Six Approaches to Writing about Film

1)FILM HISTORY

A historical approach is one of the most widely used methods in film criticism.

It can be employed with varying degrees of emphasis or consciousness,

but in general, the writer using this approach organizes and investigates

films according to their place within a historical context and in light

of historical developments. Such an approach might explore the following:

-The historical relationships of the films themselves, as when a

writer compares and contrasts the use of sets in a film from the

thirties with their use ina film from the seventies.

-The relationship of films to their conditions of production,

perhaps allowing a writer to make connections between

American films of the eighties and the trend during those

years toward the ownership of studios by large corporations

like Gulf+ Western or TransAmerica.

-The relationship of movies to their reception, demonstrated in

an essay that explores how television in the fifties changed the

expectations of movie audiences at that time.

2)NATIONAL CINEMAS

If historical issues usually play some part in essays on the movies, another

important (and related) way to discuss them is in terms of their cultural

or national character. The presumption behind this approach is that film

cultures evolve with a certain amount of individuality and that to understand,

for instance, the complexities of Alexander Dovzhenko's Arsenal

(1929), one must locate it first in the political and aesthetic climate of

postrevolutionary Russia. Similarly, to analyze an Indian film of Satyajit

Ray, such as Distant Thunder (1973), a writer should know something

about the society and culture of India. According to this approach, ways

of seeing the world and ways of portraying the world in the movies differ

for each country and culture, and it is necessary to understand the culrural

conditions that surround a movie if we are to understand what it is

about. Because it employs many westero themes and formulas, an American

spectator might have little trouble comprehending a film by Akira

Kurosawa, but without guidance and some cultural background on Japanese

society,the films of Kenji Mizoguchi or Mikio Naruse might seem too

foreign and confusing for the average American student.

3)GENRES

A French word meaning "kind," genre is a category for classifying films in

terms of common patterns of form and content. Many of us casually practice

the categorizing behind genre studies when we view movies: often,

we identify a set of similar themes, characters, narrative structures, and

camera techniques that link movies together as westerns, musicals, film

noir, road movies, melodramas, or sel-f films. Westerns feature cowboys

and open, uncivilized spaces; sel-f movies deal with adventures in outer

space or intrusions by extraterrestrials. In analytical writing, a discussion

of genre is frequently an effective way to begin examining how a film organizes

its story and its audience's expectations.

4)AUTEURS

Auteur criticism is one of the most widely accepted and often unconsciously

practiced film criticisms today: it identifies and examines a movie

by associating it with a director or occasionally with another dominant

figure, such as a star (say, Clint Eastwood). In a sense, referring to "a

David Lean film" or "a Steven Spielberg movie" is in itself a critical act,

because it implies that tile unifying vision behind what you see on the

screen is the director's and that there are certain common themes and

stylistic traits that link films by the same filmmaker. Although writers refer

casually to a dominant actor or even a screenwriter as an auteur (an

"author"), auteur criticism has its historical roots in the claims of literary

independence and creativity made by and for certain directors.

5)KINDS OF FORMALISM

Formalism is a name often given to film criticism concerned with matters

of structure and style in a movie, or with how those features (such as the narrative or the mise-en-scene) are organized in particular ways in a movie. In most instances, a writer will want to discuss these formal matters together with the major themes of a film, but the

chief focus of a formalist essay will be on patterns such as narrative openings

and closings, the Significant repetition and variation of camera techniques,

or the relation of shots and sequences to each other.

6)IDEOLOGY

In one sense, ideology is a more subtle and expansive way of saying

politics, at least if we think of politics as the ideas or beliefs on which we

base our lives and our vision of the world. Ideology might refer to one

person's belief in the sanctity of the family or another person's sense that

civilization is basically progressive. When we see a movie such as No

Man's Land (2001) or Potemkin; there is little chance of mistaking the

different political messages at work in each. The first describes a contemporary

political quagmire by telling a darkly comic tale of a Bosnian and a

Serbian soldier trapped together between enemy lines; the second hails

the force of a socialist revolution in Russia.