Chapter 3: Film Terms and Topics for Analysis and Writing

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Welcome back to the Deep Dive.

Today we are taking a step back from, I know the news cycle, the tech trends, all of that, and we're going to talk about something that I think we all do, probably a little too much of, if we're being honest.

Oh for sure, watching movies.

Watching movies, it's the universal pastime, right.

But what we're talking about today is the difference between just watching a movie and really seeing it.

Yeah, that's a huge distinction, a really important one.

Right, and I feel like we've all had this experience.

You finish a series, you walk out of a theater, and you just have this physical sensation.

You feel gutted or totally exhilarated, or maybe you're just terrified, you know, on a gut level that something just happened to you.

A gut feeling, yeah.

Exactly, the gut feeling.

But then, you know, you go to dump a drink with a friend and they ask, so what made it so good?

And you just, you freeze.

You end up saying something like, I don't know, the vibe was just really cool, or the acting was super intense.

And you realize in that moment that you don't actually have the words to explain the mechanism that just manipulated all of your emotions.

And that right there, that is the gap.

It's the gap between being a fan and being a critic.

Or, to use the language from our source material today, it's the difference between being a passive viewer and an active analyst.

And that's our whole mission today.

Closing that gap, we're doing a deep dive into chapter three of Timothy Corrigan's A Short Guide to Writing About Film.

This is the eighth edition, and the chapter itself is called Film Terms and Topics for Film Analysis and Writing.

And it's basically, I mean, you can think of it as the toolkit.

If you're a student, and you want to move from just saying, that was a cool movie, to writing a, you know,

a coherent, persuasive argument about how a movie actually works, you need to know the names of the tools the director's using.

So that's what we're going to do.

We're going to unpack that whole toolkit.

We'll start with the big picture stuff, the importance of vocabulary, how to even spot a theme.

Right.

Then we'll get into the structure of which is, I mean, way more complicated than just what happened.

Way more.

We'll look at all the visuals, mise en scene, cinematography, and then of course, editing and sound, the stuff you feel more than see.

And we're going to tie it all together at the end by walking through a sample essay that's in the chapter.

It's on the classic Western searchers.

And it really shows how you can take all these little individual pieces and, you know, build them into a real solid argument.

Okay.

So let's dive right in.

Section one, the power of vocabulary.

Corrigan kicks this off with an analogy that I found, honestly, a little humbling because I am so guilty of this.

He compares film analysis to sports.

It's a perfect analogy, really.

Think about watching a basketball game.

You can enjoy the energy.

You see the ball go in the hoop.

You cheer.

It's fun.

But if you don't know what a pick and roll is, or you can't see what a zone defense is trying to do, are you really seeing the game?

You're just seeing guys running around in shorts.

You're missing the whole strategy.

You're missing the why.

Exactly.

The same thing goes for literature, right?

A literary critic, they have to know the difference between a metaphor and a simile.

My love is a red, red rose is a metaphor.

My love is like a red, red rose is a simile.

They seem similar, but they hit your brain in completely different ways.

And so in film, if you don't know the difference between, say, a pan and a tracking shot, you might feel the emotion that the shot creates, but you have no way to explain how the director created it.

You can't analyze it.

Precisely.

And the book starts with maybe the most fundamental distinction of all.

And I'll be honest, almost everyone gets this wrong at first.

It's the difference between the screen and the frame.

Okay.

Because to me, you know, casually, those are the same thing.

I'd say it's on the screen or it's in the frame.

It means the same thing.

In everyday conversation, sure, absolutely.

But for analysis, they're actually opposing forces.

The screen, that's just the physical object.

It's the canvas, the white rectangle in the theater.

Exactly.

Or the glass on your phone.

It's two dimensional.

It's inert.

It never changes.

It's just the surface where the image gets projected.

Got it.

Okay.

So what's the frame then?

The frame is the rectangle that contains the image.

And unlike the screen, the frame is totally fluid.

It's always changing its relationship to the world it's showing you.

And this is the most important part.

The frame always implies a choice.

Corrigan says the frame effectively cuts the world.

So it's about what's included and what's left out.

Exactly.

It includes certain things and it rigidly excludes others.

So just noticing how that frame is cutting the world is like step one of analysis.

The text gives a really good specific comparison here to show why this matters.

It compares the 2008 biopic Milk with that 2010 thriller, The Tourist.

Yeah.

This is a great example of why having the right words is so crucial for your argument.

A student might watch both of those movies and they might write, well, both films feature a lot of closeups of people talking.

Which is factually true.

It's a fact, yes, but it's analytically weak.

It doesn't tell us anything.

