7.3: Reading the Movies - Assessment
- Page ID
- 248421
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Our materials for class this week were centered around the idea of ‘cinematic language,” a way for us to ‘think’ how films communicate meaning and emotion to us. While we may most notice things like performance and narrative, moving images communicate meaning through far more than dialogue alone: as Sharman notes in "How To Watch A Movie,” “the way the cinema communicates is the product of many different tools and techniques, from production design to narrative structure to lighting, camera movement, sound design, performance, and editing” (47). Importantly, too, all this is “employed to manipulate the viewer without us ever noticing” (47).
So, following Sharman: your task for this week’s discussion board is to ‘read’ the cinematic language of a clip of your choosing—to select a scene from a movie, TV show, video game, or other form of moving image, and analyze how the filmmaking team is utilizing cinematic language to communicate and connect with audiences. Your response should be 250 words, and should include a way to access your chosen scene (YouTube link preferred).
The prompt is open-ended on purpose, to give you space to explore the particulars of your chosen clip. The following questions may be helpful as you work. I’d encourage you to return the Sharman text, as well.
- What are the compositional decisions made by the filmmaking team within the scene? How do they play into the larger conversations and commitments of the film?
- How is the scene shot? How does the camera ‘work’ within the scene?
- What is put into view, and what is excluded? What do these decisions ‘do’ for our overall takeaway from the scene, or the movie writ large?
- What details do you notice in background, set design, props, character costuming? What do these details add to the piece? What would be the result if we removed them?
- What is the implicit message of the clip? How is the filmmaking team communicating this message through their creative use of the camera and other tools of cinema?
- How does the scene/film relate to the social/cultural/political concerns of the times? Is it critiquing them? Agreeing with them?
- What messages, commitments, and perspectives about the world does the scene uphold and/or dismantle? How is the filmmaking team utilizing cinematic language to do so?