Many of the techniques, terms, and critical approaches that help us analyze printed texts also apply to film. Films share with fiction and poetry elements such as settings, characters, and metaphors. As a spatial medium, drama has even more in common with film, from props to the contribution of actors’ interpretations to a given performance. This page will concentrate on what sets film apart from other textual media. If we are accustomed to the terminology and critical approaches of poetry or fiction analysis, what additional tools can we use to analyze a film? The following pages introduce some of the basic building blocks of film analysis.

Approaches to Film Analysis

Writers on film studies frequently draw a distinction between formal-aesthetic and cultural-ideological approaches to film analysis.

Formal-Aesthetic Analysis

The name “formal-aesthetic” combines two terms that have different but related meanings, linked by the emphasis on a film’s internal elements rather than its place in a cultural or political context. Formalist analysis concentrates on matters of structure and style (thematic development, narrative structure, shot composition, recurring motifs) and ways in which a film organizes those elements in patterns that give meaning to the whole. Derived from the Greek for “things perceptible by the senses,” aesthetics is the field of philosophy concerned with theories of the perception and appreciation of art or, more generally, of beauty. A formal-aesthetic approach to film, therefore, will bring together formalism’s concern with the unity of structural elements with larger themes in a way that emphasizes the artistry and unity of films. Most film reviews consist primarily or entirely of formal-aesthetic analysis.

Sociological-Ideological Analysis

The name “sociological-ideological” also combines two terms with different but related meanings. Sociology is the scientific study of human behavior. Ideology, a term with roots in Marxist thought, describes ways in which cultures develop structures and beliefs that help dominant groups retain or increase their dominance by controlling (intentionally or unintentionally) the worldview of people in the culture. Sociological-ideological analysis, therefore, strives to understand the human behavior that results in the production of a given film and also what dynamics of power and control the film articulates. As the product of particularly modern technologies and means of production, film has proved an especially rich area of study for critics interested in the relationship between art and mechanical development.

Combining Approaches: Each of the categories described above includes a huge range of narrower critical approaches. Even so, one often finds that elements of the two broad categories inform criticism based on the other approach. Film reviews, for instance, will sometimes take up political or sociological concerns in the course of issuing formal-aesthetic judgments. (This is not to mention the idea that choosing a formal-aesthetic approach to film necessarily is itself a decision with ideological implications.) Conversely, just as ideological analysis of poetry frequently employs formalist terms such as metaphor and theme, sociological-ideological analysis of film will often make reference to shots, cuts, and other building blocks of formal film analysis.

Do Films Have Authors?

We can produce poetry and fiction using technologies so old and common that they no longer strike us as “technologies” at all: a paper napkin and a pen will do the trick in a pinch. We can even compose poetry or fiction mentally and recite it without any external technology. Virtually everyone would accept that the text of a recited poem exists, though it has no material form. In contrast, one cannot recite a film; a film requires a technological mediation between its creators and its audience. While relatively inexpensive filmmaking technologies have emerged recently, most films still require contributions from a large number of people to reach an audience, including a producer, a director, a screenwriter, actors, studio representatives, distributors, theater owners, and so forth. Faced with such a wide range of contributions, critics have developed the convention of treating the director as the “author” of a film. That convention creates a lot of convenient shortcuts (I use it to list films alongside books on course syllabi, for example), but it also erases the many limits of a director’s artistic control, from the interpretations of actors to the reactions of test audiences to early versions of a film. The relative invisibility in critical and popular discourse of screenwriters–whose practice is more like that of a poet, perhaps, than is a director’s–is one of the enduring oddities of contemporary culture.

Auteur Theory: In the 1950s and 60s, the film critic Andrew Sarris became the leading American proponent of what is now called auteur theory. “Auteur” is French for “author”; Sarris argued that film at its best constitutes the kind of inspired personal expression from a director that we expect to find in a major author. Therefore, said Sarris, we can treat great directors who develop a signature style as auteurs, and we can speak of film history as a history of auteurs. Sarris’s arguments created controversy from the start because they understated the contributions of everyone but the director to film art. Since the very notion of single authorship has undergone a thorough reconsideration since Sarris wrote, contemporary academics are even less likely to accept his theory without reservation. Nonetheless, Sarris made a large contribution to the field of film studies by arguing for a way to think of film art as analogous to the other arts, and references to auteur theory still surface frequently in film studies.