Corrigan points out that in Milk, the film uses a very specific technique called shot reverse shot.

You cut from Sean Penn's face to the face of the person he's talking to and then back again.

So it's a conversation?

It's more than that.

The frame is establishing a relationship, forcing you to evaluate the conversation to see the exchange of ideas, the political tension, the subtle reactions on their faces.

It's about the dialogue.

Okay.

Whereas in The Tourist, it's a very different vibe.

Totally different.

In The Tourist, the closeups of Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, they're serving a completely different purpose.

The text argues that describing that as a predominance of closeups helps situate the film in a specific history.

The Hollywood star system.

Right.

It's not about the dialogue.

It's about glamour.

It's about their faces.

Exactly.

The frame isn't there to analyze a conversation.

It's there to present them.

It's totally reliant on the star power of the actors.

The frame is basically screaming, look at this incredibly beautiful movie star.

So even though both films have closeups, the critical vocabulary helps you argue that one is about political exchange and the other is about pure Hollywood spectacle.

That makes perfect sense.

And that brings us to the next big idea, which is themes.

And I feel like theme is probably the most misused word in every high school English essay ever written.

It is the classic trap.

So many students think the theme is just a summary of the plot.

They'll write something like, the theme of Jurassic Park is that dinosaurs eat people.

But that's just, that's just what happens in the movie.

Right.

That's the plot.

The theme is the intellectual core.

It's the big idea that the movie is exploring.

So for Jurassic Park, the theme might be the hubris of man playing God, or maybe nature versus technology.

The text brings up Harry Potter.

The plot is about a wizard school and a dark lord.

The theme is good versus evil or, you know, the loss of innocence.

Precisely.

Or Schindler's List.

It's not just a war movie about historical events.

A central theme is the idea of reluctant heroism in the face of absolute unimaginable atrocity.

The chapter has this fantastic case study that I think really helps clarify how to move from just spotting a theme to actually analyzing it.

It focuses on the film, The Conformist.

Bernardo Bertolucci's film.

This is the alienation example in the book.

So walk us through this because the student in the example, they start with a pretty basic observation, that gut feeling we talked about.

Right.

So the student watches the movie.

They feel that the main character, Clarice, he seems lonely, disconnected.

So the student's first note is, theme,

alienation.

Which is a start.

It's a good observation, but it's not an argument.

It's just an opinion.

So how do you prove it?

Well, this is the key.

You have to look for the evidence in the film itself.

The student starts looking at the mise en scene, all the visual elements, and they notice that Bertolucci very rarely frames Clarice in a comfortable open space.

Yeah.

The text specifically mentions doorways and windows as being really important.

Yes.

The character is constantly being tracked by his environment.

We see him through door frames, or with the heavy lines of a window pane cutting across his face.

He's often in these huge, stark, empty rooms of fascist architecture, where the shadows on the floor look like literal prison bars.

So the visual world, the set itself, is oppressing him.

It's visually imprisoning him.

So the analysis evolves.

It stops being just, Clarice is sad, and it becomes something much stronger.

The film uses stark framing within framing to visually imprison the character, which reinforces the theme that his compliance with fascism has doomed him to a life of isolation.

See, that is a thesis statement.

That's a real argument.

And it moves the analysis from being a moral judgment alienation is bad to a structural observation.

It's about how the film is constructed.

The framing creates the feeling of alienation.

It's a huge leap.

So for you listening, if you want to start practicing this, Corgan lists a few key questions that we should all be asking ourselves while we're watching a movie to try and dig out these themes.

They're great diagnostic questions.

First, who were the central characters?

And more importantly, what do they represent?

Is the conflict about the individual versus society?

Is it tradition versus progress?

And he says something that I really appreciate, which is don't ignore your own feelings.

Never.

That's your compass.

Ask yourself, how does this movie make me feel?

If you feel confused, don't just assume you're missing something.

Ask why the director might want you to be confused.

If you feel claustrophobic, look at the frame.

Is it tight?

Are the ceilings low?

Your emotions are the data points.

They're what lead you to the analysis.

Okay, let's move into section two.

This is where film, you know, it borrows from literature, but then it goes off in its own very unique direction.

We need to talk about narrative and character.

And first, we have to untangle three words that I know I use interchangeably all the time.

Story, plot and narration.

And most people do.

But in film theory, there are actually three distinct layers of how a story gets told.

Okay, so let's break them down one by one.

Let's start with story.

The story is everything.

It is the comprehensive, chronological timeline of all events, both the ones we see on screen and the ones that are just implied.

So if a character says something like, I was born in Ohio back in 1980, that event being born in Ohio, that's part of the story, even if we never, ever see a flashback to Ohio.

