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Understanding Movies
Eighth Edition
by Louis Giannetti
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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 to The 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. I entertain no grand pretense at teaching viewers how to respond to moving images; rather, I am concerned with suggesting some of the reasons people respond as they do.
In this eighth edition, I have retained the same principle of organization as the earlier editions, structuring the chapters around the realismÐformalism 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 (photography and movement) to the most abstract and comprehensive (ideology and theory). 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 are boldfaced the 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. The VCR revolution has allowed film analysis to be much more systematic, because a movie in cassette form can be repeated many times. In my own courses, I require my students to select a scene--preferably under three minutes--and analyze all its components according to the chapters of this book. Of course, a term paper is not likely to be as detailed as the Citizen Kane analysis, but the same methodology can be applied. If the chapters are read in a different sequence, the term paper can be organized in a corresponding manner. For example, many people would prefer to begin an analysis with story or theme, and then proceed to matters of style and technique. Citizen Kane is 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.
A word about the photos in this book. Most of the illustrations are publicity photos, taken with a 35-mm still camera. They are not frame enlargements from the movie itself, for such enlargements reproduce poorly. They are generally too harshly contrasting and lacking in detail compared to the moving image on a large screen. When exactitude was necessary, as in the series from The Seven Samurai (9Ð14) or the edited sequence from Potemkin (4Ð18), I included actual blowups from the movies themselves. Most of the time, however, I preferred to use publicity photos because of their superior technical resolution.
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