B0041VYHGW EBOK (182 page)

After the biblical quotation, there appears Scorsese’s dedication of the film: “Remembering Haig R. Manoogian, teacher, May 23, 1916–May 26, 1980, With love and resolution, Marty.” Now the biblical quotation may equally apply to Scorsese, himself from the tough Italian neighborhoods of New York. Were it not for people like this teacher, he might have ended up somewhat like Jake. And perhaps the film professor, who helped him “to see,” enabled Scorsese to present Jake with a mixture of detachment and sympathy.

As a cinema student, Scorsese was well aware of innovative foreign films such as
Breathless
and
Tokyo Story,
so it’s not surprising that his own work invites differing interpretations. The film’s ending places
Raging Bull
in a tradition of Hollywood films (such as
Citizen Kane
) that avoid complete closure and opt for a degree of ambiguity, a denial of either/or answers. Such ambiguity can render the film’s ideology equivocal, generating contrasting and even conflicting implicit meanings.

An analytical film essay for a class or publication typically runs 5–15 double-spaced pages. As an analysis, it points out how how various parts of the film fit together systematically. Like a screening report and a review, the analytical essay includes descriptions, but the descriptions are typically more detailed and extensive. Like the review, the analytical essay also puts forth the writer’s opinion, but here the opinion doesn’t usually address the ultimate worth of the film. When you analyze a film, you’re defending your view of the ways parts of the movie work together.

Think about a sad song. You could
describe
the song in various ways (“It’s about a woman who wants out of a deadend relationship”), or you could
evaluate
it (“It’s too sentimental”). But you can also
analyze
it, talking about how the lyrics, the melody, and the instrumentation work together to create the feeling of sadness or to make the listener understand the relationship. That’s the sort of thing people who study film do when they analyze movies.

The analytical essay is also an argumentative piece. Its goal is to allow you to develop an idea you have about the film by supplying good reasons for taking that idea seriously. The sample analyses in
Chapter 11
are argumentative essays. For instance, in analyzing
The Thin Blue Line,
we argue that the film tells a real-life story in a way that suggests how difficult the search for truth can be (
pp. 427
–430). Likewise, our discussion of
Raging Bull
tries to show that the film is critical of violence as used in mass entertainment while still displaying a fascination with its visceral appeal (
pp. 440
–441).

How do you come up with an argument for your essay? The preparatory work usually consists of three steps:

Start by asking yourself questions. What do you find intriguing or disturbing about the film? What makes the film noteworthy, in your opinion? Does it illustrate some aspect of filmmaking with special clarity? Does it have an unusual effect on the viewer? Do its implicit or symptomatic meanings (
pp. 63
–64) seem to have particular importance?

Your answer to such questions will furnish the
thesis
of your analysis. The thesis, in any piece of writing, is the central claim your argument advances. It encapsulates your opinion, but not in the way that a film review states your evaluation of the movie. In an analytical essay, your thesis is one way to help other viewers understand the movie. In our analysis of
His Girl Friday
(
pp. 397
–398), our thesis is that the film uses classical narrative devices to create an impression of speed. With respect to
Chungking Express
(
pp. 445
–446), our the thesis is that the film draws us to seek thematic links between two story lines that do not connect causally.

Typically, your thesis will be a claim about the film’s functions, its effects, or its meanings (or some mixture of all three). For instance, we argue that by creating a wide variety of characters in
Do The Right Thing,
Spike Lee builds up interconnected plotlines; this allows him to explore the problems of maintaining a community (
pp. 404
–408). In our discussion of
North by Northwest,
we concentrate more on how the film achieves the effects of suspense and surprise (
pp. 400
–404). The analysis of
Meet Me in St. Louis
emphasizes how technique carries implicit and symptomatic meanings about the importance of family life in America (
pp. 431
–438).

Your thesis will need some support, some reasons to believe it. Ask yourself, “What would back up my thesis?” and draw up a list of points. Some of these reasons will occur to you immediately, but others will emerge only as you start to study the film more closely. And the reasons, which are conceptual points, will in turn need backup—typically, evidence and examples. You can sum up the structure of an argumentative essay in the acronym
TREE: T
hesis supported by
R
easons which rest upon
E
vidence and
E
xamples.

Analyzing a film is a bit like investigating a building’s design. When we walk through a building, we notice various features—the shape of the doorway, the sudden appearance of an immense atrium. We may not, however, have a very strong sense of the building’s overall architecture. If we are students of architecture, though, we want to study the design of the whole building, and so we’d examine the blueprints to understand how all the individual parts fit together. Similarly, we experience a film scene by scene, but if we want to understand how the various scenes work together, it’s helpful to have a sense of the film’s overall shape.

Movies don’t come equipped with blueprints, however, so we have to make our own. The best way to grasp the overall shape of the movie is to make a segmentation, as we suggest in earlier chapters. (See in particular
pp. 72
–73,
105
–106,
397
,
426
, and
439
). Breaking the film into sequences gives you a convenient overview, and your segmentation will often suggest things that will support or help you nail down your thesis. For example, in studying
The Thin Blue Line,
we made a separate list of all the flashbacks to the murder. When we saw them lined up on our page, we spotted the pattern of development in them that became part of our analysis (
pp. 425
–431).

Now that you have a segmentation, you can go on to see how the parts are connected. In examining a nonnarrative film, you will need to be especially alert to its use of categorical, rhetorical, abstract, or associational principles. See our analysis of
Gap-Toothed Women
(
pp. 354
–359) for an example of how you can base an analysis on the overall shape of the film.

