A short guide to writing about film

SAMPLE ESSAY

This student essay on The Searchers(1956) is a good example of how a discriminating analysis involves comparative questions (about film and literature) and, in the process, demonstrates how the movie uses specific technical and formal strategies to express its themes.

The Darkened Doorways of The Searchers 

 Based on a 1954 novel by Alan LeMay, John Ford’s 1956 adaptation of The Searchers dramatizes some of the critical changes that can occur in moving a story from a book to the screen. Most film adaptations require some adjustments to the plot(usually deletions). But in Ford’s The Searchers, we witness a major alteration in the central character, Ethan Edwards, which in turn affects the significance of the entire story. As part of Ford’s transformation of Edwards, the film uses a specific image pattern that indicates how a film narrative can sometimes supplement or even surpass a literary narrative.

 Although many of the central plot elements remain intact, there are several critical changes in the adaptation, most notably in the different ways the novel and the film conclude. The most significant change, however, is the character of Ethan. In the novel he is a fairly traditional western hero who, without much psychological complexity, spearheads a search for his niece but does not survive. In the film, however, his character does survive but, more importantly, becomes complicated in three ways. First, from the beginning, there is the subtle but definite indication of a mysterious and possibly criminal past: Since the end of the Civil War, Ethan apparently resisted returning home and possibly participated in some unmentionably dangerous, violent, or illegal acts. Second, Ford’s Ethan struggles with the turbulent dangers of sexual desire. As carefully suggested by the opening sequence with Ethan and his brother’s wife Martha, Ethan has had to repress his love and passion for domestic and family codes he lives by. Third, in the film, Ethan is clearly a racist. Unlike in the novel, here he makes sarcastic remarks about his “half-blood” nephew (who, in a significant alteration of the novel’s character, is partly American Indian) and, more importantly, his mission to find Debbie is, unlike in the novel, motivated by the wish to kill her because he believes she has been sexually violated by her non-white captor.

 A violet, racist, and sexually troubled Ethan thus motivates and complicates the straightforward plot of the novel in new ways. On the one hand, The Searchers proceeds as a linear quest: Ethan and Marty Pauley search for the lost Debbie, who has been kidnapped by the Comanche tribe if Scar. That plot is ultimately resolved, in a classical manner, when they find her and she is returned home. A countercurrent within this linear, forward plot, however, is an interior search that seems to move backward and inward in the film, investigating Ethan’s twisted mind and dark past. At the center of Ethan does not appear to respond to any of these demands for self-knowledge, and his climactic confrontation with Scar suggests that nothing about him has changed: He not only kills the Comanche chief, but in an act of grotesque brutality, Ford has this cinematic Ethan actually scalp Scar (which does not happen in the novel.)

 When in a scene that immediately follows,  Ethan chases down Debbie but does not kill her, the film indicates, however, that something has indeed changed in Ethan, that has search for Debbie has revealed something horrid about himself to himself. Perhaps the scalping of Scar, who more and more seems a reflection of Ethan, has acted as a cathartic confrontation with his own dark soul. Perhaps his entire quest has, with the help of Marty, allowed him to see his own barbaric and primitive self. His decision to spare Debbie’s life becomes then, at least in part, a desired to acknowledge and free himself from his own violet desires and trouble past. Driven by the need to restore a home and domestic life, Ethan’s narrative has now become an inquiry into the dark passions that threaten that home life from within.

 Brilliantly dramatizing the tension between Ethan’s two searches is a pattern of shots focused on darkened entryways. At the opening, a three-quarters shot from behind Martha shows her looking across the plain as she stands in a doorway. The black interior of the cabin contrasts sharply with the bright light that fills the doorway from outside. A tracking shot then follows Martha out onto the porch where she watches Ethan riding toward her in the distance. At the conclusion, virtually the same shot recurs as Ethan delivers Debbie to her new home with the Jorgensens. After Debbie and the Jorgensens enter the black interior, the newly married Marty and his wife follow. Ethan, though, hesitates on the porch and then turns back into the desert. 

 both these shots position Ethan as a wanderer separated from the domestic interiors that he approaches. Complicating this image, moreover, those interiors are blackened in a way that suggests a darker reality than is usually associated with the inside of a home. In an important sense, I believe, the exteriors represent that wild and primitive world that Ethan must wander through, whereas the and primitive world that Ethan must wander through, whereas the interiors of home (and self) represent for Ethan the shadowy and dangerous passion now associated with his illicit love of Martha.

