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.

book
reel

Barsam & Monahan, Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film (3rd edn).

Good for

The most recent general introduction in the library, and it shows in the sound chapter: "Today, sound is not subordinate to image" (lam 370) is a position the older books do not take. Its genre chapter is the one that treats formula as a business model first, "a blueprint for creating and marketing a type of film that has proven successful in the past" (lam 80), and its MacGuffin definition is the clearest in the library and uses Psycho's forty thousand dollars as the example (lam 34).

Good for a second opinion on Audio, Formula, Themes and The MacGuffin; slightly less distinctive on the visual codes, where it mostly agrees with Bordwell.

In the library

Held in Reel, the local research library of scanned and indexed film books. 15 parts, 2,918 indexed passages. Page numbering is auto-checked.

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

Non-diegetic sound — 3.8× the library average (41 passages)
Continuity — 3.3× the library average (39 passages)
Lighting — 2.5× the library average (285 passages)
Audio — 2.4× the library average (386 passages)
Mise en scène — 2.2× the library average (256 passages)
Printed language — 2.1× the library average (37 passages)

Go on, then

source Aaron Baker — A Companion to Martin Scorsese Aaron Baker (ed.) (Wiley Blackwell)
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.
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.