a Film as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This is another seminal text which introduced me to the critical theory of film viewers as “readers.”

Watching a movie is not a passive activity. The mind is very active, constantly shifting through the multiple channels of information, organizing the details into a coherent picture of the fictional world presented in the film.

Monaco examines several ways in which this creative-receptive process works in the viewer’s mind.

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December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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