source

Boggs & Petrie — The Art of Watching Films

Boggs and Petrie's classroom text: plain analytical questions, a working glossary, and the flat/round and static/dynamic character pairs.

book
reel

Boggs & Petrie, The Art of Watching Films (9th edn).

Good for

The teacher's book. It is less ambitious than Giannetti and less rigorous than Bordwell, and that is exactly its use: every chapter ends in questions a student can put to a film, and the glossary entries are short enough to quote whole. Its definition of a point-of-view character as the one "with whom we emotionally or intellectually identify" (awf 506) is the wide sense of the term this site uses, and its flat/round, static/dynamic pairings (awf 56) give Character a vocabulary Bordwell does not bother with.

Also the source for Vilmos Zsigmond on motivated light, "windows, or candles or lamps" (awf 99), for dialogue being "simpler than that used on the stage" (awf 406), and for the phrase "cinematic mutilation" about pan-and-scan (awf 13).

Cited across Acting, Spoken language, Lighting, Setting, Colour, Format, Point of view, Character and Conflict.

In the library

Held in Reel, the local research library of scanned and indexed film books. 403 parts, 3,592 indexed passages. Page numbering is auto-checked.

Cite passages from this book as awf <page> — for example awf 214.

Strongest on

Measured, not guessed. Each figure is how much denser this book is on a concept than the library average — so common words don't crowd out real specialisms.

Colour — 1.7× the library average (109 passages)
Spoken language — 1.6× the library average (206 passages)
Printed language — 1.6× the library average (34 passages)
Point of view — 1.5× the library average (210 passages)
Audio — 1.4× the library average (278 passages)

Go on, then

source Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese Aaron Baker (ed.) (Wiley Blackwell)
source Barsam & Monahan — Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film Barsam and Monahan: the most current of the introductions, strong on sound, genre as industry, and the MacGuffin.
source Bruce Block — The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV and Digital Media Bruce Block's practitioner's grammar of the image: contrast and affinity, the visual components, and story structure drawn as a graph.
source Christopher Kenworthy — Shoot Like Scorsese Christopher Kenworthy (Michael Wiese Productions)
source David Bordwell — Narration in the Fiction Film Bordwell's theory of narration. Only the Soviet montage chapter is in the library — read the shelf mark before citing.
source Geoffrey Nowell-Smith — The Oxford History of World Cinema The standard one-volume history. Where to go when a film needs its industry, its movement or its decade.