Chapter 2: Beginning to Think, Preparing to Watch, and Starting to Write

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Welcome back to the Deep Dive.

I want to start today with a bit of a confession.

Ah, I watched a movie last night.

We'll see which one, to protect the innocent.

And about halfway through, I realized I had been checking my phone for five minutes.

I was looking at the screen.

I was technically present, but I wasn't seeing anything.

I was just letting the images wash over me like a warm bath.

We have all been there.

It is the Netflix trance.

Yes.

You're physically in the room, but mentally you are completely on autopilot.

Exactly.

The trance.

And that is exactly what we are declaring war on today.

We are tackling a stack of research that claims we are all watching movies wrong.

Or at least not watching them well.

Right.

We treat them like background noise or just pure plot delivery systems.

And we miss everything that actually makes them work.

Which brings us to the mantra for this Deep Dive.

Badly seen, badly said.

That's the quote, Jean -Luc Godard.

It is from his film first name, Carmen.

Godard actually plays himself in the movie.

Oh, yeah.

He's in a hospital room tapping away at a typewriter and he just mutters that line, badly seen, badly said.

It is the anchor for our whole discussion today.

So what are we diving into?

We're diving deep into chapter two of Timothy Corrigan's A Short Guide to Writing About Film, the eighth edition.

And if that sounds like a dry textbook, let me stop you right there.

Okay.

This is essentially a manual on how to upgrade your brain from passive consumer to active analyst.

It's about learning to speak the language of the film.

Because as Corrigan points out right at the start, and this really validated my struggle, writing about film is uniquely terrifying.

It is so hard.

Think about it.

If you critique a painting, the painting stands still.

It waits for you.

Right.

If you critique a book, you can reread the sentence 10 times if you need to.

But a film, it is a moving target.

Right.

Quite literally.

You are dealing with a medium that combines literature, visual arts, music, dance, theater, and architecture.

All at once.

And it's all happening simultaneously at 24 frames per second, moving relentlessly forward in time.

You have the plot, the acting, the editing, the sound design, the composition.

It is a sensory bombardment.

Jean Cocteau had that great line about this.

He said, most of us watch films out of the corners of our eyes.

Which is such a vivid way to put it.

We treat the movie as peripheral.

Yeah.

Did the guy get the girl?

The bomb go off.

Exactly.

But to really understand film, and specifically to write about it, you have to drag those images from the corner of your eye right into the center of your focus.

You have to engage in what Corrigan calls pre -production.

I loved that term when I read it.

Yeah.

Usually pre -production is what the director and the producers do before they shoot.

Scouting locations, casting, getting the money.

Right.

The business side.

But Corrigan says, we, the audience, we need to do pre -production before we even watch.

Precisely.

You don't just walk into the theater naked, metaphorically speaking.

You go in armed with a specific set of lenses, personal, technological, economic, and historical.

So our mission today is to hand those lenses to our listener.

We're going to break down how to prepare for a movie, how to have a silent dialogue with the screen while it's playing.

And then the hard part, how to take notes in the dark without losing your mind.

And finally, how to turn those scribbles into an argument that actually means something.

Okay.

Let's get the lights down.

Let's get into segment one, subject matter and meaning.

This is the preparation phase.

Corrigan argues that analysis starts before the movie studio logo even spins up.

It starts with you.

What do you mean?

Well, there is this myth that a critic is a robot who processes a film objectively.

That is just nonsense.

We are all subjects.

We all bring baggage.

Corrigan's advice is unpack the baggage and use it.

So use my own background.

Yes.

Use your own background as a wedge to crack the movie open.

He gives this great comparison of different students watching the same films.

Let's talk about the architecture student.

This is a classic example.

If you put an architecture student in front of a film by Michelangelo Antonioni, say, Leventura or Red Desert,

they're going to see a completely different movie than a drama student would.

Because Antonioni is obsessed with space, right?

With buildings and landscapes.

He is.

But an architecture student understands why that space matters, where a casual viewer might say, why are these characters standing so far apart?

Why is the camera just staring at this empty modernist building for 30 seconds?

Right.

This is boring.

The architecture student sees the built environment as a character.

They see how the stark lines of the building are actually crushing the characters emotionally.

They see the alienation in the concrete.

They have the vocabulary to describe why the scene feels lonely.

It's not just sad music.

It's the geometry of the room.

Exactly.

And that applies to everything.

