Chapter 4: Six Approaches to Writing About Film

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Welcome back to the Deep Dive.

Today, we are doing something a little bit different, something I am personally very excited about.

We are going to tackle the art of seeing.

That is a very poetic way to put it.

Well, it's true, isn't it?

You know that old parable about the blind man and the elephant?

Oh, yeah.

One touches the trunk and says, oh, this creature is a snake.

Another touches the leg and says, no, no, clearly this is a tree.

Right.

They're all experiencing the same thing, same reality, but their point of contact, their perspective really, it completely defines their conclusion.

Exactly.

And that is what happens with movies all the time.

You can have two people watch the specifically mentions Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street, and they can walk away and write two completely different yet equally valid essays.

I've seen it happen in my classes a hundred times.

Right.

One student might be completely obsessed with the lighting, the shadows, the visual geometry of the frames.

The formalist approach.

And the other might be totally focused on Fritz Lang's personal history, his biography, his flight from Nazi Germany, and what that means for the film.

And this is the key.

Neither of them is wrong.

Neither of them is wrong.

They're just using different lenses.

And that, I think, is basically the mission of today's Deep Dive.

We are going to unpack chapter four of Timothy Corrigan's A Short Guide to Writing About Film.

The chapter is called Six Approaches to Writing About Film.

And for you listening, whether you're a film major, you know, sweating over a paper that's due tomorrow.

Which is probably a few of you.

Probably a few.

Yeah.

Or if you're just someone who loves movies and you want to understand why you love them, this is for you.

This isn't just about passing a class.

It's about learning how to organize your thoughts.

It's about moving from that vague feeling of, oh, I liked it, to a really concrete statement of here is how it works.

It's about building fluency.

When you learn these approaches, you're basically learning the grammar of film criticism.

You're moving from being, let's say, a passive consumer to an active analyst.

I like that.

Active analyst.

So let's lay out the roadmap for everyone.

Corrigan gives us six distinct lenses to view a film through.

We've got film history.

Right.

National cinemas, genres, auteurs.

The big one.

Yeah.

The famous one.

Then kinds of formalism.

And finally, ideology.

And before we dive into the first one, there's a kind of golden rule in this chapter that Corrigan really highlights.

It's important.

You do not need to be a pure theorist to use these.

You don't need a PhD in film theory.

It's a relief.

It is.

But you must be aware of your approach.

If you know which lens you're holding up, you know your limits, you know who your audience is, and you know what your goal is, it really stops you from just meandering.

It prevents that feeling of staring at a blank page, just like completely lost, not knowing where to even start.

You pick a lens and suddenly you have a path.

That's it.

Exactly.

You have a framework.

Okay.

Let's unpack this.

Let's start at the beginning.

The first one, film history.

Right.

Historical approach.

Now, when I hear history,

my brain immediately goes to, you know, dates.

I think this movie came out in 1941, but it's obviously more than that, right?

It's not just trivia.

Oh, much, much more.

A historical approach in this context means analyzing a film by investigating its place within a, well, a historical context.

It's arguing that you can't fully understand the movie just by looking at the plot or the characters.

You have to understand the world it was born into.

So connecting the text, the firm itself to the timeline it exists in.

Precisely.

And Corrigan, to make this easier to grasp, he breaks this down into three key angles to help you organize that kind of thinking.

Okay.

Hit me with the first one.

The first is the relationship between films.

This is basically comparative history.

Imagine you're comparing a movie set from a 1930s film versus a set from a 1970s film.

Okay.

How has the style changed?

How has the lighting technology changed?

How has the acting style evolved?

You're looking at the evolution of the medium itself, how films talk to each other across decades.

So it's film talking to film across time.

You're essentially asking, how do we get from, say, Charlie Chaplin to Martin Scorsese?

Precisely.

You are tracking the lineage of the art form itself.

So that's angle one.

The second angle is the relationship between films and their production conditions.

Production conditions.

The behind the scenes stuff.

Exactly.

The stuff that actually dictates what we end up seeing on screen.

For example, you could write a whole paper on how big corporations, the text mentions when Gulf plus Western bought Paramount, how that merger changed the kinds of movies that were being made.

