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    Reading the Silver Screen: A Film Lover's Guide to Decoding the Art Form That Moves
    Reading the Silver Screen: A Film Lover's Guide to Decoding the Art Form That Moves
    Reading the Silver Screen: A Film Lover's Guide to Decoding the Art Form That Moves
    Audiobook11 hours

    Reading the Silver Screen: A Film Lover's Guide to Decoding the Art Form That Moves

    Written by Thomas C. Foster

    Narrated by Sean Pratt

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    From the New York Times bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor comes an indispensable analysis of our most celebrated medium, film.

    No art form is as instantly and continuously gratifying as film. When the house lights go down and the lion roars, we settle in to be shocked, frightened, elated, moved, and thrilled. We expect magic. While we’re being exhilarated and terrified, our minds are also processing data of all sorts—visual, linguistic, auditory, spatial—to collaborate in the construction of meaning.

    Thomas C. Foster’s Reading the Silver Screen will show movie buffs, students of film, and even aspiring screenwriters and directors how to transition from merely being viewers to becoming accomplished readers of this great medium. Beginning with the grammar of film, Foster demonstrates how every art form has a grammar, a set of practices and if-then propositions that amount to rules. He goes on to explain how the language of film enables movies to communicate the purpose behind their stories and the messages they are striving to convey to audiences by following and occasionally breaking these rules.

    Using the investigative approach readers love in How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Foster examines this grammar of film through various classic and current movies both foreign and domestic, with special recourse to the “AFI 100 Years-100 Movies” lists. The categories are idiosyncratic yet revealing.

    In Reading the Silver Screen, readers will gain the expertise and confidence to glean all they can from the movies they love.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateSep 13, 2016
    ISBN9780062309235
    Author

    Thomas C. Foster

    Thomas C. Foster is the author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor, How to Write Like a Writer, How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor, and other works. He is professor emeritus of English at the University of Michigan, Flint, where he taught classes in contemporary fiction, drama, and poetry as well as creative writing and freelance writing. He is also the author of several books on twentieth-century British and Irish literature and poetry.

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    • 3/5
      Thomas C. Foster is the University of Michigan English professor responsible for such books as "Read Literature Like a Professor" and "How to Read Novels Like a Professor." His latest book, "Reading the Silver Screen," takes a similar approach, but with films rather than novels as his subject. It doesn't work as well this time, but he does make some interesting points, most notably the one contained in his title: By giving attention to detail, we can "read" movies in much the same way we read novels.Most people just watch movies for entertainment. They enjoy the story, or not, then forget about it. Even when it is a film they love to watch again over and over, like "Gone With the Wind" or "The Princess Bride," they still watch it for entertainment, nothing more. Foster's point is that even an entertaining film like "The Bourne Identity" or "Blazing Saddles" will reward us if we watch it more than once and pay close attention to the details. How is the plot constructed? What role does the music play? How much does the story depend on words and how much on what we see?"I would argue that reading movies proves to be the harder task since they roll relentlessly forward, twenty-four frames to the second, with no pauses for reflection," Foster writes. "If you stop to analyze what just happened, you miss what's happening now." With a novel, you can stop at anytime to reflect, or you can reread what you just read as many times as you want.As an occasional leader of film discussions, I find I watch a movie once just for its entertainment value. If I find myself thinking about questions raised by the film, I watch it a second time to determine how suitable it would be for a group discussion. Then I will watch it again for a third or fourth time with pen in hand, taking notes about anything in the movie that might be worth talking about. If a DVD has a director's commentary, I will listen to that, too, for insights into the movie.Foster discusses a great many films, both recent ones like "Birdman" and "The King's Speech" and older classics like "Safety Last!" and "The Magnificent Seven." His book, published in 2016, is similar in format to David Thomson's "How to Watch A Movie" (2015), which mentions many of the same films. Foster's book may seem more like a college class, yet Thomson's is more intellectual and will appeal more to those who take movies very seriously. For the rest of us, Foster may have more to offer.