If you are a music student, you shouldn't check that knowledge at the door.

No.

You should be looking at West Side Story or Sweeney Todd, specifically through the lens of rhythm and dissonance.

Or even an experimental film like Berlin,

Symphony of a City from 1927.

I've heard of that one.

That film is structured like a piece of music.

If you know music theory, you have the key to that movie.

Or if you're a literature buff,

don't just follow the plot.

Right.

Don't just watch the plot of The Coon Brothers The Road.

Compare it to the sentence structure of Cormac McCarthy's novel.

How does the filmmaker translate a writer's prose style into a visual style?

So use what you're good at.

You don't have to be an expert in everything.

Just an expert in your own reaction.

And connect the subject matter to the style.

That is the golden rule.

Speaking of connecting subject to style, we have to talk about this image from the text.

It's figure 2 .01 from Kenji Mizoguchi's film Utamaro and His Five Women.

This really helped me understand what active scene looks like.

This is a beautiful example.

So for context, Utamaro was a real historical figure.

He was a famous Japanese artist known for woodblock prints,

specifically ukiyo -i or pictures of the floating world.

And these prints have a very specific look, right?

They aren't trying to be photorealistic 3D.

They're flat, graphical, very composed.

Right.

They emphasize line and pose over depth.

Now, Mizoguchi is making a movie about this guy.

He could have just shot it like a standard biopic.

Sure.

Close -ups of him painting, lots of dialogue,

handheld camera following him around.

But he didn't.

I'm looking at the still from the movie right now.

It doesn't look like a movie frame at all.

It looks like a painting.

Describe it for us.

What do you see?

Well, you have these women arranged in the frame, but they aren't interacting naturally.

They're posed.

The lighting is very even, very flat.

There are no deep shadows.

The lines of their kimonos create these geometric patterns.

It feels staged, but in a really deliberate way.

That is exactly it.

Mizoguchi is visually recreating the ukiyo -i tradition using the camera.

He is flattening the image to make the movie look like the art the main character creates.

So the analysis here isn't, this movie is about a painter.

The analysis is, this movie becomes the painting.

Boom.

That is the insight.

If you were just watching out of the corners of your eyes, you might think,

acting is a bit stiff.

But if you know the context, you realize the stiffness is an aesthetic choice to mimic the woodblock prints.

You've connected the subject, Utamaro, to the meaning, the style.

That's lens one.

Personal interest and subject matter.

Let's swap lenses, take off the art history glasses, and put on the tech specs.

Corrigan has this line, technology dictates meaning.

Which sounds a bit deterministic, doesn't it?

Like the robot overlords are telling us what to think.

It does sound intense, but it is undeniably true.

The medium is the message, as the old saying goes.

You cannot separate the story from the machine that captured it.

The simplest example he gives is screen size.

And I feel this one in my bones because I recently tried to watch Lawrence of Arabia on my iPad on a plane.

Oh, no, that is a crime against cinema.

I know.

I know.

I felt guilty the whole time.

And I realized I wasn't actually seeing the movie because a movie like that or the Ten Commandments, which Corrigan mentioned, isn't just a story about guys in the desert.

It's a story about scale.

The scale is the plot.

The vastness of the desert represents the vastness of the challenge or the insignificance of the human figures against the divine or the natural world.

When you shrink that down to six inches, you don't just lose detail.

You lose the theological weight of the image.

The meaning just evaporates.

But it goes deeper than just size.

It's the actual stock film versus digital or black and white versus color.

This is huge.

Think about The Matrix.

A classic.

I think I've seen it 20 times.

We all know The Matrix is about a computer simulation, but imagine if The Matrix had been shot on warm, grainy 16 millimeter film, like a 1970s documentary.

It wouldn't work at all.

It would feel too organic, too messy.

Exactly.

The crispness, the green tint, the bullet time effects, which were cutting edge computer technology at the time.

Those aren't just special effects.

They are the theme.

The medium is the message.

The medium of the film reflects the reality of the characters.

The movie is a computer program, essentially.

The technology used to make the film is the villain of the film.

And this leads us into digital convergence.

We've moved from these heavy 50 pound cameras to iPhones.

And that changes what we consider realistic.

Think about the French New Wave in the 60s.

They started using these lightweight handheld cameras.

Suddenly they could run down the street with the actors.

It felt frantic, alive, on the spot.

Shaky cam.