 Between these two scenes of darkened doorways is a third scene whose black space acts as the turning point in Ethan’s story and a measure of what has changed between the beginning and end of this narrative. After killing Scar, Ethan chases the fleeing Debbie to a cave. Shot from the interior as a medium long shot, the composition here clearly replicates the doorway shots that open and close the film. After approaching the cringing Debbie, Ethan does not, as we expect, kill her but instead lifts her up and says “Let’s go home, Debbie.” As Part of a climactic turning point that begins with his brutal scalping of Scar, the scene becomes a moment of partial and temporary redemption for Ethan as he enters that darkened interior but quietly refuses to act out his repressed violence. When he releases Debbie later at a similar threshold, Ethan has recognized his own violent passion and has resisted it. As he turns at the threshold and walks back into the desert, the long take becomes an acknowledgement that Ethan cannot enter that domestic world because of who he is. In the words of the sound track, he is a man who must continue to “search his heart and soul.”

 There mat be many social or personal reasons for these alterations in adapting the novel to the film in this way. What is clear is that Ford’s version of the story is a much more troubling and disturbing version because it injects race and sexuality into a character and the narrative. In this case adapting a literary narrative as a film narrative becomes not simply the translation of characters and themes but the creation of significantly different characters and themes.

Animation, 3D, And New Media

In recent years and as part of the larger digital revolution, new media and new technologies have become a major part of film and media cultures that extend or cross the borders of traditional narrative cinema. 

Although animated films have been a part of film history since its beginning—to take one important example—digital animation processes developed and refined in the last fifteen years have generated a renaissances of animated movies—from Toy Story(1995) to Monsters(2013)—capable of creating more elaborate and sophisticated images than ever before. 

One result of the expanding vision of animated cinema has been the development of narratives with bilevel addresses whose stories can speak at once to children and adults, especially apparent in Japanese anime films such as the Ghost in the Shell Films 1996, 2004). Yet, whether aimed mainly at children or at adults(as, for instance, was the 2008 animated documentary Waltz with Bashir), animated films elicit these first  questions with which to begin an analysis:

If the film straddles the world of children and adults, how dose this overlapping take shape in the film, and how dose it develop unique themes and perspectives on the world? About the role of imagination? About the nature of reality?

How and why dose animation complicate the relations between the human world and the nonhuman world in the film as a function of its forms and themes?

 More recently, and most famously announced by James Cameron’s Avatar(2009), 3D has become the latest technological innovation in a long history of special effects that extends back through Georges Mellies’s Trip to the Moon(1902) and through early experiments with 3D in the 1950s. 

Thanks to the remarkable advances in digital and computer programs and equipment in recent years, movies can now be filmed in 3D (although many recent films feature only postproduction enhancements) and even the most unlikely films, such as Saw 3D(2010) or Gravity(2013), attempt to take advantage of an often astonishing realism that allows spectators to experience a film as if physically inhabiting it. 

As with older special effects, however, students should immediately ask some fundamental questions of 3D: To what extent do the special effects add significantly to the themes of the narrative and our understanding of the film? To what extent is 3D merely window dressing?

 Finally and perhaps most important, the digital revolution has begun to dramatically change how we view movies. Not only are people watching more movies through Internet streaming, on-demand, or mobile devices, such as tablets, but more and more are and information is being created to be seen and understood specifically through these new media vehicles. 

