Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781619024816)

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.

Author: Tara Ison
ISBN-10: 1619024810
ISBN-13: 9781619024816
Publisher: Catapult
Language: English
Published: 01/13/2015
Pages: 320
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 11/01/2014
Booklist 11/15/2014 pg. 10
Publishers Weekly 11/24/2014
Library Journal 01/01/2015 pg. 102
New York Times Book Review 01/25/2015 pg. 11