Description: As the century draws to a close and film emerges as our pre-eminent mode of cultural expression, it has become increasingly important to examine how this ubiquitous art form impacts upon its audience. Unlike reading, watching a movie is often a passive experience, rendering the audience unaware of how the film is affecting them.

In Watching, award-winning journalist Tom Sutcliffe takes some of the fundamental elements of film and explores their effect on our senses through an illuminating series of essays. The book opens with a discussion of the implicit contract cinema has with its audience -- that unless explicitly told otherwise it is safe for viewers to trust the evidence of their eyes -- and then goes on to examine such aspects as screen size, freeze-frame, opening shots, and even violence, and the underlying meaning they convey. With reference to both cinema history and contemporary culture, and a broad-ranging discussion of film that touches upon everything from Birth of a Nation to Citizen Kane to Raiders of the Lost Ark, Sutcliffe produces a book about the pleasures of watching movies that is itself a pleasure to read.

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