Understanding Movies (13th Edition)
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Understanding Movies (13th Edition) Details
About the Author Louis Giannetti is a Professor Emeritus of English and Film at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He has taught courses in film, literature, writing, drama, and humanities. He has published many articles, both popular and scholarly, on political subjects, literature, and drama. In addition to being a professional film critic for several years, he has written about movies for such scholarly journals as Literature/Film Quarterly, The Western Humanities Review, and Film Criticism. Professor Giannetti is also the author of a book on cinema theory, Godard and Others: Essays on Film Form, published in both Britain and the Unites States. Giannetti’s other books include Masters of the American Cinema (Prentice Hall, 1981), a survey of American fiction films from the perspective of eighteen key figures. Flashback: A Brief History of Film, Sixth Edition (Allyn & Bacon, 2010), written with Scott Eyman, is a history organized by decade outlining the major events, trends, and important filmmakers and their work, with emphasis on the American cinema. Both books are copiously illustrated. Understanding Movies has been a bestselling text in all its previous editions, widely used in the United States and in such countries as Australia, Britain, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and Japan. Read more
Reviews
I used this book for a Film Appreciation class I was taking. I thought the material was straight forward and enjoyable reading. I have a general interest in film (which is why I took the class) and the terminology and movie back story have been interesting. The publisher has a decent amount of online study material and practice quizzes for each chapter that made the online Blackboard quizzes/tests fairly easy if you read the book. The only reason I didn't give it five stars because the author (editor?) regularly split sentences between two pages and sometimes several graphics broke things up even more to the point that I had to go back and re-read the beginning to remember what was being said. The end of chapters also gave the readers a slew of questions they should ask themselves that were fairly pointless as they were written. I can understand a bulleted list but 10-20 questions in paragraph format does nothing for me.
