Monaco's How To Read A Film is a triumph in bringing together a very wide range of theoretical, social, aesthetic, political, economic, historical, and technical information and ideas about film. In the newer editions, he has also addressed the broader range of media in general. It has been considered the "bible" by many on film history and theory for three decades. As a young film student 25 years ago, this was a required text for me then and still is today in many important schools. I learned so much from it then, and amazingly, continue to take away insights which inform my own film-making even today.
Some of the comments from other reviewers here are a bit baffling, to be frank. I don't find his writing style to be irritating at all; just the opposite! I feel that one of Monaco's real strengths is his style; he deals with what could easily be rather dry material in a way that has me unable to turn the pages fast enough! He always keeps the subject very interesting and is quite economical and free of excesses and digressions in his delivery. If anything, I found myself wanting to know more at times. One reviewer states that Monaco lacks organization and drifts randomly between topics. He cannot be serious (??). Whatever you might come up with to be critical about, I don't think that anyone could possibly make that case. On the contrary, given the utterly ambitious amount of material that he is dealing with, I truly applaud him for the organizational skill and deft handling of the presentation of such a massive amount of information! I think that he brings it all together extremely well with three indexes and a remarkable bibliography to support a highly accessible and coherent structure of chapters. This same reviewer claims that "There is nothing about auteur theory" and "very little about editing." That's just flat wrong. My gosh, did he read the book?? Monaco deals directly with this in chapter five; he points out the rather dubious translation of Truffaut's "Politique des auteurs" as a "theory," and suggests the distinction that it is more of a "policy" with a fairly arbitrary critical approach, and goes on to elaborate on the difficulty with the notion of authorship. And as far as any discussion on editing? MONTAGE, my friend!! That's a central topic which is dealt with in great depth throughout the entire text!
There is perhaps only one area that I might raise a critical question. That concerns Monaco's complete understanding of semiotics and the rhetorical devices of literary theory. He, of course, applies them extensively to film analysis; but I did yearn for a bit more scholarship at times. For example, the term "trope" is defined in a great many texts as a rhetorical figure which represents the specific figures: metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, hyperbole, etc. But Monaco doesn't use it that way and it's a little confusing. It may simply be that these terms have evolved and have acquired nuanced meanings in film analysis.
For me personally, one of the wonderful things about the book is Monaco's honesty about the state of film criticism in current times as compared to the 1960s and 70s. He has the courage to admit what so many try to say in a backwards, camouflaged way. "Thumbs have replaced theories," says Monaco; today, "there is no one with an interesting theoretical ax to grind" like the prominent critical personas who established such a ferment of critical thinking and polemics thirty years ago; people like Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Manny Farber, and Molly Haskell, to name a few. Controversial? What's surprising is that it's not; but it's a vitally important opinion to understand. And Monaco supports his claim with a fascinating and well written book. I consider this an essential text; it completely changed how I approach film, both in how I make them and in how I read them.