That's the follow the money angle.

It's totally the follow the money angle.

Or the follow the tech angle.

In a more modern context, you might look at how the shift to digital cinematography changes the whole aesthetic of action movies compared to the, you know, practical effects of the 80s.

Right.

So you're not just critiquing the story, you're critiquing the industrial machinery that built the story.

You got it.

That's the core of it.

And then the third angle is reception.

Reception.

So how people,

how the audience reacted.

Exactly.

How did audiences receive the film at the time it came out?

A great example from the book is how the rise of television in the 1950s completely changed what people expected when they went to the theater.

Ah, right.

Because they could get the small intimate stories at home for free.

Exactly.

So they started wanting spectacle.

They wanted something TV couldn't give them.

And that's why we got CinemaScope and 3D and all those massive biblical epics like The Ten Commandments.

The context of TV exists directly explains the shape of the movies in the theater.

Yes.

If you ignore the existence of TV, you might just think directors in the 50s all,

coincidentally, fell in love with super wide shots for no reason.

History explains the style.

That makes perfect sense.

But there's a trap here, isn't there?

Corrigan warns us about something he calls the unmediated picture.

This is so crucial, especially for students starting out.

It is very, very easy to watch a movie like Our Daily Bread, which came out in 1934, and say, aha, this is a documentary fact.

This shows me exactly what the Great Depression was like.

Right, because it looks realistic.

It's about a collective farm.

It's all gritty and black and white.

It feels like a perfect window into the past.

But it isn't reality.

It is a movie.

It is bound up in the questions and the biases and the artistic choices of its time.

It's an interpretation of the Great Depression, not a direct transmission of it.

So you have to ask, how is this movie constructing a version of history rather than just assuming it is history?

That's the critical step.

History requires judgment, not just a transmission of facts.

The text gives a really juicy example of this historical approach in action using the film Sunrise by F .W.

Murnau.

And I love this example because it's really about business strategy masquerading as art.

It is fascinating.

It's a perfect case study.

So let's set the scene.

It's the mid -1920s.

You have William Fox in his studio, Fox Studios.

Now, in the history books, Fox was known as a producer of folksy pictures, unpretentious stuff.

Like basic popcorn flicks, the kind of stuff that makes money but doesn't win a lot of awards.

That's it, exactly.

If you looked at the best films lists of, say, 1925, Fox had very few entries compared to the giants, like Paramount or MGM.

William Fox wanted to change that.

He wanted prestige.

Artistic prestige.

Yes.

He was planning a massive expansion of his motion picture empire, and he needed the brand to look high end, to look respectable.

So he goes shopping for a genius.

He does.

He hires F .W.

Murnau, who was this legendary German director famous for German expressionism, and he basically gives him a blank check.

He says, here's the money, make me a masterpiece.

And Murnau makes Sunrise in 1927.

So if I'm writing a historical essay on Sunrise, I'm not just going to be talking about the, you know, the pretty lighting or the act.

No, absolutely not.

A historical essay would argue that the film's lavish artistic style, which was very un -Fox -like at the time, was actually a calculated business move by William Fox to elevate his studio status right before the stock market crash.

Wow.

You are connecting the art you see on screen to the economic ambition of the studio owner.

You're connecting the aesthetics to the balance sheet.

That is historical criticism.

That is so much more interesting than just saying it's a cool black and white movie.

Right.

It adds this whole layer of motivation.

You realize the art didn't just happen.

It was commissioned for a very specific purpose.

It grounds the art in reality.

And Corrigan, citing scholars like Robert Allen and Douglas Gomory, really emphasizes that history is about that kind of judgment and context, not just listing titles and dates.

Okay.

That feels really clear.

Let's pivot to the second lens then, national cinemas.

This is a way of discussing films in terms of their, well, their cultural or national character.

The core assumption here is that films are not as universal as we sometimes like to think.

They evolved within a specific political and aesthetic climate.

Meaning a French movie is French in a way that goes deeper than just the language being spoken.

Exactly.

It's about how that culture sees the world, how it tells stories.

Correct.

And this can be a real hurdle for viewers from other cultures.

Corrigan notes that an American spectator might really struggle with the pacing of certain Japanese films.

