9780131890985

Helps readers understand how the many languages of film work together to create meaning. Louis Giannetti organizesUnderstanding Movies around the key elements of filmmaking, including cintematography, Mise en Scène, movement, editing, sound, acting, drama, casting, story, screenwriting, ideology, and theory. He synthesizes every element through a complete case study:Citizen Kane . This book's ideas are illuminated with hundreds of high-quality still photos, more than 70 in full color, taken from movies such asThe Matrix, Almost Famous, jackass the movie, Chicago, Lord of the Rings, Mystic River, and Traffic . New in this edition: a full section on contemporary special effects and computer generated imagery (CGI); up-to-the-minute information on new developments in film technology; more coverage of recent films and filmmakers; more ethnic diversity (including new material on the Islamic cinema); and more lavish use of color and high-quality paper. An updated Companion Website contains animations, video clips from interviews with movie professionals, and Research Navigator access toNew York Times film reviews. For everyone who wants to understand the artistry and meaning of the movies.

Louis Giannetti is a Professor Emeritus of English and Film at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland

Preface	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. x
Photography	p. 1
Overview	p. 2
Realism and Formalism	p. 2
The Shots	p. 11
The Angles	p. 13
Light and Dark	p. 18
Color	p. 24
Lenses, Filters, and Stocks	p. 29
Special Effects	p. 35
The Cinematographer	p. 39
Further Reading	p. 46
Mise en Scene	p. 47
Overview	p. 48
The Frame	p. 48
Composition and Design	p. 60
Territorial Space	p. 70
Proxemic Patterns	p. 81
Open and Closed Forms	p. 88
Further Reading	p. 97
Movement	p. 99
Overview	p. 100
Kinetics	p. 101
The Moving Camera	p. 118
Mechanical Distortions of Movement	p. 129
Further Reading	p. 139
Editing	p. 141
Overview	p. 142
Continuity	p. 142
D. W. Griffith and Classical Cutting	p. 147
Soviet Montage and the Formalist Tradition	p. 163
Andre Bazin and the Tradition of Realism	p. 178
Hitchcock's North by Northwest: Storyboard Version	p. 191
Further Reading	p. 216
Sound	p. 217
Overview	p. 218
Historical Background	p. 218
Sound Effects	p. 225
Music	p. 229
Musicals	p. 237
Spoken Language	p. 241
Further Reading	p. 254
Acting	p. 255
Overview	p. 256
Stage and Screen Acting	p. 257
The American Star System	p. 269
Styles of Acting	p. 286
Casting	p. 299
Further Reading	p. 304
Drama	p. 307
Overview	p. 308
Time, Space, and Language	p. 309
The Director	p. 318
Settings and Decor	p. 323
Costumes and Makeup	p. 337
Further Reading	p. 348
Story	p. 349
Overview	p. 350
Narratology	p. 352
The Spectator	p. 355
The Classical Paradigm	p. 359
Realistic Narratives	p. 364
Formalistic Narratives	p. 368
Nonfictional Narratives	p. 371
Genre and Myth	p. 377
Further Reading	p. 388
Writing	p. 389
Overview	p. 390
The Screenwriter	p. 390
The Screenplay	p. 398
North by Northwest: Reading Version	p. 403
Figurative Comparisons	p. 409
Point of View	p. 418
Literary Adaptations	p. 421
Further Reading	p. 426
Ideology	p. 427
Overview	p. 428
The Left-Center-Right Model	p. 434
Culture, Religion, and Ethnicity	p. 443
Feminism	p. 454
Gay Liberation	p. 462
Tone	p. 468
Further Reading	p. 471
Critique	p. 473
Overview	p. 474
Theories of Realism	p. 476
Formalist Film Theories	p. 483
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. -- MARCEL PROUST, NOVELIST AND ART CRITIC Cineliteracy is long overdue in American education, and not just at the college level. According toThe Television and Video Almanac,the average American family watches about seven hours of television per day. That's a lot of time watching moving images. Yet, for the most part, we watch them uncritically, passively, allowing them to wash over us, rarely analyzing how they work on us, how they can shape our values. The following chapters may be of use in understanding how television and movies communicate, and the complex network of language systems they use. My purpose is not to teach viewers how to respond to moving images, but to suggest some of the reasons people respond as they do. In this tenth edition, I have retained the same principle of organization as the earlier editions, structuring the chapters around the realism-formalism dichotomy. Each chapter isolates the various language systems and spectrum of techniques used by filmmakers in conveying meaning. Naturally, the chapters don't pretend to be exhaustive: They're essentially starting points. They progress from the most narrow and specific aspects of cinema to the most abstract and comprehensive. The chapters are not tightly interdependent: They can be read out of sequence. Inevitably, such a looseness of organization involves a certain amount of overlapping, but I have tried to keep this to a minimum. Technical terms areboldfacedthe first time they appear in each chapter, which means that they are defined in the Glossary. Each chapter has been updated to reflect recent developments in the field. I have also included many new photos and captions, most of them from recently released movies. The final chapter, "Synthesis:Citizen Kane," is a recapitulation of the main ideas of the previous chapters, applied to a single movie. The chapter can also serve as a rough model for a term paper. VCR and DVD has allowed film analysis to be much more systematic, because a movie in cassette or disk form can be repeated many times.Citizen Kaneis an ideal choice because it includes virtually every technique the medium is capable of, in addition to being one of the most critically admired films in history and a popular favorite among students.

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Understanding Movies

Understanding Movies

0131890980

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