film theory
The first in an ongoing column designed to help readers broaden their understanding of a wide variety of movies, and to become a well-rounded cinephile.
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.
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.