You know, think of directors like Ozu or Naruse.

Yeah.

Without understanding the cultural background, the pacing might just feel slow or even boring.

Yes.

Boring is the word you hear a lot.

You're waiting for the car chase, but they're just focusing on a tea kettle for 30 seconds.

And you're thinking, what is going on?

Right.

But if you understand the national context, if you understand, say, the influence of Zen Buddhism on Japanese aesthetics, you understand why it flows that way.

You understand the value that culture places on stillness or the concept of monoware, the transience of life.

The slowness isn't a mistake.

It's a feature.

It's the whole point.

The text goes into a really deep comparison here regarding African cinema, which I thought was fascinating,

specifically looking at Usmane Semben and Medhondo.

Yes.

And this is a perfect illustration of how national cinema isn't monolith.

Just because two directors are from the same continent doesn't mean they make the same kinds of movies, but they might share a common root.

And the text says that common root is the oral tradition.

Exactly.

Both Semben and Hondo invoke the oral tradition, the idea of the griot, the community storyteller as a primary influence, but they use it in completely opposite ways.

Okay.

How so?

Well, Semben's narrative style is described as being very linear.

He's like that storyteller sitting by the fire, calmly guiding you from point A to point B.

He's teaching.

There's a straightforward didacticism to his work.

He's the wise elder.

Right.

But then you look at Medhondo, his films like Soleil O or West Indies are described as

syncopated, eruptive, stylistically disruptive.

The text says it's reminiscent of black liberationist literature.

It's angry and it's fragmented.

It doesn't hold your hand.

Not at all.

It grabs you and shakes you.

But both are drawing from that same national well of oral tradition.

So a writer using this approach would analyze how these films might appropriate some Western influences like Italian neorealism, for example, but are fundamentally indebted to indigenous oral storytelling techniques.

One uses that tradition to teach calmly.

The other uses it to shout and disrupt the status quo.

So the guideline here for a writer or even just a viewer seems to be open your mind.

That's the best way to put it.

When writing about foreign films, start by asking, what distinguishes this from the American movies I know?

Don't judge it by Hollywood standards.

Try to understand it by its own cultural standards.

Ask what cultural work the film is trying to do for its intended audience.

I love that.

It turns confusion into curiosity.

Okay, moving on to the third lens.

This is a big one.

One of my favorites.

Genres.

Genre.

It's a French word, of course, meaning kind or type.

And we all do this instinctively, right?

We classify films by common patterns,

Westerns, musicals, film noir, sci -fi.

But writing about genre isn't just making a checklist.

Is it like, does it have a cowboy hat?

Check.

Does it have a horse?

Check.

Okay, it's a Western.

That feels way too easy.

No, that would be a very, very boring essay.

That's just classification, not analysis.

The real gold is in the evolution of genres.

Genres aren't static.

They change because society changes.

The Western of 1940 is not the same as the Western of 1970.

The text brings up the revisionist Western.

Right.

Look at a film like Man Who Shot Liberty Valance from 1962.

It has all the elements, the cowboys, the gunslingers.

It operates explicitly out of the generic tradition of the Western, but it subverts it.

How does it do that?

Well, it's not just a hero saving the day.

It's a film that questions the very nature of the hero and the whole myth -making process of the American West.

It uses the conventions of the genre to critique the genre itself.

And then you have more modern twists.

The text mentions Brokeback Mountain from 2005, which engages with the whole Western tradition, the epic landscape, the quiet cowboys, but it completely complicates the masculine stereotypes at the heart of the genre.

Or Little Miss Sunshine from 2006.

It's clearly a road movie, but Corrigan calls it a madcap variation on one.

The analysis comes from seeing how a specific film uses or breaks or comments on the rules of its genre.

You aren't just asking, is this a Western?

You are asking what kind of Western is this and why is it like this now?

There is a fantastic deep dive in the text, a deep dive within our deep dive, I guess, by a critic named Vivian Sobchak.

She writes about film noir and specifically the concept of the house.

Oh, this is a brilliant piece of analysis.

Sobchak argues that in film noir, a house is never a home.

Never a home.

That's a really strong, provocative statement.

It is.

