Talking Pictures by Ann Hornaday

TALKING PICTURES by Ann Hornaday, the film critic for The Washington Post, is a new book that I am excited to share with our Lit and Film teachers and their students. Subtitled “How to Watch Movies” and based on her earlier series of articles, Hornaday says she structured this non-fiction work roughly according to a film’s production, with chapters on The Screenplay, Acting, Editing, Directing and more.  Hornaday offers multiple examples throughout and she argues that “all films have an essential grammar in common: a lexicon of visual, aural, and performance conventions that link them to each other, or, when those conventions are cleverly subverted, constitute an invigorating break.” I particularly appreciated her efforts to reach out to the reader, increasingly perhaps an informal reviewer on social media, and to include some leading questions that “viewers can ask themselves after they’ve seen a movie to ascertain whether it succeeded in particular craft areas.”  For example, she suggests reflecting on: Were the people in the movie complex, unpredictable, believable? Did I care about them? Did they change or stay the same? TALKING PICTURES will be an extremely valuable resource for our students and a copy is available in the library now.