Writing about Film Extra Credit

In this extra credit assignment we take a look a Dartmouth’s writing program on writing about film. One of the first things that I noticed in being an important starting point in writing about film is getting to know the glossary of terms. They refer back to the glossary multiple time and suggest that knowing these terms will be helpful when analyzing movies, before, during and after you view them. The text then discusses they ways in which we analyze the films and points out the differences between a review and a comprehensive analysis of a film. We then looked at different types of film papers. These stem from your analysis of the film and what you want to focus on while writing your paper for example; propaganda would probably mean you would want to write an Ideological paper.

Next we take a look behind the scenes and analyze things like shot sequence, lighting, directors, production history and other critics. Finally the text talks about writing tips. Again the paper is not supposed to be a review and some tips to stay away from turning your paper into a review are: do not use “I” in your paper because that is a surefire way to turn it into a review, do not summarize the film but maybe summarize the use of camera angles or editing techniques, and don’t limit yourself to discussion of plot characters.

Throughout this paper we looked at the ways to analyze and write about movies and all of the different aspects to look at. At first after reading this I thought it would be difficult to understand the plot of the movie while simultaneously trying to figure out what the director was thinking and why they did what they did with editing. I don’t see this as being quite as big of a problem if you do research as was suggested by the author. If we took a look at the reviews of a certain film and looked at the director and his style of film making, it would take less time analyzing the film and give us more time to watch it.  It seems like a daunting task but I think it we did our homework on the film and director it would not be so bad to get a well rounded analysis of the film.