5 ideas
Ebert saw Fellini's La Dolce Vita as a young man and took Marcello's nights on the Via Veneto as a model of the glamorous life he wanted. Rewatching decades later, he saw the same character as a lost man drifting through empty pleasures, and later still he felt only sympathy. The film had not changed at all, which showed that re-viewing a great film measures the change in the viewer.
Ebert's working rule is that a movie is not good or bad because of its subject but because of how it treats that subject. A film about a noble cause can be worthless, and a genre picture about gangsters or aliens can be profound. Judgment should rest on the execution: style, performance, framing and tone.
Ebert suggests that positions in the frame carry a built-in charge for viewers. Movement to the right tends to feel positive or forward-looking and movement to the left negative or regressive. The upper part of the frame tends to dominate the lower, and the foreground to dominate the background, so a director's placement of actors signals power and mood before any dialogue explains it.
For decades Ebert led audiences through a single film one shot at a time, pausing it whenever anyone in the room called 'Stop!' to discuss what they saw. Slowing a film to the individual shot shows the deliberate choices that normal viewing absorbs unconsciously. These include camera angle, cutting, placement and light. Because anyone can stop the film, the method draws insight from the whole group rather than from one expert.
Ebert shows how Yasujiro Ozu, in films like Tokyo Story, fixes the camera low, near the height of someone seated on a tatami mat, and almost never moves it. Between scenes Ozu cuts to empty 'pillow shots' of rooftops, trains or hallways. This restraint lets viewers notice feeling on their own terms rather than being pushed toward it, so emotion arrives through patience instead of emphasis.