Correct.

We infer it.

It exists within the diegesis.

That's the technical term for the film.

Now, plot is different.

The plot is the specific arrangement and construction of those events as they are shown to us in the film.

The text uses the example of Napoleon to explain this, and I thought it was just brilliant.

It really clarifies it perfectly.

Okay, so let's say we all want to make a movie about Napoleon Bonaparte.

The story is basically fixed.

It's history, right?

He was born in Corsica.

He rose to become a general, then emperor, the Battle of Waterloo, exile, death.

That's the raw material.

But the plots we can make from that story are totally different.

Infinite variations.

I could write a script that starts with him on his deathbed on St.

Helena, and the whole movie is told in a series of flashbacks.

That is a specific plot construction.

Or I could make a movie that is strictly chronological, but only covers the three days of the Battle of Waterloo.

The story material is the same, but the plot is completely unique.

And then the third piece is narration.

Narration is the perspective that's organizing the plot for us.

Who or what is telling us this story?

Is it an omniscient, God's -eye view, where we see everything happening on the battlefield at once?

Or is it what we'd call restricted narration, where maybe we only know what Josephine knows from back in Paris?

So most of the movies we watch, you know, the big blockbusters, the rom -coms, they tend to follow what the text calls classical narrative.

The Hollywood standard, yeah.

And classical narrative has a set of rules, or at least very strong conventions.

It relies on logic, clear cause and effect.

Character A wants something, they face an obstacle, they overcome it, and at the end we get a sense of closure.

And it's almost always focused on one central character who drives the action forward.

Yes, exactly.

But there's a fascinating paradox that the book brings up.

It discusses a student paper written by Bill Evans,

I'm pretty sure it's not the jazz pianist, about the film The Big Sleep.

Right, the Howard Hawks film Humphrey Bogart.

The Big Sleep is a legend in film history for this exact reason, the classic film noir, a detective movie.

But the plot is so ridiculously convoluted, there are so many double crosses and murders,

that famously, during production,

the director Howard Hawks sent a telegram to Raymond Chandler, the author of the original book.

He asked, who killed the chauffeur?

And what was Chandler's reply?

He wired back, I have no idea.

So that's the question then.

If classical narrative is supposed to be logical and clear, how on earth is The Big Sleep considered a classic example of it if not even the author knows what happened?

And that is a brilliant insight of that student's essay.

Evans argues that the film remains a classical narrative because it very cleverly shifts its own center of gravity.

We, the audience, we stop caring about the crime logic, you know, who killed who, and we start caring intensely about the character logic.

Which is, will Bogart and Lorna Call get together?

Exactly.

The plot effectively becomes their relationship, not the murder mystery.

The film creates this incredibly compelling, unified world built entirely around their star power, their witty banter, their chemistry.

The murders are just, they're just background noise for the romance.

The narrative holds together because the characters hold together.

But of course, not all movies play by these rules.

The chapter also talks about alternative or post -classical narratives.

Right.

And these are films that intentionally challenge or reject that linear goal -oriented structure.

The text points to Wong Kar -Wai's film Happy Together.

Such a beautiful, heartbreaking film.

It is.

But if you look at its structure, it just wanders.

It's about these two men from Hong Kong who are adrift in Buenos Aires.

They break up, they get back together, they drift apart again.

The plot doesn't really drive forward to a big climax in the traditional sense.

It meanders.

And that meandering structure perfectly mirrors the aimless, drifting lives of the characters.

Or a film like Hiroshima Mon Amour, which is even more abstract.

Oh, that film is a puzzle.

It juxtaposes two stories that, on the surface, don't seem to belong together at all.

A French woman's love affair with a Japanese man in the present and the historical horror of the atomic bomb in the past.

The narrative is fragmented, it forces the audience to do the work.

You have to figure out how these things connect, which reflects the central idea that memory itself is fractured and not linear.

Okay, let's talk about characters for a bit.

Because I think the biggest trap for a casual viewer, and I'm definitely guilty of this, is that we tend to judge characters as if they were real people we might want to be friends with.

Oh yeah, you hear it all the time.

I didn't like him, he was so mean.

Or she was really annoying.

Right.

Or why did he do that?

That was such a stupid decision.

That kind of thinking is the death of analysis.

You have to take a step back and ask a different question.

Is this character meant to be a realistic, psychologically complex person, or are they a construction, a symbol representing an idea?

The text gives a great comparison between My Dinner with Andre and Public Enemies.

And they couldn't be more different.

In My Dinner with Andre, the entire action of the film is literally just two men sitting at a dinner table talking.