She argues that in traditional American melodrama, the home is the sanctuary, its safety, its warmth.

But in noir, the house represents the complete loss of domesticity.

It's a place of danger or conspiracy or just crushing emptiness.

She points to double indemnity as a key example.

The house in that film is described as furniture plane, impersonal and motel -like.

Exactly.

It's not a place where a family lives.

It's a place where they conspire to commit murder.

It's transient.

It has no soul.

And then there's the example from Mildred Pierce, The Kitchen.

Now, usually in American culture, kitchen is supposed to be the heart of the home, right?

It's warm.

It smells like baking.

It's a safe space.

The center of family life.

But in Mildred Pierce, the character's voiceover says, I felt as though I'd been born in a kitchen and lived there all my life.

That sounds like a prison sentence.

It is.

The kitchen is a trap.

It's a place where her marriage completely falls apart.

So if you're writing a genre essay, you could focus on just that one specific element, the setting.

You aren't just saying it's a film noir.

You're saying here is how this particular noir uses the setting of the home to critique the hollowness of the American dream.

That is the difference between a high school book report and a real college -level analysis.

It's finding the so -what factor.

You're finding the meaning in the furniture.

You're reading the environment.

Precisely.

Okay.

Next up, auteurs.

This is probably the most famous one, right?

The auteur theory.

People throw this term around a lot.

It's definitely the one that's broken into the mainstream.

It's widely accepted today, yes.

The basic idea is that it associates a film primarily with its director or, you know, occasionally a dominant star or screenwriter.

It treats the director as the author of the film, the auteur.

And this started in France, didn't it?

With a bunch of critics who later became famous directors themselves.

Yes.

With critics at the magazine Caille de Cinema, people like Francois Truffaut and Eric

They wanted to distinguish what they called auteurs directors with a unique personal vision from the mere craftsmen, the directors who just directed whatever script the studio handed them that week.

So it was a way to elevate cinema to the level of literature or painting, to say this director is an artist, just like a novelist.

That was the goal, to legitimize the art form.

The text highlights a great analysis by a critic named Thomas Elsieser on the director Samuel Fuller.

I have to admit, I haven't seen a lot of Samuel Fuller's work, but the description in the chapter makes me want to check it out immediately.

Fuller is a force of nature.

Elsieser identifies what he calls a Fuller signature.

He talks about Fuller's compulsion to expose contradictions in American life.

His scenes are often on the verge of complete hysteria.

The action betrays a highly electric energy.

Scenes on the verge of hysteria.

I mean, that is such an evocative description.

That tells you so much.

And he backs it up with specific examples.

He talks about Fuller's characters acting with instinctive immediacy.

They're committed to a course of action, even if it's totally perverse or self -destructive.

He looks at characters like the Baron of Arizona or Zack in the steel helmet.

They act on pure impulse, often violently.

So an autorist essay connects the dots between all these different films by the same director to find these recurring patterns, these thematic and stylistic signatures.

Exactly.

You'd say this moment of extreme violence in the steel helmet is similar to this moment in another Fuller film because of this hysterical energy.

You are proving that the director's fingerprint is on the lens, no matter what the subject matter is.

But wait, the text throws up a big red flag here.

It warns us about the ater trap.

The trap.

This is the critical thinking check, and it's a really important one.

Filmmaking is and always has been a collaborative medium.

We cannot forget that.

Right.

Editors, cinematographers, production designers, screenwriters, they all have a massive impact on the final film.

A huge impact.

Does the director actually have total control?

Or are we just ignoring the fact that the cinematographer was the one who actually lit that beautiful scene?

That's a good question.

I mean, are we just projecting unity onto the work because we want it to be there?

Because it makes for a cleaner story.

That's the danger.

And the word auteur meant something very different for Truffaut, who was working in a very independent, artist driven way in 1950s France than it does for a modern director working within a massive studio system with five producers breathing down their neck.

So the warning is don't just engage in hero worship.

Exactly.

Be skeptical.

Ask yourself if what you're seeing is truly the director's unique vision, or is it maybe the studio's mandate or the editor's genius or the cinematographer's signature style?

Don't worship the director.

Analyze the film.

That's a great reminder.

