Thiago's Thoughts

This week we started on film analysis, and I think its pretty interesting concept because it requires you to watch movies in a different way. Usually when you watch a movie, you watch to be entertained, lose yourself in the story, characters, etc, but when you are analyzing film for different elements, it requires active thinking. Instead of just focusing on the plot, you have to focus on different elements such as cinematography and mis-en-scene, and also then have to interpret how the director uses these elements to emphasize a point or add a connoted meaning to the denoted images on screen.




For example, in The Shining, there is a scene in which Jack is overlooking a miniature model of a maze and the scene then seemingly cuts to an extreme overhead shot of Wendy and Danny in the actual maze. So, it's almost as if Jack is overlooking them, and they are small and helpless by comparison. So I think this helps establish a relationship of power (of jack over his family) and also I think it also contributed to a further sense of disconnect between Jack and the other two. So here, extra meaning is derived from analyzing the use of these different elements and might have been missed if you weren't actively "looking" for it.


One issue that I have with film analysis is that it is not objective. In my view, a viewer can interpret meaning in a scene where maybe there was none or where it wasn't the filmmakers actual intention. In my view, if a reading of a scene is not what the filmmaker intended, then it's insignificant. Even my example in the previous paragraph could be over analyzing on my part and finding meaning where there is none. So film analysis is subjective to a viewer's own knowledge and how they use it to interpret a scene. Your reading of a scene could be entirely different than mine. Therefore, it's ambiguous as to who is correct. Is each viewer's individual interpretation correct? Is the majority opinion correct? or does a reading require filmmaker's intent for it to be correct? This I don't know, and why I believe film analysis is not objective.