The characters are defined completely by the stories they tell.

They are purely verbal constructions.

But in Public Enemies.

The characters are historical figures.

They are tethered to a biography.

Our understanding of John Dillinger is shaped by what we know or think we know about the real person.

And sometimes the character is a real person, but they're still being constructed as a character.

Like in the documentary Crumb.

That's a perfect example.

Robert Crumb is a real, living human being.

But the filmmaker, through editing, through shot selection, through the questions he asks, is still constructing a character named Robert Crumb for us to watch.

We're seeing a very specific version of him.

And you can't ignore the star factor.

We can't pretend we don't know who Tom Cruise is when he shows up on screen.

Absolutely not.

You bring decades of Tom Cruise action hero into the theater with you.

Later in the chapter, there's a great analysis of Sandra Bernhardt's performance in The King of Comedy.

The Scorsese film?

Amazing.

Bernhardt plays this character who is an obsessed, almost deranged fan.

But you can't separate that performance from Bernhardt's own real life public persona as a standup comic, which was famously aggressive, chaotic and confrontational.

The movie uses that friction.

The character is a fascinating blend of what's in the script and the star's already established reputation.

So before we leave narrative, we have to touch on point of view or POV.

Right.

And it's so much more than just where the camera is standing.

It's layered.

The text makes a really useful distinction between physical POV and psychological POV.

Yeah.

So physical POV is literal.

The camera looks through a keyhole or we see a shot from a character's direct eye line.

But psychological POV is about whose mind we are inhabiting, whose consciousness is filtering the story for us.

The comparison of rear window and apocalypse now in the book is really helpful here.

It is.

In Hitchcock's rear window, the POV is objectively limited.

We are physically trapped in that one apartment with Jimmy Stewart's character.

We only see the clues when he sees them.

All the suspense comes from that physical restriction.

But in Apocalypse Now,

it's the opposite.

It's completely subjective and psychological.

We're traveling upriver in Vietnam, but the war we see is being filtered through the nightmare perspective of Captain Willard.

The colors are almost hallucinogenic.

The sound design is distorted.

The pacing is feverish.

We are not seeing the war as it was.

We are seeing the war as Willard feels it were in his head.

And to wrap up this section, the book talks about adaptation, you know, comparing a book to the movie.

And it gives a really important warning against the laundry list approach.

Oh, the worst.

In the book, the car was blue.

But in the movie, the car was red.

It's boring.

And more importantly, who cares?

It's not analysis.

So what should we be looking for instead?

You have to look for the why.

Why do they make that change?

If you compare Jane Austen's classic novel Pride and Prejudice to its Bollywood adaptation, Pride and Prejudice, you aren't just noting plot changes.

You are analyzing a massive cultural translation.

How does the story's meaning change when you add elaborate musical numbers and the complexities of the Indian social hierarchy?

Or the example of Heart of Darkness versus Apocalypse Now.

Exactly.

Changing the setting from colonial Africa in the 1890s to the Vietnam War in the 1960s isn't just a change.

It's an argument.

The film is explicitly connecting the European imperialism of the 19th century to the American interventionism of the 20th century.

That's the kind of thing you analyze.

The meaning of the change.

OK, section three.

Now we get to the fancy French words,

mise en scene.

Pronounce mise en scene.

And it literally just means what is put into the scene.

So basically everything we see on screen, everything that exists independently of the camera and the editing.

If you were directing a stage play, mise en scene is everything you would put on the stage.

The sets, the props, the lighting, the costumes, the way the actors move.

Now the book points out a massive trap here that a lot of people fall into.

It's the idea of realism.

This is so critical to understand.

We have this tendency to think that realism means a lack of style.

We think a gritty documentary is real and a big colorful musical is fake.

But Corrigan argues that realism is just another style.

It is a construction, just like fantasy is a construction.

There is a student essay case study here that I think every single listener should hear because it completely flipped my own perspective.

It's about the movie Philadelphia.

The essay by Cecilia A.

Graham.

Yes, this is a perfect example of how critical thinking develops.

So the student Cecilia, she watches Fina Alfea, which is this heavy drama about a lawyer played by Tom Hanks who's dying of AIDS and he's suing his firm for wrongful termination.

Right.

And the student's initial reaction is basically a complaint.

She argues that the movie fails at being realistic.

She writes something like, this isn't the real Philadelphia.

The movie only shows shiny skyscrapers, clean streets, rich mahogany boardrooms.

It completely ignores the slums, the grit, the poverty of the actual city.

So her first draft is essentially this movie is fake.

Exactly.

But then, and this is the crucial pivot, she thinks more deeply about it.