If the film presents a narrative, your segmentation can help you answer questions like these: How does each scene set up causes and effects? At what point do we understand the characters’ goals, and how do those goals develop in the course of the action? What principles of development connect one scene to another? The pattern of the reenactments of the shooting and the various interrogations in
The Thin Blue Line
would be difficult to discern without writing them out.

Should you include your segmentation in your written analysis? Sometimes it will make your argument clearer and more convincing. We think that a broad scene breakdown helps illustrate some key points in our discussions of
His Girl Friday
(
p. 396
). Perhaps your argument will gain strength if you bring out a still finer-grained segmentation; we do this in considering the three subsegments of the final chase scene in
North by Northwest
(
pp. 400
–404).

Whether or not your segmentation finally surfaces in your written analysis, it’s good to get in the habit of writing out a fairly detailed segmentation every time you examine a film. It will help you get an overall sense of the film’s design. You probably noticed that nearly every one of our analyses includes, early on, a statement about the film’s underlying formal organization. This provides a firm basis for more detailed analysis. Writing out a segmentation is also good practice if you want to become a filmmaker yourself: screenwriters, directors, and other creative personnel usually work from a plot outline that is, more or less, a segmentation.

As you watch the film, you should jot down brief, accurate descriptions of the various film techniques used. You can get ideas for analyzing stylistic patterns from
Chapters 8
and
10
. Once you have determined the overall organizational structure of the film, you can identify salient techniques, trace out patterns of techniques across the whole film, and propose functions for those techniques. These techniques will often support or refine your thesis.

As a start, be alert for techniques taken one by one: Is this a case of three-point lighting? Is this a continuity cut? Just as important, you should be sensitive to context: What is the function of the technique here? Again a segmentation will help you by drawing attention to patterning. Does the technique repeat or develop across the film?

At any moment in a film, so much is going on that it’s easy to be overwhelmed by all the technical elements. Shot composition, performance, lighting, camera movement, color design, dialogue, music—all these things can be changing from second to second. Often, beginning film analysts are uncertain as to what techniques are most relevant to their thesis. Sometimes they try to describe every single costume or cut or pan, and they wind up drowning in data.

This is where planning your paper’s thesis in advance helps you. Your thesis will make certain techniques more pertinent than others. For example, we argue that in
North by Northwest
Hitchcock creates suspense and surprise by manipulating our range of knowledge (
pp. 400
–404). Sometimes he lets us know more than the main character, Roger Thornhill, and this builds up suspense: Will Thornhill walk into the traps that we know are awaiting him? Other times we know only as much as Thornhill does, so that we’re as surprised as he is at a new turn of events. Hitchcock devotes particular film techniques to creating these effects. Crosscutting between lines of action gives us more knowledge than Thornhill has, while POV camera work and cutting restrict us to his understanding of certain situations.

So other techniques, such as lighting or performance style, aren’t as relevant to our thesis about
North by Northwest.
(They might, however, be very relevant to some other thesis about it—say, that it treats thriller conventions somewhat comically.) By contrast, we emphasize acting technique more in our discussion of
Raging Bull,
because acting is pertinent to our discussion of the film’s use of realistic conventions. Similarly, the editing in
Meet Me in St. Louis
would be interesting from the standpoint of another argument, but it is not central to the one that we are making, so it goes almost completely unmentioned.

Once you have a thesis, an awareness of the overall shape of the film, and a set of notes on the techniques relevant to your thesis, you are ready to organize your analytical essay.

Broadly speaking, an argumentative piece has this underlying structure:

Introduction:
Background information or a vivid example, leading up to:

Statement of the thesis

Body:
Reasons to believe the thesis

Evidence and examples that support the thesis

Conclusion:
Restatement of the thesis and discussion of its broader implications

All of our analyses in
Chapter 11
adhere to this basic structure. The opening portion seeks to lead the reader into the argument to come, and the thesis is introduced at the end of this introduction. Where the introduction is brief, as in the
His Girl Friday
analysis, the thesis comes at the end of the first paragraph (
p. 396
). Where more background material is needed, the introduction is somewhat longer, and the thesis is stated a little later. In the
Thin Blue Line
essay, the thesis comes at the end of the third paragraph (
p. 425
).

You can sometimes postpone the full statement of a thesis by casting it as a tantalizing question, as we do in our analysis of
Chungking Express
(
p. 417
). We end the second paragraph by asking what the film accomplishes by following one brief plot with a second one containing a new set of characters. But if you pursue the question-based structure, be sure to provide at least a hint of the answer fairly soon (as we do in the brief sixth paragraph on
p. 418
, just over one page into the essay) to guide the rest of your argument.

As you know, the building block of any piece of writing is the paragraph. Each slot in the argumentative pattern outlined above will be filled by one or more paragraphs. The introduction is at least one paragraph, the body will be several paragraphs, and the conclusion will be one or two paragraphs.

Typically, the introductory paragraphs of a film analysis don’t display much concrete evidence. Instead, this is the place to introduce the thesis you want to advance. Often this involves situating the thesis in relation to some background information. For example, the first paragraph of our analysis of
The Thin Blue Line
summarizes the crime and investigation that are the subject matter of the film. The second paragraph sketches the circumstances that shaped the making of the film, and the third paragraph states the thesis: that finding truth is difficult.