Shaky cam.

Now fast forward to today.

If you see a movie that is super polished, steady and glossy, you subconsciously think Hollywood, artificial.

But if you see that shaky handheld footage like in the Blair Witch Project or a war documentary, your brain signals truth.

Right.

Reality.

So as an analyst, when I see a shaky camera, I shouldn't just think the cameraman had too much coffee.

I should ask, is the director trying to sell me a specific version of the truth?

You are questioning the reality the film presents based on the tools used to create it.

And you also have to consider editing.

Digital nonlinear editing allows directors to reshape reality completely in post -production.

It's not a document anymore.

No, the image is no longer a document of what happened on set.

It's raw clay to be molded.

Okay, but tools cost money.

And clay costs money.

That brings us to the economic lens.

I feel like this is the one casual viewers ignore the most.

We think of movies as art, not products.

Which is a lovely romantic thought, but the movie industry is, well, it's an industry.

Corrigan is very firm on this.

You cannot judge a $200 million blockbuster by the same metrics you use for a $50 ,000 indie film.

It's like judging a home -cooked meal against a factory -produced banquet.

They have totally different goals.

And different constraints.

Take a blockbuster, let's say The Avengers, or the Robin Hood example in the text.

When you spend that much money, you need a massive audience to make a profit.

You need everyone from the toddler to the grandma to buy a ticket.

Exactly.

And what does that do to the storytelling?

It makes it risk -averse.

Safe.

Very safe.

You can't alienate anyone.

You can't have a super depressing ending.

You can't be too experimental.

So if you are critiquing a blockbuster, you don't look for subtle avant -garde editing.

You look for, where did the money go?

Did it go to the stars?

The CGI?

The marketing.

Who is the intended audience?

Why were these choices made to appeal to them?

Contrarily, look at independent cinema,

or third cinema films from Latin America or Africa in the 60s and 70s.

Like Michael Snow's Wavelength.

Exactly.

Or films from South America.

Some of these films look rough, grainy image, bad sound, jagged editing.

It's easy to dismiss that as amateur.

Oh, they didn't know how to light the scene.

And that is the trap.

You have to ask, is this rough because they were broke?

Or is it rough on purpose?

A badge of honor.

Yes.

A way of saying, we are not Hollywood.

We are not glossy.

We are gritty and real and political.

The poverty of the image becomes a political statement against the richness of American cinema.

So the economic lens turns you into a forensic accountant.

You're following the money to find the meaning.

Follow the money is usually good advice in life and in film criticism.

Now we have to talk about the historical lens.

And Corrigan brings up the elephant in the room of film history.

D .W.

Griffith's The Birth of a Nation from 1915.

This is the classic case study for the historical lens.

You really can't study film history without hitting this wall.

It's known for being technically revolutionary, but morally repulsive.

Yes.

It is a monumental epic about the American Civil War and Reconstruction.

Technologically, it advanced narrative storytelling, editing, and scale in ways that define cinema for decades.

So it's important.

It basically invented the grammar of the modern blockbuster.

But it is also a profoundly racist film.

It distorts history, it stereotypes African Americans as fools or dangerous brutes, and it glorifies the Ku Klux Klan as heroic saviors.

So how does a student approach this?

Corrigan mentions that a first -time viewer might just dismiss it as primitive racist ideas and just turn it off.

And that is a valid emotional reaction.

But the analysis needs to go deeper.

David Cooke, a film historian mentioned in the text, points out that the danger of The Birth of a Nation isn't that it's primitive.

It's that it is chillingly accurate in its vision of an American society predicated on race.

The tragedy is that it effectively encourages racial prejudice rather than condemning it.

So analyzing it involves holding two conflicting thoughts at the same time,

recognizing its power as a piece of propaganda in art,

and recognizing the horror of its message.

Precisely.

We cannot allow our sympathies to obscure our critical judgment.

We can fault Griffith for his racism, but we also have to understand why the film was so influential.

Why did audiences in 1915 cheer for it?

What does that say about the history of the audience, not just the film?

And interestingly,

Corrigan suggests a counter -narrative here.

He doesn't just leave us with Griffith.

He brings up Oscar Micheaux.

Yes, specifically his film Within Our Gates, released in 1920.

Micheaux was an African -American filmmaker working outside the Hollywood system.

So he didn't have Griffith's budget.

Not even close.

He didn't have the technical resources.