She realizes that this unrealistic setting must be a specific choice by the director, Jonathan Demme.

Why would he choose to show the shiny, perfect city?

To create a contrast with the main character.

Precisely.

The director uses the mythical gleaning city of brotherly love, the historical image of Philadelphia, to create a deeply ironic contrast with the main character's suffering.

His body is failing, he is dying, and he is being excluded from this perfect, sterile, powerful world.

So if the background, the setting had been gritty and dirty, his suffering might have just blended in.

But because it's so clean and shiny, his exclusion really stands out.

The lack of realism is the entire point.

The mise -en -scene represents the cold, unfeeling power structure that is crushing him.

That's such a good lesson.

If something in a movie looks fake or unrealistic, the first question should always be why.

Okay, let's break down the individual elements of mise -en -scene.

First up, settings and sets.

Sets are never, ever just background.

Think of Hitchcock's North by Northwest.

The climax of that film takes place on Mount Rushmore.

With Cary Grant hanging off of Abraham Lincoln's giant stone nose.

It's completely absurd, right?

But think about the meaning.

He is scrambling for his life across the giant faces of the presidents, the ultimate symbols of American order, law, and justice.

The setting itself is participating in the irony of the film.

The law has become this treacherous, deadly cliff that might kill him at any second.

Then there's acting style.

We touched on Sandra Bernhard earlier, but the text goes much deeper into her performance in The King of Comedy.

Yeah, it analyzes her style as being grotesque.

And it's not just that her character is loud.

It's her physical gesture.

She waves her arms around wildly.

She physically crowds the other actors.

She invades their personal space.

Her voice pitches up into this frantic teenage scream.

The acting style itself creates a character of pure anxiety and neurosis.

And you can contrast that directly with something like The Bicycle Thieves.

A classic of Italian near realism.

A totally different goal.

The director, Vittorio De Sica, used non -professional actors on purpose to get a very naturalistic style.

Yeah.

He wanted it to look like a documentary.

Like you were just watching real life unfold on the streets of Rome.

Both are acting, but the tools and the goals are polar opposites.

What about costumes?

This is an easy one to overlook, but the text makes a really great comparison between Rocky and James Bond.

Both men wear a tuxedo at some point.

But that tuxedo tells a completely different story on each of their bodies.

So on James Bond.

It fits like a second skin.

It's flawless.

It signifies power, elegance, belonging.

He owns any room he walks into.

The tuxedo is his uniform.

And on Rocky.

It's a little too tight in the shoulders.

The sleeves might be a bit short.

He's constantly fidgeting with the collar.

He looks like he's being strangled by it.

The costume tells us everything we need to know.

This man does not belong in this elite world.

And then you have an iconic costume like the white suit in Saturday Night Fever.

That suit is his armor.

It's his superhero cape.

When John Travolta's character puts on that suit, he transforms from a kid who works at a hardware store into a god on the dance floor.

The costume is his entire character arc.

Let's talk lighting.

The book breaks it down into natural versus artificial.

Lighting basically sets the emotional temperature of a scene.

The text compares the film Sunday in the Country with Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon.

Sunday in the Country uses soft, diffuse, natural light to make everything look like an impressionist painting.

It feels nostalgic, warm, like a beautiful memory.

And Barry Lyndon, that's the one Kubrick famously filmed using only candlelight.

Right, which sounds so romantic, doesn't it?

Ooh, have a light.

But on screen, the effect is ghostly.

The faces are these pale ovals floating in a vast void of darkness.

It creates this profound sense of isolation and grotesquery.

The lighting tells you that these people are trapped in their rigid rituals, completely cut off from the real world.

And finally, the last piece of mise en scene is space and composition.

And the text absolutely loves using Buster Keaton for this.

And for good reason.

Everyone who studies film should study Buster Keaton.

In his film Our Hospitality, there's a running gag based on a feud between two families.

The law of hospitality in this world says the bad guys can't kill Keaton's character as long as he is inside their house.

So the house is a literal safe zone.

Right.

So the mise en scene, specifically the doorway, becomes the entire plot.

Keaton will put one foot outside and a dozen guns will start firing.

He pulls his foot back inside and they all stop.

The architecture of the set is what drives both the comedy and the narrative forward.

It's not just a backdrop.

Okay, that's a perfect transition to section four.

We are stepping behind the camera now to talk about composition and the image.

This is where we talk about the shot, the basic building block of film.

Let's start with tone color.

The most obvious example is The Wizard of Oz, black and white for Kansas and glorious technicolor for Oz.

Right.

That's a very clear binary, reality versus fantasy.

