Reeling Through Life
How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies looks at how film shapes identity. Through ten cleverly constructed essays, Ison explores how a lifetime of movie-watching has, for better or worse, taught her how to navigate the world and how to grapple with issues of career, family, faith, illness, sex, and love.
Cinema is a universal cultural experience, one that floods our senses with images and sounds, a powerful force that influences our perspective on the world around us. Ison discusses the universal aspects of film as she makes them personal, looking at how certain films across time shaped and molded who she has become. Drawing on a wide ranging catalog of films, both cult and classic, popular and art-house, Reeling Through Life examines how cinema shapes our views on how to make love, how to deal with mental illness, how to be Jewish, how to be a woman, how to be a drunk, and how to die with style.
Rather than being a means of escape or object of mere entertainment, Ison posits that cinema is a more engaging form of art, a way to slip into other identities and inhabit other realities. A way to orient oneself into the world. Reeling Though Life is a compelling look at one popular art form and how it has influenced our identities in provocative and important ways.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist and screenwriter Ison (A Child out of Alcatraz, Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead) delivers an innovative blend of film criticism and literary memoir in this absorbing collection of 10 essays. Ison uses the films she discusses sometimes as many as 18 in a single essay to explore and illuminate her own experiences with death, sexuality, creativity, and other themes. The result is powerfully universal, and the author's writing is at once intellectually razor-sharp and poetic as she delves into the most complex of emotions. "I watched my first person die when I was six years old. It was so beautiful, a lovely thing to see. And a loving thing, a moment of profound intimacy, honed by imminent loss," she writes of seeing the 1970 movie Love Story. But what starts in film weaves into a touching personal story of her own experiences with death. Ison examines how the best films make us turn the lens inward, examining our own lives and experiences in a way we would not have without them. Patterns emerge throughout the Ison's collection as she explores the art of writing and her own journey toward living on the page. These essays, combining cultural criticism with deeply personal reflections on love, religion, family, and the nature of art, offer brilliant analysis and food for thought for film aficionados and casual fans alike.