All right, number five, kinds of formalism.

This sounds a little more academic.

It can seem that way, but it's really about the nuts and bolts.

Formalism is concerned with structure and style.

Things like narrative, mise en scene, editing, sound.

It's much less concerned with the outside context, like the director's biography or the history of the era, and much more concerned with the anatomy of the film itself.

So it's like looking under the hood of a car.

You don't really care who drove the car or where it was built.

You just care about how the engine works.

That's a perfect analogy.

A formalist is looking for patterns within the frame.

A formalist asks, how does the cut from shot A to shot B create a specific meaning or emotion?

It's all about the form.

The text gives a really beautiful detailed example of this using rebel without a cause.

The opening sequence.

A formalist would have an absolute field day with this.

They would.

So let's try to visualize it based on the description.

You have James Dean, he's on the ground, curled up in a ball.

The surroundings are described as cramped, and the color palette is dominated by blacks and browns.

It feels oppressive, claustrophobic.

And then the shift happens.

He looks out the window and he sees a girl, it's Natalie Wood, and she is wearing a light green cardigan and she's standing against some green bushes.

And the camera moves with her.

The camera moves laterally with her.

Now, a formalist doesn't need to know James Dean's biography or the history of 1950s teenage angst to analyze this.

They just look at the form.

The color green and the lateral camera movement visually represent insight,

naturalness, and an escape from that cramped, dark opening scene.

So the meaning is literally in the movement.

The meaning is in the color choice.

Exactly.

The formalist argues that the film's own language is telling you green equals freedom and lateral movement equals escape.

You don't need a history book to see that.

You just need to pay close attention to the screen.

Or there's another example, His Girl Friday.

A formalist might analyze the narrative unity of that film.

How the two main characters, through their fast -paced witty confrontations, constantly propel the plot forward and how that structure inevitably leads to their remarriage.

Right.

It's about the mechanics of the story engine.

How does scene A logically necessitate scene B?

It's like a beautifully constructed logic puzzle.

So if you're a really detail -oriented person who loves noticing camera angles and color palettes and editing rhythms,

formalism is your playground.

It's all about close reading the film text itself.

Exactly.

And that brings us to the sixth and final approach,

ideology.

Ideology.

Now, this is a subtle way of saying politics, but in the broadest possible sense.

It refers to the body of ideas or beliefs on which we base our lives and our societies.

Ideas about family, progress, race, gender, capitalism, religion.

The water we swim in that we don't always notice.

That's a great way to put it.

And films can be explicit about their ideology, or they can be implicit.

Right.

So a movie like Battleship Potemkin is super explicit.

It is about the socialist revolution.

It wears its politics on its sleeve.

You absolutely cannot miss it.

No, it's a propaganda film and a brilliant one.

But a movie like The Sound of Music or The Godfather, they just seem like entertainment.

But they carry these powerful implicit messages about how the world should be.

They normalize certain family structures, certain gender roles, certain economic behaviors, and they vilify others.

The text gives an amazing example of this, summarizing an analysis by a critic named Hess on The Godfather Part II.

And this is a heavy hitter.

It's about capitalism versus family.

It's a brilliant tragic reading of the film.

The argument is that the Corleone family tries to preserve their old world family values, their Italian Catholic roots, using the modern mechanisms of American capitalism.

Right.

They run the family exactly like a ruthless business.

But the central contradiction, the tragedy, is that capitalism, by its very nature, is competitive and destructive to human relationships.

It prizes profit over people.

It's impersonal.

So Michael Corleone, in trying to save his family using these tools.

He ends up destroying it because of the method he uses.

Hess argues the film is a perfect microcosm of American capitalism.

It hollows out and destroys the very human ties it claims to value and protect.

That is such a powerful ideological reading.

It takes a gangster movie and turns it into a profound critique of an entire economic system.

You aren't just watching people get whacked.

You're watching a critique of the dark side of the American dream.

That is the power of the ideological lens.

It exposes the hidden assumptions of a film.

It asks the tough question, what is this film really trying to sell me about how the world works?

So those are our six lenses.

History, national, genre, auteur, formalism, and ideology.

But the chapter doesn't just stop there, which I think is so helpful.

