If anyone is qualified to guide readers in how to watch a movie, it is veteran film critic Thomson (
The New Biographical Dictionary of Film; Have You Seen…??). For the author, movie watching is not a passive entertainment, though he is admittedly massively entertained by film, but an elegant exercise in paying attention and awareness. To watch a movie is to see it more than once. With a prose style more conversational than didactic, Thomson dissects how the technical vocabulary of filmmaking, such as the frame, shot, cut, and sound, is used to re-create the human experience on screen. Part film interpretation, part psychology, this volume explores how the experience of watching artifice on celluloid film, digital print, or LCD screen arouses real-life emotions. Thomson supports his thesis with penetrating analysis of some of the usual suspects—
Citizen Kane, Rebel Without a Cause, and several Alfred Hitchcock classics—as well as some deep cuts and recent releases.
VERDICT Highly readable and wickedly smart, this title will inspire both lay film fans and film students to watch more closely. [See Prepub Alert, 5/11/15.]
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