James Monaco’s How To Read A Film is a triumph in bringing together a very wide range of theoretical, social, aesthetic, political, economic, historical, and technical information and ideas about film.He has also addressed the broader range of media in general. It has been considered the “bible” by many on film history and theory for three decades. As a young film student 25 years ago, this was a required text for me then and still is today in many important schools. I learned so much from it then, and amazingly, continue to take away insights which inform my own film-making even today.
Some of the comments from other reviewers here are a bit baffling, to be frank. I don’t find his writing style to be irritating at all; just the opposite! I feel that one of Monaco’s real strengths is his style; he deals with what could easily be rather dry material in a way that has me unable to turn the pages fast enough. He always keeps the subject very interesting and is quite economical and free of excesses and digressions in his delivery.
If anything, I found myself wanting to know more at times. Given the utterly ambitious amount of material that he is dealing with, I truly applaud him for the organizational skill and deft handling of the presentation of such a massive amount of information! I think that he brings it all together extremely well with three indexes and a remarkable bibliography to support a highly accessible and coherent structure of chapters.
There is perhaps only one area that I might raise a critical question. That concerns Monaco’s complete understanding of semiotics and the rhetorical devices of literary theory. He, of course, applies them extensively to film analysis; but I did yearn for a bit more scholarship at times. For example, the term “trope” is defined in a great many texts as a rhetorical figure which represents the specific figures: metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, hyperbole, etc. But Monaco doesn’t use it that way and it’s a little confusing. It may simply be that these terms have evolved and have acquired nuanced meanings in film analysis.
Authors: James Monaco
