Brief Table of Contents
Preface
Part One: Film Art and Filmmaking
Chapter 1. Putting Films on Screen
Part Two: Film Form
Chapter 2. The Significance of Film Form
Chapter 3. Narrative as a Formal System
Part Three: Film Style
Chapter 4. The Shot: Mise-en-Scene
Chapter 5. The Shot: Cinematography
Chapter 6. The Relation of Shot to Shot: Editing
Chapter 7. Sound in the Cinema
Chapter 8. Style as a Formal System
Part Four: Types of Films
Chapter 9. Film Genres
Chapter 10. Documentary, Experimental, and Animated Films
Part Five: Critical Analysis of Films
Introduction: Writing a Critical Analysis of a Film
Chapter 11. Sample Analyses
Part Six: Film Art and Film History
Chapter 12. Film Art and Film History
I only have one warning and one complaint about this book. The warning is that this book is for newbies. I had read portions of it for a class years ago and in returning to it recently, I realized I knew the material and was bored with it. My second complaint is that it cites way too many movies. Nearly every example is a different movie. The author essentially uses the reverse approach of this blog. When I read a book on film, especially an aesthetics and theory book as opposed to a factual book, I like to get all the references, put them into context and not have portions of movies given away. Now I know that no two people have seen all the same movies, but given the sheer breadth of references here, even the most serious cinephile will have a whole lot of movies they have never seen or even heard of. Considering you could nearly write the entire book with examples from Citizen Kane, the current set-up comes off as unnecessary and pedantic, although I suppose it may have been the point to introduce readers to so many movies as well as to show the sheer pervasiveness of the ideas in the book.
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