The 12-Hour Film Expert

The only book you need to become an expert on film history, technique, and appreciation.

If you are looking at this book, then you probably love watching movies and television shows. Who doesn’t? But most of us do so as passive entertainment—to wind down, relax, and escape into alternative worlds. Pay close attention though, and you can enhance your movie-watching experience and deepen your appreciation for the art of film. This book will show you how.

In The 12-Hour Film Expert, Noah Charney and James Charney offer readers all they need to know about how films are made and how to watch them in a more thoughtful way. Through twelve chapters covering a wide array of genres and periods, the authors highlight key films in each area of focus and explore important figures and more recent films to help readers develop their core understanding of films, ranging from comedies to silent films, noirs to romances, and everything in between.

Most importantly though, readers will learn how to truly watch movies. The 12-Hour Film Expert asks essential questions: What did the key films do differently? How did they push the envelope, establish new precedents? The result is a capsule-sized “course” in film appreciation. The only book readers need to master their grasp of film history, technique, and appreciation, it is perfect for movie lovers of all ages. Grab the popcorn and settle in!

Noah Charney, PhD is the internationally best-selling author of more than a dozen books, translated into fourteen languages, including The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art, which was nominated for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and Museum of Lost Art, which was the finalist for the 2018 Digital Book WorldAward. He is a professor of art history specializing in art crime, and has taught for Yale University, Brown University, American University of Rome, and University of Ljubljana. He is founder of ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, a ground-breaking research group, and teaches on their annual summer-long Postgraduate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection. He writes regularly for dozens of major magazines and newspapers, including The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Observer,and The Art Newspaper. His other books published by Rowman & Littlefield include The Devil in the Gallery: How Scandal, Shock and Rivalry Shaped the Art World ; Making It: The Artist’s Survival Guide; The 12-Hour Art Expert: Everything You Need To Know About Art in a Dozen Masterpieces; and Gold Wine. He lives in Slovenia with his wife, children and their hairless dog, Hubert van Eyck. Learn more at www.noahcharney.com.

James Charney, MD has loved movies since taking the first class in film history offered at Columbia College. He became the very definition of an amateur: a self-taught lover of film, film history, and film craft and ultimately developed a popular seminar at Yale College called Madness at the Movies. He has given talks on film history and taught courses and workshops based on the Yale seminar at The American University in Rome, Arcadia University in Rome, The University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, and the Yale Alumni College, and it is the basis of his first book, Madness at the Movies (2023). He and his wife, Diane, spend half the year in New Haven, Connecticut, where he continues to teach in the Medical School at Yale, and half the year at their home in Umbria, Italy, to be near their son, Noah, and his wife and 2 daughters who all share his passion for the movies.

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