But look at something more subtle, like Wong Kar -Wai's film In the Mood for Love.

The colors in that movie are just breathtaking.

They're these deep saturated reds and golds.

But it's not just pretty.

The two main characters are deeply repressed.

They can't speak their love for each other, so the colors have to speak for them.

The walls are red, her dresses are red.

The passion that they can't express is literally pushed into the environment around them.

Or a more famous example, The Little Girl in the Red Coat in Schindler's List.

Probably the most famous use of selective color in modern cinema.

In a three hour black and white film about the death of millions, that one single splash of red forces your eye.

It individualizes the immense tragedy.

It's Spielberg saying, don't look at the statistic, look at this one child.

The text also brings up a student essay that analyzes the horror movie Don't Look Now.

Yes, a great analysis of how color can be used as recurring motif.

The protagonist's young daughter drowns at the beginning of the film while wearing a shiny red coat.

Throughout the rest of the movie, the color red keeps popping up in a piece of stained glass and some spilled paint.

It haunts him.

The color red itself becomes a character, kind of ghost that is leading him towards his own doom.

What about perspective, specifically the use of focus?

So you have deep focus, which is when everything in the shot, from the person in the foreground to the mountains on the horizon, is perfectly sharp and clear.

It lets the audience choose what to look at.

And then you have the opposite, shallow focus, where maybe only the character's face is sharp and the entire background is blurry.

That's the camera telling the viewer, look only at this face, nothing else matters right now.

And what's a rack focus?

A rack focus is when the focus point shifts during the shot.

So the camera might be focused on me and then without cutting, the focus will slide smoothly to the person standing behind me.

The camera is physically directing your attention.

It's saying, okay, you've seen this, now look at this.

It's a very powerful tool.

Let's talk angles.

This is film 101 stuff, but the text warns us not to be lazy with our analysis of it.

Right, the standard textbook definition is pretty simple.

A high angle, where the camera's looking down, makes the subject look weak or small.

A low angle, where the camera's looking up, makes the subject look powerful or heroic.

But context is everything.

The text uses a great example from The Exorcist.

There is that famous iconic shot where the priest, Father Marin, first arrives at the house.

The camera's very low to the ground, looking up at him.

So according to the rule, he should look like a superhero arriving to save the day.

You would think so, but he's framed against the house itself.

And the house is massive, it's dark, it's looming over him in the background.

So even though it's technically a low angle shot of him, it actually emphasizes how utterly small and insignificant he is compared to the immense evil waiting inside that building.

He is being threatened by the geometry of the shot.

That's a great nuance.

Then there is the canted frame, which people sometimes call the dutch angle.

The tilted camera.

Rebel Without a Cause uses this perfectly.

In that film, the world is out of balance for these teenagers.

The characters are drunk or angry or confused, so the horizon of the world literally tips over.

The camera is visualizing their internal chaos.

I also love the concept the book brings up of off -screen space.

What we don't see is often as important as what we do see.

It's Buster Keaton again.

In his masterpiece, The General, there's a shot where Keaton is sitting on the connecting rod of a giant train wheel.

He's sad, he's daydreaming, and the train starts to move.

And he's completely oblivious.

Totally.

We, the audience, see the wheel start to turn, taking him up and down, but he doesn't notice.

The whole joke relies on the fact that the train is moving into danger off -screen, and he is just packably riding the mechanism.

The suspense and the comedy are in what the frame isn't showing us yet.

And finally, for this section, the moving frame.

You know, panning, tilting, tracking shots.

A crane shot can lift us high above the action, which can emphasize a character's isolation.

A tracking shot, or a dolly shot, is where the camera physically moves with the characters, putting us right there in their physical space.

It completely changes our relationship to the action unfolding.

Section five.

The edited image.

This is where the magic really happens.

If the shot is a word, editing is the grammar.

This is the syntax of the language of film.

Editing is the logic of the film.

It dictates the entire rhythm and pace.

Yeah, it can be slow and meditative, like the long unbroken takes in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line.

Or it can be totally chaotic, like the rapid fire, almost subliminal cutting in The Worn Ultimatum.

But 90 % of the time, the movies we watch are using what's called continuity editing.

Or invisible editing.

Exactly.

The whole goal is to make you forget you're watching a movie, to make the cuts invisible.

Casablanca is the textbook example of this.

You get an establishing shot of Rick's cafe,

cut to a medium shot of Rick, cut to a close -up of Ilsa, and you get shot or verse shot for their dialogue.

It all flows so smoothly that your brain just processes it as one continuous unbroken reality.

But then of course you have directors who want to smash that illusion to pieces.

Like Orson Welles in The Lady from Shanghai.