That kind of response.

Exactly.

Within Our Gates offers a completely different view of race relations in the early 20th century.

It detects the violence of white supremacy, the complexity of black identity, it is a direct response to the questions raised by Griffith.

So a perceptive student might compare these two.

Not just which one looks better, but how do different resources and different perspectives create two different historical truths?

And that ties perfectly into the concept from John Berger that Corrigan cites.

Ways of seeing.

Ways of seeing.

That sounds like a philosophy course.

It is fundamental, though.

Films are not just recordings of a subject, a war, a family, a romance.

They are a specific rendition of that subject.

A version of it.

An analysis is investigating why it was rendered that way.

Why does one student see the birth of a nation and dismiss it, while another sees Black Hawk Down, which is also about war involving different races, and calls it the best movie ever made?

Right.

The subject is similar, but the way of seeing and the viewer's historical context changes the meaning.

So we've done our prep work.

We've checked our baggage.

We've picked our lenses.

Tech, econ, history.

Now the lights go down.

Movie starts.

Segment two, the silent dialogue.

This is where we shift from passive spectators to active participants.

Corrigan calls it talking back to the movies.

I love that.

I usually talk back to the screen at home, mostly yelling, don't go in there.

Yes.

But this is a different kind of talking back.

It is.

It's an internal interrogation.

And Corrigan uses a fantastic story from literature to illustrate this.

The story of Thomas De Quincey.

This is the Macbeth example, right?

On the knocking at the gate in Macbeth.

Yes.

So picture De Quincey.

It's the early 1800s.

He's watching Shakespeare's Macbeth.

And there's this specific moment right after Macbeth has murdered King Duncan.

OK.

It's a scene of high horror.

And suddenly there is a loud knocking at the gate of the castle.

Knock, knock, knock.

Exactly.

And De Quincey feels weird.

He feels perplexed.

He writes, for my boyish days, I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth.

An effect for which I never could account.

He didn't know why he felt that way.

He felt a strange mixture of horror and relief.

And he didn't know why.

Most people would just shrug and say that was a weird scene.

Right.

But De Quincey is an analyst.

He leaned into the confusion.

He asked, why do I feel this way?

And he realized that the knocking was the sound of the outside world, the human world, trying to break back into the hellish sealed off world of a murder.

Oh, wow.

The knocking made the horror feel more real by contrasting it with normal life.

So his confusion was the breadcrumb trail to the insight.

Exactly.

Confusion is good.

Corrigan says, if you are confused by a scene, that is a signpost saying, dig here.

Don't ignore the confusion.

Analyze it.

He gives a modern example of this with the movie Stranger Than Fiction.

The Will Ferrell movie.

The whole premise is confusing.

Will Ferrell is a normal guy.

But he starts hearing a British woman's voice narrating his life.

Right.

If you just accept that as movie magic, you miss the point.

The confusion regarding that voiceover is the central theme.

It's the point.

Is he crazy?

Is he a character in a book?

Do we all have narrators?

The movie wants you to be confused, so you ask those questions.

To help us get this dialogue started,

especially if we aren't geniuses like De Quincey, the text provides a preliminary checklist.

These are questions to ask during a first viewing to get the gears turning.

These are simple, but they are powerful.

They are like icebreakers for your date with the movie.

First, what does the title mean in relation to the story?

That sounds so basic.

It is.

But think about a title like Silence of the Lambs.

Why silence?

Why lambs?

Or do the right thing.

It's a command.

Who's it talking to?

What's the right thing?

Exactly.

Second question.

Why does the movie start the way it does?

The opening shot is the handshake.

It sets the terms.

Third, why are the credits presented against this particular background?

I feel like people ignore opening credits so much they're on their phones.

Always.

But the font, the music, the background image, that's the mood board for the whole film.

Absolutely.

Then you ask, is this movie similar to or different from Hollywood movies I have seen recently?

You are looking for genre markers.

And importantly,

are there striking camera movements?

Is the camera acting like a character?

It's about noticing the decisions.

Someone chose to put that background in the credits.

Someone chose that title.

And someone chose the ending.

Why does the film conclude on this image?

These questions help you initiate that silent dialogue.

You are looking for patterns, repetitions, or things that just seem odd.

Speaking of things that seem odd, let's talk about the student essay analysis included in the chapter.

It's by a student named Roger Malone analyzing the 1939 film The Women.

