Chapter 11

Film Criticism: Sample Analyses

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Sample Analyses

• Narrative films, alternatives to narrative form, documentary, and analyses that emphasize social ideology will be examined.

• All of the films discussed can be analyzed in other ways as well.

• These analyses are examples of strategies that you can apply in your writing.

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The Classical Narrative Cinema: His Girl Friday

• Segmentation shows the pace of character interactions contribute to the overall pace.

• Deadlines within the plot and the clash of character traits and goals propel the cause and effect.

• Time and space are subordinate to cause and effect.

• Telephones play an important role in cause and effect.

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North by Northwest

• Using classical narrative patterns, a strict time scheme and motifs keep the narrative unified.

• Point-of-view shots offer a degree of subjectivity.

• Continually emphasizes surprise and suspense through careful manipulation of the hierarchy of knowledge.

• Hitchcock also uses climactic sequences.

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Do The Right Thing• Stretches traditional Hollywood conventions

while still upholding conventional techniques.• Setting and a limited time frame unify the plot.• The main causal action falls into two lines: Sal’s

relations with the community and Mookie’s personal life.

• Cinematic technique loosely uses the continuity system and emphasizes the community as a whole.

• Style also stresses the underlying problems in the community.

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Moonrise Kingdom

• Common story with unusual narrative structure.• Setting is highly stylized.• Unusual plot structure creates mystery and

suspense.• Narrator provides omniscience.• Anderson’s fantastical style is achieved through

staging, framing, music, and on-screen text.

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Narrative Alternative: Breathless (À Bout de souffle)

• A classic story line presented nonclassically.• Rejects classical Hollywood causality.• Classic film technique is also rejected, instead

using location shooting, and natural light and sound.

• Often breaks away from traditional editing techniques.

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Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari)

• Spatial and temporal structures are emphasized over narrative events.

• Camera and editing patterns involve using a full circle.

• Taken together, film technique suggests a different relationship among setting, duration, and story action than exists in a classical Hollywood film.

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Chunking Express (Chung Hing sam lam)

• Involves six characters in two distinct stories presented side-by-side.

• The lines of action in the two parts aren’t linked causally, which forces you to seek other connections.

• Motifs link the two stories, as does the theme that change is a part of love.

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Documentary Form and Style:Man with a Movie Camera

• Takes the “kino eye” idea as the basis for the film’s associational form.

• Exploits the power to control our perception of reality by means of editing and special effects.

• Draws a connection between the camera and human actions.

• Explicit and implicit meanings may be missed by viewers who aren’t familiar with Russian.

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The Thin Blue Line

• Uses narrative form, but not in a wholly linear way.

• Form and style shape our sympathies subtly and ask us to reflect on the obstacles to arriving at the truth about any crime.

• It is both an account of what really happened while sending the message that persistent inquirers can eventually arrive at truth.

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Form, Style, and Ideology:Meet Me in St. Louis

• Reinforces certain aspects of a social ideology: American values of family unity and home life.

• Dialogue, stylistic devices, and mise-en-scene contribute to the feeling of a happy family life.

• Referential, explicit, implicit, and symptomatic meanings all emphasize the social ideology.

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Raging Bull

• There is both sympathy and revulsion towards Jake.

• Narrative and stylistic strategies make Jake a case study in the role of violence in American life.

• The narrative organization of incidents and motifs suggest that male aggression pervades American life.

• Stylistic techniques depict the violence as disturbing but also mesmerizing.

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