Shots, Cuts, and Editing

When a camera records images, it produces shots, which are spliced together by cuts in a process called editing.

Shots

Film shots from extreme long shot (top) to close-up (bottom).

The basic visual unit of a movie is the shot. Shots are usually described in terms of camera distance with respect to an object within the shot. There are, in the end, seven fundamental types of shots:

• extreme long shot – the subject or characters are very much to the background of the shot. The surroundings now have as much if not more importance, especially if the shot is in high-angle.
• long shot – subject or characters are at some distance from the camera. They are seen in full in their surrounding environment.
• medium long shot – halfway between a long and a medium shot. If it frames a character, the whole body will be in view in the middle ground of the shot.
• medium shot – frames a character from the waist, hips or knees up (or down). The camera is sufficiently distanced from the body for the character to be seen in relation to his or her surroundings.
• medium close-up – close-up of one or two (sometimes three) characters, framing the shoulders or chest and the head.
• close-up/extreme close-up – the subject framed by the camera fills the screen. This connotes intimacy.
• shot/reverse-angle shot – also known as shot/counter shot, it is most commonly used for dialogue. It consists of two alternating shots, generally in medium close up, frame in turn the two speakers.

Each shot reflects a decision on the director’s part. Ask yourself why the director has framed a shot in that specific way. For instance, you might want to pay attention to the camera’s point-of-view. Sometimes a director will make use of what is called subjective camera. Here the camera seems to assume the point-of- view of a particular character, and thus leads the audience to identify with this character. Thus, high- or low-angle shots are used to indicate where the character is looking; panoramic shots suggest a character’s view of a landscape; and tracking shots signify that a character is in motion. Why would the director want you to identify with that character at that time?

Cuts

It is easy to assume that most of the work of film-making goes on on the set or on location: set design, lighting, choreography and lighting. But this is only part of the work, and not necessarily the most complicated part, especially not for a director. Much of what you see on the screen is produced by editing. The basic unit of editing is the cut. A cut is (oddly enough) the splicing together of two shots. Between scenes or larger narrative units, called sequences, the cut can mark a rapid transition between one time and space and another, but different kinds of cuts will have different effects, depending. There are many kinds of cuts. Here are just a few:

• jump cuts – where there is no match between the two spliced shots.
• match cuts – the exact opposite of jump cuts.
• montage cuts – a rapid succession of cuts splicing different shots together to make a particular meaning or create feeling such as vertigo, fear, etc.
• compilation shots – series of shots spliced together to give a quick impression of a place or a quick explanation of a situation, or a character’s impression of an event.
• cutaways – shots that take the spectator away from the main action or scene–frequently used as a transition before cutting into the next sequence or scene.
• cross-cuts – used to alternate between two sequences or scenes that are occurring at the same time but in different spaces.

Editing

There are four basic categories of editing, that is, for arranging long strings of cuts:

• chronological editing – editing that follows the logic of a chronological narrative, one event follows subsequently from another, and time and space are logically and unproblematically represented.
• cross-cutting or parallel editing – the linking-up of two sets of action that run concurrently and are interdependent within the narrative. cross-cutting or parallel editing – the linking-up of two sets of action that run concurrently and are interdependent within the narrative.
• deep focus – less cutting within a sequence is necessary so the spectator is less manipulated.
• montage – based on the theory that conflict must be inherent in all visual aspects in film, the principles of which include a rapid alteration between sets of shots whose signification occurs at the point of their collision, fast editing and unusual camera angles; also used for spectacular effect.

In most Hollywood movies, editing for continuity is very important. Continuity editing aims to avoid drawing any attention to the way in which the story gets told. Such editing wants to be invisible, and tries to offer a seamlessly coherent narrative, which is only disrupted by flashbacks. Sometimes continuity is ensured by what is called eyeline matching. When a character looks into off-screen space the spectator is led to expect to see what he or she is looking at. Then a cut shows what is being looked at.