This is a great example of how a student takes a gimmick or an oddity and turns it into an argument.

So the women is a social satire.

On the surface, it seems pretty standard for the 1930s gossip, divorce, high society.

But Malone notices two weird things.

Two things that would definitely make you go, huh?

Thing one, there are absolutely no men in the cast.

Not one.

Not a waiter, not a cab driver, not a voice on the phone.

It is 100 % women.

Wow.

Thing two, the movie is black and white, but right in the middle, there is a random fashion show sequence in full blazing technicolor.

Yeah, that stands out.

It feels like a mistake.

Or just a studio mandate to sell clothes.

Most people might say, oh, they just wanted to show off the dresses.

But Malone argues deeper.

He asks, why these twists?

And his argument is fascinating.

He says the absence of men actually emphasizes their power.

How so?

I don't get that.

Because the men are constantly being discussed.

The women are fighting over them, crying over them, dressing for them.

Oh, I see.

The men influence every behavior of the women, yet they are never seen.

Their physical absence becomes an ironic way of suggesting how powerfully present they are in the women's lives.

They are the invisible gods of this universe.

That's brilliant.

So the absence makes the presence stronger.

And what about the color fashion show?

Malone connects it to the same idea.

The sets, costumes, and the women themselves are concerned with appearance appearing appropriate for the invisible men.

The burst of color underlines the artificiality of it all.

It's a centerpiece for a movie about women showing other women how to appear and what to wear.

He argues that even when you can't see behind the curtain at the center of the action, hiding there is still a man.

That turns a weird moment into a central thesis.

That's what we're aiming for.

Exactly.

He moved from that's weird to why is that weird to here's what that weirdness means.

OK, so we're watching, we're questioning, we're finding the weirdness.

But we can't remember everything.

We need to take notes.

This is segment three, the practical toolkit.

And let's be honest, taking notes in a dark theater is a nightmare.

You look down at your notebook later and it looks like chicken scratch.

It is a practical challenge.

Corgan is very realistic about this.

He suggests the rule of three for viewings if you have the luxury.

Ideally, we watch the movie three times.

Ideally, the first viewing, enjoyment, immerse yourself, put the notebook away.

Just feel it.

Exactly.

Maybe make a few vague mental notes, but don't pull yourself out of the experience.

You need to feel the movie first, the second and third viewings.

That is for critical detachment.

That is when you take concrete notes.

But even then, we can't write down every line of dialogue.

It's impossible.

No, and you shouldn't.

You need economic attention.

Since you can't write everything, you focus on key sequences or motifs.

Motifs are those recurring images or themes, right?

Like breadcrumbs the director leaves for us.

Yes, patterns.

Corgan lists some famous examples to watch for.

In Citizen Kane, Rosebud, you are tracking the Rosebud mystery.

Every time a sled or a childhood object appears, you note it.

In Douglas Serk's Written on the Wind, look for the climactic death of the father.

And Spike Lee's do the right thing.

The pizza parlor window.

Yes.

That window is the barrier between the races, right?

It is.

It's transparent, but solid.

It separates the white owner from the black neighborhood.

So you watch how characters interact with that window, cleaning it, banging on it, breaking it.

That traces the arc of the film.

And sometimes the motif is a routine.

In Chantal Ackerman's Gene Dealman, the whole movie is about domestic routine.

Peeling potatoes, making guts.

Sounds thrilling.

But you watch for variations in that routine.

When she drops a potato, that is a thunderclap of drama in that specific film context.

Or in Abbas Kirstami's Taste of Cherry, look for how silence signals meaning.

And when we do write things down, Corgan warns against being vague.

Don't just write, it was sad.

Sad is not evidence.

Sad is a feeling.

You need concrete details.

Record the figures and objects in the frame, but also the photographic qualities.

Give me an example.

For example, in Meet Me in St.

Louis from 1944, don't just say family drama.

Note the father's role in the family.

Note the macabre scenes with the youngest daughter, Tootie, who is obsessed with death.

Note the use of bright color to mask the darkness.

There's a really specific example regarding sound in Fassbender film, The Marriage of Maria Braun.

This one blew my mind because I would have totally missed it.

Yes, this is advanced listening.

A student might note the ironic turns in sexual relations in that film, but a perceptive note taker will catch the sound clash at the end.

What happens?

