Louis Giannetti — Understanding Movies
Giannetti's survey: opinionated, quotable, and the library's best source for what a technique feels like rather than what it is called.
- book
- reel
Louis Giannetti, Understanding Movies (14th edn).
Good for
The most quotable general text on the shelf. Where Film Art classifies, Giannetti judges, and the judgements are what make him useful: colour is "strongly emotional in its appeal" and audiences "accept it passively" (um 23); low-key lighting belongs to "mysteries, thrillers, and gangster films" (um 17); "casting is characterization" (um 277); "incompetent artists merely repeat. Serious artists reinterpret" (um 354). He also carries the Welles quotation on Kane's moral ambiguity (um 517) and the cleanest short statement of Eisenstein's dialectical montage (um 168).
Reach for him when a concept note needs a second voice that will commit to a position. Do not reach for him for definitions; the vocabulary is looser than Bordwell's and occasionally idiosyncratic (his "classical cutting" is not everyone's).
Cited across Acting, Audio, Colour, Lighting, Setting, Camerawork, Editing, Montage, Point of view, Character, Structure and Formula.
In the library
Held in Reel, the local research library of scanned and indexed film books. 94 parts, 2,695 indexed passages. Page numbering is auto-checked.
Cite passages from this book as um <page> — for example um 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.
- Iconography — 2.7× the library average (19 passages)
- Mise en scène — 2.4× the library average (260 passages)
- Spoken language — 1.8× the library average (173 passages)
- Character — 1.8× the library average (485 passages)
- Acting — 1.7× the library average (430 passages)
- Editing — 1.6× the library average (293 passages)