Styles of Directing

Montage vs. Long Takes

Since the shot and the cut are the most basic building blocks of films, it is probably not surprising that two schools of directing emerged that emphasize the two blocks to different degrees. Sergei Eisenstein wrote that films’ meanings are created primarily by montage, or editing that uses cuts to place shots in conversation with one another. Andrè Bazin, on the other hand, emphasized the importance of long takes, where shots last for a long time and keep the elements of a scene in deep focus, letting the viewer choose his or her points of emphasis. The mise-en-scène, the design and arrangement of the shot, gains importance in this style of directing.

Hollywood Style

The defining characteristic of the “Hollywood style” is that it strives to make the reader forget the medium of film altogether. To achieve such invisibility of technique, directors will use shots and cuts that have become so familiar to film audiences that they no longer announce themselves as techniques at all. For example, we now expect to see dialogue in which cameras behind the shoulders of two speakers record the face of whichever character is speaking, switching back and forth to follow the developing dialogue. One would struggle to explain how that camerawork and editing is “natural,” since the resulting perspective could not represent a realistic human perspective on the conversation. What is more important for the Hollywood style, however, is that the effect feels natural to experienced viewers of film. In this context, think back for a moment to auteur theory. By defining film history as the development of master directors who left recognizable signatures, auteur theory minimized or dismissed the role of the Hollywood style, which strives to erase signs of the director’s artistic control.

The Brechtian Influence and Alternatives to Hollywood Style

Bertolt Brecht, a German poet, playwright, and dramatic theorist, argued from a Marxist perspective that dramatic productions should not strive to create a mystified environment in which the audience forgets (or agrees to provisionally forget) its environment. Instead, said Brecht, directors and actors should strive to remind the audience of the artifice and artistry of the performance, calling attention to the processes of acting and production that underlie the film. With the advantage of that detachment, the audience and performers can enact the kind of independent resistance to dominant ideology that fuels political resistance to established power. Whether or not they have shared Brecht’s political reasons for their artistic choices, many film directors have countered the Hollywood style by employing Brechtian principles to create alienation effects that emphasize the artificiality of film and acting.

Music and Sound in Film

The presence of a musical score in nearly all films is another factor that separates the study of film from that of most other texts. Analysis of musical scores has generally remained a more aesthetically oriented discipline than other aspects of film studies, for reasons one can only speculate upon. The largely non-verbal medium of the score might not attract the attention of scholars the way that the words and visual representations of a film do, for instance. In any case, this site will not attempt to introduce the principles of music criticism. We can, however, introduce a few terms that critics use to discuss music and sound in films.

Diegetic vs. Non-Diegetic Sound

The easiest way to divide all sound and music into film into two categories is to divide it into diegetic sound, which appears to emanate from the action portrayed on the screen, whereas non-diegetic sound (usually music) on a soundtrack would presumably not be heard by the characters in the fiction of the portrayed scene. When a character sits in a club and listens to a blues band as he sulks about his miserable life, the band’s music is diegetic. When he goes back to his apartment to continue sulking about his miserable life and we still hear the band playing, the music has become non-diegetic.

Classical Scoring Style and New Styles

By this point, you have probably picked up a pattern: traditional Hollywood film production strives to downplay the appearance of artifice in many ways, from directing, acting, and editing to–you guessed it–music. As traditionally conceived, music exists in a film to complement and enhance the emotional effects of the writing, acting, and direction. From this point of view, a successful score improves the experience of a film without calling attention to itself. Relatively recently, two alternative ways of thinking about scoring have gained momentum: one is postmodern scoring, in which the musical score attracts the viewer’s attention by offering a commentary that offers meaning that stands in a contrasting or ironic relationship to the on-screen elements of the film. The other is pop scoring, in which films function in part as promotional vehicles for popular songs that will form their heavily marketed soundtracks.

Further Reading

For more in-depth coverage of film analysis terms and concepts, see Yale’s Film Analysis website, which has detailed analysis as well as images and film clips.