Analyzing film
19 Fevereiro 2020, 14:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins
As quite a number of students are considering analyzing a Canadian film for their essay, this class was dedicated to writing an academic essay on film. It was based on the proposals presented by Timothy Corrigan in
A Short Guide to Writing about Film because academic film studies need to add considerations of formalistic analysis. They need to focus on cultural and narrative driven approaches as they consider one or more of the following:
•film history – how the technological (e.g. image digitalization or computer generated graphics or social developments (e.g. attitude to LGTB or Hays Code) permit an issue to be approached
We also examined the various elements of mise-en-scene in films settings and how these denotative elements produce connotative effects on viewers.
An example of an abstract that illustrates an appropriate approach to writing about film based on Michael McGowen's One Week (2008) is added below. You can see in this that the essay will look at topics related to national cinema and genre.
Title: The Canadian "everyman" in Michael McGowen's One Week
Abstract: In One Week (2008) Michael McGowen casts his protagonist, Ben Taylor, as an everyman something that is quite unusual for a contemporary road movie. Perhaps Elspeth Cameron’s proposals in Canadian Culture: An Introduction (1997) can offer some explanation for this unusual positioning. Cameron suggests that Canadians do not particularly like heroes, preferring the ordinary to the extraordinary; a condition she attributes to the country’s colonial past, which has given the country and its people a feeling of peripherality because “’ Head Office’ is somewhere else” (19).
Traces of Margaret Atwood’s victims, as presented in Survival (1972), can also be seen in Ben Taylor’s progression through the movie. Developing these arguments, in this essay, I will suggest that both One Week and Ben Taylor are creations that fit in the Canadian literary tradition and can be understood more easily when examined from this perspective.