It actually shows us what this looks like in practice with two complete sample student essays.

And I think this is where it really clicks for a lot of people.

Yes.

Seeing the theory applied is absolutely essential.

It's one thing to define formalism.

It's another thing entirely to see a student actually use it to build a compelling argument.

The first essay is by a student named M.

Trillo,

and it's written about Fritz Lang's classic film M from 1931.

A truly classic film and a haunting one.

The essay is titled The Reflection of M.

Now, what's really interesting here is that this student doesn't just pick one lens and stick to it.

They use a hybrid approach.

Which is very common and I think often the most effective way to write.

Trillo combines formalism, you know, looking at specific shots with history, specifically the historical context of Weimar Germany.

And the thesis is that M reflects the culture of crisis that was happening in 1930s Germany.

This idea of a society just collapsing into chaos and fear.

Right.

So look at how the evidence is structured.

The student starts by referencing historical scholars like Siegfried Crocker and Lotte Eisner, who wrote about the haunted screen and the deep psychological instability of that period.

That's the history part.

They established that Germany was a place of intense fear and social breakdown.

But then they pivot to the visuals of the film itself.

The recurring use of mirrors and reflections.

This is the formalism.

The student points out these incredible moments, like when Beckert, the child killer, looks in a mirror to see what he calls the mark of Cain on himself.

Or that incredible shot where he looks in a shop window and his face is framed by a display of knives that form a diamond shape around his reflection.

So creepy.

It just visually links the character to violence without a word being spoken.

Very.

And the student argues this visual motif suggests a split psyche.

You have the placid, normal -looking exterior of this man versus the inner madman, the monster.

The reflection reveals the truth.

But here is the aha moment for me in reading the summary of this essay.

Trillo argues that the audience is also implicated in this.

Yes.

This is the most brilliant part of the argument.

By constantly looking over the shoulder of the killer into the mirror, the audience is forced to view its own darker side.

The argument is that the film isn't just about one killer.

It's about a whole German society at that time that is a nightmarish dream.

The audience is forced to see a reflection of their own societal chaos in this one monster.

That is such a strong, sophisticated argument.

It perfectly connects the small visual detail, the mirror, to the massive historical context of the rise of fascism and chaos.

It makes the case that the form mirrors the history.

It's a perfect blend of approaches.

It shows how these lenses aren't mutually exclusive.

They can work together to build a much richer argument.

Now, let's look at the second sample essay.

This one is about the 1980 film Ordinary People.

And this one takes a very, very different tack.

It uses a purely ideological approach, specifically a feminist reading of the film.

The text calls this kind of analysis reading against the grain.

Can you explain what that means?

It means looking past the obvious surface message of the film to see what it might be saying, perhaps even subconsciously.

The film might present itself as a happy, healing story, but the critic reads against the grain and argues, wait a minute, look at who's getting hurt for this happy ending to happen.

You are interrogating the film's values, not just accepting its intended moral.

And the thesis of this particular essay is fascinating and pretty damning.

It argues that ordinary people constructs a healing male bond between the father and son by systematically demonizing the mother, Beth.

It argues that the happy ending, the father and son embracing, relies entirely on kicking the woman out of the house.

It validates the men by invalidating the woman.

And the evidence for this focuses on some very specific scenes.

Let's talk about the French toast scene.

Oh, it's a masterclass in passive aggression.

It's so painful to watch.

Describe it for us for anyone who hasn't seen it.

So the mother, Beth, played by Mary Tyler Moore, makes French toast for her son, Conrad, who is deeply depressed after a suicide attempt.

But Conrad isn't hungry.

He says, no, thank you.

Now, a normal response might be, okay, honey, I'll save it for you.

Instead, bed immediately takes the perfectly good plate of food, walks over to the sink and angrily scrapes it into the garbage disposal.

It's an act of punishment.

It's so aggressive.

Incredibly.

And the father, Calvin, tries to save the mood.

He immediately suggests he and Conrad go outside and play touch football.

He effectively tries to replace the female trouble in the kitchen with male bonding on the lawn.

The essay also analyzes the visuals, specifically a shot in the dining room.

Right.

A formalist detail being used to support an ideological argument.

