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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Do The Right Thing

• Characters create goals sporadically.• Will conflicts be resolved peacefully or

violently?• Lee’s choices emphasize the community as a

whole.

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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, using

instead 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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