If you have the desire or opportunity to write about these kinds of new media products, consider these questions as a starting point:

How to the images, stories, or sounds emphasize, more than traditional films or videos, a unique interactivity between them and the viewer? How dose that help explain their aims and goals?

How is the technology of the particular media part of its message?

In observing and writing about any formal features of a film or new technologies delivering films, your first goal should be to achieve as mush precision as possible. 

Developing a vocabulary of technical terms can be extremely helpful, but most important is developing the ability to write concrete descriptions of images and sounds in the way that best allows your reader to see and here the images and sounds you are describing. Sometimes, of course, that detailed precision is more difficult to accomplish  than at other times. 

When you must work with only sketchy notes, try to get as much out of those notes as possible. There is nothing wrong with writing about a general style in a film (“a predominance of long shots,” “an amplified sound track,” or “exaggeratedly artificial sets”), as long as your paper has a focus that does not rely solely on generalities. 

Otherwise, always try to integrate as much accurate concrete description as possible into your argument. As practice, describe—without analyzing—all the technical features of an opening or closing sequence of a movie or an especially interesting use of sound in a scene.

 Interpretation, analysis, and evaluation are, however, the primary goals of most writing about film these days. Your appreciation of these elements of a film and how they work together must, at some point, be assimilated and mede part of your ideas about what the film of films mean. 

Whether you examine the editing of a sequence, the lighting throughout a series of films, or how the mise-en-scene, framing, and sound work together in a single scene, remember that seeing, listening, and thinking must join forces as you begin to put your perceptions into words.

 More recently, and most famously announced by James Cameron’s Avatar(2009), 3D has become the latest technological innovation in a long history of special effects that extends back through Georges Mellies’s Trip to the Moon(1902) and through early experiments with 3D in the 1950s. Thanks to the remarkable advances in digital and computer programs and equipment in recent years, movies can now be filmed in 3D (although many recent films feature only postproduction enhancements) and even the most unlikely films, such as Saw 3D(2010) or Gravity(2013), attempt to take advantage of an often astonishing realism that allows spectators to experience a film as if physically inhabiting it. As with older special effects, however, students should immediately ask some fundamental questions of 3D: To what extent do the special effects add significantly to the themes of the narrative and our understanding of the film? To what extent is 3D merely window dressing?

 Finally and perhaps most important, the digital revolution has begun to dramatically change how we view movies. Not only are people watching more movies through Internet streaming, on-demand, or mobile devices, such as tablets, but more and more are and information is being created to be seen and understood specifically through these new media vehicles. If you have the desire or opportunity to write about these kinds of new media products, consider these questions as a starting point:

How to the images, stories, or sounds emphasize, more than traditional films or videos, a unique interactivity between them and the viewer? How dose that help explain their aims and goals?

How is the technology of the particular media part of its message?

In observing and writing about any formal features of a film or new technologies delivering films, your first goal should be to achieve as mush precision as possible. Developing a vocabulary of technical terms can be extremely helpful, but most important is developing the ability to write concrete descriptions of images and sounds in the way that best allows your reader to see and here the images and sounds you are describing. Sometimes, of course, that detailed precision is more difficult to accomplish  than at other times. When you must work with only sketchy notes, try to get as much out of those notes as possible. There is nothing wrong with writing about a general style in a film (“a predominance of long shots,” “an amplified sound track,” or “exaggeratedly artificial sets”), as long as your paper has a focus that does not rely solely on generalities. Otherwise, always try to integrate as much accurate concrete description as possible into your argument. As practice, describe—without analyzing—all the technical features of an opening or closing sequence of a movie or an especially interesting use of sound in a scene.

 Interpretation, analysis, and evaluation are, however, the primary goals of most writing about film these days. Your appreciation of these elements of a film and how they work together must, at some point, be assimilated and mede part of your ideas about what the film of films mean. Whether you examine the editing of a sequence, the lighting throughout a series of films, or how the mise-en-scene, framing, and sound work together in a single scene, remember that seeing, listening, and thinking must join forces as you begin to put your perceptions into words.