In the shot, the mother is framed perfectly in the center of the screen, but she's rigid, isolated.

The father and son are on the sides.

And the essay points out that the mother shrinks from his gaze.

She is visually and emotionally cut off from them.

And the essay contract Beth with the other women in the film to make its point.

The other good female character, Karen, who Conrad meets in the hospital, ends up committing suicide.

The girlfriend, Janine, is described as kind of weak.

He just giggles when Conrad gets bullied by his friends.

So the conclusion is pretty devastating.

The men, Conrad and Calvin, can only bond.

They can only heal once the cold, destructive mother is banished from the house.

The film validates the patriarchy by making the woman the villain for not performing her nurturing role correctly.

That is definitely reading against the grain.

You might watch that movie and just come away thinking, wow, that mom is really mean.

But this essay argues, no, the entire movie is designed to make you hate the mom so that the men can be the heroes of the story.

Exactly.

It reveals the ideology hidden within a simple domestic drama.

It shows that even a quiet family story has a political unconscious.

These two examples really show how these lenses can unlock the movies in a new way.

It's not just I liked it or I didn't like it.

It's here is the mechanism.

Here's how it works.

And that is precisely why Corrigan includes a set of writing exercises at the end of the chapter to get you, the student, to start practicing with these mechanisms yourself.

Let's just run through those exercises quickly just to give our listeners some potential homework.

Good idea.

The first challenge is adaptation.

The idea is to compare a film sequence to its source material, a novel, a play, maybe even a video game.

How did the change in medium change the meaning?

What did the filmmakers add or more often subtract?

Did the movie simplify the book's complex psychology?

Did it add visual symbols the book didn't have?

That's a great one.

OK, number two is single element.

This one seems really focused.

Write two paragraphs on just one thing, a single prop,

a specific lighting technique, a recurring sound effect.

Why is it important?

This forces you to be a formalist for a minute.

Stop worrying about the plot and worry about that lamp in the corner of the room.

It's a great exercise in close reading.

Number three is method application.

This one's straightforward.

Pick a film you know well and apply one of the six methods we discussed.

Do a genre analysis of Star Wars.

Do a historical analysis of Top Gun.

Do an auteur analysis of a Tim Burton movie.

And then the last one, the ultimate challenge, dual perspective.

This is the advanced level.

Discuss one film or even one scene using two different methods.

Compare, say, a formalist reading of a scene with an ideological reading of that same scene.

See how the meaning completely shifts depending on the lens you use.

That sounds like a real brain workout.

It is, but that is how you build the muscle.

That's how you get from being a fan to being a critic.

So to recap everything, we have six tools in our analytical belt now.

History, national cinemas, genres, auteurs, formalism, and ideology.

And they aren't just buzzwords to throw around in class.

They are, as you said at the start, ways of seeing.

They really are.

And remember, you don't use them just to sound smart at parties, though, you know, that can be a nice bonus.

You use them to see things that you otherwise wouldn't.

You use them to understand that a movie is never just a movie.

It's always a product of history, a reflection of a culture, a play on a genre, the vision of an author, a complex construct of form, and a carrier of ideology.

I have a final question for you and for you listening to wrap all of this up.

It's based on something the text implies.

If you watched your favorite movie again right now, and the one you've seen a hundred times, you know every line, and you were forced to switch lenses.

Let's say you usually love it for the story, but now you have to look at it through an ideological lens.

Or you usually love the acting, but now you have to look just at the editing.

Would it still be your favorite movie?

That is a really provocative question.

It's a risk, isn't it?

Sometimes when you turn on the bright lights of analysis, you see cracks you didn't know were there.

You might find out your favorite comfort movie has some pretty outdated uncomfortable politics.

That could definitely happen.

But sometimes you see a level of craftsmanship you never appreciated before.

You might notice an editing pattern or a sound design choice that just deepens your love for it.

So it's a risk worth taking.

Absolutely.

It's the risk you take to see more clearly.

Well, we hope this deep dive helps you write your next paper, or maybe just watch movies with a sharper, more curious eye.

A warm thank you from the Last Minute Lecture Team.

Keep watching and keep thinking.

See you in the next deep dive.