Yeah.

The famous climax in The Hole of Mirrors.

Oh, that scene is so dizzying and confusing.

It's meant to be.

He intentionally breaks all the rules of continuity editing.

We have no idea where anyone is standing in relation to each other.

We see five reflections of the same face in one shot.

The editing fractures the physical space to show us that the character's moral and psychological world is completely collapsing.

The text highlights a specific student essay by a student named Scott Richardson, and it's about Citizen Kane.

Specifically,

the breakfast montage.

I really want to spend a minute on this because it's such a perfect example of telling a huge story purely through editing.

It's one of the most famous and influential sequences in the history of cinema.

It tells the of Charles Foster Kane's first marriage deteriorating and failing.

It covers several years of time in just a couple of minutes of screen time.

So how does it work?

How does he do it?

It's a series of five or six short scenes all set at the same breakfast table, and they're linked by these very fast swish pans, these blurry whipping cuts that transition us forward through the years.

Okay, so scene one.

They're newlyweds.

They're sitting very close together at a tiny table.

The lighting is soft and romantic.

She's flirting with him.

She feeds a bite of food.

She says, I love you, Charles.

It's incredibly intimate.

Switch pan.

Scene two.

A little while later, the table is now slightly larger.

They're still joking and laughing, but he's a bit more distracted.

He's talking about his newspaper business.

The outside world is creeping in.

Switch pan.

Scene three.

Now the mood has completely soured.

He is criticizing the president.

She is defending him.

The lighting is getting harder, much sharper, and they're sitting physically further apart from each other.

And by the final shot.

The final shot is just devastating.

They're sitting at opposite ends of an enormously long formal dining table.

Looks like it must be 10 feet long.

The entire center of the table is filled with flowers and candelabras, these physical obstacles, and they are both silently reading newspapers.

And the newspaper she's reading is his newspaper, the one he owns, right?

Yeah, yes.

The inquirer.

His business, his ambition has literally become a physical wall between them.

They don't speak a single word.

The camera just pulls back.

End of scene.

And for all intents and purposes, end of marriage.

That is what you call economical editing.

It's absolutely brilliant.

You don't need five scenes of them having long, traumatic arguments.

Just five snapshots of a table getting longer and longer.

The book also touches on intellectual editing.

This is the classic Russian stuff.

Battleship Potemkin.

Sergei Eisenstein, the father of montage theory.

And the text mentions the famous sequence with the stone lions.

The lions, right.

So during the chaos of the attack on the harbor, Eisenstein cuts together three separate, very quick shots of three different stone lion statues.

First, a shot of a lion sleeping, then a shot of a different lion waking up, then a shot of a third lion rising to its feet and roaring.

But they're just statues.

They can't actually move.

Right.

But by cutting them together so rapidly, he creates the illusion in the viewer's mind that one single lion is rising up and roaring in revolutionary fury.

It's a pure metaphor for the Russian people waking up to fight back.

The meaning isn't in any of the individual shots.

The meaning is created in the collision between the shots.

Okay, section six.

Sound.

The chapter quotes the movie White Men Can't Jump.

You're listening, but you're not hearing.

We are such visual creatures.

We tend to focus on what we see and ignore what our ears are telling us.

But sound is so often what actually scares us or what makes us cry.

We have to start with the key distinction between diegetic and non -diegetic sound.

It's a really simple test.

Can the characters in the movie hear it?

Okay, so if a character in the film turns on a radio and music starts playing.

That's diegetic.

It's part of the diegesis, the world of the story.

The characters can hear it.

But if a shark is approaching the beach and a cello starts playing a scary theme.

That is non -diegetic.

I mean, unless that shark has a boombox strapped to its back, the characters on the beach do not hear that music.

It's for the audience only.

It's the film's score.

What about a technique like a sound bridge?

That's a great tool for smoothing over a cut.

For example, maybe we are in a character's apartment and we hear the sound of a train whistle.

And then the film cuts to the next shot, which is of a train station.

The sound bridges the two scenes and pulls us seamlessly into the next location.

The book brings up a really visceral example from Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, the famous sound map.

Oh, this is a classic cinematic shock.

A woman discovers a dead body.

She opens her mouth to let out a huge scream.

We see her face contorted in terror.

But instead of a human scream, we hear a train whistle, a piercing mechanical shriek.

And at that exact moment, the film cuts to a shot of a train rushing out of a dark tunnel.

It connects the biological horror of seeing the body with the mechanical rushing unstoppable speed of the train.

It jolts the audience far more than a real scream ever would have.

There's also a funny little bit of film history in the text about the movie Broadway Melody from 1929.