There is a powerful scene where Oswald plays a classical piano concerto, but at the same time, on the soundtrack, there is a radio broadcast of the World Cup Championship match.

Piano versus soccer.

High culture versus populist frenzy.

Melodrama versus sport.

That overlapping sound is the meaning.

It shows the schizophrenia of post -war Germany.

Wow.

If you just wrote the ending was intense, you missed the specific texture of why it was intense.

Okay, so we need to be fast and specific.

This leads us to segment four, the shorthand system.

If we want to capture that piano versus soccer moment without looking away from the screen, we need a code.

This is a lifesaver for any film student.

Corrigan actually provides a standardized vocabulary list of abbreviations.

It's like learning a new language, but a very simple one.

Let's run through them.

I'll give the term, you explain it.

See you.

Close -up.

Just the face, usually.

Emotional intensity.

Extreme close -up.

Just an eye or a mouth or a trigger finger.

It isolates a detail.

Medium shot between a close -up and a full shot, usually showing a character from the waist up.

This is your standard conversational shot.

FS or LS?

Full shot or long shot.

You see the whole body of the character and usually some of the environment around them.

34s.

Three -quarter shot, showing only about three -quarters of the character's bodies.

It's a slight variation on the medium shot.

Now in the movement, BS.

Pan shot.

The camera pivots horizontally, left to right or right to left.

Think of a spectator watching a tennis match.

VRS.

Tracking shot.

This is different from a pan.

The entire camera moves.

It's on tracks or a dolly.

It follows someone.

Right, it follows a walking figure down a hallway.

In your notes, you can even draw an arrow to show which way it's moving.

LA and HA.

Low angle.

Looking up at the character makes them look powerful.

And high angle, looking down, makes them look small or weak.

And the editing terms.

SRS.

Shot reverse shot pattern.

This is the bread and butter of dialogue scenes.

You see person A looking left.

Cut.

You see person B looking right.

It stitches the conversation together.

CT.

Cut.

Just a straight transition from one shot to the next.

LT.

Long take.

The film does not cut for an unusually long time.

The tension builds because the eye isn't given a break.

It seems like homework to memorize these.

But I can see how writing MSMomCTCUson is way faster than writing medium shot of the mom.

Then it cuts to a close -up of the son.

Exactly.

It saves you seconds.

And those seconds allow you to keep your eyes on the screen.

So we have our notes.

We have our shorthand.

Now we come to segment five.

Visual memory and reflection.

Corgan makes a point here that I think is really encouraging.

What's that?

A good critic doesn't necessarily have a photographic memory by birth.

They have a trained memory.

Yes.

I have a bad memory is not a valid excuse in film analysis.

You train your memory by taking these notes and then elaborating on them shortly after seeing the movie.

You fill in the shorthand with carefully measured descriptions while the images are still fresh.

To illustrate this, the text does a deep dive into two incredibly famous sequences.

I want to spend some time on these because they really show how to translate a visual image into words.

The first is from Sergey Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin from 1925.

The Odessa Steps sequence.

Possibly the most famous editing sequence in cinema history.

Corgan breaks this down using figures 2 .02 through 2 .06.

He highlights five shots at the center of the sequence to show how visual memory works.

Get the scene for us.

Okay.

So civilians are being massacred by soldiers on a giant stone staircase.

First, you have a shot of the soldier's legs.

See you.

Close up.

They are marching methodically.

Their boots are moving downward from the top left of the screen to the bottom right.

Okay.

So it's a strong diagonal line coming down.

A very strong diagonal force.

Then cut.

We have F .S.

full shot of a mother holding her wounded child.

She is walking up the steps.

Against the flow.

She's moving against the flow.

So we have a geometry problem here.

A collision.

The soldiers are a mechanical line moving down.

The mother is a human line moving up.

Exactly.

Then the angle changes.

We see the rifles firing directly toward the woman and child.

The line of the rifles graphically intersects with the line of the woman's movement.

It's an X on the screen.

It's a graphic intersection where the lines of implacable mechanical force, the soldiers,

collide with the lines of human resistance.

The mother.

And then the tragic resolution.

We see a M .S.

medium shot of a baby in a carriage tumbling down the steps.

That direction downward suggests the uprising is failing.

The force is waiting.

The force of the soldiers is winning.

The chaos takes over.

So analyzing this isn't just saying the soldiers killed the civilians.

It's seeing how the lines of the composition, the diagonals, the intersections, tell the story of oppression versus resistance without a single word of dialogue.

