James Monaco’s (fourth edition) How To Read a Film is a monumental and necessary read for anyone interested in understanding the art of film. It does get fairly technical, and the later chapters lean heavily into the functional details of the form, but it is framed by some incredible theory and often profound thematic insights, all of which help postion film within the larger history of storytelling traditions methods. Film might be unique in the broader scope of history, but it is not an island.
As the book repeats over and over, when storytelling methods emerge they gain a coded language. The uniqueness of film in this regard is not only found in its particular nature (capturing as it does the moving image in time and space), but in its indebtedness as an artform to technology. It is the technological aspect that sheds light on the ensuing relationship that develops between art, artist and viewer, leading the art of film to become a fluid and captive entity in ways that set it apart from other forms. On top of this, not only does there emerge a coded langauge necessary for reading a film, there is also a coded langauge for making a film. As such, the artform contains a kind of dynamism that ebbs and flows within it’s own advancements.
If film has shaped humanity’s story over the last 120 years, holding in its grip economic geo/socio-political and social evolutions, the nature of film has always straddled this line between the direction of its technological pursuits and its cultural applications. Near the end of the book the author talks about how we’ve spent most of those last 120 years learning what it means to read a film, and now we must learn how to see a film. Which becomes a kind of precarious endeavor since we find ourselves at a cultural moment where the technology is no longer about how we can push boundaries, but about how the technology is shaping us.
In one sense film is still anchored in its hisotirical presence, but the older our auteurs get, the more this history threatens to disappear into the ever increasing presence of the future, leaving emergent filmmakers with decisions to make regarding where they stand in that long line of storytellers and what and how we might preseve it, if at all. This is especially true given the ever changing economic landscape. In many ways film has morphed into something largely unrecognizable, collapsed as it is into the barrage of different social media expressions. And yet, for the time being, it still stands as stubborn resistance to the sometimes- or often times- shortsighted nature of progress.
Of course, with this future oriented progression comes the loss of coded language. Without a shared language film cannot funcion. And yet, one of the more compelling thematic threads that runs through this book is the question of whether the developed language of film has the capacity to hold these shifting tides in both tension and cohesion. If it does, this can only come from our ability to submit the technological form to the universal and etermal power of story and storytelling. This is, and must remain, its essential anchor. There must be a universal langauge behind the art that is able to navigate the changing tides of technology and culture. Meaning, no matter the form, and no matter the present state of the form, the truth of art, and the truth that art looks to reveal, remains its guiding light.
Without this, film, and it wouldn’t by hyperbolic to say humanity, stands to simply gets lost in the weeds of progress, without aim and direction and without that necessary sense of the meaning of things that inform the more scientific elements of form and function. It is easier for art forms like literature and painting to remember this. It’s much harder with an artform where the base level relationship between form and function is far more complex and allusive and fleeting. An artform tied to the very tehcnology that is presently lighting the way.
In some sense, and this is also something the author examines, film has grown from a once bastion of human creation and accomplishment into a godlike entity in and of itself. This is especially true where the loss of common setting and shared tradition are concerned (the role of the theatrical, the task of the filmmaker). As has been stated, the lines have been blurred between the artist creating art in the image of the world, and the technological creation now re-creating the world in its own image.
The final word of this book is one that I found to be rather powerful. It is a call to remember what art is- imitation. It imitates reality in order to illuminate the truths within. Thus it is always necessary to remember its aim- to equip and call us to reenter reality with fresh perspective and revelation. That’s every bit as integral to the process of reading a film as seeing a film.
Perhaps even more astutely, in some ways, in the present moment that we occupy, it’s even increasingly becoming about recovering reality.
I found myself contemplating these things as I finished the final words of this 800 page behemoth. As someone with a deep love of film, and who’s roots for this passion are founded in a love of literature, how do I become a better “viewer”. If this book has equipped me to be a better reader of film, how do I learn how to see more clearly? It just might be that the question of seeing a film is better framed as learning how to see the world. How to see reality. Even further though, and perhaps the much more difficult endeavor, is learning how to allow my engaging of film to push me to greater engagement with reality. To participate in the world rather than escape it. To find in the imitaiton something more true, something more real awaiting those final credits.
The Stories of my Life 