James Monaco - How to Read a Film Fourth Edition: Movies, Media, and Beyond

OTHER BOOKS BY JAMES MONACO

The New Wave
Media Culture
Celebrity
Alain Resnais
American Film Now
Whos Who in American Film Now (ed.)
The Connoisseurs Guide to the Movies
The International Encyclopedia of Film (ed.)
The Film Guide (ed.)
The Dictionary of New Media

Movies, Media, and Beyond

Art, Technology, Language, History, Theory

Fourth Edition, Completely Revised and Expanded

James Monaco

with diagrams by David Lindroth

2009

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford Universitys objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education.

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Copyright 1977,1981, 2000, 2009 by James Monaco

First published in 1977 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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ISBN: 978-0-19-532105-0 (pbk.)

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35798642

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The passage from Denise Levertovs The Rights Denise Levertov, 1957, reprinted by permission of City Lights Books. The page from Donald Barthelmes Sadness Donald Barthelme, 1970, 1971, 1972, reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Christian Metzs General Table of the Large Syntagmatic Category of the Image-Track from Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema by Christian Metz, translated by Michael Taylor, 1974 by Oxford University Press, Inc., reprinted by permission.

CREDITS
Joe Dunn: Photo Editor.

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

This edition of How to Read a Film is set in Adobes release of Aldus. Renowned typographer Hermann Zapf designed Aldus in 1954 for the Stempel foundry as a more readable companion to his famous Palatino. The name honors Aldus Manutius, the innovative fifteenth-century Italian printer and publisher. Zapf was one of the leading type designers of the twentieth century, and a pioneer in digital typography. The display type is Myriad Pro. The captions are set in Gill Sans.

READFILM.COM

For Susan

and our granddaughter

Katherine

Welcome!

The first edition of How to Read a Film appeared in 1977, a generation ago. The timing had been right for the book. We were just at the end of an exciting period in film history. In the sixties and seventies filmmakers had discovered their own history, a new generation of cineastes had emerged, and we were on the verge of a new technology that would change not only the way we make moviesbut our entire system of communication.

It has been fascinating to watch the development of this tectonic shift in society. The new technology is pervasive, and its effect on the way we make not only movies but all media is profound. The microcomputer revolution, which was beginning just as the first edition of How to Read a Film appeared, has thoroughly dominated the cultural and business history of our generation. The way we process text, images, and sounds today is radically different from what it was thirty years ago. And the union of media, which the invention of movies foreshadowed more than a hundred years ago, is now a reality. Its as if film, the defining medium of the twentieth century, was but prologue to the new media of the twenty-first. As the old technologies of chemistry and mechanics continue to yield to digital electronics and photonics, filmmakers are rediscovering the pioneer spirit. The medium is reinventing itself: now, if you can think it, you can film it.

The way we consume motion pictures has changed even more. In the 1970s, film buffs organized their lives around repertory-house schedules, and might travel fifty miles to catch a screening of a rare film. Today, tens of thousands of films are available on disc or on the web and you can be sure that, after Google finishes scanning all the worlds books, theyll turn their attention to digitizing all the worlds movies. Thirty years ago, very few of us actually owned movies; today, even fewer of us do not. Films are a lot more like books, now (and books are about to become more cinematic). In the past three decades our exposure to filmed entertainment has increased by several magnitudes. To my mind, this shift has been so great that it amounts to a qualitativenot just quantitativechange in the experience. More important, it has had a profound effect on the social contract. (Much of Chapters 6 and 7 deal with this new Mediasphere which now dominates our lives.)

Over the course of more than three decades and four editions was added to the third edition to discuss the digital world that had grown up since 1977. The first and second editions included a glossary which grew so much that it became its own book in 1999 (The Dictionary of New Media). Now that there are so many bibliographical tools available on the web, the extensive bibliography of the earlier editions has been replaced with a much shorter, more succinct list of suggested reading, which I hope you will find more useful.

But parts have changed very little. Chapters 1 (Film as an Art), 3 (The Language of Film), and 5 (Film Theory) have been updated but not radically restructured. The medium of film still bears the same relationship to the other arts as it did thirty years ago. Semiotics still seems to me the best way to understand how films mean what they mean (and examples drawn from the old masters seem the best illustrations). The basics of film theory were well described in the last century andalthough contemporary academics may disagreeI dont think in the last decades weve gone very far beyond the works discussed in .

Chapter 2 (Technology) presented a dilemma. The Maltese Cross, the variable shuttereven the reflex cameramust seem like quaint antiques to the digital generation. They are still here in the fourth edition because they illustrate important principles. One of the dangers of digital media is its abstraction: an appreciation for how mechanical/chemical cinema worked is, I think, critical to understanding the medium.

Youll find major changes in Chapters 4, 6, and 7. More than thirty percent of the text is new; there are 125 new illustrations and diagrams. But please understand that, despite the changes, Chapters 4 (Film History) and 6 (Media) remain just sketches of history: Scores of important and interesting films and television programs didnt make the cut.

I wrote the first edition of