This was right at the beginning of the sound era.

The talkies almost ruined movies for a little while.

The cameras were so noisy that they had to be boxed up inside these huge soundproof booths so they couldn't move.

Which meant the movie suddenly became very static, like watching filmed stage plays.

Exactly.

And the early microphones were terrible.

They were often hidden in flower pots on a table.

If an actor walked away from the flower pot, their voice would just disappear.

And what about the editing?

You couldn't edit sound tape easily back then.

There's a moment in Broadway Melody where an actor very obviously and loudly bangs a door shut.

And you wonder why.

It's because they needed a loud noise to cover up the audible pop of the audio cut on the soundtrack.

It was a purely technological band -aid.

Okay, so finally section seven.

We've gone through all the terms.

We have the toolkit.

Now we need to see how to put it all together.

The chapter ends with a fantastic sample essay on the classic John Ford Western, The Searchers.

The essay is by a student named Richard Geshka, and it's called The Darkened Doorways of the Searchers.

And this is the model.

If you're a student listening to this and you're trying to figure out how to write a film paper, this is what you should be aiming for.

It does three things perfectly.

One, it has a very clear, arguable thesis.

Two, it uses specific visual evidence from the film, in this case mise -en -scene, to support that thesis.

And three, it uses comparison, analyzing the film as an adaptation of a novel.

Okay, so what is the central argument?

What's the thesis?

The film is based on a novel by Alan LeMay.

Geshka argues that the film deliberately adapts the novel by making the hero, Ethan Edwards, who's played by John Wayne, a much darker, more obsessive and more openly racist character than he was in the original book.

Okay, that's a strong claim.

So how does he prove it?

What's the specific visual evidence?

He focuses his entire argument on a single recurring visual motif.

The doorway.

Explain what that means.

Well, the movie opens with a shot from inside a dark house, looking out through an open doorway at the bright, vast desert.

Ethan Edwards rides up on his horse.

He's framed perfectly by the dark doorway.

He is an outsider looking in.

The black interior of the house contrasts with the bright, wild world that he comes from.

And how does the film end?

This is the famous final shot of the film.

It's one of the most iconic shots in movie history.

Ethan has spent years hunting for his kidnapped niece.

He finally rescues her and brings her back to the family homestead.

The family all rushes inside the house.

They cross the threshold into civilization, safety, domesticity.

But Ethan doesn't go in.

Ethan stops at the door.

He can't enter.

He does this famous gesture where he grabs his arm, which, by the way, was John Wayne's personal homage to an old cowboy star named Harry Carrey.

And then he just turns and walks away back into the desert and the door swings shut on him, leaving us in darkness.

Screen goes black.

It's a heartbreaking ending.

It is.

And the essay argues that the framing in that shot proves the theme.

Ethan is too savage, too violent, too dark, represented by his dark silhouette in the doorway to ever belong to the civilized world that he just helped to save.

He's become a relic, a man out of time.

So the essay brilliantly connects the narrative, the fact that he leaves, the visuals, the doorway framing, and the adaptation, the way this ending makes him darker than the character in the book, all into one single unified point.

That is the deep dive right there.

That's the goal.

You aren't just watching John Wayne walk away.

You are reading the grammar of the frame to understand the deep tragedy of his character.

So there we have it.

We have built the toolkit.

We've gone from I like this movie to having the words to analyze the frame, the cut, the sound, and the adaptation.

It's really like learning a new language.

Once you know the vocabulary, you suddenly start to see and read the signs everywhere.

Before we sign off, here's a final thought to chew on.

The text in its final pages briefly mentions films like Cloverfield and the rise of digital filmmaking.

The whole shaky cam aesthetic.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Down footage.

Right.

And this book is the eighth edition, but the world moves incredibly fast.

As we move deeper into an era of TikTok, of AI generated video, of content that is shot and consumed vertically on phones,

how do all these classical rules of narrative and continuity even apply anymore?

That is the million dollar question.

We are watching a new visual grammar emerge in real time.

The idea of invisible continuity editing.

I mean, that matters a lot less to a generation that was raised on aggressive jump cuts and 15 second video loops.

Does the fundamental need for a frame ever go away?

I really don't think so.

Even if you're just holding an iPhone vertically to film your cat, you are still making a choice.

You're still deciding what to include and what to exclude.

You're still cutting the world.

The technology changes, the delivery system changes, but the fundamental act of choosing what to show someone, I think that's eternal.

Something to think about the next time you're doom scrolling through your feed.

Indeed.

A huge thank you to the last minute lecture team for helping us put this deep dive together.

Keep watching and keep writing.

We'll see you next time.