Writing on Film

When writing on film, you will still need to employ those close reading and analysis techniques you use on a literary text. Instead of choosing passages to work as evidence, you will need to do close readings of scenes and events. This can be much harder than working specifically with a text. You will probably need to rent the film or watch it again in Geddes (5th floor of CAS, they have a viewing lab) if you choose to write on a film for your paper.

Close readings of a film scene will need to address the following elements: staging (how the scene is set up, what is in the scene, how the characters and objects relate spatially to one another), lighting (how dark/light a scene is, where the light is focused), dialogue (who says what to whom – this is a lot like close reading a text), color (what colors are used in the scene and how they relate to the other colors in the film, what colors represent, etc.), and imagery (as in literature, the images in film have certain metaphoric meanings – the objects in a film often have significance). Not all these elements will be important in every scene, but they often are. You will also need to contextualize your close reading, so you will need to be careful not to fall into the plot summary trap.

You will need to be especially careful that you pay close attention to more than just dialogue; in essays it is easier to work with words than with images, and films are composed of both. Costumes, props, makeup, and setting all play a significant part in film, and, as an interpreter, you will have to deal with many elements.

Example:

In The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lector hangs one of his victims – the police officer – from the corner of the cage that was supposed to be Lector’s prison. In the shot in which the viewer sees the victim for the first time, the body is hung at a corner of the cage, his arms spread wide against a backdrop of red, white, and blue bunting. His feet are crossed and his head is hanging down, making the body look as though it had been crucified. The lighting comes from above and behind the body, shining around him and creating a halo effect, while perpendicularly crossing the lines of the top of Lector’s cage. The multiple lines (cage, bunting, light) all intersect at the torso of the body, mimicking the lines of its arms and legs in the cross shape. Though hung as though crucified, the position of the body and the fact that it has a backdrop of patriotic bunting more accurately mimics the eagle on the United States seal – which is also depicted on the floor of the building. The intersecting lines behind the corpse could also be the intersecting lines of the symbol in the seal: the eagle is holding arrows and branches in its beak and claws. By positioning the body so that it imitates both symbols – the cross and the eagle – Lector violently mocks both the United States government (the FBI and its agents) and the ideas of human morality represented by the Christian cross.