Film Analysis

COMM 111 - Week 3

Why do we analyse film?

• To better understand aesthetics and techniques

• To understand the construction of cultural meaning and representation (textual analysis)

• to be able to compare “cultures of sense-making” (textual analysis)

Textual Analysis

• A way for researches to gather information about how other human beings make sense of the world

• A methodology for those researches who want to understand the ways in which members of various cultures and subculture make sense of who they are

• An educated guess at some of the most likely interpretation that might be made of that text

• Understanding how the text has been “put together” enables understanding of the meaning that it privileges

Text

• something - anything that we make meaning from

• A book, a TV programme, a film, a magazing, a song, an advertisement, a T-shirt, an ornament, a piece of furniture

Culture

• The customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group

• The characteristic feature of everyday existence (such as diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time

• The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization

• The set of values, conventions, or social practices associated with a particular field, activity, or societal characteristics

Three ways to approach this (text)

• Realist

  • Meaning constructed by the text represents reality - any other views are wrong

  • ex. American Pie is a good, clean, fun movie that represents a rite of passage in a comic way

• Structuralist

  • Underneath the surface, the meaning is similar to other representative examples

  • ex. American Pie is not different to other Hollywood films that adopt a man active/female passive binary

• Post-structuralist

  • meaning constructed is not fixed, and is open to various readings

  • ex. American Pie promotes sexism, racism, homophobia, rape (depending on the cultural perspectives members of particular groups bring to it)

Semiotics - Denotation

What the audience sees and hears (i.e, the literal meaning of a signifier)

Semiotics - Connotation

Meaning developed by the community that does not represent the inherent qualities of the thing or concept originally signified as the meaning (i.e, an association beyond the literal meaning of a signifier)

Film Analysis - Systems

• Narration

• Mise-en-scène

• Cinematography

• Sound

• Editing

Film Analysis - Devices

• Story, plot, dialogue, perspective

• Setting, props, lighting, costumes, staging

• Long shot, close up, high angle, zoom, pan

• Voices, soundtrack, sound effects

• Cut, dissolving, long take

Narration

Literally the script

Mise-en-scène: Setting

• Helps to set the film in a particular place and time

• Can be historical, contemporary, futuristic

• Studio set or on-location

• Genre films often rely on a strong sense of setting

• Can help to express characters’ psychology

Mise-en-scène: Props (set decoration)

• Helps the impression of reality (or artifice)

• Add meaning to a scene and characters

• Have a function in ongoing action

• Motivate (or distract) from narrative (MacGuffin or red herring)

• Can embody character and identity

• Chekov’s gun: “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first act that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third act it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there. “

  • Basically only include ____ that are important to the plot and remove everything else

Mise-en-scène: Lighting

• Directs attention to areas of the shot

• Direction of _____(ex. top ____, under ____, back ____)

• Quality of _____: hard/harsh (clear shadows and contrast) vs soft/diffused (no shadows and low contrast)

• Source of ____: artificial vs natural (allows for different levels of control over the composition of the image)

• Colour and shade: Warm, cold, white, coloured

Direction of Lighting - Underlighting

Direction of Lighting - Side lighting

Direction of Lighting - Back lighting

Quality of Lighting - Hard/Harsh lighting

Quality of Lighting - Soft/Diffuse lighting

Source of lighting - Natural lighting

Source of lighting - Artificial lighting

Mise-en-scène: Costumes and Makeup

• Help to construct character identity and relations

• Help to chart narrative development

• Help to create authentic settings of time, genres, locations

• Help to articulate a film’s overall themes

Mise-en-scène: Staging (figures and movement)

• Figures can include anyone from Matt Damon, to R2D2, to Donald Duck

• Can be realistic or non-naturalistic

• Deliver entrances, exits, reactions, interactions, and movements

• ______ creates tone, atmosphere, visual detail, focus, and meaning in the frame

• Rule of thirds 

• Golden Spiral 

• Symmetry 

• Leading Lines 

• Depth 

Cinematography

• Distance

• Focus

• Angle

• Movement

• Point of view

Cinematography: Shot Distance

Cinematography: Extreme Long Shot

• Make your subject feel small against their location

• Make your subject feel distant or unfamiliar

• Make your subject feel overwhelmed by its location

Cinematography: Long Shot

• Gives us a better idea of the scene setting and how the character or subject fits into the area

Cinematography: Medium Shot

Cinematography: Close Up

• Useful when you want to reveal a character’s emotions and reactions

Cinematography: Extreme Close Up

Cinematography: Deep Focus Shot

Cinematography: Shallow Focus Shot

Cinematography: High Angle Shot

• Usually creates a sense of inferiority

Cinematography: Eye-level shot

• Subject is not inferior or superior, they are neutral - it mimics our natural perspective towards people in real life

Cinematography: Low Angle Shot

• Creates a sense of superiority around the subject as we are looking up at them and they are quite literally looking down at us

Cinematography: Tracking Shot

Any shot that physically moves the camera through the scene for an extended amount of time

Cinematography: Continuous Shot

Also called long take: a shot with a duration much longer than the conventional editing pace either of the film itself or of films in general

Organisation of signs in film

• Signs “only receive significance by virtue of the relationships of difference they stand in with respect to other signs” (Bateman, O'Halloran, Schmidt, 2011, p.82)

Paradigmatic Organisation (signs in film)

Signs linked as alternatives to one another

Syntagmatic Organisation - signs in film

Signs linked together in structural configurations (ex. in a temporal sequence)

Sound in film

• Voices, music, and sound effects

• Establishes the tone, or atmosphere of a scene

• Gives meaning to the actions, thoughts, and feelings of characters

• Helps to establish the setting

• Foreshadows future narrative events

Diegetic Sound

Any sound that the character or characters on screen can hear (voices, surrounding noises, etc.)

Non-diegetic sound

Any sound that the audience can hear but the characters on screen cannot (ex. the musical score, the voice-over narration)

Sound Bridge

Sound carrying over a visual transition

Sound Perspective

Ex. A Quiet Place (2018) where from the girl's sound perspective she couldn't hear anything since she is deaf and therefore couldn't sense the monster whereas from the sound perspective of the monster it could hear the crickets and surrounding environment 

Non-diegetic film score example

Main theme and character themes (or leitmotif) (ex. Star Wars (1997) score by John Williams) 

• Character themes help characterize or give the audience an idea about the character 

Film Editing

• Also known as montage

• Relationship between shots & process by which they are combined

• Relationship between shots can be graphic, rhythmic, spatial, and/or temporal

• Affects the film’s space, atmosphere, and narrative

Film Editing Conventions

• Cut between close up, medium shot, and long shot when showing the same subject/object from shot to shot

• Make sure the direction movement is consistent from shot to shot

• Obey the 180-degree rule for shots

Film Editing: Graphic Relationship

Match cutting to relate two other wise disconnected scenes

• “match on action” cut in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Wright, 2010)

Film Editing: Rhythmic Relationship

Assembling of shots and/or sequences according to a rhythmic pattern of some kind, usually dictated by music

• ex. in Marie Antoinette (S. Coppola, 2006)

Film Editing: Spatial Relationship

Establishing shot to situate the audience within a particular environment or setting and/or to introduce an important character or characters

• in Star Wars (Lucas, 1977)

Film Editing: Temporal Relationship

Parallel editing, a technique used to portray multiple lines of action, occurring in different places, simultaneously

• ex. The Godfather (F. F. Coppola, 1972)

Film Editing

Instead of hard cuts, film makers can use dissolves, ripple dissolves, defocus, fade in/fade out

• ex. a nice dissolve in Spaceballs (Brooks, 1987)