Title: How To Read A Film
Rating: 4 Stars
As readers of this blog know, I’ve been trying to educate myself on film. Back in 2019, I spent a year or two going through the 2008 AFI (American Film Institute) best films list. Although it has not been updated in over fifteen years, I still recommend it as a great place to go to get a grounding in American film lore. My major beef against it is that it is not very representative. With the exception of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, the other 99 films are all directed by white men. Now that I’ve gotten more experienced in film, that is a pretty glaring problem. There are many female and people of color that could easily have been added to the list. After all, Spielberg had five films on the list and Hitchcock, Wilder, and Kubrick each had four. Seventeen percent of the list is occupied by three names. Despite that obvious lapse, it’s still an interesting list of important films.
Back in 2022, the British Film Institute published the top 250 films in the world in its Sight and Sound magazine. The good news is that the list is way more inclusive. The number one film on the list was directed by a woman and other women and people of color are all over the list.
The not so good news is that it exposed how parochial my interest in. Yes, there is a significant overlap between the AFI list and the BFI list (eg Citizen Kane, The Godfather, Vertigo), but of the top 50, well over half are non US films. I’d never even heard of the majority of those films.
So, I’ve been giving myself the homework of watching at least the top 50 of the BFI list. Having just finished watching my 49th, I’m just one away from my goal. What have I learned?
Well, my subscription to Max has proven to be quite valuable. Max has some kind of relationship with the Criterion Channel, so many of the films are available on Max. Even so, there are still challenges finding some of the top rated films. Ordet, the Danish film which is the last of the top 50 that I haven’t watched, isn’t available anywhere to stream other than the Criterion Channel, so I guess that I’ll be signing up for that service as well. Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon was hidden away on Tubi. I couldn’t find Killer of Sheep anywhere, but at the last moment I did find a copy of it on the Internet Archive (complete with Spanish subtitles). The Danish film Ordet is also on the Internet Archive with Spanish subtitles, but watching a Danish film with Spanish subtitles isn’t quite good enough for me to understand it.
Another thing that I’ve learned is how, even though by now, over the last five years, I’ve watched coming up on six hundred films, the fact of the matter is that I really still don’t understand a lot. Especially with the BFI list, it seems that foreign filmmakers place a greater intellectual burden on the film viewer. I find myself occasionally lost.
To rectify this, I decided to find a film studies book. I poked around and the book that was consistently recommended was How To Read A Film, by James Monaco.
I approached the book with some trepidation. After all, it was written all of the way back in 1977. Much has happened since then. Monaco has published new releases in 1981, 2000, 2009, and, most recently, 2013. To his credit, these aren’t minor revisions. Whole sections have the book were added or heavily revised.
I was not disappointed. As I said in my Goodreads review, I found it exhaustive and exhausting. It is not a book for the faint of heart. Having said that, the writing is accessible. Monaco is an encyclopedia on the subject of film and here is his life’s work. Since I can’t really do justice to his ideas in this brief review, let me just touch on the subjects that he discusses.
When I say he starts at the beginning, he starts at the beginning. Forget about film. He starts by defining art and how it’s an abstraction of reality and what that means. He brings up other art forms like painting, theater, music, and novels and explains how each informs the art of film.
He then moves onto the mechanics of film making. He explains how images are made and how sound is made. He goes into details about cameras, lens, and filmstock, including how attributes like aspect ratio, grain, gauge, and speed affect the film making process.
He then discusses the language of film via the introduction of semiotics (the study of symbols). He talks denotative vs connotative meaning. He discusses montage and mise-en-Scene. Usefully, he first defines mise-en-Scene but then explains how it and montages are separate but yet interrelated. He defines and explains paradigmatic vs syntagmatic. Believe it or not, not only does he explain it, but he does it in a way that I found the two concepts fascinating.
He then goes into film history. This is not a shallow dive. He starts with the essential contrast between the two early French filmmakers, the verisimilitude of the Lumière brothers vs the fantasy of the magician Georges Méliès and how those two different ideas of film are still redounding over a century later.
He then goes into detail regarding world wide filmmaking in the 120 years since. Sure he talks about titans like Steven Spielberg and Ingmar Bergman. That’s a given. Do you want to learn about the early 1970s Chilean revolution in filmmaking before Pinochet came to power and shut it down? Because yes, he’s got a paragraph about that. I’m telling you that the breadth and depth of his historical knowledge of global film will stagger you.
In case that doesn’t leave you overwhelmed, you learn that he considers film to be any media that consists of moving images. Yes, that includes television. He has a whole section that describes what television is, how it actually works, including signal processing and how that translates to a picture on a Cathode Ray Tube. He then delves into a history of television with discussions on everything from Milton Berle to Ernie Kovacs to The Cosby Show to South African television.
Not content to end there, he then discusses video. Not only does he discuss the various video standards but discusses how video compression works and its drawbacks. He includes in this discussion the impact that home video use has had on the film industry.
The amount of detail in this book is staggering. I feel like he used some kind of compression technique in writing it, because it feels like he packed an encyclopedia’s worth of knowledge into a 700 page book.
My only beef is that he hasn’t revised it since 2013. He mentions youTube but doesn’t talk much about the actual impact that streaming small subsets of films has had or will have on the future of film. Similarly, TikTok is nowhere mentioned here. As our consumption of media becomes ever so truncated, it would seem to follow that it’s going to have a dramatic effect on the film industry. This book is quiet on the subject of the streaming services. Nearly all films are available somewhere but now you have to find it on some fragmented set of services (Netflix, Amazon, Max, Peacock, Disney, Criterion, Tubi, Kanopy, and so on). Films can be watched on anything from a phone to a tablet to a television to a home theater room to a movie theater to IMAX. What impact does that form factor variety have on the production and design of a film? I’d love to hear his thoughts on the subject.
I’m not going to lie. It was all a bit much. I’m not even going to pretend that I absorbed even one percent of it. However, I do feel like I have a much better understanding of what to look for from some of the more nontraditional filmmakers. I also now have it as a handy reference book that I can consult and probably even re-read as I continue my cinematic journey.
dorkenstein 