Becoming Film Literate: The Art and Craft of Motion Pictures

In his latest book, film teacher and scholar LoBrutto provides 50 short essays on 50 (mostly) great films as a primer for novice enthusiasts seeking to enrich their critical appreciation of cinema. Arranged alphabetically by movie title, each essay concentrates on a particular cinematic subject-examples include ""Nonlinear Storytelling"" (Amores Perros), ""French New Wave"" (Jules and Jim), ""The Close-Up"" (The Passion of Joan of Arc), and ""The Art of the B Movie"" (Shock Corridor)-and concludes with suggestions for further reading/screening. The arrangement eschews ranking; the emphasis here is on the sheer variety of approaches to the art form. The author touches on salient points of production history, technical and aesthetic principals and innovations, social and historical context, and artists' biographies. The entries are uneven, however. In general, the book's strength lies in its discussion of the technical aspects of filmmaking: montage editing and the roots of a cinematic grammar in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, for example, or the dawning revolution in digital filmmaking in Lucas's Star Wars: Episode II. But thematic interpretations of masterpieces like Renoir's Rules of the Game, Antonioni's L'Avventura or Woody Allen's Annie Hall come across as thin and derivative. Moreover, in less inspired essays, LoBrutto's prose appears to be either on autopilot (""Jean Renoir's direction is seamless, as light as a souffle, and as tart as the driest burgundy"") or struggling to get off the ground (""The most forceful argument supporting Peckinpah's argument that man is born with violent attributes is illustrated in the way children are portrayed in The Wild Bunch""). This book has merit as an introduction to the science and language of cinema (relevant technical terms, printed in boldface type, even appear in a handy glossary at the back), but more knowledgeable or adventurous readers may find it a limited offering despite the array of films considered.