Chapter 1
Becoming a Fantastic Film Student
In This Chapter
Starting your film studies journey
Analysing the building blocks of film
Appreciating the importance of films to the world
Film studies is about appreciating, understanding and explaining the greatest art form of the 20th century, which despite repeated predictions to the contrary is still going strong. The discipline involves research into and analysis of films, first and foremost, but also film-makers, film cultures, the film industry and film audiences.
To fulfil its aims, film studies borrows the best methods and theories from other academic areas, notably literary (or other cultural) studies and philosophy, as well as political science, sociology and psychology. In addition, analysing films uses similar tools to analysing paintings and photographs, but with the essential addition of movement.
If you already love film and want to become a film student, youâve come to the right place. In this chapter, I take you through the basics of studying film: from learning how to watch films critically, to understanding the different types of film writing that you can use for research, to justifying the meaning and importance of cinema for the wider world. Everyone knows that film is important, but as a film student you need to develop ways to say why and how it matters.
Upping Your Cinematic Game
To study films, you have to do more than simply watch them; you have to try to understand them, which doesnât just happen â studying films requires time and effort. And put on your leggings, like the kids from Fame (1980), cos right hereâs where you start paying. In sweat.
Going beyond merely watching films
Luckily, many (if not most) people love watching films. But many people decide that simply enjoying movies is enough for them, or even worry that studying films may destroy the pleasure they take from them.
You neednât worry about ruining the fun of watching films as you step into the world of film studies. Studying films not only helps you to understand why everyone needs a bit of escapism, but also offers entirely new ways to enjoy cinema:
- Understanding cinematic narrative structures can make even the dumbest action movie seem quite profound (check out Chapters 4 and 5).
- Knowing about film history can make a 100-year-old silent film as fresh and exciting as the day it was first screened (see Chapter 2 to read about early cinema).
- Appreciating the many techniques, skills and creative decisions that go into creating a successful picture can keep you interested even when the story sags.
- Viewing a wider range of films builds up your reference points and helps you understand how the classics influence contemporary cinema.
- Reading and appreciating film criticism means that you always have an opinion about what you just saw. Prepare yourself to start winning pub debates with ease.
Film studies is fun, yes, but that doesnât necessarily mean that itâs easy. Youâve been watching films in your own particular way for most of your life, and making the effort to step back and analyse something so instinctive and pleasurable can be quite difficult. Like trying to explain why you love ice cream â or sausages!
To start doing this kind of analysis, I recommend starting with your favourite film of all time. I donât mean the film you use as your favourite to impress people (step forward,
Citizen Kane). I mean your genuine favourite, the one you watch while youâre ill in bed or after getting back from a late night out.
Ask yourself what you enjoy about this film: the familiar storyline or the rewarding pay-off when the protagonists complete their journeys? Do you relate to one particular character or does the film showcase your favourite star (the person you want to be like or be with)? Or does the music â or the gorgeous images â keep you coming back?
Whatever your main reason (and be honest), focus on that and watch your film again, by yourself with no interruptions. This time, take notes. Doing so is really important. Write down every thought that occurs to you about how the film works and why you find it enjoyable. Even draw pictures if you want to. Stick men shooting each other can be a surprisingly effective way to capture and recall what is happening on screen.
If you can manage to view and take notes successfully with your favourite film, congratulations, youâve broken free from the chains of habitual watching and are now analysing, assessing and being critical. Thatâs where you need to start.
Connecting film studies to other stuff you can study
Film studies is inherently interdisciplinary, which means that it steals the best theories and research methods from other fields of study and applies them to films. This aspect of film studies is useful, because even if youâve never studied films before you may well have encountered a few film studies methods already.
I hope that the following experiences and related methods come flooding back to you as you read this book.
Studying stories
Analysing storytelling is a process thatâs very similar regardless of whether you find the story in a book, on the stage or on the silver screen. So if you spent any time grappling with literary classics at school, you have a basic understanding of concepts such as characterisation and narrative point of view, which you can apply to films.
Look a little deeper and you soon realise that some of the theories you use to understand books and those you use in film studies are strikingly similar. For example, you may be familiar with the notion that you can boil down all stories to seven (or even just three) basic universal plots, which have entertained humans throughout history.
This notion of
universal stories or
myths comes from a branch of literary theory called
structuralism, which also happens to be useful when studying films. Even Hollywood producers use a type of shorthand all the time when describing movies:
- Boy meets girl. Boy hates girl. Boy falls for girl. Boy loses girl. Boy fights to get girl back. Girl gives in.
- Girl versus shark. Shark wins. Boy versus shark. Boy loses first round due to personality flaw. Boy tackles personality flaw. Boy beats shark.
- Cowboy rides into border town. Cowboy shoots bad people. Cowboy rides off into the sunset.
Breaking films down into basic plot elements â and implying that the same stories are repeated over and over with only minor changes â is pure structuralism. So you see, Hollywood isnât as stupid as it often seems. (For much more on structuralism, flip to Chapter 13.)
Studying people and places
Watching films is an enormously popular activity across the world, and like any large-scale human activity, you can use methods from the social sciences to analyse and explain the phenomenon. When you take a sociological approach to studying film, youâre less interested in the films themselves and more interested in the people who consume or produce them.
Audience research is an important branch of film studies, which gathers data from its human subjects in many different ways. You can achieve broad surveys by using simple questionnaires, or gain more detailed and nuanced analysis through individual interviews or focus groups. The data provided can be quantitative, such as percentages or charts, or qualitative, like explanations of behaviour or emotional responses.
Cinema is a global phenomenon, and so analysing films in relation to places can be helpful. The long-standing and continued interest in studies of national cinemas is the most obvious spatial concern of film studies, as Part
III of this book attests. But the national character of film has also been tested by film scholars driven by the concept of
transnationalism. For example, studying the films of a population who are displaced or dispersed across many countries or even continents provides a transnational perspective on so-called migrant or
diasporic cinema.
Studying the past
To understand how cinema works in a particular place, you also need to think about how it developed over time. Therefore another important area of film studies draws from historical theories and methods. Historical research relies on traces of evidence to help illuminate the past, and so archives of material (including film archives) are vital.
Of course films themselves are a kind of historical evidence, particularly the
actuality films (short scenes taken from real life) that were popular in the early days of cinema (see Chapter
2). Just take a look at a few of the Lumière brothersâ films or those of Mitchell and Kenyon in Britain (I delve into British cinema of all sorts in Chapter
10). You soon realise just how much you can discover from looking into the eyes of factory workers as they left to go home at the end of a regular working day, over a century ago.
Focusing on creativity, industry and technology
Film is such a rich, varied and important object of study because it exists at the intersection of three major forces of the modern era: creativity, industry and technology â each of which I explore in the following sections.
Considering creativity
Of course film is an art form, but stop for a moment to think about what that really means. What exactly are the creative decisions that make one film different from another? What makes films âartâ?
During the first few decades of film as it found its feet as a mass medium of entertainmen...
