Eng 225

ENG 225

Draft

ENG 225

May 31, 2010

Reflective Paper

Its bet to choose something from a film you know well and is important that you’ve seen the entire movie before and know it well whether it is a blockbuster Hollywood production or a small independent effort, has a number of elements that come together in order to guide the audience through the arc of the story. The actors may be the most visible elements on the screen, but a number of other craftsmen had to perform a lot of other functions in order to get that finished film in front of an audience. If you are interested in analyzing why one movie succeeds and another fails, it is important to understand how collaborative filmmaking really is. To really have a handle on why movies work, it's helpful if you watch a number of films in different genres to understand the conventions of each. A great way to watch lots of films at home is by using stream online movies; this excellent site boasts one of the world's largest databases of legal films available for streaming online.
Here are some elements to consider when analyzing a film for a review or personal critique.
1. Consider the effectiveness of the dialogue and storyline. Although many professional screenwriters do not get the same attention as actors or directors, they are the true architects of a movie. Screenwriters may adapt a book into script form, or they may create their own original stories for the screen. Either way, you should be able to sense an attention to detail in the dialogue and plotlines. A successful movie script uses authentic dialogue and scenarios that the actors can handle with ease. A less successful script places characters in situations that feel artificial or contrived. The language of the characters may be peppered with obscenities, or thoughts that seem to come more from a screenwriters mind than the characters. When analyzing the writing in a film, ask yourself if the dialogue felt honest and the scenes flowed in a logical progression. Did you see all of the scenes you needed to see in order to stay with the storyline? Did you have any moments where the dialogue took you out of the movie?
Look at the background and set pieces. The job of a cinematographer (or director of photography) is to create the proper atmosphere for the film. When you watch a film for analysis, try to ignore the actors and dialogue for a few minutes. Pay attention to the shapes and colors of the scenery, sets and costumes. They should all be working together to create a specific mood or ambience. The use of light and darkness can be very important, as can other atmospheric effects such as shadow and fog. In a good film, the background information should enhance the scene but not overwhelm it. When cinematography is not handled well, the audience might inadvertently focus on a distracting wall decoration or an anachronistic car in the background. When analyzing a film, ask yourself if the setting and background added more to the story or distracted you from it.
Our understanding of the way in which sign systems operate is fundamental to our interpretations, and it is clear that we do indeed learn these ways of understanding film and television as a direct result of learning to communicate. The choice to describe this process as ‘reading’ though is not one that I agree with. To me this suggests that a visual medium can be reduced to some sort of text that can be scanned and understood like a paragraph on a page. It also seems to suggest an active and fully conscious approach to understanding. I would prefer to say that we learn to interpret television and film. This description allows for the various different accounts that may arise from different people watching the same show, and to me suggests a more active and brain orientated (this suggesting in turn a more sub-conscious) role for us in our understanding of what we have seen on screen. When we return from a long (and tiring) day at work we don’t want to watch an art film or a challenging science documentary that makes our minds work too hard. To relax we pick something that requires little conscious mental effort and so watching can be a seemingly passive event. However, we remain subconsciously active, applying processes we have learnt over many years... deciphering signs, interpreting and understanding meanings. The sub-conscious even shapes what we choose to watch as we know by convention what is mentally stimulating (for the conscious mind) and what is not.
In order to make sense of a film’s meaning, we ultimately therefore need to be able to situate the film in contexts larger than what simply happens at the level of plot. We need, in short, to be able to make sense of film in relation to culture. Meaning may also usefully be thought of as the expression, and communication, of an impression, an observation, a reflection, or a judgment about something; it may, furthermore, take the form of an argument about or a critique of this same phenomenon. In sum, to describe a film as meaningful suggests that we perceive this film as offering a way of making sense of something that it represents. When we say a film means something, we are saying it has some kind of point to it. In other words, the film has something to say about some kind of issue: it comments upon this issue; it offers an explicit or implicit interpretation of the issue.

References

http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1979226621&sid=1&Fmt=3&clientId=74379&RQT=309&VName=PQD

Tribune - Review / Pittsburgh Tribune - Review. Greensburg, Pa.: Mar 9, 2010.
Fiske, John & John Hartley (1978): Reading Television. London: Routledge
Monaco, James (1981): How to Read a Film. New York, NY: Oxford University Press (Part III, ‘The Language of Film: Signs and Syntax’)