Understanding Film
A Viewer's Guide
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Book Presentation:
This film analysis textbook contains sixteen essays on historically significant, artistically superior films released between 1922 and 1982. Written for college, high school, and university students, the essays cover central issues raised in today's cinema courses and provide students with practical models to help them improve their own writing and analytical skills.
This film casebook is geographically diverse, with eight countries represented: Italy, France, the United States, Russia, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, and India. The essays, sophisticated yet not overly technical or jargon-heavy, are perfect introductions to their respective films as well as important contributions to the field of film studies in general. The book's critical apparatus features credits, images, and bibliographies for all films discussed, filmographies for the directors, a glossary of film terms, the elements of film analysis, a chronology of film theory and criticism, topics for writing and discussion, a bibliography of film criticism, and a comprehensive index.
About the Author:
James R. Russo is an independent researcher who holds graduate degrees from Louisiana State University and the University of Richmond. He has taught at those schools as well as Tulane. Russo’s primary scholarly interests are the cinema and comparative literature. He has recently published The Bookman: William Troy on Literature and Criticism, 1927–1950; Film Nation: William Troy on the Cinema, 1933–1935; and Analyzing Drama: A Student Casebook.
Press Reviews:
"Few critics have managed to penetrate the dreamlike obscurities of Fellini, Antonioni, and Murnau with the wit, grace, and charm of this author. On the evidence of Understanding Film, his criticism is for anyone who has ever burst out laughing or burst into tears at a movie, without really knowing why. James R. Russo tells us (tells all students) why, but without removing the essential mystery of the magic ritual of seeing and sharing films." —Donald Brackett, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, CANADA
"In Understanding Film: A Viewer’s Guide, James R. Russo’s highly readable and often brilliantly elucidating essays on world cinema reveal intricate connections and parallels between film content and film form. This is perhaps his greatest contribution to film criticism—his insistence on relating form to content, as opposed to celebrating cinematic style for its own sake. There are few critics who read—or watch—films as closely, and finely, as this man. Students will profit from a book such as this." —André Loiselle, Carleton University, Ottawa, CANADA
"James R. Russo practices a kind of film criticism that gives first place to one’s instinct for seeing possibilities in films and for identifying films to see possibilities within. His essays on the cinema are remarkable for their range and masterful in their use of language; they are invariably intelligent, original, judicious, and highly informed—ideal models for today’s students." —Peter Brunette, late of Purdue University, USA
"James R. Russo’s criticism comes as an immensely welcome relief from the kinds of writing that have been prominent in recent years. He is neither a cultist nor a meta-critic, but a passionate (though reasonable), widely cultured, and highly perceptive observer of cinema. Film criticism today needs such educated analysis without blinkered doctrine, seriousness without pomposity, insight without crankiness. All these virtues Russo brings to his writing, plus a passion for cinema that enlightens his views of the works he examines." —Leon Katz, late of Yale University, USA
> From the same author:
Jacques Rivette and French New Wave Cinema (2023)
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Subject: Director > Jacques Rivette
> On a related topic:
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Film Theory and Criticism (2016)
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The Return: Further Post-Jungian Takes on the Moving Image
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