Exactly.

The geometry explains why the scene feels so oppressive.

The second case study is Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho from 1960.

And specifically the shower scene.

Another master class in visual patterns.

Here, the student notes might connect three specific images that all share a shape.

What are they?

One, the hole in the wall.

Norman's peephole.

Two, the close up of the shower drain.

Okay.

And three, the close up of Marion's dead eye.

They are all circles and they're all about looking.

Correct.

The film is about voyeurism, about looking, and the sexual and gendered implications of looking.

Norman looks through the peephole.

That's the active guilty look.

Then the murder happens.

Then we see the water spiraling down the drain.

It's a spinning circle.

And then in one of the most famous transitions in history, the camera dissolves from the black hole of the drain to the pupil of Marion's dead eye.

Corrigan quotes Donald Sputto's analysis here.

And it is beautiful writing.

Sputto really captures the horror.

He does.

He describes the white tiles and how the cleansing water turns to blood.

He calls the shower a shower turned coffin.

It's so visceral.

Sputto captures the shift from the banal a woman taking a shower to the horrific.

But listen to this part.

In an extraordinary lap dissolve, we emerge from the darkness of the drain out from behind her eye, open and stilled in death.

That transition drain to eye links us, the audience, to Norman, doesn't it?

Yes.

Sputto argues that by linking the drain to the eye, Hitchcock implies that we are the voyeurs.

We were looking through the peephole with Norman.

Now we are looking at the victim.

The character is the individual viewer.

Yeah, that is heavy.

But it shows how taking notes on a drain and an eye can lead to a massive psychological insight about the audience's own guilt.

It does.

Without those specific notes, without noticing that dissolve, you might miss the implication that the audience is complicit in the viewing.

This has been a workout.

We've gone from I like movies to analyzing the geometry of Russian silent films and the psychology of Hitchcock.

Corrigan wraps up the chapter with some exercises.

What should our listeners try if they want to flex these muscles this weekend?

There are two great exercises mentioned that bridge the gap between watching and writing.

Exercise number one.

Read two or three reviews or commentaries before seeing a movie.

A little bit, yes.

But the goal is to jot down three expectations.

Based on the reviews, what will be the most important features?

The sound, the acting, the lighting.

Okay.

Then watch the movie and compare reality to your expectation.

Did the reviews mislead you?

Did they prime you to see something specific?

That's good.

It forces you to be conscious of your bias going in.

And exercise number two.

Choose a single short sequence from a film, maybe five minutes, and annotate it as precisely as you can.

Just five minutes.

That's it.

Describe the shots, the sound, the movement.

Then try to draw conclusions or interpretations just from that one sequence.

Don't worry about the whole plot.

Just look at the micro to understand the macro.

I love that.

Start small.

You don't have to analyze the whole Godfather trilogy at once.

Just analyze five minutes of the wedding scene.

Exactly.

Start with the bricks and eventually you will understand the building.

So to recap our journey today.

This is a lot, but I think we have a roadmap now.

We started with preparation.

Checking our personal biases and choosing our lenses.

Technical, economic, historical.

All right.

We learned to be an architecture student or a forensic accountant, depending on the film.

Then we moved to active questioning the silent dialogue.

Asking why is this weird, like De Quincey did with The Knocking.

Then we grabbed our practical toolkit, the rule of three viewings, tracking motifs like the pizza window.

And using shorthand.

Yeah.

C -U -M -S -T -R -S.

So we don't miss the movie while writing.

We used visual memory to connect the dots like the diagonal collision in Potemkin or the circular drain in Psycho.

And finally, we turn those notes into writing.

It is a comprehensive system.

And as Corrigan says in his final thought for the chapter, the cinema muse is rich.

The cinema muse is rich.

There is so much there.

There is so much detail, so much thought, so much artistry in even a bad movie.

These tools, preparation,

shorthand, visual memory, they're just ways to tame that richness.

To make it understandable.

To make it understandable and meaningful so you can share it with others.

Well, I feel ready to watch a movie tonight.

And I promise no phone, no passive trance.

That is all we have time for on this deep dive.

Hopefully the next time you sit down in a theater or fire up a streaming service, you won't just watch with the corners of your eyes.

You'll be ready to talk back.

Keep looking and keep questioning.

A huge thank you from the last minute lecture team.

We'll see you on the next deep dive.