film analysis
Near the conclusion of The Bourne Identity (2002), we find our hero, Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), taking refuge in a country farmhouse belonging to Eamon, the ex-boyfriend of Bourne’s hostage/lover/sexy barber Marie (Franke Potente). Bourne’s shadowy employers have dispatched a rival Treadstone assassin – known only as The Professor (Clive Owen) – to eliminate the threat posed by their malfunctioning asset. When Eamon’s son notices the family dog has gone missing, Bourne (preternaturally perceptive, as always) recognizes the portent.
Breaking the boarders with transnational themes and making people cry and laugh in the same way? Genre as a global system? Why not!
Mad Max: Fury Road, the latest from Australian director George Miller, is overtly, and perhaps primarily, an action film. The vast majority of its two hour runtime is devoted to a single unrelenting chase sequence; it both drives the narrative and provides a platform for the manic and brilliantly staged action set-pieces which will define the film for many audiences.
I was watching the North Irish TV show The Fall a while ago and it struck me how handsome Jamie Dornan is, and how fascinating it is that the creators of the show cast him for the role of the sexual predator and serial killer, the villain of the story. In typical crime films and TV, the average sexual predator is portrayed to be a pretty average if not ugly guy, around or older than 40, and if he’s fat, he preferably has a constant sheen of sweat over his forehead. Someone who kind of grosses you out.
Plot, visuals, and theme are all hugely important to great cinema, but movie audiences love characters, and they remain the most memorable aspect of many films. However, the same character types appear again and again in film – the heroes, the villains, the sidekicks and the damsels in distress. We simply accept this as a part of cinema, and of stories in general, and it’s because all stories follow the same narrative structure, according to Russian theorist Vladimir Propp.
Hollywood has always been something of a boys club. If you think about the golden era of the studio system, you always hear about larger-than-life stars and the maverick, alpha-male directors that made all the classics we know and love today. Think of pictures of giants such as Howard Hawks, Samuel Fuller, John Huston, or Alfred Hitchc*ck, who are usually seen dictating their vision with booming authority.
To help you apply the knowledge of the “How To Analyze Movies” series, we made you a handy tool! This is our movie analysis Beat Sheet.
The final part in the How To Analyze Movies series – we round up the final bits, iconography and realism. And that’s it!
In this installment of How To Analyze Movies we discuss our understanding of story and genre, and how to use it to analyze film!
In this installment of How to Analyze Movies we discuss the importance of lighting, sound and score, and how you should analyze them.
In earlier instalments of How To Analyse Movies, we discussed film language, how meaning is created in film through the use of signs, codes and conventions and most recently, we covered mise-en-scène and editing. In this chapter, we’ll discuss the camera and how it too can create meaning and how important it is to know about the way the camera is used to analyse a movie. The way the camera has been positioned or has been used too can create meaning, and it’s very important to know how it has been positioned and to analyse a film in its whole.
In the last part of How to Analyse Movies, we discussed signs, codes and conventions. In this chapter we’re moving on to the scene and editing, and what that means in film language. Everything you see in a film is constructed to fit on a screen.
Quite a few people asked me now: how do criminology and movie combine and how did I do it? This post is for all of you who’ve been wondering.
In this chapter, we’ll cover the signs, codes and conventions in a film that can tell you a lot about the messages that the creators are trying to convey. Some filmmakers are aware of the use of signs, codes and conventions in their work, though some are not. In that case the symbolism may be there, but not on the surface, which makes it a little harder to interpret.
This is the first part in an eight-part series on how to analyse movies. The language of film (or video or TV) can only be detected by analysing the “moving image texts”. The idea is that every image conveys a meaning, like a photograph would convey a feeling or a message.